But the orishas are also recognizable in drumming patterns (slow for ancient Orunmila, fast for fiery Ogun) and dancing steps—Shango’s kicks, leaps, high steps, and tumbles; Obatala’s slow, cool walking; Babaluaye’s erratic jerking (low and cramped, like a sick man). In fact, dance is so central to this religious tradition that some have referred to it as a “dancing religion.” Some orishas never possess anyone. For example, Orunmila comes to earth solely through divination. But Ogun, god of war, dances in the sharp steps and aggressive postures of a warrior, his hands slicing the air on a sharp diagonal like a sword. Ochoosi the hunter pulls an arrow from his imaginary quiver, places it in his imaginary bow, and “reacts in a jerking undulation” from the force of the arrow’s release. Shango “pulls energy from the skies toward his genitals,” playing with his crotch, Michael Jackson–style. Oshun’s movements are more lyrical and less staccato, flowing like the river she represents, sensuous and potent as sex itself.54
Yoruba trance dancing is often referred to as spirit possession, but that is not quite right, since the orisha possess both the body and the spirit of the devotee. Every word, gesture, and movement of someone who has “made the god” manifests the possessor rather than the possessed. Wande Abimbola has suggested that the appropriate metaphor here is to “climb,” since most orishas (Shango is a notable exception) live inside the earth and come up through the ground to enter those they possess (feet and lower legs first).55 The possessed also speak of being caught or grabbed. The most common analogy, however, is to a rider “mounting” a horse—an image that carries with it sexual connotations of a dominant male “mounting” a submissive female. In festivals and initiation rites the orishas “mount” and then “ride” devotees, possessing their bodies in dance and their spirits in trance.
There is a vibrant debate about how much (if at all) gender mattered in traditional Yoruba religion, but there is no debating how slippery and permeable the categories of male and female are for Yoruba practitioners today.56 While worshipping the orishas of their towns, the rulers of Idanre and nearby Owo cross-dress as women. In a festival to the goddess Oronsen, crowds praise their king as Oronsen’s husband Olowo. Pointing to his fat belly, they also praise him for being pregnant—“the prolific banana tree which bears much fruit.”57 On feast days, men can dance as female orishas, and women can dance as male orishas. But even this distinction between “female” and “male” orishas is problematic, since the macho Shango is revered in Cuba as Saint Barbara, the goddess Oya is said to have been male at some point in the past, and the relatively obscure Brazilian orisha Logunede is said to spend half the year as a male hunter in the forest and the other half as a female enchantress in the river. It is also common for practitioners to switch genders when they reincarnate. Many Yoruba girls are called Babatunde (“Father Returns”), and many Yoruba boys are called Yetunde (“Mother Returns). Orishas also switch genders as they move from place to place. Like Buddhism’s bodhisattva of compassion, who is male in India as Avalokiteshvara and female in East Asia as Guanyin, Oduduwa (aka Odua and Odudua), the divine progenitor of all Yoruba kings, takes female form in northeastern Yorubaland and male form in its southwestern cities and towns. Perhaps because of this gender flexibility, many straight men in Brazil and Cuba refuse to become possession priests. They see being “mounted” as akin to playing the submissive role in a sexual encounter, so the possession priesthood in these countries is often filled by women and gay men.
New World Transformations
Many more changes came over Yoruba religion as it migrated to the New World. But these changes were only possible because the Yoruba religious impulse survived. One key to this survival is elasticity. If Yoruba religion had not bent under the unimaginable pressures of capture, passage, slavery, and emancipation, it would undoubtedly have broken to pieces. But another source of the success of Yoruba religion is orality.
