Not in God's Name: Confronting Religious Violence

by Jonathan Sacks

Apocalypse, by contrast, is the voice of despair. Normal history has failed to bring about the long-awaited redemption. Evil, far from being an instinct within us that we can conquer, is an independent force, the work of Satan. The universe is framed by the conflict between God and his enemies, and is moving towards a final confrontation that will shake the world to its foundations.

What strength is manifested when the opponent is not permitted to fight?…Hence, one should not silence those who speak against religion…for to do so is an admission of weakness.

who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter?’

Religion – as understood by Abraham and those who followed him – is at its best when it resists the temptation of politics and opts instead for influence. For what it tells us is that civilisations are judged not by power but by their concern for the powerless; not by wealth but by how they treat the poor; not when they seek to become invulnerable but when they care for the vulnerable.

I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain. James Arthur Baldwin

It became a principle in Judaism: it is not for you to complete the work but neither are you free to desist from it.

For each of us there is a Jordan we will not cross.

Abrahamic monotheism was the first moral system to be based not just on justice and reciprocity – do for others what you would like them to do for you – but on love.

Those who are held captive by anger against their former persecutors are captive still. Those who let their enemies define who they are have not yet achieved liberty.

They let their pain sensitise them to the pain of others.

First you have to build the future. Only then can you revisit the past without being held captive by the past.

Look back on a painful past, and you will not be able to move on. You will be immobilised by your tears. You will become a pillar of salt.

‘You shall remember that you were slaves in Egypt.’ Yet never is this invoked as a reason for hatred, retaliation or revenge. Always it appears as part of the logic of the just and compassionate society the Israelites are commanded to create: the alternative order, the antithesis of Egypt. Don’t enslave others, says Moses, or – because that was too much to ask at that stage of history – treat slaves honourably. Don’t subject them to hard labour. Give them rest and freedom every seventh day. Release them every seventh year.

The entire structure of biblical law is rooted in the experience of slavery in Egypt, as if to say: you know in your heart what it feels like to be the victim of persecution, therefore do not persecute others.

The Sermon on the Mount tells us to love our enemies. That is a supremely beautiful idea, but it is not easy. Moses offers a more liveable solution. Help your enemy. You don’t have to love him but you do have to assist him.

If someone is in trouble, act. Do not stop to ask whether they are friend or foe.

The Talmud rules that in a case of conflict, where your brother and your enemy both need your help ‘you should first help your enemy – in order to suppress the evil inclination’.

the belief that God will avenge wrongs spares human beings from having to do so.

We can never undo the past, nor can we fully remedy it. Killing your enemy does not bring your friend back to life. Yes, we must right past wrongs, apologise, atone, acknowledge people’s sense of suffering and grievance. But there is no perfect justice in history, only a rough approximation, and that must do. The rest we must leave to God.

What we believe about God affects what we believe about ourselves.8 Monotheism internalises conflict, whereas myth externalises it.

blame culture and a penitential culture. The first focuses on external cause, the second on internal response. Blame looks to the past, penitence to the future. Blame is passive, penitence active.

Never is someone else blamed for Israel’s troubles. This is what makes Judaism a religion of guilt, repentance and atonement, made

Its peculiar power is that penitence defies entropy, the law that all systems lose energy over time. Penitence conserves energy by turning all suffering into an impetus to do better in the future. It spares its adherents ‘the expense of spirit in a waste of shame’.

Atonement is the ultimate expression of freedom because it brings together the two mental acts – repentance and forgiveness – that have the power to break the iron grip of the past.

Atonement is where divine and human freedom meet and create a new beginning. It is the act that defeats tragedy in the name of hope.

You don’t have to be an evil person to think in such ways, but the result of such thinking is altruistic evil, and it begins when you see yourself, your nation or your people as the victim of someone else’s crime. They can then be killed without compunction. Murder becomes a moral act. You are defending your people, avenging their humiliation, ridding the world of a pestilence, and helping to establish the victory of God,

This is troubling. It is also self-defeating. Defining yourself as a victim is ultimately a diminution of what makes us human. It teaches us to see ourselves as objects, not subjects. We become done-to, not doers; passive, not active. Blame bars the path to responsibility.

Blame cultures perpetuate every condition against which they are a protest.

Dualism is a cultural phenomenon devised by tyrants to manipulate people into becoming means, not ends.

Hate and the blame culture go hand in hand, for they are both strategies of denial: ‘It wasn’t me, it was them, I acted in self-defence, I am the victim not the perpetrator.’

Victims do need our support. But they need our support to recover the power of agency.

Life is no more than a breath, and all the wealth and glory even the greatest accumulate means nothing because all that separates us from non-existence is a mere breath.

Abel represents human mortality – a mortality that comes less from sin than from the fact that we are embodied souls in a physical world subject to deterioration and decay. All that separates us from the grave is the breath God breathed into us:

That is all we are: hevel, mere breath. But it is God’s breath. Life is holy. That is common ground in Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

‘The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof’ (Ps. 24:1). It does not belong to nobody, it belongs to God.

principle on which the Hebrew Bible is based is that we own nothing.

We are mere trustees, guardians, on his behalf.

The Hebrew word Baal, the name of the chief Canaanite god, has the same range of meanings. The root means ‘to own, to possess, to exercise power over someone or something’. That for the Bible is the ultimate idolatry.

Cain represents the idea that what I own gives me power.

the fundamental conflict within the human condition: the struggle between the will to power and the will to life.

Murder in pursuit of power while invoking the name of God is sacrilege, whoever does it, whoever the victim, whatever the faith.

What drives ISIS and its kindred organisations is the restoration of the Caliphate and the return to its rule of all the lands it once controlled, from Israel to Spain.1 These are political objectives. They have nothing to do with the God of Abraham. God does not accept human sacrifice. God does not sanctify the will to power. That is the way of Cain, not that of God.

Today the secular West has largely lost the values that used to be called the Judeo-Christian heritage. Instead it has chosen to worship the idols of the self – the market, consumerism, individualism, autonomy, rights and ‘whatever works for you’ – while relinquishing

loyalty, reverence and respect

Losing its religious faith, the West is beginning to lose the ideals that once made it inspiring to the altruistic: reverence, loyalty, human dignity, the relief of poverty, public service, collective responsibility, national identity and respect for religious values while at the same time making space for liberty of conscience and the peaceable co-existence of more than one faith.

Faced with a culture of individualism and hedonism, it is not surprising that young radicals, eager to change the world, turn elsewhere to express their altruism, even if it involves acts that are brutal and barbaric.

Eric Hoffer in The True Believer.

The journalist has no reply. He or she probably believes that morality is subjective, the only basic human values are autonomy and the right to choose, the supreme virtue is tolerance even towards the intolerant, and imposing your views on others is intellectual imperialism.

In a world of relativism, what talks is power.

The West has often had no serious response to religiously motivated violence beyond ridicule and crude assaults on religion as such.