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4. Remember to observe the Sabbath as a holy day. Six days a week are for your daily duties and your regular work, but the seventh day is a day of Sabbath rest before the Lord your God. On that day you are to do no work of any kind, nor shall your son, daughter, or slaves - whether men or women - or your cattle or your houseguests. For in six days the Lord made the heaven, earth, and sea, and everything in them, and rested the seventh day; so he blessed the Sabbath day and set it aside for rest.

  5. Honour your father and mother, that you may have a long, good life in the land the Lord your God will give you.

  6. You must not murder.

  7. You must not commit adultery.

  8. You must not steal.

  9. You must not lie.

  10. You must not be envious of your neighbour's house, or want to sleep with

  his wife, or want to own his slaves, oxen, donkeys, or anything else he has.

  In the New Stone Tablets that He gave to M oses, Jehovah further implores the Jews thus:

  "Be very, very careful never to compromise with the people there in the land where you are going, for if you do, you will soon be following their evil ways. Instead, you must break down their heathen altars, smash the obelisks they worship, and cut down their shameful idols. For you must worship no other gods, but only Jehovah, for he is a God who claims loyalty and exclusive devotion.

  No, do not make a peace treaty of any kind with the people living in the land, for they are spiritual prostitutes, committing adultery against me by sacrificing to their gods. If you become friendly with them and one of them invites you to go with him and worship his idol, you are apt to do it. And you would accept their daughters, who worship other gods, as wives for your sons - and then your sons would commit adultery against me by worshipping their wives' gods. You must have nothing to do with idols."

  Having thus laid the moral code of conduct for His Chosen People, besides revealing the religious regimen of Judaism, Jehovah advanced the enabling provisions of conformity that came to be regarded as the 'Laws of Moses'. Understandably, these Laws lay down the prescriptions and proscriptions intended by 'the God' for man in the journey of his life 'here'. What is more, and inexplicably at that, the M osaic Laws detail the ordained punishments based on 'eye for eye' and 'tooth for tooth'jurisprudence.

  As the Mosaic Laws reveal, Jehovah comes out as an Impersonal Being, content Himself at punishing the wrongdoers in a legalistic fashion, rather than concerning Himself with imparting spiritual guidance to the Jews, His Chosen People, for their salvation. Nonetheless, as the following passages from the Torah illustrate, when it

  comes to His own relationship with them, Jehovah appears to be a very personal and demanding God.

  "You must not worship the gods of the neighbouring nations, for Jehovah your God who lives among you is a jealous God, and his anger may rise quickly against you, and wipe you off the face of the earth. You must not provoke him and try his patience as you did when you complained against him at Massah. You must actively obey him in everything he commands. Only then will you be doing what is right and good in the Lord's eyes. If you obey him, all will go well for you, and you will be able to go in and possess the good land which the Lord promised your ancestors. You will also be able to throw out all the enemies living in your land, as the lord agreed to help you do.'

  "In the years to come when your son asks you, 'What is the purpose of these laws which the Lord our God has given us? you must tell him, 'We were Pharaoh's slaves in Egypt, and the Lord brought us out of Egypt with great power and mighty miracles with terrible blows against Egypt and Pharaoh and all his people. We saw it all with our own eyes. He brought us out of Egypt so that he could give us this land he had promised to our ancestors. And he has commanded us to obey all of these laws and to reverence him so that he can preserve us alive as he has until now. For it always goes well with us when we obey all the lawsof the Lord ourGod.”

  The rewards that Jehovah accords to His Chosen People in exchange for their obedience are all materialistic as stipulated in the Torah thus:

  "You must obey all the commandments of the Lord your God, following his directions in every detail, going the whole way he has laid out for you; only then will you live and lead prosperous lives in the land you are to enter and possess."

