C. G.

Jung and the Jewish Soul

A Dynamism between Psyche and Religiosity

steve zemmelman

I heard a version of a story on an old recording of the great Borscht Belt comedian
Myron Cohen that went something like this:
A short, slightly built Jewish man walks into a lumber camp one morning and approaches
the head lumberjack—a big, brawny Christian fellow—asking for work cutting down
trees. The lumberjack looks him over and replies, “You must be kidding! You’re way too
small for this work. Why, what I eat for breakfast weighs more than you do with all your
clothes and shoes on.” But the Jew presses his request and the lumberjack, growing weary
of his insistence, eventually decides to have a little fun. He hands over a small axe, points
to a tree nearby, and tells him, “Take this and chop down that five-year-old tree over
there! Come back to see me before dark if you’re done by then.” The Jew, carrying the axe,
walks over to the tree. With one swing he levels it and returns to the lumberjack, again
requesting a job. The lumberjack is taken aback. He pauses for a few moments and then
hands over an axe that would fit a giant like Paul Bunyan, points to an enormous hun-
dred-year-old tree growing at the top of a distant ridge and says, “Take my personal axe
and get to work on that old oak on the ridge. Come back tomorrow and we’ll see how far
you’ve gotten.” The Jew takes the axe, hikes up to the oak on the ridge, rears back, and,
again, one blow and down comes the huge oak tree. Astounded as he watches this unfold,
the lumberjack walks to the top of the ridge and over to the Jewish man to ask, “Where
on earth did you learn to cut down trees like that?” The Jew replies nonchalantly, “In
the Sahara Forest.” The lumberjack, looking puzzled, responds, “Sahara forest? You must
mean the Sahara desert.” The Jew looks at him and says, “Sure . . . now!”

You might be wondering what on earth this has to do with the connection between
C. G. Jung and the Jewish soul. I ask you to allow it to serve as a light-hearted, sideways
overture to the historical and cultural complications between Jungian psychology and
Judaism. I will return to this story at the end.

Jung Journal: Culture & Psyche, Volume 6, Number 1, pp. 104–123, ISSN 1934-2039, ­e-ISSN 1934-2047.
© 2012 Virginia Allan Detloff Library, C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco. All rights reserved. Please
direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the ­University of
California Press’s Rights and Permissions website at www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo/asp. DOI:
10.1525/jung.2012.6.1.104.

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 Steve Zemmelman, C. G. Jung and the Jewish Soul 105

Title Page of the Sefer ha-Zohar, Cremona edition, 1659–1660 (Used by permission of the Gershom
Scholem Collection of Kabbalah and Hassidut at the National Library of  Israel.)

Despite its whimsical opening, this essay is organized seriously around two related
hypotheses: (1) that an engagement with Jungian thought and practice can serve as a
pathway toward developing a relationship with Judaism that may not have been possible
through organized religion, and (2) that a Jewish perspective can lend a unique texture
to the understanding and interpretation of Jung’s work. The path to this cross-
fertilization, and to forging a hybrid identity as a Jewish-Jungian, is a psychologi-
cally and spiritually complex matter and, most importantly, a highly individual one.

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 106 jung journal: culture & psyche 6:1 / winter 2012

The two descriptors, Jewish and Jungian, do not fit neatly together, straining against
each other, resisting collapse into a unified whole. In addition to these considerations
regarding convergence and difference, a number of more personal questions arose as
this paper was evolving. What do I have to say about Judaism that others cannot say
better and with more knowledge? How will it be to identify publically as a Jew in a
professional forum, particularly since I have always valued keeping issues of religion
and cultural background as part of my private life? Will this paper contribute in some
small measure to greater understanding and differentiation? Or will it somehow add
to a resuscitation of the polarization between Christians and Jews or between Jung-
ians and the rest of the depth psychological community? Will it alienate non-Jew-
ish patients or potential patients—or, for that matter, Jewish ones? In my practice as a
Jungian analyst, it has become natural to engage in a private dialogue that includes dis-
cussion of the yearnings of the soul, holding an open space for the possible emergence
of spiritual strivings veiled in the everyday, yet how different it is to be speaking in pub-
lic about Jewish spirit and soul. Bringing religion and faith into a secular forum feels
like entering a liminal space characterized by uncertainty, ambiguity, even danger. You
can undoubtedly already sense my caution about taking up this issue in a communal
way. Yet to address this subject in a more depersonalized manner would, in my view,
deprive us of the opportunity to wrestle with the deep layers embedded within psyche,
history, and culture that are at work here.

Meeting My Jewish Soul

I have never been an observant Jew in the usual sense of the word. In fact, as you will
soon hear, I have had an ambivalent struggle with Judaism since childhood. While I
made tentative attempts to connect with the religion, only in the last twenty years have
I been more seriously drawn to it, and not through mainstream Judaism but through
the back door, so to speak, of its mystical tradition of Kabbalah. In the Jewish tradi-
tion, one accepts limitation through a covenantal relationship with God, which is
the basis for opening into the depths of the larger order of the Mysterium. Orthodox
Jews may be able to do this through living according to a prescribed and proscribed life
following the mitzvot, the 613 prohibitions and requirements for living incumbent on
every Jew according to the tradition. However, as the Hasidic psychoanalyst Joseph
Berke points out, such rules for living can serve as a way of either freeing or enslav-
ing oneself—freeing if they are used to imbue with spirit and intention, but enslaving
if they are regarded merely as rules to be followed with an attitude of mindlessness
(Berke and Schneider 2008). My exploration of Judaism has been a response to a more
independent, individual conscience and spirit, the contradictions in my own soul as it
seeks expression and elaboration to uncover its true meaning. Kabbalah, which refers
to received wisdom, is nothing if not a uniquely Jewish path toward engagement with

