The Kabbalah of the Sweatlodge

“The Kabbalah of the Sweatlodge”, Rabbi David Mevorach Seidenberg This paper was delivered at the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies Symposium on “Jews, Native Americans and the Western World Order” at Columbia University, April 25, 2010. In a symposium where we are discussing connections between Jewish and Native American cultures and traditions, one vast difference should be noted. Judaism fits with academia like a hand in glove, and talking about Jewish religion from the perspective of secular, Wissenschaft, historical-critical perspectives comes naturally. For Native traditions, the opposite is the case. If I were going to discuss things from an academic and “Jewishy” perspective, I would start with some performative intellectualizing, while if from a more traditional Native American manner, I might start with a prayer or a story. Since I’m not one to take sides in this particular debate, I’ll attempt a bit of both. My prayer is simple: that this symposium also be a convocation, a discovery of the voices of our ancestors and the promise of a future that can sustain all people. May we attain to knowledge, but also to wisdom. Now for the intellectualizing. I want to discuss parallels between Native American ritual and Jewish, specifically Kabbalistic thought, from several perspectives. As a participant in two different communities that follow Lakota Sun Dance and sweatlodge ceremonies, I have a very personal perspective. As a student of religion, specifically from the framework of anthropology and structuralism, the question of parallels invokes its own unique worlds of thought. (Many of the things I will say complement the discussion of ritual in the paper by my teacher Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi.) And as someone who is concerned about cultural appropriation and romanticization of Native American culture in this country, especially by the New Age movement, I also have a strong sense of criticism of my own perspective. What I will come to focus on are the very precise parallels between the structure of the Inipi or sweatlodge ceremony, and Kabbalistic ideas about the unification of Tiferet and Shekhinah, the divine masculine and feminine. Before I get to that, however, I want to explore further the issues of cultural appropriation with respect to both Judaism and Native American religions. We live in a time of post-modernity, which, in some circles and cohorts, is characterized by the attempt or wish to return to (or restore) some kind of tribalism. One could say that modernity is about controlling our world through technological domination, while postmodernity in this sense is about the desire to live in community with nature. I emphasize that this is a matter of desire, as much or more than actual practice, since a large part of our capitalist culture is devoted to selling community and tribalism, though neither can be commodified and remain intact. The forms of cultural appropriation can be both shallow and deep, with greater or lesser integrity. From tribe.net, to non-native folks selling shamanism seminars or running feebased sweatlodges, to the Rainbow gathering, called a “gathering of the tribes”, the meme of the tribe is powerful. It extends into fashion, politics, and spirituality. On a spiritual level it can also include Wiccan or neo-Pagan communities, or any so-called earth-centered tradition. Native American spiritual traditions are romanticized and symbolically appropriated by people looking to connect with this sense of tribalism. One of the interesting parallels between Judaism and Native traditions is that the Jews in Eastern Europe are romanticized in much the same way as the Native American peoples in this country. When Eastern Europeans want to appropriate a sense of tribal identity, they are more likely to seek out Jewish (as well as Gypsy or Romani) cultural forms of expression, than they are Native American forms, though both can be found. We see then that one of the characteristics for being used as a tribal meme is that a culture has been subject to genocide, whether in North America or Europe. In both continents we find people who see themselves as part of what is perceived (with real historic justification) as a culture of the oppressor, and a generation who want to disassociate themselves from that culture by adopting the culture of the oppressed. Other vectors for this transference of identity include African-American culture (especially in the form of music) or African-Caribbean culture (in the popularity of capoeira, a martial art/dance form associated with Latin American slaves), as well as other minority cultures, which I will not explore further here. In North America, Jewish culture is less of a resource for those seeking a sense of tribal identification than in Eastern Europe. The concept of Judeo-Christian civilization (emphasized here by Jews who wanted acceptance and Christians who wanted to accept them) to