Judaism was born when Jews began to shift their sights, after the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 586 B.C.E., from temple rituals to textual interpretations. This historic transformation didn’t just make Judaism as we know it, it made Judaism more mobile. Whereas temple rituals could only be performed by priests at the Jerusalem Temple, the Hebrew Bible could be interpreted anywhere by anyone who could read. Yoruba religion is similarly transportable and its authority similarly decentralized. In this case, however, authority lies in the oral corpus of Ifa divination rather than in the written text of the Hebrew Bible. “Book knowledge,” writes UNESCO leader and Yoruba Studies professor Olabiyi Babalola Yai, “is devoid of às|e|.”58 So Yoruba religion was able to travel, first, inside West Africa and, later, across the oceans in the heads of diviners and the feet and hips of the god-possessed.
Some of the changes that came over Yoruba religion in the New World have already been mentioned. The orishas were whittled down from hundreds or thousands to dozens, and Ifa has largely (though not entirely) given way to simpler forms of divination. But there are other important differences between traditional Yoruba religion and the Yoruba-derived traditions of the Americas. Many orishas lost their associations with particular places and peoples in West Africa after they migrated to the New World. In West Africa only a chosen few, such as Ogun, Eshu, and Obatala, were truly pan-Yoruba deities. In the New World, however, almost all orishas serve devotees regardless of location. Some relatively unimportant West African orishas were promoted after transatlantic passage. The bow-and-arrow hunter Ochoosi is little known in his homeland but quite popular in Brazil, where in the Rio region he is identified with Saint Sebastian, whose iconography depicts him as shot full of arrows. Meanwhile, many orishas died in the Middle Passage, and many others withered away as slavery wore on. Agricultural orishas largely fell away in urbanized Brazil, though they continued to live and breathe (and eat) in Haiti. Another victim of the transatlantic passage was ancestor worship. Slavery so thoroughly destroyed extended family networks that traditional ancestor devotion became next to impossible.
Another important transformation was the emergence of houses of worship for all orishas. One key difference between Indian and American Hinduism is that in India temples typically house just one god, whereas in the United States temples typically house many. Something similar happened as Yoruba religion crossed the Atlantic. In West Africa, shrines were typically associated with one particular orisha, who was in turn associated with one region or dynastic line. But in the New World, where resources were scarcer and devotees more widely scattered, Brazilian terreiros and Cuban casas typically housed all the orishas, or at least all the orishas with enough ashe to be remembered.
These and other efforts to preserve Yoruba religion by changing it can and should be seen as transformations. But in these transformations there is continuity too. Yoruba culture has traditionally been both elastic and accommodating. While Christians have long concerned themselves with keeping their faith pure by inoculating their doctrines against impurity, the Yoruba tradition has been happily mixing with “outside” influences for millennia. So the so-called syncretism of the New World was, and is, just more of the same.
Flourishing
There is an intriguing debate about the niche religion occupies in human psychology and society. Is religion’s primary purpose to ward off the chill of death? Many believe this is the case—that religions rise and fall largely on how well they address the problem of mortality. But perhaps death and the afterlife are largely male concerns. After all, it is men who have done most of the killing in human history. Might it be that religion’s primary purpose is to make sense not of death but of birth, not of destruction but of creation? After all, the Jewish and Christian Bibles begin not with the deaths of Abraham or Jesus but with the creation of the world. Perhaps where religions really compete is on the question of how to flourish.59
In this debate, Yoruba religion comes down squarely on the side of human flourishing. There is discussion, of course, about reincarnation and about a good and a bad heaven. But the go
al is not to be reborn or occupy some otherworldly paradise but to flourish here and now. Today Yoruba religion in both Africa and the Americas attempts to repair our lives and our world by reconnecting earth and heaven, human beings and orishas, and each of us with our own particular destinies and natural environments. This world can never be a paradise, because conflict is endemic to the human condition. Gods and “antigods” are forever at war, and we humans seem forever to be forgetting our destinies. But happily we can consult the orishas through divination, call them to our sides through sacrifice, and dance with them in our own bodies. Such resolutions of our conflicts are temporary, to be sure, and must be repeated. But with proper devotion to the orishas, say the Yoruba, we, our children, and our grandchildren can live long, healthy, wise, and prosperous lives.
