"Not in God's Name," Post 3

Not in God's Name: Confronting Religious Violence, by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, reviles all violence and killing perpetrated by any "Us" vs. any "Them." But Us-vs.-Them is a function of our evolutionary history. We are wired to be deeply loyal to our In-Group and openly hostile to any alien Other. As history shows, religion can exacerbate the problem.

In the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, the proof-text that God wants humankind to rise above our inbuilt tendency to religious hatred is found in the book of the prophet Isaiah:

‘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).

But how do we get there?

After all, that same Hebrew Bible has plenty of stories about war and bloodshed, seemingly in God's name:

There are many examples in the Hebrew Bible. There is the war of revenge against the Midianites. There is the war mandated against the seven nations in the land of Canaan. There is the book of Joshua with its wars of conquest, and the bloody revenge against the Amalekites in the book of Samuel.

Rabbi Sacks shows that the Jewish sages, beginning long centuries ago, have considered at great length the Bible's attitudes about war. Despite all the biblical wars that were fought "in God's name,"

By the eighth century BCE the prophets of Israel had become the first people in history to envisage a world at peace.

We get to peace in the name of God, says Sacks, through careful consideration of the entire context and the through-story of the Bible, not by just picking out an apt verse or gripping story here or there. This is what religious tradition is all about. Each of the three versions of Abrahamic monotheism — Judaism, Christianity, and Islam — has a long tradition of biblical interpretation and re-interpretation. We need to steep ourselves in such tradition.

* * * * *

When I was entering adulthood in the late 1960s, the Vietnam War was raging. I, like many others of my age group, was antiwar. A high-minded devotion to peace was everywhere on college campuses. We had our posters:

Our peace symbols:

Our peace signs:

It was all very high-minded. But it was not deeply rooted in religious tradition. The peace movement as a whole was pretty much religion-free. We baby boomers were questioning our religions and leaving them in droves.

True, there were branches of the peace movement emanating from various religions. I myself was particularly aware of Catholic protest against the war, as I was attending Georgetown University at the time. But most of the people making the V-sign for peace were not notably religious.

So the 1960s peace movement was like a helium-filled balloon floating in the stratosphere, with no string attaching it to the ground. It was ungrounded in any particular religious tradition. And as soon as the war was over, the balloon popped. Whatever peace movement we have today is highly fragmented and marginal.

Rabbi Sacks wants us to reconsider our Abrahamic, monotheistic religious traditions as ways of grounding our desire for peace.

"Not in God's Name," Post 2

The book Not in God's Name: Confronting Religious Violence, by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, tells us why it's a travesty of Abrahamic religion — Judaism, Christianity, and Islam — to wreak violence and perpetrate death on members of other faith communities. Especially, on sibling faiths.

For each Abrahamic religion, the sibling faiths are ... the other two. During the course of history, each one has killed members of the other two "in God's name." Today, Muslim jihadists are killing and brutalizing hundreds of thousands in the name of Allah.

They are taking the lives of Christians and Jews, not to mention secular atheists and just ordinary people in the West. They are also killing one another in untold thousands, simply because different Muslims come from different traditions. There are Sunnis and Shi'ites, as the West has learned. There are also numerous other sects underneath the Islamic umbrella.

Why all the killing?

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks

Rabbi Sacks blames the human tendency toward "sibling rivalry" ... but in a religious context, it's clearly sibling rivalry run amok.

In the biblical book of Genesis, the stories of Isaac and Ishmael, of Jacob and Esau, and of Joseph and his many brothers are all stories in which one particular sibling appears, at first reading, to obtain God's favor to the exclusion of the others.

Sacks takes apart each of these stories and shows how the first reading is not necessarily the right reading. Yes, the seemingly favored son is given, in each case, a covenantal responsibility that pertains to the establishment and development of monotheism in a polytheistic world. But God never withdraws his love from the other sons. Never.

The inescapable conclusion is that there are no people on earth that God does not love. Sibling rivalry is no excuse for murder.

* * * * *

The jihad being carried out today by radical Muslim warriors is a huge mistake for another reason, writes Sacks. It's ultimately about power, not religion.

Jews in what today is the state of Israel — called, by Christians, the Holy Land — rebelled against Roman rule in 66-73 CE, in the First Jewish-Roman War. They lost, and Jerusalem fell. "What makes the fall of Jerusalem relevant to the politics of the twenty-first century," Sacks writes ...

... is that it saw the first appearance in history of religiously motivated terror. The failed rebellion, together with its disastrous sequel, the Bar Kochba rebellion (132-5 CE), left Jewish life in ruins. The Temple was destroyed. Jerusalem was levelled to the ground and rebuilt as a Roman polis, Aelia Capitolina. The Jewish population began to drift elsewhere, to Babylon, Egypt and the Mediterranean basin. Thus began an exile that was to last almost two thousand years.

