The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning

by Jonathan Sacks

  Much has been written about the history of hate that Hitler exploited. There have been libraries of books about Christian, racial and (sadly and more recently) Islamist antisemitism. Far too little, however, has been written about a fourth kind, which played its own part in the centuries leading up to the Holocaust, namely philosophical antisemitism.

  It can be found in virtually all of the great continental philosophers of the Enlightenment and beyond. Voltaire called the Jews ‘an ignorant and barbarous people, who have long united the most sordid avarice with the most detestable superstition’. Fichte (1762–1814) wrote that the only way of making Jews civilised was to amputate their Jewish heads. Immanuel Kant spoke privately of Jews as ‘the vampires of society’ and argued for the ‘euthanasia’ of Judaism.

  Hegel took Judaism as his model of a ‘slave morality’. Nietzsche accused Jews of giving the world an ethic of kindness and compassion which he saw as the ‘falsification’ of natural morality, namely the will to power. The most virulent of the philosopher antisemites, whose work was regularly cited by the Nazis, was Schopenhauer. He spoke of Jews as ‘no better than cattle’ and ‘scum of the Earth’ and said they should be expelled from Germany. The logician Gottlob Frege wrote in 1924 (he was in his mid-seventies at the time) that it was a ‘misfortune that there are so many Jews in Germany and that in future they will have full political equality with German citizens’.10

  Martin Heidegger, the greatest German philosopher of the twentieth century, joined the Nazi Party in 1933. Shortly after joining the party he became rector of the University of Freiburg. Among his first declarations was the statement that ‘The Führer alone is the present and future German reality and its law.’ After the war Heidegger made no attempt to apologise for his involvement with the Nazis, his admiration for Hitler, or his betrayal of Jewish colleagues. Jonathan Glover summarises his response as a ‘mixture of silence and grandiose evasion’.11

  This cries out for explanation. The philosophers of the Enlightenment believed that prejudice belonged to religious sentiment and that it could be cured by an age of reason, in which, in the words of the revolutionary French National Assembly, ‘All men are born, and remain, free and equal in rights.’ Why did this dream fail so consistently and so profoundly?

  The Enlightenment was a ‘dream of reason’. Reason is universal. It applies at all places, in all times. Prejudice, so Voltaire and others argued, comes from the particular: the local, the church, the neighbourhood, the community, even the family, the things that make us different, attached to this, not that. Tolerance would therefore come only when men and women learned to worship the universal, ‘humanity’.

  That is a dream destined to fail because it is universal. Its immense power, evident in science, is that it leads us to seek universal patterns, chains of cause and effect, in the phenomena of nature from the cosmos to the genome. But the human person is not entirely a phenomenon of nature. Yes, we are bodies, the ‘quintessence of dust’. But we also have minds, and whether or not the mind is coextensive with the brain, it allows human beings to do something no other life form known to us does: to become self-conscious, to feel lonely not just alone, to question, think, plan, choose, and ask ‘Why?’

  To think, we must use language and everything that goes with language: communities, cultures, conventions and codes, the things that make us different. Languages and cultures are always particular. Between Babel and the end of days, there is no universal language. To universalise, to apply modes of thought that work for science to human beings, is to dehumanise human beings. Hence philosophy in the Platonic-Cartesian-Kantian mode is no defence against genocide. Allied to hate, it makes it possible.

  So my encounter with philosophy, which I still love and cherish, taught me the limits of philosophy. I needed something more. The question was, where to find it? Where do you find God?

  There is a short story by the Argentinian poet Jorge Luis Borges called ‘The Approach to Al-Mu’tasim’.12 In it Borges imagines a young man who finds himself in a poor neighbourhood of Bombay. He is a fugitive – from what, we never learn. He takes refuge among ‘people of the vilest class’ and gradually adjusts to them ‘in a kind of contest of infamy’. He hides himself in their midst and becomes like them. One day he is in the middle of a conversation when he senses in one of the people with whom he is talking a discrepant note – a tone of voice, an inflection, that does not belong:

  All at once – with the miraculous consternation of Robinson Crusoe faced with the human footprint in the sand – he perceives some mitigation in this infamy: a tenderness, an exaltation, a silence in one of the abhorrent men. ‘It was as if a more complex interlocutor had joined the dialogue.’

  He knows that the man with whom he is conversing is incapable of ‘this momentous decorum’. He infers that he has been influenced by someone else. He is ‘the reflection of a friend, or of the friend of the friend’. He senses a trace, perhaps many times removed, of a remarkable presence. ‘Rethinking the problem he arrives at a mysterious conviction: some place in the world there is a man from whom this clarity emanates; some place in the world there is a man who is this clarity.’ He resolves to dedicate his life to finding this man.

  That is how I have sought God, not through philosophical proofs, scientific demonstrations or theological arguments; not through miracles or mysteries or inner voices or sudden epiphanies; not by ceasing to question or challenge or doubt; not by blind faith or existential leap; certainly not by an abandonment of reason and an embrace of the irrational. These things have brought many people to God. But they have also brought many people to worship things that are not God, like power, or ideology, or race. Instead I have sought God in people – people who in themselves seemed to point to something or someone beyond themselves. In 1931, in his notebook, Wittgenstein wrote the following sentence: ‘Amongst Jews “genius” is found only in the holy man.’13 In the summer of 1968 I set off in search of holy men.

  I went to America. That might seem a strange choice, but I was looking for Jewish thinkers unafraid to confront the challenges of philosophy. The mid-1960s had witnessed, in both Britain and the United States, a ‘death of God’ controversy, in both cases started not by atheists but by theologians. An American-Jewish magazine, Commentary, had published a series of Jewish responses from leading rabbis,14 and I decided to meet as many of them as I could. So I bought a Greyhound bus ticket and spent the whole of that summer travelling from city to city in Canada and the United States, meeting rabbis and asking them the big questions.

  Wherever I went, two names kept coming up in conversation. One was Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, the leading thinker of American Orthodoxy. Heir to one of the leading dynasties of East European talmudic scholarship, he had ventured out into Western philosophy and written a doctorate on post-Kantian epistemology. Coming to the United States with the rise of Nazism, he had taught several generations of modern Orthodox rabbis. Of all contemporary Jews literate in the two worlds of Talmud and philosophy, he was the greatest.

  The other was the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneersohn. Already a legend, he had done what no previous Jewish leader had ever tried to do. He had sent emissaries throughout the world, seeking out lost and disaffiliated Jews and, wherever possible, bringing them back to faith. Eventually other individuals and organisations followed his lead, but he was the first, and the people I met spoke about him with awe.

  Not only were these two – one in the arena of thought, the other in leadership – the greatest rabbis alive, they were also living remnants of the world Jewry had lost, the talmudic academies and Hassidic courts of Eastern Europe, more than 90 per cent of which were destroyed in the Holocaust. I was determined, whatever the practical difficulties, to meet them, and eventually I did. In both cases, it did not take long to realise that I was in the presence of greatness.

  Rabbi Soloveitchik, formidably erudite in every branch of philosophy, spoke about the need to create a new kind of Jewish thought
, based not on philosophical categories but on halakhah, Jewish law. Law was the lifeblood, the DNA, of Judaism, and it was more than mere regulation of conduct. It was a way of being in the world. Jewish philosophy in the past had based itself on its Western counterpart, and in so doing had failed to express what was unique about Judaism, its focus on the holy deed. For two hours he spoke with an intellectual passion and depth far beyond anything I had experienced in Cambridge.

  My encounter with Rabbi Schneersohn was unlike any other. The first half of our conversation proceeded conventionally. I asked the questions, he gave answers. Then, unexpectedly, he reversed the roles and started asking me questions. How many Jewish students were there at Cambridge? How many were actively identified with Jewish life? What was I doing to engage them? This was something for which I was not prepared. I was on a private intellectual quest, with no larger intention. I was interested in my Jewish identity, not that of others.

  I began my reply with a typical English evasion: ‘In the situation in which I find myself …’ The Rebbe allowed the sentence to go no further. ‘You do not find yourself in a situation,’ he said. ‘You place yourself in a situation; and if you placed yourself in one, you can place yourself in another.’ We were losing Jews, he said, and each of us had a responsibility to do something about it. Years later, I summed up that moment by saying how wrong people were to think of him as a leader with thousands of followers. A good leader, I said, creates followers. A great leader creates leaders. The Rebbe created leaders on a scale unprecedented in Jewish history.

  These were life-changing encounters. Rabbi Soloveitchik had challenged me to think. Rabbi Schneersohn had challenged me to lead. In both – though neither spoke of it – I sensed the extent of what Jewish life had lost in the Holocaust. In both too I felt the scale of the challenge in the present, as Jews were losing interest in Judaism, nowhere more so than on campus in their college years. Both conveyed the gravitas and depth of the Jewish soul. There was something in them that was more than them, as if an entire tradition spoke through their lips. This was not ‘charisma’. It was a kind of humility. In their presence you could feel the divine presence. At university I had found intellectual agility, subtlety, wit, the rapier thrust of trained, honed, razor-sharp minds. But these were holy people. Somehow you felt larger because of them.

  I went back to Cambridge, finished my degree, began a doctorate under Bernard Williams, then went to Oxford where I studied briefly with the Catholic philosopher Philippa Foot, who did much to bring virtue ethics back into moral thought, and then, for two years, I taught philosophy. But the memory of those two meetings stayed with me, challenging me to learn more about Judaism. So in 1973 I said goodbye to everything I had dreamed of doing as an academic, and began serious Judaic study. Five years later I became a rabbi. Thirteen years after that I became Chief Rabbi. God kept calling and I kept following, hoping that at least some of the time I was going in the right direction.

  I have sought God in the meanings that have inspired people to live in such a way that their lives seem to point to something larger than themselves, what Matthew Arnold called ‘the power not ourselves that makes for righteousness’, and what the rabbis meant when they said ‘the divine presence spoke through them’. It can be a gentleness, a tenderness, a generous embrace. It can be an affirmation, someone who gives you the confidence to be yourself. It can be a forgiveness, a way of saying, yes, you know and I know that it was wrong, but that was yesterday, and you have work to do today, and perhaps tomorrow will bring the chance to heal what you harmed. It is hard to define what it is that makes you feel, as did Borges’ young man, that you are seeing the trace of another, greater presence, but you do, at least if you have accustomed yourself to search for it.

  People within the Abrahamic monotheisms have always known that for most of us, most of the time, God, more infinite than the universe, older and younger than time, cannot be known directly. He is known mainly through his effects, and of these the most important is his effect on human lives. That is what I sensed on meeting the Lubavitcher Rebbe and Rabbi Soloveitchik. In them it was obvious. It is why they commanded so much respect within the American Jewish community. But over the years I have learned to find it so much more widely, in communities that care, in the kindness of strangers, in people who touch our lives, perhaps only momentarily, doing the deed or saying the word that carries us to safety across the abyss of loneliness or self-doubt.

  It is where I find God in Jewish history. There is a grandeur, a nobility, a heroic passion about Jews that does not seem to come naturally to this fractious, quarrelsome, stiff-necked people. We catch traces of it in a Hebrew fugitive tending his father-in-law’s sheep in the desert in Midian, in a village herdsman from Tekoah, a water-drawer from Babylon, a wine-seller in eleventh-century France, in a hundred eighteenth-century villages in Russia – in short, in Moses, Amos, Hillel, Rashi, the followers of the Baal Shem Tov, and others in every generation. Time and again, often in circumstances of back-breaking poverty, the Jewish spirit has caught fire and produced words and deeds of incandescent beauty. Their kingdom bounded by a nutshell, Jews counted themselves kings of infinite space.

