The making of Jewish authenticity: The hybrid discourse of authenticity of New Age Judaism and the complexities of religious individualization

2020 ◽  
pp. 000842982091159
Author(s):  
Rachel Werczberger
Keyword(s):  
Jewish History ◽  
Jewish Life ◽  
New Age ◽  
The Self ◽  
Authentic Self ◽  
Historical Origin ◽  
Time Periods ◽  
Expressive Content ◽  
Hybrid Discourse ◽  
In The Beginning

This article offers an ethnographically informed discussion of the hybrid discourse of authenticity of two New Age Judaism (NAJ) communities that were active in Israel in the beginning of the millennium. The article argues that the discourse of authenticity of the two communities was a hybrid discourse which interweaved two overlapping understandings of expressive authenticity: genealogical or historical (origin) and identity or correspondence (expressive content). The members of the communities aspired for self-realization and fulfillment by discovering their authentic self and at the same time articulated and legitimized their mission of renewal by referring to earlier, allegedly more spiritual time periods in Jewish history. This discourse is understood in terms of the “inward turn” and the “turn to tradition” of contemporary Jewish life as well as the penetration of consumer logic into Jewish forms of spirituality. As such it showcases the complexities of Jewish individualization whereby the focus on the self and self-authenticity is tightly linked to the cultivation of identity and communal belonging.

The Relationship between Seeker and Spiritual Guide as portrayed in contemporary Western Sufi Autobiographies

2011 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 297-332
Author(s):  
Kate Zebiri
Keyword(s):  
Life Writing ◽  
New Age ◽  
The Self ◽  
Individual Autonomy ◽  
Religious Authority ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Continuity And Discontinuity

This article aims to explore the Shaykh-mur?d (disciple) or teacher-pupil relationship as portrayed in Western Sufi life writing in recent decades, observing elements of continuity and discontinuity with classical Sufism. Additionally, it traces the influence on the texts of certain developments in religiosity in contemporary Western societies, especially New Age understandings of religious authority. Studying these works will provide an insight into the diversity of expressions of contemporary Sufism, while shedding light on a phenomenon which seems to fly in the face of contemporary social and religious trends which deemphasize external authority and promote the authority of the self or individual autonomy.

New age religion and the cult of the self

Society ◽  
2002 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 46-51 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Tucker
Keyword(s):  
New Age ◽  
The Self ◽  
New Age Religion

scholarly journals OJEBETA “THE SELF AWAKENED” IN BUCHI EMECHETA’S THE SLAVE GIRL

2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (10) ◽  
pp. 95-99
Author(s):  
Mary Stella Ran B. ◽  
Poli Reddy R.
Keyword(s):  
Christian Education ◽  
Small Degree ◽  
The Self ◽  
African Women ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Buchi Emecheta ◽  
The People ◽  
In The Beginning

The novel “The Slave Girl” by Buchi Emecheta exposes the plights of African women and portrayal of their struggle as slaves and ultimately how they come up the problem and becomes a self-awakened.  In this paper, one can see Ojebeta starting her life as a slave and finally becomes an owner of a house by passing so many phases of life as a slave. In the beginning, she is sold into domestic slavery by her own brother.  She has become the victim to her brother’s traits.  She has become a scapegoat to the plans of African patriarchy.  The intention of Buchi Emecheta is to recreate the image of women through feminism.   Emecheta’s fiction is blended with reality representing socio historical elements of the prevailing society and its environment besides questioning the pathetic conditions of the people in general and women in particular. One can observe the narration of innocence of childhood grown into adulthood by attaining certain amount of freedom with the Christian education which she has received with which she has attained a small degree of self-awareness.

Face to Face: the Growth of the Self in Thomas Merton

2020 ◽  
pp. 179-192
Author(s):  
Susanne Caroline Rose Jennings
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
Zen Buddhism ◽  
Early Years ◽  
The Self ◽  
Prolific Author ◽  
Authentic Self ◽  
Face To Face ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Individuation Process ◽  
Thomas Merton

The late Trappist monk and prolific author, Thomas Merton was intensely concerned with the self – or to be more precise, with a desire to break free from the tyranny of the self he took to be his identity. His early years in France and England were marked by a sense of loss and dislocation. After leaving Cambridge for Columbia, his subsequent life in America and decision to be baptised a Catholic at the age of 23 eventually led to his taking vows as a Cistercian monk. Given the name Frater Louis, the ‘world’ with all its temptations and unresolved issues had been left safely behind along with his old identity. Or so he thought. In fact, Merton’s years as a Trappist would lead to a best-selling autobiography written under obedience to his abbot with many more books to follow. Compared at the time of its publication to St Augustine’s Confessions, it would lead to his international renown as Thomas Merton. He voiced his disquiet over what he called ‘this shadow, this double, this writer who […] followed me into the cloister … I cannot lose him.’ In time, Merton came to the realisation through lived experience and his voracious reading of the Bible, St Augustine, the mystics, the individuation process propounded by Jung, Zen Buddhism and others that the ‘self’ he was trying to escape was, in fact, largely a ‘false’ self driven by the ego. This paper traces Merton’s journey from the that self to the authentic self which is found in God, in transcendence. Obsession with ‘the self’ as understood in the 21st century makes a study of Merton’s path to selfhood that much more vital. The advent of the ‘Selfie’, the self-promotion that social media affords and the examples of narcissistic individuals in positions of power gives the lie to lives where self-consciousness is confused with self-realisation. Nothing, as Merton discovered, could be further from the truth.    

