The Ramjackup

As a part of my immigration packet for Israel, I was required to submit a letter explaining my personal journey toward Judaism, and that letter was to include some information as to what I believed about things. Judaism is less dogmatic than other religions concerning what an individual believes. Judaism is in fact what some call an “ethnoreligion” or an “ethnogroup.” That is, it is a race, a nation, a culture, and a religion. Or it can be said that the religion is imbedded within a larger framework. This being the case, there are Jewish atheists, Jewish Buddhists, Jewish Christians (who generally prefer to be called Messianic Jews), and Jewish Muslims. Jews do have their own core of the rabbinic tradition, however, and there are a variety of beliefs and practices that have been contained within that tradition. In writing that letter, I decided to frame some of my perspectives from the vocabulary of the rabbis.

First, though, in order to make this comprehensible, I’ll start with an explanation of some urban vocabulary.

Back in the nineties, when something was messed up, we would say that it was “jacked up.” I don’t know where it came from. I imagine a car in pieces in a garage suspended on jacks with tools and nuts and bolts littering the floor all around. In addition to this, we would refer to someone who was generally messed up as a “jackup.” For example, “did you see Bob’s hair? It was a mess! And he tripped on himself like five times in an hour! That guy is such a jackup!”

Also, you are going to have to know that the rabbis divide the various generations of thinkers into ages, or generations. First, there were the Tanaim. Jesus would fall into this category. Then, around 500 CE there were the Amoraim. These were the rabbis who commented on the ancient works of the Tanaim. and were the primary contributors to the Talmud. Some people consider there to be another generation after them called the Seforaim. But the main generation of the Middle Ages were the Gaonim. There is a famous Rabbi named Saadia ben Gaon who wrote some important things. The word “gaon” in Hebrew means “genius.” Then, after the Renaissance, before the Jewish Haskalah of the 18th century, there were the Rishonim. The most famous of these rabbis were Rashi and the Rambam.

The second of these rabbis was probably the more famous, and may be the most famous of the ancient rabbis. His name was Moshe ben Maimon. Moses the son of Maimon. In Greek, he was called Maimonides, his most common name in English. But the Jews called him Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon, which forms an acronym: RMBM, which Jews pronounce as Rambam.

I decided to use a similar formula to devise an acronym to frame some of my attitudes. I’ll describe the components below.

Reform – I am actually a convert to Reform Judaism. This group comes from the perspective that the individual is the final arbiter of his own faith and practice. There is a lot more to say about this, as the group generally sees the Torah of Moses as simply a man-made historical or mythological document, not unlike Homer’s Iliad or Odyssey. I do not. I see the Torah as divinely inspired. There are many trends that dominate Reform Judaism. They tend to be secular in many respects. I certainly am not. They tend to be leftist, liberal, or progressive in political terms. I am politically centrist, though I tend to lean a bit toward the right. I will say, much to the chagrin of my Reform friends, that I am an admirer of President Donald Trump, a lifelong Democrat real estate playboy who ran as a Republican and has forged his own way in that party. At the bottom of all of this, though, is the fact that a Reform Jew decides for himself. I inherited this from my decades in Protestant Christianity.

Aristotelian – This Greek philosopher is considered to be the father of logic. As strange as religion is, with its animal sacrifices and bizarre holidays and enigmatic practices such as circumcision, ultimately all of this character is based on logical analysis of what all of the rituals and commandments actually mean. I have read Aristotle’s Metaphysics and Nichomachean Ethics as well as looked into various bits of his otheer works and concepts that came from them that have been adopted by the philosophical community. I can’t say I am a fan of everything he said or did. He was a teacher of Alexander the Great, and the things Aristotle said about Persians don’t sit well with me. However, the guy independently derived a version of monotheism by looking at the patterns of the movements of planets. He developed the term “The Prime Mover” as an epithet for God. His thinking ultimately constituted the origin of the Cosmological Argument for the Existence of God. So, I’ll consider myself aristotelian.