some extent erases differences between Jewish and white or majority Christian culture, while political dynamics in Israel and Palestine significantly muddy the delineation of oppressor and oppressed that is so fundamental to the appropriation by Westerners of tribal cultures. (The latter tension is of course much more pronounced in Western Europe than it is here.) The fact that North America is the land in which genocide against the Native peoples took place also makes Native cultures much more accessible, perhaps paradoxically, to people seeking an alternative spiritual road. Nevertheless, despite the fact that Native rather than Jewish culture is the more significant source of alternative identity in this land, there is an extraordinary interest in Kabbalah as another kind of postmodern spirituality, which at least for non-Jews represents a kind of attenuated tribalism through its roots in Judaism. (Because Kabbalah is often taught outside of any Jewish context or framework—i.e., in the Kabbalah Center or the work of Caroline Myss— this attenuation is often extreme. Note also that traditional Judaism to a tremendous degree does play the function of alternative spiritual source for fundamentalist Christians seeking the roots of Jesus’ ministry, word, and world.) These tensions and needs put Jews in an interesting position with respect to Native and tribal traditions. One the one hand, Judaism is more clearly connected to tribal roots than any other fully Westernized tradition. Jews have a strong sense of difference from both the majority secular culture and from Christian culture based in part on this sense of tribalism—even if the majority culture is less aware of those differences. Being an “MOT”—a member of the tribe, is not just an expression. One could even characterize Judaism as an indigenous tribal tradition (perhaps the only tribal tradition) that has been able to survive within modernity despite its conforming to modernity. On the other hand, Jewish culture is a full participant not only in modernity, but in the creation of modernity, indicated equally by the wholesale adoption of bourgeois suburbanism in the previous century as by the influence of Spinoza in the 17th century. One could say then that Judaism survived because of the completeness of its modernization. Jews, especially younger Jews, have dealt with this contradiction of being both tribal and modern in interesting ways, including seeking the tribal or indigenous in the translation of African-American cultural forms into Jewish forms (e.g., the Jewfro of the 70’s, or the current explosion of Jewish reggae-rap, most famously in the music of Mattisyahu—again, this is an area I will not really explore here), or in adopting aspects of Native American and neo-pagan (or earth-centered) spirituality, or in efforts both in the last century and contemporarily to go back to the land, most recently (though without the Zionist trope) in the creation of back-to-the-land farming centers such as Kayam Farm and the Jewish Farm School, both outgrowths of the Adamah farm program in Connecticut.1 Some of these agricultural experiments also draw on Native spirituality—often not directly but as a model for how we should interpret and practice Judaism. And in many individual cases, Jews find meaning directly in Native practices or symbolism—sometimes by participating directly in Native rituals or by working in and on behalf of Native communities, and sometimes by amalgamating Native symbols with neo-Pagan and New Age ideas (as I will discuss below in the example of the “Jewitch medicine wheel”). Last but far from least, there is the Kabbalah, which also speaks to Jews seeking a kind of postmodern (though often quite bourgeois) form of Jewish spirituality. All this is to say that my experiences, while full of meaning and I hope integrity, are also part of stereotypical cultural phenomena and can be critiqued from that perspective. My own encounter with Native “religion” started in Los Angeles, in a sweatlodge community called Descendants of the Earth, run by a Native couple named Wolf and Lisa Wahpepah, who inherited a tradition of doing “four nations” sweatlodges—i.e., for red, white brown and yellow peoples, or all races, as they tend to be divided up by Native Americans— from their elder, Wolf’s father Fred Wahpepah. That encounter deepened when I was invited to the Sun Dance ceremony of another four nations tribe, Sungleska Oyate, based in Eastern Washington, which was led by Buck Ghosthorse, z”l, who was given a vision of an inclusive allnations tribe. Under normative circumstances, these ceremonies are conducted only for Native Americans and the leaders of these ceremonies were in some sense renegades. My own standard for judging the integrity of these ceremonies, as best I can, is based on the following criteria: the Lakota pedigree or spiritual lineage of the founders and leaders, the strict ritual standards they employ (i.e. with respect to moon time, or with respect