The Battle of the Book

Introductory comments

Rabbi Sacks: Thank you so much.

I really apologise. One reason being that my Hebrew is biblical and this occasionally gives rise to certain misunderstandings. A while back, Elaine and I were walking along the beach in Tel Aviv and there was a big sign saying “Ein Matzil.”

I said to Elaine, that means there is no Saviour. I said I knew they were secular in Tel Aviv, but did they have to take a big sign out saying God doesn't exist? Suddenly, it took me 24 hours to realise it meant “There is no lifeguard.” And so to avoid such mistakes, please bear with me if I speak in English.

I take enormous pride in being marginally associated with a very, very exciting new project of a new National Library for Israel. A project that I think is going to have global significance for world Jewry. And what really excites me is that I hope that in the years to come, when the new building is completed, it will be at least as essential a visit from any foreign dignitary as a visit to Yad Vashem. 

Because it's important for people to know about us. Not only how Jews died, but how Jews live.

And we are, and it's an understatement to say so, Am HaSefer, the People of the Book, the people who lived by, with, and for a Book. 

Friends, tonight I want to speak about the way books and the stories they tell can be read in multiple ways, and sometimes in ways that are very dangerous indeed. 

And I want to begin a quarter of a century ago in 1989. You remember in 1989, the Berlin Wall fell, the Cold War came to an end, and the Soviet Union began to implode. It was at that time that people spoke about the end of history, that the world would be conquered by liberal democracy and market economics. 

And it was just at that moment, that a cloud no bigger than a man's hand, a tiny little interruption appeared, which turned out to be the beginning of what has become today a very great storm.

That episode, if you remember, just at this time that all was happening, happened when Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa against Salman Rushdie for his book, “The Satanic Verses.” And for the first time in modern times, we witnessed books being burned  - in Bradford, in Britain, and we remembered Heinrich Heine's famous remark that, “Those who begin by burning books end by burning people.” 

Today, the most unlikely sequence of events has actually unfolded, so that radical, political Islam has become a raging force devastating Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Nigeria, and many other places.

And few foresaw that religion would become a powerful - in some senses the most dangerously powerful - force in the international arena of all. Don't forget, that ever since the 18th century, every self-respecting intellectual believed that religion was dying, and it was at best in intensive care. So that nobody could have foreseen the return of the repressed as it is done in this century. The end result has been that we - because all of this was so unexpected - have been left with very few weapons in our intellectual armoury.

What ideas do you use to confront forces like radical, political Islam? So far, Western politicians have used very simple ideas. Freedom. Democracy.

These are the wrong words. 

They make sense to us, but not to our enemies. 

Freedom means nothing to one who believes that religion means submission.

Democracy means nothing to those who believe that the Will of God takes precedence over the will of human beings. 

And as for tolerance as a value, in the West we have tended to predicate tolerance on moral relativism, and the truth is that you can't defend anything on the basis of moral relativism, even moral relativism itself. 

The end result is that we are faced with a world on fire around Israel in which, in the famous words of W.B. Yeats, “The best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

Now, the last time this happened, the last time we had wars of religion on this scale, was in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries following the Reformation. Wars that only came to an end with the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. But what is interesting is what did not happen then and for which we are paying the price now.

Let me explain. What happened then, in the 17th century, was that a group of remarkable individuals - among them John Milton, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and our very own, my favourite apikores, Spinoza, sat and read Tanach. Some of them believed it, some of them didn't, but they were all engaged with it.

Even Hobbes, who was an atheist, quotes Tanach 647 times in “The Leviathan.” And having read the Hebrew Bible, they came up with a remarkable series of ideas. Ideas that made the whole of the modern world possible.

Social contract, the moral limits of power, the doctrine of toleration, liberty of conscience, and above all, human rights. All these ideas were born in that intensely religious age of the 17th century on the basis of the deep structure of Tanach. 

The trouble was - and of course what that led to a century later; it took, it takes a long time for ideas to percolate - but what that led to in the late 18th century was the separation of religion and power in two different ways.

