Falstaff: Of what quality was your love, then?
Ford: Like a fair house built upon another man's ground; so that I have lost my edifice by mistaking the place where I erected it.
(Shakespeare, Merry Wives of Winsdor, Act II - Scene II)
The Temple of Jerusalem is the symbol of the most sacred
the Jews ever had. During the centuries, it became also the symbol of national
sovereignty and its destruction synonym of its loss. The only part which
is still standing on the ground is a short segment of the third exterior
wall encircling the courtyard of the sanctuary. The Jews call it “The
Western Wall” (Hakotel HaMa’aravi), the Gentiles call it “The Wailing
Wall”, because they see the Jews going to the place in pilgrimage, until they touch
it with their forehead, and pouring there their bitter tears.
Tribality and Monarchy
In the book of Jeremiah (35.1-19) we are told of a strange
family, that of Ionadav Ben Rakhav, the Hebrew clan of the Rekhavim which,
lead by the Prophet into the Temple, and having been presented with glasses
filled with wine, had answered:
Houses and Tents
The German theologist Johannes Lehman proves (3), following
the thread laid down by Elias Auerbah, that the 10th Commandment as it
is presented in the 20th chapter of the Book of Exodus originally was:
“Thou shalt not covet the house”, and only in a later period was added
“your neighbor's (house)”, when this Commandment had no more reason to be,
after the Hebrews had become a people of cultivators dwelling in stone
and wood houses, and there was no point in prohibiting houses'
possession.
We found a mnemonic trace of how the events really unfolded
in Josephus' Antiquities:
On the Threshold of the Taboo
The most solemn moment described in the Torah is when,
at the end of the wanderings, Moses is close to die and he apparently
is on the verge of the satisfaction of all his aims. Strangely enough,
this moment is also characterized by a list of curses, which become the
outstanding element of the 28th chapter of the Deuteronomy.
The Kings and their Houses
Now we are able to approach the problem of the Temple,
for a closer outlook on its real significance.
Epilogue
In the last years, sporadic groups of Jewish extremists,
encouraged by fundamentalist elements from the Christian Right who see
in the re-building of the Temple a mean for enhancing the Second Coming
of Jesus, have beeing vociferously advocating the rebuilding of the Jewish
sanctuary on the Mount of the Temple, at the expense of the beautiful Mosques
standing on the site. At the moment, they are correctly perceived by the
sane majority of the Israelis as a weird group of hallucinating fanatics.
The commemoration of its destruction, the 9 of Ab, is
considered the most important day of national mourning, and the Jews fast,
sitting on the ground, weeping the loss of the sacred thing. This is the
climax of the historical trauma and it is perceived as the inconsolable
stage of the national tragedy.
The mourning must be present in every event of Jewish
life: in a just completed house, a segment of one of the walls must be left
not whitewashed, in remembrance of the Temple which lays in its desolation.
During the wedding ceremony, apex of Jewish joy, a glass is broken by the
groom, and in every joyful event it is precept to introduce an element
of grief, in remembrance of the national tragedy.
As a symptom of an obsessive neurosis, every
moment of joy must be counterbalanced by some punitive act, as an expression
of the ambivalence of the emotional content. It seems that in Jewish psyche
the Temple is the symbol of archaic traces of the mythical golden era of
an idealized childhood, whose loss is inconsolable, and whose remembrance
is projected into an atmosphere of fairy tale, where everything is perceived
as fantastic and beyond reality. All the elements of the drama are present
in the popular perception of the Temple and its saga: the ideal life,
the sin, the punishment, and eventually the unavoidable and inconsolable
loss.
The Jews have always related to the destruction of the
Temple and the loss of national independence as if they were the result
of Divine wrath, punishment and consequence of their own wickedness. The
Romans are considered only the instrument of God's hand, sent to act out
the Divine will and justice.
At difference with other ancient peoples, who considered
the act of destruction of a temple a sacrilege committed against the god
and the nation, that will rise his vengeance against the
enemy, the Jews accused themselves of being the responsible for their own
tragedy.
At difference with ancient tribes, which used to put
to death the gods who disappointed, the Jews, after every national disaster,
retrench even deeper into their own sense of guilt and its product: an
even stronger cohesion under the roof of the collective sense of
guilt.
However, what is the terrible sin which induced God to
erase his own Temple to ashes, as a punishment to His chosen people?
Jewish tradition explains that the First Exile lasted
seventy years because was caused by a sin of idolatry, while the Second
Exile is endless because was caused by hatred between brothers.
The period that preceded the destruction of the Second
Temple was indeed a period of turbulence, at least according to the description
made by Josephus (1), in which the Jewish writer depicts the various factions
of the Jews as continuously fighting between themselves. However, the one
who knows the tormented history of the Jewish people is aware that internal
quarrels on one hand and cohesion among themselves, on the other, have
always alternate without doing substantial damage to the fiber of
national identity. At the eve of the destruction of the Second Temple, it
does not seem that the internal quarrels were more destructive than in
previous periods. In Roman times the internal cohesion of the Jews was
much greater than in the previous Hellenistic period, when some parts of
the people had been tempted by the alluring Hellenistic cosmopolitan culture
into adopting Greek customs. In the second century B.C. the division between
Philo
– Hellenes (lover of Greeks) and orthodox Jews had been much more acute.
After the rebellion of 167 B.C. against the Seleucids (the Maccabee wars),
which was parallel to a civil war between Hellenism and Orthodoxy in the
midst of Judah, a consensus was formed as for the national character and
cohesion, even if religious questions continued to divide the elite of
the people. Adducing fratricide hatred as the cause of the punishment and
God's wrath sounds like a pathetic rationalization, whose aim is concealing
a much deeper and disguised sense of guilt, which has been apparently
successfully removed. Moreover, we must keep in mind that for ancient peoples, as in our unconcious,
the nature of the punishment is always directly associated to the substance
of the sin: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth; the Arabs cut the hand
which has sinned, the Roman Mutius Scevola punished the hand which failed,
stretching it into the fire, and so on.
Why should God have punished his people destroying His
own Temple?
