Prayer as Psychological Sacrifice | Biblical Series: Exodus

Well, if you take the animal and you burn it, then the smoke rises, and God is that which is above. So God can detect the smoke, and then He can detect the quality of the offering. So that's the idea behind the offering. 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.

Because you sacrifice the present to the future, at least, but you also sacrifice everything to your highest priority, if you're not confused. Then that brings up the question of what the highest priority should be and what the quality of the sacrifice should be. The answer to that, psychologically, is it should be the highest possible quality sacrifice to the highest possible thing. 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. Also, the idea that life requires sacrifice to continue in its utmost form and that sacrifice should be voluntary. 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.

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 and you don’t make the sacrifices, you're not going to be a good basketball player. Yeah, that's what's going to happen.

Well, and that's another indication of the intrinsic logos of the world. We also know this deeply, I would say, inside ourselves because people know perfectly well that their conscience can torment them. It is the case sometimes that people's conscience is overdeveloped and has this tyrannical super ego 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.

What's one of the things that's so odd about that is you can't escape from that; it just makes it worse for you. You know that you really can't escape from it, not 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, because people know they know I could have tried harder.

The question 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? I think we do still have a sacrificial system. I mean, I ask my students all the time in my maps of meaning 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. They knew exactly, generally, what they had sacrificed as well.

So we've spiritualized it in some sense. Partly what you see in the entire biblical corpus is the spiritualization, the psychologization of the sacrificial problem, very specifically. I don’t have an answer. The fact that we don’t act it out—the actual carnal representation of sacrifice—is that a loss? That's a very good question. The 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? How much does it have to be ritualized?

There is still, I mean in this tradition, there is still—even though it's not a killing of an animal, there's still a ritualized aspect of sacrifice. Is there some kind of giving, like giving money or giving something? Which becomes like, 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 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 such? I tend not to dismiss anything that's extraordinarily peculiar off out of hand, right? Because there's usually something lurking underneath it. But I mean, in Christianity, obviously, you still have this—I believe you still have the sacrifice. We participate in the sacrifice of Christ. It's not repeated sacrifice, is it? It is a participation, a perfect memory in the participation of the sacrifice of Christ.

It is an unusual period because AD 70 is when it disappeared, doesn’t it? Right—the destruction of the temple and they shifted from the temple to the synagogue. And if I understand it rightly, there’s from sacrifice to prayer, right? How does prayer fall in for sacrifice? Well, hopefully when you pray you sacrifice yourself, right? Because part of what you're saying, 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—I need to let go; there's part of me that needs to die.

It has to be given up to something higher—what part of it is of me has to go? There’s a contemplative aspect to that, and 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. 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 is, right? So that you can get yourself straight. You can give it up in abstraction so you don’t act out the pathology. Then, nothing dies in actuality, but that still means you have something to give up.

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 gonna hurt when that goes. It's like, yeah, but maybe you won't die then—you offer it up as a sacrifice to something higher. Because otherwise, why would you improve? That discriminating spirit inside that judges what's in you that should be sacrificed wouldn’t even exist unless it was existing in relationship to something higher, because there'd be nothing to serve as a judge.