[First posted October 19, 2012; reposted on the occasion of the Independence Day of Israel May 12, 2016.
One of the categories in our posts is MUST READ where we highly recommend books in our list of RESOURCES. As readers must have noticed, there are three names that repeatedly appear on books we feature here: Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, Dr. James D. Tabor, and Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks. Here is yet another book by our third-mentioned favorite, Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, titled FUTURE TENSE: JEWS, JUDAISM AND ISRAEL IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY, downloadable as an e-book from amazon.com. Its CONTENTS has 11 chapters, but we will feature only Chapter 4, excerpts of which we will quote here. The title: The Other: Judaism, Christianity and Islam.]
Why the Jews? . . . . Hate has attached to many groups in the course of history, but none with the persistence of hatred of the Jews for two thousand years. Besides which there were civilizations in which Jews lived (albeit not in large numbers), notably India and China, and that did not give rise to antisemitism at all. Surely Indians and Chinese have the same psychology as everyone else, the same tensions, the same resentments. Overwhelmingly, antisemitism has arisen in societies that either practised or were influenced by Christianity and Islam.
No sooner have we noted this than it becomes obvious why. Christianity and Islam trace their descent to Abraham, and their religious origins to God’s covenant with him. But so do Jews. And Judaism, the religion of biblical Israel, has existed twice as long as Christianity, three times as long as Islam. So Christianity and Islam faced a theological problem: what about the Jews? Somehow it had to be argued that two thousand years ago in the case of Christianity, or in the seventh century for Islam, something changed. The Abrahamic covenant was no longer with the Jewish people.
In the case of Christianity, it was argued, from Paul and the Church Fathers onward, that since Jews had rejected the Christian messiah, God had rejected them. He had made a new covenant and chosen a ‘new Israel.’ Islam put it differently. Abraham was a Muslim. The religion he taught was a preparation for Islam. In any case, the succession did not pass through Isaac as the Bible taught, but through Ishmael. Hence the difference in the sacred scriptures of these two faiths. Christianity included the Hebrew Bible but reordered its books to tell a story that culminated in the New Testament. Islam did not include the Hebrew Bible, since it claimed that Jews—in the account of the binding of Isaac, for example—had falsified events.
Generically, theologies of this kind are called supersessionist, meaning that they argue that the old has been superseded, displaced or replaced, by the new. The result was to deny legitimacy to Jews because they deny legitimacy to Judaism It might have been valid once, but no longer. Hence the difficult situation of Jews in Christian or Islamic cultures. By definition, they were less than fully human. Since they had rejected the dominant faith, God had rejected them, and they bore the stigma of that rejection.
This had political consequences. In the map of reality constructed by these faiths, they lacked conceptual space. They had no natural home. According to Augustine, Jews were the embodiment of Cain, condemned to be ‘a restless wanderer on earth’ (Gen. 4:12). In Islam, Jews, like Christians, were at best dhimmi, subject peoples under Islamic rule. In both faiths Jews had been disinherited. The promise of the land that God had, seven times, given to Abraham was null and void—in a word, superseded. . . ,
It is important to say that not all Christian theologies are alike, nor were all Christians opposed to the founding of the state of Israel. Far from it. . . . Neither Christianity nor Islam had anything to do with the racial antisemitism that led to the Holocaust. To the contrary, Christians were committe to Jewish survival. Islamic countries gave refuge to Jews fleeing Christian persecution, most notably the Ottoman Empire in the wake of the Spanish Expulsion. Both faiths recognized some form of kinship with the Jews, and both at times protected Jews from persecution.
My argument in this chapter is not about antisemitism as such, but about the phenomenon that led to the parting of the ways between Judaism on the one hand and Christianity and Islam on the other.
