Welcome to the Deep Dive. We're here to take
the articles, research, and notes you shared
with us and really distill them into something,
you know, genuinely surprising. And actionable.
And actionable. And today's Deep Dive, it's into
territory we don't explore that often, how we
talk about faith, history, and, uh... Right.
We're looking at sources that make a really bold
claim. They argue that most interreligious dialogue
is, well, fundamentally flawed because it operates
inside Christian conceptual categories. Exactly.
And the sources say that for a dialogue between,
say, Hindus and Jews to actually work, you need
entirely new ground rules. A whole new framework.
Our mission for you today is to get to that aha
moment. to show you why real -world history and
what the sources call social symmetry are the
only way forward. We're really unpacking how
power dynamics shape almost every single one
of these conversations. Okay, so where do we
start? We start with this really sharp anecdote.
The author, a specialist in Indo -Judaic studies,
is in Sri Lanka. He's organizing a dialogue session
for a very famous Catholic scholar, Leonard Swidler.
Right. Swiddler is a big name in interreligious
conversation. He was championing it. He was.
And the author was expecting, you know, this
genuine openness. But instead, the Buddhist monks
there kept saying the same thing. They call dialogue
a Christian trick, a ploy used to convert the
unsuspecting. Yeah. And the author felt naive
arguing with them, thinking, you know, surely
they're misjudging modern intentions. But here's
the first huge revelation from the sources. Those
monks were not being cynical. They were being
historically accurate. They were. Absolutely.
This is the big contradiction. Swidler himself
had this idealistic first commandment of interreligious
dialogue. Its purpose is to learn, not to convert.
OK, that sounds good. A sincere exchange. It
does. But then you look at the actual institutional
mandates of, well, the Catholic Church, the suspicion
is completely justified. The sources point out
that even after Vatican II, the new code of canon
law defined dialogue as a way for missionaries
to, yes, engage sincerely, but specifically to
lead their audience to the good news. Wait, wait,
seriously. So even the modern, seemingly progressive
structure was designed as a pathway for conversion.
It was stated explicitly. The Vatican's encyclical
Redemptoris Missio says, and this is a direct
quote, interreligious dialogue is a part of the
church's evangelizing mission. Wow. So the monks
weren't paranoid. They were just describing policy.
Dialogue was, in effect, evangelism with a very
pleasant introductory meeting. That just changes
everything. It means the whole thing was often
just, as the source puts it, conversion with
better manners. And this history, this ulterior
motive, it runs deep. Which brings us to the
Christian Sannyasins, like Father Bede Griffiths.
He was a famous Christian ascetic in India, and
he argued that the greatest missionaries were
the ones who could successfully pose as Hindu
holy men just to win converts. And this wasn't
just some theory. You have these historical examples.
Look at Ricci and the Jesuits in China. They
didn't show up as priests. No, they disguised
themselves as mandarins. They studied the Chinese
classics, blended in with the elite, all to get
a sympathetic hearing. And Denoboli did the exact
same thing in India, lived as a sanyasi, studied
Hindu scriptures, all to win over Brahmins. It's
a pattern. Infiltrate, accommodate, and then,
you know, convert. And it all comes from this
triumphalist ideology, this belief that other
religions, Judaism, Hinduism, Islam, they aren't
valid paths. They're just providential preparation
for Christianity. That's the trap. If you truly
believe your faith is the completion, the fulfillment,
the correction of every other faith, then any
dialogue has a hidden unequal agenda baked right
in. And that inequality is in the theology itself.
It is. Griffith's framework is so revealing.
He basically took the traditional Christian trivialization
of Judaism, you know, that it was just a preparation
for Christ, and applied it to all other non -Christian
faiths. He said Christ came to correct, complete,
and fulfill them. Yes, but it's the language
he uses that's so, so chilling. Griffiths argued
that Jews, and by extension other religions,
must undergo a kind of death to be born again
in Christ. A kind of death. Yeah. And when you
think about the actual history of persecution
and forced conversions aimed at Jews by Christians,
the idea that the dominant group is suggesting
the minority must undergo a death to engage.
Right. Well, it just disqualifies any real conversation
between equals. That structural inequality leads
right to the next big problem. The conceptual
bias. The Christian categories. Exactly. Christianity
becomes the unspoken intermediary. So when you
have Hindu -Christian dialogue, it almost always
ends up being about two things. The search for
the absolute and this idea of mysticism, which
is just experiencing that absolute. And that
focus comes from a very specific Christian -centric
definition of religion. It values a creator God
and certain ideas about cosmology. If you don't
have that, scholars in the West have literally
debated if you even count as a religion. Right,
like with Buddhism. For decades, the debate was,
is this even a religion? And it leads to active
distortion. Christian dialogians would just misappropriate
concepts to make them fit. Swiddler, for instance,
tried to redefine anatta, the core Buddhist idea
of non -self, as a true deep self. He's basically
trying to smuggle a soul into Buddhism. Just
to find common ground. Or trying to find a positive
spin for junyata, emptiness, when the Theravada
understanding is that reality is just. Sasara,
the cycle of rebirth, not some divine ground
of being. The source calls this this conversion
by definition. You just redefine their religion
into something you can agree with. It just shows
this massive cultural gulf. The Christian starting
point is doctrine, orthodoxy. But what if that's
not what defines your faith? And that's why I
love that Hindu joke in the sources. Oh, it's
perfect. A Hindu meets a Christian, asks about
the dietary code, learns there isn't one, and
the Hindu concludes that it must not be a religion
but a way of life. That joke gets right to the
core of it. The centrality of orthopraxy, of
practice, of ritual, of daily life over just
abstract theology. And this is exactly why the
Hindu -Jewish encounter is so different. It's
defined by two things that are totally absent
from that Christian model. Okay, what are they?
