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Summary
Summary
***2015 National Jewish Book Award Winner***
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 conceit--that is, my religion is the only right path to God, therefore your religion is by definition wrong--and 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 Bible's 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 God's Name.
Author Notes
RABBI LORD JONATHAN SACKS is a global religious leader and the award-winning author of more than twenty-five books. He is a frequent and respected contributor to radio, television, and the press around the world and teaches at universities in Britain, the United States, and Israel. Rabbi Sacks holds sixteen honorary degrees and has received many awards in recognition of his work, including the Jerusalem Prize and, in 2016, the Templeton Prize. He served as Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth from 1991 to 2013.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Chief rabbi emeritus of the United Hebrew Congregations of the British Commonwealth, Jonathan Sacks (Covenant & Conversation) turns his prodigious intellect to deconstructing the mechanisms of religious violence. This well-researched tome spans human life, from the birth of human communities and discussions of the mechanics of social cohesion, to contemporary issues of terrorism and the healing work of recent popes. Weaving in the anthropological contributions of monotheism against the fractious lethality of dualism, Sacks dissects our civilization in crisis through the prism of anti-Semitism. If tyrants can convince others that their faith, their values, their God is under attack, Sacks argues, then they have a potent paranoiac cocktail for sustaining repression, and unleashing the dangerous "altruistic evil" that arose in Nazi Germany and that we see in terrorist attacks today. But if Judaism, Christianity, and Islam can overcome their "sibling rivalry"-which Sacks dismantles in a fresh interpretation of Genesis-these monotheistic religions can again offer a generative, life-affirming model of moral cohesion in our postmodern world. Sacks displays his wide learning and empathy in service of an ambitious, ingenious worldview. We'd all be wise to listen. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Inspired by Isaiah's vision of nations beating their swords into plowshares, Sacks embraces religion as the pathway to peace. But this learned rabbi understands why New Atheists regard violence as the essence of a religious mindset that the modern world must outgrow: Jews, Christians, and Muslims have often quoted scripture to justify atrocities. Sacks denounces such atrocities as blasphemies. But he sees no hope for real peace in a secularism that has left entire nations so hungry for transcendent meaning that they have imbibed toxic pseudo-religions such as communism and Nazism, a secularism now priming rootless, morally famished young people for recruitment into global networks of terror. Cut off from the humanizing insights of the wisest exponents of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, these networks perpetuate an us-them dualism legitimizing cruelty against outsiders as service to God. Repudiating this lethally false theology, Sacks unfolds a genuinely inclusive and pacific Abrahamic faith by burrowing into the Hebrew Bible, beneath the surface narratives of tense sibling rivalries (Jacob versus Esau) and tribal genocide (Joshua's extermination of the Canaanites), discerning deep themes conducing both to a universal justice between all peoples and to a profound sense of God's particularizing love for diverse covenant communities. A much-needed antidote to lethal animosities.--Christensen, Bryce Copyright 2015 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
THE ABUNDANCE: Narrative Essays Old and New, by Annie Dillard. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $15.99.) Dillard selects 22 of her best pieces from the past four decades, including dispatches from coastal Maine and a New Age Catholic church. Across these essays, "her preferred method is to transform, through the alchemy of metaphor, natural phenomena into spiritual ones," Donovan Hohn said here. EVICTED: Poverty and Profit in the American City, by Matthew Desmond. (Broadway, $17.) In this wrenching account, one of the Book Review's 10 Best Books of 2016, Desmond, a Harvard sociologist, chronicles eight impoverished families around Milwaukee for whom eviction is a near-constant fear. While these tenants live in squalor, their landlords and others profit from their misfortune; the book casts light on how the poor are regularly exploited. NOT IN GOD'S NAME: Confronting Religious Violence, by Jonathan Sacks. (Schocken, $16.95.) Sacks, a rabbi, argues that religion must be part of the solution to combating what he sees as politicized religious extremism. Drawing on Genesis for guidance, he outlines an argument that justice and decency should prevail over loyalty toward one's own group. THE LITTLE RED CHAIRS, by Edna O'Brien. (Back Bay/Little, Brown, $15.99.) A mysterious outsider arrives in a small Irish town, leaving residents at turns curious and skeptical. There's reason for concern: He's a Balkan War criminal, but succeeds in transfixing the locals, who view him as a healer or holy man, until his secret comes out. His relationship with a young woman, her naïveté dispelled, threatens to upend her life, but she gains strength