Not in God's Name (22 page)

Abraham does not seek to impose his views on others. Yet his contemporaries sense that there is something special, Godly, about him. Melchizedek, king of Salem, salutes him with the words, ‘Blessed be Abram by God Most High, Creator of heaven and earth’ (14:19). The Hittites say to him, ‘You are a prince of God among us’ (23:6). Abraham impresses his contemporaries by the way he lives, not the way he forces, or even urges, others to live. He seeks to be
true to his faith while being a blessing to others regardless of their faith
. That seems to me a truth for the twenty-first century.

There was clearly a profound love between Abraham and God, and it is this that eventually inspired not only Jews but Christians and Muslims also, in their different ways, to see themselves as his heirs. But all who embrace Abraham must aspire to live like Abraham. Nothing could be more alien to the spirit of Abrahamic monotheism than what is happening today in the name of jihad. Barbarism and brutality, the embrace of terror and the murder of the innocent, the cold, cruel killing of those with whom you disagree, the pursuit of power in the name of empire, and the idea that you can impose truth by force: these are pagan ideas that have no place in the universe of Abraham or Abraham’s God. They constitute neither justice nor love. They are a desecration.

To be a child of Abraham is to be open to the divine presence wherever it reveals itself. The faith of Abraham’s children is told in a series of stories about how strangers turned out to be not what they seemed. Tamar is not a prostitute. Ruth is not an alien. Moses is not an Egyptian. Abraham’s three visitors are not mere men. Strangers can turn out to be angels. Pharaoh’s daughter may be a heroine. David, the inconsequential child, becomes the greatest of Israel’s kings. The ethical imperative to emerge from such a faith is: search for the trace of God in the face of the Other. Never believe that God is defined by and confined to the people like you.
God is larger than any nation, language, culture or creed. He lives within our group, but he also lives beyond.

‘Because that which connects human thought and feeling with the infinite and all-surpassing Divine light must [be refracted into] a multiplicity of colours, therefore every people and society must have a different spiritual way of life.’ So said Rabbi Abraham Kook, first chief rabbi of pre-state Israel.
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‘The righteous of all nations have a share in the world to come,’ said the rabbis in the second century.
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Rabbi Akiva, the sage of the late first century, said, ‘Beloved is every human person for he or she is in the image of God. Beloved is Israel (i.e. each Jew), for each of us is one of the children of God.’
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That is how Jews defined themselves in the past and do today. We feel ourselves close to God but we equally believe that God has a relationship with all humanity as defined in the Noahide code.

There are times when the Bible portrays Gentiles as conspicuously more religious than Jews. On the holiest day of the Jewish year, Yom Kippur, we read the book of Jonah, in which the prophet is sent to Israel’s enemies, the Assyrians at Nineveh, to preach repentance. Jonah tries to run away. Who wants to see their enemies forgiven? Yet God refuses to let him escape. Jonah delivers his message, a mere five words in Hebrew, and the entire people repent. There is no instance in the entire Hebrew Bible of the Israelites responding with such alacrity to a prophetic call. The effect of reading this story at this most sacred of times forces one into a sense of humility. For all the natural pride we feel in being part of our group – the people of the covenant, a holy nation – we are brought face to face with the fact that others may sometimes respond to the word of God better than we do.

That is what the dual structure of Hebrew spirituality does. It accepts the inevitability of identity in the here-and-now. We are not all the same. There is an Us and Them. But God is universal as
well as particular, which means that he can be found among Them as well as among Us. God transcends our particularities. That is why he often appears where we least expect him. Sometimes he speaks in the voice of a stranger, the man who wrestled with Jacob at night, or the one who found Joseph wandering in a field, or even the pagan prophet Balaam. The unique dialectic in the Hebrew Bible – so rarely understood, so often reviled – between universality and particularity is precisely what is necessary if we are to have identity without violence.

For though God is our God, he is also the God of all, accessible to all: the God who blesses Ishmael, who tells the children of Jacob not to hate the descendants of Esau, who listens to the prayers of strangers and whose messengers appear as strangers. Only a faith that recognises both types of covenant – the universal and the particular – is capable of understanding that God’s image may be present in the one whose faith is not mine and whose relationship with God is different from mine.

