Not in God’s Name: University of Chicago event

Introductory remarks

Rabbi Sacks: Andrea, Yiftach, Rabbi Brackman, Rabbi Lerner, beloved friends, thank you so much for this opportunity to set foot in this glorious university, which has indeed shaped modern thought in so many fields, in education, in literature, in economics, in political theory.

University of Chicago has won more Nobel Prizes than any other university in the world, by quite a long measure. Having come from Oxford and Cambridge myself, I'm seriously impressed. But to do so here, to do so in the company of Professor Michael Fishbane, is for me a singular honour.

Because although we hardly know one another and this conversation is totally unscripted, I have been learning from Professor Fishbane's books for many, many years. He is one of the great minds of our time and has contributed to so many areas of Jewish thought. And we'll debate for a long time which of your books is our favourite, but I do think your whole concept of inner-biblical exegesis, which you developed in “Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel” back in 1986, I think, was just thrilling for me because it told us an issue that is really at the heart of my new book, “Not in God's Name,” that what we have to wrestle with is not only texts, but context and interpretations.

And it is that meeting between the timeless word and the time-bound interpretation, that meeting between Torah SheBichtav and Torah SheBa’al Peh, that living encounter, which is the Jewish people in conversation with its destiny, a conversation that has never ceased since Sinai, “kol gadol v'lo yassaf.” That to me is thrilling, and I learned that from Professor Fishbane, and I count it an honour to sit in the same room as him. So I salute you, Professor Fishbane.

Friends, we are in a strange situation that nobody really foresaw. Nobody really thought that the 21st century would be one in which religiously motivated politics, religiously driven violence, would return mainstream to the international arena. Even 180 plus years ago, Alexis de Tocqueville says, all self-respecting 18th-century intellectuals believed that religion was dying and going to be dead.

He said, unfortunately, the facts don't bear this out at all. He came to America, a place which in the First Amendment separated Church and State, and knowing that religion had no power, he assumed it would have no influence. And here, of course, he found exactly the opposite. Its power was zero, its influence was immense. And it shaped, as he said, families, communities, education, philanthropy, everything that he held under the rubric of the art of association, which we call the apprenticeship in liberty. So the survival of religion, even into the 1830s, took people by surprise.

How much more so, of course, in the modern age. We can actually date the moment. It was 1989 when the Berlin Wall fell. The Soviet Union began to implode. The Cold War came bloodlessly to an end. And Francis Fukuyama, bless him, wrote a little thing called “The End of History.”

Goodbye, ideologies. Or as John Lennon had said in 1971, “Imagine nothing to kill or die for. No heaven and no religion, too.”

Well, that was a little premature, because just when you are writing the obituary of something or other, some unusual resurrection takes place. I know that's not a very Jewish thing, but they're kind of saying that since this is my second visit to Chicago, they're already talking about the second coming of the Lord. So somehow or other, religion has returned.

And we were very unprepared for this. As an American thinker called Richard Weaver once said, “The trouble with humanity is it forgets to read the minutes of the last meeting.” So we tend to forget that we've been here before.

Now the last time the West was in an age of wars of religion was the 16th and 17th centuries, following the Reformation. And there are very striking parallels between then and now. Then, as now, widespread discontent with the ruling power, in that case, the Roman Catholic Church.

Number two, that political dissent taking religious form. A reformation, an attempt to get back to the way that religion was in its pristine beginnings. 

Number three, however, what was absolutely fundamental, was that at the same time there had been a revolution in information technology. In that case, the invention of printing. So the ideas that Martin Luther formulated when he nailed his 95 theses to the door of Wittenberg Cathedral in 1517 had already been formulated two centuries earlier by John Wycliffe of Oxford, who in many ways anticipated much of Martin Luther's work. But Wycliffe came before the invention of printing and Luther afterwards.

And because of the revolution in information technology, as we know, as Moisés Naim wrote in his 2013 book, “The End of Power,” when there's a revolution of information technology, forces that would otherwise be marginal are suddenly able to outflank the conventional forms. And while the Catholic Church is still communicating by sermons in churches from pulpits, Luther's printers were pouring out his works in hundreds of thousands. And that, of course, is what is happening in the current world with nation-states bound to establish political forms, while Al-Qaeda and ISIS are proving themselves masters of global political theatre, using YouTube videos, Facebook, and so on. They are the real master users of it, and they have outflanked every existing political power. 

