IN THE SERVICE OF DIVINITY
Rachel Hillel, the main speaker at the 1981 conference, brought ancient religious and modern psychological insights into unity, skillfully relating the language of the two to each other in a way that illuminated both. The following report is derived from the typescript she brought to the conference. Unless otherwise indicated the quotes are hers.
As the conference opened on Friday evening, Rachel Hillel dwelt on the Jewish Sabbath and its blessing. The word Shalom (peace) relates to Shalem (to be whole). Our ancestors in the spirit “knew the psychological truth that there can be no genuine peace if it is not accompanied by an inner state of wholeness.”
In God’s creation of the universe and of the human spirit, opposites were necessary. Darkness and light, a “rhythmical alternation of polarities” made possible the wholeness of the physical creation. Similarly the knowledge of good and evil made true consciousness possible in man. Emotional struggle, endurance, and suffering were necessary to that consciousness.
God as well as man was wounded by man’s discovery of knowledge. This is a wound experienced by all parents as ingratitude, defiance, and abandonment. “This inevitable stage… brought about a new dimension … a quality of mutuality and reciprocity—God’s and man’s need for each other.
As Jung stated in Answer to Job, “All opposites are of God … Man becomes a vessel filled with divine conflict … The conscious recognition of opposites (is painful) but brings with it a definite degree of deliverance.” Jung is corroborated in the Jewish mystical teaching of the Kabbalah, that says, “Man was created for the sake of choice.”
Since leaving God’s oversight, man has been compelled to endure the process of choice, a process based on a conscious awareness of sin. That awareness and the inner struggle to deal with one’s freedom of choice—“a holy burden”—makes salvation possible.
The explanation of the Sabbath in Genesis and its reinterpretation in Exodus 31:17 reveal psychological insight as to man’s need for struggle and a return to re-establishing the eternal covenant between man and God in quiet reverence—a return to psychic balance and resolution. “God honors the psychic aspect of rest by sanctifying the Sabbath. However this balance lasts only… until the next task emerges” that must be worked through anew.
Rachel Hillel went on to dwell on “The sanctified Sabbath” saying it reflects an attitude of amor fati—a loving acceptance of one’s fate … welcoming, embracing the fullness of experience of life, come what may, with enthusiasm (as well as) awareness of suffering and distress as part of the human journey … This (the sanctified Sabbath) touches on the basic issue of human freedom which is always inseparable from the divinity within … Full participation in earthly life reflects deep reverence for God, and a Hebrew invocation refers to “the living God who takes delight in life.”
In bringing Friday evening to a close, Rachel Hillel told us that “the Jewish Sabbath tradition is psychologically rich in actualizing the Divinity through the union of opposites,” including male and female roles in family worship. “The woman’s task of lighting the candles, thus bringing illumination into the home, is balanced and complemented by the man’s incantation of the Word, celebrating over the sacramental wine. This mutuality of the ritual endows the Sabbath with the rapture of spiritual experience.”
In her second presentation Rachel Hillel dealt with a variety of ways of achieving self-understanding which she equated with living life in all its fullness and thus learning to know God. These ways include the psychological expressions of C. G. Jung, sayings of the ancient Chinese book of changes, and teachings to be found in Hasidism, the Apocrypha, and the Gnostic gospels.
In speaking of the search for one’s soul as an essential part of the human tradition, she referred to a legendary “Golden Chain” of wise men, who have passed a central message down through all ages. Jung, whom she sees as a part of this chain, said, “Anyone who has insight should concern himself with his soul. Our destiny lies in the unconscious, for the unconscious is the source of everything… The word, unconscious, does not count. What counts is the true idea behind it.”
Jung had an “ability to give new terms to the very mysteries which emanate from the eternal traditions of man … (enabling man) to penetrate his own being and to look for God … The archetypal idea of the Divinity within assumes in Jung’s writing a modern, psychological terminology, but it remains a fundamentally religious concern.” He is honoring a “living psychic reality … whose nature is bound to transcend human understanding forever. This has always been the essence of the religious experience.”
“Helping people recognize their religious potentialities by providing a method for relating to numinous experiences” sums up Jung’s view of the aims of analytical psychology. As Rachel Hillel put it, “Ultimately the individuation process is a religious process … To be healed is to become whole, and there is no wholeness without asking God into one’s life as guide and partner.” Jung concluded that “in order to gain an understanding in religious matters, all that is left us today is the psychological approach.”
Rachel described a young man’s dream, which clearly indicated that an institution, such as a church or a dogma can be an obstacle or hindrance to a direct experience of God. “Psychic contents break into life with a living force. (They) seem to come from another realm… a living manifestation of the transpersonal. The encounter (with them) … becomes a religious experience… The experience of God is a psychic reality because it comes from beyond one’s self.” Jung said, “God is the name by which I designate things which cross my willful path, which upset my plans, my intentions, and change the course of my life … Religious and spiritual events … cannot be made; they happen to us.” She illustrated the point with poetry and dream material provided by her analysands and brought out the paradox that though God is perceived as an objective, transcendent reality, we know him through our own subjective experiences.
