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Mysticism and Crisis - Hartley Lachter

• Institute for Religious and Cultural Understanding • Season 4 • Episode 11

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Esoteric elements are present in many religious traditions, where discourses of secrecy help reinforce identity and fulfill important social and cultural roles within religious communities. Our guest, Hartley Lachter, author of "Kabbalah and Catastrophe," explores how Jewish mystical thought developed in response to historical trauma and community crises. We discuss the broader social and cultural functions of secrecy in religious life, examining how discourses of revealed knowledge create power structures, strengthen community bonds, and inspire innovative responses to calamity. 

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Chip Gruen:

Welcome to ReligionWise. I'm your host, Chip Gruen. Many religious traditions and in fact, many cultural groups, more generally, have what we might call discourses of secrecy embedded in them. Being on a college campus, for example, you run into this all the time during sorority and fraternity rush, where initiation rites are kept secret, there are things that are imagined as only available to those within the group, that members have special access to special ritual knowledge or other kinds of esoteric teachings, things on the inside, things that are meant to be secret. And in fact, even if you look more close to my field in the history of Christianity, that ancient Christian liturgies featured a time at which people from the outside were invited to leave before the Eucharist was celebrated, for example, the liturgical practice of the passing of the peace and the kiss of peace seems to have been the moment at which the ritual became expressly available to those who were confirmed within the tradition. Well, Judaism also has a esoteric discourse in it. You might have heard of Kabbalah, which is entered into more mainstream knowledge within the past several decades, as celebrities or self help books or gurus have come out to talk about this medieval practice. Today we're joined with Berman Professor of Jewish Studies at Lehigh University, Hartley Lachter, who actually studies Kabbalah as it develops and emerges in medieval Judaism. His most recent book entitled"Kabbalah and Catastrophe, Jewish Historical Memory and Pre Modern Jewish Mysticism" thinks about this not only as spiritual teaching, theological teaching, understandings of God, but also he's really keenly interested on how this discourse of esotericism and the practice that comes from it serves other communal goals, whether those be social goals, identity goals, cultural goals, understanding of history, understanding of time from this particular perspective. And in fact, his this work that we're going to talk about today, Kabbalah and Catastrophe, is really interested in how trauma in the community can be a catalyst to developing other forms of religious conversation, other forms of religious knowledge, including, in this case, then the esoteric tradition of Kabbalah. So for a little bit of context here, after you listen to this episode, I want you to think about a couple of episodes in the past, and if you haven't listened to them recently, or you're new to the podcast, I invite you to go back and and listen to these again. The first is when Dr Lachter was first on ReligionWise, and way back in season one, season one, episode three, we talk about antisemitism, and we talk about the connection between the idea of exclusivity, of tight communal bonds and the idea that Jewish communities are somehow up to no good, right? We get these conspiracy theories about secret plans right that are at the root of antisemitic discourse, particularly as we've seen it re emerging, or emerging in a more forceful way recently, with the rise of the alt right. The other I want you to go back and think about again. The other episode is season two, Episode 11, that featured Dr Dustin Nash. It's entitled Belief, Conspiracy Theory and Identity, and he's really interested in the ways in which secret knowledge, or insider knowledge, or knowledge that's considered to require special keys to unlock it, builds community, builds identity. And we can think about again in the contemporary world, the way in which not only large mainstream religions might play on this idea, but also the way that contemporary conspiracy theory says the world makes sense if you only understand X, Y and Z, and they will purport to give you the secret keys, or secret pieces of information that allow you to see the whole, the whole model right to see everything from a bird's eye view, and so that also is a discourse of secrecy. So in this episode today, we're springing from, or thinking mostly about Kabbalah and medieval Europe and the development of this, this discourse of secrecy within these Jewish communities. But I think it behooves us all to think about how this is a tool that is used by groups, oftentimes, groups that see themselves on the outside, see themselves as as a minority, either numerically or politically or socially, that this becomes a tool to claim power to gain power, even if it's only in the imagination of that community. So this is a really useful thing to think about, not only as of historical interest, but also to think of as a way that individuals and communities work today to help make sense of their situation. I hope you enjoy this episode on Kabbalah, this medieval form of Jewish mysticism, and think about its implications for the wider study of religion and the role of secrecy and esotericism in the contemporary world. Hartley Lachter, thanks for coming on ReligionWise.

Hartley Lachter:

Thanks so much for having me.

Chip Gruen:

So before we dive into your work on Kabbalah, more specifically, can you share what drew you to Jewish studies and the study of esoteric traditions more broadly? Was there a particular question that sparked your interest in how religious communities make meaning using discourses of secrecy?

