What is Religion? There are many meaning of the word ‘ Religion’. What is Religion for me? # Book ‘ The pushcart prize, III: Best of the small presses. >From a journey through the land of Israel. By Pinchas Saden. Pages 132-133 ‘ ‘ To be religious, in my terms, means to understand that life is a parable of which God is the meaning – that is, to live life as a struggle to make contact with the divine. . . . . – in other words, by the drying up of the previously renewable source of human contact with God. . . . . . . There can be no other significance to life beside worshiping Him. The rest is simple a question of how one understands this worship – - that is, of how one understands God. Worshiping God, as the phrase suggests*, has nothing to do with pleasure or cultural frills. It is work, hard work, like paving a road, or farming land, or building a house. In general, I don’t believe that the purpose of life in this world is to snatch a little pleasure here or there. If it were, we might as well have been born bedbugs. In whatever we live and do – in our happiness, our suffering, our love, our hate, our passions, our thoughts – we must live and do it not just for itself, but as a parable, as a question, as a war. As work. As worship. What is man? Man is question. God is answer. If the answer were available here, in this life, the question would be unnecessary. The painful tension between the two gives life its energy.’ =====================. . / * In Hebrew the word for ‘ Worship’ avoda, is the same as the word for ‘ work’. Translator./ ========. Best wishes Israel Sadovnik Socratus ============.
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