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

by Jonathan Sacks

  What has happened to marriage is what happens when a right-brained, integrative culture gives way to a left-brained, atomistic one. What made marriage unique was the way it brought together in a single institution a whole series of essential human activities: sex, reproduction, companionship, love, responsibility for the welfare and nurture of those we have brought into being, and responsibility for their education. Marriage is to society what a unified field theory is to physics: a way of threading diverse phenomena together so that they radiate with a single light. When marriage breaks down, as it has done throughout the West from the 1960s onwards, human bonds splinter and fragment into a myriad component parts, so that we can have sex without reproduction (birth control) and reproduction without sex (techniques from artificial insemination to cloning). We can have both without love, love without companionship, and children without responsibility for their nurture.

  Each of these can be further fragmented, so that even basic biological facts of parenthood become a complex set of options: genetic mother, host mother, commissioning mother, genetic father, mother’s partner, same-sex partners and so on. The permutations are open-ended and bewildering. There is even a danger that children may become a commodity to which people have a right and that, with genetic interventions, they will be designed to order. In large swathes of contemporary society, single parenthood has become the norm and fatherhood hardly exists as a social reality. Already in the 1980s an elderly vicar told me that he could no longer talk to children about ‘God the Father’. The word they did not understand was not ‘God’ but ‘Father’.

  What are in danger of being lost are the linked qualities of loyalty, fidelity, duty, trust and the sharing of a pledge by which both partners promised not to walk away, the very things that make love a glimpse of eternity in the midst of time, and parenthood the closest any of us can come to God: love bringing new life into the world. What is lost when faith is lost is marriage as the supreme moral commitment that lifts humanity from biology to poetry.

  How does monotheism transform relationships? It begins by transforming religion itself. The religious literature of the ancient world was about politics and power, dominance and submission, struggle and victory. The race was to the swift and the battle to the strong. Ra, Marduk, Zeus and their counterparts ruled because they conquered their opponents. They were the divine equivalents of alpha males. The metaphysics of polytheism is largely about who rules what and how.

  That is not the picture the Bible gives us. That God has total power is taken for granted at the outset. God speaks and the world is. The power of God is largely irrelevant to the religious life. Miracles in the Bible are usually for the sake of impressing people who believe in that sort of thing. So the ten plagues and the division of the Red Sea are performed against the Egyptians. God sends fire at Elijah’s request to defeat the false prophets of Baal. Even the appearance of God at Mount Sinai – with thunder, lightning and the sound of the ram’s horn – is intended to awe a people who until a few weeks earlier had been slaves. When God speaks at the same mountain centuries later to Elijah, he makes a point of showing him that God is not in the whirlwind, the Earthquake or the fire, but in the ‘still small voice’.

  God, in the Bible, has a monopoly of power in order to take power out of the equation. It is not at issue. It is not what the religious life is about. Faith is about relationship sustained without the use of power. If any relationship, whether between husband and wife, parent and child, siblings, neighbours, strangers and friends, is dependent on power, faith has broken down. God does not live in such relationships. So the first revolution of monotheism is to demythologise and thus secularise power.

  The nature of the second revolution is best brought out by reflecting on a remarkable recent book by two distinguished American philosophers, Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly, All Things Shining.8 The book, subtitled ‘Reading the Western classics to find meaning in a secular age’, is a candid acknowledgement of the nihilism that haunts our godless culture. The remedy the authors propose is not a return to monotheism. It is instead a return to polytheism, to the world of Homer.

  The scene they choose to illustrate Homer’s view of the world shows perfectly what is at stake. It is the dinner party Menelaus, king of Sparta, throws for his guest Telemachus. Menelaus’ wife, the beautiful Helen, tells a story to entertain the company. She describes how, many years earlier, she abandoned Menelaus and their young child to run away with a young houseguest named Paris – the event that led to the Trojan War.

  What we find shocking about the story, say Dreyfus and Kelly, is that no one is shocked. There is no moral outrage at this tale of betrayal and adultery. Homer admires Helen. So, in his account, does Menelaus himself. When she has finished, he says, ‘An excellent tale, my dear, and most becoming.’ Menelaus goes to sleep that night, says Homer, beside ‘Helen of the light robes, shining among women’.

  Clearly a culture in which someone can be admired for an act of adultery that led to a war in which thousands died is different from ours, and Dreyfus and Kelly do a fine job of explaining why, focusing on Homer’s concept of the sacred. Homer did not think in terms of internalised conscience, a sense of duty, an inner voice saying, ‘Thou shalt not.’ He did not think of moral agency at all as we do now.

  Instead, he and his contemporaries thought in terms of people being open to external forces, personified as gods, that call forth wonder and gratitude. What makes Helen great to Homer is ‘her ability to live a life that is constantly responsive to golden Aphrodite, the shining example of the sacred erotic dimension of existence’. A god, in Homer’s world, is ‘a mood that attunes us to what matters most in a situation, allowing us to respond appropriately without thinking’.