And the end result, of course, of all of that taking place then in the 16th and 17th centuries, was pretty much almost a century of religious warfare, culminating in the Thirty Years' War, which only came to an end with the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, that created the political order that we have inhabited from then till now, in which Henry Kissinger, in his new book, “World Order,” is asking, will that survive? 

Now, what I say in the book is that wars are won by weapons, but peace is won by ideas. 

And this is where I want us, just briefly, to revisit the 17th century, because although the Thirty Years' War came to an end, really, through mutual exhaustion, as they say about one of my predecessors, the late Chief Rabbi Hertz (of the Hertz Chumash). The Dictionary of National Biography says of him that “He never despaired of a peaceful solution to any problem once every other alternative had been exhausted.”

So, exhaustion can bring peace, but what really shaped the modern world was a series of thinkers, including John Milton, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Benedict Spinoza, delivering collectively the five fundamental ideas that shaped the modern world: social contract, the moral limits of power, liberty of conscience, the doctrine of toleration, and - most important of all - human rights. Now, what is fascinating about those thinkers - Milton, very religious; John Locke, a Sasanian Christian; Hobbes and Spinoza, seen at the time as atheists.

All four of them were in dialogue with a text. In this case, the Hebrew Bible. And that is where the whole argumentation is derived from. It's fascinating to read John Milton and suddenly find him quoting Rabbeinu Bachya al HaTorah, you know, on Parashat Shoftim.

So, these were steeped because Masechet Sanhedrin, the Rambam’s Hilchot Melachim, and all these texts had been translated into Latin by the Christian Hebraists and were thus part of the universal language of scholarship in the 16th and 17th centuries. So, they went back to religious texts and found, through new interpretation of those texts, or old new interpretation of those texts, the ideas that would take them forward into a more peaceable future. 

However, they left one piece of work undone.

Essentially, the 17th-century solution was to say, we will stop religion from making us kill one another by depriving it of power. Essentially, there was formal or substantive separation of Church and State, or rather, religion and power. In other words, the dangerous texts remained.

But because you stripped church leaders of power, it was rendered harmless. What we are now seeing is an age in which the opposite is taking place. Instead of a rebellion against a religious body, the Roman Catholic Church, we are seeing a series of religious counter-revolutions against secular nationalist regimes, such as Saddam Hussein's in Iraq, Assad's in Syria, and so on and so forth.

Michael Walzer's new book called “The Paradox of Liberation” is about this. He traces it in India and Israel, as well as elsewhere in the Muslim world. So, you get Hindu nationalism as well.

In other words, religion seizing back power. Now, when religion seizes back power, those texts, hard texts, suddenly become murderously dangerous. And fundamentalism I define as “The attempt to move from text to application without interpretation.”

Now, this is when we have to sit down and start looking at those texts again, which is one of the things I did in the book, and I'm not going to weary you. I want to hear what Professor Fishbane has to say. But he is the expert on how texts can be understood, should be understood.

But I think we are going to have to do in the 21st century that theological work. Now, obviously, a Jew can only do it within Judaism. Only a Christian can do it within Christianity, only a Muslim within Islam.

What I tried to do in this book, to give strength to those moderate voices in Islam that are devoiced or disempowered at the moment, was simply to look at some foundational narratives, narratives of sibling rivalry that are part of the heritage of Jews, Christians, and Muslims, to see if I could build a kind of foundational Abrahamic monotheism that would allow the three religions to live with one another, and on which they could build their separate superstructures of belief. 

But I do think we're going to have to recognise now, and this has been clear in Graham Wood's analysis of ISIS in the Atlantic in March, the most important thing published on ISIS thus far, and the report given by the Tony Blair Foundation just three weeks ago called “Inside the Jihadi Mind.” Texts are at the very heart of ISIS and its similar movements, and the interpretation of those texts is fundamental.

So can we, as peoples of the Book, find a way of reading the Book that will allow us to live together in respect and peace? Thank you very much indeed. 

Prof. Michael Fishbane speaks

Rabbi Sacks: Thank you so much, Professor Fishbane, and let's just kick off. Let me just take this and add two footnotes, and then let's see where it goes. 

Number one is a whole issue, really, of identity, which has been an ongoing issue for the last four centuries in the West.

So you had, in the 18th century in particular, the age of reason, the idea of universality - exactly as you spoke about - the Enlightenment dream, so that we would lose our tribal identities and become pure humanity, which is really the dream of Kant's essay on “Perpetual Peace.” It is the thing that the choir sings in Beethoven's Choral Symphony in the last movement, Schiller's “Ode to Joy,” when all people become brothers. 