The Meaning of Denial

2021 ◽  
pp. 124-150
Author(s):  
Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi
Keyword(s):  
New Age ◽  
The Self ◽  
Eternal Life ◽  
Physical Body ◽  
Immortal Soul ◽  
Individual Consciousness ◽  
Early Manifestation

Could denial be a source of meaning? The meaning of denying death is clear, and most religions have been doing it for millennia. Claiming an immortal soul and thus denying the annihilation of our individual consciousness is something humans have embraced for more than 100,000 years. This chapter examines a group known as Physical Immortality, that many considered more bizarre than other belief minorities, because it promises its adherents eternal life in the same physical body they are inhabiting in this life. The author’s observations of the group and its members taught him that while the beliefs were indeed unusual, the members were ordinary and normal. It turned out to be an early manifestation of New Age activities in Israel. The group did not develop a distinct identity in its members, which was one reason for its decline. What characterized most followers was a playful openness to building up the self through support, belonging, and positivity, even if expressed in absurdities.

Beyond the Self

2018 ◽  
pp. 113-132
Author(s):  
Christopher J. Mruk
Keyword(s):  
Psychology Of Religion ◽  
Self Esteem ◽  
The Self ◽  
Protective Function ◽  
Healthy Relationships ◽  
Authentic Self ◽  
Generic Term ◽  
New Research

Chapter 6 focuses on self-esteem and its connections to something larger than the self. The first part summarizes new research on self-esteem and relationships, an area not often found in other books. Particular attention is given to the ways in which authentic self-esteem helps foster healthy relationships and how low or defensive self-esteem may hurt them. This material helps readers understand how the self-protective function of self-esteem can harm relationships and how its self-expansion or enhancement function may help them reach new or deeper levels. The last section focuses on self-esteem in a larger context but one that still involves being connected to others. This work is based on findings from the psychology of religion but does so without being preachy, denominational, or dogmatic as spirituality is used as a generic term to which anyone can relate.

On the Text of Two Troubadour Poems

PMLA ◽  
1944 ◽  
Vol 59 (3) ◽  
pp. 605-623
Author(s):  
Kurt Lewent
Keyword(s):  
Essential Elements ◽  
The Self ◽  
Usual Sense ◽  
In The Beginning

aïmbaut d'Aurenca Ara'm so del tot conquis.(B. Gr. 389, 11 ed. Kolsen, Neophilologus [1941], pp. 99–105.)The well-known tenso between Giraut de Bornelh and Linhaure (Gr. 281, 1 = Gr. 389, 10a) whose identification with the Prince of Orange, generally accepted today, stands to the credit of Adolf Kolsen, reveals Raïmbaut as an adherent of trobar clus. Our poem, however, is one of those in which that aristocratic troubadour does not adhere to his artistic convictions. We can be glad of this attitude on the part of the poet because it gave us a poem attractive in its easy-flowing rhythm, simple versification, and continuous presentation of charming thoughts and motifs, from the doubts and hesitations of the beginning to the triumphant finale of the self-confident knight. To reach this goal, the poet takes particular care to connect the stanzas of his poem by repeating in the beginning of each of them the idea on which he closes the preceding stanza and developing it into a new one. He thus forms, as it were, coblas capfinadas, not in the usual sense of metrical technique, but in a higher artistic sense. Besides this stylistic phenomenon, there are two features that seem to me characteristic of this poem. (1) Much as he likes apostrophes to God and the saints, in none of his other poems does Raïmbaut concede to God such a dominant and intrinsic rôle concerning his love as in this one. (2) So God, Love, and Chivalry, those three essential elements of medieval thinking, are blended here into a mental and artistic unity hardly equaled in any other troubadour song.

Local Faces, Human Crimes—New Histories of the Hungarian Holocaust

2018 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 119-127
Author(s):  
Ilse Josepha Lazaroms
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Jewish History ◽  
Life Stories ◽  
Jewish Life ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
Hungarian Society ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Emotional Socialization ◽  
Hungarian State ◽  
The Relationship

This essay examines the state of the art in Hungarian Holocaust research by way of three studies that appeared recently: Budapest Building Managers and the Holocaust in Hungary, by István Pál Ádám; The Holocaust in Hungary: Seventy Years Later, edited by Randolph L. Braham and András Kovács; and Hungarian Jews in the Age of Genocide: An Intellectual History, 1929–1948, by Ferenc Laczó (all in 2016). It shows how these studies navigate the intentionalist versus functionalist debate in new ways, by zooming in on local, private, and ordinary Jewish Hungarians, as well as non-Jewish Hungarians, and their experiences of and role in the implementation of the Holocaust. Two main questions stand out: how to understand and come to terms with the complicity of non-Jewish Hungarians and the Hungarian state on the level of nationwide history politics, and how to grasp the relationship between the Holocaust and earlier periods in Hungarian Jewish history. In other words, was the catastrophic fate of Hungarian Jewry presaged by a lingering and deep-rooted antisemitism in Hungarian society, or was it an unprecedented and entirely unexpected occurrence that was out of step not just with Jewish life in Hungary, but with Hungarian society as a whole? By approaching the Hungarian Holocaust in the longer durée and from a transnational perspective, these studies succeed in illuminating the ways in which the catastrophe unfolded “on the ground” and how responses to it depended heavily on previous experiences and life stories based on class, gender, and political and emotional socialization.

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