Not in God's Name (26 page)

Above all: never seek revenge. Do not believe you can rectify the past by avenging it. That way you merely succeed in perpetuating the past instead of healing it.

There is an element of the Hebrew Bible that is often misunderstood. It speaks about God’s revenge. The Psalms sometimes pray for it. Why so in a religion dedicated to love, forgiveness and the future? One of the people who decoded the mystery is Yale theologian Miroslav Volf, a native Croatian who saw at first hand the bitter ethnic wars in the former Yugoslavia. Those experiences shaped his courageous book on reconciliation,
Exclusion and Embrace
.
⁵

Having written for some three hundred pages on the need to open ourselves to the Other, he ends on an utterly unexpected note. He speaks of ‘the close association between human nonviolence and the affirmation of God’s vengeance’. His thesis, shared by the Jewish scholar Henri Atlan,
⁶
is that
the belief that God will avenge wrongs spares human beings from having to do so
. Not all injustice, let alone perceived injustice, can be remedied by human beings. The attempt to do so creates more violence and more perceived injustice. ‘Preserving the fundamental difference between God and non-God, the biblical tradition insists that there are things which only God may do.’

That is the meaning of ‘Vengeance is mine, says the Lord’ (Deut. 32:35; Rom. 12:19). We can never undo the past, nor can we fully remedy it. Killing your enemy does not bring your friend back to life. Yes, we must right past wrongs, apologise, atone, acknowledge people’s sense of suffering and grievance. But there is no perfect justice in history, only a rough approximation, and that must do. The rest we must leave to God.

Jewish law
forbids
human beings from bearing a grudge or taking vengeance:

You shall blot [any offences against you] out of your mind and not bear a grudge. For as long as one nurses a grievance and keeps it in mind, one may come to take vengeance. The Torah therefore emphatically warns us not to bear a grudge, so that the impression of the wrong should be completely obliterated and no longer remembered. This is the right principle. It alone makes civilized life and social interaction possible.
⁷

This is the corollary of belief in divine justice. If vengeance belongs to God, it does not belong to us.

There is a connection between monotheism and letting go of hate. Here I want to clarify an idea alluded to briefly in the chapter about dualism. Different civilisations generate different character types. That is not because character is a matter of ethnicity: that is racism, and it is also untrue. Humans are culture-producing animals, and the way we act, even the way we feel, depends in no small measure on structures of the mind that we have internalised from our environment and habits of the heart we learned as children. Religions are culture-shaping institutions, and they include not just a theology, but also an anthropology. What we believe about God affects what we believe about ourselves.
⁸

Monotheism
internalises
conflict, whereas myth
externalises
it. The Jesuit scholar Jack Miles, commenting on the difference between Oedipus and Hamlet, points out that the forces Oedipus confronts – fate, the Delphic oracle, the pre-scripted ending – have nothing to do with his thoughts, intentions or choices. They are ‘out there’. Hamlet’s battle, by contrast, is within, his ‘native hue of resolution sicklied o’er by the pale cast of thought’.
⁹
Just as the clashing deities of myth become, in monotheism, inner conflicts within the mind of the one God, so the human drama takes place not on the battlefield but in the mind, the soul. As soon as Jacob can wrestle with the angel, he need no longer wrestle with Esau. The Hebrew Bible, indeed Judaism as a whole, is the story of an inner struggle. That rules out, in advance and on principle, the psychological alternative:
it was someone else’s fault
.

That is the real difference between monotheism and dualism. When bad things happen to an individual or group, one can either ask, ‘Who did this to me?’ or, ‘Given that this has happened, what
then shall I do?’ The first is the question a dualist asks, the second is the response of a consistent monotheist. So different are these questions that they generate two modes of being: respectively a
blame
culture and a
penitential
culture. The first focuses on external cause, the second on internal response. Blame looks to the past, penitence to the future. Blame is passive, penitence active. A penitential culture is constructed on the logic of responsibility. If bad things happen to us, it is up to us to put them right. When that is a culture’s response to tragedy, a profound dignity is born.