You then had, in the 19th century, something that I think Freud would have called ‘the return of the repressed.’ The tribalisms returned, only in this case, not religion, which had been discredited, really, by the great wars of religion.

And so three substitutes for identity emerged in the 19th century. Number one, the nation-state. Number two, race. And number three, political ideology in the form of Marxist Communism. 

These were ways of establishing identity in an age that it seemed to say we can do without these identities. The end result was the 20th century. The nation-state gave us two world wars. Race gave us the Holocaust. And Marxist Communism gave us the Gulag, the KGB, Stalinist Russia.

So one way or another, the 20th-century, 19th-century substitutes for religion turned out to be every bit as bloodthirsty as religion. And the end result, I suppose, was postmodernism. 

But what I describe in the book as this extraordinary attempt to live without identity, not as universal humanity, but as individual selves.

The icon of our age… I have to say, in the old days, you wrote a book. Somebody bought it and said, ‘Could you sign my book?’ Nowadays, ‘Can we do a selfie?’ I really upset everyone by saying the 10 Commandments of our day, the revelation of our time, was when Steve Jobs came down the mountain with two tablets, iPad 1, iPad 2. And the result is iPad, iPhone, everything is i. 

So in the end, we've had a culture essentially since the 60s, that said that the self, the autonomous choosing self, is the hero of everything. He's the person who makes choices in the marketplace. The political parties are organised to offer everyone the best deal. And you have an abandonment of identity in deference not to the universal, but to the individual.

Now already, a remarkable thinker, secular Jew, but whose father, grandfather, and great-grandfather were all rabbanim, Emil Durkheim, in a very famous book called “Suicide,” said something remarkable. Because we always thought, until Durkheim came out with his book, that there could not be a more personal existential decision than to be or not to be. But Durkheim says no, you can actually predict the rise or fall of the rate of suicide in a given population.

He said in any society undergoing anomie, that is a loss of shared moral values, the rate of suicide will go up. Now he wrote that in when? 1897. He didn't foresee that the alternative to suicide is the suicide bomber.

But that's actually what's happened. We have lived in the West with anomie, that is an absolute absence of shared moral values. The only thing that really matters is the right to choose, whether that's the beginning of life, the end of life, the definition of marriage, etc.

And Durkheim said many people find that situation unbearable. There's a remarkable American, a longshoreman called Eric Hoffer, who wrote a book, which should be a classic that everyone should read, called “The True Believer.” 

Prof. Fishbane: It was very popular in the 60s.

Rabbi Sacks: Very, very important book explaining the radical jihadists of today, that you are willing to sacrifice anything to belong to something bigger than you. And what ISIS and al-Qaeda do very well is these little cells, these sectarian groups, in which the self is purified by sacrifice for the sake of the group. And that has deep psychological roots.

So we are seeing the return of religion as the return of the repressed of our time, which is the abdication of identity. This idea that we need to belong to groups to make sense of the world. 

Now what actually forces people to sober up and say, lo zu haDerech, we can't continue in this way? The truth is - I wish it were otherwise - but I don't imagine any jihadist in Syria is going to pay Amazon.com to send them a copy of “Not In God's Name” and give a little seminar on the subject and all of a sudden peace breaks out in the Middle East. 

The truth is, so long as you're murdering your enemies, nothing is going to change your mindset. Even if your enemies are murdering you, that's also not going to change your mindset. 

I've discovered my historical inference - based on not a vast sample - but my historical inference is you only change your mind when you discover you are murdering your friends, not your enemies. 

It is when Jews were murdering other Jews in the besieged city of Jerusalem while Vespasian and Titus were outside, that caused the real crisis that the Bavli and Masechet Gittin call Sinat Chinam and which Josephus describes in such graphic detail, Jews murdering Jews.

It is only when Christians murder Christians that you get Hobbes and Locke and Spinoza. It is not when Christians were murdering Muslims, or being murdered by them, in the great age of the Crusades. That, I think, is what is going to emerge within Islam, because the key victims, the primary victims of ISIS and al-Qaeda and Boko Haram and so on - although their intended objects, very often Christians and sometimes Jews - the truth is the real victims are the fellow Muslims, who fall the other side of the radical moderate or Sunni-Shia divide or any of the other tribal divides.

And when you find yourself, when Muslim is murdering Muslim or Christian murdering Christian or Jew murdering Jew, sane people from within the faith step back and say, hang on, this cannot be what God really wants. And then you get radical interpretation. 

