96 Is this your first novel?
JH It is. I’ve published other books, but not a novel.
96 Well, it’s a bravura performance. You must have read a great deal of fantasy literature to have such mastery of the form.
JH I have. I loved fantasy as a child, I still read it for fun, it’s been an important genre for me, I have many favorite authors, so it was wonderful to finally get to play in this field.
96 Who are your favorite authors?
JH I really like some of the classics I read growing up, Ursula Le Guin; Tolkien, of course; Guy Gavriel Kay was and is a favorite; I like Neon Yang. I’ve been reading Lev Grossman’s Arthurian novel, The Bright Sword; and Ilove Neil Gaiman.
96 One of the striking characteristics of your book is that you have four main characters. Do you identify particularly with any one of them, or do all four equally represent aspects of your character?
JH I love and identify with aspects of all of them. If I had to choose, I don’t think anyone who knows me would be surprised to learn I chose Istehar. But I drew on facets of myself in creating all of them.
96 Istehar, the “Illuminatrix, has a special relation to the Tree of Life. This is very different from the otherworldly gnostic tree we find in the Zohar.
JH Istehar is rooted in nature tradition, in a way kabbalists are a little distant from. But there is a common core, using a tree to symbolize the sacred feminine as the source of creativity—but there are also many differences.
96 Regarding the nature tradition: your own nature mysticism in this book is palpably authentic. Were you inspired by Tolkein’s tree-beings, the Ents?
JH When I was writing the book I was pretty careful not to think about the influences I might be drawing from. But sure, that must have been in my mind, and I can see that similarity now.
96 Tolkein has beautiful insight into nature, but it’s still from outside, from a human perspective. You seem to approach nature from within. Your description of the holy book of Istehar’s people, and the root-cellar-like shrines in which it is kept, suggest personal mystical experience.
JH A lot of my spiritual work has been at the nexus of nature mysticism and Judaism, so I come by that honestly. My parents had Jewish identity, but their spirituality came mostly from the natural world—I don’t know if they would have put it that way. I grew up feeling very at home and connected in gardens, woods and fields. I think one of my spiritual missions has been to uncover a genuine nature connection within my own tradition, and these are a very important component of it for me.
There is the ancient Jewish veneration of sacred trees, which is prohibited in Deuteronomy, but the prohibition wasn’t all that effective. The Tree of Life persisted as an image in scripture and liturgy; I think we can see a symbolic tree in the menorah, which has been with us since the Temple—it’s still there, just not as prominent. And I personally experience find a powerful experience of spirituality in the natural world.
96 Your parents, where did they fit into the spectrum? Were they hippies, reform Jews, conservative?
JH They went to a reform temple, but you couldn’t really label them. They were hippies to the extent that they loved the earth, but not culturally, not as far as the music or tie-dye. In fact they were kind of Republican. But they were connected to the land. My mother had gardens everywhere, my father could fix anything, spent a lot of time outside, working with trees, building things.
96 I can corroborate your view of nature mysticism as intrinsic and structural for Judaism. At the very start, the “burning bush” is already unambiguous.
And I’m not going to ask you if you’re a pagan; for me the question is whether you’re pagan enough, whether you take it to the level of seeing mythic forms as glimpses into the interior life of God.
JH I experience God and the cosmos as being very close, almost synonymous. I’m prone to experiencing the world as having consciousness, as the character Istehar does. For here the trees are sentient. I don’t know if that answers your question.
96 It does. Would you describe yourself as a pantheist?
JH I would probably call myself a panentheist, but very close to pantheism. [note: pantheism sees the world and God as identical; panentheism sees them being equivalent in location and operation, but not quite synonymous.]
96 That places you a little closer to the Shinto, animist side, a safe distance from hard-core Spinozan pantheism.
JH Maybe. OK.
96 Looking back on your work with the Kohenet institute, [note: an organization Hammer co-founded, which trained women to act as spiritual leaders, conferring on them the title of kohenet, “priestess”] —would you be willing to describe yourself as a modern-day Sadduccee? [note: The Sadducees were the last of the Jewish high priests, whose existence ended with the destruction of the second temple.]
JH No. The Sadducees had a very particular philosophy, they were interested in going back to the biblical texts, carrying out temple ritual “by the book.” My relation to those texts is, I think, more complex. But I certainly include the Sadducees on my chart of interesting Jewish movements.
96 But you’re involved in resurrecting the rituals of the temple?
JH No. Not really. No.
