Now I must shatter that mirror, undo my methodology, and
Approaching 40. Forbidden to read, to study Kabbalah
Forbidden to include this study in academic journals.
People are not interested in Jewish educational difficulties.
Excluded from canons of all sorts. Identity crisis approaching 40. Feeling grey and blue.
Blue and white, the color of the Israeli flag. Exiled in America.
In Ezekiel two images: blue stones and linen clothes. Sign-acts of schizophrenia or the divine. If you haven’t become schizophrenic by the time you reach 40 you are probably over the hurdle. Hurdling toward the Divine. Rushing toward God is a stumbling into madness.
Men under 40 have been forbidden to study Kabbalah (Matt, 1996), and women have always been forbidden to study it (Idel, 1988). Because I am under 40 and a woman, I guess I am committing double heresy. Not only is studying Kabbalah “scandalous,” as Scholem (1965/1996, p. 97) pointed out, it is dangerous. In the Kabbalah, we read: “Whoever delves into mysti-cism cannot help but stumble, as it is written: ‘This stumbling block is in your hand.’ You cannot grasp these things unless you stumble over them”
(Zohar, in Matt, 1996, p. 163). What is it one stumbles into or over? It could be ghosts, resurrections, transmigrations, voices, sparks, instability, foolish-ness, visions, weeping, angels, and what some might term “psychosis”
(Afterman, 1992, p. 71) or “insanity” (Franck, 1843/1995, p. 17). Studying Kabbalah might open up a space for understanding what cannot be repre-sented in rational discourse. The leap is reflected here: “The sky talks fast, asking one to reply. If one talks back just as fast, one can get into the sky.…
Every created thing has a ‘mouth,’ everything in the world is ‘talking’ very fast, inviting you” (Afterman, 1992, p. 77).
Psychosis or wisdom? There is nothing new about irrational modes of thinking. In fact, the history of Jewish mysticism can be traced back to the Hebrew prophet Ezekiel.
Ezekiel is the most bizarre book in the Hebrew scriptures. We read in the first chapter that “the hand of the Lord was on him there” (Holy Bible, p. 791):
As I looked, a stormy wind came out of the north: a great cloud with bright-ness around it and fire flashing forth continually, and in the middle of the fire, something like gleaming amber. In the middle of it was something like four living creatures. This was their appearance: they were of human form. Each had four faces, and each of them had four wings they sparkled like bur-nished bronze. Under their wings on their four sides they had human hands.
(1989, p. 791)
Hallucination or a vision of the divine? Voices from God, or schizophre-nia? Perhaps both. An early version of Jewish mysticism is termed
“Merkabah mysticism” and can be traced back to Ezekiel and 3 Enoch, an apocalyptic text. Harold Bloom (1996) commented, “As an apocalypse, 3 Enoch belongs to the pre-Kabbalistic tradition of Hebraic gnosis called Merkabah mysticism, the Merkabah being the prophet Ezekiel’s term for the chariot that bears the enthroned Man of his vision” (p. 48).
The Merkabah mystics believed that if they covered themselves literally with the names of God, they would experience something similar to Ezekiel.
Perle Epstein (1978) explained, “The ritual called ‘putting on the names’
literally consisted of clothing oneself in a robe inscribed all over with sacred names of God. The Merkabah mystic used the external reminder to induce in himself the absolutely undistracted meditation on the names that would carry him toward visionary experience” (p. 39).
Later trends in Jewish mysticism are associated with the Jews’ exile from Spain in 1492. The Kabbalah, a generic name for different versions of Jew-ish mystical thought, developed during the 12th and 13th centuries espe-cially in Spain. Scholem pointed out that Merkabah mysticism and Hasidism (which developed later in Eastern Europe), although falling un-der the broaun-der rubric called Kabbalah, are vastly different. He stated
“There is little resemblance between the earliest mystical texts in our pos-session, dating from Talmudic and post-Talumudic days, the writings of the ancient Spanish Kabbalists, those of the school which flourished in Safed, the holy city of Kabbalah in the 16th century, and finally the Hasidic litera-ture in the modern age” (1954, p. 19).
