Intercultural Dialogue and the Human Image: Maurice Friedman at Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (review)

Topical BookReviews \ ... ~ ".' .! • 115 way to ensure the purity of the occasion was to avoid non:Jewish friends for the eight days of the holiday. . 'Hindu practices are most evident in Jewish wedding customs in Cochin, including fifteen days of celebrations with so many guests that forty cattle were slaughtered to feed them all! Wedding celebrations concluded on the seventh day after the marriage ceremony. The regal quality of the weddings is common both to the Cochin Jews and Hindu wedding rites. Most Indian Jews assumed that other religions are complete paths, not sharing the polemical insistence upon superiority proclaimed by some Jews who endured persecution from Christians and Muslims. Emigration to Israel reduced Cochin Jewry from the two thousand reported in 1941 to about a hundred only twenty years later and less than fifty after the 1980s. Economic and political conditions decidedly worsened for the Cochin Jews with the advent of the independent Indian state. In addition Zionism expressed for the Cochin Jews a fervent religiosity for which they did not often fmd counterparts in Israel, where the modernized secular society was alien to them. Some looked forward to greater employment opportunities in Israel, others did not. But many were influenced by the lack of eligible marriage partners in India. Ironically, most Cachinnates feel they can be more observant in India than in Israel, not only because of secularization but also because of the fast pace oflife in Israel, which makes leisure time and leisurely socializing rare commodities . The Last Jews of Cochin is a uniquely important contribution to Indo-Judaic studies. Maurice Friedman San Diego State University Intercultural Dialogue and the Human Image: Maurice Friedman at Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, edited by S. C. Malik and Pat Boni (New Delhi: Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, 1995). 299 pp. $52.00. This volume includes four lectures and a discussion paper which Friedman presented in 1992 to the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts as part of its effort to investigate different dimensions of inter- and intracultural dialogue. Also included is a lecture by Aleene Friedman as well as the discussion of each presentation. True to its title, the volume is charged with the freshness of the spoken word. Remarkably, Friedman states that "I did not use a text or even notes in giving any ofmy lectures" (p. 1). Equally important is the fact that these lectures were a conscious 116 SHOFAR Spring 1999 Vol. 17, No.3 attempt to give shape to his "mature thought at seventy" by bringing it into dialogue with professors from many fields and from many parts of India. The work takes the shape of a five-part musical quartet with motifs from each section echoing through the other movements. In the fust movement Friedman reflects on the philosophical anthropology of Martin Buber. As I grow older, he writes, more than Buber's impact on religious traditions, "the aspect that speaks more and more to me is Buber's philosophical anthropology" (p. 7). Friedman rehearses familiar Buberian themes in order to address motifs of human wholeness and uniqueness: the two-fold world of I and Thou, the ontology of the between, the narrow ridge, inclusion, mutuality, and making present. For Buber, dialogue is a fully responsible response to the unique address of a lived word: Buber's morality is anything but arbitrary. On the contrary, it demands a listening and responding. It is the demand ofbeing really present-present as a whole person who makes real decision[s] from the depths again and again for as long as one lives (p. 13). The second movement, "Dialogical Psychotherapy," accumulates many formative voices, including Hans Triib, Carl Jung, Carl Rogers, and R. D. Laing, each of whom is taken up into dialogue with Buber. Stressing the importance of healing through meeting, ofexistential guilt, and of inclusion, Friedman highlights one of Buber's most provocative insights concerning the therapist's struggle to confirm a patient: . I may, as a therapist, have to struggle with you, for you, help you to set a cosmic note in this chaos, help you to find your personal direction. It is not that I impose it on you...