Not in God's Name (23 page)

Thereafter in Judaism Amalek became a mere symbol of gratuitous evil, a metaphor, not an actual people. R. Levi Yitzhak of Berditchev, for example, speaks of Amalek as the evil inclination within each of us, whom we must defeat.
⁹
War, except in self-defence, no longer takes place on the battlefield; it becomes a struggle within the soul (Islam has a similar reinterpretation of the word
jihad
¹⁰
). At a stroke, the biblical texts relating to Israel’s enemies were rendered inoperative. They speak of then, not now; of ancient nations, not contemporary ones.

If we seek, though, to understand the real transformation that took place in Judaism between the biblical era and the age of the rabbis, we need to listen to an extraordinary conversation, reported in the Talmud, between the Jewish sages in the late first century
CE
. The subject under discussion is not war as such, but rather a detail in the laws of the Sabbath. In Jewish law one may not carry a burden on the seventh day, whether from a private domain into the street or in the street itself. That is one of the categories of forbidden ‘work’. The question was: what is a burden and what, precisely, counts as carrying? Wearing clothes is clearly not carrying. Taking an object from home into the street clearly is. What the sages are debating here is a borderline case: wearing a sword or other weapon. Is this
wearing
, in which case it is permitted, or is it
carrying
, in which case it is forbidden?

What is at stake is not a narrow issue. It goes to the heart
of the value system of Jews at a critical point in their history, between the two great rebellions against Rome in the first and second centuries. Are weapons an ornament, and thus an item of clothing, or are they negative testimony to the existence of armed conflict and lack of peace, and thus a burden? At stake is how the sages saw the war against the Romans, and something deeper: how they viewed the very culture of military valour. The Mishnah records the following disagreement:

A man must not go out with a sword, bow, shield, lance or spear, and if he does go out, he incurs a sin offering. R. Eliezer, however, said: They are ornaments for him. But the sages maintain that they are merely shameful, for it is said, ‘And they shall beat their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more’ (Isaiah 2:4).
¹¹

The difference of opinion is clear. For R. Eliezer, weapons are ‘ornaments’. There is honour in fighting for your freedom and resisting an imperial power. The sages – the majority – disagree. Their proof-text is the famous verse from Isaiah in which the prophet envisions a world without war. They took this to mean that military confrontation may sometimes be necessary in self-defence but it is not, in Judaism, a positive value. In the messianic age there will be no more weapons. Those that exist will be turned to peaceful uses. Even now, therefore, they are ‘merely shameful’ and may not be worn on the seventh day. They are not a badge of honour but a burden.

That is the argument as it took place in the first century. But there is an obvious lacuna in the Mishnah text. The sages cite a biblical verse in support of their view. R. Eliezer does not. Clearly, though, he must have had another biblical verse in mind. He knew the verse from Isaiah – the rabbis knew their Bible – and must have had some other textual warrant for his dissenting opinion. The Talmud
¹²
fills in the gap:

Abaye asked R. Dimi…‘What is R. Eliezer’s reason for maintaining that [weapons] are ornaments?’

[He replied]: ‘Because it is written, “Gird thy sword upon thy thigh, O mighty one, it is thy glory and thy majesty” (Psalm 45:4).’

R. Kahana raised an objection to Mar, son of R. Huna: ‘But this refers to the words of the Torah!’

He replied: ‘A verse cannot depart from its plain meaning.’

R. Kahana said: ‘When I was eighteen I knew the whole six orders [of the Mishnah] yet I did not know until today that a verse cannot depart from its plain meaning.’

Some two centuries had passed between this exchange and the original Mishnah teaching, but more than time has changed. R. Kahana can
no longer understand
that when a psalm refers to a sword it actually means a sword. For him it was self-evident that it means ‘words’, teachings, texts. With what else does the Jewish people defend itself, if not its sacred merits achieved by devotion to religious learning?

The idea that Jews might fight battles, wage wars and glory in their victories is absurd, unthinkable. Jews do not seek honour on the battlefield. They spend their time in the house of study. By R. Kahana’s day, the nation of the sword had become the people of the book. To understand R. Eliezer’s view a mere two or three centuries earlier, R. Kahana has to be exposed to a principle he had never considered before, namely that one cannot ignore the literal meaning of a biblical text. Whatever else a verse means, it also means what it says.