One in America, one in France. In America, the First Amendment. In France, the Declaration of the Revolutionary Assembly on les droits de l'homme et du citoyen. All men are born and remain equal in rights. 

In other words, the solution that the 17th and 18th century Europeans provided for dangerous texts was not to address those texts themselves, but to ensure that people who read those texts couldn't do too much harm because they'd been deprived of power. The end result was that those texts remain to this day, dangerous texts, and there are dangerous texts in Judaism, in Christianity, and Islam.

Today, would that we could go back and disconnect religion from power in the Middle East, but we can't, because what's happening in the Middle East is religious extremists are seizing power and using it brutally. The 17th century was the beginning of four centuries of secularisation. The 21st century is the beginning of a process of de-secularisation.

The world will be more religious in the 21st century than it was in the 20th, and therefore it seems to me that we have no choice but to go back to those texts themselves and to see why they have proved dangerous in the past and how they can be guided away from violence in the future. 

Now, that's a very long story and you and I haven't got time, so to that end I'm bringing out in two days time a little book called, “Not in God's Name.” It's not for sale here, so this is not a commercial, it really isn't, and I don't get a commission from Amazon.com, but what I'm doing is just explaining that I'm going to give you a little sketch tonight, and if you didn't understand a word then, you know, you can read the book and not understand even more words, but here it is. What I would really like to do tonight, if I may, is to take one little fragment, a self-contained fragment of the argument, and share it with you.

To do which, I want to ask these three basic questions. 

Number one, is there a connection between religion and violence, and if so what is it? 

Number two, is there a specific and special connection between religion and violence when it comes to the three Abrahamic monotheisms, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam? 

And number three, is that violence implicit in the texts themselves, or is there another way of reading those texts? 

Can we, in this National Library, plot a way to separate books from bloodshed? 

Now, let me begin with the Torah's answer to the first question, is there a connection between religion and violence? And here the Torah is blunt, candid, and devastatingly honest. The first religious act in the Torah leads to the first act of violence.

What was the first religious act? Cain, Cain v’Hevel, bring offerings to God. That leads directly to the first murder, the first fratricide. 

Now, I want to leap across the centuries and come to the two figures in the 20th century who I think made most profound - gave us the most profound - insights in the connection between religion and violence as a whole.

The first of them, of course, is Sigmund Freud, who wrote about it in three books, “Totem and Taboo,” “The Future of an Illusion,” and “Moses and Monotheism,” which our kids abbreviate to M&Ms. And, of course, and the other one, of course, very influenced by Freud, was the French literary theorist and anthropologist René Girard, who taught in the United States and wrote, among his many books, the most famous book on religion and violence in the modern age, in recent, in the last half-century, and that was “Violence and the Sacred.” Now, what made these two thinkers remarkable is they turned the whole equation upside-down.

What Freud and Girard argued is not that religion gives rise to violence. They argued that violence gives rise to religion. That was their astonishing and paradigm-shifting insight. 

We know, according to Freud, what that primal act of violence is. It is the violent relationship, potentially violent relationship, between fathers and sons, the Oedipus complex. That, according to Freud, was the basis of individual psychology, but it was also, in “Totem and Taboo,” he argues, the basis of religion. What happened was the sons got together because they resented the fact that the father, the alpha male of the tribe, dominated access to women, and they banded together and killed the father.

They were then seized by guilt, which materialised in the form of the voice of the dead father, which became - Freud called this memorably - “The return of the repressed.” And that was the basis of religion, worshipping the father whom you had killed. Now, this is a very interesting theory. 

However, if you look at the actual foundational narratives of the great cultures, you will see that actually they relate violence to something very different indeed.

What does the Torah suppose is the most fraught relationship? If you look at Sefer Bereishit, is it fathers and sons? Bereishit tells a different story, a story of sibling rivalry. Five stories - Cain and Abel, Isaac and Ishmael, Jacob and Esau, Joseph and his brothers, and of course the two sisters, Leah and Rachel. 