Christianity and Islam are universal monotheisms. Judaism is a particularistic monotheism. It does not claim to be the sole path to salvation. The righteous of all nations, taught the rabbis, have a share in the world to come. You do not have to be Jewish to be good, wise or beloved of God. That is what God taught the prophet Jonah when he expressed dismay that God had forgiven Israel’s enemies, the Assyrians of Nineveh.
The God of Israel is the God of everyone, but the religion of Israel is not the religion of everyone. Even at the end of days, the prophets did not forsee that the nations of the world would embrace the religion of Israel with its complex code of commands. They would recognize God they would come to Jerusalem to pray. They would beat their swords into ploughshares and wage war no more. But they would not become Jewish. Judaism is not a conversionary faith.
Why not? That is the question. Christianity and Islam borrowed much from Judaism, but not this. On the face of it, their approach is more logical. If God is the God of everyone in general, why did he make a covenant with this people—Jacob’s children—in particular? A universal God must surely lead to a universal truth, a universal faith. Why does Judaism embody the tension between the universal and the particular, embracing both, denying neither? We will not understand Judaism or the modern state of Israel until we find an answer to this question, and to locate it we must turn to the Hebrew Bible itself.
From All People to One People
In essence, the Hebrew Bible is the story of a single people, the children of Israel, later called the Jews, and their relationship with God. Yet the Bible does not begin with this people. It begins instead with a series of archetypes of humanity as a whole: Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah and the Flood, Babel and its builders.
Not until chapter 12 do Abraham and Sarah appear on the scene, and from then on the entire narrative shifts its focus, from humanity as a whole to one man, one woman, and their children. They become an extended family, then a collection of tribes, then a nation and eventually a kingdom. In some obscure yet unmistakable way—this is the Hebrew Bible’s fundamental theme—they were to become the carriers of a universal message. For the God they believed in was not a tribal deity, a God of this people and not that, this land and not that. He is the God of all creator of heaven and earth, who in love set his image on all humanity.
The people he chose to carry this message, on the testimony of the Hebrew Bible itself, were not an obvious choice. They were not large:
The Lord did not give you his love and choose you because you were more numerous than other peoples, for you were the fewest of all peoples (Deut. 7:7).
Nor were they especially pious:
It is not because of your righteousness or the uprightness of your heart (Deut. 9:5).
The impression we gain of the Israelites throughout is of a fractious, often wayward group, a ‘stiff-necked people’.
Yet Moses and the prophets were convinced that the message they carried was not for their people alone. It had a universal significance. Moses said that the laws the Israelites had been commanded—
will show your wisdom and understanding to the nations, who will hear about all these decrees and say, ‘Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people’ (Deut. 4:6).
Isaiah famously spoke about Israel being a light for the nations, a covenant of the peoples. Zechariah foresaw a time when—
Ten men from all languages and nations will take firm hold of one Jew by the hem of his robe and say, “let us go with you, because we have heard that God is with you” (Zech. 8:23).
The idea is present in the first words God spoke to Abraham:
Through you all the families of the earth shall be blessed—
—a sentiment that appears no less than five times in the book of Genesis. Israel’s message is a universal one. Why then one people, not all peoples” Why this land, not all lands? Why were Jews not commanded to take their message everywhere and convert everyone to the one true faith?
Anti-Imperialism
. . . . .Universalism in the Hebrew Bible is set at the beginning and end of time. The beginning is the first eleven chapters of Genesis. The end is the prophetic vision of peace and harmony,
when God will be king over all the earth, on that day he will be one and his name one.
In the meantime, in historical time, life under God is marked by particularity: the multiplicity of languages, cultures, natures and civilizations. That is the Jewish narrative. Why?
Clearly the answer lies in the story of the Tower of Babel, the prelude to the choice of Abraham and the point at which humanity is divided into different language groups. Babel is the turning point from the universal to the particular. It is here that the Bible is setting forth a fundamental proposition, but what is it? What was wrong with the project of Babel?
