Baal Teshuvah

Written by Miriam Felton-Dansky

Jewish Pagans Break New Ground
When Lilinah Biti-Anat constructed her first altar, no one showed her how to do it. On her own, she dragged a wooden Coca-Cola case from the street into her New York City apartment, and put in dividers to split the case into sections. She wasn’t practicing any particular religion, and she wasn’t seeking to emulate any tradition. And instead of modeling her altar after existing ones, she turned for inspiration to the dioramas of modern artist Joseph Cornell.

Lilinah’s religious experimentation was set against the turbulence of 1960’s New York City, with the hippie lifestyle and alternative religion flourishing all around. But her quest for spiritual satisfaction began long before that, as a child in a 1950’s Jewish household in the suburbs of Chicago. Lilinah didn’t like her parents’ Judaism–it seemed obsessed with patriarchs and a male God, and she felt alienated by the religion’s restrictions and sterility. “As a child I felt like there was something else out there,” she says, and by the time she was eight, Lilinah was looking for it.

Eventually, she found Paganism. And she wasn’t alone: while Lilinah was rejecting the Judaism she grew up with, many of her Jewish peers were rejecting it too. Decades later, when she came to Paganism, other Jews were doing the same. Today, people of Jewish heritage are disproportionately represented among American Pagans, and individual Jewish Pagans have been highly influential on Paganism as a whole.

Millennia ago, so the story goes, Abraham smashed his father’s idols and founded the Jewish religion. Accordingly, his descendents’ first goal was to build a fence around abstract monotheism, separating it from the Paganism in which it had taken root, and which, to them, represented all that Judaism was not. This explains Jews’ second commandment, our moratorium on graven images, and our status as the first of the three major monotheistic faiths. Are Jewish Pagans, then, the ultimate contradiction in terms?

Not to Lilinah and many like her. Many Pagans of Jewish heritage began their religious search by rejecting Judaism outright–but later, many of those same disenchanted Jews began to combine their inherited religion with their chosen one. Pagan festivals now offer sessions for Jewish Pagans, two list-servs connect Jewish Pagans across the country, and Jennifer Hunter, a Jewish Pagan herself, will be publishing Magical Judaism–the first monograph on “Jewitches,” the term by which many Jewish Wiccans identify themselves–later this year. Morwen, facilitator of a list-serv entitled “Israel Wicca,” even reports that there is a small but growing network of Jewish Wiccans in the Holy Land. Jewitches might appear to be spiritual opportunists, taking what appeals to them from each religion and selectively ignoring other parts. But to them, their path represents a way to integrate their chosen faith and their inherited one–a way for Judaism and its polar opposite to coexist.

Alone in her room with an encyclopedia, the junior high-age Lilinah began to explore religious alternatives. “I started writing to the organizations in the book that seemed closest to how I felt,” she says. “I wrote to the Unitarians and the Universalists, I wrote to the Baha’i.” Even these alternatives, though, focused too much on the patriarchy that had turned her off to Judaism in the first place. “The general perception in our culture,” she explains, “is that God is this guy, he’s the king, he’s the boss, he’s the big daddy. And I liked the Greek stuff because the deities were both male and female and it seemed like a better reflection of what was real.” Still searching for a spiritual fit in high school, Lilinah and a small group of friends began to take part in, she says, “odd little unformed rituals in the woods.”

Lilinah attended Barnard College in the late 1960’s, when investigation of alternative spirituality was rampant and hip. Young, secular Jews were learning about yoga and Buddhism, experimenting with new forms of religion, and rejecting Judaism as stodgy and sexist. “I was taking classes on Oriental religion and philosophy,” says Lilinah, “and I started to immerse in Buddhism and certain aspects of yoga. These were psychedelic hippie days and I immersed in that too.” Then she created that first altar–and though such experimentations were stylish, to Lilinah it wasn’t just about following a trend.

After college, Lilinah moved to California. The Zen movement was going strong; she lived with Beatnik roommates and when they went to the Zendo, she went too. But though she “didn’t have any trouble meditating,” Lilinah says, Zen was “too austere” for her. So she left her contemporaries in their Ashrams and Zendos and continued on her search.

