Judaism
A Durkheimian Insight on Jewish Practices and Beliefs
According to Emile Durkheim, religion is in fact a sociological process that is derived from the collective needs of the clan, or society. The totem, or quasi- divine found in a plant or animal unites the society as a clan and this totem becomes their emblem or mascot one could say. Durkheim then proposes the idea that, "Thus, if the totem is the symbol of both the god and the society, is this not because the god and the society are one and the sameĀ
the god of the clan, the totemic principle, can be none other than the clan itself, but the clan transfigured and imagined in the physical form of the plant or animal that serves as the totem" (Durkheim 208). In other words through what Durkheim terms collective effervescence, or a misidentification of societal connectivity, the clan mistakes their own collective energy as a clan as the influence of a higher power. Thus the first religions were born as a unified system of beliefs......
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