How the Hindu-Jewish Encounter Reconfigures Interreligious Dialogue

28 SHOFAR Falll997 Vol. 16, No. I How the Hindu-Jewish Encounter Reconfigures Interreligious Dialoguel Nathan Katz Nathan Katz is Professor and Chair ofReligious Studies at Florida International University, Miami. He is co-editor of The Journal ofIndo-Judaic Studies and has studied, researched, and taught in South Asia for more than seven years. He has been awarded four Fulbright grants and has been named a "master teacher" four times by the Florida Humanities Council. Among his dozen books are Buddhist Images ofHuman Perfection (2nd ed., 1989) and The Last Jews ofCochin (1993). A letter from Temple University, my graduate school alma mater, arrived at my office at Peradeniya University, near Kandy in Sri Lanka, where I was spending my 1983/84 sabbatical. Leonard Swidler, a Catholic specialist in interreligious dialogue, was to visit Sri Lanka, and I was asked to organize a dialogue session for him with interested Buddhist monks. I had not studied with Swidler at Temple, but I knew him to be a man of integrity who represents the very best in interreligious dialogue, and since my research put me into daily contact with many monks, I agreed to help. I was disappointed by the monks' lack ofenthusiasm. Interreligious dialogue, monk after monk told me, is a Christian trick, a ploy used to convert the unsuspecting. I argued with the monks. My exposure to interreligious dialogue was limited, but I had studied Martin Buber, and his concept of dialogue precluded any such ulterior motive as conversion. Swidler himselfhad written that the ftrst commandment ofinterreligious dialogue is: "The primary purpose of dialogue is to learn.... We enter into dialogue so that we can learn, change, and grow, not so we can force change on the other, as one IThis paper was read at a panel on "New Paradigms of 'Religious Tradition': The Case of Hinduisms and Judaisms" at the American Academy ofReligion annual meeting, San Francisco, CA, November 22, 1992. 2Swidler is one of the academy's leading proponents of interreligious dialogue and a follower and interpreter of the influential theologian, Hans KUng. As such Swidler is prominent in our analysis, as is Fr. Bede Griffiths, who is very well known, and very controversial, in India. The purpose of this paper is not a comprehensive, critical history of Christian understandings of interreligious dialogue, but rather a selective view of some of the differing perspectives on interreligious dialogue raised by the contemporary encounter between Jews and Hindus. (N.B.: see note 13 for a clarification of our use of the term 'Hindu'.) For this purpose, we focus on Swidler and Griffiths as two representative Christian dialogians. How the Hindu-Jewish Encounter Reconfigures Interreligious Dialogue 29 hopes to do in debate...."3 A number of the monks relented, and a productive dialogue session was held. But the monks would not concede my point that the concepts of dialogue and conversion are in principle contradictory. In my understanding, 'dialogue requires an openness which is antithetical to the close-minded certainty of the missionary. So I believed, but I was naive. Dialogian or Missionary? Some time later I read how according to Church doctrine, dialogue is a tool for conversion. According to Hinduism Today, admittedly not always a dispassionate source, "Vatican II's new Code of Canon Law offers this defmition of dialogue: 'By witness oftheir lives and their message, let the missionaries enter into a sincere dialogue with those who do not yet believe in Christ. Accommodating their approach to the mentality and culture oftheir audience, they will open up the way for them to reach the point where they are ready to accept the Good News."'4 Similarly, I was shocked to read in the Vatican's encyclical on missionary activity that "Interreligious dialogue is a part of the church's evangelizing mission."s Even the liberal World Council of Churches viewed dialogue more as an occasion for proclaiming Christianity than for learning about the dialogue partner's tradition: "to member churches of the WCC we feel able with integrity to commend the way of dialogue as one in which Jesus Christ can be confessed in the world today.... We come ... as genuine fellow-pilgrims, to speak with them of...