The Jungian goal of individuation “is essentially concerned with personal religious experiences. Yet experience of the numinous is a reciprocal process between man and God, since the contents which are revealed … have a gradual transformative effect on the unconscious and thus on God. In this way we have become active participants in the divine drama.”
Rachel went on to relate these conclusions of Jung to Jewish Hasidism and Christian Gnosticism, which despite their differing origins had in common a search for the inner way to God. The central idea of Hasidic philosophy is “the reciprocity between man and God. God needs man in order to enter reality. Man is destined to be redeemed through the meeting of divine and human need.” Also in the Jewish lore it was believed that there are humble, insignificant people whose saintliness holds the world together.
Jesus is revealed in a Gnostic papyrus excavated in the 19th century where (going beyond the familiar biblical quotation) he is quoted as saying,“ Whenever there are two, they are not without God, and whenever there is one alone, I say I am with him; raise the stone and there thou shalt find me; cleave the wood, and there I am.”
As with Jung’s reliance on myth, the Gnostics interpreted events symbolically rather than literally. For example, they perceived the resurrection as symbolic, “a spiritual movement of enlightenment, from death to awakening.” Jesus, in these gospels, is treated as a model of the spiritual potential in every person. Every person can become a child of God—as Jesus was—and, at a deep level, identical with Jesus.
Our speaker concluded the second session by saying, “it is the unknown power of the Divine within, which guides (us) toward realization and demands loyalty to inner laws. Self-knowledge … the most difficult and challenging religious obligation … directs one to become what (one) was born to be.”
Rachel Hillel opened with Job (33:14-16) “In a dream, in a vision of the night, when deep sleep falleth on men, in slumbering upon the bed, then He openeth the ears of men and sealeth their instruction.”
This is an archetypal truth. Dream images and symbols bring us close to God because they are “the personification and the embodiment of aspects of the greater reality.” The numinous character of dream symbols is never fully explainable and thus they remain sacred secrets.
Rachel told of a dream she had following a visit from the Conference clerks. The dream involved a hearing problem in her left ear requiring surgery. The elderly surgeon’s conflicting feelings are central to the dream. He is concerned about her immediate pain as well as her ultimate well-being. At the end she ascends to the operating table—as on an altar—calmly submitting to her destiny.
The dream gave her guidance and insight, reminding her that “in life, as on the operating table, one must trust unconditionally.” The state of unconsciousness is a state in which we are open to divine compassion. As with the surgeon, “the divine healer is always a wounded healer … and only the wounded can discover the way to healing.… Disease is frequently God sent, having meaning as a potential source for new consciousness. Consciousness of God’s role is essential to healing. But are we as aware of God’s own wounds and anguish as he inflicts pain, as we are aware of his love?”
Chinese philosophy, American Indian tradition, and ancient Hebrew writings stress the importance of hearing “the still, small voice.” Elijah did not hear the Lord in the wind, in an earthquake, in fire but only in the stillness as he stood wrapped in his mantle at the mouth of his cave. This experience came to him only after he fled for his life into the wilderness and experienced the “dark night of the soul.” When depression is acknowledged and “there is no choice but to surrender to the ‘death of the ego,’ … one must listen to the higher authority.” The theologian, Cornelius Ernst, said, “We must be roused from our dreams of reality and awaken to the reality of the dream.” Rachel stressed that man’s “deepest concern is to rediscover the language of the non-rational as a way of experiencing and appreciating his life ”under the aspect of eternity.“ The Holy abides in the partnership of the temporal with the eternal.
Again she reminded us that God paradoxically “embraces all opposites.” To accept this enables us to accept the dichotomy of life in general “to live with our humanness and our limitations.” The experience of knowing God can be both fearful and numinous. Self-consciousness is a hindrance to worship. Consciousness of the need to know God is essential.
In the last part of her talk Rachel dwelt especially on the fear of God and the need to know and understand his dark side. Jacob struggled all night with a dark numinous being, after which his name became Israel—a “wrestler with God.” “God can be revealed only to those people who are tested by the dark side of his power,” she said. “To become wholly human, one has to meet his dangerous side.”
We should not strive to eliminate mystery or rid ourselves of “awe and trembling in the face of the numinous ‘otherness’ … Consciousness means accepting the dimension of the unknowable … A state of wholeness implies reconciliation of opposites, the knowable with the unknowable.”
The dream of an analysand provided the closing for Rachel Hillel’s three talks. A young woman, striving to reason her way through life, dreamed she joined the members of her family on a journey, which culminated at the feet of a statue of Buddha as tall as a skyscraper. The Buddha personified silence and contemplation. The young woman’s journey “is taking her to the realm of silence.”
RACHEL HILLEL, only child of Israeli writers, was born and raised in a kibbutz. One of five Jungian analysts trained at the University of Tel Aviv, with a doctorate in philosophy and clinical psychology, she has worked with Elined Kotschnig and others in this country. She presented a paper on “Religious Experience in the Analytical Hour” at the 1980 International Association for Analytical Psychology in San Francisco. A pamphlet, based on her conference presentation, will be called “The Divinity Within.”