Worship Through Corporeality: Mormonism, Hasidism, and Management

Speaker 1

Our next speaker is Allen Hansen, who was born and raised LDS in northern Israel, where he spent much of his life. alongside a love for literature, especially British, Russian, and Israeli. His research interests include Mormonism, Judaism, Biblical studies, late antiquity, journalism, Eastern European and Middle Eastern history. Allen Hansen.

Allen Hansen

Thank you. So this is a paper that my friend Walker and I have written. I’m presenting it because it’s a little bit difficult of a drive from Denton to Salt Lake. From Denton, Texas. So we just had some thoughts on what is LDS we would call Zion. And we looked to both Jewish, LDS, and business management is positive psychology for this. All right.

Allen Hansen

So a central teaching of Hasidic thought is that of worship through corporeality. Without getting too technical, this doctrine meant that mundane acts can be sanctified and transformed, thereby influencing for the better cosmic processes in the divine. A verse commonly quoted was from Proverbs 3:6, "In all thy ways know him." That is, everything one does can become an act of worship. It was said of one Hasidic master that he did not travel to the Maggid of Mezritch house to hear him expound Torah, but to see how he took off his shoes and how he tied his shoelaces. The same Hasidic Master also decried mere preaching. The goal instead is to be Torah. Each and every action should be in such harmony with the sacred revelations of God that the act itself embodies them. "Worship through corporeality," writes Norman Lamb, "brought into the domain of religious significance the entire range of human activity. There is literally nothing that’s outside of it."

Allen Hansen

One of the major sources for this doctrine was the Enoch work circulating in the medieval era. The influential Kabbalist Rabbi Isaac of Acre was troubled by the Bible’s iconic descriptions of Enoch and his heavenly ascent. The reasons for Elijah’s ascension were fairly clear from the biblical text, but the Enoch passages were entirely cryptic. Rabbi Isaac turned to his teacher for help. He said that he received a tradition that Enoch was Anoushkof, a cobbler. That is, he sewed together shoes. And with every incision and incision that he made using the stitching awl, he blessed God. And he blessed God with a whole heart and perfect intent, extending the blessing to the emanated Metatron. Never did he forget to bless during even so much as a single incision, but he would always do so until because of so much love, he was not. For God took him and he merited being called Metatron, and his virtue is very great indeed.

Allen Hansen

God in Kabbalistic thought is represented by a series of emanations. The term sephirot, each one has its own unique names and attributes. The emanated Metatron was considered to be Malkuth, the tenth and lowest Sephira, which is the one closest to Earth. This Metatron is distinct from Enoch, the creative Metatron, who is merely given that title. While the quote from Rabbi Isaac is a clear theurgical statement, he does introduce such patristic elements as emotion and devotion. Now living before the commandments were given to Moses, Enoch loved God and served him wholeheartedly by focusing his love and intents on God, even during such a mundane and menial act as sewing together shoes. His act of blessing caused power and vitality to flow downwards to the lower Sephirah and unite the lower and upper worlds. Because of this great love Enoch had for God, he was taken up and exalted.

Allen Hansen

Abstract emotion and devotion without accompanying acts do not suffice to cause a change in the world. But the same also holds true in the reverse. Acts without the proper devotion and emotion are sterile at best. They simply do not live up to their full potential. The redemption of the world occurs not through heroic acts by superhuman saints, but through the daily activities of a lowly tradesman.

Allen Hansen

Now, this story was frequently utilized by the 16th century Kabbalists of Tzfat in their theoretical discussions of Kabbalah, and its pietism receded into the background. Even so, it still exerted an influence on the monistic idea that profane, mundane, and menial acts carried within them the potential for holiness. The same holds true for wells dug by the patriarchs. And Rabbi Isaac Luria wrote that their intentions corresponded to those who're donning phylacteries, which in Judaism is one of the highest acts of devotion in daily life.

Allen Hansen

The Hasidic hagiography entitled Praises of the Besht includes the story of how Rabbi Yisrael Baal Shem Tov, known as the Besht, trembled when he saw a hose-maker on his way to prayers. Inviting him over, the Besht questioned the hose-maker about his daily activities. During the course of the interview, the man is shown to be a simple, hardworking, honest man full of integrity and devout. In both trade and devotion, a contemporary counterpart to Enoch, the shoemaker. The Besht said to him, "What do you do very early in the morning?" He said, "I make stockings at that time as well." He asked him, "How do you recite the Psalms?" He said to him, "I recite what I can say by heart." The Besht said about him that he is the foundation of the synagogue until the coming of the Messiah.

Allen Hansen

Now, scholar T. P. Kaufman, in her monograph on worship through corporeality, observed that the majority of the hose-makers’ activities took place outside the synagogue. It is precisely this paradoxical situation that earns him the greatest praise. Raising the realm of the profane to that of the sacred reveals the true essence of worship and hints at the monism which will prevail with the advent of the Messiah.

