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Introduction

Exile has been an ever-present phenomenon. However, in the twenty-first century, the presence of exilic people has become even more ubiquitous. There is not a nation that is unaffected by the influx of exiles. In many cases, exiles are perceived with suspicion and viewed as a threat to the homogeneous cohesion of a given society. Given the presence of hostility toward these exiles, it becomes even more imperative to revisit our understanding and approach to exile and to the exiled.

Adorno argues that exile is a “life in suspension” and is directly related to morality since “it is part of morality not to be at home in one’s home.”¹ In his view, being in exile makes one a perpetual stranger and sharpens one’s ethical stance. He further suggests that “only by resisting the comforts of home (or homeland) is it possible to exercise one’s moral judgment.”² Similarly, Lithuanian-born French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas (1906–1995) interprets exile as holding ethical implications. Levinas questions Western ethics and provides a conceptualization of ethics as being intricately connected to exile. In his Totality and Infinity, Levinas argues that the moral blindness that led to the absence of resistance to Nazism resulted from lack of concern for the “stranger.” A similar critique was offered by Horkheimer and Adorno in their Dialectic of the Enlightenment when they argued that “For Enlightenment, anything which cannot be resolved into numbers and ultimately into one, is illusion.”³

For Levinas, ethics is not a result of maxims but a consequence of human ability to empathize with the other. This other is often the one who becomes exiled or displaced. Levinas’s view of exile incidentally is in line with that of Hebrew thought which considers exilic experience as God’s punishment. The Hebrew view of exile as a mark of God’s punishment is complemented, however, by a theory of redemption that has ethical possibilities. Indeed, Saadia Gaon in The Book of Beliefs and Opinions considers exile a means of purification.

Historically, exile has become a political act since the inception of this entwinement.⁴ Biblical accounts of Abraham and Moses highlight the very first examples of exile. In most cases, exile reflects the dissident mood which results from “major differences of political allegiance between the most powerful in the state and the person being exiled.”⁵ Exile itself has often been used as a means to silence any dissidents by placing them either outside of their own country or, tucking them away from their supporters and followers. This separation from a familiar place, from friends and supporters, often produces a sense of alienation. In the Roman world, exile was a substitute for physical death. In some cases, voluntary exile was chosen as an option to avoid unfavorable political, religious, or cultural conditions. For instance, some noble Roman exiles preferred exile to the compromise of living by abiding with political conditions which they strongly disfavored but were unable to influence or change.

An exilic condition is often linked to being in diaspora. Diaspora is defined as the process of scattering.⁶ Conditions of diaspora lead us to consider the complexity of a “diasporic” identity. The diasporic identity has a potential of heterogeneity and diversity: “a conception of identity which lives and through, not despite, difference: by hybridity.”⁷ Living in these conditions engenders one with “double (and even plural) identifications that are constitutive of hybrid forms of identity.”⁸ Diasporic people often conceive of themselves in terms of powerlessness, longing, and displacement. This identity often encapsulates an awareness of a minority status. Yet, in some cases this powerlessness becomes transformed into political empowerment.

As already alluded, the Hebrew conception of exile is profoundly different from that of a Western view. Specifically, the Hebrew tradition came to see exile as a concept “laden with positive significations and possibilities.”⁹ Hebrew thought in relation to exile is articulated in the words of the Psalmist: “I am only a sojourner in the land; do not hide Your commandments from me” (Ps. 119:19). These commandments attach themselves to the stranger as one who remains on fringes of existence and as such become central to continual survival. The Hebrew prophets always appealed to the senses rather than the intellect. This appeal to the senses is exhibited in concern for those who for one reason or another might be overlooked or neglected. Abraham Heschel stated: “Instead of dealing with timeless issues of being and becoming, of matter and forms, of definitions and demonstrations, [the prophet] is thrown into orations about widows and orphans, about the corruption of judges and affairs of the marketplace.”¹⁰ By focusing on the downtrodden, exile becomes a means of attuning sensibility and attention to the stranger.

Historically, with the exclusion of Tibetan Buddhism, Buddhist conception of exile is not addressed. Perhaps the closest we can get to the concept of exile is by looking at the wandering monks. In Buddhist literature, a “wanderer” is defined as someone who is free from worldly attachment. Buddhist monks’ wandering mode of living without a settled home and the practice of pilgrimage contributed to the spread of Buddhism. In medieval Japan, from the eight century on, the hijiri became wanderers in the mountains and from village to village and city to city as protectors of the common people. They followed three religious practices: the invocation of the name of the Buddha Amida (nenbutsu); Shungendo (mountain asceticism of Tantric Buddhism and Shinto shamanism); and yin-yang magic. Nenbutsu practice was the most prominent among the three practices.¹¹

In this work, to address the issue of the implications of exile, I place into a hypothetical conversation two medieval thinkers: Shinran (1173–1262), founder of Japanese Shin Buddhism (Jodo Shinshu) and Maimonides (1136–1204), Jewish philosopher rabbi, community leader and physician, to point out that their respective environments of displacement accentuated and sensitized their construction of ethics in terms of otherness. I maintain that their views, while continuing the trajectory stated in antiquity, exhibit significant contemporary relevance with respect to such issues as exclusion, inclusion, and tolerance.

