In the Musaph service on Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, Veye’etayu kol le’ovdekha is sung. The words happily sung by the Cantor and often the congregation are:
All will come to worship you
They will bless your holy name
And tell your righteousness in far-off places.
Nations who do not know you will come to seek you
The end of the earth will praise you.
They will say "great is YWHW"
Offer you their sacrifices
Abandon their idols and turn over their statues
And come as one to worship you.
Those who seek your face will revere you with the sun
They will recognize your mighty kingship
They will teach understanding to those who err.
They will tell your deeds of glory
And exalt you above all heads
They will praise your presence in awe
And crown you with a glorious wreath
The hills will sing with joy
The far-flung places will exult in your reign
And accept the yoke of your sovereignty
And exalt you in the assembly of the people
The far-flung will hear and come
And give you the crown of kingship
The song, from the seventh century of the common era echoes the sentiments expressed by the prophets Micah and Isaiah from the eighth century before the common era: "In the end of days the lord will be king over all the earth." The eschatology that some day all people will worship God is expressed daily and weekly in one of the central prayers of the Jewish liturgy, the Aleinu prayer with which most services start winding down to their conclusion. The prayer which starts with praise and thanksgiving that we Jews are privileged to worship God and revere the king of Kings, ends with a hope to establish the old world under God’s sovereignty, letaken olam bemalkhut Shaddai and with the prophetic vision. "in that day God will be king over all the earth; on that day God will be One and God’s name One".
Jews have been very proud of the non-ethnic basis of our religion, of the fact that as a people we are to some extent volitional and becoming increasing so. In the widely used High Holiday prayer book (Mahzor) compiled and arranged by Morris Silverman, in 1951, Silverman introduces the Veyeetayu prayer with this sentiment "the following poem written more than 1200 years ago by an unknown author is remarkable for its universalistic outlook. This is particularly noteworthy since the Middle Ages were marked largely by intolerance prejudice and violence."" (p.153). But the "universalism" of this poem and of the eschatological vision of the Kingdom of God is not a pluralistic universalism. Like the self-proclaimed universalism of Christianity, the openness is to the actual people, not to their faiths, and the desire for a universal kingdom is a desire that all other faiths disappear. In other words, universalism is triumphalism, a form of intellectual imperialism that sees only one possibility in the spiritual landscape.
Does a religion have a right to be triumphalist in its eschatological vision? Can believers ever not secretly wish that their friends will come to believe as they do? Thinking that my religion is right, do I necessarily think that my religion is more right than any one else’s? If I do not think, why not join someone else’s religion. If I do think that my religion is more right than someone else’s, how can I not share it? It is too simple to think that my religion is more right only for me and your religion more right for you because of accident of birth. That would deny the possibility of change between religions.
In Judaism, I may believe that I have the privilege of having to have my belief. But by what thought process do I think that I should be privileged and others not so? One possibility that I believe that I am naturally more capable of having or receiving the more right religion, I am on the very fast slippery slope to racism. As an alternative to any idea of not super, the Bible proposed the idea of election. The biblical idea of election, "chosenness" is the alternative to an idea of natural superiority: as Deuteronomy says, it is not because Israel is bigger or smarter that God is in covenant with it, because God "chose it". Jews have been attacked for this idea of chosenness and they have commemorated this idea of chosenness. The centerpiece of home liturgy, the prayer over the wine that introduces Sabbaths sanctifies the day in this way.
"Blessed be you, O Lord King of the Universe, who has sanctified us with your commandments … For you have chosen us and made us holy among all the nations. And your holy Sabbath with love and desire you have given us as our portion" Blessed be You, who makes the Sabbath holy".
