the last note<\/a> I was positing that liturgical choice are informed by a desire to experience the Divine through prayer. And on the one hand, that seems obvious, right? And on the other hand, it’s impossibly vague. What do we mean by Divine<\/i>? What do we mean by prayer<\/i>? What do we mean by experience<\/i>? And on the other hand, the vagueness it’s totally unhelpful: how<\/i> would we even begin to go about make choices about the liturgy to make those experiences (vaddevah dey are) happen?\nSo. One thing that Rabbi Hoffman talked about was the different choices we had made in different times and places. He talked a little about the people who would fast for days and pray for hours, and the way the Orthodox texts are endlessly repetitive, and the way the Reform synagogues were built like cathedrals. And he talked about the stories we tell ourselves about the world.\n
There was a time when the metaphor we understood for the world was a fight between light and darkness—the Divine rode across the sky in a fiery chariot every day. It was a metaphor, Rabbi Hoffman hastened to point out—it’s a metaphor. The Divine is light and warmth, protecting us against cold and dark. And in our prayer services, we set fire to things. We looked at the fire, and felt it, and we ate the cooked food, and presumably at least some of the time some of the people experienced the Divine in the fire.\n
There was a time when the metaphor we understood for the world was a divide between the soul and the body—the eternal angelic part of us, intrinsically good, seeking to escape from the mortal animal, intrinsically evil. And in our prayer services, we fasted and chanted and meditated, and presumably at least some of the time some of the people experienced the Divine by (feeling as if they were) escaping their bodies.\n
There was a time when the metaphor we understood for the world was a Great Chain of Nature—the Divine stands at the top of infinitely divided ranks and terraces, and everything has an exact place somewhere on that ladder. The natural order of things is to look up to all the rungs above and down on those rungs below. And in our prayer services, we entered gigantic sanctuaries designed to give us a sense of our own smallness and the immenseness of the Divine; we looked up at a distant clergyman in a elaborate robe, halfway up to Heaven. And presumably at least some of the time at least some of the people experienced the Divine in reverence and awe.\n
The idea, here, of course, is that a culture’s driving metaphors of course<\/i> are how we experience the Divine. How else could we experience the Divine other than through metaphor? That doesn’t mean it isn’t real<\/i>, or that it isn’t really<\/i> an experience of the Divine.\n
Nor does it mean that we can’t experience the Divine in the other ways. It’s not like those metaphors ever really drop out of our symbolic vocabulary. We can experience the Divine in fire (as we light candles, or gather around a bonfire) or in awe (either in Nature or in artificial grandeur) or in ecstasy (as we sing and dance, or fast, or whatever) despite the fact that we don’t, really, here in the West in the early Twenty-First, think of the world like that.\n
So. Before we move on the next note<\/a>, I’d like to know what you think of this stuff. Despite the utterly unhistorical way I’ve presented it, does it make sense to you? Does it make sense in terms of your own religious experience, or your own knowledge of religious history? Have you experienced the Divine through prayer? Or, just as importantly I suppose, have you sought the Divine through a prayer service and not found the experience? Have you sat (or stood or knelt) in a prayer service and thought—this is not the right metaphor!\nTolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In Which Your Humble Blogger gets to the meat of the matter. Well, some of the meat. Some of the potatoes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[207],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14275","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-scripture"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14275","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14275"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14275\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16756,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14275\/revisions\/16756"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14275"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14275"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14275"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}