96 Then I’ve completely misunderstood. You must correct my view.
JH I don’t know that you’ve completely misunderstood, there are ways in which we draw on temple Judaism. What really interests me is the history of the priestesses, who did not serve in the Temple. They served in villages, as the prophets say, “on every green hill and under every spreading tree.” The Temple was one particular model of priestly work. Women has something to do with that, though it’s not exactly clear what.
We do know now that women served in other Jewish temples, there’s the evidence from Elephantine [note: there was a Jewish temple on the island of Elephantine in the Nile River from the 7th to 4th centuries BCE; papyri found there attest a more pluralistic style of Judaism]. I don’t view the Kohenet movement as reviving Temple service—though we do draw on somewhat on its traditions—but as reinvigorating as stream of sacred experience that was always there, and may not have had any place in the Jerusalem Temple.
96 Does this mean you look on the Witch of Endor as a spiritual ancestor?
JH Sure. I teach a lot about her, actually. She’s one of the only ancient women spiritual practitioners we get to see doing her thing. Others are mentioned, there are glimpses, but you don’t get a whole scene. Even though you don’t get the ritual details, you get some sense of what a channeler in ancient Israel would have been like.
96 Then you’re following Raphael Patai’s The Hebrew Goddess, in his account of this suppressed tradition, showing for example, if we may take the complaints of the prophets literally, a statue of the goddess Asherah stood in the Jerusalem Temple for two thirds the temple’s existence?
JH That’s likely, I would say. I want to make it clear that my personal relation to deity is greatly influenced by later Jewish sources, like the Kabbalah, so my primary model of the divine feminine is the Shechina, though I am aware that Asherah is a tributary factor that influences Judaism to the present day, though people may not know it.
96 I wonder how you’re able to reconcile your concept of the feminine divine with all the baggage that goes with the Zohar.
JH Every aspect of culture has baggage. There’s no cultural tradition you can draw on that doesn’t have some. When I teach Kabbalah I make that very clear. For me it’s about recovering a usable past. Like in Adrienne Rich’s poem, Diving into the Wreck, looking for what’s still usable, “the treasures that prevail.” That’s more my model of how to work with history.
96 Myself, I tend to be a bit more distrustful of such traditions. I fear they may be compromised down to their DNA. The Zohar, which Gershom Scholem called a “mystical novel,” like many another novel, views woman as either Shechina or Lilith, virgin or whore.
JH I don’t really see it that way. The Shechina in the Zohar is very erotic, not a virgin at all. She’s constantly consummating her marriage with the Holy One. It’s sometimes quite explicit, even shocking. And the Shechina has two aspects, mother and daughter, and the sephirot have different genders depending on who they’re facing. The Shechina is now a warrior, now a gentle gazelle. The image arise, I think, from mystical journeys, and are far more complex than the simplified versions that tend to be taught. I’ve learned that from my own teachers, who love the Zohar.
96 Who are your teachers?
JH Melila Hellner-Eshed, Daniel Matt, Nathaniel Berman, Leah Novick, those are the major ones.
96 Those are indeed impressively learned persons! And you make a good point: the sacred marriage between God and the Shechina, figured forth in the liturgy of every Sabbath, is a strong monist counterargument to the case I was making.
I tend to view reading SF and Fantasy novels as potentially a kind of religious practice. Would you agree with that?
JH I think I would. It has been that way for me too. Fantasy authors can explore metaphysics in a way that is not usually done outside of a religious environment. It a way to explore manifestations of the unseen.
96 One of the ways in which I think this plays out is the altered sense of time when reading a novel. Secular time seems to be suspended, one doesn’t count minutes or not the passing hour.
JH I appreciate what you’re saying. For me I think it’s more a sense of altered space, enter a region with its own topography and culture. That reminds me of the mystical journey to a higher realm.
96 Please tell me more.
JH Some of the greatest fantasy novels are known for the worlds that they create. If you think of Martin or Tolkien or Le Guinn, the iconic feature of their novels is the map. It shows the way to places that are magical and central. It’s not dissimilar to the way a mystic will enter into and inhabit a Biblical text, moving around within it as a place. It’s like a dream: your body doesn’t go anywhere, and yet you do go somewhere.
96 Your view of the fantasy map touches on something quite important, I think. At the heart of religious experience is finding the center, the source being “in the direction” as the Moslems say. So I find it meaningful that in your book’s map, Opal Island with its all-important library is at the very center of the mandala-like mapped esturary.
