Not in God's Name: Confronting Religious Violence

by Jonathan Sacks

as a society becomes affluent it becomes more individualistic. It loses what he called its asabiyah, its social cohesion.

Bertrand Russell came to the identical conclusion from a diametrically opposed starting point. Creative civilisations like ancient Greece and Renaissance Italy, he said, found that ‘the liberation from fetters made individuals energetic and creative, producing a rare florescence of genius’, but ‘the decay of morals’ made them ‘collectively impotent’, and they fell to ‘nations less civilised than themselves but not so destitute of social cohesion’.3

They pride themselves on their willingness to die and they are utterly disinclined to compromise.

we still have not understood what antisemitism is and the role it plays in the legitimation of evil. It is the first warning sign of a culture in a state of cognitive collapse. It gives rise to that complex of psychological regressions that lead to evil on a monumental scale: splitting, projection, pathological dualism, dehumanisation, demonisation, a sense of victimhood, and the use of a scapegoat to evade moral responsibility.

The real targets of the Islamists are secular Islamic regimes and the West, especially those who defeated the Ottoman Empire in 1922 and divided up its spoils.

But when they criticise Israel, they find they no longer stand alone. This brings within the fold such strange fellow travellers as the far right, the antiglobalisation left, and some notoriously politicised human rights organisations, surely the oddest coalition ever assembled in support of people practising terror to bring about theocracy.

In the Middle Ages Jews were hated for their religion, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries for their race, and today for their nation state, Israel.

A scapegoat must be someone you can kill without risk of reprisal. Israel can respond. Jews outside Israel

cannot.

one compelling reason why Israel exists. It is the only thing protecting Jews from being the scapegoat-victims of the...

The significance of antisemitism, though, is its effect not on Jews but on antisemites. It allows them to see themselves as victims. It enables them to abdicate moral responsibility.

Hate harms the hated but it destroys the hater. There is no exception.

Pope, Francis I. On 12 September 2013, in an open letter to the editor of an Italian newspaper, La Repubblica, he wrote, ‘God’s fidelity to the close covenant with Israel never failed, and…through the terrible trials of these centuries, the Jews have kept their faith in God. And for this we shall never be sufficiently grateful to them as Church but also as humanity.’ This may be the first time that a pope has publicly recognised that in staying true to their faith, Jews were being loyal to God, not faithless to him.

We must train a generation of religious leaders and educators who embrace the world in its diversity, and sacred texts in their maximal generosity.

As John Locke said, ‘It is unreasonable that any should have a free liberty of their religion who do not acknowledge it as a principle of theirs that nobody ought to persecute or molest another because he dissents from him in religion.’

Wars are won by weapons, but it takes ideas to win a peace.

To be a child of Abraham is to learn to respect the other children of Abraham even if their way is not ours, their covenant not ours, their understanding of God different from ours.

The only adequate alternative, proposed by Genesis precisely as God’s protest against violence, is to say that he has made two covenants with us, one in our common humanity, the other in our specific identity. The first is about the universality of justice, the second about the particularity of love, and in that order. Our common humanity precedes our religious differences. That must be the basis of any Abrahamic theology capable of defeating the false god of violence and the idolatry of the pursuit of power.

But Judaism, Christianity and Islam all contain interpretive traditions that in the past have read them in the larger context of co-existence, respect for difference and the pursuit of peace, and can do so today.

The crimes of religion have one thing in common. They involve making God in our image instead of letting him remake us in his.

Abraham’s God is the power that rescues the powerless, the God of glory who turns the radiance of his face to those without worldly glory: the poor, the destitute, the lonely, the marginal, the outsiders of the world. God hears the cry of the unheard, and so, if we follow him, do we.

Shakespeare, in The Merchant of Venice, sees Shylock – and by implication Jews in general – as fated to undergo an ironic role reversal. Now it is the children of Isaac and Jacob who have become outcasts in a world of ‘Hagar’s offspring’ (Act 2, sc. 5, l. 44).

‘He is Ishmael, the outcast, condemned to wander’ (pp.

In a perceptive comment, Moshe Lichtenstein suggests that Midrash operates not on a correspondence theory of truth (does it match the facts?) but on a coherence theory (does it provide an internally consistent narrative?).

‘Face’ is, of course, a fundamental element of Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophy of ‘the Other’. See, among his many writings, Alterity and Transcendence,