And to my mind - I mention it in the book - one of those great moments occurs in the sugya Shabbat, daf samech gimmel, where they're asking a technical halachic question.

You know, in a military culture, swords, ceremonial swords, are signs of honour. They're ornamentation. And a tachshit you can wear on Shabbat.

So the question is, can you wear a sword on Shabbat, or some other military insignia? 

Prof. Fishbane: Tachshit being an ornament. 

So can you wear a sword on Shabbat? And the Sages say, no. If you wear one, you're liable. You don't want to know what you're liable for, thank goodness. Make an error and just avoid the whole thing. Whereas Rabbi Eliezer says, no, it's permitted, tachshit, it’s an ornament and therefore you can.

And the Sages say, well, we can see that weapons are not an ornament but a sign of shame, because Isaiah and Micah say, “They shall beat their swords into ploughshares and their shields into pruning hooks. Nation will not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.” So we can see that weapons are shameful because one day we'll get rid of all the weapons.

And that is where the Mishna ends the subject. So the Talmud, the Gemara, asks, ‘Hang on, Rabbi Eliezer, who disagreed with the Sages, must have had a verse that supports him. So what was that verse?’ And they quote a verse from the Book of Psalms, which says explicitly that a sword is an ornament.

“Chagor charbecha al yarech gibor hodecha v'hadarecha.” Gird your sword upon your loin. You’re a mighty man of valour. This is your glory and your majesty. 

So the verse explicitly says that a sword is a sign of honour. So, you know, how come Rabbi Eliezer didn't win the vote here? So Rav Kahana says, “Hahu b'divrei Torah k’tiv.”

Rav Kahana, who was a teacher of the third century, says, ‘What do you mean? You don't think the Book of Psalms is talking about a sword? I mean, when does a Jew carry a sword? What does a Jew carry? He carries a book.’ You know, you do a war. They come with weapons. We come with a little book. Learning gemara shiur, you know. And whoever heard of a Jew fighting? You know, I mean, it's crazy. Woody Allen did, you know. 

So somebody said, so Rav Kahana takes the word ‘sword’ and moves the s from the beginning of the word to the end. So Jews don't have swords. They have words. That's how Jews do battle. 

So the Gemara says - I can't remember who said to Rav Kahana - “Ein mikra yotzei m’pshuto.” It's a very nice interpretation, but at the end of the day, a verse means what it says. Whatever else it might mean, it means what it says. And he comes along and says, ‘When I was 18 years old, I knew the whole of Shas.But I never knew till today that a verse must bear its literal meaning.’

So here you have, in the early 2nd century, Tanaitic Sages having an open argument. Can a Jew wear a weapon or not? But by the 3rd century, you have a Babylonian Sage, who can't even conceive of a Jew handling a weapon. And you see this extraordinary cultural change. And you ask, what happened between here and here? 

And do you know what happened between here and here? Not just the disaster of the great rebellion against Rome, but in a sense, spiritually - and perhaps even humanly - the even greater disaster of the Bar Kochba rebellion, which caused the whole of Jerusalem to be levelled to the ground. The historian Dio says 970 villages and towns were wiped out. 570,000 people died as a result. And we know from the Gemara itself that among the major casualties were the Rabbis, until there were almost no Rabbis left.

So it is that internal civil war that forces a religion to sit down and say, ‘These texts are terribly dangerous, and we're going to have to interpret them a different way.’ Does that make sense to you? 

Prof. Fishbane: It absolutely makes sense. I think that part of the issue that you bring out so beautifully in the book, which is the question of the cultural pedagogy of imagining the other.

Here we have this imagining a certain element of what constitutes Judaism. In very beautiful ways, the undercurrent reading that you have in the Torah literature is the sympathetic reading of the underdog and the capacity of one to be able to kind of come out of one's private space and imagine the other. So I think you're saying the same thing from the point of view of the culture of reading.

There you're talking about a kind of intercultural issue of being able to step out of a certain situation and be able to imagine the other, being able to imagine a different mode of existence. But we're in a cultural situation that we're stuck, the small groups are stuck, the internal division within Judaism. We're seeing the fragmentation precisely as a response to modernity, and as a response to modernity within Judaism and outside of Judaism, where people are holding smaller and smaller circles of interpretation.

So the capacity to learn from these texts, to rise above them and to have a perspective of the other, to teach moral wisdom - which is really the underlying part of the first part of your book - that if you teach people how to read, there's a kind of cultural and spiritual pedagogy that you're able to kind of imaginatively think of the other. 