Therefore, if the punishment is the destruction of the
Lord's house, the association leads us to assume that the primeval sin
had been its very construction.
We may ask: how can it be, having been the Lord Himself,
according to the tradition, who had commanded the Temple's edification?
In order to throw light into this apparent contradiction
we must inquire into the substance of the Jewish soul and its unconscious
contents, analyzing the different elements composing it.
Furthermore, all the other peoples, when the enemy destroys
a temple, a church, a palace or any other monument, they try to rebuilt
it as soon as possible. The Jewish people were indeed prevented from building again their Temple by external causes, but the impression is that those where only
an overlaid rationalization, adduced with the aim of concealing an inner inhibition from
rebuilding the House of the Lord. After its destruction, precise prescriptions
were codified in Jewish law with the purpose of inhibiting and prohibiting
the re-building, even if changed political conditions would render the endeavor possible.
The Talmud prohibits the reconstruction on the grounds
that the rites of purification necessary to perform the sacrifices have
been forgotten, the red heifer whose ashes must be sprayed on the
head of the congregation is not to be found, and therefore no human will
be permitted anymore to built the altar of the Lord, and to sacrifice to
Him: only the Messiah will rebuild the Temple and bring the Kingdom of
David. But the taboo is not limited to the reconstruction of the Temple.
It extends also to entering the Mount of the Temple, on the ground that,
since we don't know where exactly was the spot of the Holy of the Holies,
it is forbidden that an impure leg would casually tread on the Holy place.
A pious Jew is allowed to approach the Mount of the Temple no closer than
the Wailing Wall, and he is inhibited from ascending further.
After the conquest of the Mount of the Temple by Israel
on the 5th of June 1967, The Rabbinate hung a sign on the Gate of the Mount
with a warning in Hebrew and in English, explaining that no Jew should
pass the threshold of that gate.
The manifest justification for the prohibition is therefore
that the place is too sacred (2) to be approached.
As we shall see below, these rationalizations hide a
much more profound emotional content of ambivalence, which have been removed
and repressed.
We will drink no wine: for Yonadav the son of Rekhav our father
commanded us, saying. You shall drink no wine, neither you, nor your sons
for ever: Neither shall you build a house, nor sow seed, nor plant a vineyard,
nor have one: but all your days you shall dwell in tents; that you may
live many days in the land where you sojourn. And we have obeyed the voice
of Yonadav son of Rekhav our father in all that he charged us, to drink
no wine al our days, our wives, our sons, and our daughters; nor to build
houses for us to dwell in; neither have we vineyards, nor field, nor seed:
but we have dwelt in in tents, and have obeyed, and done according to all
that Yonadav our father commanded us (35: 6-10). *
Then, the Lord praises them for their lifestyle through the words
of the Prophet.
That Hebrew clan had abandoned the work of the soil, and
had returned to the original lifestyle of the people of Israel, as it was
at the time of the Patriarchs, who migrated as shepherds at the margins
of the seeded land, and lived in condition of social and economic equality, a
life of simplicity and justice. The Rekhavits even abstained from drinking
wine, like the Arabs and for the same reason: in order not to be compelled
to plant vineyards.
Jeremiah who, like all the prophets, manifested his disdain
for the Canaanite idolatric culture, which had been adopted by the children
of Israel since they had settled in the Promised Land, and had become cultivators,
praises the Rekhavits for having returned to the simple and spiritual
life of the nomad. Jeremiah remembers the period of the desert as the golden
age of the history of Israel.
Therefore, we see that during the period of seven centuries,
which lasted from the settlement in the Land, after the Exodus (XIV-XIII
sec. B.C.), to the first exile (VI sec. B.C.), two currents existed in
the midst of the people. The main one, constituted by the great majority
of the population, which had adopted the style of life and the customs
of the Canaanite cultivators, worshipped the Baal and the Canaanite Astarte,
and was addicted to fertility cults, as all the other settled down
peoples of the region: the Hebrews, in the Land of Israel, had become like
their neighbors, they elected a king, "as all the other people", and had
neglected Jahveh, the god of the shepherds.
The second current, numerically negligible, was the one
represented by the Prophets, champions of the god of the desert, and in
continuous conflict with the kings of Israel.
This current reconnected to the tradition of the Patriarchs,
whose emotional contents are those of the shepherds, who hate city - life
and its institutions.
The Prophets were the interpreters of the contents of
this current, which is the basic essence of Jewish psyche, where the creative
energies of the people take their roots.
In the first two hundred years from the conquest, during
the long phase of passage and the slow takeover of the land, so faithfully
described by the Book of the Judges, the Hebrew tribes had conserved their
own institutions, electing a common chief only in the moments of danger.
However,as the dwelling on the Land became more and more also a mental
reality, the more the need of adopting the same institutions of their neighbors became compelling.
The Israelites want a central authority,
which will extend its reach beyond the narrow interests of the single clans,
and that will channel the energies of the violent tribes into presenting
one identity and one will to the bordering peoples, who were putting
an unbearable pressure on Israel.
The people demand a king: “...now make us a king to judge
us like all the nations” (Sam I, 8:5). The Prophet sees the danger:
But the thing displeased Shemu’el when they said, Give us a
king to judge us. And Shemu’el prayed to the Lord. And the Lord said to
Shemu’el, Hearken to to the voice of the people in all that they say to
thee: for they have not rejected thee, but they have rejected me, that
I should not reign over them. According to all the deeds which they have
done since the day that I brought them up out of Mizraym, and to this day.
in that they have forsaken me, and served other gods, so they also do to
thee (Sam. I, 8: 6-9).
From the afore mentioned verses, it seems that in the eyes of the Lord monarchy and idolatry are equivalent. Demanding a
king means abandoning the cult of Jahveh, the god of the shepherds, in
favor of the local cults. The threat is double faced: demanding a king
means changing social structure, and that means also changing
religion. Samuel tries to resist the demands of the people:
This will be the custom of the king that shall reign over you:
He will take your sons, and appoint them for himself on his chariot. And
he will appoint for himself captains over thousands, and captains over
fifties; and will set them to plough his ground, and to reap his harvest,
and to make his instruments of war, and the instruments of his chariots.
