Not in God's Name: Confronting Religious Violence

by Jonathan Sacks

It has to do with narrative and identity: the stories we tell ourselves to explain who we are.

There was an intense argument within the Church itself as to what the new faith required, and even if it was a new faith at all. The Gospels had not yet been written. There was as yet no ‘New Testament’. Doctrine had not yet been formulated. The Jewish world was in ferment, chafing under sometimes harsh and arbitrary Roman rule. Jewry was itself divided into Sadducees, Pharisees and Essenes. We know from rabbinic sources that there was intense internecine rivalry.

Maximinus, Tertullian, John Chrysostom and Aphrahat made the final, devastating move: that the Jews are Cain who, having murdered their brother, are now condemned to permanent exile. As the fourth-century writer Prudentius put it: ‘From place to place the homeless Jew wanders in ever-shifting exile…This noble race [is]…scattered and enslaved…It is in captivity under the younger faith.’15 It was an analogy much taken up by Augustine, and it served eventually to justify the expulsions of Jews from one country after another in the Middle Ages, beginning in England in 1290 and culminating in Spain in 1492.

The Abrahamic succession passed through Ishmael, not Isaac. The Hebrew Bible says otherwise only because Jews had falsified it. Christians had misrepresented Jesus. He was merely a prophet like others, not the Son of God. Jews and Christians should therefore, in principle, convert, but if they did not do so, they were to be spared as ‘people of the Book’, and allowed to live as dhimmi, citizens with less than full civil rights under Islamic rule and protection.

It is now clear why Judaism, Christianity and Islam have been locked in a violent, sometimes fatal embrace for so long. Their relationship is sibling rivalry, fraught with mimetic desire: the desire for the same thing, Abraham’s promise.

Pauline Christianity, however, claims that it is heir to the Abrahamic covenant. Islam is built on the incorporation of Judaism and Christianity into its own scheme of salvation. Despite their structural differences and internal complexities, all three Abrahamic faiths seek to build their home on the same territory of the mind – one reason why they have so often competed for the same territory on earth: the Holy Land and the sacred city of Jerusalem. They are competing brothers. Each must therefore see the other as a profound existential threat.

At the heart of all three faiths is the idea that within humanity there is one privileged position – favoured son, chosen people, guardian of the truth, gatekeeper of salvation – for which more than one candidate competes. The result is conflict of the most existential kind, for what is at stake is the most precious gift of all: God’s paternal love. One group’s victory means another’s defeat, and since this is a humiliation, a dethronement, it leads to revenge. So the strife is perpetuated.

Such has been the history of the relationship between Judaism, Christianity and Islam. The younger believes it has prevailed over the elder.

Each regards itself as the heir to the covenant with Abraham.

We can now sum up the argument. Violence exists because we are social animals. We live and find our identity in groups. And groups conflict. They fight over the same resources: food, territory, other scarce goods.

The idea that we can abolish identity altogether by privileging the individual over the group is the West’s current fantasy and it has led to the return of religion in its most belligerent form.

Group identity need not lead to violence, but there is a mutant form, pathological dualism, that divides the world into two – our side, the children of light, and the other side, the children of darkness. If there is evil in the world, it is because of Them, not Us.

Theologians have usually assumed that this tension arose with the birth of Christianity. After all, until then, there was only one Abrahamic monotheism, Judaism, and its battle was not with siblings, faiths that were part of the family, but with idolatry. Only with the birth first of Christianity, then of Islam, was the tension born out of the competition for ‘most favoured faith in the eyes of Abraham’s God’.

But what if they do not mean what people have thought them to mean?

What if the Hebrew Bible understood, as did Freud and Girard, as did Greek and Roman myth, that sibling rivalry is the most primal form of violence? And what if, rather than endorsing it, it set out to undermine it, subvert it, challenge it, and eventually replace it with another, quite different way of understanding our relationship with God and with the human Other? What if Genesis is a more profound, multi-levelled, transformative text than we have taken it to be? What if it turned out to be God’s way of saying to us what he said to Cain: that violence in a sacred cause is not holy but an act of desecration? What if God were saying: Not in My Name?

But the twenty-first century is summoning us to a new reading by asking us to take seriously not only our own perspective but also that of the others.

Identity is based on narrative, the stories we tell about who we are, where we came from, and what is our relationship to others.

Nahmanides’ comment is thus pointedly self-critical. Do not believe, he is telling his Jewish readers, that we are entirely without blame.

There is a pathos here that is rare in biblical prose.

We identify with Hagar and Ishmael; we are awed by Abraham and Isaac. The latter is a religious drama, the former a human one, and its very humanity gives it power.

The choice of Isaac instead of Ishmael has many dimensions, but they all share one feature: they are a refusal to let nature have the final word.

Nor is destiny conferred by fatherhood as it was in the ancient world, but by motherhood: Ishmael is Abraham’s child but not Sarah’s. It is the latter point – anticipating later Jewish law that Jewish identity is matrilineal, not patrilineal – that is crucial.

If, in myth, character is proved in heroic action, Isaac is the non-hero, the figure of quiet obedience who exemplifies Milton’s line, ‘They also serve who only stand and wait.’