That, essentially, is the prophetic voice. When mishaps befall the Israelites, they say, it is because
we the people
have sinned. We dishonoured the covenant, we betrayed God’s trust. Never is
someone else
blamed for Israel’s troubles. This is what makes Judaism a religion of guilt, repentance and atonement, made bearable by divine forgiveness. A penitential culture says, ‘God, I blame no one but myself. Forgive me. Accept my broken heart. Then give me the strength to change.’ Its peculiar power is that
penitence defies entropy
, the law that all systems lose energy over time. Penitence conserves energy by turning all suffering into an impetus to do better in the future. It spares its adherents ‘the expense of spirit in a waste of shame’.
¹⁰

It produces people of astonishing strength and resilience, like the late Viktor Frankl who found that even in Auschwitz he could retain a sense of freedom and dignity.
¹¹
Atonement is the ultimate expression of freedom because it brings together the two mental acts – repentance and forgiveness – that have the power to break the iron grip of the past. Repentance testifies to our ability to change. Forgiveness expresses our refusal to be held captive by ill-will. Atonement is where divine and human freedom meet and create a new beginning. It is the act that defeats tragedy in the name of hope.

Dualism creates blame cultures
. It says, ‘It wasn’t us, and it wasn’t God, so it must be them.’ The plague, the Black Death, the loss of a child, defeat in war, the failure of an economy, the disorienting effects of change itself – all these are the intentional act
of a malevolent will, an evil presence, a satanic conspiracy whose very invisibility proves its cunning secrecy.

You don’t have to be an evil person to think in such ways, but the result of such thinking is altruistic evil, and it begins when you see yourself, your nation or your people as the victim of someone else’s crime. They can then be killed without compunction. Murder becomes a moral act. You are defending your people, avenging their humiliation, ridding the world of a pestilence, and helping to establish the victory of God, truth and right. Since not everyone understands this, you have constantly to educate the people to hate, through radio, television, the press, the Internet, social media, schools and families, so that even a three-and-a-half-year-old girl will know who are her enemies, whom she has to learn to mistrust and fear, so that one day she may blow herself up and thus earn her share in heaven, or encourage her children to do so when the time comes. Dualism is always potentially genocidal, and to avoid ever having to admit this, you must ceaselessly accuse your enemies of genocide.

This is troubling. It is also self-defeating. Defining yourself as a victim is ultimately a diminution of what makes us human. It teaches us to see ourselves as objects, not subjects. We become done-to, not doers; passive, not active. Blame bars the path to responsibility. The victim, ascribing his condition to others, locates the cause of his situation outside himself, thus rendering himself incapable of breaking free from his self-created trap. Because he attributes a real phenomenon (pain, poverty, illiteracy, disease) to a fictitious cause, he discovers that murdering the cause does not remove the symptom. Hence efforts must be redoubled. Blame cultures perpetuate every condition against which they are a protest.

This would be true even if people arrived at dualism through their own personal journey to understand the world. But usually they do not. Dualism is a cultural phenomenon devised by tyrants to manipulate people into becoming means, not ends. If you can teach a population to hate, you can get them to do whatever you
want, and they will not turn against you because all their anger is turned outwards. This, as we have seen, is the classic function of the scapegoat.

That is why the secular-nationalist regimes against which the Arab Spring was a series of uprisings were able to survive so long under conditions of oppression, corruption, economic stagnation and educational underachievement. They did so by the manipulative use of antisemitism, often focused on the State of Israel but based on passages in the Qur’an and Hadith written more than a thousand years before the State existed. Astonishingly, the Islamist movements formed in opposition to the secular-nationalist regimes use the same antisemitism with even greater virulence, and will thus perpetuate the stagnation, corruption, brutality and underachievement against which they protest.

Some years ago I sat at the bedside of a young man in intensive care who had narrowly survived death. A twenty-year-old student at a rabbinic academy in the north of England, he had been sitting on a bus in London studying a volume of the Talmud, when he was stabbed twenty-two times. His assailant told the police when he was arrested: ‘Israel are the murderers…So I stabbed him.’
¹²
An unprovoked attack on an innocent student – who, as it happened, was neither an Israeli nor a Zionist, just a Jew – became a form of self-defence.

