Not in God's Name

by Jonathan Sacks

  Freedom involves letting go of hate, because hate is the abdication of freedom. That is what Moses taught those who were about to enter the Promised Land. Don’t hate the people who persecuted you. Instead, learn from that experience how to build a society without persecution. It is what the Holocaust survivors taught me: look forward, not back. Build a life, a family, a future, a hope. Hate makes us slaves; therefore let it go. Do not wage war on the children of darkness. Make sure instead that you and your children are sources of light.

  15

  The Will to Power or the Will to Life

  Here in this transport

  I am Eve

  with Abel my son

  If you see my older son

  Cain son of Man

  tell him that I

  Dan Pagis, ‘Written with a Pencil in the Sealed Wagon’

  It began with Cain and Abel and it is happening still. Much of this book has been about sibling rivalry, so it makes sense to conclude with the story of how it started: the first human children, the first religious act, and the first fratricide. Cain brings an offering to God. So does Abel. God accepts the second but not the first. Cain becomes angry. God urges him to control himself. Cain ignores the warning and murders his brother. God then says, ‘The voice of your brother’s blood is crying to me from the ground’ (Gen. 4:10). So it was and so it is. The entire tragedy of religious history is foreshadowed in this drama.

  Yet the story is undeniably odd. Why does God reject Cain’s offering? Why does Cain respond by murdering his brother? What is the rivalry between the brothers about? Modern interpreters tend to read it as a story about the tension between shepherds (Abel) and farmers (Cain). Alternatively, suggesting non-Hebraic sources of the brothers’ names, they argue that Abel means ‘herdsman’ and Cain ‘metalsmith’. These readings miss the clue the Bible itself gives, namely the Hebrew meaning of the brothers’ names.

  Abel, in Hebrew Hevel, is among other things the keyword of the book known in English as Ecclesiastes. Its second sentence includes the word hevel no less than five times. This is how the King James Version translates it: ‘Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity.’ Hevel has also been translated as ‘meaningless, pointless, futile, useless’. These translations miss the point.

  Hevel is a word for ‘breath’. Jews, like the Greeks, spoke of the soul, or the spiritual dimension of humankind, in language drawn from the act of breathing. In Hebrew, words for soul – such as nefesh, ruach, neshamah – are all types of breath. Hevel means a shallow, fleeting, ephemeral breath.

  Ecclesiastes is a sustained meditation on mortality. Life is no more than a breath, and all the wealth and glory even the greatest accumulate means nothing because all that separates us from non-existence is a mere breath. Its mood is like the scene in which King Lear, at the end of the play that bears his name, holds the dead body of his daughter Cordelia – the one who loved him and whose love he failed to recognise until the end – and cries, ‘Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life, / And thou no breath at all?’

  Abel represents human mortality – a mortality that comes less from sin than from the fact that we are embodied souls in a physical world subject to deterioration and decay. All that separates us from the grave is the breath God breathed into us: ‘Then the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being’ (Gen. 2:7). That is all we are: hevel, mere breath. But it is God’s breath. Life is holy. That is common ground in Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

  What eventually will kill Abel is Cain. Cain in Hebrew means ‘to acquire, to possess, to own’. The Bible says so explicitly. ‘Now Adam knew Eve his wife, and she conceived and bore Cain, saying, I have acquired [kaniti] a man with the help of the Lord.’ The significance of this is lost on most translators, who read it as ‘made’, ‘gotten’, ‘produced’, ‘created’, ‘given life to’, and so on. These too miss the point.

  Kaniti, ‘I have acquired’, is one of those verbs that, like the narratives analysed in this book, yield their meaning only in retrospect, when we have gone through the entire Hebrew Bible and then returned to read the text in the light of all that follows. It was Jean-Jacques Rousseau who unintentionally provided the deepest commentary. In his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, he writes:

  The first man who, having fenced in a piece of land, said ‘This is mine,’ and found people naïve enough to believe him, that man was the true founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: ‘Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.’

  The only word with which a reader of the Bible would disagree would be the last. ‘The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof’ (Ps. 24:1). It does not belong to nobody, it belongs to God.

  The entire ethical-legal principle on which the Hebrew Bible is based is that we own nothing. Everything – the land, its produce, power, sovereignty, children and life itself – belongs to God. We are mere trustees, guardians, on his behalf. We possess but we do not own. That is the basis of the infrastructure of social justice that made the Bible unique in its time and still transformative today.

  Cain represents the opposite: power as ownership, ownership as power. The Hebrew word Baal, the name of the chief Canaanite god, has the same range of meanings. The root means ‘to own, to possess, to exercise power over someone or something’. That for the Bible is the ultimate idolatry. Rousseau was right. Violence begins in competition for scarce goods, of which the first is land.