That is not only the case as far as the Torah is concerned. In Egyptian myth, the key story is of Set and Osiris. In Greek myth, it is Atreus and Thyestes. In Rome, famously, it's Romulus and Remus. Hamlet begins with a fratricide. Claudius kills Hamlet's father to take his throne.

And that, according to Girard, is the driver of the basic driver of human violence, sibling rivalry, - or what he calls “mimetic desire,” the desire to be your sibling and not yourself. 

Now, this leads to a fascinating discovery.

I'm sure lots of you knew this. I just never knew it before, and that is that Sigmund Freud knew all this. He actually knew that there was another kind of driver of violence that was not accounted for in his theory. And I find it absolutely fascinating that whenever Sigmund Freud touches on sibling rivalry, his usual cool, calm, detached writing style suddenly turns white-hot. It catches fire. 

Listen to Sigmund Freud on sibling rivalry. This is what he writes in his book, “The Interpretation of Dreams”:

“The elder child ill-treats the younger, maligns him, and robs him of his toys, while the younger is consumed with impotent rage against the elder and envies him and fears him.”

Now, that's pretty strong language. He writes, in a letter to the novelist Thomas Mann, about Napoleon's relationship with his elder brother.

This is what he writes: ”The elder brother is the natural rival. The younger one feels for him an elemental, unfathomably deep hostility for which in later life the expression ‘death wish’ and ‘murderous intent’ may be found appropriate.”

And here again, is Sigmund Freud writing about femininity. He writes this, “But what the child grudges the unwanted intruder, if you're the eldest child and then another sibling is born, is not only the suckling but all the other signs of maternal care. It feels that it has been dethroned, despoiled, prejudiced in its rights. It casts a jealous hatred upon the new baby and develops a grievance against the faithless mother, the mother who was faithless enough to have another child and thus forcing me to share her affection. We rarely form a correct idea of the strength of these jealous impulses, of the tenacity with which they persist, and of the magnitude of their influence on later development.”

Now, there it is. Three quotes from Sigmund Freud on sibling rivalry. Why did Sigmund Freud not make sibling rivalry, rather than the Oedipus Complex, the heart of his theory? 

It seems that he repressed it. He should have been a psychoanalyst.

This is the story. It's a fascinating story. Sigmund Freud was the only boy in a family of girls. He was spoiled, something rotten, and then his mother had another boy, called Julius. When Freud was not quite two years old - and Freud really resented this - and his brother Julius died before reaching his first birthday. And I strongly suspect that Freud, throughout his life, almost half blamed himself for wishing his brother dead and for that thing actually happening.

And somehow or other, Freud seems to have repressed the significance of sibling rivalry, and it was left first to Adler, and then later, as I say, to René Girard, to put sibling rivalry at the heart of the source of violence. So that is my first point, that sibling rivalry is the primal source of violence in human nature. 

And now I move to my second point. The three Abrahamic monotheisms, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, between whom the relationships have not always been cucumber sandwiches and tea on English lawns, have sometimes been very bloody and very brutal.

Why was it so? 

After the Shoah, a French Jewish historian called Jules Isaac, who survived the war but lost family in it, decided that he felt, as a matter of duty, he had to write the history of Christian antisemitism, of Christian Judeophobia. And so, he documented what he called “The Teachings of Contempt,” which of course begin in the New Testament and reach their fruition in the writing of the Church Fathers by the fourth century. It was called the “Adversos Judeos Literature,” a specific literature of hatred against Jews.

In 1961, Pope John XXIII, one of the, I think, Chassidei Umot Olam, read the writings of Jules Isaac and met him, and suddenly realised that the Church could no longer be in denial about the history of Christian antisemitism. 

And so, he set in motion the process of Vatican II, which led to the declaration in 1965 called “Nostra Aetate” and the transformation of Jewish-Catholic relationships. And it was following Nostra Aetate that some very courageous, and thoughtful, and clear-thinking, and honest Christian theologians, like Rosemary Radford Reuther and Gregory Baum and Paul Van Buren and James Carroll, started writing themselves about that history of Christian antisemitism.