Hartley Lachter:

Honestly, when I started studying Kabbalistic literature. I wasn't so much thinking about the discourse of secrecy. I was really drawn to the fact that Kabbalistic texts are not predictable, and there's a lot of them, and many of them were under studied and not even published. There's a lot of manuscript work to be done, really still so much manuscript work to be done. So it meant an opportunity for discovering texts that we didn't really even know, in some cases, were out there, and they say things that you kind of are surprised that people were saying in the Middle Ages. They push the boundaries of what we think people were thinking about and people were talking about, they, they, they always seem to have something new, surprising, shocking, in them. And I came to realize later that the discourse of secrecy is really important for that, because by claiming something is a secret, it accounts for why it would appear to be new. And so I've always really liked the fact that Kabbalistic literature feels like a domain where a lot of new things were happening and a lot of really unanticipated new ideas seem to emerge.

Chip Gruen:

So your recent book, Kabbalah and Catastrophe, examines Kabbalistic thought and thinks about the ways in which it developed as a way to make the flows of history meaningful. Can you walk us through how mystical traditions like this, like Kabbalah, function as mechanisms for processing collective memory? What makes esoteric responses different from other religious strategies for meaning making?

Hartley Lachter:

Yeah, so often Kabbalah has this kind of reputation of being, you know, esoteric in the not just the sense of being a tradition that claims to be a divinely revealed secret that is given exclusively to the Jewish people, in the case of Kabbalah, esoteric traditions almost always claim exclusivity to the religious group that claims to have a secret tradition. But they also it also has a reputation of being this thing that is hidden knowledge that's only known. It's restricted and known to only very few people, and that it's about the mysteries of God or the mysteries of creation, and that it's not related to the everyday experience of people moving through time in history, and I really wanted to probe that and say like, is it the case that these people who are living and functioning in communities and grappling with historical problems, and in the case of medieval Jewish history, of trying to make sense of historical misfortune and political disempowerment? How? How could it be that in Kabbalistic literature, they're not they're not addressing those kinds of questions. Those were very present in that world. And what I found is that they were thinking about these kinds of things all the time, and they were really invested in understanding how history works. But we find in Kabbalah, as with other forms of esoteric thinking of mystical traditions. The claim they make is that they understand the secret mechanism behind the forces of history, that they understand how God sort of works like a puppet master manipulating the marionettes down on Earth, and explains how God is sort of causing history to take the course that it does, and that way of seeing history is also way of saying that one group knows how history works and others don't. A common claim made about Jews in the Middle Ages was that they were blind to how history works, that they were in particular, that they were blind to the development of the arrival of Christ as the Messiah and the arc of sacred history, and that Jews, in the famous depiction of Ecclesia and synagoga, Ecclesia represents the church, and she sees and stares confidently ahead. And synagoga, representing the Jewish community is blindfolded, and this inverts that claim and suggests that actually Jews are the only ones who understand how history works, because the secret has been shared with them secretly by God on Mount Sinai when the Torah was given, and that Kabbalah is a secret tradition that has been passed down orally or in hidden, hidden written form that explains all kinds of things, including how historical events come to be and what meaning they have. And they argue that Jews are actually central players in human history. And this is just part of this sort of contention between different religious groupings in the middle ages about how who has a claim to understand how history works, and who has some purchase on understanding how sort of God is guiding human affairs or not. And so this book was a way of thinking about how Jews, especially in the 14th and 15th centuries, were trying to make sense of their historical condition by using Kabbalistic claims as a way of accounting for the events of Jewish experience, in particular misfortunes, the existence of exile of the you know, not only just historically, the destruction of the temple, but also all of the forms of political misfortune that Jews throughout the course of the Middle Ages were encountering. This was a way for Jews to make sense of that and to claim that they had a exclusive secret knowledge about what the true meaning of it was and how it would ultimately culminate in messianic redemption.

Chip Gruen:

So it seems to me like Christianity gets its sort of teleological flow of history. It inherits directly from Judaism. Yet, as I'm reading, particularly in your introduction, and thinking about how you set this up, it seems like these Kabbalistic thinkers are sort of re responding right back to that Christian, you know, worldview of meaningful time and teleology moving forward. Is this like a reciprocal relationship? How are they sort of responding to one another? How is the understanding of time and history related between Christianity, Judaism in this period?

