Not in God's Name (20 page)

Note that these commands are given shortly after the Exodus. Implicit in them is that radical idea that care for the stranger is why the Israelites had to experience exile and slavery before they could enter the Promised Land and build their own society and state. You will not succeed in caring for the stranger, implies God, until you yourselves know in your very bones and sinews what it feels like to be a stranger. And lest you forget, I have already commanded you to remind yourselves and your children of the taste of affliction and bitterness every year on Pesach. Those who forget what it feels like to be a stranger eventually come to oppress strangers, and if the children of Abraham oppress strangers, why did I make them my covenantal partners?

Note also how the Hebrew Bible speaks not primarily of knowledge, reason or emotion, but of
memory
. ‘Remember that you were slaves in Egypt.’ The imperative of memory echoes like a leitmotif throughout biblical prose: the verb
zakhor
, ‘remember’, appears no less than 169 times.
³
Memory in this sense
is
role reversal: do not harm the stranger because you were once where he is now. See the world from his perspective because it is where your ancestors stood, and you have never ceased to recall and re-enact their story. Biblical ethics is a prolonged tutorial in role reversal.

There is a striking literary feature of the Hebrew Bible as a whole, namely its use of what Julia Kristeva called
intertextuality
, the way in which one text may be the ‘absorption and transformation
of another’. Intertextuality – what Michael Fishbane calls ‘inner-biblical exegesis’
⁴
– is part of the compositional structure of the Bible. ‘The words of the Torah are poor in one place, rich in another,’
⁵
said the sages, meaning that the full significance of a word or phrase is only grasped within the totality of the whole. The meaning of a word
here
may lie in that word
there
, far separated in topic and time.

The first time we encounter the phrase ‘stranger and temporary resident’ (
ger ve-toshav
) is in Genesis 23. Sarah has just died, and Abraham must bury her. It is an ironic situation. Many times he had been promised the land but now, when he needed only a burial plot for his wife, he had none, nor, as a nomad and outsider, did he have any presumptive right to acquire one. Abraham enters into negotiation with the Hittites in Hebron, beginning with these words:

I am a
stranger and a temporary resident
among you. (Gen. 23:4)

This is no mere formulaic utterance. Abraham is acknowledging his legal lack of standing. As a stranger and temporary resident, he has no entitlement to own land. He depends on the goodwill of the Hittites even to begin the conversation with the cave’s owner, Ephron.

This sets up for us, the readers, a cognitive dissonance that can be resolved only one way: we assume that the text represents Israel’s prehistory. Genesis is about the promise, not the fulfilment. One day, this will change. Israel will become a nation with its own land. Abraham’s children will have a home. Time passes. Israel goes into exile. It is redeemed from slavery. Moses leads the people out of Egypt on their way to the land. There, we cannot but expect, the people will find a home. At last, they will own the land. They will no longer be as Abraham was. Then, in one of the great paradigm-shifting moments of the Bible, the twenty-fifth chapter of Leviticus turns this expectation on its head:

The land shall not be sold in perpetuity, for the land is mine; you are
strangers and temporary residents
with me. (Lev. 25:23)

The fate of Abraham’s family, we now discover, will be not temporary but permanent – permanently temporary. They will know no certainty, have no fixed and unconditional home, even in the land of promise. Abraham had been told, in a dark vision of exile, that his offspring would be ‘a stranger in a land not theirs’. That, we thought, meant Egypt. It now turns out to mean Israel as well. This is the central, haunting irony of the Pentateuch.

Again, time passes. Israel enters the land. It begins as an amphictyony, a loose federation of tribes, led at times of emergency by charismatic figures known as judges. Then, in the days of Samuel, it becomes a kingdom. A generation later, during the reign of David, the monarchy becomes hereditary (an ‘everlasting covenant’) and Israel has a capital city, Jerusalem. The final building block is almost in place: the Temple. For this, David makes plans, but is told that the work will only be completed by his son. At this moment, the high point of Israel’s history, David gathers the people and utters a prayer:

Praise be to you, O Lord, God of our father Israel, from everlasting to everlasting…

We are
strangers and temporary residents
in your sight, as were all our forefathers. Our days on earth are like a shadow, without hope. O Lord our God, as for all this abundance that we have provided for building you a Temple for your Holy Name, it comes from your hand, and all of it belongs to you. (1 Chr. 29:10–16)

Even at their greatest moment, the Israelites know that they are strangers in a land not their own. In this extraordinary intertextual arch, from Abraham through Moses to David, from Israel’s earliest prehistory to its summit as a sovereign power, we hear the same unchanging message: the people of the covenant will be strangers
at home, so that they are able to make strangers feel at home. Only thus can they defeat the most powerful of all drives to evil: the sense of being threatened by the Other, the one not like me.