Similar sentiment introduces the festivals. The sentiment of this prayer is not arrogant; it is on the contrary grateful, and recited at the time of accepting and thanking God for the greatest gift, the Sabbath or Festival. In a similar way Jews thank God for the other greatest gift, the Torah. In a centerpiece of the synagogue liturgy on Sabbath and Festival mornings, a Jew called up to the Torah tells the congregation "Bless God" and when they answer "Blessed be God", the one called up continues "Blessed be the one who has chosen us from the nations and given us the Torah." Once again, "chosenness" is mentioned in gratitude for the gift of the distinctively Jewish religion of Sabbath and Torah. But "chosenness", though it avoids racialist arrogance, clearly has its own problems, and reconstructionist Jews can’t say it. Instead they say, "who has called us to God’s worship" which avoids the word "chosen" but still implies that God chose Jews to worship God.
Universalist triumphalism and chosenness are the Scylla and Charybdis of the belief in one God. Even the biblical and rabbinic authors who explained that God appointed each nation its guardian angel still held that only Israel was directly under God’s supervision. Moreover, they hoped that some day God would be acknowledged king over all the earth.
Of course, universalism/triumphalism in Judaism is carefully tucked away into eschatological drams. In the present world, Judaism declared itself open to converts but unwilling to proselytize. Recently, voices in the reform movement have suggested that
"outreach" to non-Jews might be a good solution to the spiritual hunger they perceive in America, but this is a very minor opinion.
In the meantime, Judaism declares itself the vanguard of the future and the preserver of the past and the importance of historical memory. If converting the nations is not an active possibility, preventing the nations from overwhelming Israel with their superior numbers is very much a problem Jews consider. And one of the ways it has traditionally sought to insure survival is by limiting social contact in a kind of "circle the wagons" approach to the dangers of assimilation and intermarriage. At the very beginning of the Jewish system of Halakhah, religious law, there were a group of relations whose express purpose was to prevent the kind of intimate contact with neighbors that could lead to Jewish disappearance. The most radical was a law in the Mishnah, perhaps deriving from the Hasmonean court, which blithely declared that zealots should feel free to attack a Jew who married a non-Jewish woman. The hero of this attitude was Phineas, who ran his spear through Zimri and Cozbi in their act of copulation. Such zealotry was popular in the Hasmonean period, but the spectre of fanaticism led the Rabbis to permit this law to be followed only if the couple was in flagrante delicto, to retell the Phineas story to show that God ensured that Phineas obeyed this restriction, and to declare that it would be better if people did not attack copulating couples.
The idea of beating up copulators has been a dead letter in Judaism for two thousand years, but there are other laws designed to limit intermarriage that are still alive in many circles. These are rules limiting table fellowship by not allowing Jews to eat regular cheese, drink Gentile wine or eat "the bread of the nations". Cheese has a kashrut problem, since it is used in animal rennet. Wine may also have an idolatry problem, since it used to be libated. But in the absence of rennet and libation, the prohibition of gentile cheeses, wine and even bread are explicitly formulated to keep peoples separate. This is problematic, particularly in the more extreme forms of not allowing Jews to drink wine that gentiles have touched, a regulation surprising still alive.
Another matter is the category of Avodah Zarah entirely. The term refers to idolatry, and by extension polytheist religions. Not only is a Jew to avoid avodah zarah, but Jews may not make financial benefit trafficking in forbidden substances. There is even a school of thought that does not allow any benefit, such as enjoyment of art or music from pagan worship. Can a pluralist religion declare certain other religions off-limits? Can it move that rejection from the realm of concepts to the practical realm of telling people to stay away? Certainly there is precedent in Judaism for not worrying about accidental benefit, for example of being able to bathe in public baths decorated with statues of Aphrodite. There is even Rabbinic precedent for declaring the fear of Avodah zarah to be null and void. But we must ask whether prohibitions of contact have any place in pluralist religion.
Pluralist religion has to be pluralist. This means it has to allow the existence of non-pluralist approaches to religion within ones own faith community. There are many people who react to the large scale of life in this country through an enclave mentality -- a philosophy of "bless the czar and keep him far away". These enclaves can and will maintain regulations designed to keep them isolated. For those who reject enclave attitudes and worry about the moral climate they may create, the isolation regulations have to be faced as an impediment to pluralistic interrelationships.
Dr. Tikva Frymer-Kensky is Professor of Jewish Studies and Ancient Mediterranean World at the University of Chicago, U.S.A.