Hartley Lachter:

Yeah, I think it's really reciprocal, a really reciprocal exchange between these these communities, because they're competing over the same assertion about who is or isn't the inheritor of the Israelite covenant, and they're trying to make sense of covenantal theology, not just in the sense of like is There a covenant if a people is experiencing historical misfortune, but also who is the recipient of the who is the inheritor of the Israelite covenant? So that obviously, that that's a that's a contentious claim in the in the Middle Ages, and Jews and Christians are both in their way, making that claim. Kabbalah is part of that story in the Christian imagination, Jews are sort of, not only blind in the sense that they have failed to perceive the change in history that happened with the advent of Christ, but that additionally, that Jews are mute, that they they are sort of These. In the Augustine's case, they're like way markers. They're like road signs that are there for Christians as they move through history, to serve as a certain cautionary tale, but that Jews themselves are not moving through history. They're sort of vestigial structures of an earlier time. And what I think not enough history of the religious full scope of religious discourse in Europe in the Middle Ages, does is pay attention to the Jewish voices that are responding to these kinds of originally Augustinian claims about the role of Jews in human history, and Jews had quite a bit to say in response to this, to reverse, to invert, to challenge Christian characterizations of Jewish Historical experience. And one of the big claims of sort of in polemical literature between Jews and Christians that Christians made, was that Jewish historical misfortunes are evidence that the covenant between Jews and God has been transferred now to those who are Christ followers, and that it's actually Christianity that has inherited this covenant, and that the evidence for that is that Jews are the smallest, most disempowered people, when compared to Christians or Muslims like obviously they are by this argument, the argument from history, as it's sometimes referred to, that they are not the chosen people. And so Jews had to address this challenge, and Kabbalah was really invested in suggesting that Jews are playing this secret role in history, and that by suffering, they're actually moving history towards its ultimate messianic culmination, but that it's necessary for Jews to suffer and purify their souls, and that Christian nations are merely instruments of this divine plan that Christians don't know about, only Jews know about, and that the covenant is still very much viable. But the existence of misfortunes at the hands of Christians for Jews in Jewish history, was a question that they had to think about, and Kabbalah was one attempt at responding to that question as part of this ongoing polemical debate about who, who is it the inheritor of the of the covenant?

Chip Gruen:

So obviously you can have this conversation theology, right? How does God work in the world? Or, as we've been talking about, historically, what are the flows of history? What does the ark of history look like? What is the ultimate goal? That history is marching forward in these arguments. But I think you also make a lot of arguments about social and cultural work like so, rather than imagining those broad sweeps, those big arguments, how are these texts? How are these thinkers operating the day to day social and cultural landscape that they're living in. How does this work affect not only the big ideas, but also the Jewish community living in this little village in Spain, in the Middle Ages.

Hartley Lachter:

Right, or elsewhere, at this point, it's starting to spread throughout the, you know, Europe and the Mediterranean basin. And the question of exactly how much penetration these ideas had, we're not entirely sure we know that Kabbalistic ideas, passages from the Zohar elsewhere, are making it into sermonic literature. There's lots and lots of Kabbalistic texts that are written and circulated, and while not everybody's reading text, people talk about ideas, right? Not everybody was reading the Talmud, either, but obviously the Talmud had enormous influence in Jewish life. It's not entirely clear, like exactly were people remaining Jewish when conversion was a very viable option because of Kabbalistic ideas. I can't measure that, but it's very clear that Kabbalistic texts sought, and Kabbalistic writers sought to spread their ideas broadly in many cases, at least, and they aspire to the strategies they wrote into their texts were were aspirations for giving Jews a reason to continue to be Jewish and to practice Jewish law in light of the historical challenges that they were facing. And it they're very explicit in saying that there is still a purpose, and that the historical misfortunes that Jews are facing do not nullify the covenant, that this is a strong claim that they continue to make, but that, I think that the social function of these ideas was a way of providing Jews with a discourse to themselves about why what they're doing still has value. It still has some sort of purpose or meaning. There's a passage from the Safer Hafleah, which is a Byzantine text from the 14th century filled with all kinds of just audacious claims of claims and really interesting things written pseudepigraphically In the name of rabbis from the rabbinic period from late antiquity. And there's one passage where it talks about, sort of moving towards messianic redemption, and that God interacts with the Jewish people like a person who's on a on a long journey through a hot, dry desert with a companion, and that the companion says, How much further, and they say a little more, and they'll say how much further, and say a little more, and they keep saying that until they get all the way, and that they say God is the same thing, that he's telling them a little more, a little more, but there is a destination, and that he leads his people through, through hope, and that Kabbalah contains the hints of what that hope is, which is ultimately, ultimately the arrival of the Messiah. And Kabbalistic texts over the course of the 14th and 15th century, they involve a lot of predictions of like, specific messianic dates. And obviously, as those dates pass, those are you could argue, failed predictions, but that doesn't stop them from coming up with new ones. And it seems the only thing worse than a messianic prediction that fails is no messianic prediction that would suggest that the esoteric tradition of Judaism Kabbalah has no knowledge about the destination of history. Has no knowledge about the course that history is going to take. And that was even worse. So I think that what Kabbalah was at least attempting to provide for people was the suggestion that everything they were doing, both in terms of practicing Jewish law, in order to move history and suffering at the hands of non Jewish peoples in terms of their historical experience, that both of these are essential functions that Jews are serving as a sort of as agents of history to move history, and that the other peoples in the world are, are divine tools around this central drama for the Jewish people. That claim was a claim to say that Judaism is no is has not been nullified by historical misfortune. What kind of role then did that happened people's lives? I think there's evidence that suggests that this was a discourse that was spread fairly broadly and was just part of the story Jews were telling themselves. And in a place like Spain in 1492 there were people to I mean, when the expulsion happened in 1492 I think it's remarkable that there were any Jews left. Why hadn't they all converted? What story were they telling themselves? This is clearly part of that story.