Abraham and Moses, the key figures of the Pentateuch, know exactly what it is to be a stranger. Abraham’s journey begins with the command to ‘leave your land, your birthplace and your father’s house’ (Gen. 12:1) – everywhere he is
not
a stranger. Moses, leader of the Israelites, does not grow up with the Israelites. He is thus doubly a stranger, to the Egyptians because he is an Israelite, to the Israelites because he looks like an Egyptian. He flees to Midian – yet another estrangement, marries Zipporah, daughter of a Midianite priest, and has a child. He gives his son a poignant name, Gershom, meaning ‘I was a stranger in a strange land’ (Exod. 2:22).

The people charged with carrying this message, the Israelites, have a specific function to play in the divine economy. They are to be the embodiment of strangeness. How Israel behaves in relation to strangers, and how nations behave towards Israel, the strange nation, will be the ongoing litmus tests of the moral acceptability of a civilisation.

Empathy, sympathy, knowledge and rationality are usually enough to let us live at peace with others. But not in hard times. Serbs, Croats and Muslims lived peaceably together in Bosnia for years. So did Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda. The problem arises at times of change and disruption when people are anxious and afraid. That is why exceptional defences are necessary, which is why the Bible speaks of memory and history – things that go to the very heart of our identity. We have to remember that we were once on the other side of the equation. We were once strangers: the oppressed, the victims. Remembering the Jewish past forces us to undergo role reversal. In the midst of freedom we have to remind ourselves of what it feels like to be a slave.

What happened to Csanad, now Dovid, Szegedi was exactly that: role reversal. He was a hater who discovered that he belonged among the hated. What cured him of antisemitism was his role-reversing discovery that he was a Jew. That, for him, was a life-changing revelation. The Hebrew Bible tells us that the experience of the Israelites in Egypt was meant to be life-changing as well. Having lived and suffered as strangers, they became the people commanded to care for strangers.

The best way of curing antisemitism is to get people to experience what it feels like to be a Jew. The best way of curing hostility to strangers is to remember that we too, from someone else’s perspective, are strangers. Memory and role reversal are the most powerful resources we have to cure the darkness that can sometimes occlude the human soul.

In the emerging world of ethnic conflict and civilizational clash, Western belief in the universality of Western culture suffers three problems: it is false; it is immoral; and it is dangerous…Imperialism is the necessary logical consequence of universalism.

Samuel Huntington
, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order
¹

Behind this whole analysis is the obvious question. Why does God need to choose in the first place? Why this drama of chosen and unchosen sons? Why Isaac, not Ishmael? Why Jacob, not Esau? Why Abraham, not everyone? Why Israel and not all humankind?

This phenomenon has aroused more anger and vituperation, perplexity and misunderstanding than any other in the history of Western spirituality.
Why does God choose?
Judaism seems caught midway between the particularities of the pagan world – each nation with its own gods – and the universalities of Christianity and Islam: one God, one truth, one way, one path to salvation, one gateway to heaven.

These two other Abrahamic monotheisms borrowed much from Judaism – its belief in one God and its sacred scriptures in the case of Christianity, its stories and prophets in the case of Islam – yet they did not borrow Judaism’s most singular feature: its
distinction between the universality of God as Creator and Sovereign of the universe, and the particularity of the covenant, first with Abraham, then with Moses and the Israelites
. It is easy to see why. If God is the God of all humanity, logic
would seem to dictate that the way of serving him should be the same for all humanity.

What, though, if
a fundamental concern of the Hebrew Bible were precisely violence in the name of God?
What if the Bible is confronting this directly? What if this should guide our reading of the text? That the Bible is preoccupied by violence is evident at the outset. The first recorded act of worship, the offerings brought by Cain and Abel, led directly to the first murder. Thus the connection between religion and violence is struck at the start. The reason the Bible gives for the Flood is that ‘the earth was corrupt before God,
the earth was filled with violence
’ (Gen. 6:11). Violence is not a marginal theme in Genesis. It is central. It makes God ‘regret that he made man on earth’ (Gen. 6:6).

We saw in
chapter 2
why
humans are violent. It has to do with the fact that we are social animals. We form groups. We are tribal beings. We are divided into different nations, languages, cultures and codes, and these are the bases of identity. There is no such thing as humanity in the abstract, just as there is no such thing as language or literature or love in the abstract. Identity is inescapably plural. That is why it leads to violence. It divides the world into Us and Them. This is the source of war. At extreme times like now it leads to pathological dualism, turning human beings into barbarians, sometimes in the name of God.