Generally speaking, there are three kinds of texts associated with Kabbalah: Bahir, Zohar and Lurianic texts. The Zohar, especially after the Jews were exiled from Spain in 1492, became what some term “the Bible” of Kabbalah (Matt, 1983, p. 11). This book was written by Moses de Leon, al-though there have been many squabbles over the authenticity of author-ship. Daniel Matt commented that the “Zohar refashions the Torah’s narrative into a mystical novel” (1983, pp. 8–9). And this is what some rab-bis thought was so scandalous. Fictionalizing biblical truths? Oy.
Many Kabbalistic ideas have gotten squashed over the years or have been completely marginalized because the rabbis thought them to be heretical.
Most of these ideas are paradoxically tied to yet alien from traditional Jewish thinking: resurrection, metempsychosis or reincarnation, notions of Ein Sof
(the infinite), Ayin (nothingness), three souls, enclothement, the shattering of sparks in a broken world. Kabbalah teaches that three garments cover the souls (because there are three souls, not one) of the righteous, the unholy have holes in their garments. For traditional Jews this is certainly (un)holy!
Mid(rush)
Mary here. Between the holes and the garments lie the holies which, because they are ciphers, cannot be read in whole, only in the holes.
The Kabbalah teaches that the world is created in a void. Sparks fly out of the void and are shattered as they plunge to earth. God is both Ein Sof, the in-finite and a transcendent being who is beyond names and is ultimately a mys-tery, and God is also reflected as sparks of light emanating out of the darkness through levels of what is called “Sefirot”: “Emanating from Ein Sof are the ten Sefirot. They constitute the process by which all things come into being and pass away” (Zohar, in Matt, 1996, p. 29). The Sefirot are thought of as numbers, “ciphers” (Matt, 1983, pp. 20–21). Whatever they are, they are not things. Scholem (1954) commented that “The Sefiroth of Jewish theoso-phy have an existence of their own; they form combinations, they illuminate each other, they ascend and descend” (pp. 224–225). Stephen Sharot noted that the Sefirot are also translated as “successive manifestations of divinity”
(1982, p. 32). The first Sefirot is Ayin, or nothingness, and it is said that great Jewish teachers, Tzaddiks, dwell in nothingness, by losing their egos (Scholem, 1962/1991). “Think of yourself as Ayin and forget yourself totally.
Then you can transcend time, rising to the world of thought, where all is equal: life and death, ocean and dry land. Such is not the case if you are at-tached to the material nature of this world. If you think of yourself as some-thing, then God cannot clothe himself in you” (Zohar, in Matt, 1996, p. 71).
Growing up in the reformed tradition, I can tell you that I have never heard of any of these things. Resurrection? “The ‘righteous’ clothed in that garment, they are destined to come back to life. All who have a garment will be resurrected” (Zohar, in Matt, 1996, p. 94). Is that not a Zoroastrian no-tion that got smuggled into Christianity? Reincarnano-tion?? One of the most bizarre images in Kabbalistic thought is Metatron. Adolphe Franck (1843/1993) wrote that “The angel, or rather the hypostasis called Metatron plays a very great part in the Kabbalistic system. It is he, properly speaking, who governs this visible world; he reigns over all spheres sus-pended in space, over all the planets and celestial bodies” (p. 18).
During the Enlightenment, when rabbis were attempting to assimilate into the larger cultural scene of rationality and scientism, the mystics were
calling for a more irrational and mythological mode of thinking, and hence, “In the revaluation of the Enlightenment, it [the Zohar] became the
‘book of lies’” (Scholem, 1949/1977a, IX). Adolphe Franck commented that the Zohar is “irrational, rude” (1843/1995, p. 149). The Zohar is downright queer. The difficulty of reading the Zohar is that it is not systematic.
Scholem claimed that this is not unlike traditional Jewish thinking: “The Zohar remains true to the tradition of Jewish speculative thought which … is alien to the spirit of systematization” (1954, p. 205).
Ah, that is why Derrida is so difficult to read?! Read his Circumfession (1993). Confessional fox or hedgehog? Clearly fox. Jewish fox, that is.