Chip Gruen:

So now we have a firm grounding of sort of, at least the beginnings of your argument in the book. But I want to stretch you out a little further, because we see similar patterns of esoteric knowledge of in other religious traditions and other mystical traditions, who could think about Sufism in Islam or Gnosticism in Christianity or even contemporary New Age movements. How is it helpful to think about esotericism as a category that spans cross culturally and on the other hand, are there ways in which that sort of comparativism, that use of that category, obscure particularity you think is important to maintain.

Hartley Lachter:

I think once you start making too many, like rules about here's how esotericism works, at some point that can become a kind of make believe category. But I think that the cross cultural comparisons are always just, you know, as J.Z. Smith would say, they're food for thought. They they help you sort of maybe notice things you wouldn't notice otherwise. One of the things I think it kind of helps us notice is that esotericism is a category that under the guise of being very conservative, of retaining either ancient knowledge, of retrieving lost knowledge, or in some cases, also in many cases, of this sort of divine revealed knowledge, or knowledge that somehow is acquired through mechanisms other than just the workings of human reason, that it gives people access to new things. And they'll claim, well, they're not, they're not new. It's just retrieving of something old or something lost or something that has now been revealed or uncovered. But that at the functional level of a religious community means that esoteric traditions are mechanisms of innovation, and so new ideas enter religious traditions, often through the esotericists who claim that this new idea is, in fact, an old idea, or a divinely revealed idea that's maybe always already been there it's just that people didn't know about it. It was a secret. And so, for instance, when Kabbalists are talking about an idea during this period that became very important was the notion of reincarnation. There had been earlier authorities in Judaism who said reincarnation was absolutely absurd, and we don't see them talking about this in earlier forms of Jewish authoritative Jewish literature. But this idea becomes, from the early 14th century onward, pretty broadly maintained by quite a number of Kabbalists and then other Jews beyond that. And the claim is, well, it's not an innovation. It's always been there, but people didn't always know it because it was a secret. Or similarly, with their kind of very complicated way of thinking about the history of the universe, and claiming that there's actually this present cosmos is only one of seven universes, and each universe is of a 7000 year duration, and each of them is controlled by one of the seven lower spherote or divine luminosities that are part of the Kabbalistic theosophy, or claims about how the inner workings of God works. And that there will be, there was other universes before this one, there will be others after this one, that this universe is governed by the attribute of divine, harsh judgment of deen or gephra, and that's why this cosmos is so difficult and so painful. And this is the sixth millennium of that Cosmos, which is the most difficult millennium of the most difficult cosmos. So they're arguing that we live in the worst of all possible worlds, but that the previous worlds and the future worlds will be better, and that your soul will be there, because souls are always recycled and retained. This is not an idea that we find, except in a very embryonic sort of suggestion about this cycle of 7000 years in the Talmud. This is, this is not in the ways that catalysts describe it, an idea that's from traditional, authoritative Kabbalistic texts, but it can be sort of encoded within Judaism as an accepted idea that's already been there, if the claim is that it's there, but it was hidden. So claims to esoteric knowledge are actually mechanisms for innovation, I think, and and often enable religious traditions to respond in new ways to historical challenges of a given moment or whatever that the struggle is at hand that a given community is trying to find ways of accounting for or of addressing.

Chip Gruen:

So I want to think about this in a slightly different way. I know that professionally, you will go to Jewish Studies conferences, and there'll be sessions on Kabbalah at these Jewish Studies conferences, and then you'll also go to conferences on comparative esotericism, right? That you have people from multiple religious traditions come together to talk about their own particular, you know, area of expertise in relation to others. Do you find that the kinds of arguments you make right or the kinds of arguments that are accepted or discussed at those conferences are different? I mean, is there a way in which thinking about Kabbalah in the context of Jewish Studies ends up being different than thinking about Kabbalah in one of these conferences on esotericism?

