Not in God's Name

by Jonathan Sacks

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  To see how tradition has traditionally worked, let us take the single example of the war traditions in Judaism, those that most directly concern the relationship between religion and violence.

  The first thing to note is that despite the apparent militarism of the early texts of Judaism, their underlying value was always peace. Already in Leviticus (26:6) we find the blessing, ‘I will grant peace in the land…and the sword will not pass through your country.’ The priestly benedictions end with a prayer for peace (Num. 6:26). By the eighth century BCE the prophets of Israel had become the first people in history to envisage a world at peace. The classic instance is Isaiah, who foresaw a time when the nations ‘will beat their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not take up sword against nation, nor will they train for war any more’ (Isa. 2:4). His vision of a world in which ‘they will neither harm nor destroy on all my holy mountain, for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea’ (Isa. 11:9) is part of the Hebrew Bible’s decisive break with the ethic of militarism that dominated the ancient world. It would not be revived, outside the Judeo-Christian tradition, until Kant’s secular essay on ‘perpetual peace’ in 1795.

  One way of seeing the change that had come over the nation is by comparing two biblical texts, both of which describe the same moment: when God told King David not to build the Temple, assuring him that the work would be done by his son, Solomon. In 2 Samuel 7:6–7, God explains:

  I have not dwelt in a house from the day I brought the Israelites up out of Egypt to this day. I have been moving about in a tent and a tabernacle. Wherever I have moved about among all the people of Israel, did I ever speak a word to any of the tribal leaders of Israel whom I commanded to shepherd my people Israel, ‘Why have you not built me a house of cedar?’

  The implication is that God does not need a monumental home of the kind built to ancient deities. He lives not in a building of cedar but in the human heart. In 1 Chronicles 22:8, written later, however, a further explanation is attributed to David:

  The word of God came to me: ‘You have shed much blood. You have fought many wars. You shall not build a house for my Name, because you have shed much blood on the earth in my sight.’

  The two passages are not incompatible: the commentators found no difficulty in reconciling them. But the new emphasis is palpable. War may sometimes be necessary, but it has no place in the domain of the holy. One who has ‘shed much blood’ may not build a house of God.

  Centuries later the rabbis went much further still, and we can identify the moment at which they did so. It took place at the time – the late first or early second century CE – when Rabban Gamliel II was deposed as spiritual head of the Jewish community in Israel for his autocratic behaviour towards one of his colleagues, and R. Elazar ben Azariah was appointed in his place. At that time many disputed issues were resolved. This is how the Talmud describes one of them:

  On that day, Judah, an Ammonite proselyte, came before them in the House of Study and asked: ‘Am I permitted to enter the assembly?’ R. Joshua said, ‘You are permitted to enter the congregation.’ Rabban Gamliel said, ‘Is it not a law that An Ammonite or a Moabite may not enter the assembly of the Lord (Deut. 23:4)?’ R. Joshua replied, ‘Do Ammon and Moab still live in their original homes? Long ago Sennacherib king of Assyria came and mixed up all the nations, as it says, I removed the boundaries of nations, I plundered their treasures; like a mighty one I subdued their kings (Isaiah 10:13), and whatever is detached [from a group] is assumed to belong to the majority of the group…They then permitted [Judah the Ammonite] to enter the congregation.5

  At a stroke the entire biblical legislation relating to Israel’s neighbours and enemies was declared inoperative, on the grounds that after Sennacherib’s conquests and population transfers (722–705 BCE), the ‘nations’ could no longer be identified. As Maimonides writes about the seven nations against which Israel was commanded to wage war, ‘their memory has already perished’.6 We no longer know who is who. That chapter in Jewish history is closed.

  What of Joshua’s campaign to conquer the land? Again the Talmud offers a radical interpretation, summarised by Maimonides in these words:

  No war, either permitted or obligatory [such as a war of self-defence] may be initiated without first offering terms of peace…Joshua sent three messages before entering the land: the first, ‘Whoever wishes to flee, let him flee,’ the second, ‘Whoever wishes to make peace, let him make peace,’ the third, ‘Whoever wishes to make war, let him make war.’7

  War, for Maimonides, is never mandated except when the effort to make peace has been tried, and failed.

  What of the Amalekites, about whom the Bible commands the Israelites to ‘blot out their memory from under heaven’? Maimonides ruled that even at the outset the command only applied if the Amalekites refused to make peace and accept the seven Noahide laws. There was no categorical imperative to destroy them. To the contrary, even here peace was preferable. Maimonides added that in any case it was no longer applicable since what applied to the seven nations applied to the Amalekites also. Sennacherib had transported and resettled the nations so that it was no longer possible to identify the ethnicity of any of the original people against whom the Israelites were commanded to fight. He also said, in The Guide for the Perplexed, that the command only applied to people of specific biological descent. It is not to be applied in general to enemies or haters of the Jewish people. So the command to wage war against the Amalekites no longer applies.8

  Thereafter in Judaism Amalek became a mere symbol of gratuitous evil, a metaphor, not an actual people. R. Levi Yitzhak of Berditchev, for example, speaks of Amalek as the evil inclination within each of us, whom we must defeat.9 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). At a stroke, the biblical texts relating to Israel’s enemies were rendered inoperative. They speak of then, not now; of ancient nations, not contemporary ones.

