Sandor Goodhart > Quotes

“To what extent, in other words, we may ask, is the imagining of God as having expelled the humans a misunderstanding of our own failure to keep commandments and accept infinite responsibility for the other individual, an alternative that, if undertaken, changes everything?”
― Sandor Goodhart, The Prophetic Law: Essays in Judaism, Girardianism, Literary Studies, and the Ethical

“Thus Freud's discoveries, for example, far from unveiling for us a realm which is genuinely new, a knowledge that is other than conscious knowledge, only display for us a region which, from within Platonism was, as it were, mapped out in advance.”
― Sandor Goodhart, The Prophetic Law: Essays in Judaism, Girardianism, Literary Studies, and the Ethical

“Double mediation describes the situation when the model becomes not only a rival blocking the subject's desires but an actual disciple, and so everything speeds up.”
― Sandor Goodhart, The Prophetic Law: Essays in Judaism, Girardianism, Literary Studies, and the Ethical

“The sequence in which Joseph is sold may veritably be described as substitution gone wild.”
― Sandor Goodhart, The Prophetic Law: Essays in Judaism, Girardianism, Literary Studies, and the Ethical

“Rabbinic Judaism, which we know today simply as Judaism, as Buber tells the story, was the product of the prophetic law of anti-idolatry.”
― Sandor Goodhart, The Prophetic Law: Essays in Judaism, Girardianism, Literary Studies, and the Ethical

“The resurrection is a kind of surrealist moment in the Gospels, one in which Jesus appears to step out of the reality in which he has been living, a “stepping out” that reveals that reality to be just one more scriptural illusion founded upon violence. In light of the resurrection, all social structure, the entire scapegoating machinery, is revealed as delusional, a delusional quality we are not permitted to see fully unless we observe the victim “after death” so to speak.”
― Sandor Goodhart, The Prophetic Law: Essays in Judaism, Girardianism, Literary Studies, and the Ethical

“With the advent of the “modern” world some twenty-five hundred years ago (and for whatever reason), these sacrificial systems were threatened and the ones that survived were the ones that effectively developed a means of living more or less without sacrificial victims in the traditional sense.”
― Sandor Goodhart, The Prophetic Law: Essays in Judaism, Girardianism, Literary Studies, and the Ethical

“Going back to Moses Maimonides, he considers Jesus that prophet who was authorized by God to prepare the heathen world (as Messiah for the heathens) for the salvation expected by Israel. I judge this attitude of a Jew very positively because he uses the same category of thought as Christian theology. This says that the Hebrew Bible is a preparation for the Gospel, and Lapide says that Christianity is a preparation of the heathen world for the Jewish Messiah.”
― Sandor Goodhart, The Prophetic Law: Essays in Judaism, Girardianism, Literary Studies, and the Ethical