Abstract
Two religious traditions have informed my personal and academic life – Judaism and Hinduism. This is a reflection on their intersection over a period of more than 40 years. This article chronicles an academic journey from a reified religious universalism towards identifying a deep structural affinity between Judaism and Hinduism defined in contrast to other major differentially constructed religious traditions, then to a position of radical alterity that is potentially just as productive of a very different discussion among those interested in cross-traditional and interreligious deliberations. The wider context is that of the relationships, conceptual and analytical, between discernible religious traditions, or dimensions thereof.
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For example, the prioritization of belief over practice, or of religious experience over discipline and authoritative practice.
In relation to Judaism, something of the scale of the necessary revisions can be appreciated by comparing (Boyarin 2006) with his more recent studies, (Boyarin and Barton 2016, and Boyarin 2018); also see (Batnitzky 2013). On Hinduism, see (Sweetman 2003, Lipner 2006, Pennington 2007, Lorenzen 2006, Michaels 2004) and the definitive collection of articles in (Llewellyn 2005).
I served as the Jewish Co-Chair of the New Zealand Council of Christians and Jews and am currently on the boards of the Wellington Abrahamic Council, and the Religious Diversity Centre of Aotearoa/New Zealand. Nationally, my work in the inter-religious space includes writing (Morris 2007; Morris 2009a, b; Morris 2009a; Morris 2019; and Morris 2011). Additionally, I have been involved in the government-sponsored Regional Interfaith Dialogues in the Asia Pacific (Yogyakarta, 2004; Cebu, 2006; Waitangi, 2007; Phnom Penh, 2008; Perth, 2009; and Semarang, 2012) as a member of the New Zealand delegation (http://regionalinterfaith.org.au/).
Jacob Neusner is persuasive that a genuine Jewish–Christian dialogue has yet to commence, that is, between two discrete religious traditions; see (Neusner 1991: ix).
Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (1888–1975), South Indian idealist philosopher and academic, prolific interpreter of Advaita, and President of India (1962–1967); and Surendranath Dasgupta (1887–1952) Bengali philosopher, interpreter of Yoga, and author of five-volume A History of Indian Philosophy (1922–1955).
There are traditionally held to be six schools (darśanas) of Indian religious thought or “theology” or “philosophy” that are taken to be āstika [‘orthodox’, that is, recognising themselves as being based on the scriptural Vedas (originary Hindu texts)]. These Vedas are understood to be śruti (“revealed” or “heard”). These schools were over time arranged in three sets of dyads: (1) Sāṃkhya (dualistic theism)/Yoga (an “application” of Sāṃkhya), (2) Nyāya (logic and epistemology)/Vaiśeṣika (Atomistic theism) and (3) (Pūrva) Mīmāṃsā (Vedic hermeneutics and orthopraxic)/Vedānta (Uttara Mīmāṃsā or higher hermeneutics) or ultimate Vedic knowledge.
Vedānta came to be the dominant elite theology in India and understood itself in a supersessionist way in relation to the other āstika schools. There are a number of different Vedāntic traditions that offer authoritative commentaries on a corpus of authoritative texts (the Upaniṣads, the Brahma Sūtras and the Bhagavad Gītā). They are classified by reference to their understanding of ultimate reality and include Advaita Vedānta (Non-dual reality), Viśiṣṭādvaita (qualified non-dual reality) and Dvaita (dualistic reality). The āstika darśanas are contrasted with the nāstika or heterodox systems of thought, which include determinist materialism (Ājīvika) and non-determinist materialism (Cārvāka), Buddhism and Jainism.
See Bereshit Rabbah 38:13.
While I would later come to appreciate the diversity of migrant Hindu festivities and their regional inflections (New Zealand, Fiji, Britain, and in North America), it was only in India that I came to realize the bewildering array of rituals and practices of different Hinduisms.