to the number of rounds and kinds of songs), the level of cultural immersion for those that become part of the community, the creation of real communities of caring and mutual support, the absence of New Age lingo or forms, the principle of never charging money for a ceremony, and support for and engagement with Native American groups and causes. Thus, any lodge that charges a fee or is led by a white person who is not tied directly to a Native-led community would be verboten to me. Similarly, I would not feel comfortable supporting a Sun Dance not led by Lakota medicine people or elders, nor would I choose to go to a Sun Dance where, for example, prayer ties are made out of purple cloth – a color only employed in New Age contexts which is not part of traditional ritual. (Prayer ties are strings of little bundles of tobacco, wrapped traditionally in red, blue, yellow, green or white cloth, which may be tied onto the roof of the sweatlodge or onto the tree at the center of a Sun Dance.) For many in Native communities, these standards are not enough, and any lodge that welcomes non-Indians is viewed as fraudulent. (See for example the Looking Horse Proclamation on the Protection of Ceremonies and the Declaration of War Against Exploiters of Lakota Spirituality, both promulgated in 2008.) If you search on the internet for Buck Ghosthorse, by the way, you will find several Native websites that denounce him as a fraud for charging money for ceremonies, along with other accusations. I can confirm that that charge is false. The mere fact that Buck Ghosthorse offered ceremonies to non-Natives was enough to engender the other accusations. For the moment, I’m going to skirt the issue of whether it is problematic to participate in these ceremonies as a white, Jewish, non-Native human being, and focus on what I learned. I’ll return to that issue further on. It’s easy enough to sum up the parallels with Kabbalah that I found in my first sweatlodge or Inipi ceremony. The position of earth/womb, ritually created within the lodge, in relation to fire, the hearth, the four directions, and the colors, all corresponded to the system of Kabbalistic symbols called the Tree of Life or the Sefirot.2 The wonder for me is in how precise the details of this correspondence were. In the first lodge I went to, I found flags in each of the four directions. [Fig. 1] To the East, opposite the lodge, was a yellow flag, to the South a white flag and a green flag together, to the West, the direction of the lodge, a black flag, and to the North a red flag. Fig. 1. The line from the center of the firepit through the altar to the lodge is never crossed. The colored flags here represent the first lodge I went to, but they are not arranged in the most common way. Usually red and white are reversed. To anyone trained in Kabbalah these colors and directions quite obviously map onto the mystics’ tree of the Sefirot: Keter (Crown) in the East, which is the origin and highest point of the tree and the source of light and blessing (yellow), Chesed (Love) in the South or right, connected with purity (white), Gevurah (Judgment) in the North or left, connected also with sin and fire (red), and Malkhut (Kingdom) in the West at the bottom of the tree, the womb, earth and mother (black). [Fig. 2] The green flag would correspond to Tiferet (Beauty), which is in the center. The meaning within Kabbalah of tying it to the same pole as the white flag of Chesed would be to draw the energy of the whole towards love and away from judgment. Fig. 2. Two different versions of the Tree of Life of Kabbalah, alongside a schematic of the sweatlodge with Kabbalistic correspondences superimposed. The tree of the Sefirot on the left was created by the author. The one on the right is found on many sites on the web. Directions and terms in yellow on the right diagram were added by the author. As in the Medicine Wheel, the colors of the Sefirot may differ, but the basic pattern is the same. Note that in one normative version of the medicine wheel (see Fig. 4), the left and right (north and south) colors are white and red respectively, the reverse of the Kabbalistic system. In both however, north is associated with winter. See further discussion of colors below. The ten Sefirot represent qualities with which God created the world, as well as the universal pattern of the image of God found in all things and levels of reality. Keter in the east is the source of blessing; Malkhut in the west is the receptacle or womb that receives blessing and in turn nourishes all. Right action on the part of human beings increases the connection and flow of blessing from Tiferet through Yesod to Malkhut, that is, from masculine to feminine; wrong action separates them. That’s not exactly what these symbols mean in Lakota spirituality, though it isn’t far off either. However, we’ll leave that point for now and focus on what is even more important: the ceremonial structure itself. In the Inipi ceremony, the domed lodge