THE EXILE AND ITS CONSEQUENCES FOR JEWISH MONOTHEISM and Zionism and Psychoanalysis

Iakov Levi

THE EXILE AND ITS CONSEQUENCES FOR JEWISH MONOTHEISM*

May 2002

According to Freud, Moses was assassinated by the Hebrews because he wanted to impose on them too a spiritual religion (1). According to this thread, the Hebrews were not yet ready to accept such a sophisticated religion as cosmic Monotheism. The Jews, before the First Exile, were indeed no less polytheist than the Canaanites they came to supplant. As is richly described in the Books of Judges and Kings, the worship of Baal, Astarte and Asherah was the rule and not the exception. Only after the Exile, after a latency period of more than seven centuries since Moses supposedly tried to impose on them Monotheism, they fully accepted and implemented it (2). Freud attributed the acceptance of Moses legacy to the reemergence of the murder from the repression, due to a renewed sense of guilt: “It appears as though a growing sense of guilt had taken hold of the Jewish people...” (3). The sense of guilt was apparently triggered by the loss of independence, and by the hardship of the new situation in which the Jews found themselves with the Exile.

I suggested in Exodus and Intrauterine Regression. The Genealogy of Jewish Monotheism a more articulated psychohistorical sequence of events, which does not necessarily involves a real murder. After all, as Freud himself said, it is the psychological events which count and not the material truth.

If there was indeed a murder it was not because of a supposed imposition of monotheism on the Hebrews ante litteram, but because he wanted to prevent the Israelites from invading the Promised Land, which in Jewish psyche is unconsciously perceived as the body of the Mother. Most interestingly this is also the interpretation made by Josephus:

We found a mnemonic trace of how the events really unfolded (at least the psychological events, because we do not believe that we are dealing with

material truth) in Josephus' Antiquities:

1. NOW this life of the Hebrews in the wilderness was so disagreeable and troublesome to them, and they were so uneasy at it, that although God had forbidden them to meddle with the Canaanites, yet could they not be persuaded to be obedient to the words of Moses, and to be quiet; but supposing they should be able to beat their enemies, without his approbation, they accused him, and suspected that he made it his business to keep in a distressed condition, that they might always stand in need of his assistance. Accordingly they resolved to fight with the Canaanites, and said that God gave them his assistance, not out of regard to Moses's intercessions, but because he took care of their entire nation, on account of their forefathers, whose affairs he took under his own conduct; as also, that it was on account of their own virtue that he had formerly procured them their liberty, and would be assisting to them, now they were willing to take pains for it. They also said that they were possessed of abilities sufficient for the conquest of their enemies, although Moses should have a mind to alienate God from them; that, however, it was for their advantage to be their own masters, and not so far to rejoice in their deliverance from the indignities they endured under the Egyptians, as to bear the tyranny of Moses (Ant., IV:1)

Josephus tells us the "real" story which he unconsciously knew: Moses did not want the Hebrews to fight the Canaanites and to conquer the land, but wanted to keep them in the wilderness. At least, Josephus gave expression to the unconscious "reality" harbored by the people in their deepest psychic layer. For sure, Josephus knew very well the manifest biblical version, which, after the First Exile, was overlaid on the repressed psychic reality. In his version, the clumsily erased traces of the repression emerge to the surface in a clear way.

The association between land and earth, and the maternal body, was made by Freud himself, back in the days of Totem and Taboo (5), as he called her “Mother Earth”, and explained the meaning. Theodor Reik returned on this association: Promised Land = maternal body (6). As Freud has explained in his work, the primal reason for the drive of killing the Father is the lust for

the body of the mother.Henceforth, if he interpreted Moses' assassination as a patricide, it is much more articulate to attribute it to the lust for the Land than just only to the imposition of too a spiritual religion. Indeed, the connection is there: imposing Monotheism meant imposing the discipline of the Father, which means imposing an instinct inhibition. The all argument is strongly interconnected, and it is impossible to separate between the two elements. It might be that Freud himself felt inhibited from making the connection. In my opinion, the only way of fully explaining Moses murder as a patricide, according to Freud's own way, is implying that he was erecting himself as a barrier between the Hebrews and the Land, i.e. between them and their incestuous drives. Again, I do not believe that we are dealing with material truth (real historical events) but with the psychological unconscious interpretation of the national ethos (legends and myth).If we take for granted this assumption, all the subsequent historical and psychological unfolding becomes much clearer, too. We must remember that Freud wrote Moses and Monotheism at the end of his life, after that, by his own admission, the Moses’ problem had been hunting him during all his life (7). He left many threads disconnected, even if he laid the founding stone, and put in place the basis for a much more articulate exposition. He had in his hands all the elements. He just could not complete his own work, probably due to his own ambivalence towards the issue. As not only Freud, but also Wellhausen and Robertson Smith before him concluded, the Jews retrenched into an intolerant iconoclastic monotheism only after the First Exile.

The Mother goddess in the First Temple

Why the exile transfigured an idol - worship people, addicted to the cultivators' cult of the land, the fertility cults related to her and sacred prostitution which was consummated at the very inner Holy of Holies of the Temple, into a monotheistic iconoclastic intolerant people? Indeed, in the Hellenist period, there was a renewed trial to reactivate pagan cults in the midst of Judah but, with the Maccabee wars, orthodoxy resumed its predominance, and this time for good. The second exile cemented even more the rule of an absolute sole God, and since then paganism and images' worship became the antithesis of Judaism. We have good reason to believe that as time elapsed, the Jews became more and more entrenched in their iconoclastic peculiarity. In a synagogue, discovered at Dura Europos in northern Syria, belonging to the third century A.D., still there are images of Patriarchs painted on the walls, and on a mosaic at Hefzi Ba (Beith Alfa), in the Jordan Valley, which belongs to the 6th century A.D., the images of Abraham, Isaac, and the two servants are composed on the floor. Not to mention the anthropomorphic representations of the months and of the sun. At the synagogue of Korazin, in Galilee, belonging to the third century A.D., the architect carved on a architrave an image of Medusa. Today, such a thing would be inconceivable in a modern synagogue. The process of instinct inhibition, activated during the First Exile, has continued to work its way in Jewish psyche into our very days. We can say that the Jews, even non – religious ones, are more “Mosaic” today than they had been two thousands years ago.