And he will take your daughters for perfumers, and cooks and bakers. And
he will take your fields, and your vineyards, and your best oliveyards,
and give them to his servant. And he will take the tenth of your seed,
and of your vineyards, and give to his officers, and to his servants. And
he will take your menservants and your maidservants, and your goodliest
young men, and your asses, and put them to his work. He will take the tenth
of your sheep: and you will be his servants. And you shall cry out on that
day because of your king which you shall have chosen you. ( Sam. I, 8:
11-18).
More clear than that the Prophet could not possibly
have been.
Nevertheless the people refused to obey the voice of
Shemu’el; and they said: "No, but we will have a king over us; that we
also may be like all the nations; and that our king may judge us, and go
out before us, and fight our battles" (8: 9-20).
What the Israelites intended was being as all the settled
down nations.
In this desire of being as the other nations,
which were also cultivators, takes roots that layer in Jewish psyche which
overlay the original one and, on one hand it enriches it, but on the other hand
it pollutes it.
That second layer of people attached to their own land
and thirsty for national sovereignty had many centuries in which to take
roots, to the point that the love for the land and its landscape is a thread
in all the biblical and post - biblical literature.
In this way, the struggle between shepherds and cultivators
was introjected, and from external became internal. The introjection process
produced a body with two souls, incompatible between themselves, and in
an inner internal conflict.
In sacred literature a great effort is invested
with the aim of concealing these two different tendencies.
After having seen how, from the very beginning, the Bible
was contrary to monarchy, to the extent that demanding a king was considered
a very denial of the Lord, afterwards the kings of Israel, Saul, David and Salomon
become the great Heroes of the Jewish people, to the point that the Messiah
himself will be a scion of David, and Salomon is considered the wisest
of men, the sole to be able of understanding the language of the animals.
It seems that no other people harbors inside themselves so an extreme
dichotomy: love and hatred towards the same object at the same time.
Lehman underlines that while the last five commandment
are very concise and open with the word “Not” (L'o), the 10th, after the
short imperative: “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's house”, adds, with
the aim of concealing the real meaning of the prohibition: “thou shalt
not covet thy neighbor's wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant,
nor his ox, nor his ass, nor anything that is thy neighbour’s”
All this list is completely overdone, and does not fit
into the concision of the other previous four Commandments, which relate
to the relationships between a man and his neighbor. Moreover the “thou
shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife” is already comprised in the 7th: “Thou
shalt not commit adultery”. The concept
of “coveting”, as for your neighbor's possession cannot be considered an
interdiction separated from that of acting out the desire, because in ancient times a sin of "desiring", separated from the action, was not even contemplated. In Hebrew legislation
only actions can be considered sinful and liable of punishment, and not
abstract “desires”.
The same as for “thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's
wife”, because in Hebrew legislation adultery is considered such only
if it is consummated with a married or engaged woman: in polygamist society
a man who seduces a virgin who is not committed to another man, even if
he himself is already married, it is not considered adultery (4).
In the fifth chapter of Deuteronomy the Decalogue is
repeated.
This Book might be posterior to the parts of the Book of Exodus
quoted above, and it has been edited at the end of the 7th century B.C.,
at the time of Josiah’ reforms (5). During the pace of time which passed
between the two traditions the traces of the real nature of the 10th Commandment
had been erased even better. Here the interdiction of owning a house was
inserted into the middle of the other prohibitions of “thou shalt not covet”,
becoming, in this way, irrecognizable.
The Decalogue, which represents one of the most ancient
traditions of the Torah, and may possibly be attributed to Moses himself,
the Egyptian prince who, according to Freud, intended to impose on the Hebrews the spirituality
of Aton’s religion (6), includes the coveting of the house among the gravest
sins: a taboo, which reconnects us to the words of the Rekhavites, as we
have seen above. The story of Yonadav son of Rekhav represents the clearest
mnemonic trace of the real original intentions, because it is reported by Jeremiah
as an example of purity and authenticity.
Lehmann, focusing and correcting Freud’s thinking, sustains that Moses’ real intention was to hold the children of Israel outside the
Promised Land, and to make out of them an ideal people of nomads, in the
observance of the purest spirituality and monotheism.
Therefore, Moses was killed not so much because he wanted
to impose too a spiritual religion on the Hebrews, as advanced by
Freud (7), but because of a much more concrete reason: he wanted to inhibit
them from possessing the houses and the fields of the Canaanites.
The Land was never promised by Moses, the Egyptian, nor
by his god, but by the second Moses, priest of Midian, who headed the Israelites
after the Moses' dispatch.
The people craved for the houses, the vineyards and the
fields of the Canaanites. Moses, the legislator, wanted to hold them back,
away from the seeded land, and to make out of them a sacred people, in
the spirit of the new monotheistic religion. The numerous rebellions described
by the Torah broke out on the ground of this conflict.
As Leheman exposited, in this conflict Moses was murdered,
his death was removed, and in this way it was also removed the inhibition
of invading the seeded land.
The Biblical redactor tried to erase the traces of the
real events. However, as a result of the counterfeit, the text is full
of contradictions and it cannot stand the analysis of the details.
In some cases, if we make an inversion of the story presented
to us by the Bible, we can suddenly see how the "real" events unfolded.
The Bible presents to us a situation in which it was
Moses who tried to push for the conquest of the Land, while the people
did not want to pursue the endeavor, out of fear and lack of faith in the
Lord.
Quite strange, if we consider how events usually happen
amidst nomadic and semi nomadic tribes wandering at the limits of the
seeded land. They usually do not need encouragement to invade the cultivators'
land. Bedouins do it all the time. And it is difficult to imagine the thirsty
Hebrew tribes preferring to stay in the desert, rather than pursuing the
conquest. Moreover, the Bible itself says that it were the Lord and Moses
to withhold them in the desert for forty years, before allowing them to
pursue the conquest. Who was the one withholding whom should be clear even from
that statement alone.