Chapter Seven
Judaism
The Way of Exile and Return
Judaism begins and ends with a story. If Christianity is to a great extent about doctrine and Islam about ritual, Judaism is about narrative. To be a Jew is to tell and retell a story and to wrestle with its key symbols: the character of God, the people of Israel, and the vexed relationship between the two.
This story has everything you could ever want in a good read. It has sex, deceit, love, murder, transgression, and tragedy of biblical proportions. It has some of the greatest characters in world literature, not least the adulterer and murderer King David and the capricious and irascible God of the Hebrew Bible. It even has a narrative arc—from garden to desert to city. The Jewish narrative is a story of slavery and freedom, of covenants made and broken and made anew. But above all else it is a story of a people banished and then called home—a story of exile and return.
The Hebrew Bible starts with God’s creation of the world in seven days—six days of labor and one of rest. The conflict kicks in not long after creation with Adam and Eve and God and a serpent all wrapped around one another in the Garden of Eden. In this primordial society God lays down only one law: do not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. So, of course, Adam and Eve take a bite and are banished for giving in to temptation. In the Christian tradition, this violation infects all of humanity with a sin virus that can only be cured by the crucifixion of Jesus. Here it sets into motion the two great contrapuntal themes in the Jewish story: a rhythm of wrongdoing, punishment, and exile; and a rhythm of covenant, breach, and new covenant. Because God is just, He punishes human beings for their wrongdoing, but because He is merciful, He extends to them the opportunities and responsibilities of a new relationship.
Later in this saga the action narrows and intensifies, shifting from the interactions of God and all humanity to the interactions of God and a particular people. In perhaps the most fateful deal in the history of the world’s religions, God calls Abraham and his descendants to be His people and promises them a special land. To get there, however, they will have to wander, as will Moses, who after leading the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt will spend forty years in the wilderness hard by the Promised Land. The climax of this story comes on Mount Sinai when God delivers the Torah through Moses and by this new covenant offers a new way out of exile, a new path back home.
Like the term dharma in Indian religions, Torah is a wonderfully expansive term. Though typically translated as “law,” it actually connotes “teaching” or “guidance.” Torah refers in the first instance to the five books of Moses: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. Torah also means the entire Hebrew Bible, which Jews refer to not as the Old Testament but as the Tanakh, an acronym for its three parts: Torah (in the narrow sense of the five books of Moses), Neviim (“prophets” such as Isaiah and Amos), and Ketuvim (“writings,” including Psalms, Proverbs, Job, and Song of Songs). Torah refers more broadly to the oral law, the interpretive tradition said to have been revealed alongside the written law to Moses on Sinai and now written down in the core texts of the rabbinic tradition: the Mishnah (c. 200 C.E.), the Jerusalem Talmud (fourth century C.E.), and the Babylonian Talmud (fifth century C.E.). Studying and debating the Tanakh and Talmud is Torah too. And according to a Jewish folk saying, “Even the conversation of Jews is Torah.”1
So this religion of memory is about both story and law. Jews are a people who remember who they are by telling these stories and by following this law. For them, law (halakha) and narrative (aggadah) are inseparable, two sides of the same coin. Anthropologist Mary Douglas once called the biblical book of Numbers “a law and story sandwich,” but the same can be said of Judaism itself.2 Here the task of human life is not to achieve enlightenment or moksha but “to walk humbly with thy God” (Micah 6:8) and in so doing to repair the world (tikkun olam).3 This redemption is thisworldly, accomplished not in heaven but here on earth. And it comes by doing rather than believing. It is by practicing the 613 mitzvot (commandments) described in the Jewish scriptures that we bring holiness to our imperfect world. In this sense Judaism differs dramatically from Christianity, where faith is paramount. Whereas Christians strive to keep the faith, Jews strive to keep the commandments.
A few years ago, I asked an Orthodox rabbi (“teacher”) which of these two elements was more important in Judaism: telling the story or following the law? “I give you a Jewish answer,” he told me in his thick Brooklyn accent. “You can’t have one without the other. Those who forget the law eventually forget to tell the story.”
