Since its emergence in the early 1970s, the Jewish Renewal movement has made a revolutionary break from past forms of Judaism. Led by Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, the movement’s architect, Jewish Renewal communities have explored new realms of Jewish ritual and aesthetic innovation, gender inclusivity, progressive political activism, environmentalism, and interfaith cross-pollination. We have sought to usher in a new Aquarian Age of Judaism.In the present moment, as we mourn the recent passing of Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi and reflect back on his brilliant contributions to the Jewish Renewal movement, we are also looking forward and wondering what the future holds. Will the revolutionary qualities of Jewish Renewal prove vibrant and lasting, or will this attempt to make a seismic break from the past eventually sink into an abyss of disappointment, as have so many other attempts to usher in radical transformation? A hundred years from now, what will historians see as Jewish Renewal’s lasting contribution to the revival of Judaism in the twenty-first century? Will it be seen merely as an umbrella movement that grew out of the Chavurah movement in the early 1970s, when Judaism met the New Age in the generation of the counterculture? What can maximize the success of this attempt to jump ahead of history, to view our world as containing the possibility of a leap forward, a paradigm shift?I believe that the future of this attempt at Aquarian Age Judaism will depend in large part on our continued exploration of the most paradigm-shifting aspect of Jewish Renewal: its radically new approach to Jewish metaphysics.Back in 1970, in a commencement address to Hebrew College, Jewish historian Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi noted that past attempts at Aquarian Ages (attempts to view the present as a seismic break from the past), have all tragically moved from revolution to disappointment and even despotism. It is the historian, he argued, who can best serve as the gatekeeper to prevent these attempts at renewal from sinking into the abyss of despair. Below I challenge Yerushalmi’s pessimistic claim about spiritual revolutions and the exclusive role of the historian to mitigate its negative consequences.Aquarian Ages usually contain two overlapping but not identical components: the practical and the theoretical, or the ritualistic/activist and the metaphysical. Much has been written on the practical components of Jewish Renewal—its aesthetic and ritual experimentation and its progressive agenda of social activism. Indeed, much of the writing about the progressive social justice dimension of Jewish Renewal has appeared here in the pages of Tikkun, as well as in Michael Lerner’s Jewish Renewal: A Path to Healing and Transformation. Less has been written about its metaphysics. A deep exploration of Jewish Renewal’s metaphysics, or theology, can contribute something crucial to the staying power and longevity of Aquarian or renewal movements and thus help avoid the pitfalls Yerushalmi described.Contemporary Jewish Renewal can be divided into two basic components. The first component, which I call “second-wave neo-Hasidism,” follows in the footsteps of first-wave neo-Hasidism popular at the turn of the twentieth century and consists largely of an adaptation, or revision, of Hasidism to conform to present-day sensibilities and beliefs. Rabbi Schachter-Shalomi was deeply engaged in this effort to adapt Hasidism to the New Age. One can see this in Fragments of a Future Scroll: Hassidism for the Aquarian Age, Wrapped in a Holy Flame, and A Hidden Light. As part of this focus, he also made great contributions to gender inclusivity, drawing together feminist Judaisms with neo-Hasidism.The second basic component of Jewish Renewal, which I call “Paradigm Shift Judaism,” is a revolutionary break from original Hasidism, and even a break from neo-Hasidism, even as its roots lie in the Hasidic revision of the traditional Judaism of its day. Rabbi Schachter-Shalomi’s innovative work on metaphysics—which has received less attention than either his early neo-Hasidic writings or his pastoral work—is at the heart of Paradigm Shift Judaism, and I contend that it is in Paradigm Shift Judaism that the real metaphysical innovation of Jewish Renewal resides.Schachter-Shalomi developed a new metaphysical template drawn from, but not necessarily an extension of, the Jewish mystical tradition that has become what he calls “the new reality map” of Renewal spirituality. His metaphysical interventions