The pilgrimage (aliyah laregel ) in Judaism was always an important social institution, one that helped promote the Jewish people's social solidarity, even before Jerusalem was "crowned" as the city where the Temple would be built (Amos 5:5 ). However, pilgrimages to the Temple in Jerusalem reached their glorious crescendo only in the last few generations of the Second Temple period, particularly on the festivals of Pesach and Sukkot.

As can be seen from the biblical text, at least ostensibly, the goal of the pilgrimage was to see God's face (Exodus 23:15, for example ). Although, in the biblical text, it is stated everywhere that visitors to the Temple will be seen by "God's face," scholars are of the opinion that the text was altered to avoid any reference to an actual physical divine presence, and that the original text simply stated that the pilgrims to Jerusalem actually did see God's face (Samuel E. Loewenstamm, "Encyclopedia Mikrait" [Biblical Encyclopedia, in Hebrew], Vol. 7, p. 236 ).

Open gallery view Huichol Indians.

It must be asked here: What is the significance of the idea of actually seeing God? There are those who argue that the Bible is preserving testimony here regarding ancient times, when a statue of God was placed in the Temple and could thus be seen by anyone who made the pilgrimage there. On the other hand, there are those who reject this assumption and explain that the visit to the Temple was considered equivalent to actually seeing God (ibid., p. 326 ).

Although we will never know what spiritual experiences were undergone by the pilgrims to Jerusalem who brought with them sacrifices (korbanot ) - namely, gifts intended to draw them closer (the verb lekarev, to draw closer, is from the same root as korban, sacrifice ) to God - it seems to me that it would be helpfpul for us to take a look at other cultures, in order to hear voices from the distant past that perhaps can indirectly attest to the experiential world that vanished with the destruction of Jerusalem's Temple.

The pilgrimage I want to talk about will take us to a distant culture, and I am intentionally doing this because I am arguing that, in the world of antiquity, which preceded the process of segregation and the growth of individualism that began in the Renaissance and which has continued until to this very day, in the postmodernist era, the idea of "seeing God's face" had a very real meaning in spiritual terms.

First, it must be pointed out that the commandment to make a pilgrimage is not at all unique to the Jewish world; it can be found in nearly every religion. Moreover, in most religions, the central concept at the heart of the worldview is connected in one way or another with the idea of walking the right path. Thus, the Hebrew word "halakha," the body of Jewish law (probably from the root heh-lamed-kaf, meaning "walk" ) conveys the same notion, for instance, as "sharia" in Islam or "marga" in Buddhism; even the hard-to-define term "tao" is connected to the concept of a path.

Furthermore, it should be noted that when we look at pilgrimages from around the world, we find that they all have a similar structure. There is always a division into three stages: the severing of oneself from routine life in order to set out on the journey; the experience of being in a liminal state; and the reunification with one's group. What is unique about the middle "elevated" stage is that, while the pilgrims have cut themselves off from ordinary life, they are still in the middle of their journey and have not yet reached the next "level." (For example, the title "haj" is added to the name of a Muslim who has already made the pilgrimage to Mecca and has returned as a person with a different spiritual status. )

Intact ritual

The pilgrimage I wish to depict here falls in the category of rare types; in other words, pilgrimages in this category have not been influenced by Western sources and have to this day kept their ancient nature almost perfectly intact. I am referring here to the annual pilgrimage made by a select group of individuals from the Huichol Indian tribe to the place that their culture holds sacred. Among all the Indian tribes, the Huichols of Mexico are the only ones who have preserved their original culture to this very day. Spanish culture has had very little impact on the Huichols and the same can be said for the Christianity that the Spaniards forcibly imposed on them.

The Huichols live in a rugged region in northern Mexico on the western ridges of the Sierra Madre Mountains, to which they apparently fled from the Spaniards four centuries ago; at least that is the theory of Hebrew University anthropologist Prof. Nahum Megged. However, the place that the Huichols regard as sacred is located in the Wirikuta desert, which is hundreds of kilometers from their villages. Although, in the past, the select group of individuals chosen to make the annual pilgrimage did so by foot, today the Huichol pilgrims are transported by truck to a spot located at a certain distance from the sacred place so that they can, for symbolic reasons, do the final stretch of the pilgrimage by foot.

