Shira Rocklin

Absolutely true. Listening is not reading...

Objects of worship need to have paper, the fewer **pictures** the
more holy, the nicer the cover the more reverence.

(I sent it out with "the fewer words" but that's not what I meant.
I'm kind of out of it the past couple of days; sorry.)

Sandra
********************

I thought this was so interesting, because my thoughts immediately went
to the Judaism I grew up with, and how book-worship might figure into
that tradition... being the 'people of the book' and all.

So, first, given that there wasn't technology/media, and writing/paper
were the only choice aside from oral tradition, Judaism doesn't fit into
that category of what objects of worship need to have, at least in my
mind. The Torah, when looked at from outside of the tradition looks
like the book Sandra described - a modern printed book, with gold leafed
edges, and a ribbon to mark your place.

But... traditional Jews don't see that as the book of worship. That is
just a 'copy.' The real thing is read from, listened to, read out loud
by a live person, every week. And its not a 'book.' Its a scroll,
printed on animal hide of some sort, written by hand by a special
scribe. The book itself as tons of words, and the letters themselves
are derived from 'pictures' of a sort (Aleph, the first letter of the
alephbet, represents of Ram, Bet, the second letter, is a picture of a
house, etc). And then the Rabbis throughout history took each of those
words and added more words of interpretation (which gives me problems in
other ways... but its intriguing and mind-boggling the sheer quantity of
interpretation that Judaism encouraged, and also the inter-connectdness
of the interpretations, and also the fact that people who lived together
and believed the same things often came up with completely opposing
understandings of the texts).

Oh, and its interesting that the written Torah is considered only equal
in holiness/value, not more, to the Oral Tradition, which is less widely
known about among non-Jews and non-traditional Jews.

Oh, also interesting. The way the Torah is learned is not through
reading, or listening, its through discussion. The traditional method
of Jewish "education" is actually called 'learning' not teaching or
education. And the form is for two people who are partnered up to
learn/translate/read a particular part of the text, and then sit and
argue about its meaning. Argument is the principle method of
understanding meaning. Isn't that interesting? I'm fascinated
sometimes with that, because its a completely different understanding of
how learning occurs from mainstream education... and it seems extra
strange to me that religious Jewish schools still use that form of
learning for those subjects, but have completely taken up the mainstream
understanding of education for the modern subjects.

I guess I've gone off topic for a moment. But I thought the book thing
was interesting. Are other religions this way?
Shira