  "If you obey all of my commandments, I will give you regular rains, and the land will yield bumper crops, and the trees will be loaded with fruit long after the normal time! And grapes will still be ripening when sowing time comes again. You shall eat your fill, and live safely in the land, for I will give you peace, and you will go to sleep without fear. I will chase away the dangerous animals. You will chase your enemies; they will die beneath your swords. Five of you will chase a hundred, and a hundred of you, ten thousand! You will defeat all of your enemies. I will look after you, and multiply you, and fulfill my covenant with you. You will have such a surplus of crops that you won't know what to do with them when the new harvest is ready! And I will live among you, and not despise you. I will walk among you and be your God, and you shall be my people. For I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, so that you would be slaves no longer; I have broken your chains so that you can walk with dignity."

  "When the Lord brings you into the Promised Land, as he soon will, he will destroy the following seven nations, all greater and mightier than you are: the Hittites, the Girgashites, the Amorites, the Cannanites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, theJebusites."

  Equally significantly, the punishments of disregard too are mundane to the core.

  "But if you will not listen to me or obey me, but reject my laws, this is what I will do to you: I will punish you with sudden terrors and panic, and with tuberculosis and burning fever; your eyes shall be consumed and your life shall ebb away; you will sow your crops in vain, for your enemies will eat them. I will set my face against you and you will flee before your attackers; those who hate you will rule you; you will even run when no one is chasing you!"

  "And if you still disobey me, I will punish you seven times more severely for your sins.

  I will break your proud power and make your heavens as iron, and your earth as bronze. Your strength shall be spent in vain; for your land shall not yield its crops, nor your trees their fruit."

  "And if even then you will not obey me and listen to me, I will send you seven times more plagues because of your sins. I will send wild animals to kill your children and destroy your cattle and reduce your numbers so that your roads will be deserted."

  "And if even this will not reform you, but you continue to walk against my wishes, then I will walk against your wishes, and I, even I, will personally smite you seven times for your sin. I will revenge the breaking of my covenant by bringing war against you. You will flee to your cities, and I will send a plague among you there; and you will be conquered by your enemies. I will destroy your food supply so that one oven will be large enough to bake all the bread available for ten entire families; and you will still be hungry after your pittance has been doled out to you."

  "And if you still won't listen to me or obey me, then I will let loose my great anger and send you seven times greater punishment for your sins. You shall eat your own sons and daughters, and I will destroy the altars on the hills where you worship your idols, and I will cut down your incense altars, leaving your dead bodies to rot among your idols; and I will abhor you. I will make your cities desolate, and destroy your places of worship, and will not respond to your incense offerings. Yes, I will desolate your land; your enemies shall live in it, utterly amazed at what I have done to you."

  "I will scatter you out among the nations, destroying you with war as you go. Your land shall be desolate and your cities destroyed. Then at last the land will rest and make up for the many years you refused to let it lie idle; for it will lie desolate all the years that you are captives in enemy lands. Yes, then the land will rest and enjoy its Sabbaths! It will make up for the rest you didn't give it every seventh year when you liv
ed upon it.”

  "And for those who are left alive, I will cause them to be dragged away to distant lands as prisoners of war, and slaves. There they will live in constant fear. The sound of a leaf driven in the wind will send them fleeing as though chased by a man with a sword; they shall fall when no one is pursuing them. Yes, though none pursue they shall stumble over each other in flight, as though fleeing in battle, with no power to stand before their enemies. You shall perish among the nations and be destroyed among your enemies. Those left shall pine away in enemy lands because of their sins, the same sins as those of their fathers."

  "But at last they shall confess their sins and their fathers' sins of treachery against me. (Because they were against me, I was against them, and brought them into the land of their enemies.) When at last their evil hearts are humbled and they accept the punishment I send them for their sins, then I will remember again my promises to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and I will remember the land (and its desolation). For the land shall enjoy its Sabbaths as it lies desolate. But then at last they shall accept their punishment for rejecting my laws and for despising my rule. But despite all they have done, I will not utterly destroy them and my covenant with them, for I am Jehovah their God. For their sakes I will remember my promises to their ancestors, to be their God. For I brought their forefathers out of Egypt as all the nations watched in wonder. I am Jehovah."

