Not in God's Name: Confronting Religious Violence

by Jonathan Sacks

War, except in self-defence, no longer takes place on the battlefield; it becomes a struggle within the soul (Islam has a similar reinterpretation of the word jihad10).

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. They change the world because they change us. That is the wisdom the zealots do not understand: not then, not now.

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.

religion can survive without power.

Apocalypse is what happens to prophecy when it loses hope, and to politics when it loses patience.

Apocalyptic politics always fails, because you cannot create eternity in the midst of time, or unity without dissent. It is like Samson in the temple of the Philistines, bringing down the building on his enemies but destroying himself in the process.

When religion becomes an earthquake, a whirlwind, a fire, it can no longer hear the still, small voice of God summoning us to freedom.

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.

What Moses taught his people was this: you must live with the past, but not in the past. 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.2

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

Exodus and Deuteronomy, memory becomes a moral force: not a way of preserving hate, but, to the contrary, a way of conquering hate by recalling what it feels like to be its victim. ‘Remember’ – not to live in the past but to prevent a repetition of the past. —

The Hebrew Bible is an extended essay in self-criticism. Antisemitism is not criticism. It is the denial of Jews’ collective right to exist. It changes form over time. In the 1930s, antisemites chanted ‘Jews to Palestine’. Today they chant ‘Jews out of Palestine’. As Israeli novelist Amos Oz put it: They don’t want us to be here. They don’t want us to be there. They don’t want us to be.

Antisemitism is a sickness that destroys all who harbour it. Hate harms the hated but it destroys the hater. There is no exception.

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. We know that we are loved. That must be enough. To insist that being loved entails that others be unloved is to fail to understand love itself.6

Fundamentalism – text without context, and application without interpretation – is not faith but an aberration of faith.

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

They know that justice is on their side. That is why the prophets used not weapons but words. It is why Gandhi and Martin Luther King preferred non-violent civil disobedience, knowing that it spoke to the world’s conscience, not its fears. True need never needs terror to make its voice heard.

Now is the time for Jews, Christians and Muslims to say what they failed to say in the past: We are all children of Abraham. And whether we are Isaac or Ishmael, Jacob or Esau, Leah or Rachel, Joseph or his brothers, we are precious in the sight of God. We are blessed. And to be blessed, no one has to be cursed. God’s love does not work that way.

Today God is calling us, Jew, Christian and Muslim, to let go of hate and the preaching of hate, and live at last as brothers and sisters, true to our faith and a blessing to others regardless of their faith, honouring God’s name by honouring his image, humankind.