The Exile, the first and even more the second, activated the Mosaic monotheistic idea of the sole rule of the Father and his demands of instinct renunciation, of which the inhibition from making images is part (8). The original drive, inhibited by iconoclasm, is the voyeuristic urge to look at the female genital, which is displaced into the inhibition to stare at the Father's genital, as part of the regression from the heterosexual drive into the homosexual urge. Staring at the face of God is a displacement of the drive of staring at his genital. The second element, at which Freud only hinted in his work, but did not explain, is the destruction of the Temple. He mentioned the loss of the Second Temple as the catalyst for the process of intellectualization and instinct renunciation of the Jewish people, but he did not explain why, and how the process unfolded.

With the First Exile, and again after the second, the Jews lost two cherished assets at the same time: the Land and the Temple. As for the Land, losing the Promised Land, we have seen that it means losing the maternal body. The Temple is her repetition. In Hebrew, the Temple is called simply Habait, which means: The House, i.e. the Temple is the house par excellence. And, as Freud himself has shown in Symbolism in Dreams (1915-1917), a house is the symbol of the maternal body. In Hebrew Bait (house) and Bat (daughter but also wife) are written with the same letters, even leading sometimes to confusion in interpretation whether the text means daughter, or wife, or house. When “Yosef spoke to the house of Par'o” (Gen. 50:4), the text did not intend to say that Josef spoke to a house but to Paro's wife (9).

Moreover, until the First Exile, the Temple of Jerusalem was the center of the cult of the Mother and not of the Father, as instead the Second Temple became afterward. The kings of Judah were also the priests of the cult of Astarte and Asherah, the Great Mothers of all the Semitic peoples, as the Bible witnesses of king Salomon himself (1 Kings 1:1-9). The biblical text has been edited by priestly censorship, and presents to us Salomon's deeds as a prevarication, but it could not have been such, if 350 years later, at the time of the first reforms by king Josiah, the altars to Astarte and to Asherah that Salomon built in Jerusalem were still there (2 Kings 23: 4-28). As is written,

“The king [Josiah] commanded [...] to bring out of the temple of the Lord all the vessels that were made for the Baal and for Ashera [...] ”. in the Semitic East, Asherah was the goddess of the sacred prostitutes (qaddeshot) , and also in the temple of Jerusalem. We can conclude that, prior to the First Exile, the cult of the Mother, i.e. heterosexual libido, had the predominance in Jewish psyche, and only with the loss of the two most important symbols of the maternal body, the Land and the House, there was, at the national collective psychic level (10), a renunciation to the heterosexual drive, due to the sense of guilt induced by every loss, which caused a retrenchment into the cult of the Father. Even according to Josephus, the conquest of the Land and the building of the Temple itself had been a prevarication in defiance of Moses' will, who wanted to hold the Hebrews in the wilderness, and to prevent them from becoming cultivators and building houses. Now, we can explain the struggle between Moses' will, and the Hebrews craving to invade the land and building houses, also as the struggle between homosexual and heterosexual libido energies.

As Freud has exposed in his work, a retrenchment from the heterosexual channel automatically produces a strengthening of homosexual libido. The catastrophe, which befell on the feminine object of lust strengthened, at the collective level, the homosexual libido of the Jewish people, as a child who loses his mother redirects his libido towards the father. At this level, Jewish Monotheism may be interpreted as the strengthening of homosexual libido after the loss of the heterosexual object. As evidence of how Freud had the all elements in his hands, and only failed of completing the addition, I quote from Totem and Taboo:

After they had got rid of him [of the father], had satisfied their hatred and had put into effect their wish to identify themselves with him, the affection which had all this time been pushed under was bound to make itself felt. It did so in the form of remorse. A sense of guilt made its appearance, which in this instance coincided with the remorse felt by the whole group. The dead father became stronger than the living one had been –for events took the course we so often see them follow in human affairs to this day. What had up to then been prevented by his actual existence was thenceforward prohibited by the sons themselves,

in accordance with the psychological procedure so familiar to us in psycho-analysis under the name of deferred obedience[...] Thus the brothers had no alternative [...] to institute the law against incest, by which they all alike renounced the women whom they desired and who had been their chief motive for despaching their father. In this way they rescued the organization which had made them strong – and which may have been based on homosexual feelings and acts, originating perhaps during the period of their expulsion from the horde (12).

As Freud states, “the homosexual feelings originated”, but he should have said “strengthened” because every human being is basically bisexual, during the exile from the horde, when they were prevented from the body of the females. In the same way, the homosexual libido of the Jewish people strengthened during the exile, where they were hindered from the Land and the House, the two most obvious symbols of the maternal body. It is not casual that, in the Kabalah, Israel is likened to "the bride of God".

NOTES

(1) Sigmund Freud, “Moses and Monotheism: Three Essays” (1939), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, (The Hogart Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, translated by James Strachey ) London 1964, Vol. XXIII, pp.36-53 (2) Ibidem, pp.66 -86 (3) Ibidem p. 86. (4) “Uccidere Dio: il Destino del Popolo Ebraico. Dall’Assassinio di Mose’ all’Omicidio di Rabin”, in Agor�, Vol. IV, (Liceo Scientifico Statale “G.Ferraris”), Varese, 2000. English tr. Killing God, in www.geocities.com/psychohistory2001/KillingGod.html (5)”Totem and Taboo”, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, The Hogart Press, London 1955, 1957 and 1962, vol. XIII, p.152 (6) Theodor Reik, "The Puberty Rites of Savages", in Ritual-Psychoanalytic Studies (Farrar, Strauss & Co.) New York, 1946, p.157. (7) Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, Edited and Abridged in one Volume by Lionel Trilling and Steven Marcus, Basic Books, New York