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 Steve Zemmelman, C. G. Jung and the Jewish Soul 107

the Mystery, the unknown, and as importantly, the living experience of the relation-
ship to the Unknowable. It is here that I found a living spirit, the antithesis of what I
had experienced earlier in life as a stereotyped, empty religious practice that had felt
so alienating. In its various iterations, Kabbalah includes an explication of divinity that
is fascinating and thoroughly psychological, filled with unsaturated projections and
analogous interactions between the psyche and the dimensions of supernal reality
encompassing it.
I embrace the idea that there are great truths in each religious tradition and that
each teaches its own version of an authentic and moral life. For me, however, the indi-
viduation path has come to include a meaningful relationship with the Jewish tradi-
tion. It is irreducibly, undeniably who I am. I have held my Jewishness in any number
of ways, but my quest for meaning is inextricably connected to the search for what it
means, for me, to be a Jew. The matter lives, literally and figuratively, in my bones. The
idea that it is necessary to become reconciled with one’s own heritage and to use it as a
basis for exploration is nothing new. Jung articulated this idea a number of times as, for
example, in his 1929 psychological introduction to the ancient Chinese text, The Secret
of the Golden Flower, where he wrote:

It is not for us to imitate what is foreign to our organism or to play the missionary;
our task is to build up our Western civilization, which sickens with a thousand ills.
This has to be done on the spot, and by the European just as he is, with all his Western
ordinariness, his marriage problems, his neuroses, his social and political delusions,
and his whole philosophical disorientation. (1929/1967, CW 13 ¶5)

Jung is making the case that one needs to explore the wider world after learning to
live within his or her own house first, using the given home base as the ground from
which to explore the vast reaches of consciousness and the depths of meaning.
I came to understand this point in a particularly powerful and personal way a
number of years ago. On the tenth day of a two-week, solo backpacking trip, I had
a dream in which my wife and I were moving into a new house. The dream ended
with the following sentence that I recalled vividly when I awoke: “This could not have
been done without the preceding work of hundreds of generations.” I knew that “this”
referred to me, making the sentence I heard in the dream prior to awakening a version
of the biblical principle of transmission of life and tradition known as L’Dor V’Dor,
meaning “from generation to generation.” James Kirsch, whose work and correspon-
dence with Jung are the subject of other essays in this issue, reported in his book The
Reluctant Prophet (1973) that, according to the Talmud, a biblical verse occurring just
prior to the moment of awakening from a dream has a prophetic significance. A cou-
ple of hours after my dream, while sitting by a morning campfire, I suddenly had the
uncanny sensation that I had been joined by my beloved grandfather, then my deceased
parents, and then an unknown ancestor. I knew I was not hallucinating and allowed

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myself to go further into the experience. I carried over several cut tree stumps to make
a place for each of these spirits to sit in a circle with me around the fire. I greeted each
of them and told them how glad I was to be with them again. I thanked them for giving
me life and for living in me. The unknown ancestor was an old, religious Jew who spoke
no English. He had a long white beard and was wrapped in a tallis, the traditional
prayer shawl. I would surmise he had lived in the eighteenth century, but he may have
been much, much older, perhaps even ancient. The experience was so powerful that I
sobbed with sadness, joy, and gratitude. When I stopped crying, I prayed together in
Hebrew with them, open-heartedly singing the most profound prayer in the Jewish
faith, the Shema—testimony to the oneness of God and to the identification of the
Jew with the common suffering of humanity (Altmann 1991), the words an observant
Jew tries to say with his last breath before he dies. The dream and the experience with
the spirits that followed it were of a piece where a particularly meaningful develop-
ment straddled both sides of the boundary between waking and sleep, conscious and
unconscious, individual and transpersonal. I was particularly in awe of the appearance
of the unknown relative. It was his presence that taught me how much I live through
and embody one of the 600,000 archetypal Jewish souls who were present at Sinai in
the moment Moses received the Torah and who live in the world at any given time.
I share this experience as a way of illustrating the presence of transformative Jewish
symbols within my psyche despite a lack of adherence to traditional modes of religious
observance or experience. I write from the perspective of a person in the process of
making my own claim on the meaning of the word “religious,” attempting to retrieve it
from the various modes of ritualistic practice and to define its ground in a living expe-
rience of the numinous within a particular genetic, historical, and cultural tradition.
Here I am following the distinction between religion and religiosity. Martin Buber
wrote, “Religiosity is the continually new becoming, what is constantly expressed and
formed anew. Religion is the sum of the customs and teachings in which the religios-
ity of a given period in a people was expressed and formed” (quoted in Mendes-Flohr
2002, 34). Along these lines, rabbi and Brandeis professor, Arthur Green, a Kabbalah
scholar, writes in his 2010 book, Radical Judaism: Rethinking God and Tradition, “The
silently spoken Divine ‘Where are you?’ is the essence of revelation. To be a religious
human being is to recognize that call and to seek to respond to it” (93). And Jung
wrote in Memories, Dreams, Reflections, “The meaning of my existence is that life has
addressed a question to me. Or, conversely, I myself am a question which is addressed
to the world, and I must communicate my answer, for otherwise I am dependent upon
the world’s answer” ( Jung 1961, 318).
The life of true religiosity is the commitment to the always unfinished journey
of asking oneself the question “where are you?” and refusing to substitute a collective
response for a life-giving, truly individual, fully symbolic answer, one’s own absolutely

