God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World (57 page)

18
. My colleague Diana Lobel informs me that in the two biblical versions of the “Ten Words” (Ten Commandments), one says to “observe” (Deuteronomy 5:12) and the other to “remember” (Exodus 20:8).

19
. Debray,
God: An Itinerary
, 47.

20
. Jacob Neusner, “Judaism,” in Arvind Sharma,
Our Religions
, 314.

21
.
Textual Sources for the Study of Judaism
, ed. and trans. Philip S. Alexander (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1984), 164.

22
. For a popular discussion of what historian Salo Baron referred to as “the lachrymose conception of Jewish history,” see Theodore Stanger and Hannah Brow, “Rethinking Jewish History,”
Newsweek
, May 18, 1992, 38. A scholarly discussion appears in Robert Liberles, “Epilogue: Beyond the Lachrymose Conception,” in his
Salo Wittmayer Baron: Architect of Jewish History
(New York: New York Univ. Press, 1995), 338–59.

23
. Shalom Auslander, “Exodus Complexidus,”
Jewish Quarterly
(Spring 2008), http://heroic-media.com/jq/issuearchive/article8230.html?articleid=355.

24
. Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 31a.

25
. Mary Douglas,
Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concept of Pollution and Taboo
(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966), especially the chapter on “The Abominations of Leviticus” (51–71).

26
. Calvin Trillin, “Drawing the Line,”
The New Yorker
, December 12, 1994, 50.

27
. The question of Judaism’s origins is of course contested. If Judaism is about monotheism, it goes back to Abraham. If it is about law, it goes back to Sinai. Some insist that Judaism emerges only after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70
C.E.
According to literary critic Harold Bloom, Judaism is “a younger religion” than Christianity (Michael Kress, “A Year-End Chat with Harold Bloom,” http://www.jbooks.com/interviews/index/IP_Kress_Bloom.htm).

28
. Wiesel,
Wise Men and Their Tales
, 278.

29
. Neusner, “Judaism,” in Sharma,
Our Religions
, 321.

30
. According to the United Jewish Communities’ “National Jewish Population Survey 2000–01,” January 2004, 77 percent of Americans say they either hold or attend a Passover Seder, while only 72 percent report lighting Hanukkah candles and only 59 percent fasting on Yom Kippur (7). See http://www.ujc.org/local_includes/downloads/3905.pdf.

31
. More than fifty million copies of the Maxwell House Haggadah are in print. See Carole B. Balin, “ ‘Good to the Last Drop’: The Proliferation of the Maxwell House Haggadah,” in
My People’s Passover Haggadah: Traditional Texts, Modern Commentaries
, eds. Lawrence A. Hoffman and David Arnow (Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights, 2008), 85–90.

32
. For different views on this important topic, see Alan F. Segal,
Life After Death: A History of the Afterlife in Western Religions
(New York: Doubleday, 2004) and Jon D. Levenson,
Resurrection and the Restoration of Israel: The Ultimate Victory of the God of Life
(New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2006).

33
. Hagigah 2:1, quoted in Jacob Neusner,
The Mishnah: A New Translation
(New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1991), 330.

34
. “The National Jewish Population Survey 2000–2001” United Jewish Communities, January 2004, http://www.ujc.org/local_includes/downloads/4606.pdf.

35
. “The Pittsburgh Platform, 1885” in Alexander,
Textual Sources for the Study of Judaism
, 136–38.

36
. Sanhedrin 106b.

37
. “Judaism: The Atheist Rabbi,”
Time
(January 29, 1965), http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,839200,00.html.

38
. On the United States, see Barry Kosmin, “The Changing Population Profile of American Jews, 1990–2008” (paper presented at the Fifteenth World Congress of Jewish Studies, Jerusalem, August 2009). According to this study, 37 percent of American Jews see themselves as not religious. In 2008 a study by the Israel Democratic Institute found that 51 percent of Israelis were secular. See “Study: 51 percent of Israelis Secular,”
Jewish World
, http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3514242,00.html.

