Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By admin on February 14, 2020

"The Lost Art of Scripture: Rescuing the Sacred Texts," by Karen Armstrong. Bodley Head/Penguin/Random House, 549 pages. $35.

This has to be Karen Armstrongs ultimate tome after all her learned, readable, fascinating and often mesmerizing books on religion in general, myth, Islam, the history of God and more. Beginning with the beginning of civilization in Sumer (Iraq) circa 3500 BCE, she retraces the history of religion, rituals, scriptures and beliefs from Greece and Israel to India and China.

Her mission is clear. Scripture is not mere text. It involves chanting, reciting, singing, rituals and performance. Dance and dogma intermingle and are indivisible. One cannot really exist in all its fullness without the other, like reading the lyrics of a song without hearing the music. The scriptures, "embedded in ritual," aim for personal transformation, liberation, harmony and transcendence. Armstrongs mission is to rescue the original performance of scripture from its written form, which gets confused with historical fact and factions.

We live in a modern world that, for example, rests on Descartes notion: "I think, therefore I am." This is the ego, the Logos of rational, analytical science and invention. External facts rule: "Logos must relate accurately to facts and correspond to external realities ..." We investigate, control, establish provable theories (well, of course theres quantum theory which eludes Logos ...). Its a left-brain thing.

Myth, on the other hand, is never intended to be factual. It is intended to express timeless, essential ideas, initiations and events. Its an early form of psychology, exploring the labyrinthine densities of the unconscious. It may have happened once Christs crucifixion but then is repeated over and over to extract an eternal meaning of liberation, the emptying out of the voracious ego, a rite of passage. Its a right-brain thing.

Myth wrestles with mystery, Logos with measurement. Mystery lies beyond the logic of language and remains obscure and hidden. Logos performs in the light with specific problems to solve.

Armstrong explores, contextualizes and helps to explain prophets, gurus, teachers, disciples, Chinese hexagrams, the Indian Rig Veda, the Torah, the Talmud, midrash, Buddhism, Hinduism (Western constructs of various religious sects), the Jains, Islam, Christianity, Confucius, Augustines "catastrophic" notion of original sin, fundamentalisms bizarre compulsion to read the Bible literally, scrolls, the Assyrians, the Persians, imams, mystics, the Vulgate, the Septuagint, premillenialists, everything in historical terms and how their scriptures and rites change, and are meant to do so, through continual improvisation.

For me, Heideggers sense of Being gets at the heart of the mystery, "a fundamental energy that supports and pervades everything that exists." You cant see it or quantify it, but its "all encompassing," indefinable and all pervasive, and we can never get outside it to describe it. Beings exist. Being underlies and powers them. Rituals celebrate it, try to connect us to it, get us to oerleap dogma and join the dance.

This astounding book looks at how four cultures over the centuries have wrestled with "the underlying unity of reality" or at least have posited and worshiped such a vision. It is triumphant, saturated with history and ritual and sacred writings, is remarkably "easy" to read, and suggests an immanent and transcendent deity who is in the fire but not the fire. Armstrong burns with authenticity and spiritual commitment.

Visit link:

Book review: Rediscovering the sacred at the heart of scriptures - The Providence Journal

Category: Talmud
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