It is widely agreed that modern Wicca, a particularly common form of contemporary Paganism, originated with British civil servant Gerald Gardner. A wiry man usually pictured in his later years, when he sported a pointy white beard below his triangular face, Gardner became obsessed with modern witchcraft in England during the 1930’s and 40’s. Despite his public persona, mysteries about his life abound, including such basic questions as whether he founded the modern practice of witchcraft or was initiated into it by existing practitioners. Either way, his research culminated in the publication of several influential books, including the seminal Witchcraft Today.

Gardner’s work spawned a movement’s worth of followers, usually referred to as Gardnerians. These groups practice the most traditional form of Wicca, based in ancient Celtic folklore, and celebrate a divine duality referred to as the “Lord” and the “Lady” or God and Goddess. They celebrate eight yearly Sabbats, which correspond to the harvest cycle, and annual holy days known as Samhain and Beltane. Today, Gardnerian covens can be found across the country and around the world.

The 1960’s saw modern Pagans taking ritual matters into their own hands. In 1967, a San Francisco State University student, now referred to by her Wiccan name, e.l.f. Silverlocke, took a religion course in which she was assigned to design her own ritual. Silverlocke sought inspiration in the work of Gardner, writer Robert Graves, and Margaret Murray–an anthropologist who published a controversial 1921 book arguing that some victims of medieval witch trials actually were members of an underground nature religion. Silverlocke’s project turned into a witches’ Sabbath. She staged the ritual with a group of friends, who became inspired and formed a coven to practice that ritual and others that they created. They called their group NROOGD–the New Reformed Orthodox Order of the Golden Dawn–and though the original coven is defunct, NROOGD still exists in the form of daughter and granddaughter covens throughout California.

As their hippie peers experimented with Zen and yoga, other young Jews flocked to Paganism. “I went through adolescent rebellion–I was getting more feminist, although I didn’t know it at the time, and was very alienated from Judaism for years,” recalls Magenta, a Jewish Pagan now living in the Twin Cities area. “I became involved in witchcraft in my twenties,” she says. Jews joined NROOGD covens and Gardnerian covens; they became solitary practitioners, as lone Wiccans are called, or, like Magenta, they joined unstructured covens that devised new rituals based on their interests. In 1979, Starhawk–Jewish by birth and today a renowned authority on modern Paganism–published The Spiral Dance, a seminal introduction to the religion. That same year, Margot Adler, also of Jewish heritage, published Drawing Down the Moon, another major work on contemporary Pagan spirituality. There was much debate on this topic in the 1980’s–at the same time, not coincidentally, as Jewish feminists were exploring the creation of female-friendly rituals and theology. These efforts, which culminated in such works as Judith Plaskow’s Standing Again at Sinai and Marcia Falk’s feminist reenvisionings of Jewish liturgy, sought to redress the same elements of Judaism–patriarchy and male-oriented prayer–that drove many Jews to Goddess-worship in the first place.

Lilinah encountered Gardnerians, and she encountered NROOGDies, as they call themselves. “Neither one appealed to me,” she says. She disliked the orthodoxy of Gardnerianism, and she says, “with the NROOGDies, it was just an excuse to smoke marijuana.” Still searching, she got married, and in 1980, gave birth to a daughter. Suddenly, she faced even more questions than she’d had before. “An awful lot of people who have been raised in a religion,” she says, “when they have a family they start going back to their church. Well, I said, I don’t have a church, and I don’t want to enforce one point of view. So I started taking books out on spirituality and children.” It was one of those books–a parents’ guide to helping children have a spiritual life–that provided the missing link, in the form of a chapter called “Introducing Your Daughter to the Goddess.” Lilinah liked what she read, and she began checking out books from the bibliography and contacting the Pagan organizations listed there.

Then, in 1984, she joined a Los Angeles coven. Lilinah liked the group because its members came from diverse backgrounds, and rather than sticking to a structured format, they created new rituals based on members’ needs and inspirations. But something was still missing–and most surprisingly, it was the thing she had given up all those years ago. It wasn’t that Lilinah felt her new Paganism conflicted with her Jewish identity–but suddenly she did feel the need, as she says, to reconcile them.

