Here’s some further links and clips to accompany this week’s story on Voodoo Dialogue.

Meet Priestess Miriam and visit her Voodoo Spiritual Temple.

Several years ago, I interviewed a Jewish witch, the very interesting Lexa Rosean. a Wiccan priestess by way of Stern College. For many years Lexa was the proprietor of Enchantments, an East Village emporium that carried some Voodoo accoutrements, among her many apothecary jars full of mysterious concoctions for casting charms and spells. Lexa is not a Voodoo practitioner but has some unique insights into the intersection of Judaism and the occult, and her own path has been fascinating. Several years ago, the Village Voice named her the best witch in New York. If you have to be a sorcerer’s apprentice, she’s the one. She also teaches and dances a killer tango, but what sorceress doesn’t?

Here’s Professor Martha Ward, author of Voodoo Queen: The Story of Marie Leveau.

Could there be a Voodoo-Muslim dialogue? Check out how Al-Jazeera covers Voodoo..

Sallie Anne Glassman is a Jewish woman originally from Maine who was ordained as a Voodoo priestess in Haiti. Here’s her site and a clip of her in action on a Voodoo holy day.

You know you can count on National Geographic to bring you into the Voodoo world of Haiti, and a trip to the birthplace of Voodoo in Africa — and beyond — and beyond that.

Voodoo Crossroad is an interesting portal, a way to jump through the looking glass into New Orleans Voodoo.

We have to be clear about one thing: This isn’t about advocating Voodoo, but a further understanding of religion itself, which has to mean a certain spiritual humility. Few religions are more polar opposites than Judaism and Voodoo. And yet I can’t help but watch a Voodoo priest swirl a chicken over his head and not reflect upon my own Kapporos with a chicken that I swirl above my head before Rosh Hashanah. If anything, this inspires me, the idea that the same the mystical fountains from above have blessed others with the same gifts with which we’ve been blessed. I can’t believe that God has given us rituals and left everyone else  stranded.

All over Africa, all through Haiti, children of God are saying the same Tehillim that I do. I can’t imagine Abraham and King David not having a lot of nachas about this. All of this is only meant to inspire wonder and further reflection about the mystery of yearning for God. I have more in common with Voodoo’s Priestess Miriam than I do with secular Jews — with whom I have thousands of other truths in common. Any exploration of religion — how humans try to comprehend and serve God — is a journey worth taking and is almost always illuminating. To be confident in one’s own Judaism is to be more comfortable in that exploration, and to be comfortable with an evangelical dream of the End of Days, as well as with what brings meaning to a Haitian mourner.

 Invariably, the Jews who are traumatized by the idea that the evangelicals are “out to convert us” are the Jews who are the least comfortable with their own Judaism. The Four Horseman of the Apocalypse can gallop into this room right now and I’d take my chances that they couldn’t convert me. But I sure would like to go out with these Apocalyptic Fab Four to an all-night diner for coffee.

For all the sour and discouraging political news, and Goldstone reports, and our Jewish sense of isolation, it is important to remember that to be a Jew is to believe in the ultimate happy ending of history, a world that unites in recognition of God and all that it means. To know that even in Haiti and the Congo, in the deep South and the South Bronx, are millions — billions — of people who define their lives as the children of Abraham is to realize that we’re closer to the fulfillment of our religious aspiration, the fulfillment of the Jewish people’s ultimate purpose than we often seem to think. You want Tikkun Olam? This is Tikkum Olam B’Malchus Shaddai on a far more serious level than busting Joe Lieberman’s chops over walking (not driving) on Shabbos and his support for flawed legislation.

Serious religion by anyone, be it in Port-Au-Prince or Piety St in New Orleans, or on the Upper West Side, is Jewish news — as important for a Jewish paper to report as anything else. The state of religion in the world is news more eternal and transcendent than anything we might ever write about politicians or a peace process that exists more in newspapers than on the ground.

Here’s the complete and unedited ideas that CLAL’s Rabbi Irwin Kula gave me on the idea of ritual objects and mercy for the rituals of others who are seeking the same God. For those who don’t know him, keep in mind that Rabbi Kula is a fully observant Jew who takes all of these Jewish ritual objects very seriously and lovingly:

Rabbi Kula: “So what really is the difference between Voodoo and our non-Voodoo religions with our lulav and etrogs, and breaking glasses under canopies, multi-braided havdalah candles, tearing a shirt in grief, a bracha before slaughtering an animal, eating matzah and marror, leyning parah adumah or seh l’ahzazehl, yet alone the eucharist, ashes on ones forehead, etc., etc…. There’s only one criteria for me: Does your practice and wisdom, your nomos and narrative help you become more truthful about who you are in this cosmos, do less damage to others, and help you become more just, compassionate, and loving?

“Any other criteria is some mixture of deflection, repression, and gobbledygook offered by judgemental people who even with the very best motivations are themselves very unnerved by this Haitian tragedy and whose own philosophies and theologies are not working, but that is to painful to acknowledge and so the judgment on Voodoo.

“If Voodoo works to help get people through the night better than some god of s’char v’onesh whether in traditionalist form or liberal metaphor form or helps better than the Jobian mystery whirlwind God, or better than rationalistic scientism then go Voodoo. Does it give them hope? Does it let them still believe that it pays to be good and to love though at any moment the earth can open up under your feet? Does it give them a sense of continuity with generations at a moment in which all seems lost? Does it help them care for each other and those more vulnerable at a higher level than otherwise? If the answer is yes then I am all for Voodoo and the onus is on the interfaith specialists who see Voodoo as pagan, demonic, heresy to look at their own systems.

“Anyway, my tradition teaches that the moment when the dead are still before us is not the time for theology - it is the time for kvod hameit and nichum aveeilim…two acts that trump theological differences.”

One of the sorriest aspects of the media’s coverage of Haiti, and somewhat typical of all coverage of religion, was the overwhelming focus on Rev. Pat Robertson’s verdict on the earthquake as Divine punishment to the exclusion of  almost all other religious understanding of what had happened. Clal’s Rabbi Brad Hirschfield had perhaps the best and thoughtful rebuttal to Robertson, because he isn’t looking to simply beat up Robertson — the easy thing to do — but to understand what Robertson was getting at.

As Rabbi Hirschfield said to us over the phone, “I feel a certain sympathy for Robertson because he was trying to figure out where was God? He was trying to work God back into the equation. I didn’t like his answer, but if you believe in a personal God, you can understand his impulse. To say that Haiti has nothing to do with God doesn’t work if you believe that everything has something to do with God. My objection was that Robertson was playing theological games to comfort himself on the backs of people who were suffering. If Haitians said ‘God did this to punish me,’ I would accept it. You have a right to any theology that helps you get through life’s toughest moments, to the extent that you don’t impose it on other people.”

Robertson was seeking God by scolding from the outside — outside the mourners. Clal’s Kula and Hirschfield were seeking God, soulfully from within.

In the end is mystery. Robertson speaks definitively, I will take you home. Kula and Hirschfield speak with a sense of the mystery — The Holy If –  as in the “Ripple” niggun of the Grateful Dead: “If I knew the way, I would take you home.”

It’s the The Holy If that makes you want to follow. Or not.