"""On my part, I like what Franz Rosenzweig has to say: “The Good Lord did not create religion; he created the world”. In Rosenzweig's scheme religion is a human endevor, and it has little to do with God. Thus religion is not a separate reality from the world in which we find ourselves as is; as we perceive ourselves, not in front of God but more in front of, and vis-a-vis others. There was a rather moving moment in the show, which threw me off my track for a moment, but which enforces brilliantly Rosenzweig’s idea that religion, in its essence, whether philosophically articulated or otherwise, is to be found in our way of being, in our omniscient limitation. Says Hendricks: “I’m a mulatto,” inviting Sandbeck to consider the problem with whether that alone means something, and hence ponder the problem with people's naïve belief in the one-to-one relation between a concept and its reality. That was rather priceless."""--Camelia Elias, cameliaelias.blogspot.com
Those that really care to know about what I do, get served, however, an interesting dish. But it doesn’t happen very often that I find it worth the while to spill the beans. So I keep flirting with other disciplines to myself, yet following religiously a master who knew a thing or two about bringing out the dead by forging forth the margin, by dealing with the pallor of death, namely Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav who once said: “it’s forbidden to be old.” I keep myself young by consciously diving into the ‘frivolous’ and the ‘non-serious’ in connection with work that I nevertheless get paid for. At the end of the day, it is precisely this very act of deviating by diving that attracts others to my ideas in the field of American studies. What Nahman means to say is that deviating is the very condition for the possibility of being.--ibid
Unitalicized text is from Marc-Alain Oaknin's LE LIVRE BRULE.
Some Wordplay Involving Religion
Rabbi Marc-Alain Ouaknin asks whether religious reality is really real. The answer depends on what the meaning of "is" is.
"The good God has not created religion. He has created the world."For Franz Rosenzweig, this sentence means that religion is not a separate reality, overlapping the world as is.
On the contrary, Rosenzweig would like to say that religion, in its first essence, is to be found in that selfsame way of being as is. That amounts to advancing, all in all, the view that God has created religion.
Rabbi Ouaknin the Alchemist
Rabbi Ouaknin then puns on the word "noble." It can mean admirable, or it can refer, in chemistry, to gases which do not react with other gases and to metals which do not decay.
In that sense, the term "religion" is noble; it has nothing in common with the smooth-talking, mystical, pious, sermonizing--preachy, in a word--meaning of the term.
However, this sentence will act as an epigraph for the views introduced in this book, while the book returns to the word "religion" its everyday and banal sense. Thus the statement "the good God has not created religion. He has created the world" is, for us, the starting point of a criticism of religion and the religious.
Rabbi Ouaknin the Revolutionary
He must think that most of the other people in France are stupid. They believe in an unsophisticated religion and a violent kind of politics.
A criticism of the religious, but also of the political. "The political," understood as meaning that institution which has the capacity to give itself the right to engage in acts of violence--which is what they are--and to legitimize this violence by the Law. Although a product of "laymen," the Law is only another religious figure.[snip]
This criticism does not aim at abolishing politics, but at its reduction. It acts to reduce the state of the State to the minimum, to restrict politics in order to free up a place for other, non-violent, speech.
One will be able to object that it is easy to criticize politics and the religious if, a priori, these terms see themselves decked out with negative, or even pejorative, significance.
