Review—The Mystical Exodus in Jungian Perspective: Transforming Trauma and the Wellspring of Renewal

by Shoshana Fershtman. New York; Routledge:, 2021. 268 pages. $155.00 cloth; $38.95 pa-per; $35.05 VitalSource e-book.

Review by Lisa Herman, Ph.D., MFT, REAT

Shoshana Fershtman significantly contributes to the canon interpreting the Jews’ miraculous escape from slavery in Egypt. The Mystical Exodus is a much-needed feminine interpretation. The story is situated in the zeitgeist of our times of transformation and the tradition of Passover when the old story is told in the present. Dr. Fershtman in her multi-threaded narrative offers a way to psychologically recover from the trauma of slavery, historical and personal – a daunting task that she executes with remarkable skill. This complex storybook, a heavily referenced inquiry into the rediscovery of the Divine Feminine, is complimented by interviews with those carrying the burdens and joy of our ancestors informed by a Jungian analysis. Dr. Fershtman presents her case claiming that the Divine Feminine as a spiritual and socially conscious force ensures the survival of the Jewish people.

One of many threads weaving through the Mystical Exodus is the original story with Fershtman’s reading of them Joseph in Egypt and his bones, Lilith as Shadow at the Red Sea are only a few of these. The Kabbala’s interpretation of the ten Plagues as related to the ten Sephirot, the role of the Matriarchs and many dreams and legends also appear. As Fershtman also offers moving soulful histories of interviewees who found a home for their spiritual longing in ‘Jewish Renewal’, a movement rooted in Northern California, these so many multi-colored strands sometimes become hard to untangle.

Jews returning to Judaism is one thread. After being disillusioned with their post-Holocaust parents’ practices of striving for the trappings of success in America, money, and power, or joining social movements aimed at egalitarian societies where everyone belonged without the stumbling block of religion, they felt how Spirit was missing from parents’ solutions. Fershtman situates parents’ choices as coping mechanisms originating from historical trauma and describes our forebears with compassionate understanding. the book These next-generation disenchanted Jews had a dream, a breakthrough moment and found the light through now an established branch of Judaism called ‘Jewish Renewal’.

Fershtman’s personal narrative begins in the 60’s when many of us sought new ways for being and relating. We rejected the constrictions of the previous generation and eschewed the dire consequences of its thinking. We made our own music, loved who we wanted and challenged structures that inhibited our evolution. We found our tribes and danced and cooked together. We wrote poems of resistance and peace and struggle. In those embodied days of alternative ways to inhabit the world, we were exposed to Eastern ways of being, drug induced epiphanies of Oneness with the planet and Something Else, as well as solutions for our dis-ease. Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi an emigrant from Vienna brought the Hassidic tradition morphed into Jewish Renewal as his solution. He preached this Judaism, more joyous than somber, in America and fired up a ‘Jewish Renewal’ for certain young people searching a spiritual connection specific to their heritage.

A lifetime learner of Jewish mysticism Fershtman narrates her personal search through various Californian ways of being and how she finds her mystical tribe in this new movement, now a worldwide organization under the brand ALEPH (The Alliance for Jewish Renewal). Fershtman, also an attorney-at-law, is skillful referring to the past as relevant precedent for the present and the future. She is as deft as any rabbinical scholar reading the Old Testament as evidence for her argument and joins a lineage of sages beginning before the 1st millennium and lasting until now. Many major religions refer to the Bible. Christians read the ‘Old Testament’ as is a prediction for the coming of Jesus the Messiah. and the Quran for Muslims is read referencing Moses and the Israelites as their ancestors. The Jews read the ’Tanach’ ‘Old Testament) as our personal biography and spiritual connect to the Divine who chose us to receive it.