sits covered in blankets, in the west, symbolizing the earth and the womb. In the center towards the east is the firepit, where the stone people, as they are called, are heated until they glow. The firepit is arranged like a circle inside a larger circle, around which participants gather before the ceremony. This larger circle is roughly the same size as the lodge. In between the two sits the altar, a small mound where one finds eagle feathers, the cannupa or sacred pipe, tobacco, and sometimes objects that participants have brought to receive the energy of the prayers made inside the lodge, or even pictures of people for whom prayers are being made. It is forbidden during the Inipi ceremony to step across the line between the firepit, the altar, and the lodge. At the same time, all circular paths must move clockwise (or sunwise, as it is understood), which leads to the path of circulation that you can see in the diagram. [Fig. 1] After participants “smudge off” with sage and file into the lodge, the “stone people” are brought in and dusted with medicine herbs, then water (mne) is brought in and ladled onto the hot rocks. This process happens four times, sometimes with new rocks being brought in. In between prayers are offered and Lakota songs are sung. The correspondence of the Inipi ceremony with Kabbalah is uncanny, what Freud would call “unheimlich”, except for the fact that it made the ceremony exceedingly heimlich, familiar and comfortable, for me. The firepit corresponds exactly to Tiferet or Beauty, the central masculine principle that represents balance and harmony and is symbolized by the heart (i.e., hearth). The altar that stands between the firepit and the lodge is the Sefirah of Yesod or Foundation, which is symbolized by the phallus and represents the principle of union between masculine and feminine. And the lodge is an exact correlate of Malkhut or Kingdom, also called Shekhinah, God’s presence, whose symbol is black, the womb, the earth, and the moon, among many other significations, as well as the fundamental feminine principle that nurtures the universe. [Fig. 2] In Kabbalah there is a specific prohibition against making a separation between Tiferet and Malkhut, that is, separating the masculine from the feminine divine principles.3 This separation is equivalent to cutting off the flow of blessing into the universe. To cause this separation would correspond to walking across the line that runs from the firepit to the lodge entrance. This is not just a fanciful overlay of two different religious systems. Both sets of ritual symbols and meanings are about unification of masculine and feminine, the vivification of the earth, and the flow of blessing to all of creation. The lodge is the symbol of the earth and the feminine, the womb and the people – just as Malkhut is symbolized by the people, idealized as K’neset Yisrael. We go to the lodge to pray for the people and for “all our relations”, Mitakuye Oyasin—for all the species and beings of this world. There are other correspondences that are less strong. I have already mentioned the colors, to which I will return below. Here I want to bring the example of the willow branches that form the skeleton of the lodge. By comparison, it should be obvious how how much stronger is the correlation between the lodge and Malkhut. The lodge is traditionally made of willow branches bent over each other into the shape of a dome and covered with heavy blankets in order to make it completely dark inside. It turns out that willow branches are an extremely important symbol in early Kabbalah, especially in Sefer Bahir, an 11th century text. Willow branches appear in the ritual of shaking the lulav (a rain ritual that uses a set of four plants representing the varied ecosystems of ancient Israel). In Sefer Bahir, the willows of the lulav symbolize the principle of rebirth, the reincarnation of the soul, and the root of the soul. Their special characteristic is that if one takes a willow branch and sticks it into wet soil—even upside down—it can take root. As the Bahir says: “What is the function of the repeated letter Shin [in the word Shoresh, root]? To teach you that if you would take a branch and plant it, the root grows back.”4 It is the case that the willow branches of a lodge sometimes do take root. Willow branches, because they are called arvey nachal, stream willows, in the Torah, also symbolize the streams that lead to the sea.5 Since the sea is again the feminine principle and the womb, symbolized also according to the Bahir by the etrog or citron (another one of the four plants used in the ritual), the streams represent the masculine principle. This example of resonance between the material culture of the lodge ritual and that of the Sukkot holiday (when the lulav with its willow branches is shaken) is evocative. However, the connection is only made strong by the Kabbalistic interpretation of Sukkot. It is evocative but not decisive with respect to seeing patterns