Not in God's Name (21 page)

The morality that applies to everyone, according to the
Hebrew Bible, is justice, fairness and the avoidance of causing harm. That was the first thing Abraham was to teach his children: ‘to keep the way of the Lord by doing what is right and just’. Justice, fairness and the avoidance of harm are what we owe everyone, Jew and Gentile, believer and atheist, friend and stranger, fellow countryman and foreigner.

The ethic that applies
within
the covenantal community involves thicker concepts such as sanctity, reverence, loyalty and respect. It is an ethic of the holy, not just the good. It is also an ethic of what the French revolutionaries called fraternity. The Bible often says things like, ‘If your brother is destitute…’ It applies the language of kin to the group. The Abrahamic covenant is not just a kinship group. It is not a matter of biological descent only. There is conversion. Ruth, heroine of the book that bears her name, was not ethnically Jewish. She was a Moabite. But she became part of the covenant community and great-grandmother of David, Israel’s greatest king. So when the Bible uses the language of family it does so metaphorically. But it is a strong metaphor. Jews feel responsible for one another as if they were a single extended family.

So the Hebrew Bible combines the two fundamentally different elements of the moral/ethical life. There is justice, and there is love. Justice is universal. Love is particular. Justice must be detached, impartial, applied equally to all. Love plays no part in it. If I decide in favour of the plaintiff because he is a family member or a friend, that is not justice but the perversion of justice. Love, on the other hand, is utterly particular. Read the wonderful biblical duet The Song of Songs, and you will hear how lover and beloved talk endlessly about what they find beautiful in the other: hair, neck, forehead, feet. There is nothing universal here at all. It is about what Wallace Stevens called ‘the particulars of rapture’. It follows that
Elokim
, God as universal, is God-as-justice.
Hashem
, God as particular, is God-as-love.

We can now understand why, after Babel and the attempt to impose by force a single language on a diverse population, God chooses Abraham and tells him to leave home and travel to a place where he will be a stranger and outsider: different. Noah and his covenant represent universality and justice. Abraham and his descendants represent particularity and love.

The Noah covenant is the Bible’s universal code, the basic infrastructure of a just social order. The Noahide laws, as understood by Judaism’s sages, set out the broad parameters of a decent society: respect for God, human life, the family, property, animal welfare and the rule of law.
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These principles are general, not specific: thin, not thick. They apply to everyone in virtue of the fact that they are in the image of God, therefore worthy of dignity and respect. They are universal rules of what today we would call responsibilities and rights.

But they apply to what we have in common, not what makes us different. So the Bible moves on from the universal to the particular – the narrative of Abraham and Sarah and the children of Israel as they journey through time and space to the Promised Land. This is a story of what it is to live closely and continuously under the sovereignty and tutelage of God. It is a story not of justice only, but also and essentially of love.

There is no implication that Abraham’s or the Israelites’ is the only story. To the contrary, as Amos 9:7 says: ‘Are not you Israelites the same to me as the Cushites? – declares the Lord – Did I not bring Israel up from Egypt, the Philistines from Caphtor, and the Arameans from Kir?’ God is active in the history of other nations. He sends a prophet, Jonah, to Israel’s enemy, Assyria, to persuade them to repent and be saved from catastrophe. Isaiah even foresees a day when God will do for Israel’s other great enemy, Egypt, what he did for the Israelites against Egypt itself – rescue them from oppression:

In that day there will be an altar to the Lord in the heart of Egypt…When they cry out to the Lord because of their
oppressors, he will send them a savior and mighty one, and he will rescue them. So the Lord will make Himself known to the Egyptians…In that day there will be an altar in the midst of the land of Egypt to Assyria. The Assyrians will go to Egypt and the Egyptians to Assyria. The Egyptians and Assyrians will worship together. In that day Israel will be the third, along with Egypt and Assyria, a blessing on the earth. The Lord of hosts will bless them, saying, ‘Blessed be Egypt my people, Assyria the work of my hands, and Israel my inheritance.’ (Isa. 19:19–25)

Nor is there any intimation in the Bible that Abraham’s family have a monopoly of virtue. One of the heroines of the Exodus, without whom there would have been no Moses, was Pharaoh’s daughter. Rahab, who shelters Joshua’s spies, is a prostitute from Jericho (Josh. 2). Jael, the heroine who saves Israel from Sisera, is a Kenite (Judg. 4). Uriah, whose faithfulness to David contrasts so sharply with David’s faithlessness to him, is a Hittite (2 Sam. 11). Job, the Bible’s most conspicuous example of a wholly righteous man, is not an Israelite.

