Additional comments on Judaism

After reviewing assignments or getting certain questions I often send out messages through Nicenet dealing with points that have come up.  For each section I am going to include some of these past messages and occasionally add to them.


THE ABRAHAMIC TRADITIONS

As you move into the second half of the course, I want you to think about what links the three great traditions we are now studying.  They all reach back to the story of Abraham, with Jews and Arabs alike claiming him as a biological ancestor while Christians and other Muslims see him as a spiritual one. 

The dominant theme in both Judaism and Islam is the idea of God as a transcendent being who created the world.  As such God is not to be pictured (and for Jews having a name not even spoken). Christianity as a reform movement within Judaism stepped back from this concept by seeing Jesus as himself divine and developing the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation in order to reconcile the theological issues such an idea presents.  As you will see later, part of the attraction of Islam for some Christians had been a return to what could be seen as a more strict monotheism.

A second theme is the notion of a covenant or deal.  Unlike the emphasis in Asian spirituality on the inherent divinity of the human spirit, for the Abrahamic traditions the emphasis is on obedience or submission (the literal meaning of islam).  Christianity diverges again from Judaism and Islam by having the theory of an original sin that keeps all humanity separated from God so that in addition to continuing obedience there is the need of salvation.

Finally, there is the emphasis on a specific recorded tradition detailing the terms of the covenant.  For Jews this is the Torah as well as a collection of other texts, for Christians it is this so-called "old testament" along with the Gospels and some other writings, and for Islam it is the Qur'an.  Just how one is to understand these scriptures does differ inside all three traditions, and one of the most important features of the current religious scene is the conflict between "fundamentalists" who insist on a strictly literal interpretation of their scriptures and others who prefer to stress these documents as the products of a specific place and time and so open to different readings as times change.


ASIAN AND WESTERN METAPHYSICS

Metaphysics, in the sense of the term used by philosophers, is the study of what is supposed to be ultimately real. Another term is ontology.

In reviewing Asian traditions and now moving on to the Western traditions, you will note that I am asking you to pay some attention to the philosophical issue of how whatever we mean by terms such as "body" and "soul" and "God" are connected.

In the West we have a strong tradition of seeing the material world, including our physical bodies, as one kind of reality and our souls or minds as a quite different kind of reality. This is what philosophers call dualism, and it characterizes philosophers such as Plato and Descartes.

Asian philosophy does not typically make such a distinction. Instead, as in Hinduism, there is a distinction between an ultimate reality (Brahman, let's say) and everything we otherwise experience, both mental and physical. There are considerable differences even in Hinduism, though, and you should review terms such as purusha and prakriti (characterizing the dualism of Yoga and Samkhya), while with Vedanta there is an approach that sees everything as ultimately the same, an expression of the ultimate reality. And in Buddhism the phrase "anicca, anatta" is supposed to mean that there is no permanent substance at all, only a flow of consciousness.

In Hinduism whatever we mean by God is simply the ultimate reality that at some level is reflected in ourselves and our visible world (sometimes this is labeled pantheism--everything is God), and it marks what it called an "immanent" view.

In Western thought, though, God is outside the picture of the world, an eternal, entirely non-physical substance as different from the world in which we live as an artist is different from the painting he might create. This is a "transcendent" view.

This does lead to different conceptions of what a spiritual life should be. For Hinduism, typically it is the meditation that allows our consciousness to rediscover what it is in itself (tat tvam asi). For Westerners, it is reaching out to a reality that is not the same as ourselves. It is the difference between saying you really are God but you just have to work at knowing it and saying you are not God but you need to reach out to find him.

It also leads to a difference in what is regarded as a sacred text. In India it is more likely to be the report of someone who has become enlightened. In the West it is the report of someone who has been contacted by God.


HOW TO LOOK AT WESTERN TRADTIONS

In various assignmentsI have been asking you to look at familiar ideas from the perspective of someone used to an Asian outlook. As I've said before, one reason for studying the Asian traditions as a group in the first half of the course has been to set up a new way of seeing what is really distinctive in the three Abrahamic traditions.

With the legend of Abraham we have a mix of old ideas and new. What is striking about the story of his being told to sacrifice his son is not really the idea of human sacrifice itself (it was common enough in the Mideast at his time just as it was in Mexico or Hawaii at the time of European contact) but the notion of a distinctive deal with a very jealous divinity. In India or China, just as in the mythologies of ancient Greece and Rome, gods and mortals were believed to interact, but the interesting direction taken in Hinduism and Buddhism was to move beyond mythology altogether. The concept of Brahman, for example, parallels the development of monotheism in the West but completely lacks the political implications it had from Abraham on.

The God of Abraham is presented in the Torah as the creator of the world, but his relationship with humanity after the "original sin" of Adam is limited to the descendants of a single individual. Since the notion of personal immortality (heaven and hell and all that) was not clearly developed in Hebrew tradition, the political dimension would have to be what mattered.

With Christianity and Islam, which would hold personal immortality as well as the resurrection of the dead as basic tenets, the strictly political dimension becomes less important. Instead, there is the idea that the God of Abraham is the one God to to be worshipped in a correct way by all humanity, and with that comes the notion that there is an obligation to "convert" non-believers, by force if necessary.

ONe thing you should do is contrast Christian and Buddhist approaches. Both traditions spread worldwide largely through the influence of missionaries belonging to religious communities (originally just monks), but what I want you to be thinking about the idea of a soul being either "saved" or "lost" would make Christians see their job differently. You might also think about how for the Christian there would still be political implications in all this that would not be there for the Buddhist (a case study would be the way in which Spain viewed the conquest of the Aztecs as in essence a religious duty).