A Religion and a People
Judaism is both the least and the greatest of the great religions. Strictly by the numbers, it is by far the smallest. There are only about 14 million Jews worldwide, not much more than the population of Mumbai, India. The Jewish population in Israel, the sole country with a Jewish majority, is only about 4.9 million. More Jews—roughly 5.2 million—live in the United States, but no other country has a Jewish citizenry even approaching one million, and most people in the world have never met a Jew.
But this tiny religion has wielded influence far out of proportion to its numbers. It started a monotheistic revolution that remade the Western world. It gave us the prophetic voice, which continues to demand justice for the poor and oppressed (or else). It gave us stories that continue to animate political and literary conversations worldwide: Adam and Eve in the Garden, Noah and the Flood, David and Goliath. Its grand narrative of slavery and freedom, exile and return, may well be, with all due respect to Christian narratives of the Passion of Jesus and Hindu narratives of Rama and Sita, the greatest story ever told. Judaism also stands at the crossroads of today’s most vexing and volatile international conflict: the contest between Jews, Christians, and Muslims in the Middle East that some conservative Christians at least believe will usher in the end of the world.
In the United States, Jews are influential in politics, thanks in part to high voter turnouts among Jews and their strong presence in key electoral college states such as New York, New Jersey, and Florida. Although the White House has not yet seen a Jewish president, Jews have occupied seats in the U.S. Congress and on the U.S. Supreme Court far out of proportion to their numbers in the broader population. The same is true of CEO positions at Fortune 500 companies.
Jews have made their deepest impression on American popular culture. Sandy Koufax, perhaps the greatest left-handed pitcher in baseball history, brought attention to Judaism when he refused to pitch the opening game of the 1965 World Series for the Los Angeles Dodgers because it fell on the Jewish Day of Atonement known as Yom Kippur. Almost every major Hollywood studio was founded by Jews, as were NBC and CBS. Jews also made their mark on Broadway in musicals (George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Stephen Sondheim) and plays (Arthur Miller, David Mamet, Wendy Wasserstein). Judaism gave the United States some of its most celebrated writers—from poet Allen Ginsberg to songwriter Bob Dylan to novelist Philip Roth—and some of its most celebrated buildings, thanks to architects Louis Kahn, Frank Gehry, and the master-plan architect for the new World Trade Center site in Lower Manhattan Daniel Libeskind.
More than any other American ar
t form, comedy has been shaped by Jewish performers. There is a long tradition of Jewish humor about the absurdities of life and the hypocrisies of the high and mighty (including God Himself). This tradition came to the United States via Ellis Island and was perfected in vaudeville, stand-up comedy, radio, and television. The history of American comedy is unimaginable without the Marx Brothers, the Three Stooges, Milton Berle, Jack Benny, Mel Brooks, George Burns, Woody Allen, Lenny Bruce, Jerry Lewis, Joan Rivers, Jerry Seinfeld, Sarah Silverman, and Jon Stewart. In fact, by almost any accounting, Jews, who make up less than 2 percent of the U.S. population, account for the vast majority of America’s working comics.
This outsized influence is by no means limited to the United States, however. Fourteen of Time magazine’s one hundred most important people of the twentieth century were Jewish, including film director Steven Spielberg, author Anne Frank, and person of the century Albert Einstein. Jews have done even better with the Nobel Prize, claiming nearly one-quarter of these honors since they were first awarded in 1901. Whenever anyone anywhere puts on a pair of Levi’s, sips a cappuccino from Starbucks, spends a night in a Hyatt, powers up a Dell computer, or performs a Google search, they have a Jewish entrepreneur to thank.
You would think all this would be enough work for any one religion. Yet Judaism also managed to give birth to Christianity and Islam. (Jesus was an observant Jew.) So while Judaism itself commands the allegiance of only two out of every thousand human beings, its offspring account for one out of every two.
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