Angels & Demons

In this talk, we explore channeling aggressive, acquisitive, and lustful impulses into positive creativity. Drawing inspiration from Jewish tradition, find insights on how these powerful energies can fuel artistic expression and innovation. Through practical guidance and spiritual wisdom, listeners learn to harness these impulses to drive their artistic endeavors, transforming potential obstacles into opportunities for growth and inspiration. The sermon inspires artists to embrace their full range of emotions and desires, using them as catalysts for meaningful and impactful artistic creations. (Parashat Acharei Mot; Leviticus 16:1-18:30; May 3, 2024)

Transcript

This week's Torah reading contains perhaps among the most difficult verses in Hebrew Bible,

The most confounding and theologically challenging and spoiling for most moderns,

The injunction against having homosexual intercourse.

It is a to'evah,

To use the word in Hebrew,

Which is often translated as abomination,

Something revolting,

Disgusting,

That sours the taste in God's mouth.

But I'm going to challenge that understanding because that word to'evah is not an eternal theological verity.

It's also used to describe Israelites and Egyptians eating together,

Egyptians' perspective on shepherds,

Certain other animals and magics.

I think it's much more accurately a taboo or anathema,

Which is to say,

At the very least,

I mean,

It is a capital crime,

But so is just about everything else in the Bible.

This is a historically mediated and a culturally mediated experience.

The ancients very rarely understood of same-sex,

Same-gender love.

It was often a coercive sexual relationship,

At least in Hellenistic culture.

I can't speak before that.

Would they have objected to same-sex love?

It's hard to know.

They certainly understood it as a taboo for their time in Leviticus 18.

22,

But did they understand it to be an eternal,

Divinely ordained mandate?

The jury is out on that.

I think even in early strains of Jewish tradition,

There was a wariness of certain theologically problematic episodes like this,

A sense that homosexuality was not chosen,

But if not genetic,

They wouldn't have understood that then,

But part of one's character.

So even Maimonides in the 11th century looks at this law,

Leviticus 18.

22,

Which has caused so much consternation in queer communities,

And begins the process of reinterpreting it,

Re-understanding it as not about whom you love,

But maybe how you love.

So in these laws of forbidden sexual intercourse,

Says Maimonides in the Guide for the Perplexed,

They inculcate the lesson that we ought to limit intercourse,

Only desiring it rarely,

That the work in Judaism is quite often a spiritual awareness of the joy of saying no,

Of not being in heat,

So to speak,

Like a cat,

But having a mental awareness,

A metacognition about our own desires and lusts and acquisitiveness that you will see elsewhere,

Not just in terms of sexual relations,

But even in terms of foods,

Times of the year,

Right?

The goal is not every man for himself,

Every person for himself.

Every person doing what's right in their own eyes is the worst kind of morality,

According to Deuteronomy.

So what Maimonides begins to suggest,

And this is echoed elsewhere in earlier and later traditions,

Is that the purpose of mitzvot,

The purpose of biblical commandments and other commandments,

Other practices,

Jewish and otherwise,

Is a refinement of character,

And an awareness that we are more than our base desires,

Whether that desire is hetero or homosexual,

Whether that desire is for cake or Facebook,

That we do have power over urges,

Whether they're good urges or bad urges,

That there is a time and place for all.

This parasha,

This week's Hebrew readings,

Are about a lot of temptation,

A lot of things that might call to us as humans and artists.

There are a couple words I'm about to use that even give me pause to shudder.

So we're told in verse 18-22,

Just before the previous verse,

That you should not pass your children through to a god named Molech,

Which literally might mean ruled or ruler,

But saying its name is unnerving to me.

It is a source and a locus of so much understood evil,

Such that I was told that there is even archaeological evidence that observing this practice of sending children through to Molech was child sacrifice through immolation,

Through burning.

Terrible stuff.

And I'm not talking about Satanism.

I don't know anything about that practice.

But there are what we might call demonic practices,

Or demotic is another word for that.

And we're told not to sacrifice to Sirim,

Which is some sort of demon.

It's connected to the word of goat.

And we hear that also in Isaiah,

That these goat demons dance.

Some sort of ecstasy,

Ecstatic practice,

Maybe hyper-sexualized practice,

Fertility rite.

It's unclear what the practice around this previous incarnation of something mystic and divine was prior to the Israelites,

This Molech,

This Sirim.

Elsewhere,

It's just called a satyr,

Using the Greek mythology,

Which I like that as a translation.

What's interesting about devils and demons in biblical tradition,

In Jewish tradition,

Is that they're not understood to be Satan.

In fact,

Satan,

As understood especially in the Book of Job,

Is not the devil per se,

But is an angel,

An accusing angel,

The prosecuting angel in the heavenly court,

The one who more or less plays,

As we would say,

Devil's advocate,

Proving to God that Job is not as good as you think he is,

For example.

And demons and devils,

Unlike Satan,

Were mischievous little gnomes,

To use other mythologies.

They were troublemakers.

They were the ones who made you misplace your keys,

Perhaps.

And they did have powers.

They did have capacities.

People did invoke them to cause trouble for a neighbor with whom you had a rivalry or fight.

So,

Ovadia Ben-Yosef Ben-Yakov Sforno,

Writing in Italy in about the 16th century called Sforno Generally,

You don't offer sacrifice to demons,

Even though they're not deities in any manner.

It's not a kind of idolatry per se.

They were just creatures that could be employed by their human masters.

In fact,

There is a tabletop roleplay indie game in the early era of indie games called Sorcerer that uses this concept.

And you're not supposed to employ these demons,

Not even for errands in distant countries.

That was the nature of demons.