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unique voice in which to express the irreducible truth of authentic existence. Our liv-
ing occurs in the dynamic tension between surrendering to this journey and resist-
ing its call. We are each summoned to this encounter as part of what defines us as
human. We choose whether and how we respond to the questions: Where are you?
Who are you? The questions are timeless, existing simultaneously in the past, present,
and future. What narrative could reveal something of the factors contributing to any
one person’s truthful response? Let me share with you some of mine.
When I was five years old, I took myself from the flat where my family lived on
Hinsdale Street in the East New York section of Brooklyn to a small shul around the
block in a basement. I cannot recall how I even knew it was there. My parents had cer-
tainly never taken me to a synagogue before. In some way I no longer recall, I had some
idea of God and a sense that this was the place where he (she? it?) could be found.
I walked in and saw people praying, chanting in a language I did not understand, mov-
ing in ways I did not know, men on one side, women on the other, a mechitza, or cur-
tain, separating them. I did not recognize anyone there and do not believe I stayed very
long but I know I was looking for something I needed. My parents lacked even the
most basic knowledge of the practice or history of Judaism although they were steeped
in the culture and both spoke Yiddish, the primary language of their childhood. My
grandparents were uneducated immigrants from shtetls in Poland and Russia who came
to New York when they were in their adolescence and young adulthood. They had no
formal education, secular or religious. The only regular Jewish practice in our home
is one I now recall lovingly: my mother standing over the shabbos candles she lit on
Friday night, a dishtowel covering her head, as she moved her outstretched arms three
times around the candles as if to gather their warm light and join it to her unspoken
prayer. Although I came to cherish the sweetness of that memory, it seemed silly to me
as a child for there was no context or explanation that made it understandable. I now
regret my inability to appreciate her simple gesture at the time, and I am left wonder-
ing what she was thinking and feeling, what that ritual might have meant to her, what
dimensions of the sacred she was touching. Our family leaned more toward assimilat-
ing as Americans than maintaining a connection with our spiritual roots. What feel-
ings about being Jewish the family did transfer to me was a connection with a history
of persecution and a sense of superiority in the accomplishments of “the chosen people,”
a concept that made no sense to me, given my American egalitarian ideals that all
people are equal, not one group superior to another. I came to believe that the idea of
God and religious practice were reflections of superstition carried to the new world by
uneducated people born in the ghettos of Eastern Europe. Religion seemed silly when
reason and science could explain everything.
We moved from Brooklyn to southeast Queens, from a working-class Jewish
ghetto to a working-class Italian and Irish ghetto, where my parents were able to fulfill

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their dream of owning their own home. As in the scene from Woody Allen’s film Annie
Hall where the narrator describes growing up under the rides at Coney Island while
the frame of the film shakes as the roller coaster goes by a few feet outside the window,
my parents’ dream to own their own home led them to buy a house two blocks from
the start of the landing lights at Kennedy airport, directly under the fuselage of the
jets that were landing every minute or two. It would be only a slight exaggeration to say
that we were able to wave to the passengers as the planes flew overhead; to say, however,
that the kids in the new neighborhood were welcoming to Jews would be a huge exag-
geration. On the street and in the public school, dealing with anti-Semitism became a
fact of daily life. There was even a “Jew Haters Club” at my school, one day leading my
deskmate, who was a member, to draw a line down the middle of our shared space,
telling me I was forbidden to cross it because I was a Jew. On the street there were
fights as I was charged with having killed Christ, as well as “jokes” about Jews having
big noses and caring only about money.
While this was going on in the secular world of public school and the neighbor-
hood, other developments were occurring within a Jewish context. I attended Hebrew
school in the afternoons after public school, four times a week for the five years leading
up to my thirteenth birthday. The experience would have been a complete joke were it
not such a disaster. I learned to read Hebrew to some degree, but what I really needed
in the House of God was to find people with true wisdom and joyous hearts who could
help me learn something about soul and the life of the spirit. Instead, the prejudice I
was encountering on the streets was met by the prejudice in my Jewish world. I recall
the bigotry among my teachers and the cantor, adults who, I could see, knew little or
nothing about either children or teaching. In retrospect, I believe the pedagogical cul-
ture of the school reflected, to some degree, unresolved trauma from the Holocaust:
a world of persecution, loss, and unspeakable horror through which a number of them
had lived and, I believe, all of them were impacted. The blue tattoo of concentration
camp numbers that I glimpsed on an occasionally exposed arm will always live in my
memory. Nonetheless I will also never forget their prejudices toward non-Jews and the
racism I experienced there. It was entirely incongruent with the vision of the black-
Jewish coalition I had assimilated through my father’s liberal politics during the civil
rights era of the mid-1960s. At my bar mitzvah, as the rabbi shook my hand and told
me he was sure he would see me at services every shabbat, I privately swore that I would
never set foot in that synagogue again.
The combination of ignorance about our culture at home, overt anti-Semitism of
the Christian children at school and in the neighborhood, and five years of an educa-
tion within conservative Judaism that was as bigoted as what I found in the street left
me ashamed of and estranged from my religion and identity as a Jew. I embarked upon
a search for answers in other places where there seemed to be more potential—a journey

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I will not describe in this essay other than to say it involved pursuing the academic
study of philosophy, playing with meditation practice, exploring various religions, and
building a career in clinical social work and depth psychology. A few lines from T. S.
Eliot’s “Four Quartets” captures something of the movement that took place:
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
(Eliot 1980, 138)

Thirty years after my first introduction to Jung’s work, I decided to become a Jungian
analyst. After beginning my education as a candidate, I learned for the first time of
the accusations of anti-Semitism—and of having been a Nazi sympathizer—that sur-
rounded Jung’s reputation. For a number of reasons, not the least of which was my
early history with anti-Semitism, the need to develop an adequate understanding
of the matter and find my own ground on which to stand in relation to it was most
important. Depending on what I found I was prepared to abandon any identification
with Jung or analytical psychology.

Jung and Anti-Semitism

I launched a study of the issue and was fortunate to discover the proceedings from the
1989 international conference held in New York entitled Lingering Shadows: Jungians,
Freudians, and Anti-Semitism (Maidenbaum and Martin 1991) and a 2002 revision of
the original work contained in a volume entitled Jung and the Shadow of Anti-Semitism
(Maidenbaum 2002). My investigation fell into two phases, separated by about five
years. In the first, I read the literature addressing the history of Jung’s attitude toward
Jews. Here is a short summary of what I learned, which, due to space limitations, will
only skim the surface of the matter. Readers can look to the monographs just cited, as
well as to Jay Sherry’s excellent new book Carl Gustav Jung: Avant-Garde Conservative
(2010), where a great deal more detail can be found. Questions regarding Jung’s anti-
Semitism followed him from the time of his break with Freud who referred to Jung’s
“race-prejudices” and his “unscrupulous pursuit of his own interests” in his 1914 paper,
“The History of the Psychoanalytic Movement” (Freud 1914). In 1933, Jung became
president of the General Medical Society for Psychotherapy, several months after
Hitler’s election as chancellor in Germany. The following year, an International Soci-
ety was established under Jung’s leadership, and he became editor of its journal, the
Zentralblatt fur Psychotherapy. The creation of an International Society out of what
was previously the German Medical Society allowed Jews who had been barred from
the German group to continue to participate as individual members. However, it was