First, the primacy of orthopraxy over orthodoxy.
Most forms of Hinduism and Judaism value practice,
dietary laws, life cycle rituals more than some
rigid unified doctrine. That's huge common ground.
And the second one is even more critical. It's
symmetry. A relationship between equals. Par
kumpari. It means one community cannot hold social
or political power over the other. Which is almost
never the case between Christians and Jews globally.
Almost never. But the source points out that
in Kerala, South India, their relations were
symmetrical for centuries. It was unique. And
that equality, that symmetry is the absolute
foundation for a real conversation. And that
symmetry isn't just, you know, theoretical. It's
rooted in a shared visceral experience. Which
brings us to the most powerful story in the source
material. The author is at the Vatican Museum
of World Religions with a Thai Buddhist monk.
And the museum itself is laid out in this subtle
Christian hierarchy. Right. Pagans, then Hindus
and Buddhists, then Muslims, then Jews. So they're
in the Buddhist art section and the monk just.
It stops cold. He's staring at a large Thai Buddha
rupa, and he's horrified. What did he say? He
whispered, that rupa was stolen from my monastery.
I heard Christians had taken it, but I never
believed it. A sacred object, stolen and now
displayed as just an artifact. And then the author
has the same experience. Moments later, in the
Judaism section, there's a Torah scroll. The
label says it's from the great synagogue of Budapest,
his mother's family's synagogue. And he realizes
his cousins who were slaughtered in the Holocaust
might have read from that very scroll. It's the
same shock, the same pain. Exactly. The source
calls it a symmetry occasioned by the religious
oppression meted out against our peoples. It's
an equality built on a shared understanding of
being a victimized minority that creates instant
common ground. But there is a challenge from
the Jewish side, right? The question of idolatry
and the Hindu use of images or Murti. Yes, that's
a crucial point. And it can't be glossed over.
The question is whether Judaism has to reject
Hinduism out of hand. The sources, though, point
to some very nuanced rabbinic views. And what
do they say? That Gentiles can acknowledge God
through mediation. As long as God is the ultimate
object of concern, using intermediaries doesn't
necessarily count as idolatry in that context.
It's not an obstacle to dialogue. It's a subject
for dialogue. So you have to actually talk to
each other to figure it out, not just impose
a definition from the outside. Exactly. Okay.
So once you have that symmetry, once you set
aside the Christian conceptual framework, what
does a real Hindu -Jewish conversation look like?
What's on the agenda? The sources lay out four
points, all focused on real lived history, not
abstracts. Number one. Mysticism and esotericism,
but framed correctly. There was this historic
Tibetan Jewish dialogue in 1990, and the Dalai
Lama was genuinely shocked by Judaism's rich
esoteric traditions. He said the overlap often
lies in esotericism. So this isn't about some
universal absolute. It's about dedicated comparative
study of intellectual traditions, comparing Talmudic
and Hindu logic or methods of scriptural interpretation.
Real deep stuff. Point two brings us back to
orthopraxy. Food. Dietary loss. Because both
traditions value practice so highly, the archetypal
mundane issue of food becomes deeply spiritual.
And it's so practical. The sources talk about
New York City where you have... Tamil restaurateurs
selling kosher doshas or Hindu Brahmin restaurants
being a safe bet for kosher dining. They share
the same practical concerns over things like
rennet or lard. It connects the sacred to the
mundane. Both codes are about the sanctification
of food. So this cooperation over a meal, it's
a shared spiritual act. The third point is profound.
It's about preserving culture in diaspora and
modernization. And this is where Jews are seen
as the first diasporized and first modernized
people. Right. And other groups have used that
experience as a roadmap. When Tibetans were forced
into exile in 1959, their leaders explicitly
wrote that they needed inspiration from a people
whose determination and hard work achieved their
long -awaited goal, Israel. A direct reference
to Jewish perseverance. It's a model. It is.
And in the same way, American Hindus look at
American Jews, the ADL, Hebrew day schools, youth
summer camps, as models for how you maintain
your religio -cultural identity while also fully
participating in American life. A lesson in surviving
modernity. Okay. Finally, point four, political
cooperation. What do American Hindus and Jews
have in common politically? A lot, actually.
Both have a huge interest in a strong secular
public education system. Both fight discrimination
in housing and the workplace. And crucially?
Crucially, both view the calls for the Christianization
of America with profound alarm. A state -sanctioned
religion is a direct threat to their survival
as minorities. They also share strong ties to
their countries of origin, India and Israel,
and try to influence American foreign policy
accordingly. This whole deep dive really reconfigures
how we even define religion. The Hindu -Jewish
dialogue allows two non -Christian traditions
to meet symmetrically, focusing on shared history
and practice without being squeezed through that
distorting Christian filter. Which leads to the
final critical warning from the sources, and
it's directed specifically at Jews engaging in
this space. Which is? Hindu -Jewish dialogue
must not be treated as an addendum to Hindu -Christian
dialogue. It has to be its own thing. Why is
that so important? Because the sources urged
Jewish participants to actively avoid those Hindu
-Christian conversations. What most Hindus know
about Judaism, they unfortunately learned from
Christian missionaries who see Judaism as just
a step on the path toward Christianity. So you
have to define yourself on your own terms. We
must insist on it. And avoid being absorbed into
that historical Judeo -Christian fiction that
missionaries created. And that insistence, that's
the core lesson here. This whole discussion about
dialogue between equals, it all comes down to
a question of identity. If we agree that real
conversation has to be with real people, not
our projections of them, then it leaves you with
a question. How do we ensure that we fully define
our own tradition, our own identity, first understanding
our practices, our history, our challenges, before
we even try to find that common ground with anyone
else? That's something to take away and really
mull over.