Moshe Idel (1988) claimed that “historical Kabbalah represented an ongo-ing effort to systematize existongo-ing elements of Jewish theurgy, myth, and mysticism into a full-fledged response to the rationalistic challenge” (p.
253). I do not believe that Western culture has ever left behind the scars of rationalism. Rationalism keeps us from thinking the unthinkable. Philip Wexler, however, asserted that cultural trends are slowly moving in a less mechanized, rationalistic manner. Wexler (1996) noted, “There is some ev-idence for a move toward a culture with a different set of assumptions than those that have prevailed since at least the Renaissance: less rationalist, sci-entific, materialist and mechanical, and instead, more spiritual, ideational, vitalist and transcendent” (p. 74).
Getting outside the frame of rationalistic and mechanistic modes of think-ing can be traced to Kabbalistic thought. Consider the followthink-ing passage:
All the time I was on my way here, I had to suffer the annoying chatter of the old man who drove the donkey. He bothered me with every kind of foolish question, for example, What serpent flies in the air with an ant lying quietly be-tween its teeth? What eagle has its nest in a tree that does not exist and its young plundered by creatures not yet created, in a place which is not?
(Zohar, in Scholem, 1949/1977b, p. 61)
Foolishness is the key to unlocking otherness, realms of lived experi-enced squashed by rational deliberation and mechanization. Beware the donkey driver.
MIDRASH: STUMBLING INSIDE THE (UN)HOME OF EDUCATION
Daniel Matt pointed out that “The root of midrash means ‘to search.’ Mid-rash is the ancient technique of searching for the meaning of passages, phrases, and individual words.… It includes philology, etymology, herme-neutics, homiletics, and imagination” (1983, pp. 7–8). Midrash is commen-tary. Jews love to comment, then comment again, countercomment and overcomment, commenting more, meta-commenting. Commenting across
heresies helps me stumble backward toward my (un)home of education. Ed-ucation as a discipline, disciplines. What counts as edEd-ucational theory and curriculum studies? Ellen Messer-Davidow, David R. Shumway, and David J. Sylvan commented, “Socially and conceptually, we are disciplined by our disciplines. First, they help produce our world. They specify the objects we can study” (1993, p. vii). Scholars outside the field of curriculum studies might suggest that my work is not related to curriculum at all. What do he-retical rantings have to do with curriculum? Everything. William F. Pinar pointed out that “the effort to understand curriculum as theological text is not a separate specialized sector of scholarship; it is the call to live with oth-ers morally and transcendentally” (1999, p. xxiv).
This chapter has been an attempt to try to cut across the “basic bor-ders” (Pinar, 1998, p. ix) of curriculum theorizing. Following Pinar’s urging, I am trying to get outside the frame of curriculum understanding to dis/position myself. Pinar (1998) wrote, “There are individuals … who are working on the edge and perhaps even outside contemporary curric-ulum discourses” (p. ix). What I have learned from studying these vari-ous heresies is to continually try to overturn my own presuppositions.
David Smith (1999) argued for the embracing of “mutations” (p. 18). He taught that “Every identifiable ‘thing’ [or I would add way of thinking] is itself in a condition of constant mutation, completely infused with every-thing else, never ‘this’ for more than a moment” (p. 18). Ghostly appari-tions, voices, sparks, broken vessels, and unnameables undo, place us on the edge of thought. Mary Aswell Doll called for “what dwells within and between oppositions and contradictions … a ghostly ‘third’” (1987, p.
146). In the (un)place of the third, curriculum sensibilities can shift, can become more open to otherness, the otherness within. Drawing on the work of Henry Corbin, Harold Bloom (1996), like Doll, urged that one enter that third or middle place, the place where mystics dare to go.
Bloom remarked that “Between the sensory and the intellectual world, sages always have experiences an intermediate realm, one akin to what we call the imaginings of poets” (p. 5). Perhaps, Wexler (1996) was right to point out that it is through the psychoanalytic notion of regression that one may experience this middle place that might inform our peda-gogical practices. Wexler stated that “The interpretation of the regres-sive process as one that enables expression and experience of the sense and communion that gets suppressed in the individuating path of auton-omous ego development is especially relevant for a cultural, historical or contextual understanding of teaching” (p. 141).