In this conversation extended across several centuries we witness one of the most profound metamorphoses in religious history. After the disastrous rebellions against Rome, the entire framework of existence of the Jewish people underwent a change. The world of kings and high priests, the Maccabees and the Hasmoneans, of military victories and all that went with them, was over. The world of the rabbis had taken its place, a culture of
study and scholarship, in which words had replaced swords and the most important battles were intellectual ones.

Here is one delightful example. The book of Numbers contains a cryptic verse: ‘Therefore the Book of the Wars of the Lord speaks of Waheb in Suphah.’ By a verbal play, the sages read the last phrase as ‘love in the end’ (
ahavah ba-sof
) and explained it thus:

Even father and son, or master and disciple, who study Torah at the same gate [=academy], become enemies of each other, yet they do not stir from there until they come to love each other, as it is written
Waheb in Suphah
, which is to be read as ‘love in the end’.
¹³

As in R. Kahana’s reading of ‘sword’ as ‘words’, so here: the ‘wars of the Lord’ have become not physical battles but the cut and thrust of Talmudic debate. Study and what the sages called ‘argument for the sake of heaven’ have become a surrogate for war. No longer is violence an acceptable form of conflict resolution. In its place have come reasoned argument and the search for peace.

Even more significant is the way in which post-biblical Judaism encouraged Jews to
identify with and enter into the feelings of the victims of Israel’s own victories
. The Talmud records a striking passage in which the angels are portrayed as wishing to sing a song of triumph at the division of the Red Sea. God silences them with the words, ‘My creatures are drowning – and you wish to sing a song?’
¹⁴
Even Israel’s enemies have become ‘my creatures’ (this, after all, is the point made at the end of the book of Jonah).

The fourteenth-century exegete David ben Joseph Abudarham explains that the reason for our custom of spilling drops of wine when reciting the Ten Plagues on the night of Passover is to shed symbolic tears for the Egyptians who suffered because of Pharaoh’s hardness of heart.

These reinterpretations, long before modernity, show that by the second or third century rabbinic Judaism had internalised the full destructive force of religiously motivated violence, even when
undertaken to preserve religious freedom against a capricious and sometimes overbearing Roman imperial power.

We often think, in the context of Judaism, of religious heroes – Moses, Joshua, Gideon, David – as men of war, and so in some respects they were. But at a later age, the real visionaries were those who realised that spiritual-cultural battles are often far more significant than military ones. In the sixth century
BCE
, Jeremiah argued tirelessly for some form of accommodation with the Babylonians. An attempt to wage war against them would result, he said, in national catastrophe. He was right, but unheeded and unpopular, and the result was the loss of the First Temple and the Babylonian exile.

In the first century, tradition attributes the same role to Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai, who sought terms of peace with the Romans and was also disregarded. Thus was the Second Temple destroyed. All that was salvaged was the rabbinic academy at Yavneh, and Judaism survived through its scholars, not its soldiers. More than six centuries separate the prophet and the rabbi, but what they held in common was
spiritual maximalism and military minimalism
. They were not pacifists but they were realists. They knew that the real battles are the ones that take place in the mind and the soul. They change the world because they change us. That is the wisdom the zealots do not understand: not then, not now.

It takes wisdom to know how to translate the word of God into the world of human beings. In this book, I have offered a series of readings of biblical narrative, arguing that their consistent theme is not sibling rivalry – competition for God’s love – but rather, understanding that we each have a place in God’s universe of justice and love. Is there only one correct reading of these or other religious texts? Clearly not. The rabbis said that there are ‘seventy faces’ of scripture.
¹⁵
R. Samuel Edels said that the revelation at Sinai took place in the presence of 600,000 Israelites because the Torah can be interpreted in 600,000 different ways.
¹⁶
Each person carries part of the potential meaning of the text.

