Simon Rocker is Judaism Editor for the JC
Lord Sacks’s new book, Not in God’s Name – Confronting Religious Violence , should be a must-read for any Jewish educator. Its central section is a close reading of some of the stories of Genesis, interpreting them in a way which shows how sacred texts can support conciliation between people of different faiths rather than confrontation.
While he depicts conflict between Jews, Christians and Muslims as a form of sibling rivalry, it is not a permanent condition, he argues. Genesis begins with fratricide – Cain murders Abel – but ends with the reconciliation of Joseph and his brothers.
Any good book stirs further questions and here are some prompted by it.
1) At one point, Lord Sacks remarks that the biblical stories he explores “only reveal their full meaning to those who have undergone a long period of moral growth”. From which we might extract the wider principle that our understanding of Judaism must be evolutionary, changing in the light of accumulated insight and experience.
But what does an evolutionary theory of Orthodox Judaism look like? Traditionally, there has been broader scope for interpretation in aggadah, the narrative parts of the Torah, than halachah, the legal codes. But if we grow morally, do not our perspectives change here too?
At another point, Lord Sacks comments, “When religion becomes an earthquake, a whirlwind, a fire, it can no longer be the still, small voice of God summoning us to freedom.”
That is a reference to the famous revelation to Elijah that God is to be found in the “still small voice”, not the mountain-shattering earthquake he has just witnessed. It comes shortly after the theatrical showdown on Mount Carmel when the prophets of Ba’al are routed – then killed. For us, the still, small voice might seem a transitional point, as though it were a development in religious understanding and the later episode was a critique of the earlier.
2) Addressing the question of violence in the Bible, Lord Sacks points out that when God says “vengeance is Mine”, what is being said is that retribution is a divine prerogative and human beings are not to take the law into their own hands. He also observes that the rabbis effectively neutralised the command to wipe out Amalek and similar commands as far as later generations were concerned (another example of religious evolution). That helps to defuse potentially incendiary texts. But it still leaves us with the problem of why some of the incidents of extreme – to our eyes – violence were necessary in the first place.
3) Lord Sacks notes the repetition of the phrase “stranger and a temporary resident” at different points in the Tanach, beginning with Abraham. Even though they are promised the land, in Leviticus God reminds the Israelites that they are “strangers and temporary residents” – a phrase echoed by King David in Chronicles.
When I met him recently , I asked whether this notion might not be used as an implicit critique of the sort of religious nationalism that has driven the settlement movement. He demurred at such an interpretation and said that the phrase “stranger and temporary resident” meant more generally that we all have to live with uncertainty.
Even so, does not the notion of “temporary resident” undercut the land-first ideology that has become so influential within the Religious Zionism post-67?
4) While Lord Sacks appeals for respect for religious diversity – the book is in one sense a sequel to his earlier The Dignity of Difference – he told me that he did not believe that Jewish school children needed to study other faiths. Or rather, that they should be taught about them as cultures rather than religions in the sense that you should understand how your neighbours live.
But is that enough in today’s world? Perhaps Jewish sixthformers ought to be doing courses in Jewish-Christian and Jewish-Muslim relations, both to understand the historic tensions and also what is being done by those of goodwill to lay the foundations of co-existence.