and confidence from the ordeal. O'Brien's "unsettling fabulist vision" recalls "Nabokov in his darker, less playful mode," our reviewer, Joyce Carol Oates, wrote here. MR. SPLITFOOT, by Samantha Hunt. (Mariner, $14.95.) Ruth and Nat, two orphans in a foster home headed by a religious fanatic, discover an ability to speak to the dead; when a con man learns of their talent, he's eager to profit from it. In alternating chapters, the story jumps to the present day, when Ruth - who has become eerily mute - lures her pregnant niece on a journey by foot across New York State. SUDDEN DEATH, byÁIvaro Enrigue. Translated by Natasha Wimmer. (Riverhead, $16.) In a novel bursting with historical figures - Galileo, Anne Boleyn, Caravaggio - 16th-century monks imbue tennis matches with spiritual import; a French executioner is himself executed; and Spanish conquistadors carry out their bloody siege of Mexico, a merger of civilizations with "planetary aftershocks."D
Kirkus Review
A remarkable exploration of the reasons behind religious violence and solutions for stopping it. Sacks (The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning, 2012, etc.), a British rabbi and member of the House of Lords, tackles one of history's intractable questions: why have the world's three monotheistic religions always been in conflict? More importantly, what can be done about it? In the first third of his work, the author uses psychology, sociology, and philosophy to tease out an answer. He explains the problems of altruistic evil and of unrestrained dualism before exploring Ren Girard's theories of sibling rivalry, concluding, "[the three religions'] relationship is sibling rivalry, fraught with mimetic desire: the desire for the same thing, Abraham's promise." What follows is a fascinating and ingenious reinterpretation of the book of Genesis, with an emphasis on the many sibling relationships in the book. Sacks argues that, repeatedly, Scripture sets up classic mythic scenarios only to foil each expected conclusion with an unexpected reconciliation. He concludes that the whole of Genesis points to a "rejection of rejection," an affirmation that all people are recipients of God's love and blessing. This leads to the last and most difficult third of the book, concerning the implementation of this knowledge in solving the problem of religious violence. Sacks notes that seeing the world through the eyes of "the other" is the surest way of creating peace. He also points out the futility of continued hatred and urges others to trust in God's ability to judge, not in our own. However, some readers may be left wondering how Sacks' conclusions could ever be seriously heard by the world's staunchest fundamentalists. Nonetheless, the author has contributed an artful and meaningful work on interfaith dialogue. His treatment of Scripture alone is worth a close read. A humane, literate, and sincere book, one with something truly new to say. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Sacks (law, ethics, & the Bible, Kings Coll. London) asks a probing question of the three Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam): How, if we are made in the image of God, can radical religious adherents commit horrific atrocities in God's name? With ardent and straightforward language, the author, who served as chief rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth from 1991 to 2013, seeks to authoritatively discredit the idea that, by its very nature, organized religion breeds violence. Using historical anti-Semitism as the lens through which to consider acts of religiously motivated brutality, Sacks finds that modern iterations of social dissociation from one's group find resolution in the Internet's virtual social networks. Misreading and misapplying texts further fuels the capacity to inflict suffering upon one's fetishized enemies, even though, concludes Sacks, "No religion won the admiration of the world by its capacity to inflict suffering upon its enemies." VERDICT While Sacks has no recipe to cure religious violence, he successfully illustrates the roots of responsibility in this terrible dynamic. A worthy read that is sure to spur conversation.-Sandra Collins, Byzantine Catholic Seminary Lib., Pittsburgh © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
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 hierarchy's visible symbols. Religion was the robe of sanctity worn to mask the naked pursuit of power. It was against this background that Abrahamic monotheism emerged as a sustained protest. Not all at once but ultimately it made extraordinary claims. It said that every human being, regardless of colour, culture, class or creed, was in the image and likeness of God. The supreme Power intervened in history to liberate the supremely powerless. A society is judged by the way it treats its weakest and most vulnerable members. Life is sacred. Murder is both a crime and a sin. Between people there should be a covenantal bond of righteousness and justice, mercy and compassion, forgiveness and love. Though in its early books the Hebrew Bible commanded war, within centuries its prophets, Isaiah and Micah, became the first voices to speak of peace as an ideal. A day would come, they said, when the peoples of the earth would turn their swords into ploughshares, their spears into pruning hooks, and wage war no more. According to the Hebrew Bible, Abrahamic monotheism entered the world as a rejection of imperialism and the use of