Levenson responds: wait a minute. For Trinitarian Christians (the vast majority today and for most of Christianity’s history), Jesus is God in a fundamental sense; but for a Jew (or Muslim), to say that a man is God is an idolatry that drastically compromises God’s fundamental oneness and uniqueness. While the content of the Tanakh – the Hebrew Bible as understood by Jews – may be mostly the same as that of the Old Testament, they are read in a very different light. To understand the Tanakh, Jews turn to Mishnah and Talmud; to understand the Old Testament, Christians turn to the New. As a result, the stories of the Hebrew Bible unfold very differently in each – they are even placed in a different order, so that the Tanakh culminates with the rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem, while the Old Testament ends with a prophesy heralding the “coming of the Lord.” And this isn’t just a matter of arcane scriptural study: it affects one’s ethics, one’s idea of the good life. Jewish ethics have been traditionally focused on following God’s laws and commandments as revealed in Torah, Christian ethics on following Jesus’s example – or even more so on faith in him and his saving grace.

Now my interest in Levenson is not in the particulars of Jewish and Christian traditions, since I identify with neither tradition. Rather, what I deeply appreciate is his criticism of Dabru Emet‘s method. Such documents, Levenson argues, “avoid any candid discussion of fundamental beliefs,” and “adopt instead the model of conflict resolution or diplomatic negotiation.” The history of violence across traditions is of course long and bloody. So, in an effort to prevent such violence, one smooths the differences over to the point that they no longer really seem to matter. The traditions, effectively, no longer say anything.

I was reminded of this point when I attended the National Seminar on Comparative Religion at the University of Allahabad in 2005, celebrating the founding of a department of comparative religion. In a country racked by conflict between Islam and “Hinduism,” the presenters had the laudable goal of trying to celebrate commonalities – but often in ways that presented more harm than good. One non-Muslim presenter even said she stressed her respect for Islam by placing an idol of Muhammad beside the other statues she prayed to – apparently not realizing that Muslims have traditionally considered idolatry of any kind to be a cardinal sin, even forbidding depictions of Muhammad. She was perhaps the clearest example of something the advocates of “interreligious dialogue” so often do: she missed the point of the tradition she was dealing with.

It is of course difficult to speak of “the” point of any given tradition. And some forms of some traditions are quite compatible with this approach to interreligious dialogue. The best example I know of is Reconstructionist Judaism. As I understand it, Reconstructionists see different traditions, such as Judaism, as “civilizations,” cultures laden with history and ritual, more than beliefs or paths to enlightenment or codes of ethics. This Judaism is more of an ethnicity than a soteriology.

Such a view might similarly suit much of what is today called “Hinduism.” Vasudha Narayanan, former president of the AAR, once in its journal juxtaposed “liberation and lentils.” Raised Hindu, Narayanan associated her tradition more with cultural rituals, such as her relatives’ choosing the auspicious kind of lentil for particular festivals, rather than the philosophical and mythological accounts of liberation that were spoken of in her graduate coursework. This “lentil Hinduism” sounds a lot like the Reconstructionist account of a religious civilization. And that account does indeed seem to fit many members of such traditions, so closely associated with a particular ethnic or national group.

But, one might ask, what about the thinkers classified as “Hindu” who do stress “liberation”? They might be a minority, but they’re there. Nobody reading the works of Śaṅkara or Rāmānuja could imagine that their traditions are all about finding the auspicious lentils for the right occasion. Śaṅkara is not trying to give us a culture, a set of traditional practices that give a group its ethnic identity. Like a Buddhist, he is trying to free us from the suffering inherent in worldly life. And his path is not necessarily compatible with others.

Śaṅkara himself provides an important challenge to the advocates of Dabru Emet-style reduction of differences among traditions. For he’s often taken to be saying all paths are equally valid – but he isn’t. True, in Śaṅkara’s Advaita tradition, it doesn’t matter which god you worship; any deity can be a viable path to the ultimate. You can worship Gaṇeśa, or Krishna, or Jesus – it’s up to you. But that’s because in some respect the gods you see ultimately reveal themselves to be illusions, compared to the one ultimate truth. More importantly, the Buddhists, who don’t worship gods, are just plain wrong, and he spends a large portion of his work attacking them and explaining why.

There are real differences between – and within – traditions, and those differences matter. The life of the ideal Confucian, deeply immersed in family life and politics, is worlds away from the
life of the ideal Jain, seeking monastic liberation from all the fetters of this world. It matters a great deal which one is right – or if both or neither are right. It makes all the difference in the world. That is why I’ve defended the practice of apologetics, of attempting to convert others, even when performed by relatively ignorant people like FOX’s Brit Hume – it is ignorant attempts to convert, not attempts to convert as such, that are the problem. It may be the case, especially in places like India, that one should publicly diminish the differences between traditions for pragmatic political reasons – pretending to agree when one doesn’t, in order to reduce violence. Here finding the truth of the matter is less important than keeping people alive. But as Levenson points out, such an approach has no place in a document whose Hebrew name means “to speak the truth.”