shared by the two cultures. Further afield, we can look at the messages in the Lakota prayers and compare them to Jewish or Kabbalistic prayers. Lyrics often give thanks to Grandfather (Tonkashila pilamye), or speak about Wakontonka, the Sacred mystery; they ask our prayers to be heard, and they say, “See, we are suffering for the people. Please listen.” I could try to draw theological parallels, but they would be tenuous at best, not only because the categories and symbols are so different, but also because the Lakota ceremonies are fundamentally not theological in their orientation. What the two traditions share in these respects is shared by nearly any prayer tradition that is rooted in a community that defines itself as a people. (This perhaps may be a good working definition of what tribal means.) The fact that we find our correlations in the realm of material culture more than in theological or metaphysical meanings gives some justification to a structuralist approach, which is not as concerned with the indigenous interpretation of symbols and meanings, as it is with internal differences and relationships between symbols within a specific tradition, and the similarity of their arrangement to that of other traditions. It is in fact in that realm that we find such strong parallels. There is however one symbolic dimension, which, while fitting into this framework, is also highly theologically developed. That element we have already referred to several times above. It is the unification of male and female. This is one of the few aspects of Native and specifically Lakota spirituality that is clearly and frequently articulated. For example, the cannupa or sacred pipe is made of a stone bowl and a stem – female and male. The entry of the stone people into the lodge is a union of male with female. And in the Sun Dance, the tree (one might say, the tree of Life) at the center of the dance is a cottonwood (preferably) that has grown and is cut into the shape of a Y – the two branches of the Y again symbolizing male and female, united in the trunk of the tree. The image very specifically is one of drawing down male and female energies in a way that creates union. As we have already noted, this is one of the most important and central motifs in every aspect of Kabbalah. (This is also discussed in Zalman Schachter-Shalomi’s paper, where he adds that the unification of male and female is part of the root origins of the lulav, long before Kabbalah interpreted it. The Kabbalistic version or vision of Judaism is the place where this idea is very clearly articulated.) Noting this, we might add to Scholem’s characterization of Kabbalah as the return of the mythic the idea that Kabbalah is the return of the shamanic, which is a crucially important dimension of indigenous tribal traditions. (There is of course more to say about the Sun Dance as well. Most importantly, the circular arbor, within which the dancers stand in a circle before the tree, is completely open to the east, and the people who come to support the dancers by singing and prayers may not cross this open space, except in special ritual moments. In the opposite direction is the place where the dancers go to sleep and sweat, in the west, hidden from view. It is also forbidden to cross the line from the tree to this resting area, and the altar where the pipes rest stands between these two places in the west of the arbor. The architectural and ritual focus on the east makes the Sun Dance quite different from the sweatlodge. Translated into Kabbalistic symbols, it would suggest that the holiest moments of the Sun Dance ritual allow direct access to the energy of Keter, something which is not available in the sweatlodge nor suggested by its architecture, and which is also not seen as available under normal circumstance in Kabbalah.) Now I want to return to the color correlations discussed above. The medicine wheel colors are not standardized to the degree that colors in Kabbalah are. Most often, red is in the south and white in the north. [Fig. 3] More rarely, the opposite is the case: red is the north and white the south, as in Kabbalah. It was somewhat accidental that in the first lodge I went to, red and white were placed in these same directions where they are found in Kabbalah. The same direction-color correspondences can be found in the following Lakota figure. [Fig. 4] The Lumbee and Cherokee tribes, to give an example of a different set of correspondences, put red in the East, yellow in the South.6 In the first, normative case, with red in the south and white in the north, the colors represent the seasons in a more obvious manner, with south being associated with red and summer, while north is associated with white and winter. [Fig. 3] In this aspect, even though the north in Kabbalah is always symbolized by red, it is also always associated with cold and winter.7 Other differences between the medicine wheel directions and colors are not as great: for example, west is almost