  I find no way of accounting for this in terms of what Jews were, or where they lived, or what happened to them. Somehow they were touched by a sense of destiny, a vision of God and the world, that transfigured them – even at times against their will – into a people that defied the normal rules of the decline and fall of civilisations. Their very existence seemed to testify to something vast and unfathomable that knowingly or otherwise they carried in their midst. They became what Isaiah called ‘God’s witnesses’. Their history, their survival against the odds, their intellectual flights and utopian endeavours, became a signal of transcendence.

  But you have to be very narrow indeed not to see beauty and wisdom in faiths other than your own. I have been inspired by seeing Sikhs offering hospitality to the poor in Amritsar, Christians building homes for the homeless throughout the world, Hindus practising sewa, compassion to the distressed, by the majestic wisdom of the great Chinese Confucian and Taoist traditions, and the courage of the many Muslims I know who fight the extremists in their own communities. The statement that every human being is in God’s image precedes both the universal covenant with Noah in Genesis 9 and the particular covenant with Abraham in Genesis 17, to tell us that our humanity precedes our religious identity, whatever that identity may be.

  Why is it that we say we see something distinctive in these lives and not, say, in a politician hoping for our vote, or a lawyer doing her job, or even a soldier risking his life for the sake of his country? Because the scientists and philosophers are to this extent right, that people generally act on the basis of rational self-interest. Consciously or otherwise, we seek to hand on our genes to the next generation. Individually and as groups, tribes, nations and civilisations, we are engaged in a Darwinian struggle to survive. All this we know, and though the terminology may change from age to age, people have known it for a very long time indeed.

  But here and there we see acts, personalities, lives, that seem to come from somewhere else, that breathe a larger air. They chime with the story we read in chapter 1, about a God who creates in love, who has faith in us, who summons us to greatness and forgives us when, as from time to time we must, we fall, the God whose creativity consists in self-effacement, in making space for the otherness that is us. This has nothing whatsoever to do with the physical laws, Darwinian or otherwise, governing biology, and everything to do with the making of meaning out of the communion of souls linked in loyalty and love. Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin see such flowerings of the spirit as ‘spandrels’, decorative motifs that have nothing to do with the weight-bearing architecture of life.15 Like most people, I see them as the redemption of life from mere existence to the fellowship of the divine. As Isaiah Berlin said, there are people tone deaf to the spirit. There is no reason to expect everyone to believe in God or the soul
or the music of the universe as it sings the improbability of its existence.

  God is the distant voice we hear and seek to amplify in our systems of meaning, each particular to a culture, a civilisation, a faith. God is the One within the many; the unity at the core of our diversity; the call that leads us to journey beyond the self and its strivings, to enter into otherness and be enlarged by it, to seek to be a vehicle through which blessing flows outwards to the world, to give thanks for the miracle of being and the radiance that shines wherever two lives touch in affirmation, forgiveness and love.

  How then are we to understand the rationality or otherwise of religious faith? Ironically, again it was Bernard Williams who led me to the answer. In one of his most famous essays, ‘Moral Luck’, he wrote about the painter Paul Gauguin. At the age of thirty-seven, in the midst of a successful career as a stockbroker, Gauguin left his wife and five children to work full time as a painter, first in Paris, then in Arles, and finally in Polynesia where he died.

  Williams asked the question: What would have had to have been the case for Gauguin’s decision to be justified? He became one of the greatest artists of his time, and that leads us to think he was right to do what he did. But he might not have become a great artist. He might simply have lacked the ability, the gift. But Gauguin could not know this in advance. None of us can. We do not know what we could become until we try to become it. It was luck that justified Gauguin’s decision. So there is a place for luck in the moral life.16

  That seems to me a faulty analysis. Whether or not Gauguin became a great artist has no bearing whatsoever on the moral question of whether he was justified in leaving his wife and family. We might well say that as an artist he was admirable, but as a human being less so. History is littered with such examples. Yeats put it best: