The abundant representation of astrological motifs in art, artifacts, household items, ritual objects, and assorted ephemera from Talmudic times through the modern age suggest that astrology was a common component in the lives of Jewish communities. The stars as a subject matter ranging from their role in the Creation to their influence upon the inhabitants of the earth is present in Jewish text via the Hebrew Bible, rabbinic literature of the Talmudic era, the scientific writings of the medieval commentators, and within Judaism’s mystical texts from the Sefer Yetzirah to the Zohar and the works of the Hasidic masters such as the B’nai Yissachar in the 1840s.

Both text and artifact show astrology as a culturally normative component in historical Jewish communities, despite the code of Jewish law, the Shulchan Aruch’s explicit ruling: “One must not inquire of the astrologers and not consult lots,” How are we to reconcile the gap between lived realities and the Jewish legal text?

An examination of the astrologically-themed texts of the Hebrew Bible, Talmud, Jewish mystical literature, and the writings of the medieval commentators reveal the dynamic tension between Judaism’s requirement to calculate sacred calendrical/liturgical time via the luminaries and the forbidden use of astrology for divinatory purposes. On the one hand, the rabbis are unambiguous about the importance of celestial bodies for the practical calendrical purposes of determining the proper and correct times of the new month, commanded feasts, and other religious obligations. On the other hand, the halachic (Jewish legal) rulings reflected an officially prohibitive attitude against astrology, with rulings such as found in the Shulchan Aruch as mentioned earlier, or the catch-all Talmudic phrase “Ein mazel l’Yisrael” used by today’s Orthodox establishment to dismiss astrology as neither a “Jewish” subject nor a subject fit for Jews.  Yet the sages and the rabbis themselves within their corpus affirm both the power and efficacy of the celestial spheres. The rabbinic enterprise itself may have even acted as a kind of rival esoteric system to the supernatural traditions of the dominant cultures by creating its differentiating innovations, producing its magicians and scientists and magical texts, and substituting its own cultural/mythic archetypes for those of the prevailing Hellenistic astrological system.

Astrology could not be ignored; the Talmud declares knowledge of the luminaries to be Israel’s heritage and the means by which sacred time is calculated and kept. Neither could cosmological knowledge be ceded to idolatrous nations, all of which incorporated star worship into their forbidden pagan practices.

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. Secondly: it allowed them to demonstrate the superiority of Judaism’s native esoteric traditions on their own terms. They did this by developing differentiating identity-building innovations in astrological knowledge, such as the doctrine of Jewish Planetary Days and Hours, the substitution of biblical symbols and archetypes for their pagan counterparts, and the creation of Jewish esoteric texts such as the Sefer Yetzirah. Their heirs, the rabbis of the medieval era, developed an astral-magical Jewish theology during the Middle Ages, a time which also saw astrology’s prominence in medicine, time-keeping, sacred poetry, and messianic speculation. The advent of modernity permanently severed the previously undifferentiated practices of astronomy and astrology. Astronomy became a scientific subject, and astrology was absorbed exclusively into Judaism’s mystical stream, eventually to be subsumed to the Sefirotic archetype first by the Zohar, then by Lurianic Kabbalah, and finally by Hasidism.

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. From a ubiquitous component of every known religious system of the ancient world to a subject to be studied in the yeshivas of medieval Ashkenaz, from Joseph’s dream of the sun, moon, and stars to the zodiac paintings on the walls of eighteenth-century wooden synagogues of Eastern Europe, from the twelve tribes whose encampment around the Mishkan (Tabernacle) in the desert below mirrored the order of the constellations above to the twelve tribes on the decorative clock on the walls of the newly remodeled Western Wall plaza in Jerusalem, the zodiac and its components are part of our story as a people.

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 artifactual evidence can reveal clues as to how community rabbis might have weighed the influence of folk life in regulating traditional communal norms. Balance and a healthier perspective is restored by correcting the “text-only” bias in how rabbinic astrologically-themed literature is read by post-modern traditionalists. If Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi at the end of Zakhor suggests the way to resolve the tension between history and memory might lie in recovering what has been lost and finding meaning in it, my work is a step in that direction. Recovering Jewish astrology and finding meaning – Jewish meaning – in an aspect of our heritage that can and does provide insight into our own lives and therefore succor, is ultimately part of our personal and communal healing.

My work seeks to reconstruct some of what has been lost and restore Judaism’s cosmological understandings in the hope of creating a fertile, multi-layered post-modern Jewish astrological tradition, enriched and informed by our past. Far from using astrology to determine when to draw down spiritual power from the planets to accomplish our means, or to fulfill messianic hopes as did our cosmologically-minded ancestors, the modern discipline of psychological astrology looks inward. Perhaps it is a bit ironic that psychological astrology, first developed by Carl Jung in the early twentieth century was done so against the wishes of his mentor, Sigmund Freud – a Jew and most definitely not an astrologer. Jung wrote “Astrology represents the sum of all the psychological knowledge of antiquity.” Yet it is the interiorization of astrology’s symbols and archetypes which marks astrology’s modern manifestation. External, causative understandings of the power of the stars passed into the realm of mysticism long ago, but the internal courses of the cosmos operate reflectively, like a mirror. Psychological symbolism rather than external causality is the basis of my work as an astrological counselor who incorporates Jewish symbols and archetypes into the classical canon. I hope that Jewish astrology for today and tomorrow can be a tool to heal ourselves and therefore the world.

• Lorelai Kude

“As Above, So Below