As Wexler pointed out, the middle place between this and that, that liminal space opens up the possibility of relationality between teachers and students. The mystical pedagogue is not up in the clouds somewhere, but in-stead is grounded in the place of no place, in the space where the ego dis-solves. We learn from mystical heresies that heretics are not escapists. Many, historically, have been social activists and fighters for social justice. Skihs,
Sufis, and Jewish heretics, generally speaking, have considered action and doing to be primary.
The odd thing about doing an indirect-mystical-autotheology is that, af-ter all, the stories I have just commented on are not about me. To get dis/po-sitioned is to undo the notion that my work is about me and that I am I.
Perhaps I have stumbled too soon and should wait until after I reach the age of 40, as the Jewish heretical tradition teaches. But I cannot wait any longer.
Perhaps I have come belatedly to my (un)home by getting (un)framed.
Lines of re-search, should serve to re-search, redo midrash, to search and search again, to desearch, to dis- the search, dis-the-sertation, to start over again or not start at all. The paradox of thinking myself out of the cate-gory of curriculum as theological text and out of the catecate-gory of curriculum as autobiographical text is that I always seem to come back to my (un)home of thinking theologically and autobiographically but never really doing ei-ther. My students asked me the other day if I thought that my work around curriculum was theological, and I surprised myself by saying no. Why the no? I don’t know!! It just came out of my mouth. (The sky has a mouth and it talks fast.) But then I told them about my next book project. The next step is a step back to Ezekiel, prophetic discourse, otherness, curriculum studies as
… confessional, heretical discourse … lifework. I stumble at calling myself an indirect-mystical-autotheological curriculum worker, because although dis/ positioned I am in position to do some kind of work that is carved and crafted in between spaces. Stumbling to keep up with the fast-talking sky is the work of this curriculum worker.
REFERENCES
Afterman, A. (1992). Kabbalah and consciousness. Riverdale-on-Hudson, NY: Sheep Meadow Press.
Bloom, H. (1996). Omens of millennium: The gnosis of angels, dreams, and Resurrection.
New York: Riverhead.
Cole, W. O, & Sambhi, P. S. (1978). The Sikhs: Their religious beliefs and practices.
Boston: Routledge.
Derrida, J. (1993). Geoffrey Bennington (Derridabase) and Jacques Derrida (circumfession). (G. Bennington, Trans.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Doll, M. A. (1987). The temple: Symbolic form in scripture. Soundings: An Interdisci-plinary Journal, LXX(1–2), 145–154.
Epstein, P. (1978). Kabbalah: The way of Jewish mysticism. New York: Doubleday.
Franck, A. (1843/1995). The Kabbalah: The religious philosophy of the Hebrews. New York: Carol Publishing.
Freud, A. (1966/1993). The ego and the mechanisms of defense. Madison, CT: Interna-tional University Press.
Gallop, J. (2000). The ethics of reading: Close encounters. The Journal of Curricu-lum Theorizing, 16(3), 7–18.
Holy Bible: New standard revised version. (1989). Iowa Falls, IA: World Bible Pub-lishers.
Idel, M. (1988). Kabbalah: New perspectives. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Maneri, S. (1263/1980). The hundred letters. (P. Jackson, Trans.). New York: Paulist Press.
Matt, D. (1983). Zohar: The book of enlightenment (D. C. Matt, Trans.). Mahwah, NJ:
Paulist Press.
Matt, D. (1996). The essential Kabbalah: The heart of Jewish mysticism. San Francisco:
Harper.
McLeod, W. H. (1989). Who is a Sikh? The problem of Sikh identity. Oxford, UK: Clar-endon.
McGinn, B. (1965/1996). Forward. In G. Scholem, On the kabbalah and its symbolism (pp. vii–xviii). New York: Schocken.
Messer-Davidow, E., Schumway, D. R., & Sylvan, D. J. (1993). Preface. In D. R.
Schumway & D. J. Sylvan (Eds.), Knowledges: Historical and critical studies in disciplinarity (pp. vii–viii). Charlottesville: University Virginia Press.
