the offering of wine as a libation in sacrificial services in the Temple. Wine was praised by the ancient Hebrews as a cheering drink. The Book of Psalms thanks God for the "wine that cheers the hearts of men." Jews drink wine on many occasions, such as the beginning and end of each Sabbath, festivals, and wedding and circumcision ceremonies. In the Talmudic law, drinking wine has been accorded a special blessing, different from the blessings over other food and drink. Hasidism, the eighteenth-century Jewish revival movement emphasizing the ecstatic communion with God, has made drinking on various occasions part of its exceptionally joyous celebrations. Nevertheless, neither heavy drinking nor drunkenness have been common among Jews.
Merriment and alcohol also occupy an important place in Shinto. Sake (rice wine) is offered to the gods and is consumed by participants during religious festivals such as those celebrating the New Year. Many Shinto shrines display barrels of wine donated by their worshipers. Some shrines are even dedicated to the "three deities of sake." The Shinto wedding ceremony, like the Jewish wedding ceremony, includes the drinking of wine by both bride and groom. The eighth-century poetry anthology, the Manyoshu, includes many poems in praise of drink, among them:
Instead of wasting thoughts on unavailing things
It would seem wiser
To drink a cup of raw sake.
Grotesque! When I look upon a man
Who drinks no sake, looking wise,
How like an ape he is!
Judaism and Shinto share a positive attitude toward human nature. They do not demand the negation of natural desires nor do they wish people to behave like God. There are neither hermits nor saints in these two religions. Jews are expected to direct their natural energies into moral and God-fearing channels and to lift society to a more spiritual level. The Bible acknowledges the human weaknesses of even the most exemplary figures. Abraham ordered his wife to pose as his sister and thus be taken into Pharaoh's harem so he could save his own life. Moses, the greatest of the Jewish prophets, disobeyed God and was punished by never entering the Land of Israel. David, the greatest of the Jewish kings, sent an innocent man to die in battle, in order to be able to take his wife. In Shinto not only mortals have their weaknesses, but so do the gods.
An affirmative acceptance of life is also expressed in the negative attitude both religions harbor toward death. Both Shinto and Judaism teach that death defiles, and a place where death has occurred requires elaborate purification. The Bible states: "He who touches the corpse of any human being shall be unclean for seven days. . . . This is the ritual: When a person dies in a tent, whoever enters the tent and whoever is in the tent shall be unclean seven days." In Shinto also, exposure to death contaminates, and relatives of the deceased must avoid contact with deities and shrines for periods ranging from seven to one hundred days. Jewish kings as well as Japanese emperors were not allowed to attend funerals or visit cemeteries. Blood and dirt are sources of defilement in both religions. Both Jewish priest and Shinto priest had to be impeccably clean before performing their religious duties. In each case this involved thorough washing and the donning of clean clothes.
Immersion in a ritual bath (mikveh) has been an important element of Jewish life for both sexes, and women must perform this rite regularly after each menstruation and after childbirth. Also important for Jews is the ritual washing of hands before meals. In Japan worshipers often stand under a cold waterfall or plunge into a winter sea to demonstrate their readiness to endure physical discomfort as a sign of religious devotion, and visitors to shrines wash their hands and rinse their mouths with water from a special stone basin. Such practices of religious ablution helped both peoples to maintain high hygienic standards throughout the ages, and made them probably less affected by diseases and plagues.
A significant similarity between Judaism and Shinto is that historically they have both remained national religions. Belonging to the Jewish people and to the Jewish religion are synonymous; a Jew who converts to another religion ceases to be a member of the Jewish community, and a convert to Judaism automatically joins the Jewish people. Most of the Jewish festivals relate to the history of the nation: Passover celebrates the exodus from Egypt; Sukkot (Tabernacles) commemorates the wandering in the desert; Purim celebrates the deliverance from extermination at the hands of a Persian king; and Hanukkah commemorates liberation from foreign oppression and religious persecution and the rededication of the Second Temple, which had been defiled.
There are no parallel Shinto festivals commemorating historical events of the Japanese people. The festivals celebrating the foundation of Japan (Kigensetsu, or as it is called today Kenkoku Kinen-bi) and the birthdays of emperors were instituted only in the nineteenth century. Unlike a Jew, a Japanese can cast away Shinto and convert to another religion without ceasing to be a Japanese. However, Shinto does relate to one particular people, the Japanese, and it attributes divinity to one royal dynasty, the Japanese emperors. Although a Japanese can adhere to any religion, it is hard to imagine a non-Japanese becoming a Shintoist.
Around the year 1000 B.C.E. King David moved his capital from Hebron to Jerusalem. The name Jerusalem, or Yerushalayim in Hebrew, although of an obscure etymology, means City of Peace. David was not allowed to build the Temple there because he had been a warrior and, as God told him, "You have shed much blood and fought great battles." That task was entrusted to David's son Solomon, a king whose reign was one of peace. The name Solomon, or Shelomoh in Hebrew, derives, according to the Bible, from shalom, meaning peace, a word that has become the standard Hebrew greeting. For more than one thousand years, with an interruption of only seventy years, the Jewish Temple stood in Jerusalem, the only House of God allowed in the realm. In 70 C.E the city was destroyed and the Temple was burned by the Romans.
Although the Temple was never restored, Jerusalem remained the holy city of the Jews and the ideal capital of the messianic future. Jewish synagogues all over the world face toward Jerusalem and observant Jews pray daily for the peace of the city. This special status accorded Jerusalem was later also adopted by Christianity and by Islam. The climax of the earthly ministry of Jesus Christ—the triumphal entry, the passion, and the insurrection—took place in Jerusalem. Mohammed is believed by Moslems to have been miraculously transported at night to Jerusalem and to have ascended from there to heaven. At the end of the seventh century, the Arabs constructed the great mosque, El Aqsa, and the Dome of the Rock on the site where the Jewish Temple had stood.
Shortly thereafter, in 710, and on the other side of Asia, Empress Gemmei moved the Japanese capital from Fujiwara-Kyo to Heijo-kyo, present-day Nara. The compound word Heijo-kyo means Citadel of Peace. In 794, Emperor Kammu moved the capital to Heian-kyo, present-day Kyoto, which until 1868—more than a thousand years—was the imperial capital of Japan. Heian-kyo means Capital of Peace. Both capitals were modeled after the splendid Chinese capital of that time, Changan (Ch'ang-an), present-day Xian (Sian). Changan in Chinese means Long Peace.
The ideal of peace is a universal human value, but Judaism was the first religion to make world peace a central element in its eschatology. The prophet Isaiah described the ideal future state of the world:
And they shall beat their swords into plowshares
And their spears into pruning hooks:
Nation shall not take up sword against nation:
They shall never again know war.
Almost every Jewish prayer ends with a petition for peace. This messianic value of peace was later inherited by Christianity and Islam.
Peace and harmony have also been central elements in Buddhism and Confucianism. In East Asia, the ideal state was the one that preserved peace and the greatest virtue of a Chinese or a Japanese sovereign was the ability to achieve and maintain peace. The word wa, which is written by the ideograph that means harmony and peace, is used in Japan to designate everything native. Thus washoku