Hermeneutic inquiries in studies of intertextuality, find the lacunae in these wisdom books are often where the juice is. For Jewish Renewal the lacuna is the story of the Divine Feminine or in Hebrew the Shekhena. Fershtman argues She was deliberately omitted for survival reasons following Schachter-Shalomi who taught the spiritual elements in Judaism were omitted during the period of the ‘Enlightenment’ when Logos ruled and ironically Jews wanted to fit in with other religious masculine norms and the ineffable God became a He. Now the replenishing of the spiritual must be renewed so Spirit can provide information vital to us today. Fershtman as an attorney and Jungian analyst is perfectly suited to offer a cogent argument based on her own culture’s historical precedent for reinterpreting the Exodus as both a spiritual and healing image relevant to now.

Fershtman’s interpretation through a feminine gaze honors Shekhena interspersed throughout the book as the Feminine Presence. Fershtman allows the women of the Exodus – courageous, wise, sexy, dancing and singing women – to lead us out of slavery, through the churning waters into the desert where we produced a new generation who could enter the Promised Land. The story goes how our great, great etc. grandmothers led the people side by side with Moses (Fershtman says he symbolizes the ‘Masculine’) and sometimes in front of him we claimed our place in the leadership of these sometimes reluctant followers. This Exodus is also a metaphor for how we heal ourselves. We were slaves in Egypt, and we suffered. We lost hope and found it again. We trusted our leaders and then betrayed them. And we kept on moving when our faith was restored. We knew Spirit in our bodies and the evidence before our eyes. Fershtman’s and referenced others’ psychological interpretations provide the most delightful reading in the book. Tales from the Mishna (originally a record of the oral tradition for everyday guidance from around the beginning of the Common Era and still being written) are a gift to bolster her case. Jewish Renewal as Fershtman argues is a movement that harkens back to when we were immersed in embodied spiritual realms and what we lost in trauma-informed Jewish patriarchal dogma.

She presents our Ashkenazi (Eastern European rooted) parents as handed down a restrictive Judaism by their parents with no heartfelt experience of being a Jew. Fershtman tells us either our parents or grandparents lost at least one relative in the Shoah even if they didn’t have knowledge of it. Trauma is in our ‘collective unconscious’ as Jews. Mom and Dad carried the burden as do we and our children. And before that our back-in-the-day relatives experienced pogroms (a Slavic word originally describing massacres of Jews and their villages in the 19th and 20th century and recently back in the news about actions by whites against blacks in Tulsa.) and we carry that too.

Fershtman’s archetypal view links recovery from trauma and the Exodus through stages: leaving the constrictions of Egypt, (the trauma), the fear of moving into unknown dangerous territory (the Red Sea), necessary wandering in the desert when old ways of doing and being are being shed as new selves (babies) emerge and entering the Promised Land (connection with the Divine). Particularly eye-catching is the phrase we need to banish our ‘inner Pharaoh’, the restrictive Protector (from Kalshead), in order to ‘leave Egypt’. She offers how therapeutically we need nourishment during the reconstruction time in our sand dunes equating this period with the experience of the Jews being nurtured by God the manna-giver and the Shekinah our water-provider, and getting directional guidance (a therapist?) From those magical/natural GPS’s of cloud and fire that appear like magic.

The Divine Feminine has been lost, shrouded to hide her sexuality and creative playfulness and we lost through her our connection to the Divine. The Shekhena closeted behind closed doors as she was in many religions was given prohibitions so she wouldn’t run amok. Fershtman with compassion presents the case why we needed rigidity and respect for Laws and Order and the reasons our great great) grandparents sought a codified route to ironically fit in with their contemporaries. Fershtman as historian is convincing, we weren’t always so restrictive on ourselves. And that takes us back to the title story and the Mystical Psychological Social Exodus from slavery and our time to reset and renew.

Fershtman concludes by recommending we continue to interpret the ‘Torah’ of old beliefs as well as previous codified interpretations. We need to ask questions and question those who don’t want us to ask. What’s the point of being human if we don’t debate our multi-faceted bibles? They say you can’t have two Jews with the same opinion. We are the people who ask why. Fershtman’s book invites us to delve deeper into our disagreements. Is this our light unto the nations?