On my blog, I usually post once a month on each track. This time, I chose to do something different and withhold my post for a bit, because I wanted to dedicate today’s post to review an interesting book I spent the last three weeks reading (I only finished it yesterday).

25 years ago on this exact date, a catastrophe occurred, spurred out of religious extremism. For my American friends, I won’t need to spell out the event I’m referring to, but for better or worse, it is on theme with the book I read.

Introduction

Lord Sacks is a prominent Jewish thinker and writer, well-known for his perspectives on religion, life, spiritually and winner of the Templeton Prize in 2016. In life (he passed on in 2020), he was a practicing Jew who held on the position of Chief Rabbi of the United Synagogue – the largest umbrella body for Orthodox Judaism in the UK. While his books cover many topics ranging from Judaism and Jewish philosophy, ethics and morality, today’s topic will focus specifically on his 2015 work Not in God’s Name: Confronting Religious Violence.

To start, Lord Sacks outlined the modern phenomena of religious violence in modern times and discussed the potential drivers that cause it. Firstly, he argues that religion is often NOT the cause of violence – it is merely the societal structure that permits the formation of groups that foster in-group trust and altruism, but intergroup distrust and violence (intergroup = between groups). In other words, religion is simply a formalization of a broader social phenomenon of humanity – the tendency to form groups, albeit in a very persistent and powerful form.

After this disclaimer, Lord Sacks moves on to discuss how violence escalates between groups. Very briefly, he highlights three steps. Firstly, people develop a dualistic thinking that separates “us” from “them”. This evolved in humanity because dualism serves as a coping heuristic that aids one to resolve with minimal mental resources who is deserving of help, and who should be kept at arm’s length, i.e. boundary maintenance. Dualism is a very old tradition, and one can see dualistic thinking in many ancient texts (think light and darkness, Cain and Abel, God vs Satan etc.). Thus, dualism is an intrinsic part of our tendencies to live in groups as a social species.

However, when taken to an extreme, dualism deteriorates into pathological dualism, where one side decides to inflict harm on another. This occurs through three steps: dehumanization and demonization of opponents, self-victimization and finally enabling one to commit violence acts for the sake of perceived “altruism”, such as eliminating “vermin” as part of “God’s work”. Together, these three steps serve a common purpose – to make an opposing group a scapegoat to take blame for the problems within the group. Scapegoating serves to strengthen group unity by establishing a common enemy (even if logically unsound), while absolving the group of blame for its own problems (“it’s THEIR fault, not us”). So effective is scapegoating that it has been used time and again over the course of history, even within members of the same faith (e.g. Muslim sects infighting) and even when there is no faith involved (e.g. antisemitism by the Nazis). At this point, everything Lord Sacks discussed thus far are processes that explain ANY intergroup violence – not just religions. To those points, I largely agree, although I wished he would elaborate on how and why dualistic thinking deteriorates into pathological dualism.

A theological perspective of the roots of religious violence

The second part of the book strikes me as rather odd. To understand the roots of religious intergroup violence, Lord Sacks turned to the first book of the OT – Genesis. Here he provides a novel interpretation of many of the stories that the later Abrahamic faiths were built on. For example, in the story where Abraham and Sarah were actively trying for children, Sarah suggested Abraham bear a child through Hagar, their servant. This succeeded, leading to the birth of Ishmael – traditionally thought to be the ancestor of Muslims. However, later, Abraham and Sarah naturally conceived, bearing a second child called Issac, the eventual bearer of the Abrahamic covenant that establishes the Jewish people. What Lord Sacks noted was that while Issac received the divine covenant, Ishmael was not forsaken and he continued to be blessed exceedingly by God (Gen 17).

Lord Sacks continues his exegesis of other stories in Genesis regarding sibling rivalry – think Esau and Jacob, as well as Joseph and his brothers. While I won’t go into the details of his exegesis, his concluding point was: 1) in each of these stories, there is an apparent theme of dualism where two parties struggle against each other, yet 2) both parties are able to resolve their differences despite said dualism. Ultimately, God can bless one side without indicating disfavor for the other. The sooner one can admit that everyone is destined for different blessings on God’s earth, the sooner we can move past our tendencies to inflict violence on people different from us.

I appreciate Lord Sack’s thorough exegesis of some of the oldest stories and well-known stories in Scripture, and I agree with his concluding point that divine favor isn’t a zero-sum game. What I found odd is the way he got to that conclusion. Who is the target audience for such a discourse? While his exegesis may appeal to Jewish or Christian readers, it is hard to imagine Muslims caring for a story that they don’t recognize as divinely inspired Scripture.