Humanity lives suspended between the twin facts of commonality and difference.
If we were completely unalike, we would be unable to communicate. If we were completely alike, we would have nothing to say
. The Noah covenant speaks to our commonality, the Abraham and Sinai covenants to our differences. That is what makes Abrahamic monotheism different from tribalism on the one hand (each nation with its own God) and universalism on the other (one God, therefore one way). Neither tribalism nor universalism is adequate to the human situation. Tribalism envisages a world permanently at war (my god is stronger than yours). Universalism risks a dualistic world divided between the saved and the damned (I have the truth, you have only error
¹¹
), and hence to holy wars, crusades and jihads.

What if the God of the crusaders, the terrorists, the inquisitors, the witch-burners and the jihadists were also the God of their victims? What if one could not, with absolute certainty, rule out that possibility? Humanity lives in that ‘what if’ and cannot survive without it. For we are finite, but God is infinite. We are
limited, but God is unlimited. However perfect our faith, there is something of God that lies beyond, which is known to God but cannot be known to the frail, fallible humanity that is all we are and ever will be, this side of heaven.

Both read the Bible day and night,

But thou read’st black where I read white.

William Blake
¹

Never say, I hate, I kill, because my religion says so. Every text needs interpretation. Every interpretation needs wisdom. Every wisdom needs careful negotiation between the timeless and time. Fundamentalism reads texts as if God were as simple as we are. That is unlikely to be true.

Religions, especially religions of the Book, have hard texts: verses, commands, episodes, narratives, that if understood literally and applied directly would not merely offend our moral sense. They would also go against our best understanding of the religion itself. There are many examples in the Hebrew Bible. There is the war of revenge against the Midianites. There is the war mandated against the seven nations in the land of Canaan. There is the book of Joshua with its wars of conquest, and the bloody revenge against the Amalekites in the book of Samuel. These strike us as barbaric and at odds with an ethic of compassion, or even with a just war doctrine of the kind that emerged in both the Jewish and Christian traditions.

There were other internal laws that the rabbis found puzzling and morally problematic. There is, for instance, in Deuteronomy, a law about a stubborn and rebellious son who is to be put to death for what appears to us to be no worse than a serious case of juvenile delinquency. So incompatible did this seem with the principles of justice that the Talmud records the view that the law was never put into effect and exists only for didactic purposes and not to be implemented in practice.
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These texts – and there are notorious examples in the New Testament, the Qur’an and Hadith also – require the most careful interpretation if they are not to do great harm. That is why every text-based religion develops its own traditions of interpretation. Rabbinic Judaism declared Biblicism – accepting the authority of the written word while rejecting oral tradition, the position of the Sadducees and Karaites – as heresy. The rabbis said: ‘One who translates a verse literally is a liar.’
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The point is clear: no text without interpretation; no interpretation without tradition; or, as 2 Corinthians puts it, ‘The letter kills, but the spirit gives life’ (NIV, 2 Cor. 3:6).

For almost the whole of their histories, Jews, Christians and Muslims have wrestled with the meanings of their scriptures, developing in the process elaborate hermeneutic and jurisprudential systems. Medieval Christianity had its four levels of interpretation: literal, allegorical, moral and eschatological. Islam has its
fiqh
; its four schools of Sunni jurisprudence and their Shia counterparts; its principles of
taqleed, itjihad
and
qiyas
. Hard texts need interpreting; without it, they lead to violence. God has given us both the mandate and the responsibility to do just that. We are guardians of his word for the sake of his world.

That is why fundamentalism is so dangerous and so untraditional. It refers to many things in different contexts, but one of them is the tendency to read texts literally and apply them directly: to go straight from revelation to application without interpretation. In many religions, including Judaism, this is heretical. In most, it is schismatic. Internal battles have been fought over these issues in many faiths. But the general conclusion at which most have arrived is that it needs great wisdom together with a deep grounding in tradition to know how to apply the word to the world.