We also saw in
chapter 2
that there have been three major attempts in history to escape from identity but that none succeeded. Christianity and Islam both said, in effect: one God, therefore one ultimate identity. That is why they clashed in the Middle Ages, and it is why they clash today in the Middle East, Africa and parts of Asia. The principle of one God, one truth, one way does not make for peace in a world in which other people have other ways. Perhaps one day we will all see the world, ourselves and God the same way. That is the prophetic vision. But not now, not yet.

The second great attempt, as we saw, was the Enlightenment, the secular European substitute for Christianity, based on the universality not of God but of reason. Science and philosophy
would, people thought, succeed where religion and revelation had failed. They would unite humankind in what Kant called ‘perpetual peace’. The reaction to this, a century later, was the emergence of nationalism, racism and communism, two world wars, the Holocaust and the Gulag. It was the return of the repressed.

The third attempt – by the West today – has been to dethrone the group in favour of the individual. The result has been the atomisation of society, the collapse of the traditional family, the erosion of community and the loss of national identity, leading to the counter-reaction of religious extremism among those who still seek identity and community. Try as the West may, the tribes keep coming back, angrier each time.

The argument of this chapter is that the Bible addresses this issue directly and with great originality. It does so in Genesis 6–11, by way of two famous stories: the Flood and the Tower of Babel.

The Bible is explicit about the failings of the generation of the Flood. The people were wicked, violent, and ‘every inclination of the thoughts of their heart was only evil all the time’ (Gen. 6:5). This is the language of systemic moral failure.

The mood at the beginning of the story of Babel seems, by contrast, almost idyllic. ‘The entire earth had one language and a common speech’ (11:1). Unity seems to prevail. The builders are intent on construction, not destruction. It is far from clear what their sin was. Yet from the Bible’s point of view Babel represents another serious wrong turn, because immediately thereafter God summons Abraham to begin an entirely new chapter in the religious story of humankind.

In fact, the stories of the Flood and Babel are precisely matched accounts of the two great alternatives: identity without universality and universality without identity. The best account of the Flood, though he does not refer to it explicitly, was given by
the man who laid the foundations of modern politics, Thomas Hobbes, in his classic
Leviathan
(1651). Before there were political institutions, said Hobbes, human beings were in a ‘state of nature’. They were individuals or small groups. Lacking a stable ruler, an effective government and enforceable laws, people were in a state of permanent and violent chaos – ‘a war of every man against every man’ – as they competed for scarce resources. There was ‘continual fear, and danger of violent death’. That is precisely the Bible’s description of life before the Flood.
When there is no overarching rule of law, the world is filled with violence
.

The story of Babel explores the opposite reality. It has usually been misunderstood. The conventional reading is that it is an etiological tale explaining how humankind, which originally had ‘one language and a common speech’, came to be divided into many languages. This reading is plausible but wrong. The reason is that the previous chapter, Genesis 10, has
already
described the division of humanity into seventy nations, ‘each with its own language’ (Gen. 10:5). The only way the conventional reading makes sense is if Genesis 10 and 11 are not in the correct chronological sequence.
²
There is, though, no reason to suppose this at all.

To the contrary, the unity of language at the beginning of chapter 11 was not natural but imposed. It is describing the practice of the world’s first empires. We have historical evidence dating back to the neo-Assyrians that conquerors imposed their own language on the peoples they defeated. One inscription of the time records that Ashurbanipal II ‘made the totality of all peoples
speak one speech
’. A cylinder inscription of Sargon II says, ‘Populations of the four quarters of the world with strange tongues and incompatible speech…whom I had taken as booty at the command of Ashur my lord by the might of my sceptre,
I caused to accept a single voice
.’
³
The neo-Assyrians asserted their supremacy by insisting that their language was the only one to be used by the nations and populations they had defeated. Babel is a critique of imperialism.

There is even a subtle hint of this in the parallelism of language between the builders of Babel and the Pharaoh who enslaved the Israelites. In Babel they said, ‘Come, [
hava
] let us build ourselves a city and a tower…lest [
pen
] we be scattered over the face of the earth’ (Gen. 11:4). In Egypt Pharaoh said, ‘Come, [
hava
] let us deal wisely with them, lest [
pen
] they increase…’ (Exod. 1:10). These are the only places in the entire Hebrew Bible where the locution ‘Come, let us…lest’ occurs. The connection is too pronounced to be accidental. Babel, like Egypt, represents an empire that subjugates entire populations at the cost of their distinct identities and liberties.
If the Flood is about freedom without order, Babel and Egypt are about order without freedom
.

