Of Religious Persuasion.

The Zohar stands out to me as an exemplar of religious texts. It's tone (though certainly partially due to translation is conversational. The narrator is not an orator that lectures to the reader, but a fellow discussing religion. Certainly, the Zohar has an opinion, but it attempts to persuade the reader. More specifically, there are elements of the Socratic method, that is, the Zohar poses questions to lead you along it's argument. On the first page of the article "If this is so with the angels, how much more so with the Torah who created them and all the worlds and for whose sake we all exist!" Page fifty-four contains a particularly good example with the discussion of Adam's sin. "'He drove out et.' Et, precisely! And who drove out Et? 'Adam' Adam out Et! The Zohar is strong in that it approaches religion in an analytical sense. It focuses on small passages and ideas and analyzes them closely for metaphorical meaning. Why is it so different in tone than passages read from the bible? It is even proper to classify the Zohar as a religious text? It analyzes religious passages, but so might a criticism and argument against religion. It's emphasis is analysis, and not new metaphor. Is an art criticism artistic? An article about baseball athletic? In the Zohar, we see a new perspective on religion, and in it's conversational and personal speech, we see that it is a model for individuals, humans, to analyze religion by. Contrastingly, the direct story told in Lamentations or Genesis is not a direct model to show how we should think about metaphors, but are the things to think about. Is a move to abstraction and meta analysis a trend with time? All of us now have taken yet another step back, in a class where we think about how we think about religion. In 2200 perhaps students will take Introduction to Religious Studies Studies.