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Affirmation of Life and

Centrality of Nation

JUDAISM and Shinto are worlds apart, but they share some unexpected similarities. Different as these two religions are in their fundamental spirituality, they are both interested in this world rather than in the next. This differs from the preoccupation of historical Christianity and Buddhism with what will happen after death. An observant Jew performs his or her religious duties not in order to attain eternal salvation, but because God has ordered these duties to be performed. The remunerations and punishments that the Law of Moses attaches to its commandments explicitly refer to this world rather than to the hereafter. The righteous will be rewarded in their lifetimes: "Honor your father and your mother, that you may long endure on the land that the Lord your God is assigning to you. . . . You shall serve the Lord your God, and he will bless your bread and water. And I will remove sickness from your midst."

Shinto, although lacking the Jewish attachment to God and his sacred commandments, is also concerned with well-being in this world. The purposes of its offerings and rites are to increase harvests, ward off misfortune, heal sickness, and provide worshipers with marital and occupational success. Many shrines in Japan are dedicated to the god of harvest and commerce, Inari, and people come to these shrines to pray for success in business. The Inari shrines are distinguished by the images of foxes guarding their entrances, for the fox, considered to possess spiritual powers, is also believed to be god's messenger. Today many large Japanese companies maintain Inari shrines on their premises to assure good profits. The Shinto orientation to worldly success also influenced Japanese Buddhism, which has adopted the Shinto concern for material gain. The most popular Buddhist sects in Japan today are those that promise such worldly benefits as good health, success in business, and matrimonial happiness. Shrines and temples in Japan are highly businesslike, renting halls for weddings and making profits from funeral services. Many have vending machines installed on the premises, selling charms and talismans for every occasion. Indeed, one of the first acts a worshiper performs when entering the premises of a temple or shrine is to throw coins into a large offering box.

Shinto and Judaism are religions that affirm life and shun suffering and death. There are no Jewish monks or nuns, as there are no Shinto monasteries. Neither of these religions considers sex to be a sin or a weakness of the flesh, as Christianity and Buddhism do. Both Shinto and Judaism reject celibacy. Abraham had both a wife and a concubine, and when his wife died he remarried, despite his very advanced age. The Japanese emperors, considered to be human gods and high priests of the sun goddess, used to have many wives and concubines, as did the Jewish kings. It was only in the twentieth century that the Western custom of monogamy was adopted by the imperial family of Japan. This century also witnessed a great decline in Buddhist celibacy; today, the priests of most Buddhist sects in Japan marry and have children.

Joy is a central element in the Jewish worship of God. One should serve God with a joyous heart and a glad spirit. Drinking wine is one way of serving God and making men and women happy. The Law of Moses orders the offering of wine as a libation in sacrificial services in the Temple. Wine was praised by the ancient Hebrews as a cheering drink. The Book of Psalms thanks God for the "wine that cheers the hearts of men." Jews drink wine on many occasions, such as the beginning and end of each Sabbath, festivals, and wedding and circumcision ceremonies. In the Talmudic law, drinking wine has been accorded a special blessing, different from the blessings over other food and drink. Hasidism, the eighteenth-century Jewish revival movement emphasizing the ecstatic communion with God, has made drinking on various occasions part of its exceptionally joyous celebrations. Nevertheless, neither heavy drinking nor drunkenness have been common among Jews.

Merriment and alcohol also occupy an important place in Shinto. Sake (rice wine) is offered to the gods and is consumed by participants during religious festivals such as those celebrating the New Year. Many Shinto shrines display barrels of wine donated by their worshipers. Some shrines are even dedicated to the "three deities of sake." The Shinto wedding ceremony, like the Jewish wedding ceremony, includes the drinking of wine by both bride and groom. The eighth-century poetry anthology, the Manyoshu, includes many poems in praise of drink, among them:

Instead of wasting thoughts on unavailing things

It would seem wiser

To drink a cup of raw sake.

Grotesque! When I look upon a man

Who drinks no sake, looking wise,

How like an ape he is!

