J onathan Sacks's splendid new book moves on three levels - a socio-political, explanatory level; a level of textual exegesis; and a philosophical-ethical level. In the first part, he mainly offers a theory about the roots of religious and other forms of social violence. In the second part, he provides an exemplary rereading of some of the biblical accounts relating to rejection and acceptance. And in the third part, he combines the two, offering a moral vision of what religion should be like in order to accommodate the Other and to reject violence.
But the levels are nowhere rigidly kept distinct; each of the three projects enhances the others. Along the way, one is additionally regaled with many of the insights and aperçus that one has come to expect from Sacks's writings, and that make one understand for the first time something long-known but now seen from an entirely new perspective.
In brief, the thesis in the first part is that groups emerge to give people a sense of identity but they soon become liable to the dualism of "us" versus "them", the tendency to see others as alien, as the enemy. We tend to be altruistic to members of our own group but violent towards those outside our group. Denying the identity provided by groups as a response to the violence is hopeless; it was the hope of the liberal enlightenment with its emerging free-market economy and stress on the rights of the individual. The hopelessness of that response can be seen, as Sacks points out, in the end-point of that attempt, the concentration camps and the gulags.
But, in the case of religious violence between Jews, Christians, and Muslims, there is an additional feature: sibling rivalry. Although Sacks tries hard to make this a problem for all three Abrahamic faiths, it is in truth a special problem for the latter two, since they saw themselves as superseding their parent religion. Sacks grounds the idea of religious sibling rivalry in the same idea in the psychoanalytic texts of the 19th and early 20th centuries.
In the second part of the book, Sacks engages in careful, sustained, and always illuminating readings of a set of biblical texts about sibling rivalry, particularly in the Hagar-Ishmael, Isaac-Jacob-Esau, and Joseph-and-his-brothers stories. The lesson learned is the rejection of rejection. God does not simply reject Ishmael and Esau, for example, in favour of their siblings. They are accepted and loved in their own terms, different from the terms on which their brothers are loved and accepted.
He discusses how to deal with texts that promote violence
In the final part, Sacks introduces the idea of a distinction between a universal morality of justice and a particularistic ethics of love. Although love is particular, extending from the relationships in a family to those in one's own group, morality embraces all persons, insiders to the group and outsiders, us and them, residents and aliens.
There is also a thorough discussion of the need to deal with hard texts, ie those texts within a tradition that appear to counsel violence. Religious traditions do and should deal with them by insisting that there is no legitimacy to the idea of the plain, uninterpreted word in these cases; each religious tradition will deal with those texts through a tradition of interpretation, a tradition that often shows that the text means almost the diametric opposite of what it appears to be saying.
Not for nothing did I open by saying that this is a splendid book. It is a very good one and (as if further evidence were needed) shows the former British Chief Rabbi as a serious and important social-religious thinker. I have two reservations: I remain unconvinced that the right model for understanding the tensions between the three Abrahamic faiths is that of the psychoanalytic idea of sibling rivalry (beyond sameness of name of course), and, secondly, I do not think that the lessons of the book, important as they are, should be addressed equally to all three faiths today, as seems to be sometimes assumed (although, to be fair, never explicitly claimed).