are exhibited in works such as Paradigm Shift, Credo of a Modern Kabbalist, Integral Halachah, and God Hidden, Whereabouts Unknown. A closer look at these metaphysical explorations may help us avoid some of the hazards that accompany all Aquarian Age renewals and thus help Jewish Renewal have a lasting impact on Judaism in America in future generations. Moreover, tapping into these metaphysical insights will equip us to access the radical nature of the Paradigm Shift project.There is a useful distinction to be made between radical theology and a new metaphysics or, in this case, between neo-Hasidism and Paradigm Shift Judaism. To my mind, before the twentieth century there were six major new metaphysical revisions of note in Judaism: those made by Saint Paul, Maimonides, the Zohar, Isaac Luria, Spinoza, and the Baal Shem Tov. There are many more figures who offered radical theologies, but new theologies can exist, and often do, within existing metaphysical paradigms.One way to distinguish between a radical theology and a new metaphysics is that new metaphysical templates are, at the outset, almost always considered heretical. Maimonides’s philosophical Guide for the Perplexed was considered heretical by many and even burned by the sages of Northern France. The Zohar and Isaac Luria’s writings were considered heretical by many detractors. Spinoza was excommunicated. And the list goes on. New metaphysical templates are considered heretical precisely because they subvert what has existed in a fundamental, not merely a functional, way. They jump over and replace an existing paradigm. In that sense, they are heretical. They are also, using Yerushalmi’s description, Aquarian. They are revealers of their own truth, often against the orthodoxies of their time. They claim a mantel of authority that is not solely bound to tradition. They are paradigm shifts.In the twentieth century, I think the most significant metaphysical interventions have come from Abraham Isaac Kook, Mordecai Kaplan, and Zalman Schachter-Shalomi. Accusations of heresy were pronounced for each one. In March 1932, Agudat Yisrael (then the political party representing the Haredi population of Israel) staged a mock trial in which Rav Kook was tried for heresy. A similar mock trial for heresy was staged against Kaplan in America. Yet Kook’s work is now a canonical source for contemporary forms of Zionism, both humanistic and ultranationalistic, and many dimensions of Kaplan’s reconstructionist Judaism have been adopted by a large swath of American Jews, from Modern Orthodox to Reform (and, of course, Reconstructionist).In the context of Jewish Renewal, neo-Hasidism falls in the category of radical theology, whereas Paradigm Shift Judaism can be understood as a new metaphysics. Neo-Hasidism is revolutionary only in its radical revision of an existing paradigm. Both in its first wave at the turn of the twentieth century, with figures such as I.L. Peretz, Samuel Abba Horodetsky, Micha Yosef Berdichevsky, Sholem Asch, Martin Buber, and Hillel Zeitlin, and then again in the postwar period in America, with the early work of Schachter-Shalomi, Arthur Green, Michael Lerner, and others, neo-Hasidism was a rereading and revision of the new metaphysics of Hasidism’s founder, the Baal Shem Tov.Much of second-wave neo-Hasidism is founded on Hillel Zeitlin’s “new Hasidism,” which Arthur Green translates and introduces in Hasidic Spirituality for a New Era: The Religious Writings of Hillel Zeitlin. One can see the maturation of second-wave neo-Hasidism and its transplant to America in the work of Abraham Joshua Heschel, whose influence on postwar American neo-Hasidism is considerable. Both in its secularized form in the first-wave and in its second-wave postwar instantiation, neo-Hasidism made no claim to a new metaphysics but rather interpreted Hasidism for a new age. Postwar neo-Hasidism shared much of the romanticism of the first wave now refracted through the American counterculture instead of the German and Russian romantics. One can readily see this neo-Hasidic romanticism in the three-volume Jewish Catalogues published in the early to mid-1970s.Paradigm Shift Judaism originates from neo-Hasidism but moves beyond it in significant ways. It is revolutionary in its metaphysical assumptions, Aquarian at its core, and has no ambivalence about being identified with New Age religion. Paradigm Shift Judaism’s revolutionary spirit is embodied in an entirely new metaphysical template built from Hasidism and Kabbalah, but it is in no way limited or bound to either. Neo-Hasidism is a