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at this time and over the next several years that Jung published his views on differences
between Jewish and Aryan psychologies, as well as pieces valorizing Hitler’s leadership
in Germany. In 1934, he wrote an essay entitled “The State of Psychotherapy Today”
in which he states:
The Jews have this peculiarity in common with women; being physically weaker, they
have to aim at the chinks in the armour of their adversary, and thanks to this technique
which has been forced on them through the centuries, the Jews themselves are best pro-
tected where others are vulnerable. The Jew, who is something of a nomad, has never yet
created a cultural form of his own and as far as we can see never will, since all his instincts
and talents require a more or less civilized nation to act as host for their development.
(1934/1970, CW 10, ¶353)

To be sure, by the end of the 1930s, Jung had abandoned any fascination he may have
had with the Nazis and ceased writing on racial psychology (Maidenbaum 2002).
To his credit, Jung assisted individual Jews during the war: working with the Swiss
government to take them in, guaranteeing their financial stability once they arrived,
and treating many Jewish patients at no fee after they resettled. He also assisted the
American Department of State to psychologically defeat the Nazis (Bair 2003). But by
then the damage had been done. His writing from those dark years irreparably dam-
aged his reputation, contributing substantially to what the Freudians already alleged
in their efforts to discredit him years before. Jung’s ideas about racial psychology and
his valorization of the Aryan spirit led me to question at the deepest level whether I
belonged at the Jung Institute. The fact that he never subsequently publically acknowl-
edged his errors or apologized only made matters worse. Perhaps he sensed early on in
the Nazi movement in neighboring Germany some form of proof for his ideas about
the activation of an archetype that might have seemed like a validation of the founda-
tional elements of his psychological theories concerning the collective unconscious.
Perhaps he was responding still to the traumatic break with Freud decades earlier, a
rupture of a collaboration that had meant so much to both men and was, ironically,
begun in part when Freud purposefully made use of Jung’s Christian background to
lead what was an overwhelmingly Jewish group of psychoanalytic pioneers. In any case,
I concluded that although it was clear Jung had never been a Nazi, his writing about
Jews and Germany were either politically naïve, opportunistic, grossly insensitive, or all
three. Jung’s was certainly not the virulent, ignorant anti-Semitism I had encountered
in my childhood. It was sophisticated and highly intellectual, yet it still reflected a prej-
udiced view toward Jews, was penned at a disastrous time, and was made use of by the
perpetrators of the Holocaust.
The encounter with Jung’s anti-Semitism ultimately did not deter me from study-
ing his work. It led to a more differentiated capacity for understanding and accepting
the frailties, imperfections, and duplicities in self and others, as well as to a deeper

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appreciation for how idealizations are gods that need to be destroyed. I was left with
regret that this great thinker revealed such an inadequate moral sense at a critical
moment in history. I also came to appreciate the historical and intellectual context
in which he lived and learned to resist the temptation to judge him from the vantage
point of a twenty-first-century American perspective. At the same time, I was deeply
engaged in my personal analysis where, naturally, one of the themes I worked and
reworked was the wounding I carried from encounters with both anti-Semitism and
organized Jewish religious practice years before. Encountering over time the shadowy
nature of these formative interactions opened an old wound that finally had a chance
to begin to heal.
Later, shortly following my certification as an analyst, I had a recurrence of the
earlier crisis having to do with Jung and anti-Semitism, but this iteration led to differ-
ent questions. It came in the wake of reading a book entitled C.G. Jung and Hermann
Hesse: A Record of Two Friendships (Serrano 1966). Hesse had a profound influence
on me during adolescence. I was intrigued to read an account of someone who had
befriended both these men when they were in their twilight years. I became curious
about the author, Miguel Serrano, who was a young man at the time he met Jung and
Hesse. I discovered a YouTube video of him giving a speech on the 100th anniversary
of Hitler’s birth while standing in front of a bevy of Nazi flags, wearing a swastika arm-
band, with an outstretched arm leading the assembly in chants of “Heil Hitler!” This
deeply disturbing experience eventually led to a question about whether there is some-
thing in Jung’s thinking that might provide a psychological ground for anti-Semites
and fascists, and this question became the focus of a new phase in exploring the con-
nection between Jung’s work and anti-Semitism. Returning to the Lingering Shadows
literature, I discovered that my question was one with which others had grappled. The
historian of psychoanalysis Paul Roazen wrote:
No one could have appreciated the full horrors of the Nazis. But intellectual historians
do rightly wonder about what elements in Western culture may have fed the long-term
sources of Hitlerism. Can it be that an emphasis on the legitimacy of the irrational in psy-
chology does also, when introduced to the world of politics, encourage Nazi-like move-
ments? It would not be too speculative, I think, to suppose that some of Jung’s ideas had
enough echo in what he heard from Germany from 1933 on for him to think that his
work might successfully fit in there. (Quoted in Maidenbaum 2002, 10)

And history professor Geoffrey Cocks wrote, “Although the Nazis exploited modern
technical and material resources, including medicine and psychotherapy, they also
built their power on yearnings for the mysterious and the transcendent” (quoted in
Maidenbaum 2002, 20).
In relation to the archetypal dimensions underlying mass movements like Nazism,
what is involved is not only the personal shadow but also the archetypal shadow,