Morris, M. (2001). Curriculum and the Holocaust: Competing sites of memory and repre-sentation. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Nizam, A. D. A. (1992). Nizam ad-din Awliya: Morals for the heart: Conversations of Shaykh Nizam ad-din Awliya recorded by Amir Hasan Sijzi. Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press.
Nurbakhsh, J. (1983). Sufi women. New York: Khaniqahi Nimatullahi.
Pinar, W. F. (1998). Introduction. In W. F. Pinar (Ed.), Curriculum: Toward new identi-ties (pp. ix–xxxiv). New York: Garland.
Pinar, W. F. (1999). Introduction. In V. Hillis & W. F. Pinar (Eds.), The lure of the tran-scendent: Collected essays by Dwayne E. Heubner (pp. xv–xxiv). Mahwah, NJ: Law-rence Erlbaum Associates.
Pinar, W. F., Reynolds, W., Slattery, P., & Taubman, M. (1995). Understanding curricu-lum: An introduction to the study of historical and contemporary curriculum discourses.
New York: Peter Lang.
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Scholem (Ed.), Zohar the book of splendor: Basic readings from the Kabbalah (pp.
VII–XVII). New York: Schocken.
Scholem, G. (Ed.). (1949/1977b). Zohar the book of splendor: Basic readings from the Kabbalah. New York: Schocken.
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Singh, N. G. K. (1993). The feminine principle in the Sikh vision of the transcendent. New York: Cambridge University Press.
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Chapter
7
Curricula vita as a Call to a Vocation: Exploring a Puritan Way
Douglas McKnight The University of Alabama
Thinking Beyond
In this chapter, McKnight provides an examination of the curriculum thinking of the New England Puritans of the 17th and 18th centuries. He makes a detailed comparison between the notions that the Puritans had for curriculum and spiritu-ality and the manner in which those ideas and theories have been remolded in the present American educational context. McKnight emphasizes the Puritan notion of reflection and spirituality. He discusses how reflection has been misunderstood, and the manner in which spirituality has become a normative experience through school programs.
Questions
1. How is the present focus on character education in schools a misunderstanding of the reflective process that McKnight describes as integral to the Puritan concept of spirirtuality? How does McKnight’s discussion of spirituality compare to Webber’s and Morris’ conceptualizations?
2. How can an analysis of the Puritan notions of curriculum assist curriculum the-orists in their move away from contemporary functionalist/modernist ideas of curriculum and schooling to discover lines of flight and multiplicities?
3. How does McKnight’s concept of curricula vita allow for the space to struggle and to create lines of flight within the current educational moment?
How can one talk about education, specifically curriculum, and also talk about the spiritual? (Huebner, 1993/1998, p. 401)
Because conventional education neglects the inner reality of teacher and stu-dents for the sake of a reality out there, the heart of the knowing self is never held up for inspection, never given the chance to be known.(Palmer, 1993, p.35) Recognizing that some very old Puritan bones will rattle and disrupt my ev-ery word with their trembling jeremiads and sermons, I acknowledge their presence and risk considering a present condition that concerns all who have invested in education, specifically curriculum, a purpose beyond the means by which we sort out social classes, warehouse students, or train them for jobs and consumerism.
The beyond of which I speak is cradled within a very old notion, that of curricula vita, literally translated as “course of life.” The term curricula is a 105
Latin root form of the modern definition of curriculum. However, curricula as a concept was flattened out by 19th- and 20th-century educators to mean a grouping of discrete subjects and competencies to be mastered. John Cal-vin sponsored the Latin phrase curricula vita in the 16th century as a de-scription of a journey that began with a summons, a call to depart by an absolute other, which for Reformation Christians was God. It is important to note here that I am not pursuing the notions of vocation and calling purely in theological terms of Judeo/Christian orthodoxy. These concepts spill over any such legalistic boundaries and wash over the individual who senses something beyond him- or herself, nothing less than a surplus that no form of knowledge can check or control. It is within the context of one who possesses a visceral impulse to investigate life and the inherent mystery within that leads one to listen, hear the calling of something absolutely other, and engage in a spiritual and temporal voyage.