always black, but sometimes it is (dark) blue (which in any case is the color most similar to black). Fig. 3. One common depiction of the colors of the Medicine Wheel. The placement of red and white are the reverse of Kabbalah, though the seasons are the same. The second image comes from http://www.getresponse.com/archive/sramsay/Come-Walk-in-My-Moccasins-March-2014-28505102.html. Different tribal traditions exist as to which colors go where. Fig. 4. A Lakota medicine wheel whose colors correspond to the first lodge I attended. Generally speaking, the Lakota version of any ritual or symbol is viewed as the most catholic, high church, and formally correct, even when people follow differing traditions from their own tribes. More descriptively, the Lakota rituals are seen as the original ones by most people, and they tend to be stricter and more ornate. If I were interested in amalgamating the traditions—which I am not—the complexity of how to map colors onto the directions could prove problematic. However, Kabbalah itself has differing color schemes, especially for some of the more secondary Sefirot. One thing that is utterly consistent in Kabbalah and in Native American traditions is that the west is the earth and is symbolized by black or blue. This itself is a fact that would interest any structuralist; the feminine pole seems to have a kind of universal valence in all these traditions. As it stands, the correspondences, and contradictions, concerning color only heighten my sense of wonder about how precisely the sweatlodge ceremony corresponds to the Tiferet-Yesod-Malkhut relationship in Kabbalah. We could ask here whether amalgamating these traditions is valid or not. I want to bring the example of a New Age medicine wheel I found online, created by someone who calls herself a “Jewitch”. [Fig. 5] This “Jewitch medicine wheel” is example of the cultural appropriation of both Native American tradition, and Kabbalah (though one might say that the creator, as a Jew, has a right to appropriate Kabbalah). Appropriation of the wheel may not be such bad news, as long as no claim is being made as to be representing Native traditions. No one in any case would mistake this figure for a Native American medicine wheel, despite its similarity of form. Fig. 5. A neo-Pagan “Jewitch medicine wheel” that appropriates Native and Kabbalistic symbols, from http://witchcraftsartisanalchemy.blogspot.com/2006/11/kabbalistic-medicine-wheel_24.html. Though this example is quite distant from my own approach, I am highly motivated to see parallels between Jewish and Native American traditions, which from an academic perspective makes me a suspect observer. I want these two spiritual paths to be parallel because I want to be able to walk them both – a task that may not in reality be possible. Yet I think the parallels I have drawn would make sense to anyone knowledgeable about both paths, and I submit them to you for your judgment. If these theological/symbolic/spiritual parallels are meaningful, then they can provide the framework for a way to participate in Lakota spirituality as a Jewish person that is more than just a form of cultural appropriation (on the condition of course that one allows the Native rituals to speak their own meaning independently of any fancy Kabbalistic interpretation). There are, however, also some conspicuous differences between Native and Jewish spiritualities. In Lakota rituals, physical suffering is considered a normative form of prayer, which includes chest piercing for the male sun dancers and fasting for four days for all the dancers, and can even include the opportunity for anyone to offer a small piece of flesh as part of one’s prayers in the Sun Dance. The idea of ameliorative suffering is hardly alien to Judaism. Nonetheless, while Judaism certainly prays through fasting, which is conceptualized as a kind of suffering or offering of flesh, the offering of a piece of flesh would be strictly forbidden as avodah zarah, alien worship. (It is no accident, by the way, that the closest thing in Jewish worship to the Sun Dance is specifically the Yom Kippur fast. Sun Dance is quite concretely the Native version of the Jewish High Holidays, including not only fasting and non-stop prayer, but also the belief that blessing for the entire year is brought down at this ritual time.) Other differences we have already alluded to, such as the tendency not to interpret or analyze rituals in Native traditions, versus the hyper-intellectualism and textualism of the Jewish tradition and its insistence on interpretation of rituals, etc. Another huge difference is that the Jewish tradition is rooted in an agricultural and pastoral society, while the Lakota tradition is rooted in a hunting society. This leads to some rather interesting contrasts in the culture around food—especially in the treatment of roadkill, if I may be blunt. But the symbolic parallels are so strong that they make these other differences less relevant. One could even