force to make some men masters and others slaves. Abraham himself, the man revered by 2.4 billion Christians, 1.6 billion Muslims and 13 million Jews, ruled no empire, commanded no army, conquered no territory, performed no miracles and delivered no prophecies. Though he lived differently from his neighbours, he fought for them and prayed for them in some of the most audacious language ever uttered by a human to God - 'Shall the Judge of all the earth not do justice?' (Gen. 18:25) He sought to be true to his faith and a blessing to others regardless of their faith. That idea, ignored for many of the intervening centuries, remains the simplest definition of the 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. It was Machiavelli, not Moses or Mohammed, who said it is better to be feared than to be loved: the creed of the terrorist and the suicide bomber. It was Nietzsche, the man who first wrote the words 'God is dead', whose ethic was the will to power. To invoke God to justify violence against the innocent is not an act of sanctity but of sacrilege. It is a kind of blasphemy. It is to take God's name in vain. *** Terror is the epitome of idolatry. Its language is force, its principle to kill those with whom you disagree. That is the oldest and most primitive form of conflict resolution. It is the way of Cain. If anything is evil, terror is. In suicide bombings and other terrorist attacks, the victims are chosen at random, arbitrarily and indiscriminately. Terrorists, writes Michael Walzer, 'are like killers on a rampage, except that their rampage is not just expressive of rage or madness; the rage is purposeful and programmatic. It aims at a general vulnerability: Kill these people in order to terrify those.' The victims of terror are not only the dead and injured, but the very values on which a free society is built: trust, security, civil liberty, tolerance, the willingness of countries to open their doors to asylum seekers, the gracious safety of public places. Religiously motivated terror desecrates and defames religion itself. It is sacrilege against God and the life he endowed with his image. Islam, like Judaism, counts a single life as a universe. Suicide and murder are forbidden in the Abrahamic faiths. Judaism, Christianity and Islam all know the phenomenon of martyrdom - but martyrdom means being willing to die for your faith. It does not mean being willing to kill for your faith. Terror is not a justifiable means to an acceptable end, because it does not end. Terrorists eventually turn against their own people. Walzer again: 'The terrorists aim to rule, and murder is their method. They have their own internal police, death squads, disappearances. They begin by killing or intimidating those comrades who stand in their way, and they proceed to do the same, if they can, among the people they claim to represent. If terrorists are successful, they rule tyrannically, and their people bear, without consent, the costs of the terrorists' rule.' There is no route from terror to a free society. Nor is it the cry of despair of the weak. The weak have different weapons. They know that justice is on their side. That is why the prophets used not weapons but words. It is why Gandhi and Martin Luther King preferred non-violent civil disobedience, knowing that it spoke to the world's conscience, not its fears. True need never needs terror to make its voice heard. The deliberate targeting of the innocent is an evil means to an evil end, to achieve a solution that does violence to the humanity and integrity of those we oppose. To give religious justification to it is to commit sacrilege against the God of Abraham, who is the God of life. Altruistic evil is still evil, and not all the piety in the world can purify it. Abraham's God is the power that rescues the powerless, the God of glory who turns the radiance of his face to those without worldly glory: the poor, the destitute, the lonely, the marginal, the outsiders of the world. God hears the cry of the unheard, and so, if we follow him, do we. Now is the time for Jews, Christians and Muslims to say what they failed to say in the past: We are all children of Abraham. And whether we are Isaac or Ishmael, Jacob or Esau, Leah or Rachel, Joseph or his brothers, we are precious in the sight of God. We are blessed. And to be blessed, no one has to be cursed. God's love does not work that way. Today God is calling us, Jew, Christian and Muslim, to let go of hate and the preaching of hate, and live at last as brothers and sisters, true to our faith and a blessing to others regardless of their faith, honouring God's name by honouring his image, humankind. Excerpted from Not in God's Name: Confronting Religious Violence by Jonathan Sacks All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.Table of Contents
| Acknowledgements | p. ix |
| I Bad Faith | |
| 1 Altruistic Evil | p. 3 |
| 2 Violence and Identity | p. 27 |
| 3 Dualism | p. 44 |
| 4 The Scapegoat | p. 66 |
| 5 Sibling Rivalry | p. 87 |
| II Siblings | |
| 6 The Half-Brothers | p. 107 |
| 7 Wrestling with the Angel | p. 125 |
| 8 Role Reversal | p. 144 |
| 9 The Rejection of Rejection | p. 161 |
| III The Open Heart | |
| 10 The Stranger | p. 177 |
| 11 The Universality of Justice, the Particularity of Love | p. 189 |
| 12 Hard Texts | p. 207 |
| 13 Relinquishing Power | p. 220 |
| 14 Letting Go of Hate | p. 238 |
| 15 The Will to Power or the Will to Life | p. 252 |
| Notes | p. 269 |
| Bibliography | p. 289 |