1961, p. 502. Freud writes: “The theoretical basis of the Moses story is not solid enough to serve as a basis for my invaluable piece of insight. So I remain silent. It is enough that I myself can believe in the solution of the problem. It has pursued me through my whole life” In one of his letters to Lou Salome Freud calls his Moses: “a ghost not laid” (The Complete Corrispondence of Sigmund Freud and Ernest Jones 1908-1939, Edited by R. Andrew Paskauskas, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England, 1993, p. 62.) (8) For the connection between Mosaic Monotheism and instinct renunciation Cf. S.Freud, "Moses and Monotheism", in op.cit., vol. XXIII, pp.116-122. Refraining from making images is a form of instinct renunciation. (9) For other examples were Bait has been mistakenly translated as “house” instead of “wife” see: Ahmed Osman, Out of Egypt, Arrow Book, London 1998, pp. 88-9. Regarding the unconscious equivalence between "house" and "woman", we are enlightened by Shakespeare in the Merry Wives of Winsdor:

Falstaff: Of what quality was your love, then? Ford: Like a fair house built upon another man's ground; so that I have lost my edifice by mistaking the place where I erected it. (Act II - Scene II)

(10) Freud explains: "I have taken as the basis of my whole position the existence of a collective mind, in which mental processes occur just as they do in the mind of an individual" in "Totem and Taboo", op.cit., vol. XIII, p.157. (11) The Jews and their Temple (12) “Totem and Taboo”, op.cit., pp.143-4

THE EXILE AND ITS CONSEQUENCES FOR JEWISH MONOTHEISM (II)

(ZIONISM AND PSYCHOANALYSIS)May 2002

We have seen how the First Exile, which was concomitant to the loss of the Land and of the Temple, strengthened the collective homosexual latent libido, and triggered a retrenchment into the archaic Mosaic monotheism.

After the return to the Land in the VI century B.C., Judaism was very different from the one preceding the Exile. However, it was also very different from the one that will develop after the loss of the Second Temple and the subsequent exile. During the Hellenistic period, the Jews remained hard core monotheistic. However, in many other ways they were more similar to their Gentile neighbors than they became in the two thousands years afterward. As long as they stayed on the Land, the heterosexual libido received a constant reactivation through the work of the land (Mother Earth), and their nationalistic aspirations (Motherland). The most extreme symptoms of heterosexual lust were repressed. The Temple itself became the House of the Lord, and no more the center of fertility cults and temple prostitution. A house remains a house, i.e. a maternal symbol, but its dwellers were no more Astarte and Asherah, the sacred prostitutes, but a unique God, whom it is prohibited even to see and to touch. On this point, there were no concessions. The Promised Land remained the beloved one, but her first - born fruits had to be brought to the Lord as a symbol of restrain and renunciation. He became the sole owner of the female body: "The land shall not be sold for ever: for the land is mine" (Lev. 25:23). The Book of Leviticus, which, as proved by Wellhausen, was composed after the First Exile, states this point: the land belongs to the Lord.

As Freud pointed in Totem and Taboo: "They renounced its fruits by resigning their claim to the women who had now been set free" (1). It is very interesting that Freud used the word "fruit" in association to the women, who had been the lusted prize of the brothers' horde. In "Symbolism in Dreams" (Introductory Lectures on Psycho - Analysis, 1915-17), Freud states that in dream symbolism "fruit" stands for the female

body. And indeed the fruits of the Land, namely the female body, had to be symbolically renounced by being brought to the Lord. The period of five centuries, between the end of the First Exile and the beginning of the Second, were a period of reckoning. There was a renunciation of the most extreme expressions of heterosexual libido, and a compromise with the Father was worked out, on the basis of a symbolic renunciation to the ownership of the Land.

However, the lust for the maternal body was hardly successfully repressed. Of all the peoples subjugated by the Roman Empire, the Jews were the ones who fought more ferociously than any other for their Land and their independence, even if they knew that they had no chance of success in their endeavor. After the repression of the last rebellion against the Romans (135 A.D.), the price of slaves collapsed in the Western world, because of the large numbers of Jews who were offered on the market. So determined were the Romans to eradicate the Jews from their land. The reason is that they had unconsciously perceived the enormous charge of energies and lust bonding the Jews to their land, and they understood that the only way to have peace in Judea was to separate between her and her sons, and the Jews became “The Wandering Oedipus”.

The more the Second Exile lasted, the more the Promised Land became an abstract concept, sterilized from its sensuous connotation. Jerusalem became Jerushalaim shel M'ala (the Heaven Jerusalem), in contrast with the previous very earthly one. As the centuries elapsed, the sense of guilt for the loss, which was perceived as having been caused by the lustful heterosexual drive, fed on itself to the point that the Jews committed not to try to regain their independence, but to wait for the days of the Messiah, the only one who will be allowed to drive the children of Israel to their land again, and to rebuild the Temple. Until then, the sacred spot of the sanctuary is to be considered Taboo, forbidden from approaching, on the grounds of the rationalization that the rites for purification have been forgotten, and no one would ever be allowed to sacrifice again, and even to tread on the sacred place . The more the Jews were segregated and persecuted, the more they related to their condition as a God - sent imposition. Trying to change the destiny imposed by the divine will is to be considered blasphemous. The Rabbis

codified the prohibition of rebelling against the rule of the Gentiles. Every active resistance against “'Ulam shel Goyim” (the Gentiles' yoke) is to be considered as a rebellion against the will of God himself. By the 19th century, the nation had reached an impasse, not only because the external conditions were such as to prevent any aspiration of redemption, freedom and independence, but also because it was the result of a self imposed inhibition. The sense of guilt was the cement of the cohesion between the brothers, under the yoke of the common rites of the religion of the Father. At the collective national level, the heterosexual libido, the lust for the Land and for the House, was repressed to the point of total denial. The Rabbis and their ruling became the doorkeepers of the threshold of the Taboo: rebellion against the Father and incest (See Jews Hugging and Kissing Ahmadinejad: Oedipus With Side – Locks, Beards and Long Coats ).

