An Open Letter to Friends in the Hindu Community
Many of you have been confused and hurt by stories about Jews discarding wigs of Indian provenance.
I share the hurt. As the child of a survivor of one of Hitler's camps, I know what it is to be castigated and vilified, to be thought of as a lesser being. Every Jew is a survivor of a painful journey of two millennia of rejection and persecution. I could not be faithful to the Jewish experience if I did not feel the pain of others.
Conflict between groups is often the product of misunderstanding caused by misinformation. My hope is to share some information about the mindset of traditional Jews – which will, I pray, lead to greater understanding. I don't expect non-Jewish readers to see things exactly the way traditional Jews do. Separating fact from fiction, however, may help to remove some of the sting and bitterness that is born of misinformation. I hope that readers will respond to the spirit in which I write – a plea to move forward in mutual respect and regard. I hope that the positive feelings towards our Hindu friends of the overwhelming majority of Jews – traditional and not – will compensate for the occasional and unintentional slight coming from a minority
Let me address, one by one, the hurt felt by many Hindus as a result of the events of recent weeks. I will present criticisms and comments culled from writers in parts of the Hindu world. After each item, I will attempt to clarify the traditional Jewish perspective.
• Labeling Indian hair "idolatrous" is demeaning to all Hindus, and implies that they are primitive pagans, especially compared to more enlightened, Western religions.
Idolatry is a misnomer and is used for lack of a better term. In fact, traditional Jews who are discussing Indian wigs are not using the term "idolatry," but avodah zarah, which literally means "foreign service." Its accepted usage included the worship of other deities, as well as the worship of the Deity in a manner that is foreign to the Jewish conception of God.
The Jewish understanding of monotheism was not always congruent with that of the religions that were spun off from Judaism. Jews see Oneness not simply as the absence of competing deities. Rather, Jews emphasize God as completely Unique. They underscore that God is an Absolute One, completely transcendent, knowing no dimension, corporeality, and limitation. All forces and phenomena exist within Him. As the great medieval scholar Maimonides put it, if God could cease to exist, everything would vanish. On the other hand, if everything that human beings know and experience would cease to exist, God would not be diminished in the slightest.
Jews allow no visual representations of the Deity. (Ancient Greeks called Jews "atheists," because they found no icons or images in their synagogues. Obviously, they had no god!) Jews do not believe that God acts like humans do, or emotes as humans do. They believe that only God can be the object of veneration or prayer, to the complete exclusion of even spiritual forces that He Himself created. They do not pray to or worship intermediaries, angels, or saints. They see all such activity, indeed, as an affront to a pure monotheism. (Interestingly, various Christian churches have had to wrestle with some of these ideas. Protestants in general are uneasy about employing icons and displays during worship; Unitarians and some Pentacostals reject the Trinity.)
• Jews who reject Indian hair will soon distance themselves from many other Indian products, to further insulate themselves against Hindu idolatry.
Unlike other major faiths, Judaism is primarily a system of law. Jews can speculate and debate all they want, but at the end of the day, it is a system of law that determines how they should act. The law about the products of other religions is very clear. Jewish law does not demand that Jews ban all products that have been somehow touched by religious ceremonies we reject. In fact, Jewish law bans only objects that were directly offered to a deity of another religion, and only when offered according to some narrow legal criteria. As of this writing, there is much debate whether the tonsure ceremony at Tirupati even falls within those criteria. Virtually anything else that Hindu writers have openly wondered about (e.g. will Jews reject shirts made by the hands of "idolatrous" Hindu workers, or computer support from techies who may have begun their work day with a Hindu prayer?) does not even pose a question in Jewish law.
Judaism, we believe, presents a middle path between the extremes of openness to all outside influences, and building barriers to keep out all such influences. The law drew a circle around some objects of religious activity, labeled them as contraband – and allowed us to deal with the rest of the culture and people. (Medieval legal responsa, for example, told Jews they could use the leftover votive candles that local Catholic priests would sell them, but also told them that they could not enter a church.) Jewish law allows us to reject some elements of a host culture without having to anathematize everything in it.