And they came up with a word which for them summed up the root of the evil. It was called “Supersessionist Theology” or “Replacement Theology,” the idea which is already found really in the writings of Paul, that somehow or other the Church has replaced Judaism as God's option in the world. 

Jews were the old Israel, Christians were the new Israel, the books of the Jews were the Old Testament, our books are the New Testament, they were partners of the old covenant, but we Christians belong to the Brit Chadasha, to the new covenant.

And something of course very similar exists within Islam vis-a-vis both Judaism and Christianity, that somehow Muhammad was the last and greatest of the prophets and therefore already included in Islam all the earlier figures of both Judaism and Christianity, from Abraham all the way through to Christianity. 

But what is really interesting - and what we don't often think about - is how actually those early Christian thinkers actually manage this manoeuvre. And I want us to listen very carefully to what are almost the first-ever Christian texts, and you may find them surprising. I found them surprising when I read them for the first time. 

The earliest Christian texts were the letters, the Epistles of Paul. They were written in some cases several decades before the earliest of the Gospels, Mark.

And I want us to listen, first of all, to one of those very, very early letters, which Paul writes to the Galatians, and listen to what he says to them. This is a group of Gentile Christians who - and this group of Gentile Christians were being told by some Jewish Christians that they should keep all the mitzvahs, keep Shulchan Aruch - and Paul got very angry with them. And this is what he says, “Tell me you who want to be under the law,” you will want to keep the Torah.

“Are you not aware of what the law says? For it is written that Abraham had two sons, one by the slave woman and the other by the free woman. His son by the slave woman was born in the ordinary way, but his son by the free woman was born as the result of a promise. These things may be taken figuratively, for the women represent two covenants.”

“Now you brothers, you brothers,” he's saying to the Galatian Christians, “You brothers, like Isaac, are the children of the promise. At the time the son born in the ordinary way persecuted the son born by the power of the Spirit. It's the same now.”

In other words, Ishmael persecuted Isaac, so the Jews are persecuting you. 

“But what does Scripture say? ‘Get rid of the slave woman and her son, for the slave woman's son will never share in the inheritance with the free woman's son.’ Therefore brothers, we are not children of the slave woman, but of the free woman.”

Do you understand what he's saying? He's getting up and saying to the Christians, ‘Your mother was Sarah, and the Jew's mother was Hagar. You are Yitzchak, the Jews are Ishmael, and what does the Torah say about Ishmael? Send them away.’

That is how he is explaining to the Christians who they are and how they are related to Abraham.

Christians are free, Jews are slaves, Christians are Isaac, Jews are Ishmael, Christians belong, while Jews are to be driven away. 

Decades later, he writes the following in his Epistle to the Romans. “Not only that,” he says, “But Rebecca's children had one and the same father, our father Isaac, yet before the twins were born or had done anything good or bad, in order that God's purpose in the election might stand, not by works, but by him who calls, she was told, ‘the older will serve the younger.’ Just as it is written, ‘I love Jacob, but Esav saneiti, I hated Eisav.” A quote, of course, from the prophet Malachi. 

You hear what Paul is now saying to the Christians. ‘We Christians are Jacob, they are Eisav. What is more, it is not merely that we are Ya’akov and the Jews are Esav, but HaKadosh Baruch Hu says through the prophet Malachi, I hate Eisav.’ ‘I hate Jews,’ says God.

By the third century, Cyprian, the Church father, is already explaining that the Jews are Leah and the Christians are Rachel. You remember, Leah had “weak eyes,” so Cyprian says that's the Jews. They can't see clearly, whereas Rachel is whom Ya’akov really loved, and that's who we are. And if you go throughout Europe to church, mediaeval churches, you will see mediaeval cathedrals. Many of them have these statues of these two wives, Leah and Rachel. Rachel representing the Church, and Leah with a blind over her eyes because the Jews are blind.