say that one has in the example of Kabbalah and of Native Lakota rituals an example of highly correlated symbolic systems that were extended and extrapolated, using different modalities, into two radically different social realities. From a structuralist perspective, then, the union of male and female that happens by way of the same configuration in both traditions may point toward something more fundamental in the human psyche, and not just in the two traditions. It is not my own tendency to seek such essentialist meanings in these correlations, but it is certainly possible to do so. One sticking point to the idea that there is a connection between these specifically tribal traditions is that the Kabbalistic interpretation of Jewish rituals in terms of male and female is so much later, more than two thousand years later perhaps, than the origin of such rituals. We could almost imagine that Kabbalah, minus the focus on textuality, is close to the interpretation that Native elders might have given to Jewish rituals if asked to interpret them according to their own symbolic systems. This suggests one last dynamic with which I may conclude. The difference between appropriation and what I hope I and some others are doing may be this: as I said above, I am not trying to integrate the two traditions into one, though of course in my own self they integrate in some fashion. I am not trying to reduce one to the other, nor am I running away from one in order to embrace the other. Fundamentally, the Lakota and Jewish traditions remain separate, like fellow travelers on this human road, hopefully as neighbors and maybe even as companions. The lessons of one may deepen the experiences and teachings of the other, but they are not a single continuum. Adding the two together is not like adding two magnitudes to get one sum, but rather like identifying new dimensions that are orthogonal to the dimensions one already knows. Ultimately, we are talking about two traditions that embody their wisdom and teachings in very physical rituals rooted in elements taken from the earth around us. That perhaps is one way to define tribal religion versus more Westernized religion—even though the tribal dimension is far more defined and manifest in Lakota ritual than in Jewish ritual. Whether this kind of comparison of religious traditions counts as appropriation or appreciation, one more essential point remains. This is the question of whether drawing on these two traditions and connecting them leads to a spiritual practice that is more connected to the world and more able to heal the world and to heal our relationship to the world. I believe I can answer unequivocally that it does. That is both a Jewish and Native value, and I wish that it may be true not just for my own experiences and experiments, but also for the work of this symposium. May it be so, for all our relations. Aho Mitakuye Oyasin! Rabbi David Mevorach Seidenberg is the director and creator of neohasid.org, and the author of Kabbalah and Ecology: God’s Image in the More-Than-Human World, published by Cambridge University Press in April 2015. 1 The Kayam farm is based in the Pearlstone Center in Maryland. The Jewish Farm School is located in Philadelphia but has branches in other locations like Long Island. The author teaches in all of these programs. 2 For a list of Sefirotic symbols and correspondences go to neohasid.org/kabbalah/symbols/ for a preliminary introduction. 3 Every Kabbalistic and Chasidic text is rooted in this conception. For a general summary of these ideas see Scholem, On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism. 4 sec. 81. 5 sec. 178. 6 The Lumbee tribe’s seal is described in the following document: http://www.lumbeetribe.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=131&Itemid=53. The Cherokee symbolism is described here: powersource.com/cocinc/ceremony/fourwind.htm. Note that the West is brown and the North is black (or blue); in any case the West is called “dark” and has a positive valence, while the North is still reflective of death and the North wind’s “countenance [is] stern”—and fairly exact description of the North in Kabbalah. 7 See e.g. Zohar 1:29b: “This ice, this frozen sea—its waters flow only when the power of the South reaches it, drawing close. Then the waters that were congealed on the side of the North are released and flow, for on the side of the North the waters congeal, and from the side of the South the waters they are released and flow, watering all the beasts of the field…” (Matt, The Zohar, vol.1, 174) The winter of the North in Kabbalah is a hypostatic symbol for what happens within the divine. The seasons such as they exist in the physical world are merely reflections of the hypostatic reality in the Kabbalistic way of thinking. This is of course is radically different compared to a Native American approach to ritual and testifies to the distance from which Kabbalah is connecting to the indigenous origins of Jewish ritual.