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Karma is a Hindu concept, but with a great deal of truth to it. Our merits and sins are to be weighed tomorrow on a scale in the heavenly court. You want to call that “karma,” I won’t stop you.

That doesn’t mean you have to worship a blue adolescent with six arms who’s always standing on one leg. But that parallels somewhat Yehezkel’s vision of heavenly angels. They have only one leg, have six wings and no head and are constantly rushing forward and falling back. A good deal of kabala goes into that imagery and that of the Divine Chariot.

The Hindus, I think, saw an actual angel, and worshipped it, mistaking it for G-d, just as Samson’s parents at first thought they should offer a burnt sacrifice to the man who came to them to tell them of the coming of their super-powered son. When he told them to offer it up to G-d, and then ascended to heaven in the flame of their sacrifice, there was a major freak out.

Hindus and Jews were exposed to similar phenomena. Jews concluded that it was all emanations of the One G-d. Hindus concluded that everybody is a god to a greater or lesser degree, and a part of the unfathomable hierarchy of the Divine Cosmos. But a sense of cosmic justice is shared between both beliefs. You can call it Karma, or you can call it the decision of the One True Judge, but the two concepts are not that far removed from each other, and not mutually exclusive.