• Because observant Jews see idolatry in Hinduism, they will likely mistreat those they reject as idolatrous.
This is a non sequitur. Once again, it is Jewish law that makes this impossible. Jewish law regarding non-Jews is straightforward and unequivocal. First and foremost, Jews stressed the notion that all human beings are created in the image of God. The Western world owes its notion of the centrality and dignity of the individual to Judaism. Jews asserted the spiritual significance of all people as well. Judaism never taught that it had an exclusive on heaven and eternal life. Instead, it stressed that non-Jews who live by a moral code of only seven commandments belong to the righteous who are assured a place in heaven.
Jews are forbidden to harm non-Jews, to steal from them, to deceive them. They are expected to help feed their poor, to bury their dead, to greet them with a kindly disposition, and to generally do the things we need to do to build better communities. Contemporary Hindus, whether living and working side by side with Jewish friends, or separated by thousands of miles, should expect nothing but polite, respectful treatment.
• Jews dancing around bonfires fueled by Indian wigs is the ultimate form of disrespect.
Such celebrations were undeniably in appropriate and in very poor taste. A very small number of people participated in them.
• There should be no discussion of idolatry in the 21st century. All that should matter is how people treat each other.
Here I suspect Jews and Hindus can see eye to eye, even as we might disagree on how to conceive of God, and how to serve Him. For billions of people, the image of God they cherish directly determines how they look at Man. People who worship a bloodthirsty god will try to reshape the world in the form of that god. Holding to a particular conception of God makes it quite easy to behead people with zeal in His name. Those who worship a god of love will have an easier time educating their children to be giving and generous – but might have a hard time using force to quash lawlessness. The smallest differences in the way we see the Deity will morph into huge differences in behavior and attitude. How we see God inexorably affects the way we treat each other! Jews believe that our notion of God has contributed to making observant Jews, for the most part, law-abiding, generous, caring citizens in many cases – and true saints in others. Holding on to the purity of that notion is, to us, a very modern demand, not a primitive artifact.
When the dust settles, good things can come from this difficult moment in our relationship. People in both of our communities will likely realize that we don't know enough about each other, and seize the opportunity to correct this.
Because of all the hoopla, many Jews have already learned facts about Indian-Jewish history that they were unaware of just a few weeks ago. They have learned that India has no history of anti-Semitism – something that is rare in our historic experience; that Jews lived there for hundreds of years without an unpleasant incident. They have heard of the Hindu masters who teach – in a manner that resonates deeply with Jewish life – that spirituality is not born of contemplating God from the distance, but by emulating Him through a constant embrace of deeds of kindness. Many Jews have come to appreciate the way India and Israel have drawn closer together, how both of those countries are victimized by the religious fascism of people who celebrate death over life, and feel no qualms about blowing up busses or trains crowded with ordinary people.
The discovery may move to more subtle areas. Writing from Israel's Golan, an Orthodox woman challenged her sisters to do some soul-searching. True, it is not easy for a married woman to cover her hair, as Jewish law demands. It is wonderful that they can fulfil the legal requirement in an esthetically pleasing way. But does it hold a candle to the devotion of the women in India whose hair is used to make those wigs? Many of them living in poverty beyond the imagination of Westeners, these women have nothing of monetary worth to bring to the Temple as an offering. They, too, take pride in their appearance, and especially the long tresses groomed carefully for years at a time. In an act of religious devotion, they offer for their belief the only thing that has worth to them, and they do so eagerly and happily. Don't the rest of us have something valuable to learn from that?
It is my hope that all of us will indeed find the will to turn recent events into a chance to learn from each other. Many in my community stand ready to converse, discuss and meet, and to transplant to American soil the bonds that united many of us on the Indian subcontinent for centuries. I am certain that we will find much to talk about. As the Hindu sages taught,"Satyam Eva Jayate."
Yitzchok Adlerstein is an Orthodox Jewish rabbi. He holds the Sydney M Irmas Chair in Jewish Law and Ethics at Loyola Law School, Los Angeles. He may be reached at ravadlerstein@torah.org
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