Memory, Land, and Identity: Visions of the Past and the Land in the Jewish Spiritual Renewal in Israel

Abstract

This study focuses on the creative reconstruction of Jewish history via a spiritual New Age perspective. Using the case of the Jewish Spiritual Renewal (JSR) narrative of the past and the land, this article aims to shed light on some of the cultural transformations which are taking place in contemporary Israeli public discourse, especially the reconfiguration of the association between Jewish history, contemporary spirituality, and the land. The JSR narrative recovers, reinterprets and remolds Jewish history in order to legitimize the claim for a spiritual renewal of the present. By offering new perspectives on the Jewish past and history, the JSR attempts to validate its postmodern and spiritual version of Judaism as an original, uncorrupted form of Jewish thought and practice. The comparison of the JSR narrative with the classical Zionist and Canaanite narrative reveals that the JSR spiritual narrative replaces particularistic and nationalistic values regarding the land with universal and global values concerning nature and the environment, in order to create a universal Jewish spirituality that caters to the identity needs of contemporary non-Orthodox Jewish Israelis.

Deep healing: ritual healing in the teshuvah movement

“…Its purpose is to contain the ailment or problem without necessarily curing it (Sered 2005). This distinction between healing and curing, conducted by the practitioners themselves, can also be found in Jewish spiritual renewal in Israel (see Werczberger 2011), and in some Christian churches (see Hollis 2005).…”

Modern Orthodoxy in Post-Secular Times

“…These include the secular batei midrash movement (Werczberger and Azulai 2011), New Age Judaism (Werczberger 2011), and a teshuvah movement of "return" to Judaism in which the returnees, some of whom are highprofile performing artists, do not detach from the secular world but rather locate themselves in some middle ground (Leibovitch 2014). The willingness of secular Israeli thinkers to acknowledge the Jewish roots of Zionism, as well as to accept that being secular is not necessarily synonymous "with an atheistic belief in the absence of God from the universe" has also been described as post-secular (Lahav 2014, 190).…”

The making of Jewish authenticity: The hybrid discourse of authenticity of New Age Judaism and the complexities of religious individualization

“…This alternative historical narrative reconstructs Jewish preexilic history as a sacred, spiritual time marked by non-institutionalized forms of religious life, pagan and nature worship and direct divine revelation and prophecy. Rabbinic Judaism which emerged after the exile transformed Jewish rituals into hollow and empty procedures (Werczberger, 2011). In order to heal the Jewish tradition and renew it, one should be return to its original, authentic spiritual state.…”