Bibles vs. Creation Myths
I’ve been feeling weird about my use of the word “Torah,” and I realized there’s a discrepancy in how I use it that makes it ambiguous how inclusive it is.
Paradoxically, clearing this up will make it more inclusive while simultaneously making it clear I’m not recommending The Torah™ to people who wouldn’t otherwise be inclined.
Rather, I am inviting everyone to consider what their own culture’s Torah is.
I have often used “Torah” to mean something equivalent to the fairly flexible definition of “Dharma;” both can mean “teaching,” and both can be used in a sort of mystical way to mean “spiritual teachings implicit in anything/everything,” and I enjoy and encourage that meaning.
But there’s something else I mean by “Torah,” still more general than The Torah™ but connected to something implicit (to Jewish people) about its role — namely its function as a CULTURAL CREATION STORY, which is not in my experience how it functions as an “Old Testament.”
There’s a vast difference between approaching a sacred text as a matrix of Universal Truth Propositions presented in a friendly narrative format, versus relating to it as a mythic History of Us that conveys an ANCESTRAL INTERIORITY about one’s PARTICULAR place in the universe.
I’ve noticed that my surrounding society — especially informed by my time studying religion at a university that typified the American redevelopment of the European model — makes an interesting literary distinction between genres of sacred texts that I do not find natural:
There’s Bibles™, those matrices of Universal Truth Propositions transmitted by Religions™, which are considered global(?) opt-in Belief Systems™ one chooses from a sort of menu.
And there’s Creation Myths™, the idiosyncratic magical-realist stories of Indigenous Peoples™.
Which one of those categories would you put the Torah in?
My assumption is that most Christian people would put it in Bibles™, and most Jewish people would be like, “למה לא שניהם” [por que no los dos], but I actually want to encourage everybody to actually DELETE THE BIBLES™ CATEGORY FROM YOUR MIND PALACE.
It is my contention that the Bibles™ category is a latter-day invention of cosmopolitan philosophical universalism, grafted back onto the Torah because it was important for particular reasons at the time. It is NOT a natural way to understand that text!
Moreover, those reasons are no longer relevant, and I wave my hand at the general Western malaise about how everyone is rootless and has no grounding traditions anymore &c. &c. as evidence that people could do with a bit more Cultural Creation Story in their lives.
My first invitation is to look at your own received sacred texts, whatever they are, this way, EVEN IF YOU DO SO SKEPTICALLY, in order to understand not so much what they say but WHY they say what they say, and why it was presented TO YOU as sacred.
My second invitation, once you’ve let that settle in a little bit, is to begin to look outwards at other cultures that way.
