Not in God’s Name: Rutgers event

Introductory comments

Rabbi Sacks: Chancellor, Professor Zerubavel, how is the audibility? Okay, I'll... You don't know how lucky you are. Chancellor, Professor Rendsburg, Professor Zerubavel, thank you for the honour and privilege of inviting Elaine and myself to be present at this great university, and to be able to celebrate its work and the work of the Ellen and Jim Bildner Centre for the Study of Jewish Life.

I wish the Bildner Centre mazel tov on its 20th anniversary. I wish Rutgers mazel tov on its 250th anniversary. Normally we wish “long life” in Judaism, we say, till 120. So you're already more than twice that far. And I love your motto, “Revolutionary for 250 years.” May you be revolutionary for another 250 years.

But you are so right, Chancellor, in saying that universities have a major role to play in bridging the divide between faiths and between cultures. Alasdair MacIntyre, that great philosopher, once said, of any institution, “Don't just ask what it does, ask of what conversations is it the arena.” And this is the conversation we must have, between faiths and those of no faith, as to what kind of world we seek to bequeath to our grandchildren.

And that is why the university is so important. 

And Professor Rendsburg, of course, you're right, we had a little mini-conversation like that between myself and my supervisor, Bernard Williams. 

I was quite religious. He was a total atheist. And he wasn't Jewish. I mean, total atheists who are Jewish, for that's no chidush, as they say. That's nothing new in this, but he was a lapsed Catholic. And we got on tremendously well. 

But then philosophers can bridge that particular gap. Because I love the sentence of the Jewish philosopher from Columbia University, the late Sidney Morgenbesser, who on his deathbed said to a colleague, “I don't understand why God is so angry with me just because I don't believe in Him.” You may need a PhD to work that one out. But it is that conversation across cultures that really matters.

Oh, here we are. [microphone issues] A small step for man, a giant step for... I'm going to try and walk and talk at the same time. Can you still hear me? Thank you.

I have to tell you this, though, while I'm just warming up and trying to remember what I'm going to say. That I did once deliver a lecture to a rather far-outlying synagogue in London. And I did this for an hour. And afterwards, at the coffee, the senior warden of the synagogue came up to me and said, “Chief Rabbi, you kept the whole audience on the edge of their seats for an hour. It was amazing.” And I said, “The talk was that good?” He said, “No, the talk was terrible. It was just that we were taking bets as to when you would fall off the platform.” 

So we'll just try and stay upright for the rest of the evening. 

Friends, let me begin at the obvious place.

Three days ago, in Paris. 11, was it 11 jihadists? 18, whatever it was, gunning down in cold blood innocent civilians, one after the other. I want you to understand, for one moment, just step back from the barbarity of it and just let us think about the intellectual history of it.

Paris was where, in 1789, the secular nation-state was born. France was the country that developed the concept of laïcité, the secularisation of public life. France and its intellectuals, the philosophes, were the most angry with religion of the whole lot, the 18th-century thinkers.

Voltaire famously said about religion, “Écraser l'infâme,” get rid of the infamy called religion. Diderot said, “We will not be free until the last king is strangled by the entrails of the last priest.” Secularisation was born in Paris.

And here we are, in the 21st century, seeing the revenge of the repressed, the return of religion centre stage to the global arena. Not, to use the imagery of the Book of Kings, religion as “a still small voice,” but religion as a whirlwind, an earthquake, and a fire. How did nobody see this coming? That is my first question. The short answer is, I think we have been engaged in modern intellectual history, in three genuine misreadings of history.

The first was very simply this, that in the 18th century there was not one self-respecting intellectual who did not believe that religion was in intensive care and about to die. Science would provide us with knowledge, technology with power, you didn't need to pray to God to have healing from illness, medicine would do that instead, etc., etc. Every single function of religion, one after the other, was taken over by non-religious auspices, and religion was presumed dying, and shortly to be dead.

Why did those scholars get it wrong? 

I want to suggest that this, quite simply, because the four major institutions in the modern world - science, technology, the market economy, and the liberal democratic state, fail, in principle, do not try, to answer the three questions that every self-reflective human being will ask at some time in his or her life:

Number one, who am I? 

Number two, why am I here? 

Number three, how then shall I live?

Those questions are not answered by any of these institutions. 

Science tells us how, it doesn't aspire to tell us why.

Technology gives us power, but doesn't tell us how we should use that power. 

The market economy gives us choices, but does not tell us which choices to make. 

And the liberal democratic state gives us freedom to live as we choose without telling us how we should choose.

So there will be a series of questions that will continue to bring people back to that search for meaning that we call religion and spirituality, number one. 

Number two, the second misreading of history is that there was a belief that as Europe and America and the West became more secular, successful religions would have to make their accommodation with society. And indeed, that was the case until relatively recently.

But now we have seen that the fastest growing elements in every one of the great world religions are not the ones that accommodate to, or seek to integrate with, the wider society, but are forms of resistance to that society. 

There's no doubt, even in the Jewish world, in America, which is the fastest-growing element of Jewish life. The Charedi element, the ultra-Orthodox element, that seeks to have as little as possible to do with the wider culture, the same in Israel.

And that, of course, is happening to some extent within Christianity. It's the evangelical churches that are growing, and the more centrist, accommodationist, Episcopalian-type churches that are not, and in Islam, likewise. 

So, again, the form of religion has defied our predictions. 

But there was a third misreading of history that we can pinpoint much more strikingly, and it goes back to the year 1989.

And it was then that one of the great misreadings of all time took place. 

You remember what happened in 1989. The Berlin Wall fell. The Cold War came to an end. The Soviet Union began to implode. Francis Fukuyama told us “The end of history.”

One way or another, this would mean that the market economy and the liberal democratic state would slowly, and peacefully, conquer the world. 

Almost immediately, that was proved to be untrue. But there is a counter-narrative, and I want to share it with you, which says that actually history did change in 1989.

But we have to look not at November 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell, but we have to look a little earlier. Because two things happened in 1989 that shaped everything that's happened since. 

Number one, the Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran issued a fatwa against the writer Salman Rushdie for his book, “The Satanic Verses.” And books were burned in Bradford, in the British Midlands. And as Heinrich Heiner said, “Where they begin by burning books, they end by burning people.” 

This was the first moment at which Islam fully understood its global reach.

A fatwa from a leader in Iran could affect behaviour in a British Midlands town. That was the first glimpse of the globalisation of radical Islam. 

The second thing that happened, however, was much more consequential.

And that is that in February 1989, after 10 years, the Soviet Union was forced to beat a humiliating retreat from Afghanistan. And the Islamist reading of history must have said the following. Who were the fighters in Afghanistan? A handful of highly driven, religiously motivated individuals, the Mujahideen. And this small group of religious radicals were able to defeat one of the world's two great superpowers. Thereafter, Russia never got over that humiliation and imploded from within. 

It must have been at that moment - I am being purely conjectural - that somebody said, if we can do that to one superpower, we can do it to the other likewise.

How will we do it? The same way, in the same place. Afghanistan, from which no foreign power ever exited in triumph. How on earth can you lure another superpower into Afghanistan? You can't do it.

I mean, you'd have to be crazy to go into Afghanistan. But, as you know, neuroscientists and evolutionary psychologists have been telling us that we have two bits of the brain, what Daniel Kahneman calls “Thinking fast and slow.” So we have this thing called the prefrontal cortex that gets us to consider the consequences of our actions. But we have an emotional system, the limbic system, of which the most powerful and primal form is the amygdala, in which we react to threat, to pain, with a flood of emotion, what Daniel Goldman calls “An amygdala hijack.” So if you can provoke so much anger and pain as to completely disable the prefrontal cortex, you may be able to tempt even the United States of America into Afghanistan.

And I suspect that is how 9/11 was born.

And all the time we were thinking liberal democracy and market economics were going to conquer the world. And it wasn't so. 

So given these extraordinary misreadings of history, we have to think our way from here to some reasonable future.

Though I think, as they used to say in Chelm, you know, when you ask the guys in Chelm, ‘How do you get to Minsk?’ They would tell you, ‘Vell, I vouldn't start from here.’ So I really wouldn't start from here, but here is where we are. 

And therefore in my book, I ask a fundamental question, which we must have asked ourselves in these last three days.

Those gunmen at the concert hall, killing one after another after another in cold blood. You must understand that this is psychologically a very odd phenomenon indeed. We have, basic to us - it's a point made way back by David Hume and Adam Smith - something called the moral sense that stops us doing harm to innocent individuals.

Nowadays, neuroscientists talk about what they call mirror neurons. Mirror neurons are the things in our brain that when we see somebody else in pain make us wince. We feel other people's pain.

And that is the basis of the most fundamental moral sense of all, which we call empathy. And because we have empathy and it's hardwired into our brain, we can't just go and kill innocent people. 

So I wanted to ask, how is it that these jihadists are able to do this and they are not psychopaths? Psychopathology is a different kind of animal altogether.

If you've read some of the stories about these French suicide bombers, you will see some of them came from quite normal French households. 

These were not psychopaths. These were people transformed by a religious belief.

So what is it that allows a religious belief to disable the bits of our brain that naturally stop us committing acts of barbarity? 

And I want to tell you a little story as I tell in the book. This is only one chapter of the book, but it's an important story. I want us to travel back mentally to 1947, when a young shepherd at the Dead Sea idly throws a stone into a cave that he sees halfway up a rock and hears the sound of breaking pottery and eventually, as you know, explores and discovers a whole cluster of manuscripts.

Eventually, many, many more caves and many more manuscripts are discovered and they became known to the world as the Dead Sea Scrolls and the people who wrote them and preserved them as the Qumran sectarians. 

What is interesting, and what some of us think about less, is that less than two years earlier than that, another manuscript discovery was made, this time in the Sinai Desert, of another cache of ancient manuscripts. Anyone know what they were called? They were called the Nag Hammadi manuscripts, exactly.

Among these manuscripts were nine gospels, hitherto unknown. People knew of their existence because Irenaeus condemned them already in the year 180, but we didn't actually have their texts until the Nag Hammadi manuscripts were discovered. They were 4th-century Coptic translations of the 2nd-century Greek texts of an unusual strand of Christianity and they became known through Elaine Pagels as the Gnostic Gospels.

Now, although the Gnostic Gospels and the Qumran sectarians were separated in time and space and religion, the Qumran sectarians were Jewish, the Nag Hammadi sectarians were Christians. Nonetheless, they had one unusual feature in common, a feature rare among monotheists. And that is, they were dualists. They believed not in one God but in two, or at least not in one force controlling the universe but in two forces. 

The Dead Sea sectarians saw the world poised in a great cosmic battle between good and evil, evil being Mastema or the Prince? Dao or Satan or whatever it is. And likewise, of course, the Gnostic Gospels, and the world is, there's God and there's a force opposed to God.

And humanity is divided into two. Either you're for God or you're for the enemies of God, or as the Qumran sectarians called it, you're either the children of light or the children of darkness. You divide the world into two, the powers that govern the world into two, humanity into two. Black and white, no grey in between. 

The Gnostic Gospels were really interesting.

For instance, they believed the real God was up in Heaven. The bad God, the Jewish God, was the one who created Earth. That's where all our troubles come from, right? We're physical, we have pains, we have hunger, we have disease, we have injustice. That's cause this bad God, the Demiurge, created the Earth. 

But the real God is up there in Heaven and, of course, in the story of Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden, the hero of the story is the serpent in the Gnostic Gospels. He's the one that tells Adam and Eve not to listen to this bad God who created the world, et cetera, et cetera.

Now, let me ask you a simple question. What makes a monotheist a dualist? 