We would hope that we can do that in families - and in the best of families people are doing that - but it's a question of whether that can be introduced into the synagogue, it can be introduced into the church, or into Islamic culture. 

We're becoming prisoners of modernity with a scarcity of truth resources, and my bottom line feeling was, despite all the goodwill, most people in modernity feel that it's a zero-sum game.

And for those of us in the university community who do have a post-modern possibility of thinking multiple truths, that has consequences for religion on its own terms, but it's not necessarily going to be the vision that may be instructive. 

So that's why I was hoping that one of the ways is this ecumenical discourse of helping the other, experience the other in exegetical discussion, so that they see the face of the other in the context of that. And not to undermine the tradition, or to help a person necessarily think beyond their own capacity. 

But I think just as aspects of Judaism, both on the secular side and the Orthodox side, our responses to modernity, we're seeing responses to modernity across the board, and I'm just trying to find some way forward that would be the way forward of a teacher using texts beyond the walls of a university, which allows multiple voices.

Rabbi Sacks: You know, what I think has happened, I kind of have in my mind's eye one of those scenes that you get in the Indiana Jones movies, and all these action movies, you know, when our hero has his feet - there are two cars racing along a road - and our hero has his feet in one car, and his arms and head in another car, and, you know, comes that moment where there's a tree in the middle of the road, and the paths diverge, and suddenly you've got to be in this car or that car, but you can't be both. 

And it seems to me that, you know, at most times of history, religious individuals - I mean, religion is one car, and general social culture is another car - and for most times, they're moving along at roughly the same road at roughly the same speed, so you can have your feet in one and your head in another. And when that happens, you get what sociologists call “Church-type religions,” very inclusive religions, where, you know, everyone feels part of what you call a big tent, basically. 

It is when the two cars diverge that you have to make your decision, and I think secular culture in the West has diverged so far, so fast - essentially in the 60s - from traditional religious ways of life, that some people went that way and became very secularised, and other people went that way and became religious, but no longer religious in a way that embraced society.

It turned inward and became sectarian, and that is the key. And it happened in Islam, and it happened in Christianity, and it happened in Judaism as well. It happened in Hinduism and Buddhism as well, so it's happened to all the world religions. 

And I'm just seeing, can we strike a note from another side? From Jews, Christians, Muslims, indeed all who value God, sacred texts, or religions, or reverence, and so on? 

Prof. Fishbane: So I think that we, you know, I think we share this. I think the issue is the difficulty of this goal.

I mean, part of the vision that you have is, as you say in the book, it's not a zero-sum game, that you can hold your truth and the other can also be blessed. But there are so many factors that make people feel that there can't be multiple blessings, and there's so much at stake in what identity means in the post-modern world, precisely because the purchase of truth is so hard, and we see this counteraction towards a dogmatism of truth. 

So the vision that you have, I share, it's a question of whether that can be shared in a way that we can move forward in a peaceful way. That is to say, that we can imagine the other and allow them to have an identity that is also a salvific identity, because that's what's being at stake, that this is a form of salvation.

We try to do this in the university, that there are multiple ways to approach these issues, but we're faced with a crisis. 

Rabbi Sacks: So what I've tried to do essentially in the book is reach out beyond Judaism and Jews. And the good news is the book's been out four months in Britain, and not only has the Prime Minister's Policy Unit read the book and asked for an early copy and factored it into government policy, so did the Archbishop of Canterbury, and he's brought together, bringing together, very quietly, an international group of religious leaders, church leaders, rabbis, and imams - many of them from the Middle East - as a response to the book and to the political situation. So that's happening there. 

More recently, in the last couple of days, I was very touched that a very feisty Muslim lady called Irshad Manji, gave a beautiful review of the book in the New York Times and just sent the most lovely email. So, and I will be speaking with, doing a public conversation with Akbar Ahmed at the American University in Washington.

Akbar Ahmed was the Pakistani High Commissioner in Britain before he came to America. He was Pakistani High Commissioner at the time when the Wall Street journalist, Daniel Pearl, was murdered in Karachi. And I made a television film for the BBC of Akbar Ahmed together with Daniel's father, Judea Pearl.

And we had them talking to one another, and then I took them to a Muslim school and a Jewish school, and we saw these remarkable interactions. So there are moderate Muslims and moderate Christians who are saying, ‘This speaks to me.’ And I think what I've tried to do in this book is to say, ‘Is there a way of reading our texts that we could do in the presence of somebody who is not of our faith?’ That's really challenging.