And by the fourth century, John Chrysostom, Tertullian, Aphrahat, and even Augustine, are drawing the ultimate conclusion that Christians are Hevel, Abel, Jews, are Cain. Jews murdered their brother, and as a result, “na v’nad ba’aretz,” the myth of the wandering Jew was born, later used by Christians to justify the expulsion of Jews from everywhere, beginning in England in 1290 all the way through to Spain in 1492 and Portugal in 1497.

Of course, in Islam, it's done much simpler, but essentially by the same manoeuvre. The covenant passes from Avraham to Ishmael, not to Yitzchak, and the reason the Torah says it the other way around is originally the Torah said that God wanted the covenant to pass through Ishmael, it's just Jews falsified the Torah. 

Now, ask yourself a simple question. I used to study philosophy in Oxford and Cambridge. This was a really, really innocent undertaking, I have to say. It was really enjoyable. You rarely see philosophers waging war against one another.

I used to love listening in to philosophers debating these wonderfully speculative things, one philosopher saying to another as they were walking through the courtyard in my college, ‘Tell me, is ambiguous, ambiguous?’ To which the other replied, ‘In what sense?’

Or Sidney Morgenbesser, that wonderful Jewish philosopher from Colombia, who as he was dying said, ‘Why is God so angry with me? Just because I don't believe He exists.’ That's the kind of thing philosophers say. 

Now, how is it that you very rarely find a nation of Platonists waging war against a nation of Aristotelians? Or how is it that Confucians and Taoists in China don't wage war with one another? Or why is it that Cartesians and Humeans and Kantians don't, you know, perpetrate acts of violence? The answer is pretty simple, because these are different approaches to truth, different ways of understanding the universe and our place in it.

One may be true, the others may be false, but they are essentially incommensurable. I, as a Platonist, am not threatened by the existence of Aristotelians, and therefore different cultures don't inherently threaten one another. 

But that is quite different when we talk about sibling rivalry.

Let me be blunt. Sibling rivalry exists in the animal kingdom, Douglas Mock has just brought out a book a few years ago from Harvard University on sibling rivalry in the animal kingdom. He uses that wonderful crossword clue from Shakespeare's Hamlet, “A little more than kin but less than kind.” 

And it turns out the birds, young birds, do this kind of thing. You know, the firstborn chucks his younger brothers or sisters out of the nest. Why? And you know why the pecking order exists, why the phrase ‘the pecking order?’ Because there are limited supplies of food. So if you're the firstborn, you are a little older and therefore a little stronger, and you don't want your other siblings taking away the food that may be vital to your existence.

And that is why sibling rivalry is serious, because my siblings threaten my food supply. 

In the case of human beings, just because we… you take most of these, actually may I confess I have never seen “Downton Abbey.” Is this a terrible confession? I honestly don't know if this is a story about succession, but the truth is if I am the younger brother, then my older sibling is going to inherit the country estate, and the only way I can inherit is if I get rid of him or her in some other way.

So in other words, sibling rivalry is intrinsically up close and personal, because my sibling is standing between me and what I most desire. Whether it is food, or it is my parents' love, or whatever it is, that person is not simply believing different things from me. They are threatening my own self-image, and that is why sibling rivalry is a primal source of violence.

Now we see precisely why Judaism, Christianity, and Islam saw each other as such a threat. Why the relationships between them were so often violent. It had nothing to do with an abstraction, supersessionist theology.

What it had to do is what underlay that theology to begin with, sibling rivalry itself. If I see myself as Isaac, and you see yourself as Isaac, then we are threatening one another for the very same position. Sibling rivalry is primarily violent, and always has that potentiality, and we can now therefore understand exactly why the relationship between Jews, Christians, and Muslims has been so fraught.

It goes back to the origin of violence itself. It goes back to the fact that Christians and Muslims,  - and indeed Jews, but we were there first - but that Jews, Christians, and Muslims define themselves by essentially usurping the others. And by taking the Jewish narratives and translating them into Christian narratives, or Muslim narratives. 

