The Tragic Torah
Torah Tragedy.
In the Torah and Gemara Rashi and Tosphot [Talmud] we find Tragedy at every turn. We find the lonely individual Moses in the wilderness took the wrong step in life and hit the rock instead of speaking to it , abruptly finding himself cut off from the land of Israel forever. David after being anointed king finds himself a hunted fugitive. in the life of every Talmudic sage we find some tragic event and inexplicable mysteries.
For Torah, the truth about life is in tragedy. True Torah, must reveal the essence of life [the ten statements by which the world was created] and thus be amoral, because life in its very core is not moral.
We know the Rambam [Maimonides] was not a particularistic. We know he held that behind every law of the Torah there is a principle at work that are life, love, and natural law.
And as the Torah is not moral guidance but rather primal natural laws, through which the Torah both creates and destroys lesser life such as human beings and animals, Torah must be regarded as "anti-life" to morally condemn natural things such as death, pain or tragedy.
Torah life unconditionally and captures its essence of existence without flinching or defending itself with morality but with natural principles.
For the truth of Torah we need not look into historical documents but into the Platonic realm of myth and magic. and without a strong and rich life of myths and magic , the people slowly decay from within.
Torah is not is not created from moral or rational principles, but from the depth of the soul of a people. The myth is the expression of that unique soul, but as soon we try to "objectify" or rationally explain its relevance, we slowly kill our cultural life and replace it with a clinic, materialist worldview. This worldview is the modern one, where we have literally killed the belief in religion, passion, magic and myth, because we no longer understand their function. We search for "objective" answers to the myth itself and unsurprisingly we find none, because the truth about life, does not lie in the Torah itself, but in its metaphorical expression of life.
There is a correlation between Torah and perception of reality. We cannot gain direct access to any "dinge an sich" objective truth, the "thing in itself"; instead, we interpret it through Torah symbolism
Torah Tragedy.
In the Torah and Gemara Rashi and Tosphot [Talmud] we find Tragedy at every turn. We find the lonely individual Moses in the wilderness took the wrong step in life and hit the rock instead of speaking to it , abruptly finding himself cut off from the land of Israel forever. David after being anointed king finds himself a hunted fugitive. in the life of every Talmudic sage we find some tragic event and inexplicable mysteries.
For Torah, the truth about life is in tragedy. True Torah, must reveal the essence of life [the ten statements by which the world was created] and thus be amoral, because life in its very core is not moral.
We know the Rambam [Maimonides] was not a particularistic. We know he held that behind every law of the Torah there is a principle at work that are life, love, and natural law.
And as the Torah is not moral guidance but rather primal natural laws, through which the Torah both creates and destroys lesser life such as human beings and animals, Torah must be regarded as "anti-life" to morally condemn natural things such as death, pain or tragedy.
Torah life unconditionally and captures its essence of existence without flinching or defending itself with morality but with natural principles.
For the truth of Torah we need not look into historical documents but into the Platonic realm of myth and magic. and without a strong and rich life of myths and magic , the people slowly decay from within.
Torah is not is not created from moral or rational principles, but from the depth of the soul of a people. The myth is the expression of that unique soul, but as soon we try to "objectify" or rationally explain its relevance, we slowly kill our cultural life and replace it with a clinic, materialist worldview. This worldview is the modern one, where we have literally killed the belief in religion, passion, magic and myth, because we no longer understand their function. We search for "objective" answers to the myth itself and unsurprisingly we find none, because the truth about life, does not lie in the Torah itself, but in its metaphorical expression of life.
There is a correlation between Torah and perception of reality. We cannot gain direct access to any "dinge an sich" objective truth, the "thing in itself"; instead, we interpret it through Torah symbolism
