In studying Abraham Heschel’s The Prophets, I am reminded that many people are heartened by the prophets’ call to care for the poor, widows, orphans, and other vulnerable people. But I worry that the prophets’ message is sometimes incorrectly universalized. In understanding why the prophets so often focus on the vulnerable, we must first answer a more fundamental question.

Many people see a fundamental similarity among religions: Jews, Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, and others are all appreciating the oneness of God in their own way. But this formulation sounds suspiciously like Carl Jung’s collective unconscious: there is some underlying reality that binds humanity together, and different religions are simply different ways of accessing it. It can also become perennialist, in the sense associated with thinkers such as René Guénon, when one focuses on supposed esoteric truths shared by the world’s ancient faiths.

But this fundamentally misunderstands religion.

I am greatly influenced by Hussain Mansour Abubakr, a writer and deep thinker on the Abrahamic faiths. For him, religion is primarily a truth claim about fundamental reality, and religions sharply differ on these fundamental truth claims. Did God reveal Himself to Moses and Israel at Sinai or not? Did God become incarnate in Jesus and sacrifice Himself to save humanity from its sins or not? Did Muhammad receive the final prophecy from God or not?

These are not merely different cultural expressions of the same underlying religious truth. They are competing claims about reality.

Judaism’s fundamental truth claims therefore conflict with those of every other religion. While Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, and other faiths contain many things that are beautiful, profound, and worthy of respect, I believe that Judaism is true.

Moving back to the prophets, I can therefore only understand the Hebrew prophets within the context of Judaism’s fundamental truth claims. Their words are not simply a collection of timeless ethical wisdom that can be detached from Judaism and transplanted into whatever moral framework we happen to prefer.

They are speaking to Israel.

We........

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