Estimated reading time: 14 minutes
A philosophy professor reflects on practices in Islam, Judaism and Christianity that underscore our oneness as humans in search of love and purpose
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Love, in the three Abrahamic traditions, can seem impossibly demanding. Love insists that we not only act on behalf of others, love insists that we feel the suffering of others, that we place ourselves in the place of the suffering of others, and that we act to relieve their suffering.
Properly transformed, our love must be suffering love. But if we are honest, we seem more captive to our fears than to our concern and care for others, especially outside of our tribe or race or group. So each of the three traditions specifies various rituals which aim at transforming us from fear-driven self-seekers into empath-driven suffering-lovers.
In this essay, I will talk about one ritual from each tradition and how it would affect our transformation into God-powered lovers. I will look first at prayer in Islam, second at Shabbat in Judaism, and, finally, hospitality in Christianity.
Prayer: connecting to God and the good
On my first trip to Turkey, some Muslims that I had just met invited me into their home for dinner. I had met them on the street and we had struck up a conversation; as we parted, they invited me home for a meal. At the dinner, I heard the omnipresent call to prayer. I waited for our Muslim hosts to end our dinner and then head off to the mosque to pray. I waited in vain.
As I waited, I noticed that one Muslim would leave the dinner table and not
return for several minutes. Then another would depart for a few minutes. They all left, one at a time, and returned without comment. Finally, my curiosity burst: “What are you all doing, leaving one by one? Where are you going?” They chuckled quietly and explained.
Most Muslims, they told me, pray most of the time in a small, dedicated room in their home or at their place of work or even in a mall. Five times a day, they enter that quiet room, unroll a prayer mat, point it toward Mecca, and recite their prayers. My friends generously invited me into their private prayer room so that I could watch their prayers.
Although I was embarrassed at turning prayer into a spectator sport, they blithely ignored me and went about their business.
My Muslim friend—praying as I spectated in that small room—told me that five times a day, he and his family pray the following:
There is no God but You
In the Name of Allah, the Most Compassionate, the Most Merciful.
Praise be to Allah, Lord of the Universes,
the Most Compassionate, the Most Merciful!
Master of the Day for Judgment!
You alone do we worship and You alone do we call on for help.
Guide us along the Straight Path.
Five times a day, he prays to the All-Merciful God to guide him along the path of righteousness and mercy. Five times he prays to the One God, the Lord of the Universes.
Five times a day he worships God alone.
Islam’s radical monotheism is nowhere more evident than in that tiny room, with just enough space for the One True God and the heart of the sincere worshiper. No room for other gods. Not Wadd, Suwa, Yagut, Yauq or Nasr; they are only wood and stone. Not the Sun or the Moon or the Mountain; he worshiped the Creator of Heaven and Earth. And not himself.
In praying to God alone, my friend is also confessing and conceding that he is not God. I heard—in his bowing and his prayers to the Lord of the Universes—the simple and powerful ritual renunciation of pride, of thinking himself God. According to Kamand Kojouri: “You have no choice. You must leave your ego on the doorstep before you enter love.”
Third, praying to God alone attaches the pray-er to the Source of Rightly-Directed Loves. In that sacred moment, the pray-er seeks to love what God loves and to hate what God hates. God loves, we know from the Quran, the poor, the widow, and the orphan; God loves, we know from the Quran, peace. The pray-er then leaves that sacred place to bring peace in love to God’s world, peace that includes the flourishing of everyone,
Even, and perhaps especially, the poor, the widow, and the orphan.
Finally, I sensed, in his double repetitions of love
In the Name of Allah, the Most Compassionate, the Most Merciful.
Praise be to Allah, Lord of the Universes,
the Most Compassionate, the Most Merciful!
his heartfelt desire to unite with love.
While ritualized activity can be dull and repetitive, I suspect such regular and repetitive rituals may be necessary to overcome our most recalcitrant desires—fears, say, or selfishness. Islam insists on regular ritually prescribed prayers to transform selfishness into love. There is no quick and easy path to love.
Prayer attaches us to Love and leads us to seek peace. I think it would be spiritually beneficial for everyone to bow down five times a day.
Shabbat and home
In the mid-90s, we joined fellow-philosopher, Stewart Shapiro, in their home to share a sabbath meal, changing my life forever. Stewart shared with me his tradition, his belief and unbelief, and his family’s love.
Upon entering the door, the sounds and smells made it feel like we were entering into a new world. We arrived just after sundown on a Friday evening and were greeted with a warmhearted, “Shabbat Shalom!”
