Not in God’s name
Noël Staples looks for answers in the new book by Jonathan Sacks
While former chief rabbi Jonathan Sacks does not give answers as to how the violence and atrocities being perpetrated by Islamic State might actually be stopped, he does suggest how they arise, how wrong are the reasons given by the perpetrators and how, when all their bloodletting is done, they will still have failed to address their real problems. Sacks naturally views the problem from a Jewish perspective and helpfully italicises important points. His anthropomorphic reference throughout to God as male may irritate.
Identity
Beginning with earliest human groups – hunter gatherers – Sacks discusses identity and trust in groups of about 150, when one can know individuals sufficiently well to trust them. ‘Morality begins with kin.’ Other groups are ‘them’. Humans tend to favour their own group members. Violence arises from identity conflicts – the ‘us and them’ mentality.
The early religions created moral communities, thus solving the problem of trust between strangers.
There is an oblique, not direct, connection between religion and identity-based violence. Sacks identifies three historical attempts to break down identity and unite humans: (a) Pauline Christianity, (b) The Enlightenment and (c) the cult of individuality, where we in the west are now, though it is hard to see how the latter might unite.
Religion enters the equation only because it is the most powerful force ever devised for the creation and maintenance of large-scale groups by solving the problem of (mis)trust between strangers.
The violence and atrocities now being committed by Islamic State in the name of religion are examples of what Sacks calls ‘altruistic evil’, which stems from dualism. Judaism, Christianity and Islam, the three Abrahamic religions, are monotheisms, believing in one God, creator of everything including violence.
‘Dualism (the light/dark, good/evil divide of the much earlier Zoroastrianism) is what happens when cognitive dissonance becomes unbearable, when the world as it is is simply too unlike the world as we believed it ought to be.’ It denies ‘the unity and omnipotence of God in order to preserve his perfect goodness.’
Sacks describes what he calls ‘pathological dualism’, which ‘sees humanity itself as radically, ontologically divided into the unimpeachably good and the irredeemably bad. You are either one or the other: either one of the saved, the redeemed, the chosen, or a child of Satan, the devil’s disciple.’ It is from this kind of dualism that humans are able to objectify others and do evil unto them without compassion.
Scapegoating
Although Sacks writes much about antisemitism he says it is only because it illustrates scapegoating. Scapegoating – committing violence on a third party when the real problem is unresolved internal conflict, such as that between Sunni and Shiite Muslims – is what Islamic State is engaged in. The term ‘antisemitism’ was first coined in 1879. Xenophobia, though, is as old as the human condition.
Genesis provides Sacks with the earliest examples of sibling rivalry which, rightly or wrongly, Sacks sees as the basis of religious conflict: Cain and Abel, Abraham’s sons Ishmael and Isaac, Isaac’s sons Jacob and Esau, Jacob’s wives Rachel and Leah, and Joseph and his brothers. God’s covenant was made both to Jacob and, through Hagar stranded in the desert with her baby, to Ishmael, and through future generations. Sacks devotes three chapters to analysing the stories to demonstrate that God favours both conflicting sides. All humans are thus sacred, subject to God’s covenants. Repentance is the theme of the Joseph story in which Judah experiences role reversal. He proposed selling Joseph into slavery, coming full circle by offering himself as a slave in place of Benjamin. It is only by becoming able to place himself (a free man) totally in the position of ‘the other’ (a slave) that he is able to repent.
The way we learn not to commit evil is to experience an event from the perspective of the victim.
This, though, may not work well for suicide bombers and murderers. One thinks also, perhaps, of the violence between Jews and Palestinians. The Rachel and Leah (‘rejection of rejection’) story leads Sacks to conclude: ‘But love is not enough. You cannot build a family, let alone a society, on love alone. For that you need justice also. Love is partial, justice is impartial.’
The final section discusses possible ways forward and cites the case of Csanád Szegedi, once a leading member of Jobbik, known as the Movement for a Better Hungary but described by some as fascist, neo-Nazi, racist and anti-Semitic. On discovering himself a Jew, however, Szegedi performed a volte-face, now attending synagogue and defending human rights for everyone.
To be cured of potential violence towards the Other, I must be able to imagine myself as the Other.
Szegedi exemplifies Sacks’ dictum, but unimaginatively!
Justice
Following his conclusion that ‘Love is not enough’ Sacks continues with a chapter looking at ‘The Universality of Justice, the Particularity of Love’, beginning: ‘Behind this whole analysis is the obvious question. Why does God need to choose in the first place?’ Here the Quaker in me bridles at the anthropomorphic suggestion that God chooses. Humans choose – God is not human, though Sacks acknowledges that ‘it is axiomatic to the Bible that God has no image.’ When a Christian or anyone finally comes to God, the experience is ineffable. The feeling of being spoken to is, at best, a translation of something cosmic, both transcendent and immanent, into human words – tools of the intellect, which cannot grasp the spirit.
The need for intelligent and wise interpretation receives a chapter to itself. The problem of under-standing religious texts is analysed.
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.
The elders of Balby remind us:
…these things we do not lay upon you as a rule or form to walk by, but that all, with the measure of light which is pure and holy, may be guided; and so in the light walking and abiding, these may be fulfilled in the Spirit, not from the letter, for the letter killeth, but the Spirit giveth life.
Quaker faith & practice 1.01
Indeed, we Quakers, with our real-time religion, are wary of codifying spirituality, regularly revising Quaker faith & practice. Sacks acknowledges Paul’s advice to the Corinthians (2 Cor 3:6)
Truth
Part of the way forward is for religions to relinquish power. Power is for secular government. Religions deal with meaning and truth: ‘You cannot impose truth by force.’ The separation of powers should be threefold, not only spiritual and temporal, but also judicial.
We must let go of hate, which harms hater more than hated, and we must look to our education. Petrodollars have been used ‘to fund networks of schools, madrassahs, university professorships and departments dedicated to Wahhabi or Salafist interpretations of Islam’. Islamic fundamentalists widely use the internet to spread hatred. We need ‘to train a generation of religious leaders and educators who embrace the world in its diversity, and sacred texts in their maximal generosity’. Our education system is sadly lacking in this regard. ‘Jews, Christians and Muslims [must] say what they failed to say in the past: We are all children of Abraham.’
Sacks is, as always, a lucid master of words. The problem not addressed, though, is how now to stop suicidal fundamentalists who want to kill and die as martyrs, and to be rewarded by God in paradise. I have given only the bare bones of this excellent book. It deserves your close reading.
The really depressing point for a Quaker for whom the Peace Testimony applies is that you can’t actually stop a killer with whom you have no communicative access and who would almost certainly reject any appeal to reasoned discourse, except by killing them.
Not in God’s Name: Confronting Religious Violence by Jonathan Sacks. Hodder & Stoughton. ISBN: 9781473616516. £20.
