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May 11 - May 31, 2018
the religion of Abraham is supremely based on love – three loves. ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your might’ (Deut. 6:5). ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself’ (Lev. 19:18). And ‘You shall love the stranger, for you were once strangers in a strange land’ (see Lev. 19:34).
But Jacob loves. He is more emotional than the other patriarchs. That is the problem. Love unites but it also divides. It leaves the unloved, even the less loved, feeling rejected, abandoned, forsaken, alone.
If we look at the eleven times the word ‘love’, ahavah, is mentioned in the book of Genesis, we make an extraordinary discovery. Every time love is mentioned, it generates conflict.
Rashi, following Midrash, itself inspired by the obvious comparison between the binding of Isaac and the book of Job, says that Satan, the accusing angel, said to God when Abraham made a feast to celebrate the weaning of his son, ‘You see, he loves his child more than you.’9 That, according to the Midrash, was the reason for the trial: to show that Satan’s accusation was untrue.
In the world of myth the gods were at worst hostile, at best indifferent to humankind. In contemporary atheism the universe and life exist for no reason whatsoever. We are accidents of matter, the result of blind chance and natural selection. The Hebrew Bible by contrast tells us that we are here because God created us in love. God’s love is implicit in our very being.
But love is not enough. You cannot build a family, let alone a society, on love alone. For that you need justice also. Love is partial, justice is impartial. Love is particular, justice is universal. Love is for this person not that, but justice is for all. Much of the moral life is generated by this tension between love and justice. Justice without love is harsh. Love without justice is unfair, or so it will seem to the less loved.
‘And God saw that Leah was hated.’ ‘And God saw’: recognising her humiliation, he gave her children instead – one of whom, Levi, would eventually beget Israel’s three great leaders, Moses, Aaron and Miriam, as well as its future priests; ...
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The love which involves choice, favouring one over the other, is experienced as rejection by the unloved:
The less loved feel hated, and therefore hate.
By the time the book of Exodus begins, the children of Israel are collectively called ‘God’s firstborn’ (Exod. 4:22).
God forgives, pre-emptively. Divine justice has given way to divine mercy. In making his covenant with Noah, God rejects rejection.
Dividing the world into saints and sinners, the saved and the damned, the children of God and the children of the devil, is the first step down the road to violence in the name of God.
‘You may have intended to harm me, but God intended it for good so that it would come about as it is today, saving many people’s lives. So then, don’t be afraid. I will provide for you and your children’
This is a highly structured literary sequence whose unmistakable message is that sibling rivalry may be natural, but it is not inevitable. It can be conquered: by generosity of spirit, active efforts of reconciliation, and the realisation – dramatised in Jacob’s struggle with the angel at night – that mimetic desire is misconceived. There is no need to want someone else’s blessing. We each have our own.
‘How good and pleasant it is for brothers to dwell together,’ says the psalmist (Ps. 133:1), to which we might add, in the light of Genesis, ‘and how rare’. Yet it is possible, and until it has been shown to be possible, the human story cannot continue. Genesis, the story of human relationships, is the necessary prelude to Exodus, the story of nations and political systems. Each child of Jacob – like each of the seventy nations and languages of Genesis 10 – has his own character and contribution. Each will become a tribe, and only as a confederation of tribes can Israel exist. Only as a
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Unlike philosophical systems, which we either understand or don’t, biblical narrative functions at many different levels of comprehension. Our understanding of it deepens as we grow. Biblical consciousness is chronological, not logical.
beginning in Genesis 2, invites us to create a world of social order, one in which every being has its integrity in the scheme of things. None is meant to supplant or displace others.
stories about love: real love, neither romanticised nor idealised. It is not only hate that creates conflict. So too does love.
Joseph forces his brothers to experience what they inflicted on him, for only one who knows what it feels like to be a victim can experience the change of heart (teshuvah, metanoia, tabwa) that prevents him from being a victimiser.
God does not prove his love for some by hating others. Neither, if we follow him, may we.
Morality, in Jonathan Haidt’s phrase, binds and blinds.1 It binds us to others in a bond of reciprocal altruism. But it also blinds us to the humanity of those who stand outside that bond.
To be cured of potential violence towards the Other, I must be able to imagine myself as the Other. The Hutu in Rwanda has to experience what it is like to be a Tutsi. The Serb has to imagine himself a Croat or a Muslim. The antisemite has to discover he is a Jew.
We are genetically disposed to defensive-aggressive conduct when faced with someone not like us, outside the group, not bound by its code of mutual identity and reciprocity. The stranger is always potentially a threat.
is human, because we can empathise, because as a matter of principle we treat people as ends not means. All these things are true and sound and noble. But you will not feel them if you decide that the Other is less than human, significantly different, an evil force, a threat. That is why rational human beings who love their people can nonetheless commit crimes against humanity for the sake of their people.
‘Religion’ comes from the Latin ligare, meaning to join or bind. Religion binds people within the group – Christian to Christian, Muslim to Muslim, Jew to Jew.