What is unique about this remote place is the peyote plant that grows there. The active substance in peyote is mescaline, a naturally occurring hallucinogenic drug that "transports" the Huichols into a different journey and enables them to make an "internal pilgrimage" to the "world of truth." When they reach the sacred place, they engage in a symbolic "hunt" for this desert cactus, which they symbolically refer to as the Blue Deer - the tribe's totem friend that helps the shaman to perform his rituals.

Ethnographers have recorded from Huichols' personal testimony early myths that shed light on their pilgrimage. The Huichols believe that, at the dawn of time, a cosmic crisis occurred that resulted in all of humanity being struck with plagues and other catastrophes. In this calamitous era, according to Huichol mythology, Tatewari (which means "our Grandfather Fire" ) convened a meeting of all the other gods. The Huichols do not perceive their gods in the same way that Jews or Christians perceive God. In the eyes of the Huichols, the primeval forces were their ancestors, and the "god" Tatewari was actually a shaman. These Indians call him, and any shaman, "mara'akame."

In the context of his role, Tatewari revealed to the other gods that the cure for the world's disastrous state was a journey that they all must make to the east where the sun was "born" - the Wirikuta desert - in order to be able to "hunt" the peyote plant and thereby "repair the world."

According to Huichol mythology, most of the gods died in the attempt to reach the sacred place, but Tatewari and a few central gods, such as the goddess of rain and the goddess of the earth, successfully completed the pilgrimage, and thus saved the primordial world from its crisis. That is why a select number of Huichols embark on this pilgrimage each year. For all those who ponder the significance of the use of peyote by the Huichols for ritual purposes, it should be emphasized that there is a world of difference between the tribe's ritual use of peyote and the consumption of drugs in Western culture in order to escape from reality: The work of the Huichol shaman with what are considered to be power-inducing plants is intended to free the shaman's consciousness and enable him to move onto a higher spiritual plane so that he can help those members of the tribe who require his intervention. In such a mental state, not only is the shaman fullly focused, he is able to concentrate his powers of empathy on the person he is treating; in the view of the Huichols, he is able to see what people in a normal state of consciousness are unable to see.

We can now return to the subject with which we opened: seeing God's face. Prof. Megged, who in 1996 joined a similar ceremony conducted by a congregation affiliated with the Christian American Indian Church, reported an experience that he was unable to put into words. At a certain stage, he writes, "I beheld a spectacle that was bright and clear. A luminous skull approached me. It looked like a flame that had been lit before my eyes and I felt that it was trying to hypnotize me. Judging by its appearance, I recognized the skull as Mokiera, the Huichol goddess of death." Megged goes on to relate his conversation with a person who stood beside him during the ceremony, and who "described word for word the same hallucination I had experienced."

Megged is a Western scholar and thus he was quite confused by this event, which he was unable to properly explain. Nonetheless, what he does manage to describe is the collective experience of pilgrims who "saw God's face."

The idea of seeing God's face as referred to in the Bible can thus be interpreted as a collective spiritual experience which, during the Temple period, was a real experience, too; however, with the Temple's destruction, it has vanished. All that is left for us is therefore to cast our gaze forward at authentic types of spiritual experiences that are suited to the development of individualism in the modern era.

Nonetheless, there is one thing, it seems to me, that can be learned from the reports concerning the experiences of the Huichol Indians: The mara'akame, the tribe's shaman, never preaches to the members of his tribe that it is permissible to murder in the name of religion, to cause distress to the members of another nation, or to persecute those who do not believe in this or that detail. The shaman does not believe that the gods punish us human beings just because we have failed to impose on others the laws governing the Sabbath, or because we have failed to force others to refrain from eating leavened bread on Passover.

The Huichols have nothing that bears any resemblance to missionary work or to the Muslim jihad, holy war. Their sins, or those acts for which people are judged by the gods, all fall into the category of what is termed in Judaism "bein adam lahavero" - interpersonal relations.

At one of the events at which Megged was present, a ceremony in which a shaman attended to a dying man, the shaman told Megged, "I took the hikuri [peyote plant] and entered the world of tananama [the gods of heaven]. I knew that he [the dying man] had been given a severe punishment. We come to this world in order to enjoy the water, light and color that the gods have given us. They ask that we remember them. It is wrong to just take, one must also give; apparently, this man forgot that rule."

In my view, it was not just the dying man who forgot the rule; our religious leaders, here in Israel and in the world, forgot a long time ago what the gods really demand of us.