  Thus, in essence, it seems that the religion of Judaism emphasizes the duty of the Jews to follow the Will of their God, in gratitude for His benevolence of their deliverance from slavery. It was this remarkable covenant of Jehovah, which made them His Chosen People that should have enabled them to brave the pogroms in alien lands for centuries with unrivalled forbearance. Besides, the underpinnings of reward and punishment regimen that their faith inculcates in their consciousness would have served the Jewish people sustain hope in the face of adversity for millennia.

  On the other hand, Jehovah, for His part, kept His word, first by punishing thejewsas he said He would, and then, in the end, gave them the Promised Land, also as promised,

  though as Golda M eir once quipped "M oses dragged us for 40 years through the desert to bring us to the one place in the M iddle East where there was no oil”. Whatever, on the basis of the executed threats and fulfilled promises, and going by the recorded history of religions, the Judaism of Jehovah has a claim for authenticity amongst the faiths of the world. Thus, as Jehovah settled scores with the Jews 'here' itself, won't the proposition be valid that, after all, there could be no Hindu swarga, no Christian Paradise and no Islamic Hereafter for man to contend with?

  And inexplicably, Jehovah, in His Islamic avatar as Allah, revealed to M uhammad that the 'Hereafter' and not 'here' is all that matters for the new set of believers. And in times to come, the propensity of the zealot M usalmans to put their lives on line to make it to the appetizing paradise has become the scourge of mankind 'here'.

  Chapter 3

  Pyramids of Wisdom

  It would be interesting to speculate what would have been the religious tenor of the Hinduism and its early derivatives, the Jainism and the Buddhism, if only the tribes of India were equal to the task of thwarting the Aryan domination in their individual domains. Would it not have brought about a confrontation between the Aryan gods and the deities of the others? Wouldn't have Indra, the Aryan spearhead of a god, forced them into a covenant with Him to destroy the alien gods of the rest of the Indian tribes? Fortunately for the Hindu spirituality and the Indian philosophy, that was not the case. Though Indra spared the local deities of his wrath, his wards were less considerate to the souls of the very land they coveted.

  As the brawn of the newbies should've successfully relegated all other tribes, save those from the hilly habitats - they were out of reach, and, besides, would have been beyond their interest - into subordinate castes, their Brahman brain got into the act of drafting the dharma in the Rig Vedic mould. However, it was only time before the Aryan's political conquest of the Bharata Khanda was conceptualized through aswamedha yoga of Yajur Veda. At length, when the kshatriyas were on the conquering course, the Brahmans went about composing two more Vedas - soma and adharva - to define the spiritual tone of sanatana dharma, which in latter-days evolved into Hinduism.

  In due course, the breadth and depth of the Brahman intellect, nourished in the comfort of the Indian climes, came to shape, first the Brahmasutras, and then the Upanishads, as adjuncts to the four Vedas. And that fashioned the Hindu Vedanta of yore; but, the culmination of the Brahman thought process and the crowning glory of the Hindu philosophy is the Bhagvad-Gita, aka Gita. The intellectual achievements of the Brahmans have so fascinated the modern philosophers and scholars of the West that they went eloquent about them.

  Jawaharlal Nehru thus compiled the eulogies of Western scholars about the Hindu intellectual achievements, symbolized by the Upanishads and the Bhagvad-Gita in 'The Discovery of India', published by Oxford University Press.

  "Schopenhauer felt that "from every sentence deep, original and sublime thoughts arise, and the whole is pervaded by a high and holy and earnest spirit.... In the whole world there is no study.... So beneficial and so elevating as that of the Upanishads.... (They) are products of the highest wisdom... It is destined sooner or later to become the faith of the people." And again: "the study of the Upanishads has been the solace of my life, it will be the solace of my death.”

  "Writing on this, Max Mueller says: Schopenhauer was the last man to write at random, or to allow himself to go into ecstasies over so-called mystic and inarticulate

  thought. And I am neither afraid nor ashamed to say that I share his enthusiasm for the Vedanta, and feel indebted to it for much that has been helpful to me in my passage through life."