Moses repeatedly criticises the Israelites, telling them, ‘It is not because of your righteousness or the uprightness of your heart that you are going to take possession of the land’ (Deut. 9:5). This note is sustained to the end of the prophetic age. Malachi, last of the prophets, says, ‘From the rising of the sun to its setting, my name is great among the nations…but you profane it’ (Mal. 1:11–12).

This is a point of immense consequence.
A chosen people is the opposite of a master race
, first, because it is not a race but a covenant; second, because it exists to serve God, not to master others.
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A master race worships itself; a chosen people worships something beyond itself. A master race values power; a chosen people cares for the powerless. A master race believes it has rights; a chosen people knows only that it has responsibilities. The key virtues of a master race are pride, honour and fame. The key virtue of a chosen people is humility. A master race produces monumental buildings, triumphal inscriptions and a literature of
self-congratulation. Israel, to a degree unique in history, produced a literature of almost uninterrupted self-criticism.

Why then Isaac, not Ishmael? Why Jacob, not Esau? Because Ishmael and Esau are strong, resourceful people who survive by their own skill and dexterity. The people of the covenant are to be witnesses
in
themselves to something
beyond
themselves. Isaac and Jacob are not strong. They are favoured by their mothers, not their fathers. They are the younger, not the elder. The patriarchs are given two blessings by God: they will have many children and a land. Yet Sarah, Rebekah and Rachel are all infertile. The patriarchs never acquire the land. Abraham has to beg for permission to buy a cave in which to bury his wife. Isaac is threatened by the local population when he reopens his father’s wells. Jacob has to pay a hundred pieces of silver to buy land on which to pitch his tent.

Moses, the man of God’s word, is the one who says, ‘I am not a man of words…I am slow of speech and tongue’ (Exod. 4:10). Israel was to be the people whose strength is not its own, as Moses was the man whose words were not his own. It was to become the people whose existence ran contrary to nature. It was small. Its land, a strategic location between empires, would always be vulnerable to conquest. Unlike the Nile delta or the Tigris-Euphrates valley, it had no natural water supply and would be constantly dependent on rain. Its people would find themselves looking up to the sky rather than down to the earth. It preserved in its collective memory no sense of being at home as of right (‘You are merely strangers and temporary residents with me’, Lev. 25:23). The children of Israel would always be dependent on forces beyond themselves. A chosen people is not a master race but its opposite: a servant community. That is why Jewry has always been attacked by – because its existence is an affront to – those who see themselves as a master race, an imperial power, or sole guardians of God’s truth.

We now understand the powerful idea implicit in the structuring of the Genesis narrative. It begins with universal archetypes – Adam, Eve, Cain, Abel, the Flood, the covenant with Noah and the critique of Babel – and only then turns to the particularity of the Abrahamic covenant to tell us that
our common humanity precedes our religious differences
. Any religion that dehumanises others merely because their faith is different has misunderstood the God of Abraham.

Jews became the test-case of this truth. They were different: monotheists in a pagan age, then non-Christians in a Christian Europe. Today they are the most conspicuous non-Muslims in an Islamic Middle East. The fate of Jewry through the ages has been the clearest indicator of whether a culture, faith or empire has been willing to accord dignity or rights to the one-who-is-not-like-them. The story that tells of how God bestowed his love on the weak, the few, the vulnerable and the different is what makes the Hebrew Bible the great narrative of hope in Western civilisation.