The story the Bible is telling is this: Genesis 10 describes the division of humanity into seventy nations and seventy languages. Genesis 11 tells of how one imperial power conquered smaller nations, imposing its language and culture on them, thus directly contravening God’s wish that humans should respect the integrity of each nation and each individual. When at the end of the Babel story God ‘confuses the language’ of the builders, he is not creating a new state of affairs but restoring the old.

Interpreted thus, the stories of the Flood and the Tower of Babel are not just historical narratives. Together they constitute a philosophical statement about identity and violence. The Flood is what happens when there are Us and Them and no overarching law to keep the peace. The result is anarchy and violence. Babel is what happens when people attempt to impose a universal order, forcing Them to become Us. The result is imperialism and the loss of liberty. Recall Samuel Huntington’s words at the heading of this chapter: ‘Western belief in the universality of Western culture suffers three problems: it is false; it is immoral; and it is dangerous…Imperialism is the necessary logical consequence of universalism.’
When a single culture is imposed on all, suppressing the diversity of languages and traditions, this is an assault on our God-given differences
. As the Qur’an (49:13) puts it, ‘O mankind! We created you from a single (pair) of a male and
a female, and made you into nations and tribes, that ye may know each other (not that ye may despise each other).’

So the Flood and the Tower of Babel between them define the fundamental human dilemma. We are different. We are tribal. And tribes clash. The result is the violence that, in the Flood, almost destroyed humankind. But eliminate difference by imposing a single culture, religious or secular, on all, and the result is tyranny and oppression. The Hebrew Bible is a unique attempt to find a way out of the dilemma by showing how the unity of God can co-exist with the diversity of humankind.

Diversity is what gives colour and texture to our life on earth. Art, architecture, music, stories, celebrations, food, drink, dance: all of these are particular. None of them is an abstract universal. The late Sidney Morganbesser was a philosophy professor at Columbia University with a wonderful sense of humour. (Shortly before dying, he asked another philosopher, ‘Why is God making me suffer so much? – Just because I don’t believe in him?’) He once took his students to a restaurant and ordered soup. ‘Which soup,’ asked the waiter, ‘chicken, carrot or borsht?’ ‘None of those,’ he replied, ‘just soup.’ The waiter, not being a philosopher, gave up. Morganbesser’s point is that you can’t drink soup in the abstract, you can’t speak a language that is universal, and you can’t have an identity that says, ‘I’m just a human being.’ Some ancient Greeks thought that, but that was because they did not regard non-Greeks as fully human. Identity is plural. That constitutes the inescapable diversity of humankind.

How then do we avoid the violence that comes when different groups meet and clash? The answer proposed by the Bible is that something transcends our differences. That something is God, and he has set his image on each of us. That is why every life is sacred and each life is like a universe. The unity of God asks us to respect the stranger, the outsider, the alien, because even though
he or she is not in our image – their ethnicity, faith or culture is not ours – nonetheless they are in God’s image.

So God is universal. But our relationship with him is particular. The Hebrew Bible expresses this in the two primary words by which it refers to God:
Elokim
(E) and
Hashem
(called by Bible scholars J).
Elokim
is God in his universality. In Genesis,
Elokim
speaks to Abimelech, king of Gerar (Gen. 20:3). Joseph, declining the advances of Potiphar’s wife, says, ‘Should I sin against
Elokim
?’ (39:9). Pharaoh, appointing Joseph, says, ‘Can we find anyone like this man, one in whom is the spirit of
Elokim
?’ (41:38). Morality in general is described as ‘fear of
Elokim
’ (20:11).
Elokim
is a purely universal term that applies to people’s relationship with God, whether they are inside or outside the covenant with Abraham.

Hashem
, by contrast, is particular. It is what God is called in the context of the Abrahamic and later Mosaic covenant. It is a proper name, not a generic noun. It is the language of intimacy and relationship. When the Bible wants to describe what Martin Buber called an I–Thou relationship, it uses the word
Hashem
.

That is why Genesis describes
two
covenants, the first with Noah and all humankind, the second with Abraham and his children, who are not all humankind, just one particular people within it. The covenant with Noah (Gen. 9) uses the word
Elokim
throughout, while the covenant with Abraham uses the word
Hashem
(15:18; 17:1–2). The Noah covenant expresses the unity of God and the shared dignity and responsibility of humankind. The Abrahamic covenant expresses the particularity of our relationship with God, which has to do with our specific identity, history, language and literature. The result is that in the Bible there is both a
morality
that applies to everyone, insider and outsider alike, and an
ethic
, that is, a specific code of conduct that frames relationships within the group. To use the language of contemporary philosophy, morality is thin (abstract, general) while ethics is thick (full of local texture and specificity).