Neo-Vedānta – also known as neo-Hinduism, modernist Hinduism, Universal Hinduism and Global Hinduism – are designations of the versions of reformist, nationalist and elitist Hinduism developed in the nineteenth century that consciously incorporated responses to the European imperial critiques of Hinduism and offered themselves spiritually as antidotes to “Western materialism”. See Halbfass (1988, 1995), and his edited volume Halbfass 1995; Nicholson 2010; Malhotra 2014. Gavin Flood astutely links “modern Hindu self-understanding” with “the West’s view of Hinduism” (Flood 1996: 257). Ninian Smart noted that neo-Hindu traditions are essentially smārta (non-sectarian, Hindu traditions drawing on Mīmāṃsā, Advaita, Yoga, and theism dating from early centuries CE) revivals (Shepherd 2009: 186).
The pivotal centrality of Advaita Vedānta within the rich panoply of Hindu religious traditions may well be seen as misplaced and as selective, although this 19th and 20th revivalist construction does reflect something of the significance of its historical and theological role. Dvārakā (Gujarat) in the West, Jagannatha Puri (Odishain) in the East, Śṛngēri (Karnataka) in the South and Badrikashrama (Uttarakhand) in the North; on links between historic Advaita and current Hinduism, see Joël André-Michel Dubois (2014).
Pirke Avot 5:21, although the anachronistic reference to Talmud clearly refers to advanced textual study. A later comment on this text attributed to Rabbenu Tam contends that the study of Talmud incorporates scripture and Mishnah too.
Śabda-Brahman, the sound generator of the manifold universe.
There is an analytical parallel in Advaita, in that certain “revealed” language has mystical potentialities and qualities that can effect spiritual transformation, and other language can be refined to aid spiritual development.
More recently, this distinction has been somewhat obscured in the debates over whether the rise of modernity is better explained as diffusionist, contact based on trade, migration, urban population concentrations, industrialization, and the application of instrumental reason; or, whether these are understood as a universal emergent human history (globalization).
See (Fackenheim 1961): 37 for an analysis of the existential self and existence.
This interest was also in the associated ‘Hindu” political organizations, the Viśva Hindū Pariṣada (VHP) and Rāṣṭrīya Svayamsēvaka Saṅgha (RSS). Vinayak Damodar Savarkar’s (1883–1966) Outlines of Hindutva (1923), reprinted in 1928 as Hindutva: Who is a Hindu?, outlines both his distinction between Hindutva/Hinduness and “Hinduism” and the relationship of the former to modern Indian (Hindu) nationalism/ Hindu Rashtra/Hindu Nation (Sarvarkar 1938). Sarvarkar in 1947 supported an independent, sovereign Jewish state in the “Jewish fatherland” and opposed the Indian United Nations vote against this proposal. See also, Friedland and Hecht (1998).
We also were invited and joined the initial editorial board of the Journal of Indo-Judaic Studies (1998–2010), which has become a major vehicle for these comparative explorations, although the focus is on “two cultures or peoples rather than” religious interactions and comparisons (Katz 2018:195). The field has significantly developed since innovative work on interfaith relationships by Nathan Katz (Katz 2007: 77–126); the implications for comparative studies in religion of Hindu/Jewish research by Holdrege (Holdrege 2007, Holdrege 2018); and a whole new pioneering field in the constructive Jewish theology of Hinduism by Goshen-Gottstein (Goshen-Gottstein 2015; Goshen-Gottstein 2016); see also, Brill (2019) and Theodor and Kornberg Greenberg (2018), and the earlier, Chatterjee (1997), Goodman (1994), and Kasimow (1999).
Three recent studies of conversion to Judaism provide an introduction to historical and contemporary concerns in Israel and beyond, Kravel-Tovi (2017), Sassoon (2018), and Parfitt and Fisher (2016). Regarding conversion to Hinduism, see Sikand and Katju 1994, Sharma 2011, Viswanathan 1998 and Barua 2015. The issue of the recognition of conversion to Hinduism is still an ongoing issue within Hindu communities. At the 2017 Religious Leaders of Aotearoa/New Zealand Forum in Auckland, a Hindu leader insisted that the non-missionary history of Hinduism and its rejection of conversion distinguished it from Islam and Christianity and provided the foundations for its “inclusive harmony”. An International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKON) spokesperson understood himself as a “convert” to Hinduism having taken a Hindu name and adopted religious practices, beliefs and lifestyle, even if this was not acknowledged by the person standing next to him. Other modern Hindu groups that do allow for conversion include Ārya Samāja, and Svāmīnārāyaṇa Sampradāya. Reconversion to Hinduism from Islam, and Christianity, is not technically conversion at all but a public reaffirmation of their jāti and, thus, Hindu identity.
