Thinking across religious boundaries, or,are Vaishavas Idolators? Journal of Vaishnava Studies

Abstract

A recent article in the New York Times, “A Religious Tangle over the Hair of Pious Hindus” (July 14, 2004) reminds us that the word
“idolatry” is very much current as a blanket term for religious otherness negatively construed. According to a group of Orthodox Jewish rabbis in Israel, to wear a wig made with even one strand of hair that was ritually tonsured constitutes idolatry. And since the hair for many wigs worn by Jewish women (for religious reasons) had come from Tirupati, South India, where daily thousands of pious Hindus have their head shaved as a gesture of devotion to the temple image of Lord Venka†eΩvara, the recent rabbinic proscription has led to public wig-burning by pious Jewish women.
A salient self-defining characteristic of the major West Asian “monotheisms” has been pointed condemnation of everything construed as idolatry, the improper worship of God, or the worship of any being other than God. Indeed, preoccupation with idolatry and the necessity to spurn it eventually becomes for these traditions a key element in the conceptualization of monotheism: Where God is properly worshiped, there must be absence of idolatry, and where there is idolatry, there is failure to properly worship the “one true God.”