The sumptuous food had been prepared beforehand. Unlike our typical Friday evening at home, the TV was off, no music was playing. Although there was a hubbub outside—with boisterous university students on parade from this pub to the next—inside it was quiet and calm and peaceful. The family had gathered in the living room, relaxing and enjoying one another’s company.
Shabbat, which means “day of rest,” celebrates the day on which God rested from creating the world and all that it contained. While aimed at honoring God, it also has a more mundane human function. In Exodus 34:21 we read, “Six days you shall work, but on the seventh day you shall rest.” If taking downtime was good enough for God, it’s good enough for God’s people. Every week, from sundown on Friday to sunset on Saturday, Jews reserve this day for holiness and peace.
One might imagine, in Hebrew Bible times, that, after six days of arduous agrarian work, a day of rest was remarkably refreshing. But more than physically refreshing, the sabbath is spiritually reorienting (or intended as such).
For six days a person works, but no work is permitted on the seventh because “in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but rested the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day and consecrated it” (Exodus 20:11).
By taking a weekly break from acts of creation (work) and focusing your entire attention on God, you are regularly reminded that God is the Creator and you are not. Every seventh day, amidst the hustle and bustle of your often self-absorbed life, you must rest and remember that you are not God. Seems like a ritual practice that everyone could benefit from.
Stewart’s wife, Beverly, and his children were delighted to share their sabbath with us. They explained the food, they spoke in Hebrew and translated for us, they sang deeply resonant songs, and they moved together in unity and harmony. However, what was familiar for them was a mystery to us. It reminded me of the Kenny Rogers song, “The Gambler.” We didn’t “know when to hold up, when to fold up, when to walk away, when to run.”
So Beverly and her children graciously guided us into their familiar world of Torah and challah bread and kosher brisket and moody candles.
To be completely honest, and despite their best efforts, it was difficult for me. Their world was not my world. Their smells were not my smells. I felt anxious not knowing exactly what to do next and not recognizing what song was being sung. And my ADD-self wanted some rock music and a little TV; I’m not good at relaxing.
This was not my home.
Then it hit me—so this is what it feels like to be an outsider. I felt anxious, isolated, ignorant, disconnected, and disempowered. I felt, for this very short time, what they must feel all of the time. What a burden we’ve laid on those who aren’t us.
No wonder they shut their doors, turn off their lights, light their candles, and cling to one another in the dark. You’d want a sabbath’s rest, too.
Why take an entire day out of one’s hectic week and rest with family and friends?
As Jews well know, the world can be hostile, broken. They’ve experienced countless manifestations—from alienation and injustice all the way to Holocausts—of our separations from one another. So, once a week it’s good to cling to one another in the dark and hope for healing of our broken selves and our broken world.
The Sabbath ritual begins with the Shalom Aleichem Prayer, a prayer for peace—for wholeness, healing, inclusion, justice, and mercy. There are many other prayers—of gratitude for God’s commandments (the light of the Law) and for God’s sustenance and grace (blessing of the wine), for sanctification (the washing of the hands), and for blessings on the children. The Sabbath’s rest is not aimed at making us better workers, it is aimed at making us better people.
The Sabbath provides space, place for re-creation, recreation, restoration, and recommitment. As fallible creators for six days, we need a day to cease from creation, to remind ourselves of the Creator, and to allow the Creator to re-create us. With family and friends, Jews play games, tell jokes, and share stories and food and lives. They meditate and receive instruction on their way to restoration and recommitment—to God and to one another and to, with God, continually creating God’s world in love and Justice.
The Sabbath recreates, every seventh day, God’s design for creation—humans, as a family, sharing a meal and sharing love in peace. I take family here to include close members of one’s spiritual community. God begins our journey to peace, in family.
We learn of God and God’s commandments, first and foremost, from our parents. We learn of love—parental and brotherly/sisterly—first and foremost within our family. We learn of obedience and patience and kindness and self-sacrifice and grace—first and foremost instruments of peace.
Families, as God intended them (and they are often not), are where we first meet God and justice and love. Families are, as God intended them, our first spiritual home, our original source of goodness and strength.
Our family and closest spiritual friends, then, are our roots. But family and closest spiritual friends are not the whole tree. And fearful human beings often make family and closest spiritual friends the whole tree.
I described above all of the benefits of family—a safe haven for cultivating patience and kindness and self-sacrifice and grace. The first place where we meet God. We will always and forever have just one spiritual home. And home is good, it’s our place of rest.
But just as our religion creates in-group, and all the good that in-group promises, religion also creates out-group, and all the bad that out-group entails.
Because fear is stronger than love, our fears of others can drive us into in-group and against out-group.