The choice of focus on these two thinkers is not predicated merely upon their being contemporaries, though divided by a vast geographic distance, but is informed by their respective statuses within their communities. Both Maimonides and Shinran faced political environments that placed them either into the position of a dissident in Shinran’s case or of an unwelcome minority (and dissident) in Maimonides’ case.

While philosophy and consequently philosophers are often treated in terms of “a continuation of Plato’s enterprise,”¹² which is the life of a withdrawal from everyday social life, viewing any thinkers and their thought outside of their respective environments means overlooking the fact that some of their views are directly affected by these environments. Any peoples’ thought cannot be fully understood if it is abstracted from the history of their lives as a whole. In the case of Shinran and Maimonides, their thought cannot be fully comprehended if their respective exiles are not taken into account. Consequently, rather than viewing Shinran and Maimonides as Plato’s “cave philosophers,” we hold that their thought demonstrates direct applicability to the concepts of integration and acceptance into a new environment.

We recall that for Jews, the conditions of exile did not allow the political control of a state; one could only control one’s own community. In some cases, a given community is forced to exercise a certain level of exclusivity. This exclusivity is connected to the concept of the boundary, which encapsulates the identity of a given community and makes that community distinct from other communities. Yet, Jewish diasporic culture, in its best circumstances, that is, Muslim Spain, allowed for “a complex continuation of Jewish cultural creativity and identity.”¹³ This contention can be illustrated through Maimonides’ ability to be “simultaneously the vehicle of the preservation of traditions and of the mixing of cultures.”¹⁴ As an “in-between” status, the cultural space situates one on both sides of the boundary. This creative mixture of cultures has its own price but also attunes one to the inadequacies and imperfections of human life and human functioning.

A diasporic existence, as already mentioned, requires a certain compromise. Maimonides’ existence would have been intolerable if he had completely isolated himself from the Islamic community. What testifies to his diasporic “hybrid identity” is that despite Maimonides’ commitment to maintaining the commandments, the Muslim world was more than “a mere background to the life of the Jewish community.” Rather, it represented “the larger frame of which the Jewish community was an integral part.”¹⁵ And yet, this ability to adjust does not negate his sense of displacement from the land of his birth and nostalgia for the familiar images. I view Maimonides’ diasporic existence in terms of a displacement from the familiar place of his birth and childhood. I view Shinran’s diasporic existence in terms of a displacement from the familiarity of the monastic environment which enhanced his subsequent ability to further reevaluate the expectations or lack thereof of the notion of indiscriminative enlightenment.

In Shinran’s case, the “diasporic identity” lay in his asserting that he was “neither a monk nor a layperson.” His “diasporic identity” exposed him to the hardships and perseverance of the common people and heightened his appreciation of their perilous lives. For Shinran, the sense of exile carries a meaning of reevaluating life in his new capacity as a layperson and reinventing one’s own identity in a setting characterized by a different set of rules.

We discuss throughout our chapters that while Shinran’s exilic life did not have a similar liminal duality to the same degree as that of Maimonides, it did sensitize him to the ways the monastic communities were often insensitive to the laity. Shinran’s ability to utilize his past experience and to integrate new knowledge resulted in his increased sense of compassion devoid of any judgment of how others should lead their lives. His experience of this displacement from the monastic community did not result, however, in dislocation from Japanese tradition and culture at large. Despite both Shinran’s and Maimonides’ distance or proximity to their respective communities and traditions, their traditions play an indisputable significance in their thought.

Shinran’s and Maimonides’ integration into a new for them society necessitated a construction of their “hybrid” identities. As mentioned, the “hybrid identity” of Maimonides was a result of belonging to multiple communities: his own Jewish community and the Islamic community in which he became embedded. Shinran’s identity was reinvented as well when, following expulsion from the monastic community, he entered the community of the common people and broke the monastic tradition by starting his own family. For him, exile meant becoming defrocked and being expelled from Japan’s capital, its intellectual and religious center, and returning to secular life. In this process of being stripped of his ordination, Shinran’s “exilic” identity underwent a change as he lost his religious name and was given a new name as a layman, which he refused to own.

Specific to Shinran and Maimonides, the creative mixture of cultures for Maimonides and the integration into a new environment for Shinran allowed them to view certain issues from the position of empathic outsiders. For Maimonides, his new life conditions stimulated an increased emphasis on Jewish communal life and the endorsement of the commandments (religious law) as a means for his continual existence while simultaneously being fully embedded and involved in the culture of his host land. For Shinran, it meant a complete and unconditional embrace of the teachings of the Pure Land and particularly of the nenbutsu practice of the Buddha Amida.