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  If we seek, though, to understand the real transformation that took place in Judaism between the biblical era and the age of the rabbis, we need to listen to an extraordinary conversation, reported in the Talmud, between the Jewish sages in the late first century CE. The subject under discussion is not war as such, but rather a detail in the laws of the Sabbath. In Jewish law one may not carry a burden on the seventh day, whether from a private domain into the street or in the street itself. That is one of the categories of forbidden ‘work’. The question was: what is a burden and what, precisely, counts as carrying? Wearing clothes is clearly not carrying. Taking an object from home into the street clearly is. What the sages are debating here is a borderline case: wearing a sword or other weapon. Is this wearing, in which case it is permitted, or is it carrying, in which case it is forbidden?

  What is at stake is not a narrow issue. It goes to the heart of the value system of Jews at a critical point in their history, between the two great rebellions against Rome in the first and second centuries. Are weapons an ornament, and thus an item of clothing, or are they negative testimony to the existence of armed conflict and lack of peace, and thus a burden? At stake is how the sages saw the war against the Romans, and something deeper: how they viewed the very culture of military valour. The Mishnah records the following disagreement:

  A man must not go out with a sword, bow, shield, lance or spear, and if he does go out, he incurs a sin offering. R. Eliezer, however, said: They are ornaments for him. But the sages maintain that they are merely shameful, for it is said, ‘And they shall beat their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more’ (Isaiah 2:4).11

  The difference of opinion is clear. For R. Eliezer, weapons are ‘ornaments’. There is honour in fighting for your freedom and resisting an imperial power. Th
e sages – the majority – disagree. Their proof-text is the famous verse from Isaiah in which the prophet envisions a world without war. They took this to mean that military confrontation may sometimes be necessary in self-defence but it is not, in Judaism, a positive value. In the messianic age there will be no more weapons. Those that exist will be turned to peaceful uses. Even now, therefore, they are ‘merely shameful’ and may not be worn on the seventh day. They are not a badge of honour but a burden.

  That is the argument as it took place in the first century. But there is an obvious lacuna in the Mishnah text. The sages cite a biblical verse in support of their view. R. Eliezer does not. Clearly, though, he must have had another biblical verse in mind. He knew the verse from Isaiah – the rabbis knew their Bible – and must have had some other textual warrant for his dissenting opinion. The Talmud12 fills in the gap:

  Abaye asked R. Dimi…‘What is R. Eliezer’s reason for maintaining that [weapons] are ornaments?’

  [He replied]: ‘Because it is written, “Gird thy sword upon thy thigh, O mighty one, it is thy glory and thy majesty” (Psalm 45:4).’

  R. Kahana raised an objection to Mar, son of R. Huna: ‘But this refers to the words of the Torah!’

  He replied: ‘A verse cannot depart from its plain meaning.’

  R. Kahana said: ‘When I was eighteen I knew the whole six orders [of the Mishnah] yet I did not know until today that a verse cannot depart from its plain meaning.’

  Some two centuries had passed between this exchange and the original Mishnah teaching, but more than time has changed. R. Kahana can no longer understand that when a psalm refers to a sword it actually means a sword. For him it was self-evident that it means ‘words’, teachings, texts. With what else does the Jewish people defend itself, if not its sacred merits achieved by devotion to religious learning?

  The idea that Jews might fight battles, wage wars and glory in their victories is absurd, unthinkable. Jews do not seek honour on the battlefield. They spend their time in the house of study. By R. Kahana’s day, the nation of the sword had become the people of the book. To understand R. Eliezer’s view a mere two or three centuries earlier, R. Kahana has to be exposed to a principle he had never considered before, namely that one cannot ignore the literal meaning of a biblical text. Whatever else a verse means, it also means what it says.

  In this conversation extended across several centuries we witness one of the most profound metamorphoses in religious history. After the disastrous rebellions against Rome, the entire framework of existence of the Jewish people underwent a change. The world of kings and high priests, the Maccabees and the Hasmoneans, of military victories and all that went with them, was over. The world of the rabbis had taken its place, a culture of study and scholarship, in which words had replaced swords and the most important battles were intellectual ones.

  Here is one delightful example. The book of Numbers contains a cryptic verse: ‘Therefore the Book of the Wars of the Lord speaks of Waheb in Suphah.’ By a verbal play, the sages read the last phrase as ‘love in the end’ (ahavah ba-sof) and explained it thus:

  Even father and son, or master and disciple, who study Torah at the same gate [=academy], become enemies of each other, yet they do not stir from there until they come to love each other, as it is written Waheb in Suphah, which is to be read as ‘love in the end’.13

  As in R. Kahana’s reading of ‘sword’ as ‘words’, so here: the ‘wars of the Lord’ have become not physical battles but the cut and thrust of Talmudic debate. Study and what the sages called ‘argument for the sake of heaven’ have become a surrogate for war. No longer is violence an acceptable form of conflict resolution. In its place have come reasoned argument and the search for peace.