radical theology and an aesthetic revision of an existing metaphysic that may serve as a bridge to Paradigm Shift Judaism. The two approaches certainly overlap in many areas (and Schachter-Shalomi was involved with both projects), but neo-Hasidism, in both its first and second waves, to my mind is not revolutionary.Arthur Green captures the neo-Hasidic spirit best in a recent essay, “Awakening the Heart,” in the April 2014 issue of Sh’ma Journal:This aptly describes Green’s intellectual and spiritual project and I think it may also reflect Schachter-Shalomi’s earlier career. But Schachter-Shalomi’s thinking later moved beyond this neo-Hasidic adaptive approach to a Paradigm Shift model that is a revolutionary break with Hasidism. It is what Schachter-Shalomi calls the “fourth turning” of Hasidism, the first being the rabbinic Hasidim rishonim (first Hasidim) of late antiquity; the second, Hasidim in the German Rhineland in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries (out of which we have Sefer Hasidim); and the third being the Baal Shem Tov.In some way neo-Hasidism adopts a Buberean reading of history as an ebb and flow of creative revision and religious conservatism. Paradigm Shift Judaism, in contrast, views history as rupture; epochs end and new ones begin. This is its Aquarian Age center. This is why, for example, for Schachter-Shalomi the kabbalistic creation myth of tzimtzum (divine contraction leading to cosmic rupture in the “breaking of the vessels”) is so central to his metaphysical worldview. Paradigm Shift is closer to a modern form of Sabbateanism (the heretical movement led by the mystical messiah Sabbatai Zevi in the seventeenth century), albeit without its overt, and tragic, messianism. Both Sabbateanism and Paradigm Shift Judaism view history as rupture rather than evolution, drawing more from the Lurianic vision of history developed by the sixteenth-century Safadean kabbalist Isaac Luria than from the more evolutionary model of Luria’s teacher and contemporary Moses Cordovero. Cordovero’s view of creation is a process of unfolding emanation. Luria’s view of creation is that it begins with rupture and then follows with reconstruction. I suggest that Cordovero’s view of creation coheres with the neo-Hasidic adaptive approach while the Lurianic view coheres with Paradigm Shift Judaism’s Aquarian approach.The neo-Hasidism that begins in the late nineteenth century as a literary and artistic movement was all but erased with the Holocaust, but it was later resurrected in postwar America. For all its important innovative energy, I think neo-Hasidism remains on the margin of the paradigm of Hasidism. Paradigm Shift Judaism, on the other hand, stands on the other side of that paradigm. In many ways history has caught up to the paradigm of Hasidism, which can be seen in Hasidism’s increasing popularity even among nontraditional Jews. Starting out as a maligned and “heretical” movement, Hasidism, often popularized and then modified, has become a dominant force in American Judaism.As Jewish Renewal grows in America and as we begin to reassess its future in a post-Zalman era, it is important to see that its two main instantiations are related but not identical. From a communal, pastoral, and political perspective, the differences may be largely irrelevant. But it is important to see the differences nonetheless, especially since Jewish Renewal is increasingly becoming a topic of scholarly inquiry and is having an increasing impact on American Jewish life and practice. Such inquiry can play an important role not only in enabling adepts to better understand the implications and complexity of their religious lives but also to situate Jewish Renewal as a significant part of the twenty-first-century American Jewish landscape, both communally and theologically.So what is the revolutionary aspect of the metaphysics embraced by Paradigm Shift Judaism? After a careful and sustained reading of Schachter-Shalomi’s theological work I have arrived at the potentially controversial conclusion that Paradigm Shift Judaism’s new metaphysics may best be described as “postmonotheistic” rather than monotheistic.It is conventionally understood that monotheism lies at the core of what we now call Judaism. Yet when we speak of monotheism today we often take for granted that monotheism simply means “one God” and rarely examine the contours of what “one God” means or whether, in fact, the Bible is accurately defined as having a theological position exclusively about “one God.” Nor do we take seriously the contours of monotheism’s