Hartley Lachter:

Well, in those contexts, we're trying to, you know, speak across traditions, right? Like it's interesting to see esoteric claims that succeed versus the ones that fail, right? And presumably, in any given moment, people are making all kinds of claims of all sorts, and sometimes they succeed and sometimes they fail, right? So the ones that we're receiving that from texts that have been preserved and copied and became authoritative are the ones that were the successful ones. That means that those were doing something in their social environment, or else they wouldn't have succeeded. No one would have copied and preserved those books. They would have been boring and uninteresting. But the ones that become especially that become really canonical within a given religious tradition, and Kabbalah becomes very canonical over the course of the Middle Ages in Judaism, it tells us something about esoteric claims, claims to secret knowledge that worked. But the you know, the purpose that it's serving will be different in medieval Judaism than it is in medieval Christianity or Islam, because the circumstances of those of those groups are different in the in the case of medieval Judaism, the one of the things that is happening, especially in the in the Christian European context, is that they are trying to grapple with Christian characterizations of Jewish Historical experience, and Christian uses of Jewish Historical misfortune and disempowerment as evidence that the Jewish covenantal relationship with God is has been nullified. Obviously, Christian esotericists aren't dealing with the same thing. They're the and neither are you know, in the in the Sufi context they have, they have their own questions that they're addressing. And so those texts will take different forms because they're they're grappling with different challenges, you know, paying attention to those forms of specificity and then the sort of shared patterns that's always a challenge and a fun one within the comparative study of religion, and there, I think those comparative conversations can be really fruitful, and the points of similarity are just as interesting and important as the points of difference.

Chip Gruen:

So your research really and particularly in this most recent book shows how historical disasters, and you've mentioned, expulsions, persecutions, spark new developments in Kabbalistic thought. How do you think about trauma, or as in the title catastrophe? How does that spark meaning making like? Why does that become an important catalyst for the religious imagination.

Hartley Lachter:

It's something unignorable, right? I don't think it was really viable for Jews in the late medieval and then sort of pushing into the Renaissance and then the cusp of the early modern period, to simply ignore the question of what would appear to be a downward arc of Jewish Historical experience. They couldn't ignore the realities of exile and the destruction of their temple, the fact that Jews had lost their political independence that they frequently suffered at the hands of more powerful people. If the claim of covenantal theology is that by if you know, if Jews observe the Law, God will protect them and bring them to live securely in the land of Israel. If that's not happening. They have to either, either there's some massive deficit in how Jews are observing the law, or the covenant is null and void, or there's something else happening. And the Kabbalah was a way of them saying there's something else happening, but they couldn't not address that question, especially as expulsions became more and more common in over the course of the Middle Ages, the 14th and 15th centuries. And while this is a big, a big generalization, and I don't want to say that, you know, Samuel Barone argued that we should avoid the Lachrymose narrative of Jewish history, that it's just sort of a series of terrible things. And of course, there were moments of stability, because we see Jewish life was still very culturally productive in the late Middle Ages. But nonetheless, they had to think about the meaning of these problems Jewish communities, either they themselves or others, were experiencing. They thought about them quite a bit, and they had to think about the broader arc of historical of world affairs and Jewish Historical experience. Catastrophic events simply aren't ignorable, and they have to be accounted for. And I think that the sense that there was an urgency of at least having a way of making some sort of meaning out of it, or explaining why history was taking the particular shape that it was, was an impetus for the production of a lot of really interesting Kabbalistic ideas, and that these Kabbalistic ideas were an attempt, possibly a fairly successful one, to give Jews a way of imagining their place in the world, even though it did not appear that they were the objects of tremendous divine favor, and arguing that still they were, they were, they were the participants in this covenantal relationship with God. So I mentioned reincarnation. I mentioned this sort of the doctrine of these sort of successive worlds. They also had a notion of a cosmos of many different interlocking, interlocking universes, this sort of complicated way of thinking about time and space as a way of saying, in some sense, they have an explanation for why history looks the way it does in this moment in time and in space. These are fairly elaborate new developments in Jewish discourse about history that I think we're we're pushed by having, having to respond to catastrophe, because catastrophe can't be ignored.

Chip Gruen:

So I want to push you a little bit, because I always like to tell my students, if a theory only works in one time and place, is not much of a theory. It needs to be transferable. So if it is the case that that trauma or catastrophe leads to this kind of religious innovation, right? And in this case, this esoteric, you know, this, these claims of of secret knowledge, I don't think it's unfair to say that a lot of people are looking around at one another today and thinking about catastrophic circumstances, the first pandemic in 100 years, the specter of climate change sort of staring at us. What many people feel is the collapsing of democratic institutions in the US, the rise of intolerance in many places around the world. Do you think that? I mean, are we in the kind of circumstance that leads to religious innovation? I mean, would do you think that we, we should be prepared for imagining religious innovation of a similar sort happening in the 21st Century?