To be sure, the great monotheisms believe in humanity as such, but often with one significant qualification: you must share our faith to be fully human. If not, we must at least subjugate you, treat you as dhimmi, regard you as pariahs.
A humanitarian as opposed to a group ethic requires the most difficult of all imaginative exercises: role reversal – putting yourself in the place of those you despise, or pity, or simply do not understand.
It is hard to identify with one whom you believe to be fundamentally in error, except with a view to converting him or her.
Note also how the Hebrew Bible speaks not primarily of knowledge, reason or emotion, but of memory. ‘Remember that you were slaves in Egypt.’ The imperative of memory echoes like a leitmotif throughout biblical prose: the verb zakhor, ‘remember’, appears no less than 169 times.3 Memory in this sense is role reversal: do not harm the stranger because you were once where he is now.
Biblical ethics is a prolonged tutorial in role reversal.
The land shall not be sold in perpetuity, for the land is mine; you are strangers and temporary residents with me. (Lev. 25:23) The fate of Abraham’s family, we now discover, will be not temporary but permanent – permanently temporary. They will know no certainty, have no fixed and unconditional home, even in the land of promise. Abraham had been told, in a dark vision of exile, that his offspring would be ‘a stranger in a land not theirs’. That, we thought, meant Egypt. It now turns out to mean Israel as well. This is the central, haunting irony of the Pentateuch.
the people of the covenant will be strangers at home, so that they are able to make strangers feel at home. Only thus can they defeat the most powerful of all drives to evil: the sense of being threatened by the Other, the one not like me.
Empathy, sympathy, knowledge and rationality are usually enough to let us live at peace with others. But not in hard times. Serbs, Croats and Muslims lived peaceably together in Bosnia for years. So did Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda. The problem arises at times of change and disruption when people are anxious and afraid. That is why exceptional defences are necessary, which is why the Bible speaks of memory and history – things that go to the very heart of our identity. We have to remember that we were once on the other side of the equation. We were once strangers: the oppressed, the victims.
Having lived and suffered as strangers, they became the people commanded to care for strangers.
Judaism seems caught midway between the particularities of the pagan world – each nation with its own gods – and the universalities of Christianity and Islam: one God, one truth, one way, one path to salvation, one gateway to heaven.
yet they did not borrow Judaism’s most singular feature: its distinction between the universality of God as Creator and Sovereign of the universe, and the particularity of the covenant, first with Abraham, then with Moses and the Israelites.
The first recorded act of worship, the offerings brought by Cain and Abel, led directly to the first murder. Thus the connection between religion and violence is struck at the start.
The principle of one God, one truth, one way does not make for peace in a world in which other people have other ways.
The second great attempt, as we saw, was the Enlightenment, the secular European substitute for Christianity, based on the universality not of God but of reason.
The third attempt – by the West today – has been to dethrone the group in favour of the individual. The result has been the atomisation of society, the collapse of the traditional family, the erosion of community and the loss of national identity, leading to the counter-reaction of religious extremism among those who still seek identity and community.
To the contrary, the unity of language at the beginning of chapter 11 was not natural but imposed. It is describing the practice of the world’s first empires.
Babel is a critique of imperialism.
If the Flood is about freedom without order, Babel and Egypt are about order without freedom.
When at the end of the Babel story God ‘confuses the language’ of the builders, he is not creating a new state of affairs but restoring the old.
When a single culture is imposed on all, suppressing the diversity of languages and traditions, this is an assault on our God-given differences. As the Qur’an (49:13) puts it, ‘O mankind! We created you from a single (pair) of a male and a female, and made you into nations and tribes, that ye may know each other (not that ye may despise each other).’
The unity of God asks us to respect the stranger, the outsider, the alien, because even though he or she is not in our image – their ethnicity, faith or culture is not ours – nonetheless they are in God’s image.
That is why Genesis describes two covenants, the first with Noah and all humankind, the second with Abraham and his children, who are not all humankind, just one particular people within it. The covenant with Noah (Gen. 9) uses the word Elokim throughout, while the covenant with Abraham uses the word Hashem (15:18; 17:1–2). The Noah covenant expresses the unity of God and the shared dignity and responsibility of humankind. The Abrahamic covenant expresses the particularity of our relationship with God, which has to do with our specific identity, history, language and literature.
there is both a morality that applies to everyone, insider and outsider alike, and an ethic, that is, a specific code of conduct that frames relationships within the group.
Jews feel responsible for one another as if they were a single extended family.
The Noah covenant is the Bible’s universal code, the basic infrastructure of a just social order. The Noahide laws, as understood by Judaism’s sages, set out the broad parameters of a decent society: respect for God, human life, the family, property, animal welfare and the rule of law.4 These principles are general, not specific: thin, not thick. They apply to everyone in virtue of the fact that they are in the image of God, therefore worthy of dignity and respect. They are universal rules of what today we would call responsibilities and rights.