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which is to say the existence of evil on both the individual and collective psychol­
ogical levels. Opening oneself to the influence of archetypal energies creates an expan-
siveness as it links the finite ego to an encompassing supra-ego reality. But what then?
The encounter with archetypal energy can be extremely creative but also most destruc-
tive. More specifically, the impersonality of the numinous archetypal dimension of
human experience lacks a connection with the ethical ground that may evolve from
an identification with the yearning and suffering of our fellow beings. It is in the expe-
rience of our own subjectivity in dialogue with the other as the center of his or her
subjectivity, in the lived and personal commitment to recognize the other in all of our
humanness, that potentially transformative and inflationary archetypal reality may
be held in a dynamic tension with the interhuman, inhibiting individuals from car-
rying out the evil and genocidal acts that characterize fascist movements. Here are
Jung’s own words, penned two decades after his writing on racial psychology in the
early 1930s:
One can, as experience has often shown, relieve oneself of the difficult act of self-
knowledge by shutting out the moral criterion with so-called scientific objectivity or
unvarnished cynicism. But this simply means buying a certain amount of insight at
the cost of artificially repressing an ethical value. The result of this deception is that
the insight is robbed of its efficacy, since the moral reaction is missing. (1963/1970,
CW 14, ¶674)

Along what I believe are related lines, Joseph Berke and Stanley Schneider, in
their book Centers of Power: The Convergence of Psychoanalysis and Kabbalah (2008),
draw a contrast between the Kabbalist and the narcissist: the latter insists that pride-
fulness is the means to be God whereas the former sees humility as the basis for accessing
God. The narcissist, suffering from some version of identification with the archetypes,
cannot tolerate limitation and surrender to something greater than his own ego.
The ethical commitment of the Kabbalist lies in accepting limitation, living with a
heart open to God, self, and one’s fellow man.

The Symbol
Among the most valuable and central ideas in analytical psychology is Jung’s under-
standing of the symbol. An early articulation of his thinking is found in Psychological
Types, where he differentiates between a symbol and a sign, the former pointing to the
unknown, the latter designating something specific and known:
Every view which interprets the symbolic expression as an analogue or an abbreviated
designation for a known thing is semiotic. A view which interprets the symbolic expres-
sion as the best possible formulation of a relatively unknown thing, which for that rea-
son cannot be more clearly or characteristically represented, is symbolic. (1921/1971,
CW 6, ¶¶815–816)

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He goes on to state, “So long as a symbol is a living thing, it is an expression for some-
thing that cannot be characterized in any other or better way. The symbol is alive only
so long as it is pregnant with meaning” (¶¶815–816). The symbolic attitude Jung
identifies is characterized by a process born out of the capacity to tolerate resisting the
compulsion to “understand.” It opens potentiality for nonlinearity, irrationality, body,
feeling, and the transformational experience of the numinous. His approach to the
symbol deepened my understanding of the variegated nature of experience and mean-
ing, which, in turn, made possible a new openness to the symbolic depth of the Jewish
tradition. The symbolic attitude unfettered the image of God from anything specific
and concrete, allowing the idea to seek greater expression. The symbolic attitude he
identifies is characterized by an inner subjective process in which the meaning subjec-
tively bestowed supersedes concrete facts. Berke and Schneider write:
While signs point, symbols carry meaning, as a poem, on not one but many levels. They
are the basis of self-reflection, self-awareness and self-realization. In other words, sym-
bols are what make us human, while they also allow us to extend ourselves far beyond
the bounds of human limitations. Signs keep us tied to the ground. Symbols allow us to
soar. (2008, 147)

In the Talmud, there are four levels of understanding or revelation, which can
be thought of hierarchically, representing a movement from lesser to greater know-
ing, from greater to lesser concealment. In medieval literature these levels are referred
to as the PaRDeS, the Hebrew word for “orchard, ”where the P, R, D, and S are cap-
italized to show that they signify four increasingly esoteric levels of interpretation:
pshat, remez, d’rash, and sod. First and most basic is the pshat level, in which mean-
ings are taken in a literal, traditional manner. Next comes the remez level, which pro-
vides a hint or foreshadowing of a deeper meaning. D’rash is the level of understanding
that points beyond the literal to the allegorical, moral, or philosophical dimensions.
Finally, at the greatest depth is sod, which goes beyond the rational into the hidden,
mystical level of understanding. At the sod level, there is an intersection with the Jung-
ian symbolic attitude. For example, the prohibition against graven images, found in
the Ten Commandments or Decalogue, can be understood literally at the pshat level as
a rule barring the manufacture of material representations of the Divine. At the remez
level, however, there is a suggestion that something about the Divinity precludes its
appearance in material form. When this commandment is regarded from the d’rosh
level, it includes an investigation of the moral implications of making images of God.
Finally, at the depth level of sod, we are dealing with the nature of the Divine itself, a
living experience of the truth of its incorporeality and timelessness. It is “that which
I am,” unknowable and incapable of being expressed. Emmanuel Levinas writes about
the capacity of reading scripture where the ability to say supersedes the intention,
and where the words come to contain more than they had contained, where language

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 116 jung journal: culture & psyche 6:1 / winter 2012

generates a surplus of inexhaustible meanings (1994/95). With the foregoing as a basis

for further discussion of the symbolic, I would like to now turn to a brief overview of
several core elements of the highly symbolic kabbalistic view of creation and conscious-
ness. This will then lead into the final section of the paper, which explores how Jung’s
use of kabbalistic imagery could be further amplified if seen differentially within its
Jewish context.