Living traditions constantly reinterpret their canonical texts.
That is what makes fundamentalism – text
without
interpretation – an act of violence against tradition. In fact, fundamentalists and today’s atheists share the same approach to texts. They read them directly and literally, ignoring the single most important fact about a sacred text, namely that its meaning is not self-evident. It has a history and an authority of its own. Every religion must guard against a literal reading of its hard texts if it is not to show that it has learned nothing from history.

The sacred literatures of Judaism, Christianity and Islam all contain passages that, read literally, are capable of leading to violence and hate. We may and must reinterpret them. The great work of Jewish mysticism, the Zohar, says those who love the divine word penetrate beneath its outer garments to its soul. That is how, many centuries ago, the sages heard in biblical texts that on the surface spoke of a war, another meaning altogether. The ‘wars of the Lord’ became the debates in the house of study. They understood the deep spiritual truth that the idea of power is primitive: what makes us human is the power of ideas. The result was that they were able to shape a pacific faith capable of sustaining itself through centuries of exile and persecution. Hard texts are a challenge to the religious imagination and to our capacity to engage in
covenantal listening
to God’s word as we seek to build a future that will honour the sacred legacy of the past.

The word, given in love, invites its interpretation in love.

Power buries those who wield it.

Talmud
¹

To one who has a hammer, said Abraham Maslow, every problem looks like a nail. Politics is about power, but not every political problem has a solution that involves power. Failure to see this can cost a civilisation dear. It almost cost Judaism its life.

Jews in Israel in the first century had been restless under Roman rule for years, angered by its ineptitude, its heavy tax impositions and the indifference it showed to Jewish religious sensitivities. Finally, in 66
CE
when procurator Gessius Florus failed to defend the Jews of Caesarea from a murderous onslaught by their Greek neighbours, fury became open revolt.

Hoping to repeat the victory of the Maccabees against the Greeks two centuries earlier, Jews fought to restore their independence and win back religious freedom. At first the rebellion went well. The Roman garrison in Jerusalem was overcome. The Roman army, massing its troops in Acre, was forced to retreat. Realising that it faced a major struggle, Rome sent its most distinguished general Vespasian, together with his son Titus, to quash the uprising.

We owe our most vivid description of the conflict to an eyewitness, Josephus. Sent to organise the Jewish population in Galilee, he soon realised that the task was hopeless. The population was divided, some in favour of armed resistance, others against. He was in Jotopata in 67
CE
when the Romans laid siege to the town. Its inhabitants held out for two months, finally committing suicide rather than be taken captive, as did those in the last
outpost of resistance at Masada six years later. Josephus, the sole survivor,
²
surrendered to Vespasian and thereafter observed the war from the Roman side.

The picture he paints is of hopeless factionalism.
³
The Jews of the late Second Temple period were deeply divided. There were three primary groups: the Sadducees, the upper echelons associated with the Temple and political power; the Essenes, a pietist group to which the Qumran sectarians may have been affiliated; and the Pharisees, attached to the oral tradition and rigorous observance of the Law. The Pharisees themselves were split, the Talmud going so far as to say that there was a risk that divisions between the disciples of Hillel and Shammai were so deep that Judaism was at risk of becoming ‘two Torahs’, that is, two religions, not one.
⁴
Cutting across these rifts were political disagreements between moderates and extremists, those who favoured war and those who were convinced that an accommodation had to be reached with Rome.

Particularly chilling is the scene Josephus describes of Jerusalem under siege. The Jews were heavily outnumbered. There were 25,000 within the city, facing Titus’ well-equipped and disciplined army of 60,000 soldiers. They might have held out were it not that they too were split: the Zealots under Elazar ben Simon, an extremist faction led by Simon ben Giora, and a third force of Idumeans and others under John of Giscala. Josephus tells us that for much of the time these groups were more intent on attacking one another than the enemy outside the walls. They killed each other’s men, destroyed one another’s food supplies, and engaged in what Josephus calls ‘incessant, suicidal strife’. At one point in his narrative he breaks off to lament: ‘Unhappy city! What have you suffered from the Romans to compare with this?’
⁵

What makes the fall of Jerusalem relevant to the politics of the twenty-first century is that it saw the first appearance in history of religiously motivated terror. The terrorists were known as the
Sicarii
, named after their favourite weapon, the short-bladed dagger. This is how Josephus describes them:

These in broad daylight in the middle of the city committed numerous murders. Their favourite trick was to mingle with festival crowds, concealing under their garments small daggers with which they stabbed their opponents…First to have his throat cut by them was Jonathan the High Priest, and after him many were murdered every day. More terrible than the crimes themselves was the fear they aroused, every man as in war hourly expecting death.
⁶

Their aim, as with their successors today, was to inflame relations between the local population and the occupying power, to generate an atmosphere of fear, and to incite reprisals on both sides, adding fuel to the flames of conflict.

