Do Not Turn to Ghosts
Spiritual Experience is Not the Point
Do not turn to ghosts and do not inquire of familiar spirits, to be defiled by them: I the Lord am your God. (Leviticus 19:31)
Then Saul said to his courtiers, “Find me a woman who consults ghosts, so that I can go to her and inquire through her.” And his courtiers told him that there was a woman in En-dor who consulted ghosts. Saul disguised himself; he put on different clothes and set out with two men. They came to the woman by night, and he said, “Please divine for me by a ghost. Bring up for me the one I shall name to you.” But the woman answered him, “You know what Saul has done, how he has banned [the use of] ghosts and familiar spirits in the land. So why are you laying a trap for me, to get me killed?” Saul swore to her by the LORD: “As the LORD lives, you won’t get into trouble over this.” At that, the woman asked, “Whom shall I bring up for you?” He answered, “Bring up Samuel for me.” Then the woman recognized Samuel, and she shrieked loudly, and said to Saul, “Why have you deceived me? You are Saul!” The king answered her, “Don’t be afraid. What do you see?” And the woman said to Saul, “I see a divine being coming up from the earth.” “What does he look like?” he asked her. “It is an old man coming up,” she said, “and he is wrapped in a robe.” Then Saul knew that it was Samuel; and he bowed low in homage with his face to the ground. Samuel said to Saul, “Why have you disturbed me and brought me up?” And Saul answered, “I am in great trouble. The Philistines are attacking me and God has turned away from me; He no longer answers me, either by prophets or in dreams. So I have called you to tell me what I am to do.” Samuel said, “Why do you ask me, seeing that the LORD has turned away from you and has become your adversary? (1 Samuel 28:7-24)
What’s wrong with talking to ghosts? On first blush, the answer is not that they are illusions, or that chatting to spirits is a kind of madness. No, ghosts are real. But they represent a kind of attempt at spiritual bypass. Why are some who seem to have spiritual talent or insight nonetheless morally defective? One possible answer is that their spiritual talent, while genuine, is misdirected. They’ve turned the spiritual life into a form of self-service, a form of ego-worship, rather than into a humble life of service. It’s easy to find extreme examples, but this propensity lurks within us all, and is perhaps greatest in those of us who have experienced “eureka.”
The temptation to chase revelation like a high, instead of asking how we might live more soberly and responsibly day in and day out, is an occupational hazard of spiritual life.
Despite banning the practice of spirit summoning, and enforcing the law as prescribed in Leviticus 19, King Saul cannot help himself. The Torah gives us a story not just of a leader violating the law, but of a leader violating the very law he himself has executed—in a moment of striking hypocrisy (and pathos). When Saul’s prayers are unanswered, he takes to desperate measures, anything to make contact with the divine. Who wouldn’t? “If you don’t like my principles, I have other principles.”
From the example of Saul, we gain some perspective on what the Torah might be up to in making ghost-consultations illicit.
If you ask social scientists what religion is about they’ll tell you that it’s about human need. For Mordechai Kaplan, religion is “folk wisdom.” For Clifford Geertz, it’s a system of signs. For Emile Durkheim, religion is about “collective effervescence.” For Marx, it’s a “haven in a heartless world.” But is religion just a sociological phenomenon? Social scientists are out of their depths on this question, because their methods, like all academic methods that owe their roots to the 19th century German university, are atheistic and rationalistic. From a purely abstracted, clinical point of view, there is no difference between ghost consultation and YHWH worship, or, to put the point most brutally, between child sacrifice and animal sacrifice. This is, effectively, Leo Strauss’s critique of modern thought in Natural Right and History. The social sciences are morally relativistic. The task of the social scientist is to describe, not evaluate.
The reduction of religion to human need and human expediency is precisely what the Torah consistently challenges. In rejecting Cain’s sacrifice, God offers us the hard lesson that religion is not a fail-proof technology for manipulating our environment. And in rejecting Saul, this point is made for us again. Sometimes, religion is about hearing no, hitting a limit. Sometimes, God affirms our intuitions, but other times, the existence of God means that we are in the wrong, and that we can’t just live inside our own projections. There is a truth outside of us and we need to be open to self-correcting. Call this view moral realism, a concept I recently had the pleasure of exploring in conversation with Tara Isabella Burton. To consult the ghost is to look for reasons to self-justify and self-defend instead of accepting feedback.
Ok, sure, there is something dodgy about the spirit-world. But perhaps the main reason for the ban has more to do with the motivation than with the substance. What would lead someone to pursue a kind of spiritual connection on the “Black market”? A person who is looking for a second opinion, who is shopping around for the answer she wants, is not a genuine seeker. Saul doesn’t pull Samuel up from the grave to get answers, but to confirm his bias. This is a great and common human foible, not just an outlier occurrence. It is not just the ghost consultant who suffers from confirmation bias, but also the YHWH worshipper, who can turn even monotheism or Judaism into an occasion for self-worship.
Depending on context, the unwillingness to hear “no” can be a virtue or a vice. Virtuously, it’s a sign of stubborn attachment, loyalty, commitment, persistence. Viciously, it’s a sign of rigidity and delusions of grandeur. The first lesson of monotheism is we are not God. The second lesson is that despite not being God, we are Godly, and can find divinity, partially, in ourselves and one another. We cannot be God, but we can walk in God’s ways. We can be holy. But the paradigmatic person who seeks to summon up ghosts is not looking to be godly. He’s looking to be God, to turn religion into a means of self-service. The ghost consulter turns the spiritual life into a practice of attainment and achievement rather than waiting, patience, and receptivity. In so doing, the holy becomes profane, spirituality becomes a skill or craft or experience no different than anything else.
Here’s the rub: there are many great spiritual experiences one can have, and which the Torah acknowledges as powerful. But the criterion by which we judge spiritual experience is not solely or mainly whether it was enjoyable or even meaningful. I’m sure Saul would have given the Witch of Endor a five star Yelp review. But “user experience” is a shallow metric for those who are called to be holy.
The call to be holy unifies the variety of laws that appear in this week’s parasha, Kedoshim. This call is different than the call to be impactful or the call to self-optimize or the call to curate one’s life to one’s liking, to be a Lebenskünstler. It is a call that commands the self from without, that reminds the self that it originates in and is obligated to something beyond itself.
Of course, we cannot and should not lose ourselves or sacrifice ourselves to the point of total abnegation, yet we should be less attached to our default orientation of self-centeredness. The “holiness code” prescribes a set of behaviors that we can practice to habituate ourselves away from self-worship, a set of reminders that we are not God.
When we leave the corners of our field for the poor, offer up first fruits of harvest in jubilee, let the land rest, care for elders, or observe the statutes that seem, on their face, non-obviously utility-maximizing, we are humbling ourselves.
To know conceptually that we are fallible and limited is one thing. To live it is another. The Torah is a tree of life for those who live it.
Shabbat Shalom,
Zohar Atkins @ Etz Hasadeh
Heterodox Academy featured an edited version of my conversation with John Tomasi.
My conversation with novelist and theologian Tara Isabella Burton is out. We talk about new age religion, social media, pluralism, and much more!
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