Since Jews in Maimonides’ time never wrote their autobiographies, Maimonides had not addressed his own experience. Thus, everything that is known about him comes from his other writings and letters. Some additional important information is culled from the Cairo Geniza materials, discovered over a century ago in a closed chamber of the Fustat (or Old Cairo) synagogue. Likewise, Shinran had not left any notes or a personal account of his experience of exile.¹⁶ The influence of their displacements from their respective communities becomes apparent through their writings. Their writings demonstrate that this displacement—from the Andalusian Jewish community of his childhood and youth for Maimonides and from the monastic community of Kyoto for Shinran—produced a more sensitive and tolerant approach to other human beings. Thus, understanding their views requires taking into account the distinctive social circumstances in which their thoughts germinated and crystallized, including the circumstances and conditions of their exile. The goal is to demonstrate that their biographical experiences, which have informed their thinking, resonate with conditions of exile and diasporic living in pluralistic societies that define the lives of many individuals, communities, and societies in the twenty-first century.

Applying the definition of ethics as “the glue that binds society together and ensures harmony, cohesion, and togetherness” and exile as “the dissolution of the communal bond and the expulsion one of one’s homeland or community,”¹⁷ we ask how to reconcile these two conflicting notions? The exiled never completely fits a given society’s consensus but by virtue of his experience carries the touch of another world and other viewpoints. How exactly could the conditions of exile contribute to ethics? We ask the question of how did Shinran and Maimonides become the exiles capable of experiencing awareness and sensitivity to the neglected and suffering of others by following Levinas’s articulation that “truth is accessible only to the mind capable of experiencing an exile away from its preconceptions and prejudices.” But we turn first to Shinran’s and Maimonides’ respective environments as the major contributors to their thought.

NOTES

1. Theodore Adorno, Mimina Moralia. Reflections on a Damaged Life (London/New York: Versa, 2005), 87.

2. Adorno, Mimina Moralia, 39.

3. Max Horkheimer and Theodore Adorno, “The Concept of Enlightenment,” in Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: Continuum, 2007), 3–5.

4. Jan Felix Gaertner, Writing Exile: The Discourse of Displacement in Greco-Roman Antiquity and Beyond (Leiden: Brill, 2007).

5. Jo-Marie Claassen, Displaced Persons: The Literature of Exile from Cicero to Boethius (Madison/London: University of Wisconsin Press/Duckworth, 1999), 9.

6. International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, 2nd edition, 2007, 356–358. Diasperien is composed of—dia, “across” and—sperien, “to sow or scatter seeds.” Historically, this term is connected to “displaced communities of people who have been dislocated from their native homeland through the movement of migration, immigration, or exile.” (Jana Evans Braziel and Anita Mannur, “Nation, Migration, Globalization: Points of Contention in Diaspora Studies,” in Theorizing Diaspora: A Reader [Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2003], 1). This term was first used in the Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures intended for the Hellenic Jewish communities in Alexandria (circa third century BCE) to describe the Jews living in exile from the homeland in Palestine. I do not attempt to emphasize this fact since the term “diaspora” also denotes “traveling” and “wandering,” it can be applied to the Buddhist tradition of wandering monks as well. For a discussion on exile from God, cf., Yitzhak E. Baer, Galut (New York: Schocken Books, 1947).

7. Stuart Hall cited in International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, 357.

8. Claassen, Displaced Persons, 5.

9. Abe Doukhan, Emmanuel Levinas. A Philosophy of Exile (New York: Continuum, 2012), 11.

10. Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Prophets: An Introduction (New York: Harper Collins, 1969), 3.

11. Ichiro Hori, “On the Concept of Hijiri (Holy-Man).” Numen, Vol. 5, No. 3, pp. 199–232, September 1, 1958. Shinran can be seen as part of the hijiri approach. As we will see in our discussion, Shinran denied the formal temple and priest system of his time. Following the principles of the tradition of hijiri, he never lived in a temple but rather in hunts or small hermitages and “stressed household religion as more important than temple religion” (224).

12. Cf. Alasdair Macintyre, Edith Stein. A Philosophical Prologue, 1913–1922 (Lanham, MD: Roman and Littlefield, 2007), 3.

13. Bluma Goldstein, “A Politics and Poetics of Diaspora: Heine’s ‘Hebraishe Melodien,’” in Diaspora and Exiles, Varieties of Jewish Identities, ed. Howard Wettstein (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2002), 74.

14. Daniel Boyarin and Jonathan Boyarin, “Diaspora: Generation and the Ground of Jewish Identity,” in Theorizing Diaspora: A Reader (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2003), 108.

15. Sarah Stroumsa, Maimonides in His World: Portrait of a Mediterranean Thinker (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 2.

16. Some very valuable information can be culled from the letters of Shinran’s wife Nun Eshinni. See James C. Dobbins, Letters of Nun Eshinni. Images of Pure Land Buddhism in Medieval Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2004).

17. Doukhan, Emmanuel Levinas, 5.