The failed rebellion, together with its disastrous sequel, the Bar Kochba rebellion (132–5
CE
), left Jewish life in ruins. The Temple was destroyed. Jerusalem was levelled to the ground and rebuilt as a Roman polis, Aelia Capitolina. The Jewish population began to drift elsewhere, to Babylon, Egypt and the Mediterranean basin. Thus began an exile that was to last almost two thousand years. The tragedy was all the greater because it was self-inflicted. The institutions around which Israelite and Jewish life were organised in the days of the Bible had gone. There was now no compact nation, no sovereignty, no collective home. The age of priests, prophets and kings had gone. The Temple and its sacrifices were no more. Not until the rise of antisemitism throughout Europe towards the end of the nineteenth century were Jews to organise themselves politically again.
⁷

Out of darkness, though, sometimes comes light. What Jews discovered when they had lost almost everything else was that
religion can survive without power
. Instead of the Temple they had the synagogue. Instead of sacrifices they had prayer and charity. Repentance, the direct turning of the heart to God, took the place of the high priest’s service on the Day of Atonement. In place of the nation state, they had communities scattered across the world yet united by a covenantal
bond of mutual responsibility. Jews became the world’s first global people.

The rabbis achieved what kings, priests and prophets failed to achieve in the course of a thousand years of biblical history. Jews, who as the Israelites had often been seduced into the idolatrous cultures of their neighbours and who are portrayed in the Hebrew Bible as a fractious, wayward people, became a God-intoxicated nation often willing to die rather than renounce their faith. A minority everywhere, they kept their identity intact, becoming the only significant minority in history to survive without assimilating to the dominant culture or convert to the majority faith.

This is not an argument for powerlessness. A thousand years of persecution culminating in the Holocaust are sufficient to refute the notion that Jews, or any other nation, can survive without the ability to defend themselves. But to reach, as they did, the spiritual heights without any of the conventional accoutrements of nationhood and political self-determination is enough to tell us that religion and power are two different things altogether, even if both in their distinct ways and different senses are political.

Sixteen centuries later, Christians made the same discovery. In 1517 the young priest Martin Luther nailed his ninety-five theses to the door of All Saints’ Church in Wittenberg, setting in motion one of the great upheavals of European history. Like the zealots of the Second Temple in their opposition to Hellenised Jews, Luther was incensed by what he saw as the corruption and decadence of the Renaissance papacy, its worldliness and abuses of power. Like the Maccabees of the second century
BCE
, and their successors in the first century
CE
, Luther sought a return to the original message of faith, its simplicity and fervour, and like them he found a wide receptivity to his message.

The Reformation set in motion far-reaching changes in the political map of Europe, challenging the authority and power of Rome. For more than a century, Europe became a battleground, an epidemic of wars brought to an end only by the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. The aftermath in the seventeenth century was, for Europe, the birth of the modern. It witnessed the rise of science (Bacon, Galileo, Newton), a new mode of philosophy (Descartes) and a new way of thinking about politics spearheaded by Hobbes and Locke. What all these movements had in common was a quest for basic principles that did not rest on dogmatic religious foundations.

Christianity, which had hitherto been spacious enough to encompass the Renaissance, could no longer be relied on, for how could it resolve disputes when it itself was the greatest single source of dispute? As Abraham Lincoln put it later, during the American Civil War, ‘Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other.’
⁸
If two professing Christians, one Protestant, the other Catholic, could not resolve their disagreements without anathemas, excommunications and violence, then religion could not become the basis of a sustainable social order.