opposite (erroneously called polytheism) and whether “many gods” is an accurate description of the nonmonotheistic alternatives. In fact, both monotheism and polytheism are terms that become operable only in the seventeenth century. The ancient Israelites obviously didn’t call themselves “monotheists,” nor did anyone really call themselves “polytheists.” Polytheism doesn’t really exist independent of monotheism; it is the monotheistic definition of the “other.”In a controversial book titled Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism, the contemporary Egyptologist Jan Assmann describes biblical monotheism through what he calls the “Mosaic distinction.” Assmann uses the concept of Mosaic distinction to describe what he sees as the most important aspect of the shift from “primary religions” (religions that evolved historically within a single culture) to “secondary religions” (religions such as Judaism, Christianity, and Islam that “owe their existence to an act of revelation and foundation … and typically differentiate themselves from [primary religions] by denouncing them as paganism, idolatry, and superstition”). Explaining this Mosaic distinction, he writes:Assmann suggests that secondary religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) are revolutionary and practice a kind of erasure of what preceded them. This erasure is founded on nonrational and nontraditional sources of authority—revelation, incarnation, or prophecy. Maimonides essentially affirms this idea in one of his Thirteen Principles of Faith when he states that no other revelation can usurp the Mosaic revelation. Thus on Maimonidean terms, all religions that do not recognize the “non-translatability” of the Mosaic revelation at Sinai are, by definition, false. That is, there is only one faultless, true religion (Judaism) and all other religions are true only to the extent that they recognize the truth of Judaism as illustrated in the revelation at Sinai. In fact, Maimonides views the recognition of the exclusive truth of the Sinai revelation and its rabbinic interpretation as a condition for being included in the “righteous of the nations.” On these terms, Christianity and Islam, each of which may recognize the revelation at Sinai as an event but contest the exclusive Jewish interpretation of it, are, from the perspective of Maimonides, false religions.For our purposes, the crucial point in Assmann’s Mosaic distinction is that it functions primarily as a political theology that deems past religions—that is, everything prior to the revelation of God’s presence on Mount Sinai—as false, setting “one God” on the pedestal of “no other gods.” Assmann claims that the original impulse of revolutionary monotheism seems “to consist of tearing apart the archaic unity of creation and dominion, or cosmic and political power, and to conceive of religion as a means of emancipation from the politico-cosmological power structure of the ancient world.” In other words, this revolutionary monotheism enables the oppressed to feel independent of their oppressors. A covenant with a singular, transcendent God enabled Israel to liberate itself from the confines of foreign legislation.It is interesting to note here that in the middle decades of the twentieth century, the Israeli Bible scholar Yehezkel Kaufmann made a similar argument to reach the opposite conclusion. Kaufmann called the Hebrew Bible a product of the “Mosaic revolution,” a unique monotheistic moment that rejected all idols as human creations and created the conditions for what became known in some modern Jewish circles as “ethical monotheism.” Assmann, in contrast, suggests that the Mosaic distinction views the God of Israel as the sole God to exclude all other gods, thereby creating the makings of theological exceptionalism and, from Assmann’s perspective, intolerance.A question we can ask is: Are today’s practitioners of traditional Judaism closer to Kaufmann’s Mosaic revolution, that is, practitioners of ethical monotheism, or to Assmann’s Mosaic distinction, that is, advocates of Jewish exceptionalism? Paradigm Shift Judaism suggests that much of today’s Judaism stresses an exceptionalism that must be subverted, not only through political activism and social change (e.g., through the efforts of groups such as Tikkun’s Network of Spiritual Progressives) but also theologically, through a reassessment of Judaism’s foundational principles.Assmann’s Mosaic distinction rests primarily on what he considers the biblical move away from the translatability of gods, that is, ancient societies’ propensity