For Calvin, and for the colonial Puritans of the 17th and 18th centuries, this journey was to reveal one’s gifts for a life task, a vocation that embodied both spiritual and mundane obligations. Curriculum was not a part of the process. It was the intensive, rigorous, reflective process of studying and re-ceiving a purpose and meaning in life. “Call” (or “calling”) and “vocation”
are significant in a discussion about perceiving curriculum as something be-yond, because each generates obligations and responsibilities on the individ-ual’s part, as well as on the cultural institutions within which people dwell.
I would like to ruminate on these notions as alternative means of inter-preting and approaching the predominate understandings of curriculum as practiced in schools. I approach the issues first from an etymological standpoint, which should provide a context by which to trace how these his-torical meanings have shifted in their applications in modern America, with grave consequences to the notion of the “individual.” I then conclude with a narrative of how colonial Puritans in early America utilized the notions of curricula vita—calling and vocation as means to relate the individual to soci-ety, to his or her interior existence and to a spiritual absolute other that in-fused meaning to one’s everyday activities. Such an examination should present the benefits as well as potential pitfalls of applying such powerful notions to modern schools and curriculum in general.
ETYMOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE
Both vocation and calling are sewn from the same historical seeds. Vocation comes from the Latin terms vocatio (“a bidding or invitation”), and vocare (“to call to”). Vocation is linked with vox, or voice and vocal. In this sense, a vo-cation is something one is called to or invoked to (invovo-cation) by another, as well as a condition in which one is given a singular voice. The term calling or call encompasses both the actual invitation from something that is wholly other, and thus not able to be articulated, as well as the process one chooses to enter into to infuse mundane existence with spiritual meaning.
In this call toward a vocation, one is compelled to travel through a life’s course (re curriculum), with an ambiguous gesture, literally stepping two different ways at once. One trajectory directs the individual to meditate on and embody received cultural institutions—family, school, civil/state soci-ety, work, and church, and the cultural artifacts produced by each. An effect of this motion is to understand and relate to any meta-narrative (cultural themes and assumptions) that may stitch institutions together. At same time, the individual, with an inherited map and language of interpretation in possession, departs on a spiritual, interior campaign. A spiritual quest binds one not only to existing institutions, but also to a state of absolute oth-erness, a theological or philosophical other that issues the original call.
Crucial to this cultural process is the embodiment of how to listen for the call, how to recognize the message as a summons, and how to respond and submit to its direction—a gesture that generates and stirs one beyond any immediate condition. Out of this spirit of seeking (sometimes torture, sometimes grace), a method of interpretation surfaces, a means by which to understand how one’s singularity unfolds in the everyday world and to ad-vance a spiritual relation that gives meaning to existence beyond “objective facts.” This is curriculum as curricula vita; a course one runs in life. Under-standing curriculum as curricula vita, as an ambiguous labor first given to the American consciousness by the colonial Puritans, has been lost in the modern discourse of curriculum, except for occasional voices in the wilder-ness (e.g., Huebner, 1993/1998; Macdonald, 1995; Pinar & Grumet, 1976).
MODERN CURRICULUM AND THE LOSS OF INTERIORITY The void left by the collapse of curricula vita language, an effect of the mid-to late 19th-century institutionalization of mass public schooling, has been filled by a technical curriculum discourse that treats individuals as eco-nomic resources, far past even what the worldly and practical colonial Puri-tans would consider appropriate. Students and teachers have become pliable materials to be exploited for social/economic utility (Palmer, 1993).
Individuals are expected to accept curriculum, now associated almost solely with schooling, as a disparate grouping of subjects. Each subject field has its own closed discourse, without any explicit means to guide the individual in crossing disciplinary boundaries so that he or she could have insight into how knowledge is produced, or how each field shares similar metaphors and ways of understanding. The individual is given no “time” to explore temporality, no moments of recursion to draw relations between exterior and interior existence. An effect is the lack of any greater purpose attached to that life (Palmer, 1993). The student (knower) is separated from what is known (the exterior world), and what is unknown (the interior worlds of a living being). No tools are given for the individual to build an interchange between the two. Without such interpretive appliances, a rupture occurs and the idea of moving beyond one’s present condition collapses into dust