Hate and the blame culture go hand in hand, for they are both strategies of denial: ‘It wasn’t me, it was them, I acted in self-defence, I am the victim not the perpetrator.’ The murder of the innocent then becomes a holy deed. Victims
do
need our support. But they need our support to recover the power of agency. Taking responsibility for your own fate is not a luxury of the moral life, but a necessity. First build the future: that is how you redeem the past.

Freedom involves letting go of hate, because hate is the abdication of freedom. That is what Moses taught those who were about to enter the Promised Land. Don’t hate the people who persecuted you. Instead, learn from that experience how to build
a society without persecution. It is what the Holocaust survivors taught me: look forward, not back. Build a life, a family, a future, a hope. Hate makes us slaves; therefore let it go. Do not wage war on the children of darkness. Make sure instead that you and your children are sources of light.

Here in this transport

I am Eve

with Abel my son

If you see my older son

Cain son of Man

tell him that I

Dan Pagis
, ‘Written with a Pencil in the Sealed Wagon’

It began with Cain and Abel and it is happening still. Much of this book has been about sibling rivalry, so it makes sense to conclude with the story of how it started: the first human children, the first religious act, and the first fratricide. Cain brings an offering to God. So does Abel. God accepts the second but not the first. Cain becomes angry. God urges him to control himself. Cain ignores the warning and murders his brother. God then says, ‘The voice of your brother’s blood is crying to me from the ground’ (Gen. 4:10). So it was and so it is. The entire tragedy of religious history is foreshadowed in this drama.

Yet the story is undeniably odd. Why does God reject Cain’s offering? Why does Cain respond by murdering his brother? What is the rivalry between the brothers about? Modern interpreters tend to read it as a story about the tension between shepherds (Abel) and farmers (Cain). Alternatively, suggesting non-Hebraic sources of the brothers’ names, they argue that Abel means ‘herdsman’ and Cain ‘metalsmith’. These readings miss the clue the Bible itself gives, namely the
Hebrew
meaning of the brothers’ names.

Abel, in Hebrew
Hevel
, is among other things the keyword of
the book known in English as Ecclesiastes. Its second sentence includes the word
hevel
no less than five times. This is how the King James Version translates it: ‘Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity.’
Hevel
has also been translated as ‘meaningless, pointless, futile, useless’. These translations miss the point.

Hevel
is a word for ‘breath’. Jews, like the Greeks, spoke of the soul, or the spiritual dimension of humankind, in language drawn from the act of breathing. In Hebrew, words for soul – such as
nefesh, ruach, neshamah
– are all types of breath.
Hevel
means a shallow, fleeting, ephemeral breath.

Ecclesiastes is a sustained meditation on mortality. Life is no more than a breath, and all the wealth and glory even the greatest accumulate means nothing because all that separates us from non-existence is a mere breath. Its mood is like the scene in which King Lear, at the end of the play that bears his name, holds the dead body of his daughter Cordelia – the one who loved him and whose love he failed to recognise until the end – and cries, ‘Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life, / And thou no breath at all?’

Abel represents human mortality – a mortality that comes less from sin than from the fact that we are embodied souls in a physical world subject to deterioration and decay. All that separates us from the grave is the breath God breathed into us: ‘Then the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being’ (Gen. 2:7). That is all we are:
hevel
, mere breath. But it is God’s breath. Life is holy. That is common ground in Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

What eventually will kill Abel is Cain. Cain in Hebrew means ‘to acquire, to possess, to own’. The Bible says so explicitly. ‘Now Adam knew Eve his wife, and she conceived and bore Cain, saying, I have acquired [
kaniti
] a man with the help of the Lord.’ The significance of this is lost on most translators, who read it as ‘made’, ‘gotten’, ‘produced’, ‘created’, ‘given life to’, and so on. These too miss the point.