to translate foreign gods into their own regional theologies, thus internationalizing their God idea by subsuming other gods rather than excluding them as false. There has been much criticism of Assmann’s “Mosaic distinction,” one of the best being Mark Smith’s God in Translation: Deities in Cross-Cultural Discourse in the Biblical World. Smith claims, with others, that we can find many cases of translatability in the Hebrew Bible, and thus Assmann’s flattening out the Bible as the rejection of theological translatability (a central tenet of his Mosaic distinction) is inaccurate. Of course, Smith’s compelling claim is precisely correct to the extent that the Hebrew Bible is not monotheistic, at least not in the normative, Maimonidean sense. Once mature monotheism emerges, perhaps not finally until the Jews meet the Greeks through the Muslims in the Middle Ages, Assmann’s “Mosaic distinction” may indeed apply.While Smith may be correct when it comes to the Hebrew Bible, Paradigm Shift Judaism’s new postmonotheistic metaphysics is not a response to the Bible but rather to its reception in historical Judaism where the Mosaic distinction may be more palpable. And it is precisely what I call Schachter-Shalomi’s postmonotheism, in my mind a new articulation of what Assmann calls premonotheistic “cosmotheism” (which may have been an earlier stage of biblical protomonotheism), that renews the possibility of translatability, which Assmann claims the Bible denies.Smith ends his book-length critique of Assmann with the following observation: “Translatability of divinity is no mere academic task; it is a central task of human self-understanding. Otherwise, in this situation, something of our humanity—and arguably of our divinity—may be lost.” I think it is precisely the (post)monotheism that says “one God” implies “all gods are one”—that is, a universal monism—that Paradigm Shift Judaism is espousing. Given that Schachter-Shalomi thinks we exist today at the other end of this monotheistic spectrum, following what he calls the transition from theism (the Middle Ages through modernity) to pantheism (the new paradigm), postmonotheism emerges as a real theological template for Paradigm Shift Jews.Cosmotheism, the term Assmann uses to contrast with the Mosaic distinction, is a theological construct based on the premise that the divine world (the cosmos) and the world we live in are inextricably intertwined. Cosmotheism holds that “the divine cannot be divorced from the world.” It believes in a plurality of divine life in the world and its accessibility to the human, focusing more on ritual than on Scripture or text. This comes close to what I am calling Paradigm Shift Judaism’s “postmonotheism.”Postmonotheism’s new metaphysical template may indeed be a revival of a very ancient template that had fallen into disuse among Jews. Even though the Zohar and Hasidism in some way reflect this idea, they were both situated deeply in a monotheistic world that did not enable them to think outside the monotheistic paradigm, at least not in any overt way. However, Schachter-Shalomi suggests that both resist normative monotheism within their respective monotheistic orbits. It is in Paradigm Shift Judaism that this covert resistance to classical monotheism rises to the surface to become a new metaphysics. The central tenet of this paradigm shift is Schachter-Shalomi’s innovative interpretation of the kabbalistic concept of tzimtzum—divine contraction.I believe that the political theology of biblical monotheism that Assmann considers the backbone of the Mosaic distinction is precisely what Schachter-Shalomi is criticizing in his Paradigm Shift Judaism. He often writes of a “post-triumphalist” Judaism, by which I take him to mean a post-elective one, chosenness itself arguably the product of a monotheism that says “no other gods,” as opposed to “all gods are one”: not one humanity but God’s chosen people. Resistance to Jewish exceptionalism has taken many forms, for example, in the revision of exceptionalist proclamations in the liturgy as well as in many flourishing Jewish social justice movements that focus on human injustice rather than on only Jewish issues.In this sense, Paradigm Shift Judaism is part of that larger community of progressive Jews. However, it does not contest Jewish exceptionalism through a liberal critique of religious pluralism but through a metaphysical one that constructs the cosmos such that some of the hazards of traditional monotheism are resolved. In ways similar to a progressive or radical critique of liberalism, Paradigm Shift’s