Judaism and Shinto share a positive attitude toward human nature. They do not demand the negation of natural desires nor do they wish people to behave like God. There are neither hermits nor saints in these two religions. Jews are expected to direct their natural energies into moral and God-fearing channels and to lift society to a more spiritual level. The Bible acknowledges the human weaknesses of even the most exemplary figures. Abraham ordered his wife to pose as his sister and thus be taken into Pharaoh's harem so he could save his own life. Moses, the greatest of the Jewish prophets, disobeyed God and was punished by never entering the Land of Israel. David, the greatest of the Jewish kings, sent an innocent man to die in battle, in order to be able to take his wife. In Shinto not only mortals have their weaknesses, but so do the gods.

An affirmative acceptance of life is also expressed in the negative attitude both religions harbor toward death. Both Shinto and Judaism teach that death defiles, and a place where death has occurred requires elaborate purification. The Bible states: "He who touches the corpse of any human being shall be unclean for seven days. . . . This is the ritual: When a person dies in a tent, whoever enters the tent and whoever is in the tent shall be unclean seven days." In Shinto also, exposure to death contaminates, and relatives of the deceased must avoid contact with deities and shrines for periods ranging from seven to one hundred days. Jewish kings as well as Japanese emperors were not allowed to attend funerals or visit cemeteries. Blood and dirt are sources of defilement in both religions. Both Jewish priest and Shinto priest had to be impeccably clean before performing their religious duties. In each case this involved thorough washing and the donning of clean clothes.

Immersion in a ritual bath (mikveh) has been an important element of Jewish life for both sexes, and women must perform this rite regularly after each menstruation and after childbirth. Also important for Jews is the ritual washing of hands before meals. In Japan worshipers often stand under a cold waterfall or plunge into a winter sea to demonstrate their readiness to endure physical discomfort as a sign of religious devotion, and visitors to shrines wash their hands and rinse their mouths with water from a special stone basin. Such practices of religious ablution helped both peoples to maintain high hygienic standards throughout the ages, and made them probably less affected by diseases and plagues.

A significant similarity between Judaism and Shinto is that historically they have both remained national religions. Belonging to the Jewish people and to the Jewish religion are synonymous; a Jew who converts to another religion ceases to be a member of the Jewish community, and a convert to Judaism automatically joins the Jewish people. Most of the Jewish festivals relate to the history of the nation: Passover celebrates the exodus from Egypt; Sukkot (Tabernacles) commemorates the wandering in the desert; Purim celebrates the deliverance from extermination at the hands of a Persian king; and Hanukkah commemorates liberation from foreign oppression and religious persecution and the rededication of the Second Temple, which had been defiled.

There are no parallel Shinto festivals commemorating historical events of the Japanese people. The festivals celebrating the foundation of Japan (Kigensetsu, or as it is called today Kenkoku Kinen-bi) and the birthdays of emperors were instituted only in the nineteenth century. Unlike a Jew, a Japanese can cast away Shinto and convert to another religion without ceasing to be a Japanese. However, Shinto does relate to one particular people, the Japanese, and it attributes divinity to one royal dynasty, the Japanese emperors. Although a Japanese can adhere to any religion, it is hard to imagine a non-Japanese becoming a Shintoist.

Around the year 1000 B.C.E. King David moved his capital from Hebron to Jerusalem. The name Jerusalem, or Yerushalayim in Hebrew, although of an obscure etymology, means City of Peace. David was not allowed to build the Temple there because he had been a warrior and, as God told him, "You have shed much blood and fought great battles." That task was entrusted to David's son Solomon, a king whose reign was one of peace. The name Solomon, or Shelomoh in Hebrew, derives, according to the Bible, from shalom, meaning peace, a word that has become the standard Hebrew greeting. For more than one thousand years, with an interruption of only seventy years, the Jewish Temple stood in Jerusalem, the only House of God allowed in the realm. In 70 C.E the city was destroyed and the Temple was burned by the Romans.