And what I'm doing is rereading a whole series of very famous narratives in Bereishit in Genesis, asking myself, ‘How would I read this text if Ishmael or Esau were actually sitting in the room?’ And the second you imagine them in the room, you see something else in those texts. It's not something I've invented. It's something that hits you immediately, but you never looked at it that way because you were reading it among true believers, like you.

The second we try and bring somebody else into the room, we find we have to read the text a different, and I think, a more generous way. And I think that's one way of doing it. 

But could I suggest at this moment that we open up the conversation to, would that make sense? So Yiftach, are you going to? 

Yiftach, Moderator: I'll just get at it.

Questioner: So I'm wondering how you would respond to a kind of reader who shares what was singled out as one of the aspects of the fundamentalist that they think that there is one way to read, but who is coming at the text from a point of view which is hostile to the religious. You could call them like a hostile pashtan. Someone like Spinoza, who goes to great lengths to say that what Maimonides is doing falsifies the Bible in all of these different kinds of ways. Or someone who says that hiding behind sophisticated deep… is doing a disservice to our understanding of the text. How do you respond to someone like that? 

Rabbi Sacks: Well, I mean, as a religious believer, try and say it one more time in slightly different words. Yiftach, you do it.

Moderator: Sure. Can you actually repeat the question? How does one make the case that you can approach a text in a way which is religiously authentic, but which moves away from what we might call shots for the simple meaning, especially with relation to these texts which have the possibility of inspiring violence?  If one is confronted by a reader who says, no, actually the simple meaning of the text of your tradition are quite comfortable with religious violence and the fact that it ended in many different circumstances, how does one make the case that if you're trying to move in a different direction and say deep bang the text, you are doing this from a standpoint of religious authenticity and not just trying to help your opinion?

Rabbi Sacks: What we all know is that Rabbinic Judaism is predicated on the idea that there is an Oral Torah as well as a Written Torah.

And the Gemara says that somebody who, well, we know in Judaism if you deny the Oral Torah, you've denied one of the fundamentals of the faith. So in Judaism, the interpretation has a similar authority to the text itself. 

Prof. Fishbane: I'd like to just try to come in on the moral aspect of that.

And there's a very interesting principle that Ernest Simon, who was a disciple of Buber and was close to Rosenzweig, once made related to these kinds of issues. And I think it bears on a way out of the issue that you were dealing with. 

You have to use the tradition for the sake of the tradition.

In other words, you have to find principles of value that are supreme values. Let's say in the case of this book, the issue of life, the issue of justice, the issue of the other, which the traditions themselves support. And you use the tradition for the sake of the larger scope of the tradition.

In other words, the only way to get out of this moral bind is to have some meta-principle that is guiding you in a larger sense. It may come out of the scripture or may come out of the oral tradition, but you have to find some way to jack yourself out of that in each of these traditions, which would be, say, concerned with the dignity of the other, the face of the other, the image of the divine, however that would be. And that principle has to now be, in a difficult pedagogical way, put in juxtaposition to these hard texts.

So it's using one principle of value within the tradition against others. That's going on all the time in the oral tradition, where you're using one legal precedent to establish it. But people are choosing which precedent they're using for the sake of which kind of outcome and which kind of notion of the human and society you want to do.

Within these moral questions, I think it's trying to help these cultures find some meta-principle within their own tradition, whether it's legal or theological, that allow them to have a principle, to have a counterpoint, so that you can teach within that. 

Rabbi Sacks: And I would simply add this. You're talking about the fundamentalist atheist, basically. Am I right? Sure. And the Richard Dawkins-sort of type. And they're always scientists for some reason, because science does not allow for a whole oral tradition. You know, once you've got a scientific theory, you don't get Rashi saying this, and Ibn Ezra saying that, and so on. So if I want to explain to somebody who has no religious belief whatsoever, why interpretation is central to a textual tradition, then I will use one of two other examples, which are not religious at all. 

Number one, the role of a Supreme Court in interpreting and ruling on hard cases. And what that Supreme Court has to do is it's got to read back previous rulings and interpret them. So one of the really important literatures that helped me relate to Torah was Ronald Dworkin - who was the Professor of Jurisprudence at Oxford and NYU and so on - who writes a lot about this, how the interpretative process of a judge deciding a hard case. 