Although the term saṅgha (Pali; Sanskrit, saṃgha) clearly refers to the new community of assent in Buddhist traditions generally, its resonances range from the new community of monks and nuns (Theravāda) to all Buddhists (Mahāyāna). It is interesting to note in contrast to the threats of loss of Hindu caste identity by leaving India and the opprobrium associated with yeridah for Jews leaving the land, Christians, and Buddhists spiritually deterritorialized earlier traditions as evident in Origen; see Wettstein 2003; and Levy and Weingrod 2004).
To give a brief and illustrative example of the wrong questions, I was a consultant for Crown Law concerning the proposed end to the ministerial exemption which permits (limited) košer slaughter (šeḥitah) in New Zealand. They wanted to identify the underlying belief in order to understand how to evaluate the practice, and when this rationale did not seem to work, there was difficulty grasping the persistence of these ritual practices. What counts is inner dispositions and beliefs rather than external practices. Similar logics seem to operate in the continuing number of countries banning of košer religious slaughter in Europe.
This is explored in Doniger O'Flaherty et al. (1998).
See Mahābhārata (400 BCE); these traditions form the narrative and imaginative ground for what is sometimes referred to as proto-Sāṁkhya, the traditions that developed into textual Sāṁkhya school.
Attributed to Īśvarakṛṣṇa (c. 350 CE).
Prakṛti (matter) is composed of three types – sattva, rajas and tamas – generating unceasing transformations. See (Burley 2007).
In Sāṃkhya, material reality is categorized as 25 tattvas (things) consisting of five thick elements (mahābhūtas); five subtle elements (tanmātras); five motion possibilities (karmendriyas); five senses (jñānendriyas); mind (manas); ego (ahaṃkāra); intellect (buddhi); underlying, unchanging Prakṛti; and, Puruṣa.
Buddhist religious thinking can be seen as an extended rejectionist commentary and reconfiguration of Sāṃkhya dualism, and the comparatively early translation of the Sāṃkhya Kārikā into Chinese ensured that it played a role in the development of Chinese Buddhism too.
The focus here on the radical differences in understanding of the demarcation line between self and non-self (matter) is designed to illustrate the ways in which complex traditions, over time, in this case Judaisms and Hinduisms, embed metaphysics in myth, liturgy, image, symbol, metaphor and narrative, that is, in religious cultures. We can, of course, dis-embed positions, pedagogies and practices from these larger religio-cultural traditions and explore parallels, such as the evident affinities between Hindu traditions, the moral and spiritual refinement of conduct in living according to the Dharma, or the development of the Jewish person following the Jewish teachings of Musar.
Genesis is understood to teach that we are made up of two discrete elements body and soul, and this unique admixture, a temporal unity of the upper and lower worlds, comes to be understood as allowing humankind to do Torah.
See also his accessible work, Michaelson 2006.
See also Prothero 2011 on religious difference.
The difficulty here is the designation of those who frame their lives in terms of these traditions. Gershom Scholem suggested replacing “Judaism” with “Those who are peaceable and faithful in Israel” (2 Samuel 20:19) and what they undertake accordingly by those who understood “themselves as obligated by the heritage (yerushah) of the generations and as obligated to the tradition (masoret) of historical Judaism” (103), in Scholem (1989: 98–104), or as members of a “holy community” (kehillah kedoshah); see Woolf 2015.
When the secular/religious opposition is challenged, it becomes plausible to include the religiously non-affiliated and those who declare “no religion” in censuses as integral to the religious diversity of a nation or region. It is, of course, as significant for the non-religious to find ways to live alongside the religious as the obverse.
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Morris, P.M. The Study of ‘Hinduism’ and the Study of ‘Judaism’: A Personal Journey. Cont Jewry 41, 639–660 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12397-021-09381-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12397-021-09381-3