Kaniti
, ‘I have acquired’, is one of those verbs that, like the narratives analysed in this book, yield their meaning only in retrospect, when we have gone through the entire Hebrew Bible and then returned to read the text in the light of all that follows. It was Jean-Jacques Rousseau who unintentionally provided the deepest commentary. In his
Discourse on the Origin of Inequality
, he writes:

The first man who, having fenced in a piece of land, said ‘This is mine,’ and found people naïve enough to believe him, that man was the true founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: ‘Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.’

The only word with which a reader of the Bible would disagree would be the last. ‘The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof’ (Ps. 24:1). It does not belong to nobody, it belongs to God.

The entire ethical-legal principle on which the Hebrew Bible is based is that we own nothing. Everything – the land, its produce, power, sovereignty, children and life itself – belongs to God. We are mere trustees, guardians, on his behalf. We possess but we do not own. That is the basis of the infrastructure of social justice that made the Bible unique in its time and still transformative today.

Cain represents the opposite: power as ownership, ownership as power. The Hebrew word
Baal
, the name of the chief Canaanite god, has the same range of meanings. The root means ‘to own, to possess, to exercise power over someone or something’. That for the Bible is the ultimate idolatry. Rousseau was right. Violence begins in competition for scarce goods, of which the first is land.

Eve unwittingly gave her eldest son a name that would eventually lead him to murder.
Cain
represents the idea that what I own gives me power. When I give some of what I own to God in the form of a sacrifice, I am doing so in order to receive in return some of his power. That is pagan sacrifice: a way of propitiating, cajoling or bribing the gods. That kind of sacrifice God does not accept. The sacrifice he accepts, that of Abel/
hevel
, is one that comes from the humility of mortality. ‘God, I am mere breath. But it is your breath I breathe, not mine.’

This, as the Bible understands it, is the fundamental conflict within the human condition: the struggle between the
will to power
and the
will to life
. Life, down here on earth, is holy. It is also exceptionally fragile. It is
hevel
, a mere breath. Almost in his last words, Moses tells his people, ‘I call heaven and earth to witness against you today that I have set life and death, blessing and curse, before you. Therefore choose life so that you and your descendants may live!’ (Deut. 30:19). Murder in pursuit of power while invoking the name of God is sacrilege, whoever does it, whoever the victim, whatever the faith.

That drama is still being enacted today in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Nigeria, Somalia, Libya, and in acts of terror around the world. What drives ISIS and its kindred organisations is the restoration of the Caliphate and the return to its rule of all the lands it once controlled, from Israel to Spain.
¹
These are political objectives. They have nothing to do with the God of Abraham. God does not accept human sacrifice. God does not sanctify the will to power. That is the way of Cain, not that of God. When religion turns men into murderers, God replies: ‘The voice of your brother’s blood is crying to me from the ground.’

What then will happen if we do nothing directly to confront the ideology that has led in our time to barbarism and bloodshed? First, the world will be more religious a generation from now, not
less. This will be so even if religion fails to convert a single soul. It has to do with demography. The more religious people are, the more children they have. The more secular they are, the fewer children they have. The indigenous populations of Europe, the most secular continent on earth, are committing long, slow suicide. Their below-replacement birth rates mean that they will get older and fewer. Demographically, as Eric Kaufmann has shown, the religious will inherit the earth.

Within religion, the most extreme, anti-modern or anti-Western movements will prevail. This is happening in Judaism, Christianity and Islam. The old marriage of religion and culture has ended in divorce. Today the secular West has largely lost the values that used to be called the Judeo-Christian heritage. Instead it has chosen to worship the idols of the self – the market, consumerism, individualism, autonomy, rights and ‘whatever works for you’ – while relinquishing the codes of loyalty, reverence and respect that once preserved marriages, communities and the subtle bonds that tie us to one another, moving us to work for the common good.