Having followed primarily the Christian tradition, I am unfamiliar with Jewish rabbinic practices of interpreting Scripture (my guess is that they have a far more flexible approach to extract meaning out of holy texts). Yet, the theological exegesis section of the book was highly repetitive in some places, and he reads a lot into many minute details of these stories, such as Issac’s blindness in his old age and his indecision when issuing the first blessing to Jacob, not Esau. I don’t find many of his interpretations particularly convincing, especially after zooming out beyond Genesis and examining Israel’s future relationships with its neighbors; some of them descendants of Ishmael. Consider these passages:

And the angel of the Lord said to her, “Now you have conceived and shall bear a son; you shall call him Ishmael, for the Lord has given heed to your affliction. He shall be a wild ass of a man,
with his hand against everyone, and everyone’s hand against him, and he shall live at odds with all his kin.” (Genesis 16:11-12 NRSVUE)

For whenever the Israelites put in seed, the Midianites and the Amalekites and the people of the east would come up against them. (Judges 6:3 NRSVUE)

They say, “Come, let us wipe them out as a nation; let the name of Israel be remembered no more.” They conspire with one accord; against you they make a covenant—the tents of Edom and the Ishmaelites, Moab and the Hagrites… Let them be put to shame and dismayed forever; let them perish in disgrace. Let them know that you alone, whose name is the Lord, are the Most High over all the earth. (Psalms 83:5-6; 17-18 NRSVUE)

In the Deuteronomistic tradition, God said that while Ishmael and his descendants may be blessed, they are destined to live in antagonism with the surrounding nations. In the Psalms, the people of Israel call upon God to destroy their enemies – including the Ishmaelites. So much for the end of sibling rivalry. In other parts of the Hebrew Bible, Israel is instructed to extend hospitality to aliens inconsistently. God instructs them to extend hospitality only to other Israelites and selectively to other nations, whereas in the same voice He calls upon the destruction of specific clans in the Promised Land. It is an irony that Israel is the alien in the Promised Land instructed by God to care for other aliens but called to destroy the natives in the process. Even if there is a way for competing nations to coexist peacefully without displacing one another, I certainly don’t see it in the Judeo-Christian tradition. Isn’t the point of following God in any tradition to be holy – aka to be set apart?

Indeed, you shall annihilate them—the Hittites and the Amorites, the Canaanites and the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites—just as the Lord your God has commanded, (Deut 20:17 NRSVUE)

Granted, Lord Sacks did justify address how rabbis made sense of these morally questionable, “hard texts”. He chastises those who interpret these texts literally, while condemning fundamentalists who wield these texts to incite violence. He argues that the motifs in Genesis – overcoming sibling rivalry, finding one’s place in God’s earth, rejecting altruistic evil in the name of God – should take precedence in interpreting Scripture to make sense of these morally questionable texts. In other words, we must reinterpret these hateful texts to avoid succumbing to religious dualism, hate and violence, while prioritizing peace, overcoming differences and live in harmony. Frustratingly, he dedicates a tiny, woefully insufficient portion of his book to build his case, and there is a glaring, obvious alternative that he neglects to mention: why not just reject these texts altogether?

What now?

After a long theological exposition, Lord Sacks concludes the book with several calls to action. Firstly, he staunchly condemns those to seek to “impose truth by force”. No religious violence committed in the name of God has ever brought anyone closer to God. Using power to impose a universal monotheism onto others just doesn’t work. Instead, he argues that a liberal democracy, rather than enforcing a universal monotheism, is ironically the best way for a modern, pluralistic society to reject inter-group violence and coexist harmoniously. More importantly, a liberal democracy makes space for different people to continue being different, recognizing that no one has a unique right to enforce their ideas of “truth” onto others. Lord Sacks is careful in his wording here – he does not claim to deny the existence of a one “truth” (an anathema among Abrahamic religions); only that no one should forcefully impose it over others. Other advice he gives includes: 1) rejecting hate, 2) rejecting the temptation to exact revenge, and 3) rejecting power-grabbing to advance one’s religious views.

In my humble opinion, while the book started off decent, Lord Sacks went through a very roundabout exposition to arrive at very generic solutions to religious violence – something secular humanists can arrive at in much fewer words. His reinterpretation of sacred Jewish texts is unconvincing to me. Personally, I am inclined to believe that no amount of reinterpretative effort will be enough to remove dualistic thinking from followers. Such is the nature of the three great monotheistic religions – each assume theirs will reign the earth someday. Neither do I think that his theology was helpful in advancing his concluding points – a sentiment I suspect is shared by many others. Take away the entire theological section of the book, and his advice still stands. Perhaps a more helpful discourse would be to approach the topic of religious violence from a psychological standpoint: why do some people feel compelled to commit altruistic evil, whereas others who share the same religious traditions do the complete opposite instead?

Lord Sacks unfortunately passed on in 2020, and I wonder if his thoughts would have changed had he lived for a few more years to witness the Israel-Palestine war today. We’ll never know, but do give Lord Sack’s book a read if you are keen and let me know your thoughts!