Allen Hansen

Reflecting on the centrality of this Enoch tradition to Hasidism, Martin Buber remarked that man exerts influence on the eternal, and that this is not done by any special works, but by the intention with which he does all his works. It is a teaching of the hallowing of the everyday. By using Enoch as its blueprint, Hasidism spread not only among the poor, illiterate masses, but among wealthy merchants as well. Indeed, they were among its staunchest supporters.

Allen Hansen

By invoking the Hasidic concept of worship through corporeality, the Seer of Lublin reassured busy merchants and his audience that they could transform business trips into paths to holiness. In the seer’s own words, "When a merchant travels on business, he should say to himself, 'I am traveling for business so that I will have money to serve God by paying for my son’s tuition, so that my sons will be Talmudic scholars engaging in the Torah and Mitzvot for the sake of heaven, and so that I can marry my daughters to scholars and sanctify the Sabbath and give charity.'" And in this way he connects his business to God.

Allen Hansen

Enoch the Shoemaker served as a blueprint not only for Hasidism, but for the Musal movement as well. The Lithuanian rabbi Yusael Selante sought to transform the Jewish world around him, which he felt had become entirely immersed in ritual and outward trappings, at the expense of true devotion to God and man. The vehicle for his projected revival was exacting psychological application of ethics, that is Musar, to all spheres of life. Now the Musar movement fought against a broken and fragmentary Judaism, against a narrow-minded and limited Judaism—in the words of one of its scholars. It demands a consistent Judaism, a Judaism that is wide in scope and broad in vision. Half measures do not suffice in observing the Torah. Keeping well-known commandments and warnings alone will not do. The entire framework must be perfected and expanded to encompass the Torah in all of its commandments and warnings; be they those between God and man, between man and man, between man and himself, and between man and the entire world around him.

Allen Hansen

For example, according to the Musar Movement, impatience and severity in judging others is on the same legal and moral footing as theft. Rabbi Saad saw in the pursuit of ethical perfection a communal effort, and as an initial step sought to establish among the Jewish upper and middle classes groups for the study and application of Musar. This segment of society was well educated, affluent, and thoroughly involved in community affairs.

Allen Hansen

In Abisael’s analysis of the Enoch tale, theurgical and theosophical elements are entirely discarded in favor of ethics. This does not mean that when Enoch sewed together shoes he was cleaving to supernal thoughts. The law forbids it, for how can he be occupied with something else when he is employed on behalf of other people? Rather, the essence of his unifications was a concern that each and every stitch would be good and strong in order for people to benefit from the shoes. Thus he cleaved to the attribute of his Maker, who bestows his beneficence on all. And this is how he performed unifications, desiring nothing other than to cleave to the attributes of his Maker.

Allen Hansen

And in the words of his modern biographer, when there was a conflict between God-centered piety or kindness towards one’s fellow man, Abisael preferred the latter, even when it meant sacrificing the former. Enoch’s ascension came as a result of his intense devotion to benefiting and bettering his fellow man. This was the true essence of God’s own character. So doing even the menial task to the utmost of one’s ability in order to help others is indeed the highest form of imitatio dei. Doing one’s job well takes precedence over studying lofty theological matters.

Allen Hansen

Now, Rabbi Abraham Isaac Cook, the preeminent Jewish mystic and thinker of the 20th century, combined elements from Hasidism and Musar into his own thought. and provides perhaps the clearest expression of Jewish monism. For Rabbi Cook, the essence of Judaism, which flows from Jewish monotheism, is a passion to overcome separatism. The severance of man from God, of man from man, of man from nature. It is a passion to perfect the world through man’s awareness of his links to all else in existence. It is a rejection of the alleged antagonism between the material and the spiritual. It is a rejection of every parochialism that seeks to build man’s spiritual home and a structure of values by taking to itself a fragment of life and ignoring the rest. The Jewish outlook, said Rabbi Cook, is the vision of the holiness of all existence.

Allen Hansen

Now this collapse of sacred distance is, according to Terryl Givens, one of the hallmarks of Mormonism and of Joseph Smith in particular. Joseph insistently refused to recognize the distinctness of those categories that were typical in traditional Christianity; the sense that there is an earthly and a heavenly, a bodily and a spiritual. Every time that we think we have found an example of what we think is a dichotomy, Joseph collapsed it into one. We are told by Joseph that not only is God the Father embodied, but was once a man as we are, and is an exalted man, and sits enthroned in yonder heavens. Both spirit and body become the soul of man in Joseph’s hands. Spirit itself is no longer seen as an immaterial substance. but a more fine or pure matter that can only be discerned by purer eyes. The gathering of Latter-day Israel was literal, as was the establishment of Zion; its model being the translated city of Enoch. It was made clear that all things unto the Lord are spiritual, with no temporal law ever being given.

