Judaism and Pluralism

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 c.e., echoes the sentiments expressed by the prophets Micah and Isaiah from the eighth century b.c.e: “In the end of days the lord will be king over all the earth.” The eschatology that someday 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 nonethnic basis of our religion, of the fact that as a people we are to some extent volitional and becoming increasingly so. In the widely used High Holiday prayer book (Mahzor) compiled and arranged by Morris Silverman in 1951, Silverman introduced 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 reign 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 realm 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 anyone else’s? If I do not think so, 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 an 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? If I believe in the possibility that I am naturally more capable of having or receiving the more right religion, I am very quickly on the slippery slope to racism. As...