In 1985, Senator Jesse Helms and Representative Robert Walker introduced bills into the Senate and House of Representatives that would deny Wiccan churches the tax-exempt status granted to other religious institutions. That same year, prison inmate Herbert Dettmer was waging a court battle for his right to possess salts, a statue, a robe, and other elements of Wiccan worship that prison officials had denied him on the grounds that those items constituted prison contraband–and that Wicca wasn’t a “real” religion anyway. These disputes weren’t just about incense and tax dollars; at stake was the government’s willingness to recognize Wicca as a legitimate religion. Along with many prominent Pagans, the ACLU intervened, and the legislation failed, though barely. A Federal Appeals Court upheld Dettmer’s right to worship, as well as Wicca’s status as a constitutionally protected religion, but in the end, denied his right to possess the ritual objects, figuring that when it came to security, prison authorities knew best.

“Pagans were feeling oppressed, and they had a reason to,” says Lilinah. Wiccans living in her neighborhood got used to having their tires slashed and their backyard altars smashed by local teenagers. So when Lilinah decided to hold a Passover seder with her coven, she focused on “the idea of freedom,” she says. “Pagans had a strong victim mentality. I wanted a liberation thing, so instead of three pieces of matzoh I had a corn tortilla, a rice cake, and a slice of rye bread. We had three colors, three textures, three continents–the New World, Asia, and Europe.” It wasn’t just about Pagan rights, though; the seder also represented Lilinah’s first attempt to integrate her Jewish past with her Pagan present.

Lilinah’s return to her Jewish roots was, again, in synch with the leanings of many others of her generation. Right around the time Lilinah threw her seder, Magenta was reminiscing about Passover with a Jewish Pagan friend. “We were saying we really miss seders,” she said. “We like the foods, we like the idea.” So they created one: “I don’t know if we even called it a Pagan seder,” she explains, “but it was about liberation and culture and about eating these lovely foods.” Rather than changing the ritual elements of the seder, as Lilinah did, Magenta’s group endowed the traditionally Jewish foods with new meaning. “Matzoh is the first food–it represents the early days, the golden age of the Goddess, before there was patriarchy,” she explains. “The bitter herbs are the coming of patriarchy. The greens are the return of the Goddess.” Magenta’s coven, composed of three Jewish and three non-Jewish Pagans, continues to revise and celebrate their seder to this day.

Passover’s obvious relationship to the seasons and the harvest cycle makes it an easy point of nexis between Judaism and Paganism; during the 1980’s and 90’s, many of Lilinah’s and Magenta’s contemporaries were reexploring Judaism after sojourns as Pagans, and many of them also began by participating in a seder. Since these early attempts, though, many Pagans have discovered it isn’t the only common ground: Jen Hunter, author of the forthcoming Magical Judaism, explains that there are lots of overlaps between Jewish and Pagan ritual, and today, many take advantage of them. They combine the holidays that relate to the seasons or the harvest–Passover, Tu B’Shvat, and Sukkot–and celebrate the moon cycle, which easily corresponds to Rosh Hodesh, traditionally a Jewish women’s holiday. Penny Morris, a 26-year-old undergraduate at Clark State College in Ohio, concurs: she’s the only Jew in the Order of Iris, the feminist Pagan group to which she belongs, but when she attends their Sabbat festivals she also celebrates the closest Jewish holiday. Chanukah, for instance, falls close to the Winter Solstice, and since both include a symbolic act of lighting candles at the darkest time of the year, Morris observes them as one.

This overlapping fits well with many Pagan traditions: Helen Berger, sociologist at Westchester University and author of Voices from the Pagan Census, explains that it’s often acceptable in Paganism to integrate multiple deities, rituals, and beliefs. The traditional Jewish perspective on this question couldn’t differ more. Most Jewish Pagans don’t place too much importance on how a rabbi would see their practices–they don’t seek to stay within a halachic framework anyway. Even if staying technically true to Judaism isn’t the goal, though, Berger notes that Jewish Pagans, whether or not they retain any Jewish practices, have difficulty ceasing to identify as Jews. “I definitely would not consider leaving Judaism behind and just being Pagan,” confirms Morris. Carly Lesser, a founding member of Becoming, a DC-based Pagan group, even sees her practice as “shamanic earth-based Judaism.” When members of Becoming gather on a Friday night, they celebrate with wine and fresh baked challah–while dancing around a bonfire and honoring the four elements. “Now,” explains Hunter, “people are making more effort to bring their Jewishness in instead of letting it sit in the background. I think we’re feeling left out of the whole Celtic craze. The Jews among us are left going, eh? That’s not my tribe.”