  Helen is ‘the embodiment of Eros’, and Eros for Homer is ‘not just physical or sexual pleasure’ but rather ‘an entire way of being that draws the best kinds of people naturally to one another’. Clearly Dreyfus and Kelly do not mean ‘the best kinds of people’ in a moral sense. Their entire case is amoral or pre-moral. They mean people who shimmer, like the dancer Nureyev, with the charisma of beauty or physical grace. That Helen betrays her husband and child, that yielding to erotic passion is incompatible with loyalty, duty and fidelity, is irrelevant. That is precisely their point. Polytheism – which the authors advocate – actually means ‘receptivity to a plurality of incompatible gods’.

  By reviving the ancient idea of polytheism the authors allow us to see with fresh eyes what is at stake in monotheism. At its heart is the moralisation of love. Once we step back from the minority Christian interpretation of Adam and Eve as a story about the sinfulness of sexuality, there is nothing anti-erotic in the Hebrew Bible. What the Bible is against is not Eros but adultery, not sex but infidelity, not beauty but betrayal.

  The key narrative of Genesis is the story of Abraham and Sarah, a married couple who embark on a journey together, suffer trials and disappointments and grow old together, but who stay faithful to one another and to God. Dreyfus and Kelly’s candid polytheism helps us understand why Genesis consistently portrays the world outside the covenantal family as a place of sexual anomie. Abraham and Isaac both fear that they will be killed so that their attractive wives can be taken into the royal harem. The people of Sodom attempt to commit an act of homosexual rape on two strangers. Shechem, a local prince, abducts and rapes Jacob’s daughter Dinah. In Egypt, Potiphar’s wife attempts to seduce Joseph. Failing, she accuses him of rape.

  Genesis does not contrast monotheism with idolatry. That comes later in the Bible. Instead it contrasts it with a world of sexual free-for-all. Many gods means many commitments, or rather no commitment at all, just the mood of the moment, deified, sacralised, stripped bare of any moral content, with no qualms for whom one may be betraying or what the consequences may be. It is not surprising that when Dreyfus and Kelly seek contemporary examples of the sacred they choose sport (the baseball hero Lou Gehrig, Roger Federer the tennis master) or art (Nurey
ev, the ballet dancer). Sport and art are for us safe space, time out, where we experience emotions that would be devastating if we were to live by them in the real world.

  There is a reason why the world of Homer exists no more. A world of beautiful heroines and noble warriors is also a world where the unbeautiful are inconsequential, where battlefields are strewn with corpses, where moral commitments mean nothing and where life, when it loses its vividness, is a bore. The Hebrew Bible achieved something no other literature, sacred or secular, has ever done: made love a moral adventure and invested marriage with metaphysical grandeur. Comparing the fidelity of husband and wife to the ideal of faithfulness between humanity and God, it turned marriage into a sacred covenant.

  Consider the metaphors for God in the Bible. There are, to be sure, times when God is seen as a king, a sovereign. That is a political image and it is used for the social, legislative and judicial aspects of religion. But overwhelmingly the imagery is drawn from the family. God is a husband and we are his wife. God is a parent and we are his children.

  It is in those relationships, between marriage partners, or between parents and children, that we find the love, responsibility, steadfastness, kindness and care that are the essence of covenantal relationships. Yes, there are times in the Bible where God is portrayed as majestic, royal, all-powerful, sustaining all life and watching over the affairs of humanity. But the most powerful images are of God the caring father (and, in the last chapters of Isaiah, a comforting mother) and the loving partner:

  ‘Though the mountains be shaken

  and the hills be removed,

  yet my unfailing love for you will not be shaken

  nor my covenant of peace be removed,’

  says the Lord, who has compassion on you.

  (Isaiah 54:10)

  Faith is the moralisation of love. It is not a cognitive act. Emunah, the biblical word for faith, really means ‘covenant loyalty’. It means being true to the bond you have made with another, honouring your word and trusting them to honour theirs. God makes promises to us. We make promises to God. At the deepest level of metaphor and meaning, faith is a marriage, a bond entered into in love and honoured in life.

  Faith lives, breathes and has its being in the world of relationships, in the respect we pay our marriage partner, the steadfastness with which we bring up our children, and the way we extend the feeling of family to embrace neighbours and strangers in acts of hospitality and kindness. ‘Love your neighbour as yourself.’ ‘Love the stranger.’ The familiarity of these commands should not blind us to their strangeness. The Greeks would have found them unintelligible. Strangers, to them, were barbarians. Every morality contains a principle of justice. Unique to Abrahamic faith is the centrality of love.9

  Here, though, the possibility of misunderstanding is great, and I need to revisit the two most misunderstood of all biblical passages: Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, and the binding of Isaac. The former is about the relationship of husband and wife, the latter about that between parent and child. I will argue that neither means what it has been taken to mean.