However, as Freud taught us, no repression can hold for ever, and the more the energies invested in it, the more the day of reckoning will be explosive, as the boiling water compressed by the lid of a hermetically closed pressure - pan will eventually explode. The events of the late 18th and early 19th century in Europe, the Enlightenment, and thereafter the nationalistic movements of liberation, found the Jews in the Schtetel of Eastern Europe in a condition of exasperation, as the pressure of the boiling water in the pan was mounting more and more. The Emancipation, and the civil rights bestowed on the Jews in the West, were the first crack in the wall that had so far contained the pressure. This was the first chance in many centuries for questioning the rule of the Rabbis and the sense of guilt that maintained the heterosexual libido in the repression. Enlightenment, national movements of liberation, socialism, and revolution were all a repetition of the rebellion of the Horde of the Brothers against the authority of the Primal Father and his tyrannical rule. The stimulus of powerful events which were taking place among the Gentiles, in their midst the Jews were living, triggered a breach of the threshold of the Taboo among them, too. As the physical walls of the ghetto came down, the inner walls cracked, too.

It is not casual that all the first Zionists were atheists. The renewed lust for the Promised Land had to be concomitant with the rebellion against the rule of the Father. In Western Europe, the ideological foundation of Zionism was laid by the first generation of Jews who were born outside the walls of the ghetto, and who considered themselves as the antithesis of their grand fathers. Jewish nationalism was a byproduct of the rebellion to the tradition of the Fathers. In Eastern Europe, the new Socialist revolutionary ideas triggered the same outcome. In the West, it was acted out by intellectuals, like Hess, Herzl and Nordau, who had previously flirted with emancipation and cosmopolitanism, and were inflicted a narcissistic injury by the rejection of the Gentile world, in which they tried to be absorbed. Being intellectuals and burgeois, they planned a liberal open society where the Rabbis would be restricted to the synagogues, and prevented from influencing public life. In the East, in contrast, where the masses of Jews were destitute and still restricted to the Schtetl, and the repression of the Law of the Father was still in full force, the rebellion against past and tradition was even more violent. The Zionist pioneers who came from Eastern Europe, and founded the first kibbutzim, codified a religion of anti - religiosity as the instrument of the redemption of the Land. Instead of being liberal and tolerant, like their Western counterpart, they considered atheism, and total rejection of Jewish rites, as the key to redemption. Atheism was not a personal choice, but part of the new religion of the Land. At the physical contact with the Promised Land, and with the work of the soil, the heterosexual energies, that had been repressed for so many centuries, exploded. Homosexual libido, which had been the vector of monotheism and the submission to the Law of the Father, was cast aside in favor of a new religion of the earth and of the senses.

They reconnected to the Hebrew tradition preceding the First Exile, and not only to the one previous to the Second. They wanted to cease to be Jews, and to return to be Hebrews. Now we can understand why, in the first Kibbutzim, the pioneers ate pork meat in the very Day of Atonement, in defiance to Jewish tradition and with ostensible pride. They wanted to eradicate any memory of the yoke of the primal Father. If matrimony and the patriarchal structure of the Jewish family, with its tradition and its rites, had become during the centuries a household name for the Sacred, now they declared that the family itself should be abolished. Not only they

codified the sacredness of promiscuity, and abolished marriage, but the children were taken very early from their mothers to be raised collectively. It was a new rite, which was to substitute the old one: the rites of the Mother in defiance of the rites of the Father, like it had been in Judah, before the First Exile. They indeed produced a lot of social ideological rationalizations, and it might seem that this was the product of the stimulus triggered by the revolutionary ideas in Russia, but the collective unconscious was working its way to a much more archaic past, to the sacred prostitution and the cult of the Land of the ancient Hebrew cultivators. Even the idea of taking the children away from mothers, as every ideology, did not flash out of the blue. It was a sublimated unconscious elaboration of the mnemonic traces of sacrifice of children by the ancient Hebrews in the Valley of Bnei Hinom, on the Western side of Jerusalem, which were performed as a rite to pagan deities for the sake of military victory or a good harvest. Obviously, this time no one was actually sacrificed, but the mental content was the same, because taking the babies from their mothers was exactly what was done in Judah previously to the First Exile.

Every element points to the cult of Mother Earth. The festivities of Pesah, Shavu'ot, and Succoth in the kibbutzim were celebrated not as was done in the last 2500 years, i.e., as the celebration of the deliverance from Egypt, the feast of the Torah and the feast of the Booths, but as the feasts of the cycles of Nature and, in those days, processions were organized in the fields carrying the first born of the fruits of the earth, as it was before the First Exile. As we read in the Bible, Succoth became the feast of the Booths only after the return from the Babylonian exile (Nehemiah 8:13-18). Before that, it had been the feast of figs and olives. Pesah became the feast of the Deliverance from Egypt only in the very last days of the kingdom of Judah (2 Kings 23:21-23). Before that, it had been an agricultural celebration. Now, the Zionist pioneers, in their craving for casting aside the yoke of the Law of the Father, reconnected to the mental heterosexual contents of the Hebrews cultivators, as they were before Hebraism became Judaism, i.e., the religion of the Father.

We can say that Zionism was the product of a resurgence of heterosexual libido, triggered by the events in 19th century Europe. At the same time, we

can understand why, at the beginning, orthodox Judaism was anti – Zionist. The Rabbis stared with horror at the substitution of the cults of the Father with the idolatry of the cults of the Mother. There is a point, which has been overlooked, but it is charged with significance. When Haim Weitzmann and the leaders of the Zionist movement contacted the British, in the middle of World War I, they asked for the help of His Majesty Government not for the establishment of a Jewish state, but for a Home for the Jewish people. At the manifest level, it has been rationalized, a posteriori, as if they did not want to pressure in too an open way with a demand that could embarrass the British, but it seems a rationalization. They could ask for an autonomy, or self- rule. In diplomatic language, there are expressions much apter than the word "Home", to describe a national aspiration. "Home" does not fit diplomatic and official language. It is intimate and childish. But as such it appears in the Balfour Declaration: "a Home for the Jewish people". A Home, the symbol of the maternal body, was the word used in the first official document legalizing Jewish national aspirations and, in this way, it hints at the real mental and emotional contents.