It was, in its way, though, the beginning of the marvelous modern-day Jewish mindset, inasmuch as:

Out of darkness, though, sometimes comes light. What Jews discovered when they had lost almost everything else was that religion can survive without power. Instead of the Temple they had the synagogue. Instead of sacrifices they had prayer and charity. Repentance, the direct turning of the heart to God, took the place of the high priest’s service on the Day of Atonement. In place of the nation state, they had communities scattered across the world yet united by a covenantal bond of mutual responsibility.

"Religion can survive without power": that's the key phrase for all of us, not just Jews. Not only that: "Religion and power," Sacks writes, "are two different things altogether."

* * * * *

Martin Luther

Christians found out the same thing after, in 1517, Martin Luther nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to the door of his church in Wittenberg, in what is now Germany. Thus began the Protestant Reformation. It:

... set in motion far-reaching changes in the political map of Europe, challenging the authority and power of Rome. For more than a century, Europe became a battleground, an epidemic of wars brought to an end only by the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648.

Europe would then see the rise of secular science and a "new mode of philosophy [in a] mutual "quest for basic principles that did not rest on dogmatic religious foundations." Suddenly, religion was losing its disctatorial grip over people's lives.

But all was not lost. Religion and power became disentangled in the West, that was true ... and it was a good thing. Sacks says:

More gradually, but also more extensively, Western Christianity had to learn what Jews had been forced to discover in antiquity: how to survive without power.

So, perhaps Muslims are today in the process of learning this basic truth which Sacks brings out so starkly: "Monotheism allied to power fails."

Welcome to the "Not in God's Name" Blog!

I've been reading the book Not in God's Name: Confronting Religious Violence, by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks. This is a book I wish everybody would read. It looks at the ancient scripture of the foundational Abrahamic faith, Judaism, as providing ample reason for Jews, Christians, and Muslims — members of the three religions that hark back to the original monotheistic patriarch, Abraham — never to kill one another in the name of God.

That ancient scripture, which Christians call the Old Testament, is of course the Hebrew Bible. Muslims revere that scripture as well, not just their own Qur'an. According to Wikipedia, "The Qur'an mentions the names of numerous figures considered prophets in Islam, including Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses and Jesus, among others." The stories of Adam, Noah, and Abraham are told in the first book of the Hebrew Bible, Genesis. Moses's story is told in the second book, Exodus.

In this book, Rabbi Sacks shows how the stories told in Genesis that occur after Noah's flood — those of Abraham, Isaac and Ishmael, Jacob and Esau, and Joseph and his many brothers — reveal to us a distinctive pattern.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks

The pattern is one of sibling rivalry and the displacement of the elder brother by the younger. Abraham's first son Ishmael is cast out as a child — along with his mother Hagar, who had served as a maternal surrogate because Sarah was seemingly barren — with the second son, Isaac, carrying forth God's covenant with Abraham. Ishmael, who grows up to become prosperous, is today thought of as the progenitor of Muslim peoples. From the point of view of Hebrew scripture, however, Isaac is seemingly the one blessed by God.

Yet Rabbi Sacks points out a counter-narrative. First of all, the name Ishmael means "God had heard," i.e., "God has heard of Hagar's misery" upon being cast out with her son. "It turns out that what we have here," Sacks writes, "is not a simple drama of choice and rejection at all. Isaac has been chosen for a specific destiny, but Ishmael has not been rejected — at least not by God."

Reading the story, we feel for Hagar and Ishmael in a way that we do not for Isaac and his mother Sarah (who by the grace of God had turned out to be able to conceive a child after all). Moreover, says Sacks, the text of the story goes to an "extraordinary length ... to insist that Ishmael will be blessed by God" (Sacks's italics):

At the end of the story — surprise, surprise! — the "rejected" son Ishmael stands side by side with the "chosen" Isaac at their father's grave. And according to the ancient Jewish sages, Isaac even had gone to some trouble to reunite Hagar, Ishmael's mother, with Abraham as an old man. According to Sacks, "The story beneath the story ... is that neither Abraham nor Isaac made their peace with the banishment of handmaid and child."

In fact, "... long before the birth of Islam, many rabbis in the Mishnaic and Talmudic periods, from the first century CE onwards, were called Ishmael, hardly likely – indeed impossible – if Ishmael were a rejected figure in Judaism."

Already, even without going on to examine the story of Jacob and Esau, we begin to see what Rabbi Sacks is talking about. Right there in sacred scripture is ample reason for Jews, Christians, and Muslims not to take sibling rivalry as a rationale for killing one another. Beneath every story of sibling rivalry in the Book of Genesis is a counter-narrative which defuses such a twisted reading.

I'll talk more about how Sacks works all that out in future posts to this blog ...