God chooses those who cannot do naturally what others take for granted.

What for others is natural, for Israel is the result of divine intervention. Israel must be weak if it is to be strong, for its strength must come from heaven so that it can never say, ‘My power and the strength of my hands have achieved this wealth for me’ (Deut. 8:17). It is Ishmael’s natural strength that disqualifies him. Yet Ishmael is not vilified.

In situations of stress, sympathy for the other side can come to seem like a kind of betrayal.

Nor is this the end of the story. After the close of the biblical canon, reflection on Israel’s destiny passed from the prophets to the sages, and from revelation to interpretation – the genre known as Midrash through which the sages filled in the many gaps in biblical narrative.

What is happening here? Why, after the protracted drama of Abraham’s wait for a child, do we suddenly read that, in old age, Abraham has six more sons by a new wife? Who is Keturah, of whom we have heard nothing until now and of whom we will hear nothing again?

is not ‘history’ in the conventional sense. It is covenantal history, the working out of truth through time.

What gives the Midrash its unique significance is the names it ascribes to Ishmael’s wives. Both are references to the Qur’an and Islam. Ishmael’s first wife, Ayesha, bears the name of the prophet Mohammed’s child-bride. Fatimah is the name of the prophet’s daughter.

The force of the Midrash is greater still in light of one striking fact: that in the Bible, Abraham does not bless Isaac. God does, after Abraham’s death, but he himself does not.

Less important to the story of Ishmael but central to the theme of this book is the test by which Abraham judges the worthiness of Ishmael’s wives, namely, did they show kindness to strangers? – the criterion by which, in the Bible, Abraham’s servant chooses a wife for Isaac. At the core of the Bible’s value system is that cultures, like individuals, are judged by their willingness to extend care beyond the boundary of family, tribe, ethnicity and nation.

Beneath the surface, however, the sages heard a counter-narrative telling the opposite story: the birth of Isaac does not displace Ishmael. To be sure, he will have a different destiny. But he too is a beloved son of Abraham, blessed by his father and by God. He becomes a great nation. God is ‘with him’ as he grows up. God stays with him to ensure that his children flourish and become ‘twelve rulers’.

systemic feature of the biblical text. In each narrative of apparent choice-and-rejection, there is a counter-narrative that subverts the surface story and presents a more nuanced, generous picture of divine (and, by implication, human) sympathy.

The proof is that early rabbinic Midrash heard the nuances and drew attention to them, despite the fact that they preclude any clear, black-and-white, good-versus-bad reading of the text.

The counter-narrative is more radical still, because it hints at the most radical of monotheism’s truths: that God may choose, but God does not reject. The logic of scarcity – of alpha males and chosen sons – has no place in a world made by a God whose ‘tender mercies are on all his works’ (Ps. 145:9).

Potiphar’s wife accuses him of attempted rape. He is thrown into prison, where once again he shows talent as an administrator.

There can be no more life-changing trial than finding yourself on the other side.

One concept is implicit throughout the Bible, essential to the message of the prophets and made explicit in the book of Jonah. Yet it was only in the rabbinic period, following the destruction of the Second Temple, that it became the subject of systematic reflection. It is the idea of teshuvah, usually translated as ‘repentance’.10 Literally it means ‘return’ – in Christianity metanoia, in Islam tabwa, in secular terms moral change and growth.

This is how Maimonides defines it: What is repentance? It consists in this, that the sinner abandon his sin, remove it from his thoughts, and resolve in his heart never to repeat it, as it is said, ‘Let the wicked forsake his way, and the man of iniquity his thoughts’ (Isaiah 55:7)…it is also necessary that he make oral confession and utter the resolutions he made in his heart.13

Maimonides again: What is perfect repentance? It occurs when an opportunity presents itself for repeating an offence once committed, and the offender, while able to commit the offence, never the less refrains from doing so, because he is penitent and not out of fear or failure of strength.14

And if we can change ourselves, together we can change the world.

The Hebrew Bible is the West’s key text of human freedom – and more than it tells the story of man’s faith in God, it tells the story of God’s faith in humankind.

That is why the covenantal family, the children of Israel, begin their collective life as a nation in Egypt, as slaves, so that they will know from the inside what it feels like to be on the other side.

The way we learn not to commit evil is to experience an event from the perspective of the victim.

The Hebrew name for the Bible, Mikra, means a summons, a proclamation.

If a man has two wives, one loved, the other unloved [senuah], and both bear him sons but the firstborn is the son of the unloved one, when he wills his property to his sons, he must not give the rights of the firstborn to the son of the loved one in preference to his actual firstborn, the son of the unloved one.

The reference to ‘double share’ recalls Jacob’s words to Joseph, firstborn of his beloved Rachel, ‘To you I gave one portion more than to your brothers’ (48:22). He does this by giving Joseph’s two sons, Manasseh and Ephraim, the status of tribes in their own right (48:5).

Jacob’s behaviour is not to become normative for his descendants. What he did then, is now forbidden.8 There are to be no more dramas of chosen and rejected sons, preferential treatment, favouritism, and the psycho-dynamics of sibling rivalry.

Deuteronomy brings belated closure to the narratives of Genesis. No more will the younger usurp the older.