The Lord smelled the pleasing aroma and said in his heart: ‘Never again will I curse the soil because of man, for the inclination of man’s heart is evil from his youth. I will never again strike down all life as I have done. As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never cease.’ (Gen. 8:21–22)
A new principle enters the relationship between God and humanity. Where earlier the wickedness of the human heart had been a reason to destroy the earth, it now becomes a reason not to destroy it. God forgives, pre-emptively. Divine justice has given way to divine mercy. In making his covenant with Noah, God rejects rejection.
Love, the very emotion that forms human bonds, bringing new life into the world, is neither simple nor universally benign in its effects. If we are human we cannot help but love X differently from the way we love Y, simply because X and Y are not the same. To be sure, we might love platonically, caring for all equally. But that would no longer be human love, the love of husband and wife, parent and child. A world in which we loved strangers as much as friends, non-kin as deeply as kin, someone else’s children as much as our own, would not be recognisably human at all – and whatever else it is, the Hebrew Bible is about the ‘crooked timber of humanity’. The question it poses is: how shall we live – we who are human, who have passions, delights, desires, loves, and therefore vulnerabilities? A love that made no distinctions, that was remote, distant, undifferentiating, would simply not be love for another human being in his or her particularity.
But this has profound consequences. To love X differently from the way we love Y is to create the possibility that Y – Ishmael, Esau, Leah, Joseph’s brothers – will feel rejected. If one thing is clear from the narratives we have analysed, it is that God feels the plight of the rejected. The narrative genius of Genesis is precisely that it forces us to undergo role reversal. We don’t just see the world through the eyes of the chosen. We identify with Ishmael, Esau, Leah, the people on the other side of the equation, and we cannot but identify with them if we listen to the text with an open heart. We feel their sense of rejection. Genesis, otherwise sparing in its prose, goes out of its way to draw us into their world, their plight, their sense of abandonment.
That is why Genesis is the story of two covenants (why two, we will explore in chapter 11): between God and humanity on the one hand, God and Jacob’s children on the other. God unconditionally affirms both, the former as his ‘image’, the latter as his ‘children’. The conclusion to which the whole of Genesis has been leading is the rejection of rejection.
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Genesis, the foundational book of Abrahamic monotheism, directly addresses many of the themes we explored in Part I as lying at the roots of pathological dualism. First, it is a stunning rejection of dehumanisation, demonisation and the division of humanity into the all-good and the all-bad, the children of light versus the children of darkness. None of the central figures in these dramas is either all good or all bad. The best have their faults. The worst have their virtues. As we noted in chapter 3, Abraham and Isaac pass their wives off as their sisters. Jacob deceives his blind father. At key points in the narrative our sympathies are drawn to Ishmael and Esau. Joseph, who initially appears as a young man of overweening ambition, eventually emerges as the man who saved a whole region from starvation. Judah, the person who proposed selling Joseph as a slave, becomes the moral hero who is prepared to spend the rest of his life as a slave so that his brother Benjamin can go free. There is nothing predictable or one-dimensional about any of these characters. They are studies in moral complexity. We now understand why. Dividing the world into saints and sinners, the saved and the damned, the children of God and the children of the devil, is the first step down the road to violence in the name of God.
Note also that Genesis contains a powerful argument against the second step: seeing yourself as a victim. That is precisely what the first humans do. Adam and Eve sin, but when challenged by God, both deny responsibility. Adam says, ‘The woman you put here with me – she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate’ (Gen. 3:12). The woman says, ‘The serpent deceived me, and I ate’ (3:13). Both define themselves as victims. By the end of Genesis, however, Joseph, who really was a victim, refuses to define himself as such. He says to his brothers, ‘You may have intended to harm me, but God intended it for good so that it would come about as it is today, saving many people’s lives. So then, don’t be afraid. I will provide for you and your children’ (Gen. 50:20–21). This is an immensely significant transformation. Instead of asking, ‘Who did this to me?’ Joseph asks about his suffering, ‘What redemptive deed has this put me in a position to perform?’ He looks forward, not back. Instead of blaming others, he exercises responsibility. Joseph represents the first great biblical rejection of the culture of victimhood, the reaction that caused the first humans to lose paradise.