Messianic – I do believe that the Messiah is coming soon. In Judaism, the term “Messianic” is generally applied to those who believe that Jesus is the Messiah. There are a variety of groups of Messianic Jews who resemble Christians in most ways, and others who resemble Rabbinic Jews in most ways, and these guys have a variety of beliefs and practices. I am not attached to any of these groups, and I have always considered that the prophet Elijah will appear at some point and settle the matter definitively for everyone who the Messiah is. Until then, people should derive their own opinions. For my part, I will say that I will say publicly that I am convince that the Messiah will be supernatural. I do not think he will just be a normal human person like the rest of us. If you want to know more than that, you’ll have to ask me personally, and I may or may not tell you. For me, though, the coming of an actual personal Messiah, not just a vague concept of a utopian age, is important.

Jungian – Carl Gustav Jung was a student of Sigmund Freud and the father of Analytic Psychology. He is primarily known for his development of the archetypes of the personality, the collective unconscious, and synchronicity. This concept of synchronicity has been a central facet of this book. Synchronicity itself is basically the notion that events that do not have an obvious relationship form patterns with meaning. It can be called the study of meaningful coincidences. Jung himself called them acausal relationships. Jung was a Swiss Reformed Christian, but not of the garden variety, as all of his efforts were strictly evidence based. You wouldn’t find Jung passing out bible tracts or recommending that you accept Jesus as your personal savior, though by saying this, I do not mean to demean the efforts of those who do such things. However, if you have a problem, Jung would offer you psychotherapy. However, he did read the Bible in Latin and interspersed quotes from it throughout some of his works. He was an avid student of religious and mythological literary patterns. In fact, he developed his science of synchronicity after comparing the behavior of a schizophrenic patient to something he read from a French kabbalist. This book that I am writing seeks to illustrate how the acausal relationships of Carl Jung can contribute to the Teleological Argument for the Existence of God.

Chassidic – In Judaism there is a movement started by a rabbi they call the Baal Shem Tov who stressed that joyful and loving service to God should be at the center of worship before academic study. In Heberw, Chesed is the term for a love that depends on nothing else and never wavers or changes. It is generally referred to as kindness rather than love, as it is not specifically romantic or sexual or related to personal preferences as the word love often conveys in modern English. The Jewish Chabad movement that I have often associated with is in fact the modern descendant of this Chassidic movement that started with the Baal Shem Tov. Since I see this chesed as central, I do see myself as fundamentally chassidic.

Kabbalistic – Kabbalah is Jewish mysticism. The name of the movement comes from a root that means “that which is received.” At the center of the idea of this Jewish mysticism is that it is possible to see things in different ways to connect patterns of meaning out of ordinary events. Much has been made out of Kabbalah. Madonna popularized the movement, and much of what we call Kabbalah today is essentially a form of eastern mysticism. Further, the Jewish kabbalists of old got themselves into just about every kind of mess that a person can get into. They spoke with demons, practices sorcery, all of that. I do not by any means advocate everything that calls itself kabbalah. I have talked with demons myself, but not intentionally. I do not recommend that anyone do this sort of thing. And I do not appreciate Kabbalah being mixed with Gnosticism or eastern mysticism. I am actually ignorant of much of what is included in Kabbalah. I am not very familiar with the Zohar, Kabbalah’s main text, and I only have cursory knowledge of many of the works of Isaac Luria and Chaim Vital, the chief authors of Kabbalah. I am primarily influenced by some older works such as the Sefer Yetsirah and the Bahira, and of the Tanya, the text of Chassidic Kabbalah. However, since Kabbalah is rooted in the idea of seeing hidden patterns in things, such as in the science of Gematria, I do consider myself a Kabbalist.

Proselyte – I was raised in a secular gentile environment and am a convert to spirituality and religion in general. As said above, I am a convert to Reform Judaism. Therefore, the fact that I am essentially a proselyte, a convert, is important to me.

If you take the first letter of these words and make an acronym out of them, you get RAMJCKP. If you supply a couple of vowels, you get RAMJaCKuP. Maybe I will come up with another “a” and a “u” somewhere down the line. The Ramjackup. I thought that would be a cute name for a title, and it describes some of what I think about things.