This is real sibling rivalry, and it is the root of the violence between the three Abrahamic monotheisms.

Therefore, I move to the third and final stage of my argument. Do these stories, on which Christianity and Islam base themselves - our stories, stories of Isaac and Ishmael, Jacob and Esau, Joseph and his brothers, Leah and Rachel, do those texts actually mean what they have been taken to mean? 

And here I had to do some re-reading, some serious listening to those texts, and that is the sort of central core of the book. And therefore, I can only speak now very briefly indeed, but I think you'll be able to go back and re-read those stories, and do the rest of the argument yourself.

I just want to give you two very simple examples. You know the story of Bereishit chapter 21, the birth of Isaac? When do we read that? That's the Kriyat HaTorah for the first day of the Jewish year, the first day of Rosh Hashanah. You remember the story.

Isaac is born, Sarah sees Ishmael “m’tzachek,” laughing, jesting, and she says to Abraham, ‘Send Hagar and Ishmael away.’ Abraham is reluctant to do so. God says, ‘Do so.’ And you remember the story. They're sent out into the desert in the scorching heat, their water runs out. Ishmael is about to die. Hagar puts him under a bush, sits away, because she doesn't want to see her son die.

At that moment of the depths of despair, an angel suddenly appears, indicates a well of water, and tells Hagar, ‘It'll be okay,’ because “Ki shama Elokim et kol haNa’ar ba’asher hu sham,” He's heard the voice of the child, the're where he is. And have no fear, “Ki l’goy gadol asimenu.” I will make him a great nation. 

I want you to envisage, just visualise this scene, and please, this is an open question.

As you read these texts, that text, with whom do your sympathies lie? Sorry, it's an open question, I need an answer. Pardon? With Hagar, with Ishmael. It is one of the most emotive scenes in the whole of Torah.

There's a mother watching her child die. I defy anyone to read Bereishit chapter 21 and not identify with Hagar and Ishmael. You can't read it in any other way. You cannot read it in any other way. 

And yet, it's very clear that Sarah is right, and Isaac is chosen, and God says so. Now, this is a very, very odd narrative, because it tells us that Isaac is chosen, and yet, we read it such that our sympathies are directed in the other direction.

It is bewildering. Chazal found it so bewildering that, as you know, Rashi quotes them, they had to read something into the narrative that is not there, bipshuto shel mikra, at all, which is that Ishmael, when it says he was “metzachek,” means he was either guilty of idolatry, or murder, or forbidden sexual relations. That is Rashi's explanation, that is Chazal, and we understand why, because it's the only way you can turn that into a coherent narrative somehow.

But that's not the way the text is written. It is written so as to enlist our imaginative sympathies on the other side of the equation. 

I want to give you another example, Bereishit chapter 27, the chapter in which Rivka says to Ya’akov, when she hears that Isaac is about to bless Eisav, dress up in Eisav's clothes, take this venison, and he will bless you.

Jacob dresses up in Esau's clothes, pretends to be Esau, and takes the blessing. He then leaves, and then Eisav comes in. And there is a moment when the language of the Torah becomes more emotional than any other place in the whole of the Chamisha Chumshei Torah.

Listen to the wording of the Torah. As Isaac, the blind, and Esau, the son, suddenly begin to realise what has just happened. “VaYecharad Yitzchak charada gedol ad me’od,” Isaac trembles, an intense and very deep trembling.

With Esau, “VaYitzak tza’aka gedola umara ad me’od,” Esau cries out with a loud and exceedingly bitter cry. 

What words describe the emotions of Abraham and Isaac at the Binding of Isaac? There's not one word about their emotional state. We have to guess it.

As Eric Orbach wrote in his famous essay, “Odysseus Iscard,” the biblical narrative is fraught with background. It leaves it all out. We have to guess for ourselves.

What is Abraham feeling? What is Isaac feeling? The Torah is unbelievably parsimonious. It is very, very self-effacing when it comes to describe the emotional state of individuals there. Very rare.