The other obvious example is any theatrical director who is putting on a Shakespeare play in the 21st century. You are going to have to interpret Hamlet or King Lear or The Merchant of Venice. You're going to do it in 16th-century dress or in contemporary? How are you going to interpret the play? How are you going to draw out its meaning? 

So whether you're a theatrical or film director or you're a Supreme Court judge, you are involved in interpreting texts, and therefore it's not just religious texts that need that interpretation.

Moderator: More questions? I ask that you please be concise. I'll repeat the question afterwards to the microphone. 

Questioner (too quiet to hear)

Moderator: The question was... I think you agreed with the notion that there are now small communities that are being formed and large grassroots following. But what do you do in an age where there are less and less charismatic leaders and information gets disseminated through Facebook and other forms of media? 

Rabbi Sacks: Well, bad things can go viral, but good things can also go viral. And I'm very interested in this.

For some reason, I found myself getting to know a guy called Bob Geldof. Are you familiar with that name? He did something called... What was it called? “Live Aid”? And then the Americans did something called “We Are the World”, do you remember? A long time back, Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie. This is in the Jurassic Age when I still had some black hair in my beard.

And you had these iconic figures coming together to speak to the better angels of our nature, essentially. And they were very, very powerful. So I'm trying to see if we can start a counter-movement.

What I know when I have conversations with young Muslims - and I've had a lot of conversations with young Muslims - is they do not want to hear a secular voice. They feel deeply alienated by a secular voice. And therefore, though I could have written an entirely secular book on the same subject as “Not In God's Name,” I realised that if I wanted to communicate with young Muslims, I had to write a very religious book indeed.

I had to up the stakes. I had to speak from the highest of high ground as far as a Muslim is concerned, as far as a Christian is concerned. The very opening sentence of the book says, “When religion turns men into murderers, God weeps.”

Now, I used the G word there. That's enough to upset every secularist. You have no idea how secular Britain and Europe is today. So they got really upset by my using the G word. 

But I know perfectly well that if I want to talk to young Muslims, and young Muslims, wherever they are on the religious spectrum, from the most moderate to the most extreme, are deeply religious. Be aware that Islam is the most proof against secularisation of any of the three Abrahamic monotheisms.

Judaism is almost at the other extreme. One of the things that proved to me that HaKadosh Baruch Hu, that God has a sense of humour is that the very strident atheist, the late Christopher Hitchens, discovered right at the end of his life that actually he was Jewish. He didn't know this. At first, he was a little bit affronted and then he decided that actually it was a good thing, because Jews made the best atheists.

So it was quite cheery. So I've learned over many years, if you want to communicate to Muslims you have to speak very religiously.

So I'm basically saying can we, using the same social media and the same, you know, search for meaning and belonging that Al-Qaeda and ISIS are touching, can we touch those same chords? But in this case, with an Islam or a Christianity or a Judaism that makes space for the other.

And I have to tell you that the young Muslims I know - and they are not, I suppose, absolutely typical - but I have always known them to resonate with this kind of message. And I used to use television to do this. I did, oddly enough, I used to make television programmes for the BBC and on one occasion I did a television programme about an Orthodox Jewish school, under my aegis, when I was Chief Rabbi, in Birmingham where more than half of the children at this school are Muslim.

A very unusual school. A lot of Hindus and Sikhs. The reason is that this school, which was an Orthodox Jewish school, the Jewish population of that city has so declined that even when all the kids go there's still only about 30% of the student intake.

So just to show on television a religious Muslim parent, who's a professor at the university in Birmingham, tell the camera that he specially moved to that part of Birmingham so he could send his children to a Jewish school. This was a very healing message. I spent the day teaching the kids - and the BBC cameras were filming - this a peace song from the Middle East - “Od yavo shalom aleinu.”

And to see this song being sung in Hebrew and English by Muslim kids and Sikh kids and Hindu kids and Jewish kids and Chinese kids. The number of emails I got from non-Jews, from Christians saying we were in tears watching this. But it was speaking to the moral and religious high ground.

This was not a secular message. It was a deeply religious one.

Prof. Fishbane: It was also the modelling that you did. The teaching which is the modelling. That capacity to hold the other with respect while you're speaking from the values of that tradition. Your presence as a model and the role of teachers that I indicated at the end or in this context can't be disregarded as a fundamental presence.

As much as the text, the fact that you were there, and respecting them and speaking from a Jewish place, is a fundamental stance. 

Rabbi Sacks: And really this is what I'm trying to encourage. A young generation who will grow up to be religious leaders.

