Not in God's Name

by Jonathan Sacks

  The picture he paints is of hopeless factionalism.3 The Jews of the late Second Temple period were deeply divided. There were three primary groups: the Sadducees, the upper echelons associated with the Temple and political power; the Essenes, a pietist group to which the Qumran sectarians may have been affiliated; and the Pharisees, attached to the oral tradition and rigorous observance of the Law. The Pharisees themselves were split, the Talmud going so far as to say that there was a risk that divisions between the disciples of Hillel and Shammai were so deep that Judaism was at risk of becoming ‘two Torahs’, that is, two religions, not one.4 Cutting across these rifts were political disagreements between moderates and extremists, those who favoured war and those who were convinced that an accommodation had to be reached with Rome.

  Particularly chilling is the scene Josephus describes of Jerusalem under siege. The Jews were heavily outnumbered. There were 25,000 within the city, facing Titus’ well-equipped and disciplined army of 60,000 soldiers. They might have held out were it not that they too were split: the Zealots under Elazar ben Simon, an extremist faction led by Simon ben Giora, and a third force of Idumeans and others under John of Giscala. Josephus tells us that for much of the time these groups were more intent on attacking one another than the enemy outside the walls. They killed each other’s men, destroyed one another’s food supplies, and engaged in what Josephus calls ‘incessant, suicidal strife’. At one point in his narrative he breaks off to lament: ‘Unhappy city! What have you suffered from the Romans to compare with this?’5

  What makes the fall of Jerusalem relevant to the politics of the twenty-first century is that it saw the first appearance in history of religiously motivated terror. The terrorists were known as the Sicarii, named after their favourite weapon, the short-bladed dagger. This is how Josephus describes them:

  These in broad daylight in the middle of the city committed numerous murders. Their favourite trick was to mingle with festival crowds, concealing under their garments small daggers with which they stabbed their opponents…First to have his throat cut by them was Jonathan the High Priest, and after him many were murdered every day. More terrible than the crimes themselves was the fear they aroused, every man as in war hourly expecting death.6

  Their aim, as with their successors today, was to inflame relations between the local population and the occupying power, to generate an atmosphere of fear, and to incite reprisals on both sides, adding fuel to the flames of conflict.

  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. The tragedy was all the greater because it was self-inflicted. The institutions around which Israelite and Jewish life were organised in the days of the Bible had gone. There was now no compact nation, no sovereignty, no collective home. The age of priests, prophets and kings had gone. The Temple and its sacrifices were no more. Not until the rise of antisemitism throughout Europe towards the end of the nineteenth century were Jews to organise themselves politically again.7

  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. Jews became the world’s first global people.

  The rabbis achieved what kings, priests and prophets failed to achieve in the course of a thousand years of biblical history. Jews, who as the Israelites had often been seduced into the idolatrous cultures of their neighbours and who are portrayed in the Hebrew Bible as a fractious, wayward people, became a God-intoxicated nation often willing to die rather than renounce their faith. A minority everywhere, they kept their identity intact, becoming the only significant minority in history to survive without assimilating to the dominant culture or convert to the majority faith.

  This is not an argument for powerlessness. A thousand years of persecution culminating in the Holocaust are sufficient to refute the notion that Jews, or any other nation, can survive without the ability to defend themselves. But to reach, as they did, the spiritual heights without any of the conventional accoutrements of nationhood and political self-determination is enough to tell us that religion and power are two different things altogether, even if both in their distinct ways and different senses are political.

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  Sixteen centuries later, Christians made the same discovery. In 1517 the young priest Martin Luther nailed his ninety-five theses to the door of All Saints’ Church in Wittenberg, setting in motion one of the great upheavals of European history. Like the zealots of the Second Temple in their opposition to Hellenised Jews, Luther was incensed by what he saw as the corruption and decadence of the Renaissance papacy, its worldliness and abuses of power. Like the Maccabees of the second century BCE, and their successors in the first century CE, Luther sought a return to the original message of faith, its simplicity and fervour, and like them he found a wide receptivity to his message.

  The Reformation 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. The aftermath in the seventeenth century was, for Europe, the birth of the modern. It witnessed the rise of science (Bacon, Galileo, Newton), a new mode of philosophy (Descartes) and a new way of thinking about politics spearheaded by Hobbes and Locke. What all these movements had in common was a quest for basic principles that did not rest on dogmatic religious foundations.

  Christianity, which had hitherto been spacious enough to encompass the Renaissance, could no longer be relied on, for how could it resolve disputes when it itself was the greatest single source of dispute? As Abraham Lincoln put it later, during the American Civil War, ‘Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other.’8 If two professing Christians, one Protestant, the other Catholic, could not resolve their disagreements without anathemas, excommunications and violence, then religion could not become the basis of a sustainable social order.

