Jonathan Sacks - Not in God’s Name: Confronting Religious Violence
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In this powerful and timely book, one of the most admired and authoritative religious leaders of our time tackles the phenomenon of religious extremism and violence committed in the name of God. If religion is perceived as being part of the problem, Rabbi Sacks argues, then it must also form part of the solution. When religion becomes a zero-sum conceitthat is, my religion is the only right path to God, therefore your religion is by definition wrongand individuals are motivated by what Rabbi Sacks calls altruistic evil, violence between peoples of different beliefs appears to be the only natural outcome.
But through an exploration of the roots of violence and its relationship to religion, and employing groundbreaking biblical analysis and interpretation, Rabbi Sacks shows that religiously inspired violence has as its source misreadings of biblical texts at the heart of all three Abrahamic faiths. By looking anew at the book of Genesis, with its foundational stories of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, Rabbi Sacks offers a radical rereading of many of the Bibles seminal stories of sibling rivalry: Cain and Abel, Isaac and Ishmael, Jacob and Esau, Joseph and his brothers, Rachel and Leah.
Abraham himself, writes Rabbi Sacks, sought to be a blessing to others regardless of their faith. That idea, ignored for many of the intervening centuries, remains the simplest definition of Abrahamic faith. It is not our task to conquer or convert the world or enforce uniformity of belief. It is our task to be a blessing to the world. The use of religion for political ends is not righteousness but idolatry . . . To invoke God to justify violence against the innocent is not an act of sanctity but of sacrilege. Here is an eloquent call for people of goodwill from all faiths and none to stand together, confront the religious extremism that threatens to destroy us, and declare: Not in Gods Name.
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ALSO BY JONATHAN SACKS
Arguments for the Sake of Heaven: Emerging Trends in Traditional Judaism
Celebrating Life: Finding Happiness in Unexpected Places
Community of Faith
Crisis and Covenant: Jewish Thought After the Holocaust
The Dignity of Difference: How to Avoid the Clash of Civilizations
Exodus: The Book of Redemption
Faith in the Future: The Ecology of Hope and the Restoration of Family, Community, and Faith
From Optimism to Hope: Thoughts for the Day
Future Tense: Jews, Judaism, and Israel in the Twenty-first Century
Genesis: The Book of Beginnings
The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning
The Home We Build Together: Re-creating Society
A Letter in the Scroll: Understanding Our Jewish Identity and Exploring the Legacy of the Worlds Oldest Religion
Leviticus: The Book of Holiness
Morals and Markets
One People?: Tradition, Modernity, and Jewish Unity
The Persistence of Faith: Religion, Morality, and Society in a Secular Age
The Politics of Hope
To Heal a Fractured World: The Ethics of Responsibility
Tradition in an Untraditional Age
Will We Have Jewish Grandchildren?: Jewish Continuity and How to Achieve It
Copyright 2015 by Jonathan Sacks
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Schocken Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Ltd., Toronto. Originally published in Great Britain by Hodder & Stoughton, a Hachette UK company, London, in 2015.
Schocken Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
All Scripture references are taken from the authors own translation, unless otherwise indicated. (Scripture references marked KJV are taken from The Holy Bible, King James Version.)
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint the following previously published material:
Scripture references marked NIV are taken from The Holy Bible, New International Version, copyright 1979, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, formerly International Bible Society. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Written with a Pencil in a Sealed Wagon by Dan Pagis, translated by Anthony Rudolf and Miriam Neiger-Fleishchmann. Copyright Anthony Rudolf and Miriam Neiger-Fleishchmann. First published in Silent Conversations: A Readers Life by Anthony Rudolf, Seagull Books/University of Chicago Press, in 2013.
Faces of the Enemy by Sam Keen, first published in Faces of the Enemy: Reflections of the Hostile Imagination by Sam Keen, HarperSanFrancisco, in 1992. Used by permission.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Sacks, Jonathan, [date]
Not in Gods name : confronting religious violence / Jonathan Sacks.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-8052-4334-5 (hard cover : alk. paper). ISBN 978-0-8052-4335-2 (e-book).
1. ViolenceReligious aspects. 2. Abrahamic religions. 3. Bible. GenesisCriticism, interpretation, etc. I. Title.
BL 65. V 55 S 24 2015 201.76332dc23 2015016809
eBook ISBN9780805243352
www.schocken.com
Cover image: Total solar eclipse by Dan Suzio/Science Source/Getty Images
Cover design by Oliver Munday
v4.1_r2
a
To my brother Eliot,
With love
I could not have completed this work without the help of some remarkable people who read the manuscript and made many insightful suggestions. My thanks go to Mark Berner, Dayan Ivan Binstock, Dr Megan Burridge, Revd. Canon Professor Richard Burridge, David Frei, Professor Robert P. George, Rabbi Alex Greenberg, Ed Husain, Justin Mclaren, Geoffrey Paul, Rabbi Yehudah Sarna, Professor Leslie Wagner and Professor N. T. Wright. Their comments saved me from many inaccuracies and infelicities. The errors that remain are my own. I also owe an enormous debt to Prince El Hassan bin Talal and Professor Akbar Ahmed, two figures who over the years have inspired me with their generous and deeply humane vision of Islam.
Special thanks to my office team of Joanna Benarroch, Dan Sacker and Val Sheridan for the kindness and efficiency they show daily; to my indefatigable and motivating literary agent Louise Greenberg; and to Altie Karper and her team at Schocken for their enthusiasm and professionalism. My greatest thanks as always go to my wife Elaine, my best reader and constant support.
Ultimately this book could not have been written without many encounters over the years with people of different faiths who have known, and had the courage to show, that our overarching humanity transcends our religious differences. They and what they stand for are our best hope for the future. Religious extremism flourishes when the best lack all conviction, while the worst are filled with passionate intensity. That must no longer be the case. Religiously motivated violence must be fought religiously as well as militarily, and with passionate intensity, for this will be one of the defining battles of the twenty-first century.
Jonathan Sacks
March 2015 / Adar 5755
Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.
Blaise Pascal
When religion turns men into murderers, God weeps.
So the book of Genesis tells us. Having made human beings in his image, God sees the first man and woman disobey the first command, and the first human child commit the first murder. Within a short space of time the world was filled with violence. God saw how great the wickedness of the human race had become on the earth. We then read one of the most searing sentences in religious literature. God regretted that he had made man on the earth, and his heart was filled with pain (Gen. 6:6).
Too often in the history of religion, people have killed in the name of the God of life, waged war in the name of the God of peace, hated in the name of the God of love and practised cruelty in the name of the God of compassion. When this happens, God speaks, sometimes in a still, small voice almost inaudible beneath the clamour of those claiming to speak on his behalf. What he says at such times is: Not in My Name.
Religion in the form of polytheism entered the world as the vindication of power. Not only was there no separation of church and state; religion was the transcendental justification of the state. Why was there hierarchy on earth? Because there was hierarchy in heaven. Just as the sun ruled the sky, so the pharaoh, king or emperor ruled the land. When some oppressed others, the few ruled the many, and whole populations were turned into slaves, this was so it was said to defend the sacred order written into the fabric of reality itself. Without it, there would be chaos. Polytheism was the cosmological vindication of the hierarchical society. Its monumental buildings, the ziggurats of Babylon and pyramids of Egypt, broad at the base, narrow at the top, were hierarchys visible symbols. Religion was the robe of sanctity worn to mask the naked pursuit of power.
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