In Comparison to Judaism

The Church of the Holy understands existence as fundamentally relational. Humanity is not separate from nature, nor does the sacred exist only beyond the material world. We are participants in an interconnected reality that includes human beings, animals, plants, the land, and the processes through which life emerges and changes.

Ancient Israelite religion developed within the wider religious world of the ancient Levant, where divine beings, sacred places, natural forces, and human communities were understood through complex relationships. The surviving biblical texts preserve traces of this religious history, alongside later movements toward exclusive worship of Yahweh.

The Church draws inspiration from the broader history of these traditions while developing its own understanding of consciousness, nature, and the divine.

The Church understands human life as inseparable from the wider systems that sustain it. Our relationships with other people, animals, and the land are not secondary to spiritual life; they are among the places where our understanding of the sacred becomes tangible.

We emphasize responsibility, reciprocity, care, and the recognition of our interdependence. To honor existence is to consider how we participate in it, how our actions affect others, and how we might live in ways that sustain rather than diminish the conditions that allow life to flourish.

We seek a relationship with the sacred that is lived through participation in the world, not only through belief about what exists beyond it.

Asherah was a goddess worshiped in the ancient Levant, with archaeological and inscriptional evidence indicating that traditions involving Asherah existed among some communities in ancient Israel and Judah.

For the Church of the Holy, Asherah offers an opportunity to explore the place of feminine divinity within the history of the region’s religions. We understand the sacred as encompassing generative, relational, and nurturing dimensions of existence, without requiring divinity to be confined to a single gender or image.

Kabbalah is a tradition of Jewish mysticism that explores the nature of the divine, the structure of reality, and the relationships through which divine presence is understood to manifest in the world.

The Church shares an interest in the possibility that reality contains relationships and patterns that extend beyond what we immediately perceive. We explore consciousness, interconnectedness, and the emergence of complexity through philosophy, scientific inquiry, mythology, and lived experience.

We approach these traditions as sources of insight rather than as doctrines we must reproduce. Our theology continues to develop through the relationships we discover between existence, consciousness, and the world around us.