  The story of Adam and Eve has been read, outside Judaism, as a story about original sin, by which we are all tainted. There are good grounds for not reading it this way. First, the concept of original sin is not mentioned anywhere in the Hebrew Bible.10 Second, it offends against justice. As Jeremiah and Ezekiel both say, guilt attaches only to the sinner, not to his or her descendants.11 Third, God explicitly forgives humanity after the Flood: ‘Never again will I curse the ground because of man, even though every inclination of his heart is evil from childhood’ (Genesis 8:21). Fourth, there is a partial return to Eden through the covenant of Sinai. The ark the Israelites carried with them in the wilderness was adorned by cherubim, angelic figures mentioned elsewhere only in the context of Eden.12 The Torah is described in the book of Proverbs (3:18) as ‘the tree of life’. The sanctuary in space, the Sabbath in time, symbolise paradise regained, Eden re-entered.13

  The key to the story of the first humans lies in a sequence of three sentences at the end, whose juxtaposition seems to make no sense at all. They begin with Adam’s curse for having eaten the forbidden fruit:

  ‘By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return.’

  The man named his wife Eve, because she would become the mother of all the living.

  The Lord God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them. (Genesis 3:19–21)

  What is the connection between mortality (‘to dust you will return’) and the man giving a new name to his wife? And what is the connection between that and God making the couple garments of skin, as if he were giving them a gift as they left the garden?

  To understand the passage we have first to realise that it is not a myth but a philosophical parable about language and relationships, the difference between species and individuals, nouns and names, and about what lifts the relationship between husband and wife from the biological to the anthropological, from animal reproduction to human relationship and love.14

  The story of the first humans in Genesis 2 begins with God giving Adam the ability to use language to classify things. He names the animals: ‘Whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name.’ He sorts and labels them as species. But human beings do not function at the level of species. They are conscious of themselves as unique individuals. They are not merely alone, a physical state. They can also feel lonely, a psychological state. So, ‘for the man no suitable helper was found’. He is not alone, but he is lonely. Animals form species; humans are individuals.

  God then creates a partner for the man. But if we listen carefully to the poem he speaks on seeing her for the first time, we note something odd: ‘She shall be called woman, for she was taken out of man.’ He names the woman as he named the animals. He uses a generic noun. She is ‘woman’, not a person but a type. She is ‘taken out of man’, ‘helper to man’, but not an individual with her own fears and feelings. Adam does not understand her otherness. She is, for him, merely his mirror image: ‘bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh’.

  Eve rebels against this by striking out on her own. The conversation she has with the serpent is the first conversation she has. Adam has spoken about her but not to her. She eats the forbidden fruit. She gives some to her husband, who also eats. She has become the prime mover in the relationship, but still they have not spoken.

  Then comes the discovery of their sin. God confronts them both. Each responds by denying responsibility. Adam blames the woman. The woman blames the serpent. Still they are talking about self and other as if they are not free and choosing individuals, but mere things caught up in the forces that operate on things.

  Then Adam hears that he is mortal. Dust he is, and to dust he will return. Suddenly Adam understands the difference between individual and species. Species live on; individuals die. There was a world before we were born, there will be a world after we die, but we will not be here to see it. In the knowledge of our mortality we discover our individuality.

  But if Adam is an individual, so is the woman. And God has just said to the woman, ‘With pain you will give birth to children.’ Within the curse is a blessing. Humans may be mortal, but something of them survives their death, namely children. But children are born only when man and woman are joined in a bond of love. That is when Adam gives his wife the name Chavah, Eve, meaning ‘mother of all life’. The point is not which name, but the fact that it is a name, not a noun. Species have nouns, individuals have names. The woman is now, for the man, not ‘woman’, but Eve. Adam has discovered personhood, uniqueness, individuality, and thus the difference between biology and anthropology. Animals form species, humans are individuals. Animals mate, humans relate. Animals reproduce, humans beget. Animals have sex, humans have love.

  The rabbis said that Adam became the first penitent and was forgiven.15 God then shows kindnes
s to the couple by making them garments of skin. The rabbis said that they were made of snakeskin,16 as if to say: The very thing that led you to sin (the serpent) will now protect you. Your physicality, which first caused you embarrassment, can be made holy when transmuted into love and sanctified by a bond of trust. Far from ending on a note of condemnation, it ends on a note of divine grace.

  The story teaches us about language and love, and about the difference between biological reproduction – a property of the species – and the human family, which is always made up of individuals who are more and other than their similarities. Even clothing, which God endorses with his gift, signals that we are not naked and transparent to one another. There is a part of each of us that always remains hidden. In Hebrew the word chavah, Eve, also has the meaning of ‘hidden’.17

  There are two subtle hints in the narrative that this is what the story is about. The first, often confused in translation, is that the text speaks throughout of ha-adam, ‘the man’, not adam, ‘Adam’, which is, like Eve, a proper name. ‘The man’ becomes Adam only when ‘the woman’ becomes Eve.

  The second is that the name of God changes too. In Genesis 1, God is called Elohim, a noun meaning roughly ‘the totality of forces operative in the universe’. In Genesis 2 – 3, he is called Hashem-Elokim, and in Genesis 4, immediately after the Adam-Eve story, he is called Hashem alone. Hashem is God’s proper name, just as Adam is Adam’s and Eve, Eve’s. Our experience of God mirrors our experience of other people. When we relate to other people as persons, we relate to God as a person. Or, to put it differently, God as Hashem is the transcendental reality of interpersonal relations. We love God through loving other people. That is the only way.