https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=HXhyENF0fwQ
Well, if you take the animal and you burn it, then the smoke rises and God is that which is above and so God can detect the smoke and then he can detect the quality of the offering. So that’s the idea behind the offering and it is archaic. It’s not the way that modern people think about sacrifice, but I think about it psychologically as a developmental move towards full recognition of the idea, first of all, that work is a form of sacrifice and vice versa and that because you sacrifice the present to the future at least, but you also sacrifice everything to your highest priority if you’re not confused and then that brings up the question of what the highest priority should be and what the quality of the sacrifice should be and the answer to that psychologically is it should be the highest possible quality sacrifice to the highest possible thing because otherwise you have to ask yourself why would you bother doing it? So it’s easy to dismiss these ideas of burnt offering as primitive superstition, but there’s an idea behind them that’s unbelievably deep and profound and also the idea that life requires sacrifice to continue in its utmost form and that the sacrifice should be voluntary and that even it should extend in some sense and has to, to the sacrifice of the innocent. I mean that’s an extremely profound and also very problematic idea, but it can’t be just hand-waved away. And there’s a manner in which if you take that factually and you apply it to little things or to purposes in general, there’s a manner in which the purpose will always know the quality of your sacrifice because what you do, the quality of what you do will attain or not the purpose. The world will hit you back. You can pretend with people, you can lie, you can deceive, but if you’re trying to be a good basketball player, if you don’t make the sacrifices, you’re not going to be a good basketball player. That’s what’s going to happen. Yeah, well and that’s another indication of the intrinsic logos of the world. And we also know this deeply, I would say, inside ourselves because people know perfectly well that their conscience can torment them and it is the case sometimes that people’s conscience is overdeveloped and has this tyrannical super-eagle element and will knock them down. But if your conscience is functioning well, basically what it does is indicate to you constantly that your sacrifices are either not of the right sort or they’re not of the highest quality. And you call yourself out on that, right? And what’s one of the things that’s so odd about that is you can’t, if you try to escape from that, it just makes it worse for you and you know that and you really can’t escape from it, except by abiding by it. You can fight it and all of that and you can harden your heart and become even more determined in your willingness to make improper sacrifices, but you know perfectly well. I’ve never seen anyone that in some fundamental sense was deluded on that account. People know, they know, I could have tried harder. By the way, is it your theory then in light of all these days and that subject of sacrifice, do you feel that we are net losers, religiously, morally, theologically, net gainers or neither, having no more sacrificial system? Well, I think we do still have a sacrificial system. I mean, I asked my students all the time in my maps of mini-class, a lot of them were children of first generation immigrants, often Asian. I said, what did your parents sacrifice to come here? Well, it’s like they knew exactly what that meant and they knew exactly generally what they had sacrificed as well. And so we’ve spiritualized it in some sense and partly what you see in the entire biblical corpus is the spiritualization, the psychologization of the sacrificial practice. Very specifically, and I don’t have an answer. And the fact that we don’t act it out. The actual carnal representation of sacrifice, is that a loss that we don’t have that? That’s a very good question. I mean, part of the question that Jonathan and I have been debating back and forth constantly is and part of the question that this book raises is to what degree does what’s become abstract still need to be represented in image and action, right? How much does it have to be ritualized? The answer is no. In Jewish tradition, there is still, even though it’s not a killing of an animal, there still is a ritualized aspect to the sacrifice. Is there some kind of giving, like giving money or giving something which becomes like a… Judaism, the Torah and Judaism later are very concrete religions. It was even dismissed by some Christians in the Middle Ages as a carnal religion because it’s so deeply embedded in life. So, yes, the abstract is less important than the concrete in many ways in the Torah and in Judaism. But I’m asking this, I don’t know if you know this, I’m sure Oz knows this, but many, many religious Jews still pray daily for the restoration of the sacrificial system, that the temple will be rebuilt and specifically so that we can sacrifice again. There’s no denying the drama of blood and death. Right, so you would not dismiss that prayer as odd. Well, I tend not to dismiss anything that’s extraordinarily peculiar out of hand, right? Because there’s usually something lurking underneath it. But I mean, in Christianity, obviously, you still have a sacrificial… We believe we still have the sacrifice. We participate in the sacrifice of Christ. It’s not a repeated sacrifice, isn’t it? It is a participation, a perfect memory in the participation of the sacrifice of Christ. It is an unusual period, AD 70 is when it disappeared, isn’t it? Destruction of the temple and they shifted from the temple to the synagogue and from, if I understand it rightly, from sacrifice to prayer. And I always wondered, how does prayer fill in for sacrifice? Well, hopefully when you pray, you sacrifice your retirement, right? Because that’s it. Well, you sacrifice a lot of time to pray. Part of what you’re saying is, I think if the prayer is proper, is you’re saying, there’s part of me that needs to go. There’s part of me that needs to… I need to let go. There’s part of me that needs to die and it has to be given up to something higher. What part of it is of me has to go? And there’s a contemplative aspect to that. And then you look to the highest to help guide you in that. So there’s a discriminating spirit within you that can help separate the chaff from the wheat and the offering up of the chaff is the sacrificial gesture. And so that can be transformed into prayer. One of the things that Jung would say about that, for example, is that if you give up enough psychologically, you don’t have to… You’ll cut your losses in actuality. And of course, that’s sort of what thoughts for, right? So that you can get yourself straight. You can give it up in abstraction so you don’t act out the pathology and then nothing dies in actuality. But that still means you have something to give up. And part of that repentance idea is a sacrificial notion. It’s like, well, oh, that’s what I did wrong. Oh, that’s a big part of me. Oh, it’s going to hurt when that goes. It’s like, yeah, but maybe you won’t die. And then you offer it up as a sacrifice to something higher because otherwise, why would you improve? And that discriminating spirit inside that judges what’s in you that should be sacrificed, that wouldn’t even exist unless it was existing in relationship to something higher because there’d be nothing to serve as a judge.