Kellner, Leibowitz & the “contra mysticism”/Academic Orthoprax crowd.
[in progress]
Is part of the Kellner/’rational Torah’ Academic Orthoprax cabals problem that they completely ignore or are unaware of the cognates between Judaism and Primal belief systems/cosmologies – or perhaps thinking them as superfluous, ‘primitive’? “You have to be Lakota to see the Lakota world! There are worlds you cannot see because you are wasichu” (i.e., non-covenanted, un-specified...)! If you live with us as us, metaphysical principles of our universe apply to you that did not before (examples from “being changed”; also similar to R. Eiseman and ‘hashgacha-earning individuals”)! Just the kind of conception that the whitebread Yuterian/‘Edah’ “rational universalism”/solidarity crowd disdains when it occurs in Judaism! (Here with the Lakota as exotic ‘Other’, it would probably be lauded by Edah types, maybe seek a chitchat about it).Tribally, one is born into highly experiential, symbolic, specific and contextual – yet radically rational and awesomely complex cosmologies, webs of “exclusive” relationships shared by perhaps little more than a large extended family, etc – at the same time cosmologies that are profoundly, resoundingly covenantal, down to flora, fauna and ephemera (dimensions and spheres of reality militated against by Hellenistic/’philosophical’ “universalisms”). “Family first” is not merely a matter of survival; it is how one relates to the universe. In Torah, Humanity comes out from an even more “exclusive” relationship – two people. Not abstractions and ‘universalisms’, not ‘principles’. Two people, the meaning of the universe comes out from. Tribal, Primal, shamanic, is very likely Pre-Mabul if not pre-Adamic; universalisms, philosophy, idolatry, Nations, etc, flourish after Bavel, in Exile, in non-Redeemed context. Israel was Tribal, profoundly so. To embed it in philosophy, ‘rationalism’, late-in-the-day abstractions (no less than ‘aftermath mysticism’, etc), is to miss this, is to miss the central Pivotal, Axial nature of Covenant. Covenant as a natural instinct of Nefesh/Ruach – where man covenants with natural world and has some cognizance of High God (Rambam). This is tens of thousands of years old. Direct, Tribal similarities are even more profound in the “mystical”,, mythic, symbolic aspects (signs to be interpreted, within a particular language, etc); etz chaim and trees of life, yggrdazil, the world tree…the serpent, etc…(there are more abstracted examples by other world religions that get further from the direct tree/tree correspondence examples; xtian cross/tree, etc).