Losing its religious faith, the West is beginning to lose the ideals that once made it inspiring to the altruistic: reverence, loyalty, human dignity, the relief of poverty, public service, collective responsibility, national identity and respect for religious values while at the same time making space for liberty of conscience and the peaceable co-existence of more than one faith. Today Western politics often seem bereft of vision beyond the mantra of ‘freedom and democracy’ and cost-benefit calculations of maximum services for the minimum of tax. Faced with a culture of individualism and hedonism, it is not surprising that young radicals, eager to change the world, turn elsewhere to express their altruism, even if it involves acts that are brutal and barbaric. ‘The act of self-denial seems to confer on us the right to be harsh and merciless toward others,’ said Eric Hoffer in
The True Believer
.
²
Altruism misdirected can lead to evil: that has been the thesis of this book. That is why the West must recover its ideals.

The moral relativism that prevails today in the secular West is no defence of freedom. To see this, all you have to do is to watch any interview between a Western journalist and an Islamist. The journalist will make a comment like, ‘Surely killing people for blasphemy is wrong.’ The Islamist will say, ‘I can understand how you see it that way, but people have different moral views, and you surely understand that some people see it differently.’ End of conversation. The journalist has no reply. He or she probably believes that morality is subjective, the only basic human values are autonomy and the right to choose, the supreme virtue is tolerance even towards the intolerant, and imposing your views on others is intellectual imperialism. The journalist has, in effect, signalled his defeat before he has even opened his mouth, and the Islamist knows this.

In a world of relativism, what talks is power. In that sense, the Islamist is a faithful child of the twenty-first century. He or she knows that what makes the West sit up and take notice is the brute assertion of force. The West has often had no serious response to religiously motivated violence beyond ridicule and crude assaults on religion as such.

It was a great sage of Islam, ibn Khaldun (1332–1406), who saw that as a society becomes affluent it becomes more individualistic. It loses what he called its
asabiyah
, its social cohesion. It then becomes prey to the ‘desert dwellers’, those who shun the luxuries of the city and are prepared for self-sacrifice in war. Bertrand Russell came to the identical conclusion from a diametrically opposed starting point. Creative civilisations like ancient Greece and Renaissance Italy, he said, found that ‘the liberation from fetters made individuals energetic and creative, producing a rare florescence of genius’, but ‘the decay of morals’ made them ‘collectively impotent’, and they fell to ‘nations less civilised than themselves but not so destitute of social cohesion’.
³

So there will be more terror, more bloodshed, and more civil war in the Middle East and Africa. Other countries, like Jordan and Lebanon, may be drawn into the abyss. There will be further
barbaric new crimes against humanity, broadcast courtesy of the Internet. There will be rising tension in every European country. People will feel that their liberties are being threatened, but will have no clear idea of how to respond. Every time a movement like al-Qaeda is defeated, another will arise to take its place. Young people, in search of meaning, identity and community, will continue to be recruited to the cause.

The West, indeed the world, has never faced a challenge quite like this. Against it stands a movement more like a series of flash-mobs than a nation or a coalition, groups that can form, dissolve and reform almost at will. None of the normal conventions of war apply: uniforms distinguishing combatants from non-combatants, or the rules like those of the Geneva Conventions that constrain the cruelties that may be practised in the name of humanity. Indeed, the radicals pride themselves on their inhumanity. They have no qualms against butchering and beheading those with whom they disagree, using civilians as human shields, turning people into slaves and ten-year-old girls into suicide bombers.

Nor are they amenable to the kind of rational considerations that have governed international conflict in the past. They pride themselves on their willingness to die and they are utterly disinclined to compromise. According to Graeme Wood, ISIS ‘rejects peace as a matter of principle’ and ‘hungers for genocide’.
⁴
It believes that time and God are on their side. Radical Islam has proved its ability to recruit anywhere via the Internet, by playing endless video scenes of suffering and humiliation, enlisting people to take revenge, sacrificing their own and other people’s lives to win their place in heaven.

If we fail to address the issue seriously now, this will be our future. It is not one any of us should wish to bequeath to our grandchildren.

In
chapters 3
and
4
I devoted what might seem to be a disproportionate amount of space to antisemitism. This is not because Jewish suffering is different from Christian or Muslim suffering. It is not. All human suffering matters, and matters equally. Nor is it because Jews are suffering more than others today. They are not. Everyone is a potential victim. Humanity as a whole is suffering.