Not in God's Name

by Jonathan Sacks

  Religion leads to violence when it consecrates hate. That was the tragedy that befell the Church in the fourth century. It took six centuries for the violence to follow, but it was inevitable. Enshrine hate within a culture, and it will remain dormant but still alive and potentially deadly. Christians did not kill only Jews. They killed Muslims, heretics, witches and sectarians, for the greater glory of God and in the name of the religion of love. Yet Christianity changed, not least because Pope John XXIII and his successors knew it had to change. Today the epicentre of hate is radical and neo-traditionalist Islam, sadly because Islam was immune to the virus for so long.

  You cannot create a free society on the basis of hate. Resentment, rage, humiliation, a sense of victimhood and injustice, the desire to restore honour by inflicting injury on your former persecutors – sentiments communicated in our time by an endless stream of videos of beheadings and mass murders – are conditions of a profound lack of freedom. What Moses taught his people was this: you must live with the past, but not in the past. Those who are held captive by anger against their former persecutors are captive still. Those who let their enemies define who they are have not yet achieved liberty.2

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  I learned this from Holocaust survivors. I came to know them when I became a rabbi, and they became one of the great inspirations of my life. At first it was difficult to understand how they survived at all, how they lived with their memories, knowing what they knew and having seen what they saw. Many of them had lost their entire families. The world in which they grew up was gone. They had to begin again as strangers in a strange land.

  Yet they were, and are, some of the most life-affirming people I have ever met. What struck me most was that they lived without resentment. They did not seek revenge. They did not hate. They cared, more than anyone else I knew, when other people were being massacred in Bosnia, Rwanda, Kosovo and Sudan. They let their pain sensitise them to the pain of others. In later life they began to tell their stories, especially to young people. They used to visit schools. Sometimes I went with them. They spoke about what had happened, and how they survived. But their fundamental message was not about the past at all. What they wanted young people to know was how precious freedom is, and how fragile; what a miracle it is that there is food to eat, windows you can open, gates you can walk out of, a future to look forward to. They spoke about tolerance and how important it is to care for the people who are different from you. Never take freedom for granted – that was their message. Work for it, fight for it, stand up especially for minorities, and never give way to hate even when others do.

  How, I wondered, had they exorcised the pain that must have haunted them nightly, and led many, including Primo Levi, to commit suicide, sometimes many years later? Eventually I realised the answer. For decades they did not speak about the past, even to their spouses, even to their children. They focused single-mindedly on the future. They learned the language and culture of their new home. They worked and built careers. They married and had children. Only when they felt their future absolutely secure, forty or fifty years on, did they allow themselves to turn back and remember the past. That was what I learned from the survivors. First you have to build the future. Only then can you revisit the past without being held captive by the past.

  That is what the biblical story of Lot’s wife is about (Gen. 19:17–26). Messengers – angels – come to tell Lot and his family that they have to leave. The city is about to be destroyed. Lot hesitates, prevaricates, but eventually they depart. ‘Don’t look back,’ say the angels, but Lot’s wife does, and she is turned into a pillar of salt. As a child I thought this was a silly story, but as an adult I felt its power. Look back on a painful past, and you will not be able to move on. You will be immobilised by your tears. You will become a pillar of salt.

  The people Moses was addressing were not survivors, but they were children of survivors. Their parents had lived through the first collective tragedy of the Jewish people. It was essential that he teach them to focus on the future, not to look back in anger or pain but to use the past constructively, creatively. The Mosaic books refer time and again to the Exodus and the imperative of memory: ‘You shall remember that you were slaves in Egypt.’ Yet never is this invoked as a reason for hatred, retaliation or revenge. Always it appears as part of the logic of the just and compassionate society the Israelites are commanded to create: the alternative order, the antithesis of Egypt. Don’t enslave others, says Moses, or – because that was too much to ask at that stage of history – treat slaves honourably. Don’t subject them to hard labour. Give them rest and freedom every seventh day. Release them every seventh year. Recognise them as like you, not ontologically inferior. No one is born to be a slave.

  Give generously to the poor. Let them eat from the leftovers of the harvest. Leave them a corner of the field. Share your blessings with others. Don’t deprive people of their livelihood. The entire structure of biblical law is rooted in the experience of slavery in Egypt, as if to say: you know in your heart what it feels like to be the victim of persecution, therefore do not persecute others. Biblical ethics is based on repeated acts of role reversal: the principle we saw in the Joseph story in chapter 8. You cannot stay moral in hard times and towards strangers without something stronger than Kantian logic or Humean sympathy. That ‘something stronger’ is memory.3 In Exodus and Deuteronomy, memory becomes a moral force: not a way of preserving hate, but, to the contrary, a way of conquering hate by recalling what it feels like to be its victim. ‘Remember’ – not to live in the past but to prevent a repetition of the past.

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  The Sermon on the Mount tells us to love our enemies. That is a supremely beautiful idea, but it is not easy. Moses offers a more liveable solution. Help your enemy. You don’t have to love him but you do have to assist him. That is the basis of the simple command in Exodus:

  If you see your enemy’s donkey sagging under its burden, you shall not pass by. You shall surely release it with him. (Exod. 23:5)

  Behind this law is a simple idea: your enemy is also a human being. He has a problem. Besides which, his donkey is suffering. Hostility may divide you, but something deeper connects you: the covenant of solidarity. Pain, distress, difficulty – these transcend the language of difference. A decent society will be one in which enemies do not allow their rancour or animosity to prevent them from coming to one another’s aid when they need help. If someone is in trouble, act. Do not stop to ask whether they are friend or foe. Do as Moses did when he saw shepherds roughly handling the daughters of Jethro, or as Abraham did when he prayed for the people of the cities of the plain.

  The rabbis noted that in Deuteronomy (22:4) a similar law appears, but this time in relation to friend, not foe: it speaks of ‘your brother’s donkey’. The Talmud rules that in a case of conflict, where your brother and your enemy both need your help ‘you should first help your enemy – in order to suppress the evil inclination’.4 Both may be equally in distress, but in the case of an enemy, there is more at stake: the challenge of overcoming estrangement, distance and ill-will. Therefore, it takes precedence. The ancient Aramaic translations (Targum Onkelos, and more explicitly Targum Yonatan) say something fascinating at this point. They take the phrase ‘You shall surely release’ to mean not just the physical burden weighing on the donkey, but also the psychological burden weighing on you. They translate the verse as: ‘You shall surely let go of the hate you have in your heart towards him.’

  What is powerful about this provision is that it is not utopian. It does not envisage a world without animosities. Your enemy may still be your enemy. Until the end of days, people will still fight over land, wealth and power. But strangers can still come to one another’s assistance. During 9/11, in the World Trade Center, a Hassidic Jew rescued a Muslim at prayer. During the attack on the Jewish supermarket in Paris in January 2015, a Muslim worker at the shop rescued twenty Jewish customers by hiding them in a cold storage room. No one in real crisis stop
s to ask whether the person they are about to rescue is ‘one of us’. That is when crisis brings out the best in us, not the worst.

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  Above all: never seek revenge. Do not believe you can rectify the past by avenging it. That way you merely succeed in perpetuating the past instead of healing it.

  There is an element of the Hebrew Bible that is often misunderstood. It speaks about God’s revenge. The Psalms sometimes pray for it. Why so in a religion dedicated to love, forgiveness and the future? One of the people who decoded the mystery is Yale theologian Miroslav Volf, a native Croatian who saw at first hand the bitter ethnic wars in the former Yugoslavia. Those experiences shaped his courageous book on reconciliation, Exclusion and Embrace.5

  Having written for some three hundred pages on the need to open ourselves to the Other, he ends on an utterly unexpected note. He speaks of ‘the close association between human nonviolence and the affirmation of God’s vengeance’. His thesis, shared by the Jewish scholar Henri Atlan,6 is that the belief that God will avenge wrongs spares human beings from having to do so. Not all injustice, let alone perceived injustice, can be remedied by human beings. The attempt to do so creates more violence and more perceived injustice. ‘Preserving the fundamental difference between God and non-God, the biblical tradition insists that there are things which only God may do.’

  That is the meaning of ‘Vengeance is mine, says the Lord’ (Deut. 32:35; Rom. 12:19). We can never undo the past, nor can we fully remedy it. Killing your enemy does not bring your friend back to life. Yes, we must right past wrongs, apologise, atone, acknowledge people’s sense of suffering and grievance. But there is no perfect justice in history, only a rough approximation, and that must do. The rest we must leave to God.

  Jewish law forbids human beings from bearing a grudge or taking vengeance:

  You shall blot [any offences against you] out of your mind and not bear a grudge. For as long as one nurses a grievance and keeps it in mind, one may come to take vengeance. The Torah therefore emphatically warns us not to bear a grudge, so that the impression of the wrong should be completely obliterated and no longer remembered. This is the right principle. It alone makes civilized life and social interaction possible.7

  This is the corollary of belief in divine justice. If vengeance belongs to God, it does not belong to us.

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  There is a connection between monotheism and letting go of hate. Here I want to clarify an idea alluded to briefly in the chapter about dualism. Different civilisations generate different character types. That is not because character is a matter of ethnicity: that is racism, and it is also untrue. Humans are culture-producing animals, and the way we act, even the way we feel, depends in no small measure on structures of the mind that we have internalised from our environment and habits of the heart we learned as children. Religions are culture-shaping institutions, and they include not just a theology, but also an anthropology. What we believe about God affects what we believe about ourselves.8

  Monotheism internalises conflict, whereas myth externalises it. The Jesuit scholar Jack Miles, commenting on the difference between Oedipus and Hamlet, points out that the forces Oedipus confronts – fate, the Delphic oracle, the pre-scripted ending – have nothing to do with his thoughts, intentions or choices. They are ‘out there’. Hamlet’s battle, by contrast, is within, his ‘native hue of resolution sicklied o’er by the pale cast of thought’.9 Just as the clashing deities of myth become, in monotheism, inner conflicts within the mind of the one God, so the human drama takes place not on the battlefield but in the mind, the soul. As soon as Jacob can wrestle with the angel, he need no longer wrestle with Esau. The Hebrew Bible, indeed Judaism as a whole, is the story of an inner struggle. That rules out, in advance and on principle, the psychological alternative: it was someone else’s fault.

  That is the real difference between monotheism and dualism. When bad things happen to an individual or group, one can either ask, ‘Who did this to me?’ or, ‘Given that this has happened, what then shall I do?’ The first is the question a dualist asks, the second is the response of a consistent monotheist. So different are these questions that they generate two modes of being: respectively a blame culture and a penitential culture. The first focuses on external cause, the second on internal response. Blame looks to the past, penitence to the future. Blame is passive, penitence active. A penitential culture is constructed on the logic of responsibility. If bad things happen to us, it is up to us to put them right. When that is a culture’s response to tragedy, a profound dignity is born.

  That, essentially, is the prophetic voice. When mishaps befall the Israelites, they say, it is because we the people have sinned. We dishonoured the covenant, we betrayed God’s trust. Never is someone else blamed for Israel’s troubles. This is what makes Judaism a religion of guilt, repentance and atonement, made bearable by divine forgiveness. A penitential culture says, ‘God, I blame no one but myself. Forgive me. Accept my broken heart. Then give me the strength to change.’ Its peculiar power is that penitence defies entropy, the law that all systems lose energy over time. Penitence conserves energy by turning all suffering into an impetus to do better in the future. It spares its adherents ‘the expense of spirit in a waste of shame’.10

  It produces people of astonishing strength and resilience, like the late Viktor Frankl who found that even in Auschwitz he could retain a sense of freedom and dignity.11 Atonement is the ultimate expression of freedom because it brings together the two mental acts – repentance and forgiveness – that have the power to break the iron grip of the past. Repentance testifies to our ability to change. Forgiveness expresses our refusal to be held captive by ill-will. Atonement is where divine and human freedom meet and create a new beginning. It is the act that defeats tragedy in the name of hope.

  Dualism creates blame cultures. It says, ‘It wasn’t us, and it wasn’t God, so it must be them.’ The plague, the Black Death, the loss of a child, defeat in war, the failure of an economy, the disorienting effects of change itself – all these are the intentional act of a malevolent will, an evil presence, a satanic conspiracy whose very invisibility proves its cunning secrecy.

  You don’t have to be an evil person to think in such ways, but the result of such thinking is altruistic evil, and it begins when you see yourself, your nation or your people as the victim of someone else’s crime. They can then be killed without compunction. Murder becomes a moral act. You are defending your people, avenging their humiliation, ridding the world of a pestilence, and helping to establish the victory of God, truth and right. Since not everyone understands this, you have constantly to educate the people to hate, through radio, television, the press, the Internet, social media, schools and families, so that even a three-and-a-half-year-old girl will know who are her enemies, whom she has to learn to mistrust and fear, so that one day she may blow herself up and thus earn her share in heaven, or encourage her children to do so when the time comes. Dualism is always potentially genocidal, and to avoid ever having to admit this, you must ceaselessly accuse your enemies of genocide.

  This is troubling. It is also self-defeating. Defining yourself as a victim is ultimately a diminution of what makes us human. It teaches us to see ourselves as objects, not subjects. We become done-to, not doers; passive, not active. Blame bars the path to responsibility. The victim, ascribing his condition to others, locates the cause of his situation outside himself, thus rendering himself incapable of breaking free from his self-created trap. Because he attributes a real phenomenon (pain, poverty, illiteracy, disease) to a fictitious cause, he discovers that murdering the cause does not remove the symptom. Hence efforts must be redoubled. Blame cultures perpetuate every condition against which they are a protest.

  This would be true even if people arrived at dualism through their own personal journey to understand the world. But usually they do not. Dualism is a cultural phenomenon devised by tyrants to manipulate people into becoming means, not ends. If you
can teach a population to hate, you can get them to do whatever you want, and they will not turn against you because all their anger is turned outwards. This, as we have seen, is the classic function of the scapegoat.

  That is why the secular-nationalist regimes against which the Arab Spring was a series of uprisings were able to survive so long under conditions of oppression, corruption, economic stagnation and educational underachievement. They did so by the manipulative use of antisemitism, often focused on the State of Israel but based on passages in the Qur’an and Hadith written more than a thousand years before the State existed. Astonishingly, the Islamist movements formed in opposition to the secular-nationalist regimes use the same antisemitism with even greater virulence, and will thus perpetuate the stagnation, corruption, brutality and underachievement against which they protest.

  Some years ago I sat at the bedside of a young man in intensive care who had narrowly survived death. A twenty-year-old student at a rabbinic academy in the north of England, he had been sitting on a bus in London studying a volume of the Talmud, when he was stabbed twenty-two times. His assailant told the police when he was arrested: ‘Israel are the murderers…So I stabbed him.’12 An unprovoked attack on an innocent student – who, as it happened, was neither an Israeli nor a Zionist, just a Jew – became a form of self-defence.

  Hate and the blame culture go hand in hand, for they are both strategies of denial: ‘It wasn’t me, it was them, I acted in self-defence, I am the victim not the perpetrator.’ The murder of the innocent then becomes a holy deed. Victims do need our support. But they need our support to recover the power of agency. Taking responsibility for your own fate is not a luxury of the moral life, but a necessity. First build the future: that is how you redeem the past.