I mean, you know, if you're already going to believe in more than one God, why not go all the way? You know, I mean, the great thing about being a polytheist is if you believe in 40,000 gods, at least one of them has got to like you, right? So why stop at two? Are you with me? 

The interesting thing is, I suggest, that dualism is born when cognitive dissonance reaches a point where it is unbearable. Where you read your holy books and they tell you that God wants you to do thus and thus, and you do thus and thus. You're faithful to God.

And all the stuff that the holy books promised would happen, doesn't happen. And when that happens, it is sometimes easier to say these bad things didn't come from God. They came from a force opposed to God.

It is easier to explain evil if you're a dualist than if you're a monotheist. Okay? 

Now, we know that Judaism and Christianity resisted dualism. Anyone know… There is a verse. Listen to this. There is a verse. You search the whole of Tanach, the whole of the Hebrew Bible, the verse that most rejects and refutes dualism is a verse from Isaiah.

I'm going to read you the verse. It says that God is “Yotzer or uVorei choshech, oseh shalom uVorei et haRa.” God forms light, creates darkness, makes peace, and creates evil. 

So good and evil all come from God. The good comes because God is good, and the evil comes because sometimes we are bad. The Rabbis took that verse and with slight change, just so as not to use the word ‘evil,’ made it the first sentence of communal prayer every day. That's what we say in shul after Baruch Hu, the beginning of communal prayer. That is the first sentence. 

So you will see, the Rabbis took dualism so seriously, they confronted it at the very beginning of every day's prayer. 

Now I want to tell you why I'm talking about dualism, because when you are a dualist, something very bad happens to human psychology.

If you're a monotheist, you say, good has happened, thank you, God. Bad has happened, oops, I must have done something wrong, or You're trying to test me, or something or other. And one way or another, I take the bad as a stimulus to repent, to apologise, to change my ways, et cetera, et cetera.

That is if you're a monotheist. 

But if you are a dualist, something flips in the mind. And when bad things happen, instead of asking, what did I do to make this happen? Or what should I do to make it better? You ask a different question.

The question, who did this to me? 

And the answer is Satan and those who represent Satan. The force of evil. And not only are they doing this bad thing to me, but they are doing it because they intend to do a bad thing to God Himself. 

And that is what happens when you become a dualist.

Now, dualism isn't always dangerous, but whenever it is caught up with the political process, it becomes very dangerous indeed. Very dangerous indeed. 

You don't have to be religious to be a dualist.

Nazi Germany was a dualist culture. It was the Aryan race against the rest. The children of light against the forces of darkness.

Stalinist Russia was dualist. It's we communists against the capitalists. So long since I met a communist, I've forgotten what the Western imperialists, lackeys, et cetera, et cetera.

So you don't have to be religious to be a dualist, but the monotheisms have given rise at various times to dualism. And when that is caught up with the political process, it becomes dangerous. 

And now I want to answer the question that I raised at the outset.

How is it that a religious belief, or a belief, can disable the moral sense such that ordinary human beings can commit barbaric crime?

And my analysis is very simply this. 

The first thing that dualism does is that it makes you dehumanise your opponents. They are no longer human beings, with the same faults and the same virtues as us.

Instead, they are children of the devil, worshippers of Satan, enemies of God. They are no longer human. 

To the Nazis, Jews were vermin. They were lice. They were a cancer. They were a gangrenous limb.

To the Hutus, in 1994 in Rwanda, the Tutsis were inyenzi, cockroaches. 

When you see your enemy as less than human, you disable that thing called empathy. 

Because they're no longer human. They are attacking you. They are unclean, or they are cancerous growth, and you have to remove them. And you do so without qualms, because they are not fully human.

So the first thing that dualism allows you to do is to dehumanise, and sometimes demonise, your opponents. 

Number two, the second thing dualism does, as I say, is that it defines you as a victim. You no longer say, what did I do wrong? Or how can I do better? How can I put it right? You say, who did this to me? I must take revenge. And not only for the sake of revenge, but for the sake of protecting my people and restoring its honour, because they have humiliated us. 

When you define yourself as a victim, you have disabled the second element of the moral sense, which is moral responsibility. If I'm only a victim, I'm not responsible. They did it, not me. Does that make sense to you? 

And when that happens, the sense of victimhood banishes all responsibility. Don't blame us, it was them.

And don't forget, 90% of several major Islamic countries believe that 9/11 was either perpetrated by the CIA or by the Mossad, by the Americans or by the Israelis. Major channels of communication in the Middle East have already said that the jihadists in Paris were Israelis. 

Because your sense of victimhood is essential to your disavowing responsibility.

Don't blame me that I had to murder the innocent. Blame them. They are the people killing my people. 

And that disables the second element of the moral sense.

When you add those two things together, the end result is so paradoxical that I had to give it a new phrase, a deliberately paradoxical phrase in the book, “altruistic evil.”

I'm saying that there are some things that are so obviously evil to everyone. Believe you me, killing the innocent, bombing an airliner and killing 25 children in the process, these things are forbidden in Judaism, Christianity, Islam.

I mean, no code in the universe sanctions such a thing. So in order to justify the commission of what everyone knows is evil, you have to say I am serving a higher cause, namely God Himself. And that then becomes altruistic evil. I am doing this for a higher cause. 

And when that happens, the defeat of the moral sense is complete. 

And that is how ordinary, non-psychopathic human beings can be turned into cold-blooded murderers. By a dualistic belief that defines your people in a cosmic struggle with a force that is trying to destroy your people, currently defined as the Shia-Crusader-Zionist alliance. It's America, it's Israel, it's Iran - if you happen to be Sunni, or if you happen to be Shia, it's Saudi Arabia and ISIS and so on. 

And that is how it happens. 

What is the cure for dualism? I think three things.

I think number one, we have to stand up, members of the monotheistic faiths, and say dualism is not monotheism. That is why the Qumran sectarians didn't become the mainstream of Judaism. That's why the Nag Hammadi Christians didn't become mainstream Christians. And that's why these extreme apocalyptic sects - Al-Qaeda, ISIS, Boko Haram, Al-Shabaab, Al-Nusra, Islamic Jihad and the rest - are really not mainstream Islam. 

And at the end of the day, Jews can't do this for Muslims, they can't do it for Christians, Jews have to do it for Jews, Christians for Christians, Muslims for Muslims, but at least I've tried in my book to outline certain basic presuppositions of any Abrahamic monotheism, one of which is monotheism itself. And dualism is not monotheism.

That is point one. 

And the great advantage of that is that it forces us to see that every human being is in fact a mix of light and shade. That is the most striking thing of the Abrahamic books.

The heroes and heroines of the Hebrew Bible are full of faults. They have virtues, but they have faults. And the worst of them have virtues as well.

There's no person who's purely evil, there's no person who's purely good. 

I think about my candidate for Darth Vader in the Hebrew Bible would be Pharaoh of the Exodus. He orders every male Israelite… this man had as his daughter the woman who rescued and adopted Moses and gave him his name. So the worst of the worst has a saving grace called a daughter, you know. So nobody's purely evil. 

Once that happens, you can begin to work your way beyond hatred and demonisation and victimhood. That's number one. 

Number two, we have been here before. The last time the world was faced with a massive war of religions was in the 17th century, following the Reformation, following the battle between Catholics and Protestants in France, then culminating in the Thirty Years' War of 1618 to 1648, in which as many as one in three of the population of Central Europe died in the course of that war.

Decent human beings, decent - mainly Christians - sat down and said, this cannot be what God wants. Okay, maybe He wanted us to fight Muslims in the Crusades, but He certainly didn't want Christians murdering Christians right across Europe. So four figures sat down: Milton, Hobbes, John Locke, and Benedict Spinoza. They sat down and they meditated on the Hebrew Bible. Some of them were religious, some of them weren't. I mean, Spinoza being Jewish obviously was an atheist. I mean, that's the Jewish way in these things, you know. But still, they were all four in dialogue. Spinoza is in dialogue with Tanach throughout the “Tractatus Theologico-Politicus.” Hobbes, another atheist, quotes it 647 times in the course of “The Leviathan.” And out of this meditation on what God wants and that he cannot want us to be murdering one another, they came up with the five ideas that frame the modern world.