Allen Hansen

As a covenant people, the Mormons felt that they were duty-bound to the toil and sweat of Zion-building. The need to find the divine and the mundane surely increased as the Mormons headed west and established an isolated theocratic government. As historian Matthew Bowman has noted, "Brigham Young bound even more closely than had Joseph Smith the Mormon sense of themselves as a covenanted people, especially chosen by God to the practical work of building a community on earth. The distance between the sacred and secular on the trail was vanishingly small. The captains of the companies routinely celebrated the Lord’s Supper as they prepared decisions about when to move and what trail to take."

Allen Hansen

President Young saw the work of building up Zion as a practical work and not a mere theory. The saints were not going to wait for angels or for Enoch and his company to come and build up Zion, but we are going to build it. Young often spoke of present salvation brought on by the constant presence of the Spirit. It is present salvation and the present influence of the Holy Ghost that we need every day to keep us on saving ground. I preach comparatively but little about the Eternities and gods and their wonderful works in Eternity, and do not tell who first made them nor how they were made, for I know nothing about that. Life is for us, and it is for us to receive it today and not wait for the millennium. If the divine as an abstraction was on its deathbed with the teachings of Joseph Smith, it met its ultimate demise under the reign of Brigham Young.

Allen Hansen

"In the mind of God," said Young, "there is no such thing as dividing spiritual from temporal, or temporal from spiritual, for they are one in the Lord." Only to those who understand the principles of life and salvation, the priesthood, the oracles of truth, and the gifts and callings of God to the children of men, is there no difference in spiritual and temporal labors. All are one. The sacred task could range from preaching, praying labouring with my hands for an honorable support, whether I am in the field, mechanic shop, or following mercantile business. Wherever duty calls, I am serving God as much in one place as another. So it is with all, each in his place, turn, and time.

Allen Hansen

With this outlook, Brigham declared that his mission was to teach the saints with regard to their everyday lives. My desire is to teach the people what they should do now, and let the millennium take care of itself. For Young, reducing the gospel to the present time circumstances and condition of the people was the way in which God’s people should live it. The law of God in his view was a system best to live by and best to die by. It is the best for doing business, it is the best for making farms, for building cities and temples, and would bring present security and peace.

Allen Hansen

Now, recalling a conversation with a gentleman who didn’t think that the Mormons seemed very religious, Young explained, "That is a mistake. We are the most religious people on the face of the earth. We do not allow ourselves to go into a field to plow without taking our religion with us. We do not go into an office behind the counter to deal out goods, into accounting house with the books, or anywhere to attend or transact any business without taking our religion with us. If we are railroading or on a pleasure trip, our God and our religion must be with us." Okay.

Allen Hansen

Now, the Mormon religion incorporates every act and word of man. No man should do it unless he does it in God. And this cosmological monism can be seen in other late nineteenth century publications. So in 1897 the Millennial Star talked of a Mormon Indian colony on the Malad River in Boxelder County, where the local Aborigines were being urged to dig an irrigation ditch. So the elder was going to be absent, and he left one of the Indian converts in charge. And he asked him what he would be preaching. And the reply, and one of the best examples of Mormonism’s own worship through corporeality, only preach him, heap, water, ditch, water, ditch. Now the Lamanite had partaken of the spirit and genius of Mormonism. Water ditch and water baptism are both vital principles of that religion. The redemption of the soul, the body, and the home of man is its purpose. The redemption of the earth and its restoration to a paradisiacal state will be brought about in part by the blessing and power of God, and in part by the labors and sacrifices of its inhabitants under the light of the gospel and direction of the authorized servants of God. The Lamanite who had grasped the need of a water ditch by means of which to redeem a portion of the earth’s surface that was a desert, had grasped the vital principle of the gospel of Christ.

Allen Hansen

How much more time do you have? One minute. All right. So we’re running out of time here, but

Allen Hansen

This monism established by Joseph Smith and expanded by Brigham Young was a key element in Mormonism’s doctrine of eternal progression. That was, as Jacob Baker explained, the biggest attraction for the intellectuals in the church was the idea of progression eternally. And despite the Platonic ideal, people do not spend the majority of their time in the act of deep contemplation. Instead, they are performing the seemingly menial tasks of daily life. This largely consists of one’s form of employment, and finding meaning in the lone and dreary world of day-to-day work has been a point of increasing interest among management experts and organizational theorists. And their findings yield very fruitful results which we can apply to Mormonism. So business author Daniel Pink has identified three key components: autonomy, mastery, purpose. The second, mastery, is similar to flow, but it means something that we’re constantly seeking for. And when we get all this done, then we are engaged in a work which combines elements of being joy-- sorry, elements of joy, of autonomy. And this activity is what gives our life meaning.