To have that courage to go into the place of the other and do so with humility about oneself and respect toward the other that can make that difference. 

Moderator: I was told that we can take only one more question and I promised that, right 

Rabbi Sacks: Could you speak more loudly please? 

Questioner: “Do not swerve to the left or right of the law.” How can you justify the authority of the law? 

Moderator: The question was regarding the verse in Deuteronomy, “Do not swerve left or right from the law.” How can you justify the law? 

Prof. Fishbane: I think that principle, “Lo tasuru mimeno yemin o smol,” is already a principle of authority in the Dead Sea Scrolls. But it's the fundamental first principle that Maimonides introduces in the Sefer HaMitzvot, when he's talking in the first principle of that issue.

The answer to the question, the issue for those who are not aware of this is that you can't swerve to the right or the left but you can't swerve to the right or the left of the leaders and the teachers of that generation. 

So the issue is to produce a generation of teachers and leaders who will lead in a way, that guide in a new radical way. What that means in certain cases of halacha is one issue that Maimonides was talking about, but I think you're talking about a much larger issue. And that the issue then clearly for the Rambam, for Maimonides, is that adherence to the teachings of the Sages, precisely because they're not prophets, they're not Nevi’im. 

There's a fundamental distinction in Maimonides between the revelation to Moses and the role of the Sages. And the role of the Sages is to lead and to guide, and the hope is in Judaism now there are multiple groups who are giving different visions of the human, and how that human can be instantiated within Judaism. Those voices within Orthodoxy and beyond Orthodoxy have to be strengthened as with other communities.

So it's a question of authority, but authority is not simply in a culture of interpretation it didn't just happen once. It's happening repeatedly. You will join a community in relationship to the authority that really speaks to the moral and spiritual values. That's part of one of the issues that are at stake. A more traditional community might make those halachic decisions differently. 

But that principle is not independent of the decision of leaders and Sages to interpret. And that's precisely what we've been talking about the whole time. 

Rabbi Sacks: That verse is precisely the foundation, one of the foundations of the Oral tradition because it says do not move to the left or the right of that which they, the authorised teachers and interpreters of the generation, tell you.

And I think you know, in a certain sense, the Sages did say and I think not wrongly, “Chacham gadol miNavi,” a Sage is greater even than a Prophet. Because the Prophets were the great visionaries of Judaism but usually nobody ever listened to them. I mean the only time anyone really listened to a Prophet is when Jonah went out and talked to non-Jews in Nineveh.

He said five words to them - “Od arba’im yom Nineveh nehefachet,” In forty days Nineveh will be destroyed. And then immediately everyone listened. All the Assyrians. They did repentance. So people used to ask me ‘How do you find it possible to go and teach Judaism on the BBC and the radio and television,’ and I said ‘Easy. It's much easier with non-Jews. They listen to you.’ 

And the fact is that the Prophets who gave us the most dazzling visions and shaped our imaginative horizons but they didn't actually change people.

But the Sages changed people. They were extraordinary. I mean you don't need a proper book about just how revolutionary and transformative Chazal were.

You know, they were the ones who said when every element of Judaism - as configured traditionally in the biblical age - had been shattered with the Roman destruction, the Bar Kochba defeat. No more sovereignty, no more independence, no more Land, no more Kings, no more Priests, no more Prophets, no more Temple, and no more sacrifices. 

And along came the Sages and in effect said, ‘Ah! Out of this immense tragedy we can rescue fragments of redemption, because when we pray every Jew becomes like a Priest offering a sacrifice. And when we learn Torah, every Jew becomes like a Prophet hearing the word of God. 

Interpretation then replaces revelation. 

And so they democratised Judaism and we became for the first time fully a “mamlechet kohanim v'goy kadosh,” a kingdom of priests and a holy nation. 

So I think the Sages were absolutely remarkable and the real heroes. And it is that verse that you quote that is the foundation of rabbinic authority. And I love the fact that Maimonides, who had these dramatic ways of putting things, said in that introduction, that if there were a thousand Prophets of the level of Isaiah to say one thing and a thousand and one Sages were to say the opposite, the law is like the thousand and one Sages.

And that is a real democratisation of access to the word of God. Because the Prophet couldn't choose, will God reveal himself to me? But the Sages created a Judaism in which we can each sit and study texts and feel that when we're doing so we're hearing the voice of God.

So thank you for a wonderful question and thank you for being such a great audience.

Closing remarks