  Eve unwittingly gave her eldest son a name that would eventually lead him to murder. Cain represents the idea that what I own gives me power. When I give some of what I own to God in the form of a sacrifice, I am doing so in order to receive in return some of his power. That is pagan sacrifice: a way of propitiating, cajoling or bribing the gods. That kind of sacrifice God does not accept. The sacrifice he accepts, that of Abel/hevel, is one that comes from the humility of mortality. ‘God, I am mere breath. But it is your breath I breathe, not mine.’

  This, as the Bible understands it, is the fundamental conflict within the human condition: the struggle between the will to power and the will to life. Life, down here on earth, is holy. It is also exceptionally fragile. It is hevel, a mere breath. Almost in his last words, Moses tells his people, ‘I call heaven and earth to witness against you today that I have set life and death, blessing and curse, before you. Therefore choose life so that you and your descendants may live!’ (Deut. 30:19). Murder in pursuit of power while invoking the name of God is sacrilege, whoever does it, whoever the victim, whatever the faith.

  That drama is still being enacted today in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Nigeria, Somalia, Libya, and in acts of terror around the world. What drives ISIS and its kindred organisations is the restoration of the Caliphate and the return to its rule of all the lands it once controlled, from Israel to Spain.1 These are political objectives. They have nothing to do with the God of Abraham. God does not accept human sacrifice. God does not sanctify the will to power. That is the way of Cain, not that of God. When religion turns men into murderers, God replies: ‘The voice of your brother’s blood is crying to me from the ground.’

  —

  What then will happen if we do nothing directly to confront the ideology that has led in our time to barbarism and bloodshed? First, the world will be more religious a generation from now, not less. This will be so even if religion fails to convert a single soul. It has to do with demography. The more religious people are, the more children they have. The more secular they are, the fewer children they have. The indigenous populations of Europe, the most secular continent on earth, are committing long, slow suicide. Their below-replacement birth rates mean that they will get old
er and fewer. Demographically, as Eric Kaufmann has shown, the religious will inherit the earth.

  Within religion, the most extreme, anti-modern or anti-Western movements will prevail. This is happening in Judaism, Christianity and Islam. The old marriage of religion and culture has ended in divorce. Today the secular West has largely lost the values that used to be called the Judeo-Christian heritage. Instead it has chosen to worship the idols of the self – the market, consumerism, individualism, autonomy, rights and ‘whatever works for you’ – while relinquishing the codes of loyalty, reverence and respect that once preserved marriages, communities and the subtle bonds that tie us to one another, moving us to work for the common good.

  Losing its religious faith, the West is beginning to lose the ideals that once made it inspiring to the altruistic: reverence, loyalty, human dignity, the relief of poverty, public service, collective responsibility, national identity and respect for religious values while at the same time making space for liberty of conscience and the peaceable co-existence of more than one faith. Today Western politics often seem bereft of vision beyond the mantra of ‘freedom and democracy’ and cost-benefit calculations of maximum services for the minimum of tax. Faced with a culture of individualism and hedonism, it is not surprising that young radicals, eager to change the world, turn elsewhere to express their altruism, even if it involves acts that are brutal and barbaric. ‘The act of self-denial seems to confer on us the right to be harsh and merciless toward others,’ said Eric Hoffer in The True Believer.2 Altruism misdirected can lead to evil: that has been the thesis of this book. That is why the West must recover its ideals.

  The moral relativism that prevails today in the secular West is no defence of freedom. To see this, all you have to do is to watch any interview between a Western journalist and an Islamist. The journalist will make a comment like, ‘Surely killing people for blasphemy is wrong.’ The Islamist will say, ‘I can understand how you see it that way, but people have different moral views, and you surely understand that some people see it differently.’ End of conversation. The journalist has no reply. He or she probably believes that morality is subjective, the only basic human values are autonomy and the right to choose, the supreme virtue is tolerance even towards the intolerant, and imposing your views on others is intellectual imperialism. The journalist has, in effect, signalled his defeat before he has even opened his mouth, and the Islamist knows this.

  In a world of relativism, what talks is power. In that sense, the Islamist is a faithful child of the twenty-first century. He or she knows that what makes the West sit up and take notice is the brute assertion of force. The West has often had no serious response to religiously motivated violence beyond ridicule and crude assaults on religion as such.

  It was a great sage of Islam, ibn Khaldun (1332–1406), who saw that as a society becomes affluent it becomes more individualistic. It loses what he called its asabiyah, its social cohesion. It then becomes prey to the ‘desert dwellers’, those who shun the luxuries of the city and are prepared for self-sacrifice in war. 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

  So there will be more terror, more bloodshed, and more civil war in the Middle East and Africa. Other countries, like Jordan and Lebanon, may be drawn into the abyss. There will be further barbaric new crimes against humanity, broadcast courtesy of the Internet. There will be rising tension in every European country. People will feel that their liberties are being threatened, but will have no clear idea of how to respond. Every time a movement like al-Qaeda is defeated, another will arise to take its place. Young people, in search of meaning, identity and community, will continue to be recruited to the cause.

