[Avodah] Fables and Lies

[Rich, Joel]

  Our modern alienation from myth is unprecedented.  In the pre-modern
world, mythology was indispensible.  It not only helped people make
sense of their lives but also revealed regions of the human mind that
would otherwise have remained inaccessible ... "

I would probably add that of course there are life giving, life
affirming, myths, and destructive, death myths, and some of the
(post)modern studies of mythology do not, to my mind, sufficiently
distinguish between the two (I was not joking about the apikorsis).  But
I tend to think there is still quite a bit of value in these studies,
because they are able to explain in modern language something that I
think we moderns sometimes forget, which is how to more fully understand
some of our own texts.


Regards

Chana


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I agree that Ela Ezkara is a valuable myth and the description "  Our
modern alienation from myth is unprecedented.  In the pre-modern world,
mythology was indispensable.  It not only helped people make sense of
their lives but also revealed regions of the human mind that would
otherwise have remained inaccessible ... " beautifully articulated
something I've always felt (perhaps based on a limited but extremely
valuable high school and college literature education)

The problem I've tried to articulate is that (and it's really ironic
that you describe it as a "moderns" problems) those of us without a
sense of history (that a premodern world existed with its own rules)
read these as fact and assume if you don't you are an apikores.  Of
course one might argue that the talmud was written for all generations
and thus knew that the myth issue would come up yet was still written
this way because......

KT
Joel Rich
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