Rabbi Daniel Siegel – Head of Jewish Life

The Big Bad Wolf

Beyond being created by a Jew, Stephen Sondheim, the musical, Into the Woods, presents a Jewish perspective on our journey to individuation and wholeness.

We all must enter the woods to bring to consciousness the darker unconscious shadow side of our being in realising an integrated more mature self. The Kabbalisitc and Hasidic traditions call this process עליה מתוך ירידה/Aliyah miTokh Yeridah – “Ascending through descending”, more popularly known as tikkun/tikkun olam. Only in encountering and confronting our suppressed dark side (“in the woods”) and “owning it”, do we move beyond projecting our shadow self upon the other, and locate it within ourselves. This is the “shadow work” or tikkun upon which Little Red Riding Hood embarks that makes her and us “excited and scared”. Facing the darkness within herself, Little Red Riding Hood, looking upon the Big Bad Wolf exclaims: “What big hands (not paws) you have”.

As her dark side becomes less of a stranger, she abandons the red cloak of her immature self for the wolfskins (in our Emanuel version of the story), which she dons after emerging from the belly of the beast, embracing and transforming (effecting tikkun) her wolf/shadow side into a new, reborn and reintegrated self.

Watching Lara Rutstein wearing the wolfskins brought to mind the first human beings in Gan Eden.

Proclaiming they hid from Him because they knew they were “arum” (meaning naked but also cunning and deceptive), God makes for Adam and Chavah garments of skin. Perhaps snake skins, reflecting that part of themselves they projected upon another when they blamed the snake (described as most “arum”, deceptive of animals) for their eating from the “tree of knowledge, good and bad”.

Tikkun, individually and collectively, demands of us, from the very beginning and throughout our lives, to enter the woods to continually and courageously strive for a rectification and reintegration of self and community beyond the fragmented life of fear and self-deception, our Big Bad Wolf/Snake.

“A complex becomes pathological only when we think we have not got it.” (Carl Jung). Because, then it has us.