post-triumphalist/post-elective monotheism does not pose a social solution to the problem of intolerance but strikes at the metaphysical core of what it claims produces intolerance: the elective and exclusivist nature of the old paradigm, which is not founded solely on social circumstances, i.e., exile, but rooted in the metaphysical construction of reality that helped produce and maintain those exilic social constructs.In order to root a post-triumphalist Judaism theologically, one must first offer a metaphysical template that corresponds to a new theo-political reality, since politics lies at the heart of the very conception of God in the Bible, resulting in, among other things, the political theology of election. Schachter-Shalomi does this through a creative reading of the kabbalistic idea of tzimtzum, the doctrine of divine contraction, not primarily as a creation myth but as a construction of God that serves as a watershed, ultimately undermining the monotheistic and elective nature of Jewish theology and politics, respectively.In his 2013 book God Hidden, Whereabouts Unknown and in earlier works as well, Schachter-Shalomi presents a notion of God in Judaism as a trajectory from deism (in the Bible) to theism (in Medieval rationalism, as discussed by Maimonides) that is then challenged by the kabbalistic (Lurianic) concept of tzimtzum and its literal and metaphoric interpretations. In this model, tzimtzum is the final phase of the theistic period, resulting in two divergent interpretations: the nonliteral interpretation that breaks with theism to a penultimate panentheism (or acosmism, still theistic, common in neo-Hasidism) and ultimately to pantheism, a final break from theism that serves as the postmonotheistic metaphysical template of Paradigm Shift Judaism.Paradigm Shift Judaism’s four-world metaphysics (deism, theism, panentheism, and pantheism) is viewed as the template of the history of God in those civilizations for which the Bible is central. Schachter-Shalomi argues that Kabbalah retains the mythic (perhaps plural) notion of the God of the Bible that was repressed through later biblical, then rabbinic, and finally medieval Jewish rationalism. Rather than deploy the language of myth as do many Bible theologians, he suggests that the first conception of God in the Hebrew Bible is deistic: a God who can occupy corporeal space but whose place is beyond the cosmos and thus unknowable. This constitutes a kind of deistic transcendence that makes room for divine descent into the world but holds that divine presence is uncanny; there is no real intimacy between God and world—the separation is categorical. God can be simultaneously corporeal and totally other (e.g., Isa. 55:8; 40:18, 25). Even in the intimate moments between God and Abraham or Moses, there is strangeness (Exod. 33:18–23). As Midrash Rabbah claims, “The world is not God’s place.” In this deistic phase, God is an interloper.We normally think of the kabbalistic idea of tzimtzum as a creation myth. Isaac Luria suggested a model of creation whereby God withdrew Godself to create an “empty space” and then infused that space with divinity, in limited doses, into what becomes a “finite” realm through a cosmic catastrophe known as shevirat ha-kelim (the rupture of the divine vessels). Schachter-Shalomi’s new metaphysics seems uninterested in tzimtzum as a creation myth and more interested in it as a metaphor for thinking about the history of God more generally and God’s presence in, rather than absence from, the world. This notion of tzimtzum as more about divine presence than absence is less Lurianic and more rooted in the early Hasidic thinking of Dov Ber, the Maggid of Mezritch. This tzimtzum as divine presence informs later Hasidic theology, but it is only in Schachter-Shalomi that tzimtzum as divine presence becomes the centerpiece of a new metaphysics.Tzimtzum simultaneously affirms and subverts radical transcendence. God as eyn sof (infinite, distant, and indecipherable) exists alongside God as finite (the infusion of divinity into the empty space that becomes our cosmos and world). Tzimtzum serves Schachter-Shalomi as the final stage of biblical theism in that it houses both the radical transcendence of God as eyn sof and the initial stage of divine immanence in the light that is infused into the finite space of God’s absence.More interesting for Schachter-Shalomi is the internal kabbalistic debate that was raging in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries about whether the Lurianic doctrine of tzimtzum should be taken literally or