We need, then, rituals that extend empathy out of in-group and into out-group. Or, another way to put it, we need rituals to expand in-group to include all of God’s holy creatures.
Hospitality
The first two rituals, daily prayer in Islam and keeping the Sabbath in Judaism, are rooted first in God’s love for us and second our family’s love for us. They are foundational rituals that aim at orienting us towards love of others. But daily prayers and the keeping of sabbath are vastly more likely to orient us toward and identify us with in-group. When you add in the many real and also countless imaginary fears that we face, daily prayer and sabbath-keeping can cultivate in-group love at the expense of out-group care and concern.
Our fears move us to build walls, but God wants us to build bridges. The Abrahamic solution, hospitality, involves rituals of love that either extend empathy to out-groups or expand an in-group to include all of God’s creatures. I will conclude with a discussion of hospitality, a decidedly out-group-aimed virtue. Although I will focus on the Christian tradition, we can find the virtue of hospitality in Judaism and Islam as well. Let us start with a definition. According to Henri Nouwen, Hospitality means primarily the creation of a free space where the stranger can enter and become a friend instead of an enemy.
Hospitality is not to change people, but to offer them space where change can take place… Hospitality is not a subtle invitation to adopt the lifestyle of the host, but the gift of a chance for the guest to find his own.
Note: Hospitality seeks to cultivate a change in the host, not in the guest. Hospitality is a virtue that aims at cultivating self-giving, other-regarding love. However, Christian “hospitality,” as practiced, is often disguised evangelism, the attempt to change the guest’s beliefs. But Hospitality is a unique virtue, one that aims at uniting human beings across, often deep divides.
I have taken many Christian philosophers on dozens of trips to China for cross-cultural dialogues—Confucian-Christian, sometimes, or Daoist-Christian, or Buddhist-Christian. In addition to encouraging Christian scholars to write in simple, clear, idiom-free sentences and to speak slowly and enunciate every word, I also ask them not to evangelize. I’m not opposed to anyone sharing their faith. But missionary work is illegal in China; evangelism can put the entire group or the future of the project in jeopardy. And, Christians, of all dialogue partners, are among the world’s worst listeners.
But some philosophers couldn’t resist a captive communist audience and loudly took every opportunity to tearfully share their testimony. The secret police would intervene and the following year’s conference would be mysteriously canceled.
I tell these stories to make the minor point that love listens but also the major point, the one that Nouwen makes, that Hospitality aims primarily at the expansion of empathy in one’s self by “the creation of a free space where the stranger can enter and become a friend instead of an enemy.” Hospitality is not aimed at changing the stranger; the virtue of Hospitality seeks to transform the host into a better, more expansive lover, not to transform the stranger into another self. So Hospitality, clean and simple, is not disguised evangelism—if you are aiming at them, the stranger, you are being combative and hostile, not empathetic and expansive.
Love listens, love expands.
The cultivation of the virtue of Hospitality requires us to heed Jesus’s demand to love not only our own people, but everyone in the world. It requires us to begin opening up ourselves to people who are not like us, people that we might even fear as stranger or enemy. So, first and foremost, Hospitality often takes courage—to walk out of your home and down your street to the house of your unknown and very different Muslim or African-American or Mexican or Jewish or atheist neighbor. You may need to leave your comfortable worship home and visit a synagogue or a mosque or the Free-Thinkers Society meeting. Or you may need to roll down your window and share a dollar or a cup of coffee with a street-side beggar.
Each of the Abrahamic traditions includes rituals which, if practiced as intended, would learn us love. Love, so it seems, takes practice, practice, practice.
Learning to love God, Muslims say, requires five private prayers a day, every day, for the entirety of your life. Learning to love kin and extended kin, Jews say, requires setting aside normal activities and sharing with others for twenty-four long hours each week. Learning to love strangers and even enemies, Christians say, requires courageously and humbly opening your door and inviting them in for food, drink, and shelter.
Daily prayer reorients our love away from self and toward God and what God loves; as Rumi writes: “The ego is the greatest idol.” Shabbat re-orients our love away from self to kin and extended kin. Hospitality reorients our love from self and kin (ingroup) to stranger and enemy (out-group). Each ritual step of the way is a difficult move away from fear, resentment, grief, and anger—toward gratitude, humility, generosity, and respect.
Each ritual of love is designed to practice love of God and others, over and over and over. Until it catches.
There is no easy path to Abrahamic love; so there’s no easy path to God’s blessing all the world through the children of Abraham.
You may also enjoy reading The Magic of Self Love and Positive Energetic Vibration, by Karamjeet Kaur.
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