One reason is, of course, that these are often very ancient texts, originally directed to times and conditions quite unlike ours. The war commands of Deuteronomy and the book of Joshua, for example, belong to a time when warfare was systemic, endemic and
brutal. The massacre of populations was commonplace. Another reason is that we are dealing with sacred scripture, texts invested with the ultimate authority of God himself. How do you take the word of eternity and apply it to the here-and-now? That is never simple and self-understood. That is why, for much of the biblical era, ancient Israel had its prophets who delivered, not the word of the Lord for all time – that had been done by Moses – but the word of the Lord for
this
time. There are things that may be justified in an age of prophecy that are wholly unjustifiable at other times.

As a general rule, though, the application of every ancient text to another age involves an act of interpretation, and there is nothing inherently religious about this. It is a central problem in secular law and jurisprudence, deliberated over in every Supreme Court. How is a law enacted then to be understood now? It is a problem every theatrical director faces in deciding how, for example, to stage
The Merchant of Venice
for a contemporary audience. In each case, the issue is how to apply the-word-then to the-world-now, bridging the hermeneutical abyss of time and change. Religions develop rules of interpretation and structures of authority. Without these, as we see today, any group can do almost anything in the name of religion, selecting texts, taking them out of context, reading them literally and ignoring the rest. Without rules, principles and authority, sacred texts provide the charisma of seemingly divine authority for purposes that are all too human. As Shakespeare said, ‘The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.’
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What happens in the case of fundamentalism is a kind of principled impatience with this whole process. A radical thinker decides that the religious establishment is corrupt. In his eyes it has made its peace with the world, compromised its ideals and failed to live up to the pristine demands of the faith. Therefore let us live by the holy word as it was before it was interpreted and rendered pliable and easy-going. Recall that even the founder of Christianity told his disciples, ‘Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a
sword’ (NIV, Matt. 10:34). There is always a confrontational as well as an accommodationist reading of any tradition.

Usually, of course, radical religious movements within an established faith tend to be sectarian and small-scale. What makes the present moment different is precisely what made the Reformation different in Christianity: the emergence, at roughly the same time, of a back-to-the-text-as-it-was-in-the-beginning religiosity, together with a revolution in information technology that allows the radicals to bypass conventional means of communication: church sermons in the age of printing, local imams and community elders in the age of the Internet. Suddenly the radicals command the heights and address the masses, while the religious establishment is left flat-footed and outpaced and looking old.

There is another factor also, that has been present in the background of all three Abrahamic monotheisms, namely the sheer dissonance between the world of tradition and the secular domain. It begins to seem impossible to hold religion and society together. There comes a tipping point at which faith can no longer be seen as supporting the social or cultural order and becomes instead radically antagonistic towards it. The term ‘fundamentalism’, for example, was originally coined in the early twentieth century to describe a reaction within the Protestant church in America against what seemed to traditionalists to be a steady erosion of faith in the light of modern science and biblical criticism. There was a similar movement in Orthodox Judaism against any accommodation with the intellectual doctrines of the Enlightenment or the social pressures involved in Emancipation.

In Islam much of the energy that produced the new radicalism came out of a deep disillusionment with the secularisation and Westernisation of traditional societies after the First World War and the fall of the Ottoman Empire. In each case, the radical neotraditionalists felt the force of the echoing question: ‘What shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?’ (KJV, Mark 8:36) Fundamentalism emerges when people
feel that the world has been allowed to defeat the word. They, by contrast, are determined to defeat the world by means of the word.

To see how tradition has traditionally worked, let us take the single example of the war traditions in Judaism, those that most directly concern the relationship between religion and violence.

The first thing to note is that despite the apparent militarism of the early texts of Judaism, their underlying value was always peace. Already in Leviticus (26:6) we find the blessing, ‘I will grant peace in the land…and the sword will not pass through your country.’ The priestly benedictions end with a prayer for peace (Num. 6:26). By the eighth century
BCE
the prophets of Israel had become the first people in history to envisage a world at peace. The classic instance is Isaiah, who foresaw a time when the nations ‘will beat their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not take up sword against nation, nor will they train for war any more’ (Isa. 2:4). His vision of a world in which ‘they will neither harm nor destroy on all my holy mountain, for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea’ (Isa. 11:9) is part of the Hebrew Bible’s decisive break with the ethic of militarism that dominated the ancient world. It would not be revived, outside the Judeo-Christian tradition, until Kant’s secular essay on ‘perpetual peace’ in 1795.