Multiple Worlds, Shattered Vessels

The most basic idea of Judaism is that there is one God, a nondualistic, immaterial,
and undefinable no-thing, who cannot be known or experienced directly. Kabbalis-
tically speaking, God’s will is what makes it possible for anything (other than God)
to exist. Everything other than God consists of varying gradations of divine light that
function to clothe the qualities of Godliness within. In Kabbalah, what is above is as
below and vice versa. Kabbalistically, we live in a holographic universe where the radi-
ance emanating from Ein Sof, the Without End, exists in five worlds or levels of con-
sciousness (Afterman 2005). The idea of a world, in the kabbalistic sense, refers not to
anything of a physical nature but to a discrete universe of meaning. The five worlds in
Kabbalah exist simultaneously and are created anew in each moment. They are some-
times referred to as garments that both reveal and conceal divinity, and function like a
transformer that steps down, so to speak, the light of divinity, since it would otherwise
obscure everything else. Ratzon, which is identical with the will of God, is the highest
world. The four lower worlds are the worlds of Atzilut (emanation), Beriya (creation),
Yetzirah (formation), and Assiyah (the created physical world). This idea of multiple
worlds is often imaged for the sake of explanation through the metaphor of building a
house: first there must be the will to build the house; then the wisdom to know how to
build it; next a blueprint for how it will be constructed, after which comes the actual
construction, and finally the completion of the project when the house is actually built.
What most of us think of as the reality of this world is entirely within Assiyah, a world
that conceals Divinity to the greatest degree. Although the idea of the five worlds may
seem hierarchical or spatial to modern ears; in fact, the multiplicity of worlds, except
for Assiyah, do not exist in any physical sense. “Higher” in this context refers to close-
ness to the source, whereas “lower” means further away, where divinity is more fully
concealed. These worlds can be thought of as encompassing spheres of intention that
exist simultaneously and through which there is a constant flow of divine energy. This
is not about creation as a one-off historical event but as an unfolding in an eternal pres-
ent. In other words, without a continuous creative process, nothing could exist.
Theogonic myth, that is, myth having to do with the self-manifestation of God,
tells the mystical story of the creation. Its most fully articulated kabbalistic vision was
developed in the sixteenth century by Isaac Luria, known as the Ari. In this version,

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 Steve Zemmelman, C. G. Jung and the Jewish Soul 117

an omnipresent God who fills everything to the ultimate degree cannot create with-
out making room for something other than Himself. He accomplishes this by an act
of divine will, called tsimzum, a process of self-contraction away from a center, leav-
ing a void, a space for creation. A single beam of radiant light reintroduces God’s pres-
ence into this space. This divine light, in order to exist in a new, differentiated form,
must be contained in some fashion; otherwise, it would instantly become so overpow-
ering and full that nothing else could exist. The containment is accomplished by gra-
dations of light that form ten vessels or sefirot. The ten sefirot represent the potential
form and ideal manifestation of each quality of the Creator brought into the multi-
ple worlds. Each of these qualities is associated in the Zohar, the most influential Kab-
balistic text, with a multitude of names including intellect, wisdom, power, strength,
mercy, justice, eternity, and receptivity. The sefirot can be imagined as opposing pairs
held in a dynamic tension, two polarities (right and left) with a mediating principle
between them. They are also conceived as being grouped into personifications (e.g.,
Ancient One, Mother, Father, and so on) that can interact autonomously and harmo-
niously with one another. The Kabbalists envisioned a continual process of ebb and
flow, ascent and descent, an in and out movement with an obviously sexual connota-
tion (Fine 2003). The sefirot holding more pure forms of light are more durable and
capable of containing the energy within. However, the ones holding less pure forms
of light shatter, sending shards containing sparks of sefirotic light falling into lower
worlds and ultimately into the lowest level of Assiyah, our physical world. It is our
work to lift these sparks back to unity with their source, a process called in Hebrew
Tikkun Olam, the repair of the worlds. To repair the interior life of one person, to con-
nect the sparks of divinity found in the darkest recesses of the soul, to hold the ten-
sion of the opposites and effect a transcendent union, is to effect a change in the entire
universe. This is not a model of an almighty God determining what happens on earth
but of mutual dependence and influence between humans and the infinite, timeless,
unknowable oneness of Being. Kabbalah scholar Daniel Matt writes, “According to
Kabbalah, every human action here on earth affects the divine realm. God is not static
being but dynamic becoming” (1995, 1).
There is profound psychological insight in the symbolism of the creation as a con-
tinuous dialectical process of coming into being and passing away. It has almost a con-
temporary, postmodern resonance in explicating the cotemporal processes underlying
the creation and destruction of meaning. The shattering of the vessels is regarded kab-
balistically as a necessary step in the development of consciousness, free will, and an
ethical attitude. How else could the givenness of the world and its conventional mean-
ings be destroyed? How else could the task of meaning-making, creativity, and life
itself, be authentically and fully pursued? Are words and ideas to exist as false idols or
is their underlying sanctity revealed when the idols are smashed and the great mystery
of creativity is experienced anew? As I hear the Shema, “Shema Yisrael Adonoi Elohenu

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 118 jung journal: culture & psyche 6:1 / winter 2012

Adonoi Echad” (“Hear, Oh Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One”), it is saying,
“There is only Oneness and everything else is but a manifestation of this one reality.” It
is followed by “Baruch shem k’vod malchuto l’olam va’ed” (“Blessed be the name of his
glorious kingdom forever and ever”), which I hear as “Blessed is the Holy Name, the
Source, enclothed in all worlds and in every word, spoken and not spoken, revealed
and concealed, as it exists and as it could exist potentially, forever.” We are dealing here
with the creative power of silence and of the spoken word; much as in the biblical cre-
ation story, the world was spoken into existence. Creation could not have occurred had
God not contracted himself to make the space in which anything else could exist. In
Kabbalah, everything that exists is a manifestation of divine radiance and all symbols
point to a transcendent reality.
As a Jungian analyst who is also a kabbalistically oriented Jew, when I sit with
patients I sometimes think about the unspeakable Holy Name as the underlying real-
ity contained within every utterance we each make and do not make, existing dif-
ferently and simultaneously in each of five worlds, in every possible world of will,
belief, creation, intention, and action. Every dialogical act points to a divine spark,
whether concealed or revealed by gradations of worlds of meaning. In analysis, we
are often seeking an encounter with the hidden meaning, the unconscious, working
to enlarge the canvas of personal and collective meaning-making. More than seeking
some absolute truth is the effort to broaden and deepen a particular person’s expe-
rience of being human. The kabbalistic image of the shattering of the vessels can be
a most useful metaphor for relating to how the ego fractures when it cannot hold
an emotion or an experience. Sometimes this shattering happened long ago in the
course of a traumatic event. When this happens, the analyst may help by holding
and containing the splintered, fragmented pieces, perhaps allowing the patient an
opportunity to integrate slowly those parts of experience that he or she could not
contain before. Sometimes the analyst even becomes a participant in the shattering
process through an enactment or even through his or her curiosity, asking questions
that invite the patient to explore ideas, thoughts, and feelings that were never ques-
tioned before, perhaps destroying certain givens (vessels), and inviting new meaning
(raising of the sparks). Moreover, the shattering of the vessels in analysis, however,
is not limited to a potential response to trauma but can serve as a metaphor for the
existential necessity of the deconstruction of language and concepts that allows for
the possibility that genuine, authentic experience may reveal itself. To do this work,
as analysts, we must accept living with the experience of the repeated shattering of
our own sacred vessels, as the authentic encounter between our patients as individ-
uals and our own subjectivity will repeatedly create experiences of deintegration of
our own egos, thus calling forth a need to develop our own genuine ways of not just
understanding but also being in relation to the mysterious, singular dialogical rela-
tion between self and other.

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 Steve Zemmelman, C. G. Jung and the Jewish Soul 119

Dynamic Tensions of Difference

Jung the scientist maintained repeatedly that when he wrote about God he was not
asserting anything, one way or another, about God as a transcendent Being but rather
that he was addressing deity as a symbol, an inner mental representation, a psycho-
logical factor existing in the mind. Jung was a pioneer in opening the nascent world
of depth psychology to include the spiritual dimension of human experience, but he
wanted a clear demarcation between an empirical psychology on the one hand and
theology on the other. That being said, sometimes he wrote in ways that were self-
contradictory, and this was one theme in which that happened, repeatedly, for at times
in his writing there are certainly references to the relationship between man and God
that read as if he is referring to a transcendent being. A kabbalistic view takes us in a
quite different direction than Jung’s. For the Kabbalists, the purpose of the symbol, in
image and in word, is to point to a greater reality, the Divinity, to which we stand in
a relation of transcendence. Jungian analyst Steve Joseph explains that imagery in the
Zohar is simultaneously a gateway of ascent to the intuitive connection with a Divinity
who cannot be known as well as a gateway of descent from the Divine into the
finite world. He concludes, “This role of the psyche in attaining religious insight and
knowledge/gnosis of God is fundamentally different from Jung’s viewpoint” (2007,
326). Along similar lines, Buber’s dialogical approach suggests a method for making
use of the deeply Jewish experience of self in encounter with the other, whether the
other is God or the presence of holiness in another person: it is radical otherness, the
thing-in-itself that Jung maintained we can never know, taken as a necessity for claim-
ing the fullness of our own being. In the world of I and Thou, human potential is ful-
filled through reaching into one’s true self to contact the ground within that allows
genuine contact with the other. There are kabbalistic sparks enclothed within each of
us, relating to each other and to their common source in the higher worlds.
The Shekhinah is the feminine aspect of God within the Jewish mystical tradition.
She symbolizes God’s dwelling or presence in this world reflecting God’s radiance, such
as one might experience in the transformative beauty of nature or of the higher inten-
tion with which even the most common human activities can be conducted. In the
Zohar, the Shekhinah functions as a symbol of the potential for an inner, loving rela-
tionship between the masculine and feminine aspects of the Divine, using imagery
of the unification of male and female, both on earth and within God, and creating a
pathway for the expression of both spiritual and embodied love. Arthur Green writes,
“It is only through her that humans have access to the mysteries beyond. All prayer
is channeled through her, seeking to energize her and raise her up in order to affect
sefirotic unity. The primary function of the religious life, with all its duties and obli-
gations, is to rouse the Shekhinah into a state of love” (2004, 53). It is important to
understand that within the Kabbalistic tradition, it is intention and adherence to the

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 120 jung journal: culture & psyche 6:1 / winter 2012

mitzvot, the commandments, that returns the Shekhinah to her sacred partner, to God.
Thus, the unification of God and his Shekhinah is brought about through intention-
ality and our actions! In this system, as noted previously, humans have an impact on
God, and the fate of the universe—where the repair (tikkun) of the brokenness of cre-
ation relating back to the shattering of the vessels—is influenced by how humans con-
duct the ordinary activities of life as an expression of sacred intention, or kavannah,
underlying those ordinary activities. Since kabbalistically, a human is a holographic
image of the universe, his or her existence, including his or her sexual desire, reflects the
nature of the divinity and serves as a possible gateway to the unification of opposites:
male and female, God and the Shekhinah. The Shekhinah calls our attention to the pos-
sibility of the expression of holiness in every human encounter, potentially tempering
the instinctual and the archetypal. The container that comes from a personal relation-
ship with a God who is simultaneously and paradoxically beyond oneself and yet of
oneself, a God who is ineluctably calling to the individual to engage in a dialogue that
is nothing if not intimate, is fundamentally different than insisting that what can be
known is only the inner image of God—a psychological factor. In this sense, the Jew-
ish and Jungian ways of understanding kabbalistic symbols are differentiated, reflect-
ing how each is embedded in a different tradition and context of meaning.
This can be further explored through consideration of one aspect of Jung’s last
great work, Mysterium Coniunctionis, in which the end product of the alchemical and
psychological opus, namely the conjunction of opposites, is envisioned as taking place
through three stages, the first of which is a process Jung refers to in terms of the alchem-
ical notion of the unio mentalis. The unio mentalis is understood as a process of devel-
oping a perspective on one’s projections that can only come through questioning the
fictions one holds about oneself. Jung describes, in this stage, the process of “the ego
coming to terms with its own background, the shadow” (1963/1970, CW 14, ¶707).
Here he quotes at length the alchemist Gerhard Dorn describing how “asceticism” and
“meditative knowledge” are required to accomplish this task. His method requires a
withdrawal from the everydayness of living as the key to opening the world of soul. It is
in the second stage that the soul is reunited with the body and the affects in a process
symbolized by the alchemical marriage. In contrast, the Shekhinah carries the elements
of love and relatedness that are very much in this world. The unification of opposites,
in the kabbalistic sense, is not achieved through asceticism or the denial of the body,
but through engaging with it—sanctifying the everyday through a consciousness that
knows each moment as an opportunity to recognize the work of the Creator. Jung
engaged with kabbalistic material and symbols after the end of World War II, during
the last years of his life. However, his reading of it in the Mysterium imposes a qual-
ity on it that seems more consistent with a Christian understanding of the relation-
ship between a disembodied Eros and the eternal, which differs from what one finds
in a Jewish context. He refers to the preliminary step in the individuation process as