So, for the Torah to use this kind of language of Isaac and Esau, it just hits us between the eyes. You cannot read Bereishit 27 without reading it in such a way that your sympathies go with Isaac and with Esau, as they sit there comforting one another. It is the most emotional passage in Torah.

And yet, we know the covenant was supposed to go with Ya’akov, and it did go with Ya’akov. And again, Chazal had somehow to square the circle, which they did, again, very ingeniously, and we understand why. “Ki tzayid b'fiv,” when Esau was growing up, “ki tzayid b'fiv,” - they translated it as he deceived his father Esau into thinking he was more pious than he was, etc., etc.

But read Bereshit 21 and 27, and you will understand these are extraordinary literary constructs. Always, epic literature, religious foundational stories, have a clear direction. This is right. This is wrong. This is the chosen. This is the unchosen.

And yet, these narratives completely destroy that paradigm, because our identification has to go with the unchosen. 

And what I believe is the case with all these narratives - and many others beside - is that we have, indeed, in the narratives of Isaac and Ishmael, Jacob and Esau, Joseph and his brothers, Leah and Rachel, underneath the surface, a concealed counter-narrative, whose very thrust is in the opposite direction to the surface narrative. In other words, what we have in these stories is a set of narratives that are meant to be read on two levels.

Number one, when we're young, when we're open, we read them on the surface as simple stories. But number two, when we've got a little bit older and we know a little bit more of what happened in biblical history, and we know a little bit more about human relationships and about the vagaries of love and the sense of rejection, we are able to go back and read the story at a completely different level and learn from it a completely different lesson. And that, I think, did not happen by accident.

I think every one of these stories is the Torah's response to the problem with which we began. 

That HaKadosh Baruch Hu discovers that the first time two human people - the first two human children - make him an offering and one of them is not accepted, they murder one another? HaKadosh Baruch Hu wants us somehow to grow out of this violence that somehow seems caught up with religion. And He wants us to grow up out of it, but He can't confront that directly because sibling rivalry is at the very core of human psychology.

But if you think about it, why does sibling rivalry exist in the case of animals? Because there's a limited food supply, so the more siblings I have, the less food I have. Why does it happen in the case of children? Because the attention of parents is sometimes a limited commodity. I feel that my father or my mother love my brother or sister more than me, and sometimes it's very hard for a parent to convince children otherwise.

There is, in other words, behind sibling rivalry, a logic of scarcity. There is just so much food, attention, affection, love to go around, and the more that goes to him, the less that comes to me. There's a logic of scarcity.

And yet, can we really imagine that the same logic of scarcity applies to God's love? Is that so finite and limited, that for God to love me, He has to hate you? That for God to choose me, He has to reject you? That makes no sense of God at all, whose love is infinite. “SheRachamav al kol ma’asav,” whose tender mercies are on all His creations, who created every single human being, regardless of gender and class and colour and creed. “B’tzalmo ub’dmuto.” The God who, through Noah, made a covenant with all humanity. The God who taught us as Jews that “Chasidei umot HaOlam yesh lahem chelek l’olam Haba.” the righteous of all nations have a share in the World to Come.

It makes no sense that God's love for human beings is a scarce, finite commodity, such that loving me, He has to dislike or reject you. 

But the Torah knows that this is really tough for us to understand, because we think of God like our parents, or like, you know, on a human model, and therefore we think it's either him or me. And we have to be very mature indeed to move beyond that sibling rivalry that Freud was so passionate about in saying that that resentment and that violence of feeling, we underestimate how long it lasts and how influential it is for the rest of our lives.

And so the Torah doesn't confront it directly. It confronts it with ultimate subtlety by telling us a series of stories that on the face of it are about sibling rivalry, but deep down are telling us that, yes, Hagar will not see her child die, and Ishmael will become a “goy gadol,” and Eisav will have kings and nations descend from him, and God will tell Moshe Rabbeinu, don't take anything from Har Seir, or from Edom, because I gave that to the Bnei Eisav. 