Social contract. The moral limits of power. The doctrine of toleration. Liberty of conscience. And most important of all, human rights. 

These emerged from the thinkers of the 17th century whose work had been preceded by the Christian Hebraists of the 16th century. And out of those they formulated the principles that led to the free societies of the modern world.

And that is what must happen now, in Islam, because the primary victims of Islamist violence are Muslims. And the time will come when young Muslims will sit down and say, this cannot be what Allah wants. 

And it begins with only a handful.

I mentioned four individuals. It begins with a small handful. But I hope through this book I'm opening a door through which a small handful will come.

And then finally, I think we have to insist that the Bible is written the way it is written, not by accident. The Bible does not begin with Judaism. It begins with a statement.

In Genesis 1, “Na’aseh adam b’tzalmeinu kidmuteinu.” God says,”Let us create Man in our image according to our likeness.” And this applies… And this is what was revolutionary about it. To every human being, regardless of colour, culture, class, or creed. 

Every one of us is in God's image.

Which means that one who is not in my image is still in God's. 

Can I see the trace of God in the face of a stranger? 

And that, I think, is the ultimate appeal. From the first chapter of the Book held sacred to all of us. That our common humanity precedes and must take priority over our religious differences. 

So I hope I've taken you through a little of how we didn't expect this. The theological and psychological dynamics through which it works. And the way, hopefully, we can work our way through to a more constructive and gracious future. 

And I really wrote the book to be as brutally honest as I could be. But at the same time, end with a narrative of hope. Which is what we're about. 

So since this has been a rather serious talk, let me just end with a story that, to me, illustrates how if you think hard enough, you can solve even the most insoluble problem. It is one of my favourite stories.

It refers to that, it relates to that year in 1947, when those of you who are familiar with that period will know that relations between the British mandatory power in what was then Palestine, and the Israelis, was not great. And Chaim had just got himself arrested by the British for illegal gun-running for the Haganah. And he is in the British military prison in Akko and he receives a letter from his wife.

And she, Chenya, writes, “Dear Chaim, it's all very well for you to go and be a hero for the Jewish people. But we have a farm to run. And we have potatoes to plant. And we have a field to plough. And how am I supposed to plough a field while you've got yourself thrown into prison? What am I supposed to do?”

Chaim thinks for a moment. And he sits down and writes a reply.

“Dear Chenya, whatever you do, don't touch the ground. There are rifles buried underneath.”

The letter is intercepted by the British military authorities.

The next day the farm is surrounded by British soldiers. They dig up every single inch of the ground. They fail to find a single rifle.

Disconsolate, they return to base. 

The next morning Chaim writes, “Dear Chenya, now plant potatoes.”

Thank you very much.

Pre Q&A announcements and comments

Professor Zerubavel: So I wanted to ask you, in your book, you take the reader through a very carefully crafted journey, getting to the points that you talked about here, but also taking the reader through the interpretation of key narratives in the book of Genesis, that discuss the issue of sibling rivalry. 

And the thesis that is underlying this very interesting analysis, or interpretation, of the text is that the sibling rivalry is analogous to the three Abrahamic faiths, the monotheistic faiths. So my question to you is, in doing this journey, which I really would like to recommend to all of you to read, because it is so unbelievably intelligent and humanistic, and I would say personally moving. I was really moved to read the way that you analyse text that are not usually analysed in that way. You definitely bring up the humanistic perspective, but in a world of today, and not only today, historically too, when you have the three monotheistic religions also at war in each other, to what extent one can, if you can give a little bit of a sense to the audience, how you treat the narratives of Genesis as a paradigm to work through the relationship between the three monotheistic faiths?

Rabbi Sacks: Yael, you showed in your book, “Recovered Roots,” how you cannot separate identity from narrative.

In a sense, we are the story we tell about ourselves. That is point one. 

Point two is that René Girard, the great French scholar who taught here in America in Stanford, and who just died a week ago, aged 91, whose book “Violence and the Sacred” is a key text here - and I also show that Sigmund Freud had a very similar feel for things - argued that sibling rivalry, what he called mimetic desire, but what you and I would commonly call sibling rivalry, is the prime driver of human violence.

Not Freud's Oedipus conflict between sons and fathers, but between siblings. 

And historically, that's the case. In Egypt, you have the myth of Set and Osiris. In Rome, you have Romulus and Remus. Hamlet begins with Hamlet's Uncle Claudius killing his father and usurping his throne. And as you know, Genesis is structured around stories of sibling rivalry. Cain and Abel, Isaac and Ishmael, Jacob and Esau, Joseph and his brothers, and the two sisters Leah and Rachel. 

So, sibling rivalry is a driver of violence, according to Girard, and it made a lot of sense to me. 

What I then discovered, I suppose we all knew this, but we never focused on it, is that the three Abrahamic monotheisms tell their stories in a way that forces them into a relationship of sibling rivalry with one another.

The case of Islam is the simpler of the two, because Islam simply says that the covenant passed from Abraham through Ishmael and not through Isaac. And why does the Bible say it passed through Isaac? Because the Jews falsified the Bible. So, the relationship between Islam and Judaism is constructed in terms of the sibling rivalry of Isaac and Ishmael.

What is less well-known is that Christianity defines itself in the same terms. You know what the first Christian texts were? The first Christian texts were the letters of Paul, which were written several decades before the first of the Gospels. One of his earliest letters, the Epistle to the Galatians, he is explaining to the Galatians, to this group of gentile Christians, that they don't need to keep the Torah and mitzvahs and milk and meat and two sets of keilim and all that. You know, you don't need all that because, you know, Jesus has come and liberated us from the law. 

And he then says this. Abraham, we're children of Abraham, but Abraham had two children. One by a slave woman called Hagar, and the other by a free woman called Sarah. It is the Jews who are the slaves to the law, and therefore they are Ishmael. And it is we Christians who are the child of the free woman, Sarah, who are free of the law, therefore we are Isaac.

So, in these most basic narratives, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam define themselves in sibling rivalry with one another. 

Now, this is serious. Let me be blunt.

If you are, tell me, in England we have a phrase. Do you have the same phrase in America, “the pecking order?” Do you have a pecking order? Not in Rutgers, but I mean elsewhere. You know how you get this phrase because if a lot of chicks are born, the firstborn, being a bit older and stronger and bigger than the next one, gets to have the first go at the food.

And so that number two and number three, who will starve if number one eats all the food. Understand that number one is standing between them and their very life. So you will get sibling rivalry amongst animals. 

The standard work on this, Douglas Mock's work published in 2005, uses that lovely phrase from Hamlet, “A little more than kin and less than kind.”

And so, they're in competition for scarce resources and it's vital. I mean, you know, my life is at stake here and I've got to get rid of you if I am to get to the food. 

Now with human children, it doesn't, well certainly with Jewish children, there's no shortage of food. But there is a shortage of something else, namely mother's attention. And that is a finite quantum. So, you know, if she's busy looking after him, she's not busy looking after me and that matters. Psychologically, it matters very much indeed. So that is why sibling rivalry is such a cause of violence. I mean, it's there and it's absolutely basic to it.

But what I did in the book is I stopped and said, hang on, all of these sibling rivalries are predicated on a logic of scarcity. There's just so much food to go around, there's just so much maternal attention to go around. 

But does it make any sense whatsoever, in terms of Abrahamic monotheism, to say that God's love works on the logic of scarcity? 

Is there just so little of it that it's a zero-sum game such that the more I have, the less you have? 

It doesn't work like that.

If it doesn't work like that, then for God to love me, He doesn't have to hate you. For God to choose me, He doesn't have to reject you. 