  The West, indeed the world, has never faced a challenge quite like this. Against it stands a movement more like a series of flash-mobs than a nation or a coalition, groups that can form, dissolve and reform almost at will. None of the normal conventions of war apply: uniforms distinguishing combatants from non-combatants, or the rules like those of the Geneva Conventions that constrain the cruelties that may be practised in the name of humanity. Indeed, the radicals pride themselves on their inhumanity. They have no qualms against butchering and beheading those with whom they disagree, using civilians as human shields, turning people into slaves and ten-year-old girls into suicide bombers.

  Nor are they amenable to the kind of rational considerations that have governed international conflict in the past. They pride themselves on their willingness to die and they are utterly disinclined to compromise. According to Graeme Wood, ISIS ‘rejects peace as a matter of principle’ and ‘hungers for genocide’.4 It believes that time and God are on their side. Radical Islam has proved its ability to recruit anywhere via the Internet, by playing endless video scenes of suffering and humiliation, enlisting people to take revenge, sacrificing their own and other people’s lives to win their place in heaven.

  If we fail to address the issue seriously now, this will be our future. It is not one any of us should wish to bequeath to our grandchildren.

  —

  In chapters 3 and 4 I devoted what might seem to be a disproportionate amount of space to antisemitism. This is not because Jewish suffering is different from Christian or Muslim suffering. It is not. All human suffering matters, and matters equally. Nor is it because Jews are suffering more than others today. They are not. Everyone is a potential victim. Humanity as a whole is suffering.

  My point is that 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. It allows a culture to blame others for its condition without ever coming to terms with it themselves. The antisemitism flooding through the Arab and Islamic world today is as widespread and virulent as it was in Europe between 1880 and 1945, and it is being disseminated worldwide through the Internet.

  Antisemitism is only contingently related to Jews. The real targets of Christians in the age of the Crusades were the Muslims, not the Jews. The targets of Nazi Germany were the European nations that had defeated it in the First World War and humiliated it thereafter. 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.

  Jews, however, played an essential function in the group psychology of these movements. By fulfilling the role of the scapegoat, they could be blamed for everything bad that happened to the group. As the mysterious, omnipotent, all-embracing enemy, they united the group, silenced dissent, distracted the mind from painful truths and enabled otherwise utterly incompatible groups to become allies. Today, for example, Islamist groups find it hard to win Western support for the imposition of Sharia law, the beheading of captives, the forced conversion of Christians or the sentencing to death of blasphemers. 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.

  Note that antisemitism, to succeed, must always disguise its motives. It did so in the Middle Ages by accusing Jews of killing Christian children and spreading the plague. It did so in Nazi Germany in terms drawn from medicine. Jews were the cancer in the midst of the Aryan nation. T
oday it does so by blaming Israel or Jews, in classic Blood Libel/Protocols of the Elders of Zion style, for controlling America, dominating Europe, manipulating the economy, owning the media, perpetrating 9/11 and all subsequent terrorist attacks, creating AIDS, Ebola, the 2004 tsunami and global warming.

  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. In the West, antisemitism is now usually disguised as anti-Zionism. In Arabic, the rhetoric is usually more honest: it speaks openly of Jews. But the targets of Islamist terror in the West – the synagogue guard in Copenhagen, Jewish shoppers in a kosher supermarket in Paris, visitors to the Jewish Museum in Brussels, and so on – were Jewish, not Israeli. The reason is simple. A scapegoat must be someone you can kill without risk of reprisal. Israel can respond. Jews outside Israel cannot. Indeed, that is one compelling reason why Israel exists. It is the only thing protecting Jews from being the scapegoat-victims of the world for another thousand years.

  No one I know confuses antisemitism with legitimate criticism of Israel. Jews believe that no human, certainly no nation, is above criticism. Judaism is one of the world’s most self-critical cultures. 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.

  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. Whatever is wrong in the world, ‘It isn’t our fault, it’s theirs. They did it to us. After all, they control the world.’ The result is that hate paralyses the mind and perpetuates the very failures that caused defeat or underachievement in the first place. Antisemitism did not help Christians win the Crusades, or the Nazis win the Second World War. It will not help Muslims in the Middle East, Africa and Asia build societies that will honour God and his image in humankind. Those who hate Jews, hate freedom. Those who seek to eliminate Jews, seek to eliminate freedom. Antisemitism is a sickness that destroys all who harbour it. Hate harms the hated but it destroys the hater. There is no exception.