God has a place for every single one of us in his scheme of things. But the Torah had to bury that message beneath the surface of biblical narrative, because we have to be very mature and confident enough to read it that way.

But one thing is absolutely clear. If you read the stories of sibling rivalry in Bereishit, they tell a story, and let me just do it for you. Ignore every other bit of the narrative and look at the last scene in each of those relationships.

What's the last scene in Cain and Abel? Abel is dead. 

What is the last scene in Isaac and Ishmael? They are standing together at Abraham's grave. 

What is the last scene in Jacob and Esau? They meet, they embrace, they kiss, and they go their separate ways.

What is the last scene in Joseph and his brothers? Forgiveness and reconciliation. 

In other words, there's an upward curve to these stories. And only when there is forgiveness and reconciliation between Joseph and his brothers can the story of the Jewish people begin. With the beginning of Sefer Shemot and with the fifth story of siblings, only in this case it is Moshe and Aaron and Miriam working together, leading together. God telling Moses that, though I have made you the leader, your brother Aaron will rejoice when he sees you. 

So, the Torah tells a non-tragic story about sibling rivalry, and that is what I've tried to show in detail in studying all these sibling rivalry narratives in Bereishit. 

If that is the case, then the way all of us have read these stories until now - especially Christians and Muslims - as an either-or, either God chose you or He chose us, is not the only way, and is not the best way, of reading those stories.

That actually, those stories, understood in their depth, are God's answer to this terrible source of violence in the human heart.

So, I have thus tried to provide a way forward in what has been a very tangled and tragic history for many centuries. You will see it is a theological way forward. I've not tried to update Milton and Hobbes and Locke and Spinoza for the 21st century, because I've told you that solution worked 400 years ago. It is not the solution for our time. 

Halevye we could deprive violent religious activists from power, but they have seized it, and they're not about to go to an advanced course in philosophical politics at the Hebrew University and become vegetarians and liberal democrats.

If you are dealing with religious passion, you have to fight it with religious passion.

You have to provide people who read texts seriously, and you have to show them that they have not read those texts seriously enough. 

My aim, of course, is not to convince the extremists. They will not be convinced by anyone. 

But I do think that we should begin trying to train future generations of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim leaders, to stop thinking of themselves as enemies of one another, and start thinking of themselves as potential friends. 

And the key challenge will be, can each of us, Jews, Christians, and Muslims, stand in the 21st century - knowing the history between us, knowing the bloodshed, knowing how much we have seen people hate in the name of the God of love and practise cruelty, in the name of the God of Compassion, and kill in the name of the God of Life. Can we, knowing the worst about one another, look each other in the eye, and say what Yosef said to his brothers, “Atem chashavtem alye ra’a v’Elokim chashva l’tova.” You tried to harm me, but I'm still here.

And God turned that pain into some possibility of blessing. 

Can we aspire to that astonishing statement of Chazal in Avot de Rabbi Natan, “Eizehu gibor? HaOseh soneh oheiv,” Who is a real hero? Not one who defeats his enemies, but one who turns an enemy into a friend. That is my argument.

What I've tried to do, in other words, is number one, provide a religious response to religiously motivated violence. To say, as a religious believer, not in God's name. You are not acting in God's name.

Number two, to think through some new ideas, religious ideas, that will allow us to reconsider the texts that we have, each of us in our different ways, taken to be our own, and read them and understand them in a new way. 

I've done this because, although wars are won by weapons, peace is won by ideas. 

And finally, I've tried in this quite difficult and depressing age, to articulate a theology of hope, and thus free ourselves from being forced into a theology of fear.

My aim, as I say, is simply to see if I can inspire young Jews - and hopefully young Christians and Muslims as well - to think of an alternative way of conceiving our relationship with one another and with God, and thus to redeem the past without repeating it and all its tragedies and tears. 

May Hashem help us all to see a future of peace. “Hashem oz l’amo yitein, Hashem yevarech et amo baShalom.” Thank you.

Closing remarks