After throwing her Pagan seder, Lilinah began researching the Pagans who were her tribe: ancient Israelites. “I began to see there wasn’t instant monotheism,” she explains. “There was a long stage of development–the Jews were originally Pagans like everyone else. I said, here’s a way I can work them both together.” She researched ancient Canaanite and Phoenician gods. She checked out grammars and glossaries, book after book. Soon afterwards, when she moved to San Francisco, Lilinah joined a Pagan group with a subset of people who were, like her, interested in Canaanite worship. Together, they used existing source materials to patch together rituals celebrating ancient Israelite gods, and began to create new ones. In 1997, Lilinah launched a web site called “Qadash Kinahnu: a Canaanite Phoenician Temple,” to make her new knowledge available. It also serves as a guide to Canaanite rituals, inviting others to honor El, Asherah, Baal, and other ancient Middle Eastern deities.

Ultimately, Lilinah explains, “I am a poly-atheist or an atheo-Pagan. I characterize the multiple deities as a way for breaking the universe into mind-sized chunks.” Hunter theorizes that this is precisely why many Jews have sought alternatives in the first place: “In most other religions,” she explains, “if you want a human face of God, you don’t have to look too hard. I think a lot of people might turn to polytheism because they find the Jewish god too impersonal.” Yet for some Jews, polytheism only goes so far: though Carly’s group could be considered pantheistic, they, and she, also subscribe to a slight variation: panentheism, a belief that recognizes God as being within everything in the natural world, yet simultaneously more than the sum of everything in the world. This formula allows Carly to stay close to her roots: “I couldn’t let that one go,” she says. “I mean, I am Jewish.” And surprisingly, it fits well with contemporary Paganism too: Hunter postulates that most modern Pagans are “really closet monotheists.” Most, she explains, “will tell you that when you get down to it, all the gods are just facets of a unity. That idea of seeing the deities as aspects of a unity is, I believe, something that comes from our Jewish background. I don’t think many ancient Pagans had that.”

Penny Morris is a generation younger than Lilinah. Raised in a Reform Jewish household, she attended Hebrew School and was Bat Mitzvah’d–“I considered becoming a rabbi for a while,” she adds–and began to feel dissatisfied with Judaism for the same reasons Lilinah had, and at the same age as Lilinah had, though a quarter-century later. “I got disillusioned with the masculine side of Judaism,” she says. Jewish observance began to feel stale. Then, as a high school senior, she landed a role in a school play: a dramatization of Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Forest House, an account of pre-Arthurian druidic worship. Morris was cast as priestess: “We performed a Beltane ritual and a Samhain ritual,” she says, and “it was very exciting and eye-opening.”

It wasn’t until well into her exploration of Wicca’s Goddess-worship that Morris discovered Judaism’s own feminine side. Like Morris, many Jews seeking female-friendly worship have become Pagans, but others have simply brought Goddess-worship into Judaism itself. “They speak about the Goddess as being the Shabbos bride,” says Berger. “They have claimed that in the Hebrew the word for God is ambiguous in terms of gender and therefore that it’s both God and Goddess that’s being spoken of.” Others see the shekhina as a goddess figure–the same half of the male/female duality that the Lady represents for Wiccans. Worship of ancient Israelite goddess Asherah may have preceded Judaic monotheism, but in the end, they might not be so different.

Lilinah raised her daughter, Tamara, now 24, with a combination of Judaism and Paganism–and with the permission to follow any spiritual path she wanted. Morris feels the same way: she hopes to have children, and when she does, will bring them up Jewish and Pagan–“but,” she adds, “if they decided to go off in another direction, that would be fine.” In the end, perhaps, Jewish Pagans are just adding another layer onto the already intertwined histories of their two faiths: reaching back through chosen Paganism to inherited Judaism, and back further, to chosen Judaism and inherited Paganism–and then passing everything along to a new generation. “Judaism has a rich Pagan history,” says Hunter. “It’s just that we mostly learn about it by learning what we’re not supposed to do.”

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Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved.