Not in God's Name

by Jonathan Sacks

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  We saw that morality begins with kin, those who are genetically related to me. It extends to the group on the basis of reciprocal altruism, Tit-for-Tat, and the trust we have in others on the basis of repeated interaction. Eventually it extends to the city and the nation, originally on the basis of religion. From an evolutionary point of view, religion made possible the single greatest distinction between us and other social animals. It solved the problem of trust on a macro-scale by moving beyond Tit-for-Tat to the extended community of faith. The highest expression of this, central to the Judeo-Christian ethic, is the command, ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself.’

  The Hebrew Bible, though, goes significantly further. It is not difficult to love your neighbour as yourself because in many respects your neighbour is like yourself. He or she belongs to the same nation, the same culture, the same economy, the same political dispensation, the same fate of peace or war. We are part of the same community of fate, and we participate in the same common good. What is difficult is loving the stranger.

  We are genetically disposed to defensive-aggressive conduct when faced with someone not like us, outside the group, not bound by its code of mutual identity and reciprocity. The stranger is always potentially a threat. What he or she threatens depends on time and place: sometimes our lives, at others our territory or livelihoods, perhaps, in the case of immigrants and asylum seekers, no more than our sense of the familiar, the faces, voices and smells we recognise and that make us feel at home.

  That is what makes classic theories of morality inadequate. They fail to distinguish between kin and non-kin, brother and other, neighbour and stranger. They account for altruistic behaviour within the group. They tell us: treat the alike, alike. What they do not fully confront is the problem of altruistic behaviour beyond the group. Why should I behave well to someone not like me? Because he or she is human, because we can empathise, because as a matter of principle we treat people as ends not means. All these things are true and sound and noble. But you will not feel them if you decide that the Other is less than human, significantly different, an evil force, a threat. That is why rational human beings who love their people can nonetheless commit crimes against humanity for the sake of their people. It is why people of God have sometimes conquered, converted and burned people at the stake, for the greater glory of God and the salvation of their victims’ souls.

  ‘Religion’ comes from the Latin ligare, meaning to join or bind. Religion binds people within the group – Christian to Christian, Muslim to Muslim, Jew to Jew. More specifically, since some of the most bitter conflicts take place within a faith, it bonds members of the same sect, church or denomination. It invests group solidarity with sanctity. What it does not do is provide people with a reason to be gracious to, or even tolerant of, those outside the group.

  To be sure, the great monotheisms believe in humanity as such, but often with one significant qualification: you must share our faith to be fully human. If not, we must at least subjugate you, treat you as dhimmi, regard you as pariahs. Now we see why. For a Jew, Christian or Muslim to make space for the Other, he or she would have to undergo the most profound and disorienting role reversal. A Christian would have to imagine what it would have been like to be a French or German Jew at the time of the Crusades. A Muslim would have to imagine what it would have been like to be a Jew in Baghdad in the eighth century, forced to bear a yellow badge of shame, walk the street with downcast eyes, and stand and be silent in the presence of a Muslim. A Jew would have to imagine what it would be like to be a Christian or Muslim facing the threat of death because of their faith in Syria or Iraq today.

  A humanitarian as opposed to a group ethic requires the most difficult of all imaginative exercises: role reversal – putting yourself in the place of those you despise, or pity, or simply do not understand. Not only do most religions not do this. They make it almost impossible to do so.2 For those who think in secular terms, there is more than one country, nation, language, culture or code of conduct. It is not impossible for an Englishman to imagine what it would be like to be French or Italian or African or Indian. But for those who are monotheistically religious, there is usually only one way to be holy, or true to God, or saved.

  Empathy with the other as the Other is ruled out ab initio. It is hard to identify with one whom you believe to be fundamentally in error, except with a view to converting him or her. Empathy across boundaries can sometimes threaten religion at its roots, because one of the sacred tasks of religion is boundary maintenance. Monotheism is not relativism. That is why, historically, the great monotheisms have not been in the vanguard of tolerance. Even John Locke, father of the doctrine of toleration, would not extend citizenship to Catholics or atheists.

  Only against this background can we appreciate the extreme radicalism of the Genesis narratives. They are telling us – not by way of abstract theory, but by using the full resources of narrative to engage our imaginative identification – that the one outside the covenant, Hagar, Ishmael, Esau, is also human, also loved, also blessed by God.

  All this is a prelude to the great historical drama about to be enacted when the entire covenantal family experiences exile and enslavement in Egypt. It will be there that every member of the nation will undergo an act of moral education that, if remembered through time, will transform their view of humanity and morality.

  Do not wrong or oppress the stranger, for you yourselves were once strangers in the land of Egypt. (Exod. 22:21)

  Do not oppress a stranger, for you know what it feels like to be a stranger, for you yourselves were once strangers in the land of Egypt. (Exod. 23:9)

  Note that these commands are given shortly after the Exodus. Implicit in them is that radical idea that care for the stranger is why the Israelites had to experience exile and slavery before they could enter the Promised Land and build their own society and state. You will not succeed in caring for the stranger, implies God, until you yourselves know in your very bones and sinews what it feels like to be a stranger. And lest you forget, I have already commanded you to remind yourselves and your children of the taste of affliction and bitterness every year on Pesach. Those who forget what it feels like to be a stranger eventually come to oppress strangers, and if the children of Abraham oppress strangers, why did I make them my covenantal partners?

  Note also how the Hebrew Bible speaks not primarily of knowledge, reason or emotion, but of memory. ‘Remember that you were slaves in Egypt.’ The imperative of memory echoes like a leitmotif throughout biblical prose: the verb zakhor, ‘remember’, appears no less than 169 times.3 Memory in this sense is role reversal: do not harm the stranger because you were once where he is now. See the world from his perspective because it is where your ancestors stood, and you have never ceased to recall and re-enact their story. Biblical ethics is a prolonged tutorial in role reversal.

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  There is a striking literary feature of the Hebrew Bible as a whole, namely its use of what Julia Kristeva called intertextuality, the way in which one text may be the ‘absorption and transformation of another’. Intertextuality – what Michael Fishbane calls ‘inner-biblical exegesis’4 – is part of the compositional structure of the Bible. ‘The words of the Torah are poor in one place, rich in another,’5 said the sages, meaning that the full significance of a word or phrase is only grasped within the totality of the whole. The meaning of a word here may lie in that word there, far separated in topic and time.

  The first time we encounter the phrase ‘stranger and temporary resident’ (ger ve-toshav) is in Genesis 23. Sarah has just died, and Abraham must bury her. It is an ironic situation. Many times he had been promised the land but now, when he needed only a burial plot for his wife, he had none, nor, as a nomad and outsider, did he have any presumptive right to acquire one. Abraham enters into negotiation with the Hittites in Hebron, beginning with these words:

  I am a stranger and a temporary resident among you. (Gen. 23:4)

&n
bsp; This is no mere formulaic utterance. Abraham is acknowledging his legal lack of standing. As a stranger and temporary resident, he has no entitlement to own land. He depends on the goodwill of the Hittites even to begin the conversation with the cave’s owner, Ephron.

  This sets up for us, the readers, a cognitive dissonance that can be resolved only one way: we assume that the text represents Israel’s prehistory. Genesis is about the promise, not the fulfilment. One day, this will change. Israel will become a nation with its own land. Abraham’s children will have a home. Time passes. Israel goes into exile. It is redeemed from slavery. Moses leads the people out of Egypt on their way to the land. There, we cannot but expect, the people will find a home. At last, they will own the land. They will no longer be as Abraham was. Then, in one of the great paradigm-shifting moments of the Bible, the twenty-fifth chapter of Leviticus turns this expectation on its head:

  The land shall not be sold in perpetuity, for the land is mine; you are strangers and temporary residents with me. (Lev. 25:23)

  The fate of Abraham’s family, we now discover, will be not temporary but permanent – permanently temporary. They will know no certainty, have no fixed and unconditional home, even in the land of promise. Abraham had been told, in a dark vision of exile, that his offspring would be ‘a stranger in a land not theirs’. That, we thought, meant Egypt. It now turns out to mean Israel as well. This is the central, haunting irony of the Pentateuch.

  Again, time passes. Israel enters the land. It begins as an amphictyony, a loose federation of tribes, led at times of emergency by charismatic figures known as judges. Then, in the days of Samuel, it becomes a kingdom. A generation later, during the reign of David, the monarchy becomes hereditary (an ‘everlasting covenant’) and Israel has a capital city, Jerusalem. The final building block is almost in place: the Temple. For this, David makes plans, but is told that the work will only be completed by his son. At this moment, the high point of Israel’s history, David gathers the people and utters a prayer:

  Praise be to you, O Lord, God of our father Israel, from everlasting to everlasting…

  We are strangers and temporary residents in your sight, as were all our forefathers. Our days on earth are like a shadow, without hope. O Lord our God, as for all this abundance that we have provided for building you a Temple for your Holy Name, it comes from your hand, and all of it belongs to you. (1 Chr. 29:10–16)

  Even at their greatest moment, the Israelites know that they are strangers in a land not their own. In this extraordinary intertextual arch, from Abraham through Moses to David, from Israel’s earliest prehistory to its summit as a sovereign power, we hear the same unchanging message: the people of the covenant will be strangers at home, so that they are able to make strangers feel at home. Only thus can they defeat the most powerful of all drives to evil: the sense of being threatened by the Other, the one not like me.

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  Abraham and Moses, the key figures of the Pentateuch, know exactly what it is to be a stranger. Abraham’s journey begins with the command to ‘leave your land, your birthplace and your father’s house’ (Gen. 12:1) – everywhere he is not a stranger. Moses, leader of the Israelites, does not grow up with the Israelites. He is thus doubly a stranger, to the Egyptians because he is an Israelite, to the Israelites because he looks like an Egyptian. He flees to Midian – yet another estrangement, marries Zipporah, daughter of a Midianite priest, and has a child. He gives his son a poignant name, Gershom, meaning ‘I was a stranger in a strange land’ (Exod. 2:22).

  The people charged with carrying this message, the Israelites, have a specific function to play in the divine economy. They are to be the embodiment of strangeness. How Israel behaves in relation to strangers, and how nations behave towards Israel, the strange nation, will be the ongoing litmus tests of the moral acceptability of a civilisation.

  Empathy, sympathy, knowledge and rationality are usually enough to let us live at peace with others. But not in hard times. Serbs, Croats and Muslims lived peaceably together in Bosnia for years. So did Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda. The problem arises at times of change and disruption when people are anxious and afraid. That is why exceptional defences are necessary, which is why the Bible speaks of memory and history – things that go to the very heart of our identity. We have to remember that we were once on the other side of the equation. We were once strangers: the oppressed, the victims. Remembering the Jewish past forces us to undergo role reversal. In the midst of freedom we have to remind ourselves of what it feels like to be a slave.

  What happened to Csanad, now Dovid, Szegedi was exactly that: role reversal. He was a hater who discovered that he belonged among the hated. What cured him of antisemitism was his role-reversing discovery that he was a Jew. That, for him, was a life-changing revelation. The Hebrew Bible tells us that the experience of the Israelites in Egypt was meant to be life-changing as well. Having lived and suffered as strangers, they became the people commanded to care for strangers.

  The best way of curing antisemitism is to get people to experience what it feels like to be a Jew. The best way of curing hostility to strangers is to remember that we too, from someone else’s perspective, are strangers. Memory and role reversal are the most powerful resources we have to cure the darkness that can sometimes occlude the human soul.

  11

  The Universality of Justice, the Particularity of Love

  In the emerging world of ethnic conflict and civilizational clash, Western belief in the universality of Western culture suffers three problems: it is false; it is immoral; and it is dangerous…Imperialism is the necessary logical consequence of universalism.

  Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order1

  Behind this whole analysis is the obvious question. Why does God need to choose in the first place? Why this drama of chosen and unchosen sons? Why Isaac, not Ishmael? Why Jacob, not Esau? Why Abraham, not everyone? Why Israel and not all humankind?

  This phenomenon has aroused more anger and vituperation, perplexity and misunderstanding than any other in the history of Western spirituality. Why does God choose? Judaism seems caught midway between the particularities of the pagan world – each nation with its own gods – and the universalities of Christianity and Islam: one God, one truth, one way, one path to salvation, one gateway to heaven.

  These two other Abrahamic monotheisms borrowed much from Judaism – its belief in one God and its sacred scriptures in the case of Christianity, its stories and prophets in the case of Islam – yet they did not borrow Judaism’s most singular feature: its distinction between the universality of God as Creator and Sovereign of the universe, and the particularity of the covenant, first with Abraham, then with Moses and the Israelites. It is easy to see why. If God is the God of all humanity, logic would seem to dictate that the way of serving him should be the same for all humanity.

  What, though, if a fundamental concern of the Hebrew Bible were precisely violence in the name of God? What if the Bible is confronting this directly? What if this should guide our reading of the text? That the Bible is preoccupied by violence is evident at the outset. The first recorded act of worship, the offerings brought by Cain and Abel, led directly to the first murder. Thus the connection between religion and violence is struck at the start. The reason the Bible gives for the Flood is that ‘the earth was corrupt before God, the earth was filled with violence’ (Gen. 6:11). Violence is not a marginal theme in Genesis. It is central. It makes God ‘regret that he made man on earth’ (Gen. 6:6).

  We saw in chapter 2 why humans are violent. It has to do with the fact that we are social animals. We form groups. We are tribal beings. We are divided into different nations, languages, cultures and codes, and these are the bases of identity. There is no such thing as humanity in the abstract, just as there is no such thing as language or literature or love in the abstract. Identity is inescapably plural. That is why it leads to violence. It divides the world into Us and Them. This is t
he source of war. At extreme times like now it leads to pathological dualism, turning human beings into barbarians, sometimes in the name of God.

  We also saw in chapter 2 that there have been three major attempts in history to escape from identity but that none succeeded. Christianity and Islam both said, in effect: one God, therefore one ultimate identity. That is why they clashed in the Middle Ages, and it is why they clash today in the Middle East, Africa and parts of Asia. 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 second great attempt, as we saw, was the Enlightenment, the secular European substitute for Christianity, based on the universality not of God but of reason. Science and philosophy would, people thought, succeed where religion and revelation had failed. They would unite humankind in what Kant called ‘perpetual peace’. The reaction to this, a century later, was the emergence of nationalism, racism and communism, two world wars, the Holocaust and the Gulag. It was the return of the repressed.

  The third attempt – by the West today – has been to dethrone the group in favour of the individual. The result has been the atomisation of society, the collapse of the traditional family, the erosion of community and the loss of national identity, leading to the counter-reaction of religious extremism among those who still seek identity and community. Try as the West may, the tribes keep coming back, angrier each time.