But the Editor tried to mislead the reader in every possible
way:
And it came to pass, when Par’o had ley the people go, that
God led them not through the way of the land of Pelishtim, although that
was near; for God said, Lest the people repent when they see war, and they
return to Mizrayim (Ex. 13:17)
Therefore, it was “God”, i.e. Moses, who did not intend to
drive the people into the Land. That it was done because of an alleged
fear by the people it is an obvious rationalization.
Moreover, archaeological excavations prove that “the
way of the land of Pelishtim”, which the Egyptians called “The way of Horus”
(Via Maris),at the time of the Late Bronze (XV –XIII century), was
free of fortified cities until Gezer, at the foot of the Judean Hills.
The Philistines, mentioned in the text, arrived to the
eastern shores of the Mediterranean sea at the earliest only a century later
(8).
Beyond all, it is very strange that the Israelites, out
of fear, and being pursued by the Egyptian Army, would prefer the way leading them into the obstacle of the Red Sea.
What really happened is that Moses prevented
them from going through the way which would have easily led them to the
desired aim, and therefore paid the price of having erected himself as
a barrier between the Hebrews and their desire.
The miracles in the desert, and particularly the separation
of the Red Sea waters, were the magic formula for affirming Moses’ will,
and the demonstration that the children of Israel should refrain from pursuing
the conquest of the Land. It was a continue struggle of will between Moses
and the thirsty Hebrews.
The other story, which becomes comprehensible only if
inverted, is the one of the explorers.
Apparently, the Lord commands to send twelve explorers “all those men were heads
of the children of Ysrael” (Numbers 13: 1-33), to spy out the land.
Why does the Lord command the sending of men to spy out the
land, when he knew that they will return scared to death, and would demoralize
the people?
Indeed the twelve explorers returned and recommended
to the people to desist from the conquest, and to keep staying in the wilderness. He is Moses who must console them.
If we invert the story, as we often do in the interpretation
of dreams, the real sequence of events becomes clear: the people pressured
Moses to pursue the conquest, and it was the latter who tried to resist,
on the ground of the presence of terrible Canaanite inhabitants, as
an adult who tries to scare a child from committing a misdeed with a scarecrow.
In both cases it was the Lord who said, "Lest the people
repent when they see war", and who afterwards commands to send the explorers,
and in both cases the outcome is inhibiting the children of Israel from
pursuing their aim. From the final outcome, we can infer the initial intention.
1. NOW this life of the Hebrews in the wilderness
was so disagreeable and troublesome to them, and they were so uneasy at
it, that although God had forbidden them to meddle with the Canaanites,
yet could they not be persuaded to be obedient to the words of Moses, and
to be quiet; but supposing they should be able to beat their enemies, without
his approbation, they accused him, and suspected that he made it his business
to keep in a distressed condition, that they might always stand in need
of his assistance. Accordingly they resolved to fight with the Canaanites,
and said that God gave them his assistance, not out of regard to Moses's
intercessions, but because he took care of their entire nation, on account
of their forefathers, whose affairs he took under his own conduct; as also,
that it was on account of their own virtue that he had formerly procured
them their liberty, and would be assisting to them, now they were willing
to take pains for it. They also said that they were possessed of abilities
sufficient for the conquest of their enemies, although Moses should have
a mind to alienate God from them; that, however, it was for their advantage
to be their own masters, and not so far to rejoice in their deliverance
from the indignities they endured under the Egyptians, as to bear the tyranny
of Moses (Ant., IV:1)
Josephus tells us the "real" story which he unconsciously knew:
Moses did not want the Hebrews to fight the Canaanites and to conquer the land, but wanted to keep them in the wilderness. At least, Josephus gave expression to the unconscious "reality" harbored by the people in their deepest psychic layer. For sure, Josephus knew very well the manifest biblical version, which, after the First Exile, had been overlaid on the repressed psychic reality. In his version, the clumsily erased traces of the repression emerge to the surface in a clear way.
The ones who read this chapter ask themselves: which
kind of god is this, who torments his people for forty years in the desert,
promises the land of milk and honey, and at the very moment of fulfilling
his promise, bestows on his people the most terrible curses, peculiar to a
most perverse sadistic mind?
The paragraph which deals with the blessing is fourteen
verses long, the one of the curses lasts fifty four.
The paragraph describing the blessing is tepid and controlled, while the
one dealing with the curses is passionate and relentless.
The prophecy that the curses are dealing only with an
hypothetic future, meaning, only if the people sin, is a rationalization
overlaid later, because so is written below:
For I know that after my death you will surely become corrupted,
and turn aside from the way which I have commanded you; and evil will befall
you in the latter days; because you will do evil in the sight of the Lord,
to provoke him to anger through the work of your hands (Deut. 31:29)
Therefore, the above described curses with such a
macabre fervor, are not an hypothetical future condition, but a certainty,
and the reason is that the sin is not to be consummated in a far away
future, but in the immediate present, at the very moment of the conquest
itself.
It seems that to Moses seeing the Hebrews entering the
Promised Land was not the climax of his own mission but a painful disappointment,
worthy of the most excruciating punishment.
This is the real meaning of the sentence, so often repeated
in the text: “ it is a stiff-necked people”: they were never
able to give up their incestuous fantasies, until they had the upper hand. The craving for the Land is to be interpreted as an incestuous drive because, in the unconscious collective mind, Promised Land is equivalent to the body of the Mother.
However, the taboo has a double meaning.
To the ancients, "sacred" and "cursed" were the equivalence
of the same concept (see note 2): in Hebrew: qaddosh (sacred) and
qaddesh
(the prostitute); in Arabic: Haram (sacred – prohibited), in Latin:
sacer.
Therefore also Holy Land = cursed land.
And since every sacrilege implies a punishment, on the
threshold of the profanation of the taboo, the children of Isrel are cursed:
So the Lord will rejoice over you to destroy you, and to annihilate
you; and you shall be plucked from off the land into which thou goest to
possess it. And the Lord shall scatter thee among the peoples, from the
one end of the earth to the other...(Deut. 28: 63-64)
Which god can rejoice in plucking the people from
off the land he himself had promised? For sure not the same god who made
the solemn promise, and who strove to fulfil it.