It is not by accident that the beginning of Zionism was also concomitant to the beginning of psychoanalysis. The first Zionist Congress in Basel was organized in 1897, two years before the publication of one of the most important of Freud's works: The Interpretation of Dreams. Freud himself was not an active Zionist, but somehow the two movements unfolded in a parallel way. Apparently, there is no connection between the two. Zionism was founded as the national movement of redemption of the Jewish people, and psychoanalysis was founded as a branch of the medical profession, whose endeavor was the exploration of the human soul. Moreover, Freud and his disciples were almost all Jews, and all of them were detached from their Jewish roots, to the point that Freud himself, at the beginning of his career, contemplated the possibility of baptism, with the only purpose of detaching himself also in a formal way from his roots (2). Afterward, he changed his mind, and felt strongly connected to his Judaism, but it was a long process, which culminated with the publication, at the end of his life, of Moses and Monotheism.

The only connection seems to be that both Zionists and psychoanalysts

were the first generation of Jews born outside the walls of the ghetto, and at the same time estranged from religiosity, in an outburst of rebellion against the Law of the Father, and both wanted to severe their ties with tradition. It was not out of affection for the Gentiles' ways, but out of intolerance for a repressing Judaism. The repression was that of the heterosexual libido, during centuries of ruling by the Rabbis intending to maintain it in the repression. As the first Zionists, the first psychoanalysts were not only atheists but also anti - religious. Pubertal boys who live a stage of rebellion against their fathers feel not only defiant, but also mocking towards their fathers' generation, and this wave of rebellious feelings is concomitant with a resurgence of the heterosexual libido, which had been repressed in the latency period. This kind of mockery is present in Freud's words:

The neuroses on the one hand display striking and far – reaching resemblance with the great social production of art, religion and philosophy, but on the other hand they have the appearance of being caricatures of them. One might venture the statement that hysteria is a caricature of an artistic creation, the obsessional neurosis a caricature of religion, and paranoiac delusions a caricature of a philosophical system (3).

The statement is correct, and it is a scientific one, but it is enlightening that it was made by recently emancipated Jews, who severed their ties with every tradition. As the first Zionists unconsciously associated between the Promised Land and the maternal body, so Freud unconsciously associated between psychoanalysis and a woman. Speaking of his efforts in completing one of his more central works, Totem and Taboo, he says: “With all that I feel as if I had intended only to start a little liaison and then discovered that at my time of life I have to marry a new wife” (4), meaning, psychoanalytical research = a wife. Furthermore, Totem and Taboo is pivotal to the understanding of the Oedipus complex, which deals with lust for the mother and rebellion against the father. Moreover, he associated Totem and Taboo not only with the woman (a wife), but also with Judaism, as he writes to Abraham:

I am working on the last section of the Totem which comes at the

right moment to deepen the gap [between him and Jung] by fathoms....I have not written anything with so much conviction since Interpretation of Dreams, so I can predict the fate of the essay...[it] would serve to make a sharp distinction between us and all Aryan religiosity (5)

Namely, he was most convinced dealing with Totem and Taboo, which he considered almost a Jewish affair, and that the Gentiles could not understand and accept. Jones writes:

A fortnight later, however, there was quite another tone. As so often happens after a great achievement, elation was replaced by doubt and misgiving. With this change Freud's pugnacious attitude also softened “Jung is crazy, but I don't really want a split; I should prefer him to leave on his own accord. Perhaps my Totem work will hasten the break against my will”. Ferenczi and I read together in Budapest and wrote to Freud in high praise. We suggested he had in his imagination lived through the experience he described in his book, that his elation represented the excitement of killing and eating the father, and that those doubts were only the reaction. When I saw him a few days later on a visit to Vienna and asked him why the man who wrote The Interprettion of Dreams could now have such doubts, he wisely replied: “then I described the wish to kill one's father, and now I have been describing the actual killing: after all it is a big step from a wish to a deed” (6).

Therefore, he associated himself, his aggressive drives towards his own father, Judaism (supra), and his psychoanalytical achievements. Why Totem and Taboo was so “Jewish” to provoke a split with Jung and other Gentile psychoanalysts? After all, it was dealing with the prehistory of all mankind, and not with a segment of Jewish history. Freud unconsciously perceived that his discoveries and particularly the Oedipus complex and Totem and Taboo, were the product of a new upsurge of heterosexual libido, which was shared by him as by the rest of the Jewish people. It was triggered by the rebellion against the tradition of the Fathers, while the Gentiles did not share this new experience in a similar magnitude. In the Western world, the rebellion against the Law of the Father had been

a very old affair, back to the times of Solon (VI century B.C.) and the pre – Socratic philosophers, the institution of the polis and the democratic institutions of Classic Greece, which came to substitute the ancient rites and the cohesiveness of the clan of the brothers. Dodds has called this phase "the passage from a shame to a guilt society" (7), implying that a tribal society, like the one in pre- Classic Greece, has as priority the cohesiveness of the horde of the brothers, in which all are one, and if a member does not comply he feels ashamed, while in polis society the moral questions are up to the single, and if he does not comply with his own moral standards, he feels guilty. The internal psychic turmoil, caused by the passage from the former structure of society to the latter, found its own catharsis in Sophocles' tragedy, which, not casually, dealt with Oedipus and its incestuous murderous drives. Sophocles, as delegate of the group, found his own catharsis and that of his fellow countrymen in the tragedy Oedipus Rex, while Freud found his own catharsis and that of his Jewish fellow men in decoding the Oedipus complex through the instrument of scientific observation, and not casually he called it "The Oedipus Complex". He unconsciously perceived that the tension, which had driven the Greeks into Sophocles' tragedy was the same as the one which drove him into his own discoveries (8). This is the reason why Zionism and psychoanalysis were concomitant. They were the siblings, offspring of a newly discovered female body, after the liberation from the pressure of the Law of the Father and its tyranny.

NOTES

(1) “Totem and Taboo", in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, The Hogart Press, London 1955, 1957 and 1962, vol. XIII, p.143.

(2) Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, Edited and Abridged in One Volume by Lionel Trilling and Steven Marcus, Basic Books, London 1961, p.112. Jones writes:

when Freud thought of joining the Protestant "Confession", so as to be able to marry without having the complicated Jewish

ceremonies he hated so much, Breuer merely murmured, "Too complicated".[At p. 100, Jones writes:] All along he had comforted himself with the thought that in Germany, where he would marry, a civil cerimony was all that was necessary, so he was spared the painful dilemma of either changing his “Confession”, which he could never have seriously intended, or going through the complicated cerimonies of a Jewish wedding, which he abhorred”.

