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- Title
אנושי ועל־אנושי מדי: תשוקה, אניגמה והחוויה הדתית.
- Authors
ביטי רואי
- Abstract
In this essay regarding the work of Ruth Stein, I take as my point of intersect the resemblance between the mother-infant dyad and human-Divine relations, which in their centers lie the enigma, a crucial, indecipherable riddle that deals with the secret of life. As I see matters, the enigmatic message not only constitutes the adulated sexual experience, but also characterizes the religious realm, with inherently sublime transformations between the corporal-sensual, the erotic-sexual and the spiritual-divine. At the heart of both the maternal and the religious experience stands what I term a “transfer object” that serves as a yearning point that, as such experiences develop, slowly reveals itself from under its covers. In addition, I deal with the implementations of the “divine desire” – what God desires, as it were – and seek to illuminate its features in Jewish tradition, from the time of the Sages in late antiquity to the origins of the mystical tradition in the Kabbalah and later Hassidism. As opposed to the threatening, commanding, castrating God image, in the latter literature there immerges a feminine divine, loving and passionate God, similar to that of the mother in infancy. At the heart of the relationship between the divine, the world and the human stems a huge passion that has no rational justification nor functional reason but itself. This depiction emphasizes the strength of this passion and defines it as a major pole for the world, explaining the creation of all life in this world, its essence and meaning. With the awareness of the danger represented by the perverted, depraved tensions that religious subjugation can evoke, this article articulates the religious enigmatic arena as an acknowledgement of the fact that the world is full of freedom and creativity that enables a shift from the corporal to the spiritual, from reality to the phantasmatic, from believing to doubt, and from the alienated to the close and well-known. The article criticizes the patriarchal approach which derives from the classical oedipal model, which had served as the basis for the psychoanalytic approach to understanding religious terror, and suggests adopting a maternal model of passionate feminine divinity of nourishment, whose internalization would better serve to encourage hope and to mitigate the God who needs to be pacified and appeased. This precise model exists in the heart of many Jewish mystical traditions.
- Publication
Ma'arag: Israeli Journal of Psychoanalysis, 2019, Vol 9, p433
- ISSN
2413-290X
- Publication type
Article