Therefore, the god who "rejoices in plucking off the people
from the land" is one who had not wanted to give it to them in the first
place, and who saw in the Conquest an act of transgression.
As always, the substance of the punishment (plucking
from the land) is connected to that of the transgression (coveting her),
because for ancient peoples the nature of the sin and of the punishment
were always associated.
The Book of Deuteronomy was edited at the end of the
7th century B.C., at the eve of the first exile (9). The political situation
of the region was extremely fragile, with the Babylonian threat which was
like a nightmare for the tiny Kingdom of Judah, which had managed to stay
independent, between the Assyrian, and thereafter Babylonian rock, and
the Egyptian hard place.
The trauma of the destruction of the Israelite northern
kingdom, and the dispersion of the ten sister tribes, weighted heavily
on the Judhaites who managed to cling to the Judean hills around Jerusalem.
It is no wonder, therefore, if the traumatic events of
the last decades triggered the reactivating of an archaic sense of guilt.
This is the reason why it is the Deuteronomy which tells
us of terrible curses. Witnessing ten tribes in twelve being dispersed
and disappearing, reconnected the two which had survived to their own repressed
sense of guilt.
Seeing the exile and the loss of the land, craved by
their ancestors and possessed on Moses’ dead body, becoming a close reality,
unconsciously reminded them the original sin of the Hebrews: the patricide
and the Conquest (the incest).
The cursed land, in which the Canaanites committed all
sorts of atrocities, had transfigured and had become the Holy Land. What
had been a Taboo, had become a precept, and if cultivating the
fields (an erotization of the work of Mother Earth), possessing vineyards and houses had been the ultimate horror, now
the Torah legislates the precepts linked to the land.
However, the emotional ambivalence had not disappeared
into the thin air.
In order to exorcise the sense of guilt, the precepts
linked to agriculture and cultivation were codified.
A settled down people of cultivators, who do not have an ambivalent
relationship towards the land they work, do not need also a so detailed
codification in order to exorcise their own emotional ambivalence.
And it shall be, when thou art come in to the land which the
Lord gives thee for an inheritance...that thou shalt take of the first
of all the fruit of the earth, which thou shalt bring of thy land... and
shalt put it in a basket...And thou shalt go to the priest that shall be
in those days, and say to him, I profess this day to the Lord thy God,
that I am come to the country which the Lord swore to our fathers to give
us...When thou has made of tithing all the tithes of thy produce in the
third year, which is the year of tithing, and hast givenit to the Levite...then
thou shalt say before the lord thy God, I have removed the hallowed things
out of my house...according to all thy commandments, neither have I forgotten
them (Deut. 26: 12-24).
Six years thou shalt sow thy field, and six years thou shalt prune
thy vineyards, and gather its fruit; but in the seventh year shall be a
sabbath of solemn rest for the land, a sabbath to the lord (Lev.25:2-6)
The land shall not be sold for ever: for the land is mine (Lev. 25:23).
What was considered taboo in relation
to the land, the fields and the houses, became precept.
To avoid the curse of the land retaliating on the
ones who craved for her, it is solemnly declared that the land does not belong
to the people, but to the Lord: a symbolic renunciation of the fruit of
the sin.
The equivalence between work of the Land, possessing her, harvesting her fruits, and the act of incest and heterosexual penetration becomes obvious.
As every first born must be redeemed, for the sake of distilling
the procreation from the sin which is at its source, so the land must be
redeemed, through the sacrifice of the first fruits, from the sin which
is at the source of her possession.
Jewish legislation betrays, in this way, the fact
that the Israelites cultivators never succeeded in completely removing
the feeling that their existential transfiguration from shepherds into
cultivators had its roots in transgression and in sin. When eventually
the exile did befall on them, we can say that “ they had been waiting for it”
We have seen how the Prophets and Samuel's attitude towards
the monarchy had been extremely negative. However, the redactor of the
Book of Deuteronomy had been living with a monarchy reality of life which had
been lasting for the last four century. He could not ignore it:
When thou art come to the land which the Lord gives thee, and
shalt possess it, and shalt dwell in it, and shalt say, I will set a king
over me, like all the nations that are about me; then thou mayst appoint
a king over thee, whom the Lord thy God shall choose...But he shall not
multiply horses to himself...Neither shall he multiply wives to himself...neither
shall he greatly multiply himself silver and gold (Deut. 17:14-20)
We see how the editor of the Book of Deuteronomy,
who already knew the actual situation, codified it according to the
reality of life, referring it to Moses himself, without succeeding, nevertheless,
to erase the traces of the original deep disgust for the institution.
We owe the first Temple to Salomon, a king as praised
as hardly accepted, to the point that, after his death, ten out of twelve
tribes depart from his kingdom and his scion.
While before the monarchy, the Israelite cultivators
had been dwelling only huts and modest houses, and did not rebuild any
of the majestic constructions peculiar to the conquered Canaanite cities,
Salomon builds again “the wall of Jerusalem, and Hazor, and Megiddo, and
Gezer” (1 Kings 9:15).
Archaeological excavations proved that a new stratum,
characterized by monumental buildings overlays now the lower one, which
consisted only of modest houses and huts (10).
At Megiddo, the archaeologists thought, at the beginning,
of having found even the stables of the great king (11).
Exactly as Samuel had predicted, and as the redactor
of the Deuteronomy still remembered, the king enlisted to his work the children of
Israel, who found themselves, from having been free men, mere
subjects: “And king Shelomo raised a levy out of all Yisrael; and the levy
was thirty thousand men. And he sent them to Levanon, ten thousands a month
by turn” (1, King 5:27).
Besides the Temple, which was a building by a very modest
size compared with the Second Temple erected by Herod the Great, the king built the so
called “house of the forest of Levanon” and a majestic “house where
he dwelt”: “All these were of costly stones, according to the measures
of hewn stones, sawed with saws...”(1, Kings 7: 1-12).
A great king built great houses, and among them also
the House of the Lord. In Hebrew, even today, the house of the Lord is
referred to as “Habait" (The House), meaning: the House of the Lord
is THE house par excellence.
The House, like the Land, is another maternal symbol, and therefore the deeper layer of guilt associated with possessing it (Cf. The Exile and its Consequences for Jewish Monotheism.
The Second Temple, initiated by Nehemiah at the end of the VI century (or V century) B.C. was very modest: only the essential for the performance of the sacred
rites.
Until another great king ruled on Israel: Herod the Great.
As Salomon cut a covenant with Hiram, king of Tyre and
foreign kings, with the purpose of glorifying his own reign, so Herod came
to pacts with the Romans, and in this way, although he was hated by his
subjects, he saved Jewish independence for another forty years.
Although the Jews remember in a positive way the son
of David, and in a negative way Herod, the son of Antipater, the Edoumean,
second generation of a people converted by force to Judaism by Johannan
Horkanous for political reasons, there was not, after all, a big difference
between the two: both submitted the people to hard labor and high taxes,
and both tried to imitate the surrounding peoples.
Although the sacred literature is permeated with hostility
towards the great king, the traces of admiration for the house of the
Lord that he erected are present everywhere.
What today is called The Mount of Temple is Herod’s
creation. He built a huge platform, leaning on massive stone arches, heightening
the base on which he afterwards built the construction. The splendor of
the Temple reconnects to the Hellenistic conception of the temples and reminds
the massive construction of Gentile Palestine and the Greek towns (poleis) of the region.
Herod made of Jerusalem a city, which had nothing to envy
to other Hellenistic cities of the Middle East and of Greece herself.
The king revealed himself as a stateman much superior
to the Asmonite kings who preceded him: he had a conception of state's sovereignty
and its institutions worthy of Machiavelli. If he had been living one
thousand years before, he would have been remembered in a much more positive
way.
His misfortune was to reign in a period in which the
Jews had become buttressed in their iconoclastic spirituality, and
did not want to be part of the cosmopolitanism by Hellenistic
matrix of the ecumenic Roman empire. In the meantime, the Jews had become
an intolerant people jealous of their particular God.
The five centuries, which had elapsed since the return
from the first exile (VI century B.C.) had been a period in which Jewish
psyche had been distilled and sublimated. Only then they became Jews, and
not just Hebrews.
The history which had preceded the exile and its reality
as a people of cultivators, and henceforth the close connection with idolatry and fertility
cults, had been rewrote, and its traces clumsily concealed.
The priestly code, as is described in the Book of Leviticus,
on which the Jewish ritual is based, was edited in this period (12), when
the Jews dedicated themselves to make a new elaboration of their own past,
in the spirit of a new – old spirituality.
Idolatry, which before the Babylonian exile had been
concomitant and had been dwelling under the same roof with Jahveh's cult,
and which for many centuries had been dominant, was completely eradicated
from Jewish soul, to the point that being Jewish had become the anti-thesis
of being pagan.
While the ancient heroes of the Jewish people, Judges
and Kings, had been also the priests of Astarte and Baal, starting from
the VI century B.C., the Jewish priestly class saw as its mission the eradication
of all the cults estranged to Jahveh, the shepherds’ god.
A long process of transfiguration, which made out of him the cosmic
and spiritual God that He is today began to take hold. According to Freud, the process had been worked out through
the communion with the idea of Moses’ God, Aton, and his monotheistic and
spiritual peculiarities.
The God who at the beginning had been a ram, a vindictive
and bloodthirsty totem, ended in being, after the fusion with Aton, the
God whom the Jews worship today. It is possible that other elements concurred in the process.
To this new - old God the Jews who returned from the
exile dedicated their Temple. However, the seed of the ancient contradiction
was there, only to be exacerbated by the new mental situation of the post -
exile condition.
This new God, who was the transfiguration of semi - nomads'
and shepherds’ God, enriched by the ancient Aton’s spirituality, could
not dwell in a house as the gods of city dwellers and cultivators,
and be constrained among its walls.
The verse: “And let them make me a sanctuary; that I
may dwell among them” (Ex. 25:8) reconnects us to the emotional ambivalence
whose
source was in the period of the Conquest, on the footsteps of an archaic
past as nomads, meaning, they will make me a house, but I shall dwell among
them, not in it.
This was the mental habitat of the Jews, when
Herod the Great erected the Temple Mount and the House of the Lord.
The splitting of the Jewish soul between the two antithetical
tendencies resulted in making a mythical projection of all the positive
into Solomon's figure, although the traces of all his “evil” doings could
not be erased from the Bible even by the redactor's censorship (1, Kings
11: 5-8), and made a projection of all the evil into Herod, although
after he had completed the edification of a huge and magnificent Temple
in honor of the God of the Jews, he hung on the gate to the external court
of the Temple a sign, in Hebrew and in Greek, forbidding the entrance to
any Gentile, punishable by death.
The reason is clear. The Jews, at Herod’s times were
not living anymore, as before the exile, a mental condition of idol - worshipping cultivators addicted to the work of the land and
to the fertility cults related to her.
During the monarchy, the idea of the iconoclastic god
of the shepherds had apparently been successfully removed, and only the
prophets of Jahveh occasionally tried to disturb the pastoral idyll.
At the time of Herod, after the destruction of ten tribes
out of twelve, after the first traumatic exile, the loss of freedom, the
presence of the Romans, and under the constant pressure of the Hellenistic
neighbors who constituted the majority of Palestine's inhabitants, the overall
mental background had changed.
The idea of the iconoclastic god of the shepherds and
the ancient Mosaic concept of a spiritual and ecumenical god, once reactivated,
could no more cohabit with the concept of a majestic temple, house of the
Lord, in which sacrifices and rites were performed.
The archaic hostility versus the house, codified
in the Decalogue, began to pressure for a recognition.
As the Jews had exorcised the taboo of the Land codifying
the precepts associated to agriculture, which have all the connotation
of magic apotropaic means, so the ancient taboo of possessing a house emerged again with all its scaring effects: in order to exorcize it, the Mezuzah was codified.
This is a small container, by the form of a rectangular
box, containing a pergamen with some verses from the Torah. The tiny box
is fixated on the right doorpost of every Jewish house, and every pious
Jew, before treading through the threshold of the house, streches his hand
and kisses it. The rationalization of this precept explains that the Angel
of Death, seeing this sign, will not hit the house by death, as he did
not hit the Israelites’ houses in Egypt.