JH The artist did a beautiful job of rendering the map, but at the start I had to sketching it myself; it was clear to me that the library, which is at the heart of culture, had to be in the center. There are other centers, the place and the shrine, and they have their own pull which creates a tension, so the library isn’t the only such place, though it’s the principal one.
96 I think it significant that Moonstone’s world is at a confluence of waters. Did you intend something particular by this, or were you following intuition?
JH When I began the book, I resolved not to wonder about why I was writing what I was writing, and only to think about that when I was finished. Afterwards, it seemed to me that Moonstone’s world was perhaps based on Manhattan island. Or Venice, a city I love. And Fire Island, off the coast of Long Island, another place I love. Many of the places I have found very beautiful and felt deeply at home in are islands. And wate. It seems to me that the earth comes alive by water. I grew up by a creek, and my family often went to the ocean.
96 Going back to Tolkien for a moment, it seems grimly pertinent that there the center, the goal of the heroic quest, is a land of the dead, “Mordor where the shadows lie,” and at the center’s center are the “Cracks of Doom,” where the goal is the destruction of all that world’s magic. This glance at his map, for me, puts a question mark beside his entire enterprise.
JH Tolkien was a Catholic mystic, so I wonder if there isn’t a touch of Christian apocalypse in his Cracks of Doom. [note: the phrase “Crack of Doom” is in fact an archaic Christian term for the blowing of the trumpet to announce the Last Judgement.] I wonder also if Tolkien felt that leaving behind the world of magic was part of growing up. One could spend a lot of time psychologizing Tolkien.
Tolkien has a very firm, binary idea of light versus darkness, which I wouldn’t want to buy into. In my book there are characters who do bad things, but I wasn’t trying to create a drama of good against evil. I was more interested in how people live in a world that may be hostile.
96 Certainly Tolkien’s world is dualist, while yours is wholesomely monist. And I think there may be more to your well-watered world than place associations. The garden of Eden is the center from which radiate the rivers that define the four directions. Rather than multiply such instances of waters defining the cosmic center, I will content myself with sixth-century BCE prophet Ezekiel’s vision of the Temple turning into a world-irrigating stone fountain. So your library on Opal Island seems to recapitulate an extremely august Hebrew archetype.
JH That’s wonderful. I love that. Zechariah also talks about the waters coming out from a temple. This is, I think, part of how culture replicates itself. It gets inside you and emerges in new ways.
96 What’s next, do you plan a sequel?
JH We’ll see how this one does. I’ve already worked on a sequel, so there’ll be one if it’s wanted, if enough people read this book.
96 Another intriguing thing in Moonstone was the blank pages of Istehar’s Book of Life.
JH That was very exciting for me to explore. I was, from childhood, a voracious reader, and written words have always been important in my life. And yet some of my career has focused on trying to re-embody a tradition that has been largely written. To return people to immediate experience and practice. The book which had no words in some way expresses the return of the delight of the written page to the body, sensation, feeling—to experience.
One of the books I have written about is the Sefer Yetzirah, “The Book of Creation,” a mystical work which talks about God using writing, the alphabet, to create the world. I’m sure that was in my heart when I wrote about the book with no words.
96 So the blank page is a border between words and reality.
JH Yes, and that border fascinates me. When do our words become what’s real. How are words and thinks related, this is something that The Book of Creation is obsessed with.
96 This touches on the mystery of silence, Elijah’s “still small voice.”
JH Maybe. I’m reflecting as I’m talking with you. With Istehar I had to explore what a prophetic experience would be like. Istehar is, from a Biblical perspective, a kind of prophet. The trees talk to her. But she’s also an ordinary person who has feelings, who gets overwhelmed. Those books without words that she can read are a doorway to something larger than herself. Her way of hearing that still small voice.
96 Have you had mystical or prophetic experiences?
JH I have had mystical experiences, I wouldn’t dare to call them prophetic.
96 There is a poem you wrote which touches on the topic of mystical experience and grazes the question of authority,
Find poems women have written.
Hide them in your Bible.
If someone asks what they are,
say they are holy.
JH That was a really fun poem to write. One of the core aspects of my work is the attempt to infuse Judaism with an awareness that part of what made our sacred texts sacred for us was the fact they were written by men, they were compatible with patriarchy. Other people also created culture, women created culture, on the fringes, and this is something I am documenting. It’s very important to me to see women’s sacred work as holy, and not as marginal.