Hindu God, Jewish God: Breaking Boundaries beyond Same and Different

This talk will engage Hindu-Jewish religious encounter, using the 21st century approach of Professor Francis X Clooney and his students. It is no longer acceptable to discuss other religions until one has engaged in detailed knowledge of the other religion and one’s own religion.

My vantage point is one of looking at Hindu divinity from a Jewish perspective and discussing same and difference from a Jewish perspective. Using this method, the talk will survey the issues in comparing Hindu conceptions of God with Jewish conceptions by breaking the question down into smaller pieces of Saivite/Vaishnava, various philosophic darshana, and questions of emanation, darshan, avatars, images, and immanence. The goal is to avoid simple dichotomies and to avoid binary questions such as if Hinduism is monotheistic or not.

In the process, the discussion will show the usefulness of this approach for returning to discuss Jewish conceptions of God and divinity as presented in Midrash, Jewish philosophy, Kabbalah and Hasidut as well as seeing Jewish ritual in a new light.

All four talks in the panel are by scholars who have written books, either already published or in the pipeline, on Jewish –Hindu encounter. The panel will allow a public presentation of the current state of the field and the different approaches of the four scholars. It will be especially important for pushing the speakers into charting a future course of the field.