Finally, Genesis tells us that sibling rivalry is not a given of the human condition. For what it tells are not just four narratives of conflict between brothers. The stories themselves tell a larger story. We can see this by one simple move: looking at the last scene in each story. At the end of the first, Cain and Abel, Abel is dead and Cain wears the mark of a murderer. At the end of the second, Isaac and Ishmael are standing together at their father’s grave. At the end of the third, Jacob and Esau meet, embrace and go their separate ways. At the end of the fourth, Joseph and his brothers work through a process of forgiveness and reconciliation. This is a highly structured literary sequence whose unmistakable message is that sibling rivalry may be natural, but it is not inevitable. It can be conquered: by generosity of spirit, active efforts of reconciliation, and the realisation – dramatised in Jacob’s struggle with the angel at night – that mimetic desire is misconceived. There is no need to want someone else’s blessing. We each have our own.
All of this prepares the way for the fifth story of siblings in the Bible, one that will gloriously transcend all the others: Moses, Aaron and Miriam, between whom there is no rivalry. To the contrary, it is Miriam who watches over the young Moses and ensures he knows who his parents and his people are. It is Aaron who acts as Moses’ spokesman in Egypt, and who becomes the first priest to stand beside the greatest of the prophets. The implication is that only when a people has overcome its internal rivalries is it ready for the journey from slavery to freedom.
So Cain and Abel are the first word about the human condition, not the last. ‘How good and pleasant it is for brothers to dwell together,’ says the psalmist (Ps. 133:1), to which we might add, in the light of Genesis, ‘and how rare’. Yet it is possible, and until it has been shown to be possible, the human story cannot continue. Genesis, the story of human relationships, is the necessary prelude to Exodus, the story of nations and political systems. Each child of Jacob – like each of the seventy nations and languages of Genesis 10 – has his own character and contribution. Each will become a tribe, and only as a confederation of tribes can Israel exist. Only as a confederation of nations can the world exist.
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Genesis is not simply a work of history, or a cosmology. It is a subtle, multilayered philosophical treatise constructed in the narrative mode. It represents truth-as-story rather than truth-as-system, and it does so for a profoundly philosophical reason: it is about meanings, and meanings cannot be conveyed except through narrative – by a plot that unfolds through time, allowing us to enter the several perspectives of its dramatis personae and sense the multiple interpretations (narrative and counter-narrative) to which stories give rise. Unlike philosophical systems, which we either understand or don’t, biblical narrative functions at many different levels of comprehension. Our understanding of it deepens as we grow. Biblical consciousness is chronological, not logical. Its connections are not abstract and conceptual, but real encounters of challenge and response, during which wisdom matures and relationships are honed and refined.
God, in Genesis 1, creates a world of natural order, then
, beginning in Genesis 2, invites us to create a world of social order, one in which every being has its integrity in the scheme of things. None is meant to supplant or displace others. This is a high ideal, but not an impossible one. Genesis shows us how it plays out in human terms, in a series of stories about love: real love, neither romanticised nor idealised. It is not only hate that creates conflict. So too does love. Hence the dramas of Isaac and Ishmael, Jacob and Esau, Leah and Rachel, Joseph and his brothers. Time and again Genesis forces us to engage in role reversal: to see not only from the perspective of the chosen but also from that of the unchosen – to hear the tears of Hagar and Ishmael, Esau and Leah. Joseph forces his brothers to experience what they inflicted on him, for only one who knows what it feels like to be a victim can experience the change of heart (teshuvah, metanoia, tabwa) that prevents him from being a victimiser.