metaphorically. That is, did God actually create God’s own absence in the vacuum that would become the cosmos and our world, or is divine contraction a metaphor suggesting that there was never any compromise of divine presence? This debate becomes the way in which the deistic/theistic biblical monotheism begins to unravel, resulting in what I call postmonotheistic pantheism. In God Hidden, Whereabouts Unknown, Schachter-Shalomi writes, “The literalists were on the front-line of the defense of the theistic idea of God, whereas the metaphorical interpreters were the forerunners of a new, pantheistic reality-map.” This is the overcoming of the theistic universe of the Middle Ages and inaugurates what Schachter-Shalomi calls “the Pantheism of Aquarius.”This Pantheism of Aquarius here becomes a notion of multiplicity and hierarchy; it is not an equation of God and nature in which “everything is ultimately the same.” It includes a metaphysical spectrum in which the personal God of biblical deism (where God can be present in the world but never at home) and rabbinic/medieval theism (involving the God of radical transcendence) is reinvented in a pantheistic mode through the two interpretations of tzimtzum in Hasidism and Schachter-Shalomi’s interpretation of that theological move. God can finally be at home in the world. Subverting the midrashic dictum “God is the place of the world but the world is not God’s place,” Schachter-Shalomi argues that “the world is (also) God’s place.” Here the divine-human relationship has overcome its vertical metaphor, a metaphor founded on a theistic foundation (God and world are categorically distinct). This is the sense of his personalist pantheistic vision: the recognition that you and I are nothing but different and developing dimensions of God, informing God about God.American Christians have moved in this direction from the time of the transcendentalists. Perhaps the notion of incarnation (God entering the world through the human body) more easily lends itself to a place of God in the world. Alternatively, the strong theistic foundations of normative Judaism, articulated most forcefully in Maimonides, prevented Jews from easily moving to this pantheistic place of radical immanence. The Zohar and the Kabbalah that followed in its wake resisted this notion of radical transcendence but never rejected it outright. The Baal Shem Tov and Hasidism pushed Jews further in this pantheistic direction. Jewish theologians such as Abraham Joshua Heschel and Martin Buber pushed even further but still maintained a position of classical theism that we can see in second-wave neo-Hasidism’s panentheism.It is only in Paradigm Shift Judaism that we witness the final rupture of the theistic myth of Judaism. As in many Aquarian Ages, this is illustrated by a historical event: in our case, the Holocaust. This event works in conjunction with the disappearance of any traditional hegemony that could resist a transition from monotheism to postmonotheism. The erasure of Jewish hegemony, especially in America, creates the conditions for Schachter-Shalomi’s final radical break with theism. Richard Rubenstein’s After Auschwitz, published in 1966, posits that the transcendent, omniscient God of Judaism (theism) is dead. He puts his finger on this rupture but it is only Schachter-Shalomi who builds a new metaphysics out of it.Paradigm Shift Judaism’s interpretation of rebuilding malkhut (the lowest cosmic realm) and the Shechinah (divine indwelling) is not only about social justice; it is also about the reconstruction of a personalist, pantheistic God—a God of nature who hears prayer because nature is alive, a God whose name can be translated among various other deities, each occupying a given space in the cosmos. This move in some way revives the repressed elements embedded in the Bible through Kabbalah and Hasidism, to bear fruit only in the postwar turn by Jewish Renewal to New Age religion in America. It is Schachter-Shalomi who articulates this spiritual, cultural, and aesthetic tradition in metaphysical terms. In doing so, he moves through and beyond the neo-Hasidic revival as previously understood and into unchartered territory.By shifting from monotheism as “no other gods” to a postmonotheistic “all gods are one,” I do not suggest we erase all difference and say that all forms of religiosity are, by definition, equally valid. I mean, rather, that Paradigm Shift Judaism revives the translatability of the expression of the divine; that gods can be seen as true, even necessary, refractions of one God; and that Paradigm Shift