In my opinion, Jewish rite of marriage is not that complicated. It is an obvious rationalization by Freud, who wanted only to express his rebellion towards the religion of the fathers.

(3) Ibidem, p.290. Jones quotes Freud.

(4) Ibidem, p.288.

(5) Ibidem

(6) Ibidem, 288-9

(7) Eric R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational, Berkeley 1951, chap.I.

(8) For a comparative analysis between Greek tragedy, the debasement of the Law of the Father in pre- classic Greece on one hand, and psychoanlysis, the abandonment of the rites of the Father in 19th century Jewry on the other, see: Iakov Levi, Un'analisi del dissenso tra Freud e Jung. La genealogia di un turbamento, in Dialegesthai. Rivista telematica di filosofia [Entered July 16, 2002]

Links: Exodus and Intrauterine Regression. The Genealogy of Jewish Monotheism Pinocchio. The Puberty Rite of a Puppet

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Iakov Levi

The Image of God in Judaism: Father or Mother? (Letter from a reader)

22 Dic. 2004

I received a letter from a reader, the main points of which I report in my translation from Italian:

"...I have been puzzled by the question why, speaking of God, we underline his peculiarities as a Father – figure, while we don’t mention his maternal peculiarities. In the books of Prophets, in particular, God is compared to a mother breast – feeding his children. Sometimes he is referred to as “The Merciful”, the root of which “rachem” is an obvious reminder of the uterus (rechem). Another point that puzzles me is the analysis of the fifth commandment, in which we are demanded to honor both parents. Some commentators, including the Rambam, sustain that this Commandment is so important, that it represents a guarantee to the other nine. If the guarantee of the Law is a paternal role, would it not be enough a Commandment demanding only to honor the father?"

My response was as follows:

In the two monotheistic religions, Judaism and Islam, the image of the Mother has been forcefully repressed. When an emotion charged with an intense energetic content is repressed, eventually presses for recognition from behind the curtains. In both religions, the Father God, previously severe and cruel, assumes also some of the peculiarities that are maternal by definition. As you have mentioned, Jahveh became Rachum, Merciful. In a similar way, Allah, in Arabic, became Rachim. Before the Babylonian exile, Jahveh had exclusively been a warrior god, phallic symbol of the tribe of Judah, that brought him into battle in order to be led by him. After the Exile, he condensed with El, a god associated to the Northern kingdom of Israel and its tribes, and became one god. The idiom “Lord of the Hosts” is not to be interpreted as an abstraction, but as a very concrete content. Abstractions are later overlays of very concrete early realities. Before the First Exile, the Hebrews worshipped, side by side with Jahveh, also the two Mother Goddesses Astarte and Asherah. Therefore, at that time, God was exclusively a male

figure, and the two goddesses interpreted the maternal role. After the return from the exile, the maternal image was repressed and the Hebrews, now Jews, retrenched into an intolerant monotheism. When a child loses one parent, in this case the mother, he attaches even more to the remaining parent, in this case the father, who becomes also a maternal image. The same happened to the Jews. I have discussed the issue in Exodus and Intrauterine Regression. The Genealogy of Jewish Monotheism and in Exile and Monotheism (Supra) .

It is not casual that in the Books of Prophets, in particular, God is defined also with those maternal peculiarities that you have mentioned. The Prophets were the ones who opposed the fertility cults associated to Astarte and Asherah, and were pressing for the repression of the maternal instance. If they wanted to impose on the people an instinct renunciation directed at the Mother, they had to offer at least a partial compensation, proposing a paternal instance that included some of the maternal peculiarities now renounced. Specially, the most missed ones, feeding – breasts and Rachamim (Mercy), with its Rechem (uterus) connotation. We are at the eve of the Exile, with its horrifying threat of loss of the Land and the Temple, the two symbols of the maternal body. As explicitly described by Jeremiah, at the beginning the Jews refused to give up the cult of the Mother Goddess:

Then all the men who knew that their wives burned incense to other gods, and all the women who stood by, a great assembly, even all the people who lived in the land of Egypt, in Pathros, answered Jeremiah, saying, As for the word that you have spoken to us in the name of Yahweh, we will not listen to you. But we will certainly perform every word that is gone forth out of our mouth, to burn incense to the queen of the sky, and to pour out drink-offerings to her, as we have done, we and our fathers, our kings and our princes, in the cities of Judah, and in the streets of Jerusalem; for then had we plenty of victuals, and were well, and saw no evil. But since we left off burning incense to the queen of the sky, and pouring out drink-offerings to her, we have wanted all things, and have been consumed by the sword and by the famine (Jeremiah, 44, 15-18).

"The Queen of the Skies" is the Babylonian Ishtar (Sumerian Inanna), equivalent to the Canaanite Astarte, which was a merciful Mother Mater Matuta and Nutrix, protecting her people from famine and from the sword. When she was forcefully removed from Jewish psyche, Jahveh assumed her peculiarities, and became the Rachum (the Merciful). However, it was very painful for the Jews to remove from their psyche the maternal image, and she re – emerged as Torah. I have discussed the significance of the Scrolls of the Torah in: On Trees and on Birds (and on Flowers). For the Arabs, it was easier to remove the maternal image, because in their mental archive they had not an articulated and rich polytheistic past as the Hebrews and the

Canaanites, not to mention the Greeks – Romans. In many things, they mimicked the Jews, but the Koran, their holy book, did not assume the same intense contents, charged with energies, as the Torah for the Jews, that study and comment it (her) with the intensity peculiar to obsessive neurotic symptoms. To the Jews, intellectual penetration became the equivalent of genital penetration. They had been inhibited from the fertility cults in which they penetrated Asherah, and now they discharge the same energies in penetrating the “hidden meanings” of the Holy Torah. In this context, it is worth mentioning that Freud, in “Symbolism in Dreams” (1915 – 17), has shown that books are the symbol of the woman. Henceforth, “The People of the Book”, unconsciously means “The People of the Mother”.