Although the Temple was never restored, Jerusalem remained the holy city of the Jews and the ideal capital of the messianic future. Jewish synagogues all over the world face toward Jerusalem and observant Jews pray daily for the peace of the city. This special status accorded Jerusalem was later also adopted by Christianity and by Islam. The climax of the earthly ministry of Jesus Christ—the triumphal entry, the passion, and the insurrection—took place in Jerusalem. Mohammed is believed by Moslems to have been miraculously transported at night to Jerusalem and to have ascended from there to heaven. At the end of the seventh century, the Arabs constructed the great mosque, El Aqsa, and the Dome of the Rock on the site where the Jewish Temple had stood.

Shortly thereafter, in 710, and on the other side of Asia, Empress Gemmei moved the Japanese capital from Fujiwara-Kyo to Heijo-kyo, present-day Nara. The compound word Heijo-kyo means Citadel of Peace. In 794, Emperor Kammu moved the capital to Heian-kyo, present-day Kyoto, which until 1868—more than a thousand years—was the imperial capital of Japan. Heian-kyo means Capital of Peace. Both capitals were modeled after the splendid Chinese capital of that time, Changan (Ch'ang-an), present-day Xian (Sian). Changan in Chinese means Long Peace.

The ideal of peace is a universal human value, but Judaism was the first religion to make world peace a central element in its eschatology. The prophet Isaiah described the ideal future state of the world:

And they shall beat their swords into plowshares

And their spears into pruning hooks:

Nation shall not take up sword against nation:

They shall never again know war.

Almost every Jewish prayer ends with a petition for peace. This messianic value of peace was later inherited by Christianity and Islam.

Peace and harmony have also been central elements in Buddhism and Confucianism. In East Asia, the ideal state was the one that preserved peace and the greatest virtue of a Chinese or a Japanese sovereign was the ability to achieve and maintain peace. The word wa, which is written by the ideograph that means harmony and peace, is used in Japan to designate everything native. Thus washoku means Japanese food; wafuku is Japanese dress. The native name of Japan, Yamato, is spelled in Japanese with two Chinese characters meaning Great Peace.

Yet quite often peace implies domination, and in many languages the word "pacify" means also "conquer." King Solomon could afford to be a king of peace because he reigned "over all the kings from the Euphrates to the land of the Philistines, and to the border of Egypt." Emperor Kammu could establish the Capital of Peace in Japan because he had first subjugated the aborigines of the north. The peaceful world that the Jewish prophets envisioned was to be ruled over by a scion of the House of David, later called the Messiah, who would destroy the enemies of Israel before establishing his kingdom of peace and bliss. Isaiah's verse about messianic peace is preceded by a verse concerning the ideal future king's authority:

Let us go up to the Mount of the Lord

To the House of the God of Jacob;

That He may instruct us in His ways,

And that we may walk in His paths.

For instruction shall come forth from Zion,

The word of the Lord from Jerusalem.

The Jews were often under the domination of others, but they were always inspired by the belief that in the future world of peace and justice they would serve as spiritual leaders. This vision of a world mission gave them the strength to suffer severe persecution and propelled them to the forefront of various "messianic" and idealistic movements in modern times like those of human rights, socialism, and communism.

The peace to which the Japanese aspired was also combined with a sense of mission. According to the Nihongi, Emperor Jimmi', the first sovereign of Japan, after conquering the plain of Yamato established a capital there that he called Hani-yasu, or Clay Peace. This capital, he declared, would be extended "so as to embrace all the six cardinal points, and the eight cords [or: corners] may be covered so as to form a roof." That declaration of "the eight cords under one roof" (hakko ichiu) became in modern times the slogan of Japanese imperialists, who claimed that Japan had a mission to establish peace in the world and to extend the emperor's authority over other countries. The Nihongi tells us about the third-century Empress Jingu, who with divine help pacified the island of Kyushu and conquered Korea. The king of the Korean kingdom of Silla is reported by the Nihongi to have told the empress: "I have heard that in the East there is a divine country called Nippon, and also that there is there a wise sovereign called the Tenno.... Henceforth forever, these lands shall be styled thy western frontier provinces, and will not cease to offer tribute." There is no historical evidence that such a conquest ever took place, but the legend about Empress Jingu and the declaration of the King of Silla were quoted later by those Japanese who intended to subjugate Korea.