An Orthodox Rabbi Argues That Jews and Hindus Worship the Same God

According to the Talmud, the prohibition against avodah zarah—literally, “foreign worship,” but often rendered “idolatry”—extends to all of humankind, and not to Jews alone. Usually, the term is taken to mean the worship of multiple gods. Thus Islam, with its strict monotheism and rejection of physical representations, is definitively not avodah zarah, while ancient Greek and Roman paganism were. The status of Christianity, however, was the subject of rabbinic debate: on the one hand Christians worship the God of the Hebrew Bible; on the other, belief in the trinity and the divinity of Jesus seems to violate the idea that God is one. Medieval rabbis described trinitarianism as shituf, or “partnership”—the idea that the one God can have other divine partners.