In the end, Genesis affirms the incommensurability of the human person and of different civilisations. We are all different, but we each carry in our being the trace of the one God. God cares for all he creates. In chapter 5, I argued that sibling rivalry lies at the heart of the adversarial relationship between Judaism, Christianity and Islam, leading to a tragic history of religiously motivated hatred. In these past four chapters I have shown why the idea arises, and why it is wrong. On the surface, Genesis is a series of stories in which the elder is supplanted by the younger. Beneath the surface, in a series of counter-narratives, it tells the opposite story, subverting the whole frame of mind that says, ‘Either you or me. If you win, I lose. If I win, you lose.’ That may be true of scarce goods like wealth or power. It is not true of divine love, which is governed by the principle of plenitude.
A tendency to think in terms of sibling rivalry is deeply rooted, genetically encoded, in the human mind. It can exist among good and religious persons. That is why it cannot be refuted, merely subverted, in the form of narratives that only reveal their full meaning to those who have undergone a long process of moral growth. It is not surprising that the interpretations I have given are missed by most readers of the text. But they exist; they have not been artificially read into the text. If so, we have just encountered the Bible’s own theological refutation of the mindset that says that human beings who stand outside our community of faith are somehow less than fully human. This is God’s reply to those who commit violence in his name. God does not prove his love for some by hating others. Neither, if we follow him, may we.
PART THREE
The Open Heart
10
The Stranger
I am a stranger on earth;
do not hide your commands from me.
Psalm 119:19
Jobbik, otherwise known as the Movement for a Better Hungary, is an ultra-nationalist Hungarian political party that has been described as fascist, neo-Nazi, racist and antisemitic, though it resists these labels. It has accused Jews of being part of a ‘cabal of western economic interests’ attempting to control the world: the libel otherwise known as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. In the Hungarian parliamentary elections in April 2014 it secured over 20 per cent of the votes, making it the third largest party.
Until 2012 one of its leading members was a politician in his late twenties, Csanad Szegedi. Szegedi was a rising star in the movement, widely spoken of as its future leader. Until one day in 2012. That was the day Szegedi discovered he was a Jew.
Some of the members of the party had wanted to stop his progress, so they spent time investigating his background to see whether they could find anything that would do him damage. What they found was that his maternal grandmother was a Jewish survivor of Auschwitz. So was his maternal grandfather. Half of Szegedi’s family were killed during the Holocaust.
Szegedi’s opponents started spreading rumours about his Jewish ancestry on the Internet. Soon Szegedi himself discovered what was being said and decided to check whether the claims were true. They were. After Auschwitz his grandparents, once Orthodox Jews, decided to hide their identity completely. When his mother was fourteen, her father told her the secret but ordered her not to reveal it to anyone. Szegedi now knew the truth about himself.
He decided to resign from the party and find out more about Judaism. He went to a local Chabad rabbi, Slomó Köves, who at first thought he was joking. Nonetheless he arranged for Szegedi to attend classes on Judaism and to come to the synagogue. At first, Szegedi says, people were shocked. He was treated by some as ‘a leper’. But he persisted. Today he attends synagogue, keeps Shabbat, has learned Hebrew, calls himself Dovid, and in 2013 underwent circumcision.
When he first admitted the truth about his Jewish ancestry, one of his friends in the Jobbik party said, ‘The best thing would be if we shoot you so you can be buried as a pure Hungarian.’ Another urged him to make a public apology. It was this comment, he says, that made him leave the party. ‘I thought, wait a minute, I am supposed to apologise for the fact that my family was killed at Auschwitz?’
As the realisation that he was a Jew began to change his life, it also transformed his understanding of the world. Today, he says, his focus as a politician is to defend human rights for everyone. ‘I am aware of my responsibility and I know I will have to make it right in the future.’
Szegedi is the antisemite who discovered he was a Jew.
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Szegedi’s story is not just a curiosity. It takes us to the heart of darkness in the human condition, and to why the biblical narratives we have been studying are what they are.