They were emissaries.

They were invisible servants.

They were troublemakers.

They were ways you could cause minor curse upon your neighbor with whom you were having a land dispute,

Say.

And there are similar stories of even senior demons like Asmodeus being used by God,

God's self,

On missions and commissions.

So,

What all this is pointing to in terms of sexuality,

Desire,

The demonic,

Is what seems to be the id,

What seems to be the troublemaking part of self can have an active role in one's life for the positive,

Allowing us to do things.

The id at one point,

The wicked impulse as it's called in our tradition,

Is captured by the rabbis,

And then chickens stop laying eggs,

And they have to release it.

These things that seem perplexing or problematic are vital parts of self.

And it's possible,

I think,

As artists to channel those desires and inquisitiveness and capacities towards arts-making,

Towards creativity.

Bruegel and Turner,

These fiery lights of hell being the power of the painting.

Gene Wolfe in his book The Sword of the Lictor says,

An angel is often only a demon who stands between us and our enemy.

Again,

To say the wicked,

The problematic aspects of self can be used for the creative,

The generative,

The positive.

So,

The challenge is where to draw the line.

As noted before by Sforno,

These satyrs,

These goat demons are not necessarily,

And no demon is understood to be divine.

No demon,

Unlike some aspects of,

I think,

Pentecostalism,

The devil is not at all acquainted with God in terms of power.

There is a subordinate relationship,

Absolutely subordinate,

And not even as powerful as some of the senior angels.

But Ibn Ezra,

Who is Rabbi Abraham Ben Meir,

Writing in Spain in the 12th century,

Says,

When you summon demons or believe in them,

It's a kind of faithlessness to God,

Right?

You're not talking to the manager,

You're talking to the clerk.

And all ultimate good or ill comes from the supernal realms,

From the Almighty God Self,

Glorious and awesome.

Again,

It's in the way that you use it.

What do you understand your deficits to be?

Are they eternal?

Are they insuperable?

Are they things that you should live in and through or use delicately and carefully with thought?

Having a metacognition,

Not just diving into one's narcissism or violence or aggression,

But thinking,

Is this the right moment for that?

Right before the goal is about to be scored in soccer,

Is it time to get really aggressive?

When you're driven in career in your mid-20s and you need to be assertive,

Is it time to seek,

To drive,

To be driven,

Be acquisitive?

There are times,

There are places,

There are ways of understanding it,

Right?

That acquisitiveness and greed is not our top value,

But can be useful.

As Adam Smith would point out,

It's the nature of all markets.

So after the death of Aaron's sons,

One of the things we learn is that no one should ever come into the sanctuary,

The Holy of Holies,

Behol eit,

At any moment or at will,

As it's often felicitously translated at the beginning of chapter 16 of Leviticus.

Time and place,

And the right time for the right place.

That's the hard thing,

Right?

Even in terms of where you apply a red color in a canvas.

You can use it broadly like Rothko or narrowly in proportion like Turner.

That's up to you,

But it is worth considering.

And we are a delicately balanced humankind.

There is almost no conception in Judaism until very late of anything that looks like original sin,

But there is a deep understanding that we are precariously balanced between good and ill.

The struggle is to keep the good impulse,

The wiseness,

The charitableness,

The kindness,

The giving,

Generosity,

Grace towards others in charge,

And to keep the greed and lust and aggression in check.

That sense of bifurcation or division or multitudinousness of self appears a little bit in the story of the goat sent off to Azazel.

Azazel also may have been a demonic name.

It reads like one.

Anything that ends in the word L is some kind of angelic or supernal creature.

It's called a theophoric name,

A name that calls out or contains God,

Particle of God.

So the priest would have two goats.

One would be sacrificed immediately,

And one would be sent off to the wilderness.

They would carry the scapegoat,

Carry the transgressions of the people on the Yom Kippur holiday,

And go off to an inaccessible region.

A lot of later stories say that that goat was also slaughtered naturally,

Would fall down a cliff,

Tied to a rock and fall down a cliff.

It was a gruesome end,

Is a lot of the suspicion of how that process and ritual really worked.

But there was the goat that contained the sins,

The goat that was sacrificed in some sort of more natural or pure state.

We live with both.

We use them both on the canvas in the recording studio when we sculpt.

We use our will and our ego and our superego,

Id,

Altruism,

All of it.

They all come to play,

And the question is how.

The question is when and in what proportion.

So azazel,

Our sages love to do name etymologies that are sort of fanciful,

Not always completely fanciful.

Sometimes they make complete sense.

Azazel they take as more or less an acronym.

Without going too deep into the Hebrew,

It's this opposite to this God did,

Meaning God did A and God did the opposite of A,

Is the acronym they take azazel to mean.

One of our later sages said there's a goat for azazel,

Which is this distant region,

This demonic space,

And there's a goat for God sacrificed in tabernacle and temple,

But they are the same kind of goat.

They were allotted by random chance.

There were two goats brought,

And I think there was a red thread and a white thread,

And one would go to one place and the other to the other.

But they were the same potential goat,

The same goat in quantum state,

The same Schrodinger's goat until they were selected,

Which is to say,

Says this sage,

The gifts to God and the gifts for personal enjoyment should be equivalent.

You're not holy or profane.

You're not good or bad.

You're not an artist or a destroyer.

You are all and more.

We are finely balanced,

And the balance goes right through the soul of every creature.

And the work is really to know the right time,

The right place,

The right balance,

To put in charge when.

And maybe I might say that I wish us more times when our good impulse could ride on top,

Both for our own sake,

But it implies something about the world not needing violence.

May this be a year of people's better angels.