. . . . . The story of Babel is, of course, set against the historical backdrop of the Babylonian ziggurats, man-made artificial mountains where, it was believed, heaven and earth touched. This is the area from which Abraham’s family came and which they were commanded to leave. The biblical critique of Babylon becomes clearer in light of the book of Exodus, set centuries later, this time in Egypt. What was common to these two ancient civilizations, the Mesopotamian city-states and Egypt of the Pharaohs, was their monumental architecture—in both cases, physical symbols of concentrated power. The ziggurats, pyramids and temples of the ancient world were built at the cost of turning most of their population into slaves.
We begin to see an immense idea slowly taking shape. Judaism was born in two journeys, Abraham’s from Mesopotamia, Moses’ and the Israelites from Egypt. What is unusual about both journeys is their direction. At most times, in most places, migration is from poor countries to rich ones, from weak nations to strong ones. The two founding Jewish journeys were in the opposite direction, from advanced urban civilizations to a land of small towns, nomadic shepherds and agricultural settlements. This remains the utopian prophetic dream. Micah envisions a future in which—
Every man will sit under his own vine and under his own fig tree, and no one will make them afraid (Mic. 4:4).
Judaism is a critique of empire and the rule of the strong.
In the first chapter of Genesis we are told that every human being is in the image and likeness of God. This is not an abstract metaphysical proposition. It is a political statement of potentially explosive force. The kings and pharaohs of the ancient world were seen as gods, the children of the gods, or the sole intermediary of the gods. They presided over hierarchical societies in which there was an absolute, ontological difference between rulers and ruled.
By stating that not just the king but everyone is in the image of God, the Bible was opposing the entire political universe of the ancient world. Every individual is sacrosanct. Every life is sacred. The human person as such has inalienable dignity. Every life is sacred. The human person as such has inalienable dignity. Here is the birth of the biblical revolution, which did not materialize in the West until the seventeenth century with the articulation of the concept of human rights, meaning the rights we bear simply because we are human. Babel is the symbol of the sacrifice of the individual to the state. Abraham, by contrast, is to become the symbol of all individuals in search of worth as individuals. The Hebrew Bible is a sustained protest against empire, ruling elites and the enslavement of the masses. But what has this to do with particularity?
A Mishnah in the tractate of Sanhedrin makes the famous statement—included in Steven Spielberg’s film about the holocaust, Schindler’s List—that ‘One life is like a universe. Save a life and you save a universe; destroy a life and you destroy a universe.’ It goes on to say, ‘When a human being makes many coins in the same mint, they all come out the same. God makes everyone in the same image—His image—and they all come out different.’ In this teaching, I eventually realized, the rabbis had decoded the story of Babel and the biblical narrative as a whole
The fundamental difference between human sovereignty and divine sovereignty—the rule of humankind and the rule of God—is that humans impose uniformity; God makes space for difference. It is the nature of totalitarianisms like Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union to allow only one image—the Aryan race, the proletariat—to prevail. All those who fail to fit that image forfeit their rights and, often, their lives. The Tower of Babel and Egypt of the Pharaohs are symbols of the negation of the principles in which Judaism vests its faith: the dignity of the individual, the sanctity of life, the rule of justice over the powerful and powerless alike, the compassionate society and law-governed liberty.
Its key is diversity. We are all in God’s image, and we are all different. Another great nineteenth-century thinker, Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, saw this idea already foreshadowed in the symbol of the covenant God made with humanity after the Flood, namely the rainbow. Hirsch suggests that it represents the white light of God’s radiance refracted into the indefinite shadings of the spectrum. For Hirsch and Berlin, the division of humanity into many languages and cultures is the necessary precondition of human freedom and dignity until the end of days.
[S6K: There is so much more just in this chapter and on this topic that continues . . . there is enough in these excerpts for you to chew on so if your interest has been stimulated enough to get your copy of Chief Rabbi’s book, please do so, like all the other books we have recommended, this is worth the purchase!]
Reader Comments