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 Steve Zemmelman, C. G. Jung and the Jewish Soul 121

“a clear blend of Stoic philosophy and Christian psychology” (Jung 1963/1970, CW 14,
¶672). Here, we can return to the kabbalistic shattering of the vessels, described ear-
lier. Is this a psychological process (à la Jung) or is it simultaneously describing a break-
down at a level of reality beyond psyche, perhaps encompassing it even in such a way
that would continue to exist even if psyche did not? Jung held that the Self, not the
ego, is both the center of the psyche and psychic totality. A kabbalistic view takes us
in a quite different direction, one that cannot be assimilated to Jung’s. For the Kabbal-
ists, the purpose of the symbol, in image and in word, is to point to a greater reality,
a divine other, to which we stand in a relation of simultaneous surrender and humility.
Kabbalistically, the Shekhinah carries the elements of love and relatedness that
are very much in this world. I believe that such elements of Kabbalistic mythology can
serve a bridging function between what many experience as Jung’s more experience-
distant psychological theorizing and what the relational or intersubjective schools of
psychoanalysis find in the moment-to-moment, mutually constructed interactive pat-
terns between patient and analyst. The sanctification of the ordinary unites the tran-
scendent and the imminent, much as the Shekhinah provides a route between life in this
world and the Eternal, spanning the gap between the immediacy of human behavior
and interaction in the world and the Eternal One. She is both the passageway through
which the “higher” qualities must pass before they can reach humankind as well as the
means through which, in the lower world, humankind’s sacred intentions and actions
affect and transform the upper levels of the sefirotic tree and God Himself. It seems to
me that an understanding of the Jungian approach to the conjunction of opposites is
further nuanced by considering it side by side with a kabbalistic orientation.
Adam and Eve ate from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, not from the tree of
life. The sin of eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil is to seek knowing with-
out relatedness. The Shekhinah is the tree of life. It is that aspect of holiness that is not
about knowing, but about caring and loving—and not only in a Platonic, purely spiritu-
alized sense. The Shekhinah is not the Jungian anima conceived of as a contrasexual soul
image but an aspect of Divinity itself connected with human existence through the most
powerful urges, creating channels for intentionality, action, and a relationship to God.

Conclusion
I began this essay with a story about two men, a Christian and a Jew, sparring over cut-
ting down a tree. Is it the tree of the knowledge of good and evil or the tree of life?
The former is the link to intellectual knowledge, the latter to Da’at, the connecting
fiber between the sefirot of Chochmah (intuitive understanding) and Binah (intellec-
tual understanding), knowledge as the embodied product of heart and mind. Is the
Sahara a vast barren desert devoid of life, or is it a symbol of a transcendent reality, a
forest holding the timber of a new beginning?

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 122 jung journal: culture & psyche 6:1 / winter 2012

Wrestling with Jung’s work helped me accept and open to my Jewish life in ways
organized religion could not. He showed how, within the context of western science in
general and psychology in particular, there needed to be a place for the spirit, for a mean-
ingful encounter with that which is beyond the ego. I hope that in this essay I have illus-
trated to some degree the ways Jung’s approach to the symbol, the mystery, the union of
opposites, and even wrestling with his anti-Semitism, helped this exiled Jew find a way to
a relationship with my own roots in a kabbalistic universe. Equally, I hope I succeeded in
some measure by showing how the symbolic dimensions found within the Jewish mystical
tradition might amplify Jung’s ideas about the union of opposites or psychic wholeness,
particularly in forging a link with dimensions of psychic reality that can tie the archetypal
to interhuman relatedness. These traditions—analytical psychology and Kabbalah—have
historically and culturally divergent sources. The differences between them create a ten-
sion that can produce a deeper understanding and experience, a window through which,
for me, the woundedness in relation to being a Jew could be transformed, take root, and
reveal more fully who I am. About the visions he had following his heart attack in 1944,
Jung wrote in his autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections:
My life as I lived it had often seemed to me like a story that has no beginning and no end.
I had the feeling that I was a historical fragment, an excerpt for which the preceding and
succeeding text was missing. My life seemed to have been snipped out of a long chain of
events, and many questions had remained unanswered. Why had it taken this course?
Why had I brought these particular assumptions with me? What had I made of them?
What will follow?” (1961, 291)

I am deeply moved by these words. They come from a direction toward which we
might each turn to hear in the quiet stillness our singular response to the eternal ques-
tion, “Where are you?”

note
References to The Collected Works of C. G. Jung are cited in the text as CW, volume number, and
paragraph number. The Collected Works are published in English by Routledge (UK) and
Princeton University Press (USA).

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steve zemmelman, m.s.w., ph.d., is an analyst member of the C. G. Jung Institute of

San Francisco and maintains a private practice in San Francisco and Berkeley, California.
He is an associate clinical professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of
California at San Francisco, a lecturer at the University of California at Berkeley, and a core
faculty member of the Sanville Institute for Clinical Social Work and Psychotherapy. He has
an interest in the intersection of depth psychology, spirit, and culture. Correspondence: 2142
Sutter Street, San Francisco, California 94115. E-mail: stevezemmelman@comcast.net.

abstract
The author narrates the development of his relationship with his Jewish roots and its evolution
as a form of religiosity. He shows how this process was nurtured by an immersion in Jungian
psychology and how, in turn, the Jewish Kabbalistic tradition can inform the understanding and
clinical application of analytical psychology. The history of Jung’s relationship with Judaism is
explored, particularly during the rise of Nazi Germany. The paper includes a discussion of Jung’s
application of a Christianized interpretation of the symbolism in Mysterium Coniunctionis that
could be amplified by considering it through a kabbalistic lens.

key words
anima, anti-Semitism, archetype, Buber, Christian, Divine, Divinity, ego, feminine, God,
Judaism, Jung, Kabbalah, Nazi, religiosity, Self, Shekhinah, symbol, tikkun olam

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