Judaism’s postmonotheistic vision does not by definition exclude all expression of divinity except Israel’s particular expression of God.What distinguishes Schachter-Shalomi’s new pantheism is that he argues that his approach actually salvages the personal God that he believes is undermined by the radical transcendence of theistic monotheism. As Orthodox theologian Michael Wyschogrod once noted, there is a very thin line separating Maimonides’s radical transcendence and atheism. Schachter-Shalomi advocates for a Gaia rendering of the universe, arguing that the sephirotic realm (the realm pertaining to God’s multiple emanations), like the planet earth, is both alive and divine, intricately connected to the corporeal, and multiple (encompassing all deities and all humans). In this way, by reviving what can be called a countermonotheism, Schachter-Shalomi claims to open the channels for a divine-human intimacy that theism can accomplish only by apologetic means (that is, by suggesting that there is a personal God with whom we can have no direct relationship because that God is transcendent and unknowable).The theo-political concerns are very much at play here. Erasing the triumphalist notion implicit in divine election (chosenness) from Paradigm Shift Judaism does not produce any naïve universalism, but it does enable Judaism to come out of its exclusivist cocoon and participate fully in the global concern for the well-being of the planet and all its inhabitants. It does this not only with a call to ethics or any form of Jewish social gospel (for example, in the many contemporary Jewish social justice movements today) but also by presenting a new metaphysics that conforms to a theory of multiplicity surrounded by divine unity. When this new metaphysics is in place, a new practice can emerge that conforms to the parameters of a new theological system.The first systematic attempt to apply this new metaphysics can be found in Schachter-Shalomi and Daniel Siegal’s Integral Halachah, an experiment in the radical revision of Halachah for Paradigm Shift’s new metaphysics, a new Shulchan Aruch (Code of Jewish law) for a new paradigm. It is the first practical and systematic attempt at a post-halachic Judaism. Central to this project is the idea that Judaism’s resources, insights, and teachings can and should contribute to the larger, humanistic concerns of the day and not to keeping the Jews separate. This move toward theological globalism is not meant to subvert particular communities from having their own distinct identities. It is about the way each particular community relates to the others and the responsibility that each holds toward the betterment of human society. Its credo might be “Serving the world, just like serving God, is an obligation (mitzvah).”I have used postmonotheism here as a marker to distinguish Paradigm Shift Judaism from neo-Hasidism. Some will reject its premises. Some will accept them. Those who reject them can still find a place in the Jewish Renewal camp under the auspices of neo-Hasidism, a broader project that seeks the revival of Judaism in all its many aspects in a variety of ways. I want to stress that in my view neo-Hasidism and Paradigm Shift Judaism are bounded as part of a larger critique of mainstream Judaism in contemporary America. For those who are compelled by my reading of Paradigm Shift Judaism’s call for the end of classical theism, there are deep theological, practical, and societal ramifications that need to be worked out. But even for those neo-Hasidic adepts who reject such a radical break and prefer a more adaptive approach, Schachter-Shalomi’s new theological work can serve as a way to think through the difficult issues that confront neo-Hasidism’s adaptation of classical Hasidism in a new generation.This new pantheistic, postmonotheistic space as a foundation for a devotional Jewish life is historically situated in postwar America. It is a byproduct of the maturation of New Age religion based on an Aquarian Age. Does Paradigm Shift Judaism’s new metaphysics have the potential to move beyond the hazards that face all Aquarian Ages? It is too soon to tell, but perhaps in this case the Renewal movement will prove Yerushalmi wrong, demonstrating that radical breaks from the past are indeed possible if done with care and a deep awareness of the potential pitfalls. The survival of Paradigm Shift Judaism’s revolutionary contributions will depend at least in part on how Jewish Renewal’s practitioners acknowledge, understand, and critically engage in the radical program of their own making.