Idol Worship Isn’t a Relic of the Past

Follow your critic as you would someone with a treasure map, goes the advice attributed to Buddha in the Dhammapada. Or, as Proverbs 10:17 puts it: “He errs who ignores reproof.”

With this in mind, I begin by expressing gratitude to Alan Brill and Tara Isabella Burton for their critical responses to my essay on the practice of yoga by religious Jews. Luckily for me, after due consideration that will not require my bending myself into too-elaborate an intellectual pretzel—I remain confident in the soundness of my argument. I’ll take the two responses in order of their appearance.

Rabbi Brill, whose writings I’ve followed and admired for years, reminds us that (a) yoga is not monolithic but multiform, that (b) in fact some scholars see it not as a product of Hinduism but as predating the arrival of Hinduism on the scene, and that (c) Moses Maimonides’ 12th-century magnum opus, Guide of the Perplexed—a quintessential work of Jewish religious philosophy—may in places reflect the influence of Hindu and yoga texts read by him in translation.