I didn’t say anything – I wasn’t part of that conversation – but something about that offhand remark has bothered me ever since. “Offensive“? Is that the best word you have for a criticism, I thought? In the politically correct Nineties, had moral criticism been erased and replaced with mere “offensiveness”? Then something must have gone terribly wrong. For to my mind, offensiveness had always been something good. We political radicals – as I and the other students identified – were supposed to be offensive against the values of the conservative mainstream… weren’t we? Even now, when I’m far less political, I still love deliberately offensive humour – the bad taste of Sarah Silverman’s stand-up comedy or of South Park. To be inoffensive, by contrast, seems a lot like being nice, in the wrong way. If all that was wrong with On the Road was that it was “really offensive,” it seemed to me, then nothing is wrong with it.

What does it mean, indeed, to be “offensive”? The word has achieved a particular currency in the era of identity politics – a cultural product is “offensive” to particular groups of people. But what is that? What makes it “offensive”? Is offensiveness purely a creation of a postmodern era of heightened sensitivity? Typically, I think, something is called “offensive” because it is presumed to be insulting; more specifically, because someone feels insulted. I suspect there isn’t much of an objective dimension to offensiveness; something is only offensive if someone is offended.

And here Śāntideva’s magnificent words in chapter six of the Bodhicary?vat?ra come back to me. Śāntideva is an advocate of measured and pleasant speech; he is unlikely to insult anyone unless, perhaps, it is specifically necessary for their own spiritual development. (Thus he does direct some insults at himself.) He does not wish us to be offensive, then. But he is less worried, overall, about our insulting others than about our feeling insulted ourselves – concerned less about our offending than about our being offended. When others slander us, say bad things about us, knock down others’ praise of us – we are in grave danger not from these insults, but from our reactions to them. The latter are the real problem, one he addresses in a beautiful passage that may be my favourite in all his works, one I’ve been personally inspired by many times. I will let the (translated) passage speak for itself:

Just as a child cries out in pain when his sandcastle is destroyed — that’s how my mind appears when I lose praise and admiration. The word of praise doesn’t matter if it’s not thought; the cause of my pleasure is that someone else is pleased with me. But what do I get from someone else’s pleasure toward me? That pleasure and happiness is only theirs. Not even a small part of it is mine. If I get pleasure from their pleasure, I should get pleasure from everyone’s. Why don’t I feel as good when people are pleased by others’ actions? So the delight that I am praised is just the gesture of a child, because it is absurd. Praise, fame and admiration give me a false sense of security, and destroy my intensity. They produce jealousy toward good people, and make me angry. Therefore, those who attack my praise and so on are just protecting me against a fall into destruction. (BCA VI.93-9, my translation)

Many people in the United States, of course, do not celebrate Christmas. Most often, such people are Jews, and perhaps sometimes Muslims and followers of Asian traditions. It is the rare atheist or agnostic who refuses to celebrate Christmas – a fact I find somewhat telling. In my own Canadian childhood I found that refusal somewhat bizarre. My family never went to church, my parents never believed or taught any ideas they recognized as Christian; but we nevertheless celebrated Christmas, as North Americans in North America, and nobody thought that was weird. When we went to India we always celebrated Diwali and Holi without thinking of ourselves as Hindus, and nobody seemed to think that was weird either.

The first people to challenge my non-Christian celebration of Christmas were Jewish friends during my undergrad days at McGill. “The word is Christ-mass,” they would say. “It doesn’t make sense to celebrate that if you’re not Christian.” The argument didn’t ring true with me then, and still doesn’t. First there’s the point that Christmas in the West was not Christian to begin with: the date of Christmas was set in the fourth century to follow the feast of the Roman sun deity, and the traditions of pagan Saturnalia became part of typical European Christian celebrations. But even if we think of Christmas’s origins as Christian, the festival of Christmas has become part of North American life, like Thanksgiving. Should I avoid celebrating Hallowe’en because I’m not a Celtic pagan?

I respect the desire of modern Jews to retain their status and identity as a separate, unassimilated people. For them the non-celebration of Christmas could be seen as a deliberate self-denial for the sake of preserving distinctness; modern Jews often view the kosher laws the same way. What makes us who we are is that we don’t eat pork, we don’t celebrate Christmas. (I’ve heard it said that such an oppositional conception of identity is weak and limiting, but I do personally feel sympathetic to it, coming from a place that defines itself above all in terms of not being American.) And I respect the attempt to honour that self-denial by saying “happy holidays” rather than “merry Christmas.”

I’m less sympathetic to the idea that one is obliged to say “happy holidays” to avoid offence, that there’s something wrong with saying “merry Christmas” to people whose background you’re not sure of. Oppositional identity has consequences, including negative ones. Because Canadians are determined to be a separate people with a separate state, we didn’t get to vote for John Kerry in 2004, though our votes would have tipped the election to him; and we face many difficulties trying to find paid work in the United States. We have chosen in important ways to avoid the North American mainstream, and that choice has consequences. If one doesn’t celebrate the mainstream celebrations where one lives, one shouldn’t feel insulted when others assume that mainstream as the norm. If a North American restaurant has its employees say “Merry Christmas,” that’s no more an insult to Jews and Muslims than if it puts bacon on the menu.