Not in God's Name: Confronting Religious Violence

by Jonathan Sacks

A chosen people is the opposite of a master race, first, because it is not a race but a covenant; second, because it exists to serve God, not to master others.5 A master race worships itself; a chosen people worships something beyond itself. A master race values power; a chosen people cares for the powerless. A master race believes it has rights; a chosen people knows only that it has responsibilities. The key virtues of a master race are pride, honour and fame. The key virtue of a chosen people is humility. A master race produces monumental buildings, triumphal inscriptions and a literature of self-congratulation. Israel, to a degree unique in history, produced a literature of almost uninterrupted self-criticism.

our common humanity precedes our religious differences.

Any religion that dehumanises others merely because their faith is different has misunderstood the God of Abraham.

The fate of Jewry through the ages has been the clearest indicator of whether a culture, faith or empire has been willing to accord dignity or rights to the one-who-is-not-like-them.

For this reason man was created alone, to teach that whoever destroys a single life is as if he destroyed a complete universe…

Terror, the killing of the innocent and the sacrifice of human life in pursuit of political ends are not mere crimes. They are sacrilege. Those who murder God’s image in God’s name commit a double sacrilege.

Here is the father of monotheism, yet in the biblical text itself Abraham breaks no idol, challenges no polytheist, seeks no disciples,7 and establishes no new religious movement.

He holds them to the standards of morality, not those of ethics or holiness.

Abraham impresses his contemporaries by the way he lives, not the way he forces, or even urges, others to live. He seeks to be true to his faith while being a blessing to others regardless of their faith.

There was clearly a profound love between Abraham and God, and it is this that eventually inspired not only Jews but Christians and Muslims also, in their different ways, to see themselves as his heirs. But all who embrace Abraham must aspire to live like Abraham. Nothing could be more alien to the spirit of Abrahamic monotheism than what is happening today in the name of jihad.

To be a child of Abraham is to be open to the divine presence wherever it reveals itself.

search for the trace of God in the face of the Other.

That is what the dual structure of Hebrew spirituality does. It accepts the inevitability of identity in the here-and-now.

That is what makes Abrahamic monotheism different from tribalism on the one hand (each nation with its own God) and universalism on the other (one God, therefore one way). Neither tribalism nor universalism is adequate to the human situation. Tribalism envisages a world permanently at war (my god is stronger than yours). Universalism risks a dualistic world divided between the saved and the damned (I have the truth, you have only error11), and hence to holy wars, crusades and jihads.

Fundamentalism reads texts as if God were as simple as we are.

the Talmud records the view that the law was never put into effect and exists only for didactic purposes and not to be implemented in practice.

Rabbinic Judaism declared Biblicism – accepting the authority of the written word while rejecting oral tradition, the position of the Sadducees and Karaites – as heresy.

‘The letter kills, but the spirit gives life’ (NIV, 2 Cor. 3:6).

That is why, for much of the biblical era, ancient Israel had its prophets who delivered, not the word of the Lord for all time – that had been done by Moses – but the word of the Lord for this time.

As a general rule, though, the application of every ancient text to another age involves an act of interpretation,

Religions develop rules of interpretation and structures of authority. Without these, as we see today, any group can do almost anything in the name of religion, selecting texts, taking them out of context, reading them literally and ignoring the rest.

As Shakespeare said, ‘The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.’4

Suddenly the radicals command the heights and address the masses, while the religious establishment is left flat-footed and outpaced and looking old.

the sheer dissonance between the world of tradition and the secular domain. It begins to seem impossible to hold religion and society together. There comes a tipping point at which faith can no longer be seen as supporting the social or cultural order and becomes instead radically antagonistic towards it.

By the eighth century BCE the prophets of Israel had become the first people in history to envisage a world at peace.

War may sometimes be necessary, but it has no place in the domain of the holy. One who has ‘shed much blood’ may not build a house of God.

removed the boundaries of nations, I plundered their treasures; like a mighty one I subdued their kings (Isaiah 10:13), and whatever is detached [from a group] is assumed to belong to the majority of the group…

No war, either permitted or obligatory [such as a war of self-defence] may be initiated without first offering terms of peace…

War, for Maimonides, is never mandated except when the effort to make peace has been tried, and failed.

