ABSTRACT
Jewish monotheism is a language about God. For example, when a Jewish
person eats a first fruit, he/she thanks God by blessing ‘‘shehecheyanu’’ שהחיינו
(meaning ‘‘Who has kept us alive’’). The blessing is recited at every joyous
occasion in the Jewish life cycle, such that the gratefulness to God for anything
we eat is inherent in the Jewish mental constitution. When my grandfather, a
believing Jew, was on his dying bed, he was unable to avoid asking, like many other Jews, ‘‘where did I sin to God, to deserve the punishment?’’ At great odds
is the Confucian ‘‘anthropocosmic vision’’ (as coined by TuWeiming), namely,
a vision that stresses the continuity of being, between human and cosmos.