One way of seeing the change that had come over the nation is by comparing two biblical texts, both of which describe the same moment: when God told King David not to build the Temple, assuring him that the work would be done by his son, Solomon. In 2 Samuel 7:6–7, God explains:

I have not dwelt in a house from the day I brought the Israelites up out of Egypt to this day. I have been moving about in a tent and a tabernacle. Wherever I have moved about among all the
people of Israel, did I ever speak a word to any of the tribal leaders of Israel whom I commanded to shepherd my people Israel, ‘Why have you not built me a house of cedar?’

The implication is that God does not need a monumental home of the kind built to ancient deities. He lives not in a building of cedar but in the human heart. In 1 Chronicles 22:8, written later, however, a further explanation is attributed to David:

The word of God came to me: ‘You have shed much blood. You have fought many wars. You shall not build a house for my Name, because you have shed much blood on the earth in my sight.’

The two passages are not incompatible: the commentators found no difficulty in reconciling them. But the new emphasis is palpable. War may sometimes be necessary, but it has no place in the domain of the holy. One who has ‘shed much blood’ may not build a house of God.

Centuries later the rabbis went much further still, and we can identify the moment at which they did so. It took place at the time – the late first or early second century
CE
– when Rabban Gamliel II was deposed as spiritual head of the Jewish community in Israel for his autocratic behaviour towards one of his colleagues, and R. Elazar ben Azariah was appointed in his place. At that time many disputed issues were resolved. This is how the Talmud describes one of them:

On that day, Judah, an Ammonite proselyte, came before them in the House of Study and asked: ‘Am I permitted to enter the assembly?’ R. Joshua said, ‘You are permitted to enter the congregation.’ Rabban Gamliel said, ‘Is it not a law that
An Ammonite or a Moabite may not enter the assembly of the Lord
(Deut. 23:4)?’ R. Joshua replied, ‘Do Ammon and Moab still live in their original homes? Long ago Sennacherib king of Assyria came and mixed up all the nations, as it says,
I removed
the boundaries of nations, I plundered their treasures; like a mighty one I subdued their kings
(Isaiah 10:13), and whatever is detached [from a group] is assumed to belong to the majority of the group…They then permitted [Judah the Ammonite] to enter the congregation.
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At a stroke the entire biblical legislation relating to Israel’s neighbours and enemies was declared inoperative, on the grounds that after Sennacherib’s conquests and population transfers (722–705
BCE
), the ‘nations’ could no longer be identified. As Maimonides writes about the seven nations against which Israel was commanded to wage war, ‘their memory has already perished’.
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We no longer know who is who. That chapter in Jewish history is closed.

What of Joshua’s campaign to conquer the land? Again the Talmud offers a radical interpretation, summarised by Maimonides in these words:

No war, either permitted or obligatory [such as a war of self-defence] may be initiated without first offering terms of peace…Joshua sent three messages before entering the land: the first, ‘Whoever wishes to flee, let him flee,’ the second, ‘Whoever wishes to make peace, let him make peace,’ the third, ‘Whoever wishes to make war, let him make war.’
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War, for Maimonides, is
never
mandated except when the effort to make peace has been tried, and failed.

What of the Amalekites, about whom the Bible commands the Israelites to ‘blot out their memory from under heaven’? Maimonides ruled that even at the outset the command only applied if the Amalekites refused to make peace and accept the seven Noahide laws. There was no categorical imperative to destroy them. To the contrary, even here peace was preferable. Maimonides added that in any case it was no longer applicable since what applied to the seven nations applied to the Amalekites
also. Sennacherib had transported and resettled the nations so that it was no longer possible to identify the ethnicity of any of the original people against whom the Israelites were commanded to fight. He also said, in
The Guide for the Perplexed
, that the command only applied to people of specific biological descent. It is not to be applied in general to enemies or haters of the Jewish people. So the command to wage war against the Amalekites no longer applies.
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