As every rationalization, it has also some content of
truth.
The true elements of this explanation are the Angel of
Death and the house.
Why should the Lord’s Angel, in seeing the Israelites'
houses, be enraged to the point of hitting them by death, were it not
for the fact that the very sight of the houses is the cause of his rage?
The taboo, the possession of a house, was so powerful,
that it had not been limited only to the houses in the land of Israel,
as it is with the taboo of working the soil, but was extended to the
houses in the Diaspora, too. The Jews brought it with them in all their
wanderings.
The Mezuzah is the amulet meant to keep away the punishment
and the rage of the Lord, and its sense is keeping away the Angel of Death
from the very same houses, the possess of which is the sin, and the cause
of the divine rage.
This association relates also to the 10th plague of Egypt,
the worst of all, the firstborne sons' death, first- born of the womb, as
the first fruits are the first-born of the soil. The association is that
the possession of houses, mortal sin of a culture of residents, like the
Egyptians, was the cause for the plague and the death of the first- born sons.
This is the unconscious interpretation of the sense of the Mezuzah's precept
The associative circle closes: the Mezuzah,
fixated on the doorpost of the children of Israel's houses, reconnects to
Egypt and to the death of the first-born sons, and the Exodus reconnects
to Moses and to the taboo prescribed by him: “Thou shalt not covet a house”.
As we have seen the House, like the Land, is a maternal symbol. Possessing a house is the psychic equivalent of possessing the maternal body. Dwelling in it is equivalent to being in the body of the Mother. The taboo is therefore double - level. At the deepest level, the prohibition of possessing the Land and houses was interpreted as a taboo against incest.
In the Torah, the Lord demands from his people a house,
a sanctuary. This precept too, in order to be understood ought to be inverted.
The Hebrews, in their eagerness of possessing houses
and fields, which is psychically equivalent to commiting incest, projected their desire into their god. It is as if they had
shouted to the Angel of Death: “It were not we, it was He! We only executed
orders”
However, the traces of the misstatement remained in the
sediments of the sense of guilt, and in the rites acted out with the purpose
of exorcising it.
As the Promised Land, from the very moment that she was
possessed, was expected to be lost, so the Temple, from the
very moment that it was built, was expected a priori to be destroyed.
The Mishnah and the Talmud apparently have only words
of praise for the Temple and its rites. Once destroyed it became the symbol
of the lost freedom and sovereignty. Its destruction was the beginning
of an exile, which this time “will never end”, and its ruins became the
symbol of God’s wrath.
All that is associated with the Temple is projected into
the mythical sphere of the lost golden age. What it had been and will never
be again. Being "The House", the fantasy is also closely related to the craving for the maternal womb. At this very point, the real emotional content of the mourning
emerges in all its ambivalence: its reconstruction is solemnly forbidden.
The spiritual legacy of Moses and of Jonadav Ben Rakhav
triumphed on the other layers of Jewish psyche. The inhibiting instance triumphed, as the Super Ego is supposed to gain the upper hand on the Id's demands.
On the ravages of the cursed house sounds the Prophet's
anathema:
Says the Lord: I am sated with the burnt offerings of rams,
and the fat of fed beasts; and I delight not in the blood of bullocks,
or of lambs, or of he goats. When you come to appear before me, who has
required this at your hand, to trample my courts? (Isaiah, 1: 12-13).
All the zeal invested by the Jewish people in
their eagerness to praise the Temple, the bitter tears on the stones of
the last wall, and the passionate nostalgy for the golden age, on one hand,
and the ultimate Taboo versus the sacred place, and the inhibition to re-act
out the misdeed, on the other hand, are shouting to the sky: “We have lost the
most precious of all, but shall no one dare giving it back to us!”
Beyond the deep immorality of such a proposition, which
totally disregards the presence and the rights of another people, who shares
with us the Land and her sacred places, the endevour itself is anti
Jewish,
and in contraddiction to the millenary experience and aspirations of the
Jewish people. It represents a regression to those layers in Jewish psyche,
which remained embedded in idolatry, and which have been distilled and
overcome in two thousands years of wandering and suffering.
At the deeper level, it represents a regression to intra-uterine hallucinations. Therefore, the regressive aspect of the craving to build the House again. If craving for the Promised Land is a fantasy which belongs to the Oedipal - genital level, and hencefore is progressive in nature, as long as it does not become a fixation, craving for a Temple - House, in which beasts are daily slaughtered, is a bloody - placental hallucination of the worst kind, associating to the lower levels of human psycho-sexual evolution.
The voice of the Prophets was therefore the voice of the Super - Ego trying to prevent a regression.
Only if Moses’ legacy and the message of Jonadav Ben
Rekhav, transmitted by the Prophets, is learned and absorbed in all its
moral significance, the two inner antithetic layers of Jewish psyche, tormenting
it from the beginning of the nation's history, will be able to dwell together,
fertilizing and distilling each other in a unique synthesis.
Then the words of the prophet will become true:
And righteousness shall be the girdle of his loins, and faithfulness
the girdle of his reins. The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the
leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and
the fatling together (Isaiah 11:6)
Links:
The Image of God in Judaism: Father or Mother?
Killing God. From the Assassination of Moses to the Murder of Rabin
The Assassination of Rabin and its Consequences for the Israeli Palestinian Conflict
Exodus and Intrauterine Regression. The Genealogy of Jewish Monotheism
The Exile and its Consequences for Jewish Monotheism
(1) Josephus Flavius (or Josephus) was born as Yosef
Ben Mattatiahu and was a scion of an important family of Jerusalem Priests
(Cohanim). When the rebellion against the Romans erupted in
66 A.D, he became one of the generals of the rebellion and was the
commander of the fortress of Iodfat (Iotapata) in Upper Galilee. When this
was taken by storm by the Romans, headed by their general Vespasianus,
Josephus saved himself making to Vespasianus the prophecy that in
a short time he will be elected Emperor of Rome. The Roman general was
so flattered and impressed that spared his life and when he became indeed
emperor in 69 A.D. he adopted him and gave him the name
of the Flavian family.We know on the situation in Judea at the outburst
of the rebellion through his work, written in Aramaic and Greek: The War
of the Jews. Josephus was obviously interested in presenting the situation
among the Jews as the most unstable as possible in order to justify his
passage into the enemy camp. At the time of the siege of Jerusalem in 70
A.D. he was in the Roman camp, as an observer, and in his work he describes
the situation as if Titus had tried to prevent the destruction of the Temple.
