Not in God's Name: Confronting Religious Violence

by Jonathan Sacks

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.

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. The world has changed. Relationships have gone global. Our destinies are interlinked. Christianity and Islam no longer rule over empires. The existence of the State of Israel means Jews are no longer homeless as they were in the age of the myth of the Wandering Jew. For the first time in history we can relate to one another as dignified equals. Now therefore is a time to listen, in the attentive silence of the troubled soul, to hear in the word of God for all time, the word of God for our time.

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.

Jacob’s blessing had nothing to do with wealth or power. It had to do with the children he would teach to be heirs of the covenant, and the land where his descendants would seek to create a society based on the covenant of law and love. To receive that blessing Jacob did not have to dress in Esau’s clothes. Instead he had to be himself, not a man of nature but one whose ears were attuned to a voice beyond nature, the call of God to live for something other than wealth or power, namely, for the human spirit as the breath of God and human dignity as the image of God.

In effect, the stranger said to him, ‘In the past you struggled to be Esau. In the future you will struggle not to be Esau but to be yourself. In the past you held on to Esau’s heel. In the future you will hold on to God. You will not let go of him; he will not let go of you. Now let go of Esau so that you can be free to hold on to God.’

The truth at which Jacob finally arrived, to which the name Israel is testimony, is that to be complete we need no one else’s blessings, only our own.

Peace comes when we see our reflection in the face of God and let go of the desire to be someone else.

An ambiguous supernatural message is not a prophecy but an oracle.

The prophet warns; he does not predict. Tomorrow is made by our choices today. Time, for the prophets, is not the inexorable unfolding of destiny but the arena of human freedom in response to the call of God.

He now knows who he is, not the man holding on to his brother’s heel, but the man unafraid to wrestle with God and with man because he has successfully wrestled with himself.

Sibling rivalry is defeated the moment we discover that we are loved by God for what we are, not for what someone else is. We each have our own blessing. Brothers need not conflict. Sibling rivalry is not fate but tragic error.

Not accidentally are our sympathies drawn to him, as if to say: not all are chosen for the rigours, spiritual and existential, of the Abrahamic covenant, but each has his or her place in the scheme of things, each has his or her virtues, talents, gifts. Each is precious in the eyes of God.

Am I loved more than my brothers or sisters? Less? Once asked, the question must lead to sibling rivalry, but it is the wrong question and should not be asked. Love is not quantifiable: not a matter of more or less. Jacob is Jacob, heir to the covenant. Esau is Esau, with his own heritage and blessing.

Genesis was about the birth of the covenantal family. Exodus is about the birth of the covenantal nation. The unstated but implicit message of Genesis is this: not until families can live in peace can a nation be born.

The message of Genesis is that love is necessary but not sufficient. You also need sensitivity to those who feel unloved.

It is this honest confrontation with complexity that makes Genesis so profound a religious text. It refuses to simplify the human condition.

Repentance is an attitude to the past and a resolve for the future. What, though, shows that the remorse is genuine? The answer lies in the concept of ‘perfect repentance’ (teshuvah gemurah), which is not purity of heart but a simple, demonstrable change of deed.

Perfect repentance comes about when you find yourself in the same situation but this time you act differently. That is proof in action of a change in heart.

Forgiveness is easy, repentance – true change of character – is difficult. Yet it is repentance, moral growth, on which the biblical vision depends.

The Joseph story brings Genesis to closure by showing that sibling rivalry is not written indelibly into the human script. We can change, repent and grow.

In a real sense, then, freedom extends to more than our ability to choose between alternative futures. It includes the freedom to reshape our understanding of the past, healing some of its legacy of pain. The point could not be more significant in the context of the sibling rivalry between Judaism, Christianity and Islam. The past does not dictate the future. To the contrary, a future of reconciliation can, in some measure at least, retroactively redeem the past.

Eventually Joseph forced them to recognise that just as a brother can be a stranger (when kept ‘at a distance’), so a stranger can turn out to be a brother.

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.

Each will become a tribe, and only as a confederation of tribes can Israel exist. Only as a confederation of nations can the world exist.

God, in Genesis 1, creates a world of natural order, then, 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. This is a high ideal, but not an impossible one.

The principle of one God, one truth, one way does not make for peace in a world in which other people have other ways. Perhaps one day we will all see the world, ourselves and God the same way. That is the prophetic vision. But not now, not yet.

The neo-Assyrians asserted their supremacy by insisting that their language was the only one to be used by the nations and populations they had defeated. Babel is a critique of imperialism.

The story the Bible is telling is this: Genesis 10 describes the division of humanity into seventy nations and seventy languages. Genesis 11 tells of how one imperial power conquered smaller nations, imposing its language and culture on them, thus directly contravening God’s wish that humans should respect the integrity of each nation and each individual. 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.

The Hebrew Bible is a unique attempt to find a way out of the dilemma by showing how the unity of God can co-exist with the diversity of humankind.

Elokim is a purely universal term that applies to people’s relationship with God, whether they are inside or outside the covenant with Abraham.

Hashem, by contrast, is particular. It is what God is called in the context of the Abrahamic and later Mosaic covenant. It is a proper name, not a generic noun.

The result is that in the Bible 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.

To use the language of contemporary philosophy, morality is thin (abstract, general) while ethics is thick (full of local texture and specificity).

The morality that applies to everyone, according to the Hebrew Bible, is justice, fairness and th...

Justice, fairness and the avoidance of harm are what we owe everyone, Jew and Gentile, believer and atheist, friend and stranger, fellow countryman and foreigner.

It follows that Elokim, God as universal, is God-as-justice. Hashem, God as particular, is God-as-love.

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

That is why the Bible sets out two covenants, not one: one that honours our common humanity, the other that sanctifies diversity and the particularity of love. And the universal comes first. You cannot love God without first honouring the universal dignity of humanity as the image and likeness of the universal God.

As God resists categorisation, so does humankind.

One who is not in my image is nonetheless in God’s image – that is the basis of God’s covenant with Noah, a universal requirement of all cultures if they are to honour God who gave us life.

Those who murder God’s image in God’s name commit a double sacrilege.

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. That seems to me a truth for the twenty-first century.

The ethical imperative to emerge from such a faith is: search for the trace of God in the face of the Other. Never believe that God is defined by and confined to the people like you. God is larger than any nation, language, culture or creed. He lives within our group, but he also lives beyond.

Only a faith that recognises both types of covenant – the universal and the particular – is capable of understanding that God’s image may be present in the one whose faith is not mine and whose relationship with God is different from mine.

What if the God of the crusaders, the terrorists, the inquisitors, the witch-burners and the jihadists were also the God of their victims? What if one could not, with absolute certainty, rule out that possibility?

Humanity lives in that ‘what if’ and cannot survive without it. For we are finite, but God is infinite. We are limited, but God is unlimited. However perfect our faith, there is something of God that lies beyond, which is known to God but cannot be known to the frail, fallible humanity that is all we are and ever will be, this side of heaven.

Fundamentalism reads texts as if God were as simple as we are. That is unlikely to be true.

That is why fundamentalism is so dangerous and so untraditional. It refers to many things in different contexts, but one of them is the tendency to read texts literally and apply them directly: to go straight from revelation to application without interpretation. In many religions, including Judaism, this is heretical.

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. There are things that may be justified in an age of prophecy that are wholly unjustifiable at other times.