Exile and Otherness. Ilana Maymind
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.
Introducing Shinran and Maimonides
Shinran
Born in 1173 as Hino Arinori,1 Shinran belonged to a once aristocratic family, which eventually fell from political favor.2 The course of Shinran’s life directly affected the development of his thought, and his life can be analyzed through the lens of four distinct periods. Except for his childhood, he lived during the Kamakura period hence the first period of Shinran’s life falls between 1181 and 1201. At the age of nine, Shinran became a Tendai monk and studied on Mount Hiei. During this study, Shinran was an ordinary temple monk (dōsō), exposed to the Tendai system’s major doctrines as well as Pure Land thoughts of such Tendai masters as Ennin, Ryōgen, and Genshin. In addition, he was influenced by a prevalent religious consciousness in society known as the veneration of Prince Shōtoku (574–622),3 who was traditionally credited with the formal adoption of Buddhism in Japan and was seen as a manifestation of the Bodhisattva 4 of compassion: Avalokites̕vara (Jpn.: Kannon) and who in effect also preserved the link to Shinto’s concept of kami.5
The second period falls between 1201 and 1207. At the age of 29, despite