Islam was more successful in repressing the Mother image. However, there too, she emerges from the repression is some faint images of quasi - saints as Fatima and Mary herself. As Herodotus reports, one thousands years before the implementation of Islam, the Arabs worshiped one main god and one main goddess:

They believe in no other gods except Dionysus and the Heavenly Aphrodite; and they say that they wear their hair as Dionysus does his, cutting it round the head and shaving the temples. They call Dionysus, Orotalt; and Aphrodite, Alilat. ( Hrdt.Hist . 3.8.3 )

"Alilat" is the feminine version of the Canaanite – Hebrew god El, associated to the Northern tribes of Israel. El - Allah - Alilat are male and female versions of the same Semitic god. When Alilat was removed, Allah assumed some of her maternal connotations. Therefore, the Arabs had been worshiping a sacred couple, Orotalt and Alilat, as the Hebrews had been worshipping Jahveh and Asherah in Judah, before the First Exile. As has been proved by archaeological excavations at Elephantine, in Upper Egypt, a colony of Jewish mercenaries had continued worshipping the sacred couple Jahveh and Asherah until the 5th century B.C. It seems that they had not been noticed on the monotheistic reforms implemented in Jerusalem almost a century earlier.

When the Mother in the sacred couple was removed, all what remained was the Father.

Concerning the second part of the question of the reader: “Another point that puzzles me is the analysis of the fifth commandment, in which we are demanded to honor both parents. Some commentators, including the Rambam, sustain that this Commandment is so important, that it represents a guarantee to the other nine. If the guarantee of the Law is a paternal role, would it not be enough a Commandment demanding only to honor the father?” We must understand the latent, unconscious, significance of the Commandment. “Honor your father and your mother” intends prohibiting the libidinal discharge of energies on the original objects of the libido of the child: the father and the mother. Theodor Reik was the first to decode the events on Sinai as an acting out of the totemic meal[1]. In another essay, he also interpreted the Torah as a Mother Goddess[2]. The Law, the Torah, being the Mother, unconsciously comes from the Father. Moses

climbed the sacred mountain in order to capture her from the Father. She represents his extension and, therefore, she belongs to him. In the biblical re – elaboration of the pre - historical events, she was granted as a gift, but the unconscious content points to a violent act of abduction that Moses, the delegate of the Brotherhood Horde, acts out on the behalf of the group. The mnemonic traces of the real significance are encrypted in the text itself. Moses descends the mountain, and “There is a noise of war in the camp” (Ex. 32:17), and then: “And the people sat down to eat and drink, and rose up to play (Waiaqumu Lezacheq)” (Ex. 32:6). Rashi, in his commentary to this verse, says: “They committed incest, and shed blood, because the word Zachoq has both meanings”. These are the mnemonic traces of the totemic meal and orgy, while Moses triumphantly raises the Tablets of the Law—the paternal penis and female body. The Law, the Torah, comes from the Father. Therefore, she is his extension and part of his body: his erection. The same is the Mother. Lacan grasped the issue when he said: “the mother is one of the names of the father”. “Name” is an abstraction of the real thing: “the penis”. Being a part of his body, we should say “the main part”, she must be preserved and defended from the aggressive libidinal discharge of the sons. As Theodor Reik has shown in Myth and Guilt, the original taboo is the one of aggression against the paternal genital. If we penetrate the latent sense of the text, we can now understand also the interpretation of the Rambam: if the Father and his Law (Mother – penis) are honored, the social order, ultimate aim of every law, is preserved against those erotic – aggressive drives that undermine its stability. The function of the Mother, at least in later Judaism, is therefore interpreted as the articulation of the Father’s will. "Hear, my son, your father’s instruction, and reject not your mother’s Torah” (Proverbs,1:8). In Hebrew poetry, the second part of the verse is always a synonym of the first part. Namely, your father’s instruction is your mother’s Torah. The Torah – Mother representing an erotic object, per se, and belonging to the Father, is to be honored and preserved.

Another latent level, which sucks from the primal layers of peoples’ psychic life, condenses with these contents. As Freud has shown, the primal deity was a mother – goddess, then a son – god, and only later a father – god made his appearance in the Pantheon of the peoples: the return from the repression of the assassinated primal father[3] .Judaism and Islam brought the process to conclusion, repressing the image of the Mother and of the Son, and leaving the space only for a sole omnipotent god. In Judaism, the mnemonic trace of a Son God - image emerge in the craving for the Messiah. In Islam, in the craving for the hidden Imam. In both religions, only a foggy nostalgia remained in the background, after that the two Son - gods, leaders of the Brotherhood Horde, Moses and Mahomet, had been degraded to mortals, and transformed into Vicars of the Father. Christianity reached a compromise, in which the Son - god and the Mother - goddess continued to have the prominence, as it had been in the cults of the Greek - Roman world, where it was implemented.

However, the process of shifting the emphasis from Mother to Father, which has its parallel in that stage of childish psychic evolution in which the child begins harboring the feeling that the Father is the one who created everything, had already been present, in embryo, in Greek mythology. In one of the versions on the birth of Aphrodite, the female – goddess par excellence, associated to sexuality like her Eastern counterparts Inanna - Ishtar - Astarte, and Asherah, we are told that the goddess was born from the castrated penis of Ouranus, thrown into the sea by his son Cronos.

The biblical story of Eve being born from Adam’s rib conceals - albeit in a more distorted way - the same unconscious concept of the woman as a man’s penis. As Theodor Reik has shown, Adam’s rib - from which Eve was born - is a displacement of the man's penis[4] (The Creation of the Woman, Braziller, New York 1960, pp. 107-110).

Therefore, the Greeks, too, side by side with the archaic myths of a world engendered from a female primal goddess, harbored the perception, expressed in the myth of Aphrodite's birth, that the woman, object of sexual desire, is the penis of the Father, she is its transformation, and therefore is a part of his body. As such, she belongs to him. Sexual desire directed at the woman becomes, in this way, an infraction against the sacredness of the paternal penis. This is, indeed, the original taboo, from which all taboos and prohibitions derive.