  In another place he says: "The Upanishads are the.... sources of ... the Vedanta philosophy, a system in which human speculation seems to me to have reached its very acme."

  Max Mueller's wonderment about the Upanishads seems unending going by what Nehru quoted:

  "I spend my happiest hours in reading Vedantic books. They are to me like the light of the morning, like the pure air of the mountains - so simple, so true, if once understood."

  "Formulating his admiration for the Hindu thought and culture, he further said that," Nehru continued, "there is, in fact, an unbroken continuity between the most modern and the most ancient phases of Hindu thought, extending to over more than three thousand years. If we were to look over the whole world to find out the country most richly endowed with all the wealth, power and beauty that nature can bestow - in some parts a very paradise on earth - I should point to India. If I were asked under what sky the human mind has most fully developed some of its choicest gifts, has most deeply pondered over the greatest problems of life, and has found solutions of some of them which well deserve the attention even of those who have studied Plato and Kant - I should point to India. And if I were to ask myself from what literature we here in Europe, we who have been nurtured almost exclusively on the thoughts of Greeks and Romans, and of one Semitic race, the Jewish, may draw the corrective which is most wanted in order to make our inner life more perfect, more comprehensive, more universal, in fact more truly human a life, not for this life only, but a transfigured and eternal life - again I should point to India"

  "Romain Rolland, who followed him, was no less eloquent: "If there is one place on the face of the earth where all the dreams of living men have found a home from the very earliest days when man began the dream of existence, it is India."

  "G. W. Russell, the Irish poet, privy to the power of inspiration said about the inspiring value of the ancient Hindu scriptures: "Goethe, Wordsworth, Emerson and Thoreau among moderns have something of this vitality and wisdom, but we can find all they have said and much more in the grand sacred books of the East. The Bhagavad-Gita and the Upanishads contain such godlike fullness of Wisdom on all things that I feel the authors must have looked with calm remembrance back through a thousa
nd passionate lives, full of feverish strife for and with shadows, ere they could have written with such certainty of things which the soul feels to be sure."

  Given the above, it would be imperative to have a peep, first into the Upanishads, and then into the Gita, that fascinated so many modern intellectuals of the East and the West alike. It could be said, ironically so, that the Brahman intellectual quest that was exemplified by the gdyatri mantra of the Rig Veda, 3.62.10, which forms the Hindu daily prayer was in fact composed by sage Vishvdmitra, the kshatryia rishi, and it reads thus:

  Om bhur bhuvah svah / tatsaviturvarenyam / bhargo devasya dhTmahi / dhiyo yo na h prachodayat

  "We meditate on the Spiritual Splendor of that supreme and Divine reality, source of the physical, astral and celestial spheres of existence. Allow that divine being supreme to illuminate our intellect, so that we can realize the supreme Truth.”

  The following excerpts are from The Upanisads' translated by Valerie J. Roebuck that was published by Penguin Books India, expostulate some of the many facets of Hindu knowledge thus:

  "OM .That is full; this is full;

  Fullness comes from fullness:

  When fullness is taken from fullness,

  Fullness remains.

  They who worship ignorance Enter blind darkness:

  They who delight in knowledge Enter darkness, as it were, yet deeper.

  Whoever knows knowledge and ignoranceBoth of them, togetherBy ignorance crosses over death And by knowledge reaches immortality.

  They who worship non-becoming Enter blind darkness:

  They who delight in becoming Enter darkness, as it were, yet deeper.

  Whoever knows becoming and destruction Both of them, together By destruction crosses over death And by becoming reaches immortality.

  From the unreal lead me to the real.

  From the darkness lead me to light.”

  Now, contrast this with the Torah line where the God forbids Adam to eat the fruit from the Tree of Conscience for that would open his eyes, and thus makes him aware of right and wrong, good and bad! And yet, it isthejewsand the Christians, though notthe Musalmans, of the Semitic religious dispensations that have reached the heights of science and technology in modern times! And sadly, the Hindus, who once hovered about the intellectual horizon of the world, have sunk into the depths of collective ignorance and prejudice for reasons not far to seek.