Let’s start with a fun exercise; read and contemplate:
What are the sefirot of an octopus?
The partzufim of ants?
What is the god/s of an elephant?
It feels silly to think so much about animals when I’m reading abstract kabbalah. But the history of us distancing ourselves from them, the lies we tell ourselves to maintain Self seem ever present in my mind. Our ancestors were far more aware of animals, of nature, of just how close humans are to animal-nature without certain support structures. Our Torah and our history show us those connections and how our approach to them has shifted through time. Our modern life and rapid developments in the past 50 years show us our own changing consciousness towards non-humans.
One of the greatest lies humans have believed for most of recorded human-ing is that we are somehow not animals. That we are above them, above our own clear connection to the earth. As we begin – more and more – to engage in conversations around our animal companions, their consciousnesses, and what sharing this world with them means; we will also have to grasp with what being /this/ kind of animal means – an animal that wants to pretend it isn’t.
I’ve been thinking about our systems, about how we acquire them – yes even that precious human logic – from our bodies and surroundings. I can’t blame humans for being so binary minded having been planted with bilateral symmetry in a world with two main lights and two main time cycles and twos everywhere. But I want our Future work to be the work of breaking those binaries down into parts, to better understand their power on us.
The body map of kabbalah has Keter, Chokhmah, and Binah located in the head. These ‘intellects’ map into us humans as well – truthfully they have to because this is /our/ (Jewish) human platonic-astral-communal map of the body ideal. Most humans of history would acknowledge what communally makes humans different from “animals” is a short but notable list: built to walk upright, intellect and tool users, and for most of history worshiping some divinity. Since we can’t understand other animals to the depth of our languages, we’ve assumed ourselves to be historically alone in these. (hint hint were not) We believe our intellect different from, superior to, more advanced than other animals. These three sephirot of intellect are a more recent development in the animal map of sephirot evolution. Where did these intellects come from?
Da’at. A stiff-necked people. yOur voice in the wilderness. Da’at the weak spot of that famed mind/body disconnect, the vocal chords manifest. The luz bone. The space of speech. The place of shattering.
Another greatest lie humans have believed almost as long as recorded human-ing is that the mind and the body are not the same, are not a joint package, can somehow be separate-d. That great Greek Western myth has been made apocalyptic by Christianity and crass by capitalism, but its still here create catastrophe in our very bodies. And the more we pretend this divided state is real, the longer we will live in exile.
I have begun seeing Da’at as a place of healing, of vulnerable speaking – which I feel our ancestors intuited – but also as the breaking open to new growth. Instead of a shattering of self – a mirror breaking into shards as we animals became aware of being aware – we can see Da’at as the seed of consciousness splitting open to the Intellects’ first growths. We can think of humans as a unique flowering of consciousness, one with particular ties to the symbols and metaphors of our beloved planet. We can think of the g-d aspect Change and how we humans have pushed divinity to change with us and our ever-adaptable selves.
Then instead of a shattering from the perspective of the seed; broken, overwhelmed, new senses rushing and sensitivity ramped on high; we can perhaps occasionally see the long view – this experiment in consciousness and power we are living through. We can take a step back and see our pain for what it is – the struggle of the long battle toward slow betterment and our poor physical brain’s attempt to keep up with how much change/disconnection we are living in.
To be a full possible human is to be the holy animal haShem asks of us. Repairing our internal Da’at, repairing communal and familial Da’at, these will repair our body-mystic idea/l, will heal the shatter, will move us past the breakage into new body/divinity maps.
It is the modern and post-modern humans’ job to gently, fervently, lovingly reconnect our brains and our bodies. And in doing that reconnect our bodies to the earth, to hir cycles and moods. The tikkun of Da’at is not just in elevating those sparks. It is in elevating the very idea of tikkun, in rectifying the breaking itself and letting g-d grow with us. Avram could not allow for a g-d that would let them kill a beloved child, their own childhood trauma replayed – and so Elohim changed with Avraham. Yaacov needed a g-d present in the here and now, not up some ladder but in the struggle – and so El Shaddai elevated the liminality, wrestling with Israel. The Beit haMikdash crumbled and the Shekinah She moved to paper.
In this global diaspora, we are now even in diaspora from our bodies. Reconnecting our minds to our bodies with love and work will bring about new g-d. Humbling human egos to recognize our animal beauty will bring new g-d. These are the divine paths, the netivot kodesh, back into our most human beautiful, changeable divine, quantum physical selfs.
L’shanah tovah umetukah. Much love. To a year, good and sweet. May you be inscribed to life.
eish zarah 