On One Foot
JEWISH ASTROLOGER LORELAI KUDE ON HER WEBSITE The Talmudic-era rabbis used their powerful corporate identity, personal piety, and superior knowledge exclusive to Torah scholars to triumph over the esoteric traditions of the dominant culture which threatened their authority. They institutionalized astrology in the beit midrash, which accomplished two things: first, it denuded foreign esoteric traditions of any legitimacy and condemned them along with their practitioners to the status of permanent outsiders. Sec- ondly: it allowed them to demonstrate the superiority of Judaism’s native esoteric traditions on their own terms. Two thousand years of Talmudic Judaism and the evolution of halacha (Jewish law) have run concurrently with Judaism’s mystical stream. Astrology is the bridge that crosses that stream, and re-crosses, and crosses it again. Understanding astrology’s role in Jewish life throughout history is significant because it seeks to recover a rich and rewarding component of Jewish cultural heritage. Striving to resolve the dissonance between prohibitions against astrology in legal texts and the ubiquity of the artifac- tual evidence can reveal clues as to how community rabbis might have weighed the influence of folk life in regulating traditional communal norms. 6
6 THE AUTHOR, an astrologer and horoscope columnist, is one of the few Jewish astrologers who seem to have done some work uncovering old Jewish traditions. Here, she argues that astrology is not akin to many other beliefs that rabbis have maintained at earlier points in history that have since been proven wrong. In other words: in her view, astrol- ogy is like a belief in the world to come, which is unprovable but fundamental to many Jews, rather than like the “fact” that the sun revolves around the earth, which at some point rabbis (along with the rest of the world) believed but now know to be false.
PLACING YOUR FAITH in Judaism doesn’t mean auto- matically accepting all ancient ideas, especially when we have so much in our tradition that helps us separate between what is central and what reso- nates in a particular era. I am not the first to point out that Maimonides would not stand by much of the science that he promoted if he were alive to- day. That being said, astrology has been part of Jewish culture since its inception. If you want to claim that your horoscope and star charts are part of your Jewish expression (as opposed to something fun you like to read in the morning), maybe try to find readings that draw from Jewish wisdom.
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