Have you heard the one about the magician and the rabbi?

BY HARV BISHOP

You’re standing at the crossroads, up in the air, and don’t know which way to turn. You’re frustrated and ready to sell your soul. A magician and a rabbi come from opposite directions. You explain your predicament. The magician says to cast a  spell to change your circumstances. The rabbi says to learn from your circumstances and change yourself.

You still don’t know what the hell to do.

We’ve all had those moments when work, relationships, health and even where we live is up in the air. These are big choices and we don’t know what we don’t know.

The “crossroads” is a metaphor in magic (and the blues) for the ambiguity of life.

Yet both magaicians and rabbis agree that there is spiritual power at the crossroads. A much disputed legend says that blues great Robert Johnson traded his soul for his prodigious guitar-playing talent at a Mississippi crossroads. The lyrics themselves speak of loneliness, fear and redemption. “Went down to the crossroads, fell down on my knees to pray,” Johnson sang.

The expression the fog of war refers to the uncertainty and incomplete information soldiers have to cope with on the battlefield while making life-and-death decisions in fluid and constantly shifting situations.

While most daily decisions aren’t a matter of life and death, I think we often make uncertain choices with incomplete information. Those decisions can help or harm ourselves or others. It is easy to become paralyzed.

As the poker champion Annie Drake writes, luck can make wise decisions go wrong and bad decisions look wise.

The concept of luck is antithetical to New Thought,  which reflects the American worship of confidence, certainty and can-do optimism.

Ernest Holmes wrote in The Science of Mind textbook, “There is Something within me that goes before me and prepares the way wherever I go —- making straight the way, making perfect the way, making… harmonious every situation.”

I was fresh  out of university and starting my first job as a reporter when I read these words. And I was scared to death of the uncertainty of a new job and whether I was good enough to succeed. I took these words of Holmes to heart and very literally. It was my answer to the frightening uncertainty. And despite constantly affirming these words, this job was anything but harmonious. Every twist of fate from a combative colleague to something as innocuous as a grumpy interviewee I took as evidence of not having the “right” consciousness. After all I had “created” these situations.

I was so obsessive and literal on this that I even took growling dogs seriously. Because as everyone in esoteric circles know, dogs “read” energy and react to your energy field, so if a dog growled it obviously sensed my “low” energy. If I could have only told my younger self that sometimes dogs growl because that’s just what you do if you are a dog.

It’s taken a lot of living and a mix of heartache and joy and everything in between to respect that life is often ambiguous. Luck is part of that picture, as is the soul’s path, prayer, mind metaphysics and what could be called the fog of life.

It’s why people have always wondered whether the Goddess Fortune will smile on them or turn away. It is the inspiration for the popularity of petitionary prayer, magic spells and divination tools, and soothsayers.

New Thought isn’t terribly comfortable with uncertainty, and ambiguity. It posits  impersonal spiritual laws that mirror our consciousness back to us in our every positive or negative circumstance. The metaphor of science, as in Religious Science or Divine Science, to name two variants, replaces mystery.

We encounter the crossroads because of mystery, in the times when we don’t know what the hell to do. Magicians and rabbis agree that this difficut, chaotic space is good news because it opens us to the spiritual world. The Fog of Life is infused with the Divine.

When we are faced with uncertainty, do we use prayer or magic to change our outer circumstances or do we work to change ourselves? To recap, magicians favor changing the circumstances; rabbis favor opening to Divinity and our souls to heal psychological wounds and work on ourselves.

Magician and author Gordon White defines the crossroads as an in-between state. It is seen in life’s uncertainties before future probabilities unfold into reality. It is also found in the liminal state of odd hypnogogic dream visions just before we fall asleep.

This is good news according to White because the crossroads is the place where the future is in flux. In this fluid space we can have some effect with magic spells—or in New Thought terms affirmations or affirmative prayer practice—to reshape circumstances. New Thought luminary Neville Goddard’s advocacy of entering a hypnagogic state for visualizing symbols of a desired future is consistent with this as well as his call to visualize symbols of desired outcomes right at the moment before sleep. Both represent crossroads consciousness.

White writes that there are spiritual beings at the crossroads that are especially effective for prayer or magical spells. Visions of Mother Mary span the bridge between the physical and the spiritual and so are beings of the crossroads. So too Lucifer or other trickster figures that retain understanding of both the spiritual world and the ambiguity of this world.

Rabbis also agree that the fluidity of the crossroads are fertile ground for spiritual growth albeit for different reasons.

To my teacher Rabbi Howard Hoffman, our very humanity and spirit are the crossroads. It is first found in the crucible between mortality and immortality. Every pocket should have two coins, he says, one that reads, “The world was made just for me” and the other reads, “I am but dust and ashes.”

The crossroads is symbolized in the tzitzit , the fringe on the prayer shawl. The fog of life and frayed parts of our life are the fertile ground where we reach out beyond ourselves to Ultimate Reality and our true origins.