We have, collectively, a propensity to violence. The historian Will Durant once estimated that there have only been twenty-nine years since history began in which there were no wars. In 1989, as the Berlin Wall fell, the Soviet Union collapsed and the Cold War came to an end, several serious analysts, most famously Francis Fukuyama, argued that we had reached the ‘end of history’ in the sense of serious national or ideological wars. The market economy and liberal democracy had triumphed and would eventually spread throughout the world. A quarter-century later the West finds itself facing a rising tide of terror. Several countries in the Middle East have descended into chaos. Religious extremism, profoundly hostile to the values of the West, is growing.
Our argument has been that what is best in us and what is worst both come from the same source: our tendency to form ourselves into groups, to think highly of our own and negatively of others. Morality, in Jonathan Haidt’s phrase, binds and blinds.1 It binds us to others in a bond of reciprocal altruism. But it also blinds us to the humanity of those who stand outside that bond. It turns the ‘I’ of self-interest into the ‘We’ of the common good. But the very act of creating an ‘Us’ simultaneously creates a ‘Them’, the people not like us. Even the most universalistic of religions, founded on principles of love and compassion, have been capable of seeing those outside the faith as Satan, the infidel, the antichrist, the children of darkness, the unredeemed. They have committed unspeakable acts of brutality in the name of God.
There are times when only one thing has the power to defeat dualism and the division of the world into two, namely role reversal. To be cured of potential violence towards the Other, I must be able to imagine myself as the Other. The Hutu in Rwanda has to experience what it is like to be a Tutsi. The Serb has to imagine himself a Croat or a Muslim. The antisemite has to discover he is a Jew.
This is something moral philosophy has failed adequately to confront. Since Plato, thinkers have explored the many factors that make us moral: knowledge, habit, virtue, empathy, sympathy, rationality, intuition. Yet we saw how all these things failed in Germany in the 1930s, and not only among the masses but even among some of the greatest minds of the day. That is the power of dualism to subvert and anaesthetise the moral sense. If we divide the world into the children of light and the children of darkness, we are capable of dehumanising and demonising the Other, seeing ourselves as a victim and committing altruistic evil. Dualism is alive and well in parts of the world today, it has a religious source, or
at least speaks a religious language, and it is leading to terror, brutality, civil war and chaos on an ever-widening scale.
The Hebrew Bible, in the narratives we studied, was confronting this fact at its roots, forcing us to enter into the humanness of the Other: Ishmael, Hagar, Esau, Joseph and his brothers, Leah and her children. We know that Sarah and Isaac are part of the covenant. Hagar and Ishmael are not. But our sympathies are unmistakably drawn to them in some of the most powerful scenes of pathos in the Bible, Hagar cast out into the desert, the young Ishmael dying of heat and thirst.
We saw the same with Isaac and Esau in the great scene where Jacob takes the blessing, deceiving his blind father. We saw how Joseph and his brothers had to overcome their mutual estrangement, and we saw how Leah cried out for love and was heard by God. These are extraordinary stories because they force us to enter into the mindset of the characters who are not chosen, who seem to be left out – displaced. They do for us what discovering he was a Jew did for Szegedi. They force us into an imaginative act of role reversal. They show us that humanity, light and virtue are not confined to our side. They exist on the other side also. They humanise the Other.
And they defeat dualism. What readers of the Bible often find so disconcerting is that the heroes have faults and the villains have virtues. There are times when Esau seems to act more morally than Jacob. Joseph tells tales about his brothers and upsets the rest of the family by talking about his dreams. Judah, who emerges at the end as a hero, at the beginning was the man who proposed selling Joseph as a slave. Though it is a much larger subject and beyond the scope of this book, this is a general feature of biblical narrative. It is not confined to Genesis.
Some readers who are unsympathetic to Judaism take this as a sign that the Hebrew Bible is morally ambivalent. Precisely the reverse is the case. It is engaging with morality at its most fundamental level. It is forcing us to see that the Other, the outsider, the one who stands outside our circle of salvation, is also human – that to be human is to be a mix of good and bad – and to wrestle with that fact as Jacob wrestled with the angel. Only when we understand this do we become immune to dualism and religiously or ideologically motivated hate.
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