39
. The key expression is Phyllis Trible,
Texts of Terror: Literary-Feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives
(Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984).

40
. Bara Batra 16b, quoted in Denise Lardner Carmody,
Women and World Religions
, 2nd ed. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1989), 147.

41
. Richard Rodriguez, “The God of the Desert: Jerusalem and the Ecology of Monotheism,”
Harper’s,
January 2008, 45.

Chapter Eight: Daoism: The Way of Flourishing

1
. Victor H. Mair, trans.,
Wandering on the Way: Early Taoist Tales and Parables of Chuang Tzu
(Honolulu: Univ. of Hawaii Press, 1998), 33.

2
. Again, I am forgoing the older Wade-Giles transliterations scheme, which rendered the subject of this chapter as Taoism and its most famous text as the
Tao Te Ching
, for the newer Pinyin system, which renders these terms as Daoism and the
Daodejing
.

3
.
Huainanzi
1, quoted in Thomas Michael,
The Pristine Dao: Metaphysics in Early Daoist Discourse
(Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 2005), 130.

4
. Mair,
Wandering on the Way
, 5, 7, 9, 21, 385, 35. Elsewhere, Mair writes that the
Zhuangzi
could be called “
In Praise of Wandering
.” See Victor H. Mair, “Chuang-tzu and Erasmus: Kindred Wits,” in
Experimental Essays on Chuang-tzu
, ed. Victor H. Mair (Honolulu: Univ. of Hawaii Press, 1983), 86.

5
. Mair,
Wandering on the Way
, xiii. Over a hundred different English-language translations of the first chapter of the Daodejing can be found at http://www.bopsecrets.org/gateway/passages/tao-te-ching.htm.

6
. Russell Kirkland,
Taoism: The Enduring Tradition
(New York: Routledge, 2004), 43.

7
. Benjamin Hoff,
The Tao of Pooh
(New York: Penguin Books, 1982), 1–7.
The Tao of Pooh
is a favorite target of Daoist scholars, who dismiss its teachings as “New Age Daoism” and “Pooh Bear Daoism.” Coming from scholars deeply committed, both professionally and personally, to ancient Daoist texts, this criticism is understandable, but it ignores Daoist observations about the inevitability of change. Scholars’ determination to make Daoism serious seems to spring more from academic culture than from Daoism itself. Zhuangzi, whose sense of humor is well attested, would have loved
The Tao of Pooh
.

8
. Kristofer Schipper,
The Taoist Body
, trans. Karen C. Duval (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1993), 1.

9
. Cheng-tian Kuo,
Religion and Democracy in Taiwan
(Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 2008), 56.

10
. Sheng-chi Liu, “Religious Development in Mainland China in the Reform Era,”
Studies on Mainland China
44, no. 12 (2001): 79.

11
. See Jantzen,
Becoming Divine.

12
. Michael,
Pristine Dao
, 77.

13
.
Huainanzi
7, quoted in Michael,
Pristine Dao
, 134.

14
. Mair,
Wandering on the Way
, 145.

15
. Schipper,
Taoist Body
, 126.

16
. Or, as my colleague Thomas Michael puts it in
Pristine Dao
, “human beings are not a kind of projectile attempting to shoot clear of their ontological reality in the effort to identify with an absolute principle standing somewhere outside and beyond” (35).

17
. Alan K. L. Chan, “The
Daodejing
and its Tradition,” in
Daoism Handbook
, ed. Livia Kohn (Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill, 2000), 4.

18
. Livia Kohn,
The Daoist Monastic Manual: A Translation of the Fengdao Kejie
(New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2004), 12.

19
. Schipper,
Taoist Body
, 16.

20
. Julian F. Pas, “Introduction: Chinese Religion in Transition,” in
The Turning of the Tide: Religion in China Today
, ed. Julian F. Pas (New York and Hong Kong: Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society in association with Oxford Univ. Press, 1989), 8–9.