Our personalities, which the rabbi describes as “mixed bag” of good traits and bad, are also the crossroads. If we approach our mistakes gently and mindfully rather than trying to pretend to be perfect, our mistakes can be transformed to good. This is the process of tshuva, “returning to the land of our soul” in the words of the rabbi/singer Schlomo Carlebach. Approached this way the poison of anger, rage and other traits can alchemeically become the cure. The all-too-human figures in the Torah—Abraham, Isaac, and David to mention a few—inhabit this crossroads and demonstrate the process of Tshuva.

Jewish mysticism takes a dim view of magicians and divination, though both traditions embrace the crossroads. This is somewhat a mystery as Torah shows instances of  Moses acting as a de-facto magician. He was the greatest magician of his age, says Rabbi Hoffman. This can also be seen in the Talmud. Honi the Circle-Maker is known for for bringing rain in a time of great drought in Israel. He rhythmically and meditatively drew a circle with his staff in the 1st century CE, a practice familiar to magicians. Honi then prayed in the circle, refusing to move until rains came. He argued with G-d when it drizzled. The rain turned into a down pour. He continued to challenge G-d and explained to G-d a calm rain was needed. Honi won the argument.

Why this suspicion if there is magic in Torah and Talmud?

First magical power in the physical realm can distract from the delicate still, silent voice of the Divine found within, says the rabbi. I have some other educated guesses though I have never discussed this explicitly with the rabbi.

Moses and Honi worked their “magic” for the benefit of the collective rather than their individual ego needs. And Moses used magic to kill an Egyptian guard  leading to a Tshuva process that lasts throughout his life. Magical power is real, says the rabbi, but doesn’t come with a get out of jail free card.

Divination and magic spells, knowing the future and creating reality, could undermine the uncertainty that leads us to reach out to Ultimate Reality and form a partnership based on prayer, dialogue and even arguing with the Divine. The ultimate goal of Jewish mysticism is creating a partnership with “two” valued and unique partners. It’s not about losing the self in Oneness or becoming as a child who looks to Ultimate Reality as what the rabbi terms a substitute parent and “a cosmic Pez dispenser.”

Gordon White agrees with the above writing in The Chaos Protocols that there is an expectation that “the entire spiritual world exists” to help you obtain the latest tech gadgets when “the last fifty thousand years of human history suggests this probably not the case.”

The rabbi argues that the only true miracle is a “change in perception” not changes in physical reality. He doesn’t deny such miracles can happen, but again they can blind people to essential soul growth. The occultist and writer Carl Abrahamsson in his brilliant book Occulture shares a similar view. Abrahamsson writes that the magical emphasis on fulfilling desires can short circuit psycho-spiritual growth and self-understanding that can come from analysis and depth psychology.

At the same time mystical Judaism doesn’t ignore our desire to affect what happens in our lives. Rituals that give us taste of heart break and scarcity can lessen the need for the karmic circumstances in our lives to create those difficult lessons, says Rabbi Hoffmann. Prayer in Judaism also gives the space to vigorously assert our deeply human needs. But again the model is partnership and surrendering the idea of total control that an emphasis on the magical will or some variants of New Thought can promise.

So we come back to the essential dilemma. Do we seek to change our outer circumstances or do we work on changing ourselves and thus our karma? Both White and Rabbi Hoffman have powerful points. My rule in such cases is to hold the truths in each view even, and especially when, they appear contradictory.

There is a Talmudic story that captures the essence of the dilemma of the crossroads and life’s ambiguity. The second century rabbinic sages are debating whether a particular oven should be considered pure or impure. Rabbi Eliezer argued the minority view that the oven was impure, a view that was rejected by all the other sages. Rabbi Eiezer invokes a series of miracles to prove his point. In support of Rabbi Eliezer a carob tree uproots itself and moves, and a small body of water flows backwards. The other sages reject the miracles as evidence. He then says, in essence, if I am right let the walls of this study  prove it. The walls started to fall. Rabbi Joshua challenges the walls saying they should stay out of a human debate. Out of respect for both rabbis the walls remained at angle neither collapsing or standing straight.

Exasperated,  Rabbi Eliezer implores the  Heavens to open and G-d to affirm his argument. The heavens indeed open and the heavenly voice endorses Rabbi Eliezer’s argument. Rabbi Joshua and the other sages are still not impressed. Rabbi Joshua responds by quoting Torah, saying “The Torah is not in heaven.”

As with many Talmudic stories there are many layers of interpretation. At the most basic level it is saying that discussion and debate about religious law are preferable to absolute certainty and flashy supernatural signs from heaven. Debate is better suited to navigate the messy  ambiguity of our humanity and the world.  The sages held debate to be so important that they went to great effort to preserve minority opinions.

Rabbi Hoffman says we learn more about our inner divinity in the messy times in life when G-d appears to be absent.  As another commentator once told the PBS host Bill Moyers, the sages are essentially saying to G-d,  “Who ask you! You’re the one who left us down here to wrestle with all these questions.”