R. Levi Yitzhak of Berditchev, for example, speaks of Amalek as the evil inclination within each of us, whom we must defeat.

As in R. Kahana’s reading of ‘sword’ as ‘words’, so here: the ‘wars of the Lord’ have become not physical battles but the cut and thrust of Talmudic debate. Study and what the sages called ‘argument for the sake of heaven’ have become a surrogate for war. No longer is violence an acceptable form of conflict resolution. In its place have come reasoned argument and the search for peace.

The Talmud records a striking passage in which the angels are portrayed as wishing to sing a song of triumph at the division of the Red Sea. God silences them with the words, ‘My creatures are drowning – and you wish to sing a song?’14 Even Israel’s enemies have become ‘my creatures’ (this, after all, is the point made at the end of the book of Jonah).

These reinterpretations, long before modernity, show that by the second or third century rabbinic Judaism had internalised the full destructive force of religiously motivated violence, even when undertaken to preserve religious freedom against a capricious and sometimes overbearing Roman imperial power.

In the sixth century BCE, Jeremiah argued tirelessly for some form of accommodation with the Babylonians. An attempt to wage war against them would result, he said, in national catastrophe. He was right, but unheeded and unpopular, and the result was the loss of the First Temple and the Babylonian exile.

More than six centuries separate the prophet and the rabbi, but what they held in common was spiritual maximalism and military minimalism. They were not pacifists but they were realists. They knew that the real battles are the ones that take place in the mind and the soul.

arguing that their consistent theme is not sibling rivalry – competition for God’s love – but rather, understanding that we each have a place in God’s universe of justice and love.

R. Samuel Edels said that the revelation at Sinai took place in the presence of 600,000 Israelites because the Torah can be interpreted in 600,000 different ways.16 Each person carries part of the potential

Living traditions constantly reinterpret their canonical texts. That is what makes fundamentalism – text without interpretation – an act of violence against tradition. In fact, fundamentalists and today’s atheists share the same approach to texts. They read them directly and literally, ignoring the single most important fact about a sacred text, namely that its meaning is not self-evident. It has a history and an authority of its own. Every religion must guard against a literal reading of its hard texts if it is not to show that it has learned nothing from history.

They understood the deep spiritual truth that the idea of power is primitive: what makes us human is the power of ideas.

The word, given in love, invites its interpretation in love.

Out of the disaster of the rebellions against Rome came the rich heritage of early rabbinic Judaism – Midrash, Mishnah and Talmud

The result was that although religion took no part in government, it was ‘the first of their political institutions’, providing the moral base of civic society, what he called its ‘habits of the heart’. It created communities, strengthened families and motivated philanthropic endeavours. It lifted people beyond what he saw as the great danger of democracy – individualism, the retreat of people from public life into private satisfaction. Religion strengthened the ‘art of association’, the underlying strength of American society.

God told Samuel that in their desire for a king, the people were rejecting God himself.

In Judaism the state exists to serve the individual; the individual does not exist to serve the state. This is anything but a cliché: it is a rejection at the most fundamental level of Hellenistic ethics. The state is a necessary evil. As

Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence; the palaces of kings are built on the ruins of the bowers of paradise.’17

‘How small, of all that human hearts endure / That part which laws or kings can cause or cure.’18

At its spiritual core, there is an empty shrine. That shrine is left empty in the knowledge that no one word, image, or symbol is worthy of what all seek there. Its emptiness, therefore, represents the transcendence which is approached by free consciences from a virtually infinite number of directions.

Religion seeks truth, politics deals in power. Religion aims at unity, liberal democracy is about the mediation of conflict and respect for diversity.

Religion inhabits the pure mountain air of eternity, politics the bustle of the here-and-now.

Coerced agreement is not consent, said the Jewish sages.21 Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s, said Jesus (Matt. 22:21). There is no compulsion in religion, says the Qur’an (2:256).