The love of which the prophets spoke, of God for Israel, that fractious, sometimes disobedient people, is love for those who are different because of their difference, not for those who are the same because of their sameness.
Love is particular
. That is why, having given humankind, in the Noahide covenant, the general rules of a moral society, God turns to Abraham and commands him and his descendants to be a living example of what it is to love and be loved by God.

There is no single, simple system that will honour both our commonalities and our differences
. Tribalism – identity without universality – leads to violence. Imperialism – universality without identity – leads to the loss of freedom and the suppression of the very diversity that makes us human. That is why the Bible sets out two covenants, not one: one that honours our common humanity, the other that sanctifies diversity and the particularity of love.
And the universal comes first
. You cannot love God without first honouring the universal dignity of humanity as the image and likeness of the universal God.

Note also that the phrase ‘image of God’, as it appears in the Bible, constitutes a paradox, almost a contradiction. It is axiomatic to the Bible that God
has no image
. To suggest otherwise – to make or worship an image of God – is the paradigm case of idolatry. When Moses asks God who he is, his reply is: ‘I will be what I will be’ (Exod. 3:14). God transcends categorisation. Were he to have an image, he would be like this, not that; here, not there; in this colour, creed or code, not that. Judaism’s sages fully understood the implication:

For this reason man was created alone, to teach that whoever destroys a single life is as if he destroyed a complete universe…and for the sake of peace among humanity, so that no one could say to another, ‘My father is greater than yours’…and to proclaim the greatness of the Holy One, blessed be He, for when a human being makes many coins from one mould, they are all the same, but the supreme King of kings makes every human being in the same image, yet all are different.
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As God resists categorisation, so does humankind.

The Bible has a second surprise for us. The same phrase reappears, eight chapters later, after the Flood as part of God’s covenant with Noah:

Whoever sheds the blood of man,

by man shall his blood be shed;

for in the image of God

has God made man. (Gen. 9:6)

This sounds like a restatement of Genesis 1. In fact, though, it is the opposite. Genesis 1 tells us that
we
are in God’s image. Genesis 9 tells us that the
other person
is in God’s image. Genesis 1 speaks of the pre-eminence of humankind (‘Fill the earth and master it’). Genesis 9 declares the prohibition against murder. Between the two lies tragedy. Granted mastery over nature, human beings used
that power to attempt mastery over other human beings, and the result – from Cain to the Flood – was violence and murder. It still is. That is why Genesis 9 is
not a repetition but a reversal
of Genesis 1.

Genesis 1 is about the self, Genesis 9 about the human Other.
One who is not in my image is nonetheless in God’s image
– that is the basis of God’s covenant with Noah, a universal requirement of all cultures if they are to honour God who gave us life. Terror, the killing of the innocent and the sacrifice of human life in pursuit of political ends are not mere crimes. They are sacrilege. Those who murder God’s image in God’s name commit a double sacrilege.

The unique structure of biblical spirituality – its calibrated tension between the universality of justice and the particularity of love – is the most compelling way I know of giving religious expression to
both
our common humanity
and
our religious differences. How does this work out in practice?

Consider the life of Abraham. Readers of the Bible are so familiar with his story that they often fail to notice how strange it is. Here is the father of monotheism, yet in the biblical text itself Abraham breaks no idol, challenges no polytheist, seeks no disciples,
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and establishes no new religious movement. He lives among people whose beliefs and practices were alien to his own, yet he does not reprimand them, except when the servants of Abimelek, a king with whom he had made a treaty, seize one of the wells he had dug (Gen. 21:25). He holds them to the standards of morality, not those of ethics or holiness.

When his nephew Lot chooses to live among the people of Sodom, about whom the Bible says that they ‘were wicked and were sinning greatly against the Lord’ (13:13), Abraham does not criticise him. Nor does he condemn them. To the contrary, he fights a battle on their behalf (Gen. 14) and when he hears that
God is planning to punish them, he pleads for them in one of the most audacious prayers in the Bible: ‘Shall the Judge of all the earth not do justice?’ (18:25).