| Title | : | 'the Tata-Fication of Africa: Indian Corporations will Drive Innovation and Investment in Africa' Emerging Economy Report by CKS (Report) |
|---|---|---|
| Author | : | Cross Currents |
| Release | : | 2008-01-01 |
| Kind | : | ebook |
| Genre | : | Education, Books, Professional & Technical |
| Size | : | 85587 |
| Asceticism and Judaism generally have not been associated with each other in the popular and, until recently, scholarly mind. It has long been assumed that Christianity is an ascetic religion while Judaism is not. In fact Judaism is widely viewed as an anti-ascetic faith. I have demonstrated elsewhere, first of all, that these assumptions are incorrect. Moreover, they have been made at least in part because both Jews and Christians have a vested interest in these caricatured descriptions of their faiths. Beginning with Paul Christians saw Christianity as a spiritualized form of religious life that was superior to the materially oriented religion of "carnal Israel." The practice of asceticism fit nicely into this Christian self-conception, and it was to be expected that Jews, who were still chained to the literal reading of Scripture, would not have ascetic practice as part of their repertoire. Jews, on the other hand, viewed Christian asceticism, especially celibacy, as a sinful rejection of God's world and a failure to fulfill the divine obligation to be fruitful and multiply. With the psychologizing of religion in modernity, Jews also saw the absence of asceticism in Judaism as an indication of the relative healthiness of Judaism from a psychological perspective while--although it was rarely put in those terms--its presence in Christianity was viewed as being symptomatic of what were perceived as Christianity's pathological aspects. (1) My interest here is not in demonstrating that historically asceticism, both as ideology and as spiritual practice, has been integral to many forms of Judaism; this too I have argued at length elsewhere. (2) My goal in this essay is to formulate an ascetic understanding of Jewish religious observance. I believe that asceticism is inherent in much of rabbinic Judaism--the Judaism developed by the sages of the Jewish communities of the land of Israel and "Babylonia" (present-day Iraq) from the first century and onward--especially as interpreted and modified by the hasidim or pietists of the 12th and 13th century centuries in northern Europe and the adherents of the musar movement, which began to flourish in Lithuania in the 18th century. In my view an ascetic exegesis of Jewish observance is necessary both to revitalize it and to make it an effective response to the greatest spiritual challenges of our time--consumerism and materialism. |