Hartley Lachter:

That's a really interesting question. So first I would say, I would be careful to say that that catastrophe leads to a development of a discourse of esotericism and the use of esotericism to innovate religious ideas. I'm careful about I don't think that it's just you sort of take a catastrophic historical event and then out pops a new capitalistic idea, but that historical misfortunes happen, and sometimes Kabbalah is part of the toolkit, sometimes innovatively So, for thinking that that event through, or for thinking through the broader historical question of, Why does history as such? What are the conditions of the possibility for history as it has taken place, to take place. You know that apocalyptic thinking is sometimes driven by moments of misfortune, but sometimes we find, you know, real trends of apocalyptic thinking in moments that appear not to be terribly catastrophic. It works in all kinds of ways, but that esotericism is one of the ways that people make sense of history, and it is the way that it is a way that they make sense of of misfortune. I'm not sure that misfortune creates esotericism, right? So I like there's a debate in the field of Kabbalah. Did the the expulsion of Jews in Spain in 1492 like, create some of the forms of innovative Kabbalah that happened in the. subsequent century. And I don't think it's that simple, but I think that Jews, in after 1492 did utilize things within Kabbalah to help understand that event. Are moments like sometimes history is more dramatic than others, right? Are those more dramatic moments, those more catastrophic moments, ones that lead to more religious innovation? It is a good question, because religion is always innovative, right? It's very hard to find a boring century in the history of any given religion, right? Like there's change happens a lot. Nonetheless, I think when people have maybe I'll say it this way, when there's a perception that a moment of urgent crisis is upon us. People always have that perception, right? Like in people often think they're living in the generation of the right on the cusp of the Messianic era. Jews have been thinking this for a very long time. But when there's a perception of crisis, often I think that there's an appeal to say, what is? What is something secret that might help us understand what's going on? Is there a key out there that's hidden that we can use to unlock or pull back the veil of history? Essentially, Kabbalists were trying to pull back the veil of history and make a claim, hey, we see what's going on behind the veil. And remarkably, in a fairly traditional religion like Rabbinic Judaism, Kabbalists were able to make that claim, and lots of people believed it. Lots of people really embraced it. They believed that Kabbalah saw beyond the veil of history and provided a privileged glimpse into how, into how history works, but that that's driven by an anxiety that history looks like it's going really badly and has God abandoned them to the forces of history. And I think that when there's an anxiety about being abandoned to the destructive forces of history, there's also sometimes, together with that, a desire to find that key that will maybe reveal what's really going on, and that can take all kinds of forms, sometimes really, like destructive ones. I think that the esoteric impulse is just as much of what we see in some like, really creative and innovative and really rich mystical traditions, as well as in like conspiracy theories and in some cases, you know this case, what's interesting is antisemitic claims that are conspiratorial in nature are, in a sense, an esoteric claim to having privileged knowledge about what's really going on and who's pulling the strings of history. So the kind of inclination towards conspiratorial thinking that we've seen in the past few years, in a sense that's nothing new, but it does kind of feel like it's driven by a, at least a segment of the population that's saying maybe there's a key out there that will tell us what's really going on, because what seems to be happening in history needs a different explanation. There must be some other explanation, but a hidden one, a hidden one that people with privileged access or knowledge can perhaps share, and if you're then part of that group that is read in on the secret, right, when you feel let in on a secret, you feel powerful. You feel like now you finally understand what's going on and that other people don't. The temptation for that is powerful, and it does all kinds of things in the social environment. Sometimes it gives you, it gives you an esoteric or mystical religious tradition. Sometimes it gives you really destructive, conspiratorial thinking too.

Chip Gruen:

So you mentioned two things that I want to follow up on. One is the idea that there is a, you know, a minority that might hold the secret key, or the the secret knowledge that enables you to understand history better. And then the other is the specter of of antisemitism and antisemitic thinking. It seems to me that the nature of esoteric tradition suggests that these types of religious communities, or the religious thinkers behind them, maintain kind of a public and a private face, right? That there is a public persona that shows itself to the outside world, but then there are private things that are for individuals within the community that are behind closed doors. How does the presence of what we might call inner teachings affect the broader community's identity and practices? You know, in the case of Judaism, how does the discourse of secrecy affect, you know, even adversely, public knowledge and perception, like, if you have that pull between those things that are public and those things that are private, like that, that that can be a public relations problem, right? That that can be, that can be caustic for the how the community exists in the in the wider social structure.