Stephen Toulmin offered the best explanation of what motivated those who sought a new way: ‘Failing any effective political way of getting the sectarians to stop killing each other, was there no other possible way ahead? Might not philosophers discover, for instance, a new and more rational basis for establishing a framework of concepts and beliefs capable of achieving the agreed certainty that the sceptics had said was impossible?’
⁹

More gradually, but also more extensively, Western Christianity had to learn what Jews had been forced to discover in antiquity: how to survive without power. The similarity of these two processes, so far apart in time, suggests two hypotheses. First, no religion relinquishes power voluntarily. Second, it does so only when the adherents of a faith find themselves fighting, not the adherents of another religion, but their own fellow believers. The
Crusades – Christians against Muslims – did not provoke the same reaction, nor did the loss of the First Temple – Jews against Babylonians. It took the spectacle of Jew against Jew, Christian against Christian, to bring about the change. You do not learn to disbelieve in power when you are fighting an enemy, even when you lose. You do when, with a shock of recognition, you find yourself using it against the members of your own people, your own broadly defined creed.

That is happening within Islam today. The primary victims of Islamist violence are Muslims themselves, across the dividing lines of Sunni and Shia, modernist and neo-traditionalist, moderate against radical, and sometimes simply sect against rival sect.

Violence is what happens when you try to resolve a religious dispute by means of power. It cannot be done. Trying to resolve ultimate issues of faith, truth and interpretation by the use of force is a conceptual error of the most fundamental kind. Just as might does not establish right, so victory does not establish truth. Both sides may fight with equal passion and conviction, but at the end of the day, after thousands or millions have died, whole countries reduced to disaster zones, populations condemned to poverty and generations to hopelessness, after the very enterprise of faith has been degraded and disgraced, no one is a millimetre closer to God or salvation or illumination.
You cannot impose truth by force
. That is why religion and power are two separate enterprises that must never be confused.

What rescued Judaism in the first century and Christianity in the seventeenth was not success but failure, not victory but defeat. Out of the disaster of the rebellions against Rome came the rich heritage of early rabbinic Judaism – Midrash, Mishnah and Talmud – one of the most subtle and intricate of all religious literatures. The ‘wars of the Lord’ were now fought, not on the
battlefield but in the house of study. Judaism became a culture of argument and debate, of words rather than weapons. The nation of the sword became the people of the book. Catastrophe honed and refined the Jewish message. Losing power, Judaism rediscovered itself.

The Christian corollary was best described by Alexis de Tocqueville after his visits to America in the early 1830s. He was struck by a phenomenon that seemed to defy something he had hitherto taken for granted:

In France I had almost always seen the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom marching in opposite directions. But in America I found they were intimately united and that they reigned in common over the same country.
¹⁰

The explanation, he found, lay in the separation of church and state. Talking to clerical leaders, he found ‘that most of its members seemed to retire of their own accord from the exercise of power, and that they made it the pride of their profession to abstain from politics’. The result was that although religion took no part in government, it was ‘the first of their political institutions’, providing the moral base of civic society, what he called its ‘habits of the heart’. It created communities, strengthened families and motivated philanthropic endeavours. It lifted people beyond what he saw as the great danger of democracy – individualism, the retreat of people from public life into private satisfaction. Religion strengthened the ‘art of association’, the underlying strength of American society. Relinquishing power, religion was able to avoid the inescapable danger of those who wear the mantle of politics:

The church cannot share the temporal power of the state without being the object of a portion of that animosity which the latter excites. In proportion as a nation assumes a democratic condition of society and those communities display democratic
propensities, it becomes more and more dangerous to connect religion with political institutions…The American clergy were the first to perceive this truth and to act in conformity with it. They saw that they must renounce their religious influence if they were to strive for political power, and they chose to give up the support of the state rather than share in its vicissitudes.
¹¹

Monotheism allied to power fails
. Rabbi Naftali Zvi Yehudah Berlin (1817–93), head of the rabbinical seminary in Volozhin, made a fascinating comment on the biblical story of the Tower of Babel. It begins with the statement that ‘The whole world had one language and shared words.’ This, he says, was precisely what was wrong with it: