Rabbi Michael Leo Samuel

In July of 1969, a team headed by of anthropologist Edmund Carpenter, went to study a primitive Stone Age tribe in a remote part of New Guinea off the Sepik River. These anthropologists were eager to study how the natives would react to the gadgetry of the Western world. Loaded with various paraphernalia from the West, e.g. mirrors, instant cameras, and video equipment, the native villagers were at first surprised, bewildered and fearful of the foreigners’ Western technology. Eventually, they became enamored by the culture of the West.

When Carpenter returned with his crew, three months later, they were shocked by what they had seen: “At first I thought I had made a mistake and come to the wrong place. It had changed completely. Houses had been rebuilt in a new style. The men wore European clothes, carried themselves differently, acted differently. They had left a village after our visit and, for the first time, traveled outside the world they had previously know . . . . Suddenly the cohesive village had become a collection of separate, private individuals. Like the hero of Matthew Arnold’s poem, they wandered “between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born.”[1]

Carpenter discerned that everything the tribe had regarded as sacred became commercialized and de-scaralized. Modern society violated the world of an archaic civilization. Shocked by what his seemingly innocent experiment had caused, Carpenter and his crew realized they had inadvertently done was nothing less than cultural murder.

Psychologist Carl G. Jung observed that once a primitive tribe’s spiritual values are exposed to the impact of modern civilization, its people will lose the meaning of their lives; the social order disintegrates; the people themselves morally decay. In this condition, man is out of touch with himself, and can no longer make sense and meaning out of his life. To the person who experiences “loss of soul” society’s myths, rituals, symbols, images and traditions cease to have any relevance.

What does this mean in a practical sense?

Whenever “soul loss” occurs, the world of religious tradition no longer holds sway over the conscious psyche. Religious dogma and its symbols become diminished, along with the individual’s sensitivity for its cultural values. In effect, the individual has already assimilated to the dominant culture’s values. This is an important point for the Jewish community in particular because it really doesn’t matter whether one calls oneself “Conservative,” “Reform,” or even “Orthodox.”

Whenever a society or individual experiences soul loss, life seems to have no purpose or consequence. People lose not only their sense of past, but their sense of future as well. It is for this reason, Jung regarded the loss of soul is also one of the primary causes of the social discord and spiritual chaos of our times.

Antecedents of soul loss to a certain degree, could be seen when the Industrial Age began producing rippling changes throughout the world. Before that time, people everywhere from Europe to Africa, experienced the meaning of their lives in the context of the tribal and religious customs of the community. Whole tribes were completely displaced from their ancestral roots. The old standards were irrevocably changed and severely shaken by technology and the forces of capitalism. The power of money became the yardstick that measured the value and utility of the person. (Indeed, the same cultural phenomenon can be seen in today’s “outsourcing” of American jobs to third-world countries that can produce the same goods for a much cheaper cost to the manufacturer and the consumer, people in our own country suddenly feel completely displaced in many parts of our country where jobs are no longer existent.)

As families scattered to the cities looking for work, the bonds that had integrated families and communities started to disintegrate. The social order began to unravel. Without his faith, the individual was left unprotected. Isolated, and cut off from his spiritual roots, the modern technological man was left to fend for himself in his attempt to make life meaningful.

Modernity produced what sociologist Peter Berger describes as the “heretical imperative.” The English word heresy comes from the Greek verb hairein, which means “to choose.”[2] Values were no longer eternally given or defined by God — man became the creator and chooser of value, The pre-modern society was a world of religious certainty; deviation was the exception rather than the norm. By contrast, the modern situation is a world of religious uncertainty; the boundaries differentiating the religious world are hazily defined. Religious affirmation must be consciously affirmed rather than assumed. Once the choice for self-definition was made, the pre-modern societies began to unravel and disperse. Modernity helped shattered the historical consciousness of traditional religious societies.

Psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton, describes the modern age as “protean” named after Proteus, the Greek sea-god of many forms. He asserts that the protean age is one of great historical changes, and is characterized by great social upheavals that have dramatically impacted community and individual life alike. The social institutions that have traditionally anchored human lives have become ineffectual.The modern man/woman is a historically fragmented creature and has adopted change (proteanism) as a way of overcoming homelessness.

In the next section, we will examine how soul loss has impacted the religious imagination of today’s contemporary Jew.