  Stephen Toulmin offered the best explanation of what motivated those who sought a new way: ‘Failing any effective political way of getting the sectarians to stop killing each other, was there no other possible way ahead? Might not philosophers discover, for instance, a new and more rational basis for establishing a framework of concepts and beliefs capable of achieving the agreed certainty that the sceptics had said was impossible?’9

  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. The similarity of these two processes, so far apart in time, suggests two hypotheses. First, no religion relinquishes power voluntarily. Second, it does so only when the adherents of a faith find themselves fighting, not the adherents of another religion, but their own fellow believers. The Crusades – Christians against Muslims – did not provoke the same reaction, nor did the loss of the First Temple – Jews against Babylonians. It took the spectacle of Jew against Jew, Christian against Christian, to bring about the change. You do not learn to disbelieve in power when you are fighting an enemy, even when you lose. You do when, with a shock of recognition, you find yourself using it against the members of your own people, your own broadly defined creed.

  That is happening within Islam today. The primary victims of Islamist violence are Muslims themselves, across the dividing lines of Sunni and Shia, modernist and neo-traditio
nalist, moderate against radical, and sometimes simply sect against rival sect.

  Violence is what happens when you try to resolve a religious dispute by means of power. It cannot be done. Trying to resolve ultimate issues of faith, truth and interpretation by the use of force is a conceptual error of the most fundamental kind. Just as might does not establish right, so victory does not establish truth. Both sides may fight with equal passion and conviction, but at the end of the day, after thousands or millions have died, whole countries reduced to disaster zones, populations condemned to poverty and generations to hopelessness, after the very enterprise of faith has been degraded and disgraced, no one is a millimetre closer to God or salvation or illumination. You cannot impose truth by force. That is why religion and power are two separate enterprises that must never be confused.

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  What rescued Judaism in the first century and Christianity in the seventeenth was not success but failure, not victory but defeat. Out of the disaster of the rebellions against Rome came the rich heritage of early rabbinic Judaism – Midrash, Mishnah and Talmud – one of the most subtle and intricate of all religious literatures. The ‘wars of the Lord’ were now fought, not on the battlefield but in the house of study. Judaism became a culture of argument and debate, of words rather than weapons. The nation of the sword became the people of the book. Catastrophe honed and refined the Jewish message. Losing power, Judaism rediscovered itself.

  The Christian corollary was best described by Alexis de Tocqueville after his visits to America in the early 1830s. He was struck by a phenomenon that seemed to defy something he had hitherto taken for granted:

  In France I had almost always seen the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom marching in opposite directions. But in America I found they were intimately united and that they reigned in common over the same country.10

  The explanation, he found, lay in the separation of church and state. Talking to clerical leaders, he found ‘that most of its members seemed to retire of their own accord from the exercise of power, and that they made it the pride of their profession to abstain from politics’. The result was that although religion took no part in government, it was ‘the first of their political institutions’, providing the moral base of civic society, what he called its ‘habits of the heart’. It created communities, strengthened families and motivated philanthropic endeavours. It lifted people beyond what he saw as the great danger of democracy – individualism, the retreat of people from public life into private satisfaction. Religion strengthened the ‘art of association’, the underlying strength of American society. Relinquishing power, religion was able to avoid the inescapable danger of those who wear the mantle of politics:

  The church cannot share the temporal power of the state without being the object of a portion of that animosity which the latter excites. In proportion as a nation assumes a democratic condition of society and those communities display democratic propensities, it becomes more and more dangerous to connect religion with political institutions…The American clergy were the first to perceive this truth and to act in conformity with it. They saw that they must renounce their religious influence if they were to strive for political power, and they chose to give up the support of the state rather than share in its vicissitudes.11

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  Monotheism allied to power fails. Rabbi Naftali Zvi Yehudah Berlin (1817–93), head of the rabbinical seminary in Volozhin, made a fascinating comment on the biblical story of the Tower of Babel. It begins with the statement that ‘The whole world had one language and shared words.’ This, he says, was precisely what was wrong with it:

  Since the views of human beings are not the same, [the builders of Babel] were concerned that no one should have a contrary opinion. They therefore took care that no one be allowed to leave their city, and those who expressed contrary views were condemned to death by fire, as they sought to do to Abraham. Their ‘shared words’ became a stumbling-block because they resolved to kill anyone who did not think as they did.12

  Berlin sees Babel as the first totalitarian state. The ‘shared words’ of its builders were a denial of the diversity of human opinion. Dissent was forbidden. Those who expressed it were threatened by death. Utopian-sectarian communities pride themselves on their unity, but it is secured at too high a price: hostility to those who do not share their views.

  Berlin died before the Russian Revolution, but he anticipated its failure. His critique precisely echoes Aristotle’s – and more recently Karl Popper’s13 – of Plato’s Republic. Plato had argued that ‘It is best for the whole state to be as unified as possible.’ Aristotle disagreed: ‘We ought not to attain this greatest unity even if we could, for it would be the destruction of the state.’14 The degree of unity aspired to in the total society is incompatible with human freedom and the right to disagree. Politics should be the mediation, not the suppression, of conflict.

  To be sure, there is a profound difference between the Greek and Judaic views of politics. The Athenians and Spartans had a civic ethic.15 For them, the highest good was to serve the polis, respecting its laws, participating in its debates, being willing to fight and if need be die for its sake. Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori, ‘It is pleasant and proper to die for one’s country.’

  The Hebrew Bible, by contrast, is a sustained critique of politics. The prophets denounced the corruption of rulers. God told Samuel that in their desire for a king, the people were rejecting God himself.16 In one of the key sentences of the Bible, Gideon, invited by the people to become their king, says, ‘I will not rule over you, nor will my son rule over you. The Lord will rule over you’ (Judg. 8:23).

  It is not accidental that the book of Exodus with its political themes – slavery, liberation, tyranny, freedom – is preceded by Genesis with its tales of family life, nor that the book of Ruth with its non-political message of love and loyalty is the historical prelude to the political books of Samuel and Kings. The function of these works is to emphasise the primacy of the personal over the political. The polis is not the summum bonum, the highest good. In Judaism the state exists to serve the individual; the individual does not exist to serve the state. This is anything but a cliché: it is a rejection at the most fundamental level of Hellenistic ethics. The state is a necessary evil. As Tom Paine put it in Common Sense (1776), ‘Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence; the palaces of kings are built on the ruins of the bowers of paradise.’17 The Hebrew Bible is an intensely political document, but it never loses sight of the limits of politics and the risk that those limits may be transgressed.

  That, paradoxically, is the religious significance of liberal democracy. Western democracy is not Athenian democracy. It is a rare phenomenon in political history because of its modesty, its sense of limits, its self-restraint. The liberal democratic state does not aspire to be the embodiment of the good, the beautiful and the true. It merely seeks to keep the peace between contending factions. It is procedural rather than substantive. It makes no claim to represent the totality of life. It knows, with Oliver Goldsmith, ‘How small, of all that human hearts endure / That part which laws or kings can cause or cure.’18 In the eloquent words of Michael Novak:

  In a genuine pluralistic society, there is no one sacred canopy. By intention there is not. At its spiritual core, there is an empty shrine. That shrine is left empty in the knowledge that no one word, image, or symbol is worthy of what all seek there. Its emptiness, therefore, represents the transcendence which is approached by free consciences from a virtually infinite number of directions.19

  That is what makes liberal democracy, however odd this sounds, the best way of instantiating the values of Abrahamic monotheism. It does not invite citizens to worship the polis, nor does it see civic virtue as the only virtue. It recognises (unlike Jean-Jacques Rousseau20) that politics is not a religion nor a substitute for one. The two are inherently different activities. Religion seeks truth, politics deals in power. Religion aims at unity, liberal d
emocracy is about the mediation of conflict and respect for diversity. Religion refuses to compromise, politics is the art of compromise. Religion aspires to the ideal, politics lives in the real, the less-than-ideal. Religion is about the truths that do not change, politics is about the challenges that constantly change. Harold Wilson said, ‘A week is a long time in politics.’ The book of Psalms says, ‘A thousand years are in your sight as yesterday when it is gone’ (Ps. 90:4). Religion inhabits the pure mountain air of eternity, politics the bustle of the here-and-now.

  More important still is what liberal democratic politics achieves. It makes space for difference. It recognises that within a complex society there are many divergent views, traditions and moral systems. It makes no claim to know which is true. All it seeks to do is ensure that those who have differing views are able to live peaceably and graciously together, recognising that none of us has the right to impose our views on others. Coerced agreement is not consent, said the Jewish sages.21 Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s, said Jesus (Matt. 22:21). There is no compulsion in religion, says the Qur’an (2:256). Democratic politics has no higher aspiration than to allow individuals freedom to pursue the right as they see the right, with this proviso only, that they extend the same right to others. It seeks the maximum possible liberty compatible with an equal liberty for all.