  Even more significant is the way in which post-biblical Judaism encouraged Jews to identify with and enter into the feelings of the victims of Israel’s own victories. The Talmud records a striking passage in which the angels are portrayed as wishing to sing a song of triumph at the division of the Red Sea. God silences them with the words, ‘My creatures are drowning – and you wish to sing a song?’14 Even Israel’s enemies have become ‘my creatures’ (this, after all, is the point made at the end of the book of Jonah).

  The fourteenth-century exegete David ben Joseph Abudarham explains that the reason for our custom of spilling drops of wine when reciting the Ten Plagues on the night of Passover is to shed symbolic tears for the Egyptians who suffered because of Pharaoh’s hardness of heart.

  These reinterpretations, long before modernity, show that by the second or third century rabbinic Judaism had internalised the full destructive force of religiously motivated violence, even when undertaken to preserve religious freedom against a capricious and sometimes overbearing Roman imperial power.

  We often think, in the context of Judaism, of religious heroes – Moses, Joshua, Gideon, David – as men of war, and so in some respects they were. But at a later age, the real visionaries were those who realised that spiritual-cultural battles are often far more significant than military ones. In the sixth century BCE, Jeremiah argued tirelessly for some form of accommodation with the Babylonians. An attempt to wage war against them would result, he said, in national catastrophe. He was right, but unheeded and unpopular, and the result was the loss of the First Temple and the Babylonian exile.

  In the first century, tradition attributes the same role to Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai, who sought terms of peace with the Romans and was also disregarded. Thus was the Second Temple destroyed. All that was salvaged was the rabbinic academy at Yavneh, and Judaism survived through its scholars, not its soldiers. More than six centuries separate the prophet and the rabbi, but what they held in common was spiritual maximalism and military minimalism. 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.

  It takes wisdom to know how to translate the word of God into the world of human beings. In this book, I have offered a series of readings of biblical narrative, arguing that their consistent theme is not sibling rivalry – competition for God’s love – but rather, understanding that we each have a place in God’s universe of justice and love. Is there only one correct reading of these or other religious texts? Clearly not. The rabbis said that there are ‘seventy faces’ of scripture.15 R. Samuel Edels said that the revelation at Sinai took place in the presence of 600,000 Israelites because the Torah can be interpreted in 600,000 different ways.16 Each person carries part of the potential meaning of the text.

  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. It has a history and an authority of its own. Every religion must guard against a literal reading of its hard texts if it is not to show that it has learned nothing from history.

  The sacred literatures of Judaism, Christianity and Islam all contain passages that, read literally, are capable of leading to violence and hate. We may and must reinterpret them. The great work of Jewish mysticism, the Zohar, says those who love the divine word penetrate beneath its outer garments to its soul. That is how, many centuries ago, the sages heard in biblical texts that on the surface spoke of a war, another meaning altogether. The ‘wars of the Lord’ became the debates in the house of study. They understood the deep spiritual truth that the idea of power is primitive: what makes us human is the power of ideas. The result was that they were able to shape a pacific faith capable of sustaining itself through centuries of exile and persecution. Hard texts are a challenge to the religious imagination and to our capacity to engage in covenantal listening to God’s word as we seek to buil
d a future that will honour the sacred legacy of the past.

  The word, given in love, invites its interpretation in love.

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  Relinquishing Power

  Power buries those who wield it.

  Talmud1

  To one who has a hammer, said Abraham Maslow, every problem looks like a nail. Politics is about power, but not every political problem has a solution that involves power. Failure to see this can cost a civilisation dear. It almost cost Judaism its life.

  Jews in Israel in the first century had been restless under Roman rule for years, angered by its ineptitude, its heavy tax impositions and the indifference it showed to Jewish religious sensitivities. Finally, in 66 CE when procurator Gessius Florus failed to defend the Jews of Caesarea from a murderous onslaught by their Greek neighbours, fury became open revolt.

  Hoping to repeat the victory of the Maccabees against the Greeks two centuries earlier, Jews fought to restore their independence and win back religious freedom. At first the rebellion went well. The Roman garrison in Jerusalem was overcome. The Roman army, massing its troops in Acre, was forced to retreat. Realising that it faced a major struggle, Rome sent its most distinguished general Vespasian, together with his son Titus, to quash the uprising.

  We owe our most vivid description of the conflict to an eyewitness, Josephus. Sent to organise the Jewish population in Galilee, he soon realised that the task was hopeless. The population was divided, some in favour of armed resistance, others against. He was in Jotopata in 67 CE when the Romans laid siege to the town. Its inhabitants held out for two months, finally committing suicide rather than be taken captive, as did those in the last outpost of resistance at Masada six years later. Josephus, the sole survivor,2 surrendered to Vespasian and thereafter observed the war from the Roman side.