He describes the defendors of the city as zelots and fanatics, who brought
the disaster on the Jewish nation by their internal dissent and bloody
quarrels
(2) For the ancients “sacred”, from Latin sacer, meant
“unapproachable” i.e. part of the taboo. There was no distinction, as today,
between untouchable because too holy or because of too wicked. In archaic
mind there was no difference between one concept and its opposite since
the word meant both, which are the same thing. The French has maintained
the double meaning of the one word and sacre’ means Holy and Cursed.
(3) Johannes Lehmann, Moses - der Mann aus Agypten,
Hoffmann und Campe Verlag, Hamburg 1983, pp.187-189.
(4) When a man seduces a virgin, his only penality is
to marry her or to pay the price of her virginity to her parents. The choice
is in the hands of the girl’s family. If she was engaged it is a very different
matter, because she is considered committed to her betrodhed, even if the
marriage had not been consummated. In this case the penalty is death.
(5) For the cronology of the Pentateuch
and of the Deuteronomy, see Julius Wellhausen, Prolegomena zur Geschichte
Israels, Reimer, Berlin, 1899. Eng. Tr., Prolegomena to the History
of Ancient Israel, The Meridian Library, New York 1957, pp. 1-13. Wellhausen
takes for good the Books’s statement (2 Kings 22: 8-9), according to wich
the Book of Deuteronomy had been “found” (i.e. composed) at the times of
Josiah, king of Judah.
(6) On Freud’ thesis of Moses being and Egyptian,
see: Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism: Three Essays (1939), in The
Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud,
(The Hogart Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, translated by James
Strachey ), London 1964, Vol. XXIII, pp. 36-53
(7) Ibidem, second essay.
(8) Katleen Kenyon, Archaeology in the Holy Land,
London 1960, 1965 e 1970, p. 221.
(9) See note 5.
(10) K.Kenyon, ibidem, pp. 240-259.
(11) Ibidem, p. 248. However the last excavations by
the Institute of Archaeology of the Tel Aviv University cast serious doubts
on the “stable interpretation” of the building. It seems that we are dealing
with storage facilities, and not with stables, after all. When I asked
the late Professor Johannan Aharoni, back twenty five years ago, where,
therefore, in his opinion, king Salomon had put his horses to rest, he
responded with his usual sense of humor: “with all the due respect to king
Salomon horses, they apparently had been sleeping outside”.
(12) See note 5
Postscript (July 25, 2005)
From a psychological point of view, it does not make any difference whether a person "Moses" did really exist or not, nor whether he was actually involved in any way in the house's taboo. After the First Exile, his image as a cultural hero, to use a concept minted by Mircea Eliade, was unconsciously interpreted as an inhibiting instance, and therefore associated to the taboo.
Freud postulated an actual murder of Moses by the Hebrews, as an explanation for the Jews' sense of guilt, and for the implementation of monotheism after a latency period of seven centuries: what he called "deferred obedience" and "the return of the Father". According to Freud, the murder of a leader, who is a Father - imago, activated again the sense of guilt for the primal patricide, common to all mankind.
I admit that at the beginning I was seduced by Freud's theory, because there is no doubt that the Jews feel guilty of Moses' assassination. In the biblical narrative, the sense of guilt is transparent. Reading attentively the story of the Exodus and of the wanderings in the wilderness, one cannot avoid the sensation that the later editor invested a major effort in the trial to repress a deeper "truth", associated to collective aggressive drives towards Moses' image. The paragraph I reported from Josephus' Antiquities reveals also the reason for those aggressive drives: the inhibition to the pursue of the conquest, represented by Moses - imago.
However, in my opinion, it is not necessary to infer an action, in order to explain a sense of guilt. Senses of guilt grow on the grounds of desires (drives - instinctual needs - Triebs), and not because of actions. One ought not to postulate a real event in order to explain a sense of guilt. If it is true in relation to the single, it is also true in relation to groups and nations.
The Hebrew tribes, which were wandering at the fringe of the seeded land, had been trying to invade her for at least two hundreds years, before succeeding in their endeavour. This is true even without implying a migration into Egypt and an Exodus.
The lust for the Land, which is unconsciously interpreted as incestuous, is the source of the sense of guilt. We have seen that the Arabs too, like the clan of the Rekabites mentioned by Jeremiah, had been keeping the taboo of the land and of the houses. As long as the Hebrews lived on their land as cultivators, and enjoyed sovereignty and freedom, the sense of guilt had been successfully repressed. However, with the destruction of the kingdom of Israel and the impending loss of Land and of the Temple, the mounting sense of guilt began to press for recognition.
It seems that before the First Exile, the image of Moses was interpreted as that of a Son - god, a salvific god as the Greek god Asclepius who, like Moses, personified medicine and salvation. As is written:
Hezekiah the son of Ahaz king of Judah began to reign...He removed the high places, and broke the pillars, and cut down the Asherah: and he broke in pieces the brazen serpent that Moses had made; for to those days the children of Israel did burn incense to it; and he called it Nehushtan. (2 Kings 18: 1-4)
I proceed on an assumption which, so far as the readers I require are concerned, I do not have to prove—that the "sinfulness" of human beings is not a matter of fact, but is much rather only the interpretation of a factual condition, namely, of a bad psychological mood, with the latter seen from a moral-religious perspective, something which is no longer binding on us. The fact that someone feels himself "guilty" or "sinful" does not in itself yet demonstrate that he is justified in feeling like that, just as the mere fact that someone feels healthy does not mean that he is healthy (The Genealogy of Morals, Section Three, 16).
Links:
The Chariot of the Sun and the Messiah