As shown by Theodor Reik in Myth and Guilt, the Original Sin - cause of the Fall - was not a sin of lust towards the female body, but the cannibalistic aggression against the penis – body of the god. Since the source of the sons’ aggressiveness towards the father is in the inhibition that the latter represents against their instinctual needs, the two, incest and patricide, are strongly associated. However, the ancients limited the taboo to the penis – body of the god, and did not extend that taboo to sexual desire per se. The Jews, implementing monotheism after the Babylonian exile, increased the restrictions towards sexuality, that had been, until then, very scarce and almost non – existent (as it was in the midst of other Semitic peoples)[5]. However, the taboo remained restricted to the body of the Father. Henceforth, also the interdiction of pronouncing the name of God, because knowing and uttering the name of God is unconsciously interpreted as an act of aggression directed at the divinity. The Jews enlarged the concept of taboo of the paternal penis to “your neighbor’s wife” (probably inspired by the Egyptians). However, sexual intercourse was never considered sinful per se. On the contrary, in Judaism, sexual intercourse is a precept, retracing the customs of fertility cults and sacred orgies peculiar to other Semitic peoples, as to the Hebrews before the Exile. It is worth mentioning that, in Judaism, "adultery" refers only to sexual intercourse with a woman who is married or engaged to another man. Meaning, it is not the sex which is forbidden, but the possession of another man's property. In this case, his property, his woman, is his penis, and therefore, the sin of adultery is an aggression against the body of "the neighbor". It is a sin of aggression,

which disrupts social harmony, because it engenders hatred and desire of revenge. As is written:

Men don't despise a thief, If he steals to satisfy himself when he is hungry: But if he is found, he shall restore seven times. He shall give all the wealth of his house. He who commits adultery with a woman is void of understanding. He who does it destroys his own soul. He will get wounds and dishonor. His reproach will not be wiped away. For jealousy arouses the fury of the husband. He won't spare in the day of vengeance. He won't regard any ransom, Neither will he rest content, though you give many gifts. (Prov . 6:30- 35)

At this point, we can better understand why, in every craving for another man's woman, there also is a component of latent homosexuality: lusting for the man's woman, means also lusting for the man's penis.That the original taboo is associated to the man's penis (every aggressive content is also highly erotic), and not to sexual intercourse per se, is confirmed by the fact of the matter that in antiquity female homosexuality was never considered a sin. In Judaism and early Christianity it is not even mentioned. The sin is erotic aggression versus a penis. All religious prohibitions of mankind are intended to prevent that infraction, which is the original taboo. On the other hand, Christianity shifted the burden of sinfulness to sexual intercourse, even more, to "lust" itself. What had originally been a sin of patricide aggression became a "sin of the flesh", keeping only the mnemonic trace that "the flesh" had been that of the assassinated and devoured Father. Patricide was repressed and denied. However, the sense of guilt did not disappear, but was displaced into sexuality per se. It is a classic case of repression and displacement.

Now, we can better understand the latent meaning of the Commandment: "Honor your father and your mother". They are both the same thing: the Father and his penis, transfigured into Mother and Torah.

The Mother goddess in the First Temple

Links:

El, god of Israel--Yahweh, god of Judah The Chariot of the Sun and the Messiah

Postscript

The phantom organ syndrome

This is a comment on the brilliant article by L.M. Barré " El Defines Israel". In my opinion, Judah was the one that, after the Exile, adopted the name Israel, and also adopted the traditions linked to Jacob and the Northern Tribes. Indeed, only the Northern Tribes had been previously calling themselves "Israel". After the Exile, the ones who had been only Judhaites assumed the identity of the missing part and called themselves "Israel".Furthermore, there is no evidence that the clans of Judah and the Northern Tribes had ever been part of a United Kingdom. All the archaeological evidence points to the contrary. It seems that the version of a "United Kingdom" under the rule of Saul, David and Salomon, has been a device invented by the post - Exile editor, to enhance the role of the House of David and the tribe of Judah. At this point, El and Yahweh condensed into a sole god. I am inclined to agree with Ahmed Osman, who sustains that David's and Salomon's stories related to the United Kingdom refer to the Late Egyptian Kingdom of Tuthmosis III (David) and Amenhotep III (Salomon) ( Out of Egypt, Arrow, London 1999, Chapter seven). After the Exile, Israel was the missing and missed part of the Hebrew conglomerate. In

psychoanalysis, it is called the "phantom organ syndrome". When a person loses an arm or a leg, sometimes he continues behaving as if the missing organ were still there. It even aches or hurts. It happens when the patient is unable of successfully undergoing the process of mourning. The sudden disappearance of the kingdom of Israel, which was the strongest part of the Hebrew tribes, was so traumatic, that could not be successfully elaborated. As the prophet Jeremiah complains: "Is Ephraim my dear son? Is he a darling child? For as often as I speak against him, I do earnestly remember him still: therefore my heart yearns for him" (Jer. 31:20).The disappearance of Israel was psychically denied through the assumption of the identity of the missing part. Now, Judah became Israel, and adopted also the Israelite sagas and mythology, related to the stories of the patriarchs. Most interesting, even today the archaic mourning for the disappearance of Israel has not yet been overcome. When the Jews returned to the Land and founded a state, they did not call it "The State of Judah", as it would be suitable, but called it "The State of Israel". After all, we, the Israelis, are all Judahites, and not Israelites.

Link: El - The Bull

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[1] “The Moses of Michelangelo and the Events on Sinai”, supplement to “The Shofar”, in Ritual: Psycho - Analytic Studies, Farrar & Straus, New York 1946.

[2] "The Re-Emerging Mother-Goddess" in Pagan Rites in Judaism, Farrar & Straus, New York 1964, pp. 66 - 68.

[3] Group Psychology and Analysis of the Ego, 1921, Postscript XII.B.

[4] The Creation of the Woman, Braziller, New York 1960, pp. 107-110.

[5] As pointed by Freud in Totem and Taboo, in primitive tribes of savages there is a strong taboo related to marriages (exogamy). The same was probably true for our primitive ancestors. It seems that, with the progress of civilization, the peoples relaxed more and more sexual restrictions. As described by Robertson Smith, in the civilizations of the Semitic East, from Babylonia to Cyprus, orgies were custom, and with the participation of close relatives, too. Before the Babylonian exile, the Hebrews were not different from their neighbors. In this sense, Jewish monotheism represented a

regression from sexual freedom to a new – old restrictive way of life in relation to sexual customs.