Hartley Lachter:

Especially for minorities living within a majority culture, with whom there's also this really contentious claim about covenantal inheritance, right? This was always a real trick for Jews in the Middle Ages. So there, you know, there are moments when Jews claiming secret knowledge. It's, it does the the internal, internally for Jews, it's, it's useful to them to say, No, we have a secret tradition that explains why our history is, in fact, so bad. Or a secret tradition about like the impact of the performance of Jewish commandments on the realm of the Divine, bringing blessing into the world, and that this is a, you know, a secret that's not necessarily claiming anything bad about anyone else. It's merely claiming that Jews have this special power. And so that's useful within the context of the community to account then for certain things, like historical misfortune. But does that then create a public relations problem like sometimes, yes, although there are moments when Jewish esoteric knowledge became really desirable in some Christian contexts in Spain, where Kabbalah really flourishes in the late 13th century, in the court of King Alfonso the 10th Alfonso the Wise, El Sabio, there's evidence that he was very interested in his sort of creation of a large library, including acquiring and translating Kabbalistic texts. That this was part of this sort of attempt at having a comprehensive library and a bid for Holy Roman Emperor, and that the Kabbalistic knowledge was seen as perhaps being really interesting, because it's this ancient revelatory knowledge that was acknowledged Jews had access to, which was the revelation at Sinai. And so there were Christians who thought, well, maybe Kabbalah is a long standing oral tradition that relates back to that revelation that Jews were, in fact, present for in the Renaissance, in the Italian Renaissance, I just got back from a trip in Italy, and we were in Florence, and I had actually never been to Florence before, and it was just so great to be in this city where there'd been all of this really innovative sort of flourishing of thought, and among many innovative Christian thinkers like Pico della Mirandola, he was very interested in working with Jews and learning Hebrew and gaining access to Kabbalistic traditions, not because he thought that Judaism was the true religion. He was very adamant that he thinks Kabbalah proves that Christianity is the true religion and disproves Judaism, but he worked closely with Jews like Yochanan Alemano, who was important Kabbalist in Florence at the time, because he believed that Kabbalah transmitted ancient, revelatory knowledge that was useful to Christians, and that Kabbalah actually decoded Christianity. And it was a pretty bold claim in essentially saying that Christians don't understand Christianity until they they don't understand its true inner essence until they have some access to Kabbalah. And so this was a form of religious innovation using Kabbalah on behalf of Christians. And there was evidence. There are some Kabbalists who talk about being in in Florence after the expulsion from Spain, and that they feel like you can barely, was want to use as an expression that you can barely walk down the street without someone grabbing for a Jewish man by the hem of His garment garment, and a Christian asking them, be my be my teacher in this science. Be my teacher in this this wisdom, the wisdom of Kabbalah. So that was a kind of very different, unique historical moment, but there is, like, there is little pull there, right? Like, on the one hand, it's a, it's a useful discourse within the Jewish community, but on the other hand, does it? Does it suggest a certain type of insider knowledge that almost plays into conspiratorial thinking about Jews?And I think that you know that tension is, is there in different historical moments for sure.

Chip Gruen:

So thinking about that translation to wider communities outside, sort of the you know, those in the know, right that you talked about Christians in the Renaissance or Christian courts, or what have you. But we see that operating today, that we get Kabbalah popularized through meditation apps or celebrity endorsements, or, I think you even showed me a can of some sort of Kabbalah cola at some point, right?

Hartley Lachter:

There is a bottle of Kabbalah water......well a celebrity from the, Yeah,

Chip Gruen:

Right, right. That this is, you know, become sort of a recognizable word that, maybe not the content of it, but the idea of it gets out there. I mean, Madonna being, you know, although I've noticed when talking to students today that, sort of the most famous, you know, I don't know what you would call her, the most famous ... like we know who Madonna is. This might not be the most the most current for a popular culture for them. But my question is, you know what happens when these traditions become more widely available? Even the idea of them, or, I mean, you know, those of you out there, listeners, you know, go Google Kabbalistic text, right? You'll be able to find pieces of the Zohar. You'll be able to find things translated like the cat is out of the bag a little bit around the secrecy of this. And it's interesting to me, you know that you said one of the things that drew you to this was the unpublished text, that this stuff is underneath the radar in part, you know, your life's work is, to some extent, you know, reveal, you know, some of these things right to, to make them, at least in scholarly circles, more approachable and understandable and discernible. What does that do to the esoteric tradition when it becomes mainstream or popularized or available to those outside that inner circle in the community?

Hartley Lachter:

Well, I think it's always it's always transforming, and even within the Jewish community, it was there while there were elements of attempts at sort of more restricted knowledge, especially in the earlier Kabbalistic traditions. My colleague, John Dauber at Yeshiva University, wrote a great book about Jewish esotericism and ways in which there were, there is evidence of these forms of knowledge that were kind of within restricted circles. There were also a lot of moments later on of really trying to that the claim to esoteric knowledge is a strategy for popularization and wanting Jews, very broadly, to know about Kabbalah, and feeling like this was really necessary for the viability of their Judaism, and for them to understand what they saw as the inner core of Judaism. So the within the community, there's been moments of, you know, trying to spread that knowledge more broadly. And it's always changing with the development of Hasidism in the 18th century. It changes. It's, it's, it's changing all the time. It doesn't, it doesn't stay still. On, on the other hand, you know, spreading beyond the Jewish community with the development of Christian Kabbalah in the Renaissance, and then with the development of post modern Kabbalah, it's just another chapter in what has always been happening, which is this constant transformation in new historical moments, new cultural context, and in the in the case of the sort of modern and post modern popularization of Kabbalah, and the sort of interest in Kabbalah beyond the Jewish community and the presentation of Kabbalah as a thing that's no longer inherently Jewish. Some scholars refer to this as dis embedding, the dis embedding of esoteric or mystical traditions. And now suddenly, you know, yoga is a form of exercise, and Kabbalah is a form of sort of self improvement, or a key to self fulfillment, and the access to it through sort of capitalism and the sort of late capitalist mechanisms of commerce and exchange where you can, you know, buy seminars and courses, books, access to Kabbalistic instruction for the purpose of attaining personal fulfillment. And that this isn't for people who are Jewish. This is for anybody, and that it's an ancient wisdom. And ancient wisdom is valuable, but it's an ancient wisdom that has this utility in the post modern context, and can be combined with other forms of very, very hybrid kind of ways, very eclectic ways, with other forms of esoteric knowledge, with other mystical traditions, with astrology. This is something that is just sort of part of the marketplace of religion in the post modern world, and Kabbalah, unsurprisingly, in the western context, is is part of that, that post modern religious marketplace. So that's a that's just sort of another chapter in the transformation of Kabbalah in this case, not uniquely, but it's beyond the confines of the Jewish community. But Renaissance Christian Kabbalah was also beyond the confines of the of the Jewish community.

Chip Gruen:

So as we sort of reach the end of our conversation, I always like to ask, What am I leaving out? Right? Either regarding esoteric traditions or the place of Kabbalah within Jewish studies, more generally, in the context of medieval Judaism or contemporary religious life. Like, what am I not asking? What are the what is the important, most important topic that we haven't talked about you think would be important for listeners to hear, to think about? You know how they think about Kabbalah and esoteric traditions in their construction of their own worldview?

Hartley Lachter:

Well, as always, I like the questions you ask, but when thinking about esoteric traditions like Kabbalah, it's worth sort of pausing and remembering that even in our sort of and looking at this from an academic perspective, as we are here, that it sometimes is hard to be aware of our own presuppositions about what an esoteric or mystical, right, these are all sort of problematic terms in their own ways, what these traditions are, what are already the assumptions that we're making when we define them or label them or categorize them with these words, what are the assumptions we're sort of bringing to it, that there's like no way to come at these kind of cold and open we often are making assumptions that we're not even recognizing, like the assumption that Kabbalah has been this thing that's hidden, that's known to very few people, except that over history, it seems lots and lots of people knew about it, and lots and lots of texts were written and circulated, right that this is something that's really exclusive to Jews, except that we see, you know, evidence of non Jews being really invested in it and interesting in it, interested in how it sort of functions, that the there's, we bring a lot of sort of unexamined assumptions when it comes to studying these things and uncovering what our unexamined assumptions are, is sometimes part of the fun of uncovering these texts that do kind of get imagined as being the less traditional, less widely known, even though sometimes, in some moments, they were quite traditional and quite widely known. But that it's hard to come at them as a blank slate. We're often thinking about them in these ways that sort of place them into a certain box before we've had a chance to kind of see what they're about and that they are like I said at the beginning. I was drawn to them because they're surprising. And they keep being surprising. They just keep saying things you're sort of surprised they're going to say. The imagery they use is often audacious, the claims they make are take a turn that you don't you don't anticipate that these texts are often not, not what we're expecting, and that that's sometimes really part of the fun. So the unexpected, I think, is part of what maybe we're we're missing when we're talking about these categories that seem like we should know what they are, and they just don't often yield texts that function in ways that we can easily anticipate in advance.

Chip Gruen:

All right. Well, I think that is a great place to leave off. Hartley Lachter, thanks for coming on ReligionWise, it's been fun.

Hartley Lachter:

Thanks so much for having me.

Chip Gruen:

This has been ReligionWise, a podcast produced by the Institute for Religious and Cultural Understanding of Muhlenberg College. ReligionWise is produced and directed by Christine Flicker. For more information about additional programming, or to make an inquiry about a speaking engagement, please visit our website at religionandculture.com There you'll find our contact information, links to other programming and have the opportunity to support the work of the Institute. Please subscribe to ReligionWise, wherever you get your podcasts, we look forward to seeing you next time.