And I've shown that beneath all the sibling rivalry narratives in Genesis is what I call a concealed counter-narrative that runs in the opposite direction to the surface narrative.

This is not legerdemain, this is not midrashic licence. You will read the book and see, you know what? That's what the text is saying. In other words, the Bible is recognising that sibling rivalry is the primary driver of violence.

What is the first act of violence in the Bible? Cain kills Abel. And when does Cain kill Abel? After both of them have just performed the first recorded religious act in history. They both bring offerings.

So there is a connection between a religion and violence. It is driven by sibling rivalry, but God doesn't accept that. He says to Cain, “The sound of your brother's blood is crying to me from the ground.”

That is the sound I heard when I stood for the first time in Auschwitz-Birkenau and asked myself, ‘Where was God in Auschwitz?’ And I heard those words coming from the ground. 

So what we're doing is something very sophisticated indeed. It is acknowledging that sibling rivalry is the cause of violence and telling us a series of stories which, when we read them in full maturity, in their full depth, will lead us beyond sibling rivalry.

And thus, they do in fact describe an arc of hope. 

Professor Zerubavel: So that's what I would like to continue the conversation about, because the way that you interpret these texts and bring out the way that we can understand the sibling rivalries, and God's love, and the way that we can move from the conflict to empathy, to embracement, to God's love, to the weak, to the unchosen, and to reconciliation, provides a very different route to look at these texts and also to look at what we can learn from these texts in terms of our own reality. 

And you go on from that, which I thought was really masterfully, taking the reader to see how the same approach can be applied.

And so, we are back to the question of that dualism that you raised before. We and they, us and them, demonising the other. Now, it's very easy to look at it and to say, yes, that is happening, when it's happening by somebody else doing it to us. That is to say, when we see somebody talking about we, whether it's the West, Americans, Jews, whatever you take as the collectivity. 

But in fact, if we are really looking consciously at what we are doing, and we look at our own cultures, even in democratic countries, demonising the other is not exclusively done by those who oppose us and those who commit violence. 

So, the question is, what is the pathology? I mean, are you pathologising human behaviour to have this distinction between we and us? Or are you showing us that, yes, it's there, but we have to overcome it and to move into a relationship of trying to understand one another, to understand your enemy, to try to negotiate, to try to reach reconciliation? I mean, what is in application of the paradigm that you described? How far would you go with that? 

Rabbi Sacks: The truth is, what we can discuss, in beautiful university campuses, in North America, in these conditions of open speech and of graciousness, is not always available in the heart of conflict zones, in Aleppo or in Damascus or in Beirut or what have you.

And it is very easy for societies to be polarised, and as you suggest, our public discourse, even in the West, has become very polarised. And when this happens, I think there is a role for religious leaders, and not only for religious leaders, let me be very blunt. I don't think we have any monopoly here, because what we're talking about, as you say, is humanism. It can be a religious humanism, it can be a secular humanism, but a humanist is one who understands that I am not threatened by difference. I am enlarged by difference. 

I wonder if I can give you an example of this. If any of you had visited Britain 50 years ago, and you went into a local cafe or restaurant, you would have the great choice of fish and chips or fish and chips.

Today, you walk into the average school in inner-city London, the kids come from 40 to 60 different countries and language groups, and you can eat in any high-street cuisine from any part of the world you get. That is being enlarged by difference. 

And I think it is not difficult for humanists, be it religious or secular, to understand that is what God is all about.

He did not create us all the same. You remember what the Mishna says in Sanhedrin Chapter 4, ‘When a human being makes many coins in the same mint, they all come out the same. God makes us all in the same image, His image, and we all come out different.’

God loves diversity. 

I coined a phrase as a title of the book I published on the first anniversary of 9/11, the phrase, “The Dignity of Difference.” 

God did not create a single life form, he created three million life forms.

He did not create a single tree, he created 250,000 species of tree. 

He did not create a single language, there are 6,000 languages spoken today. 

And the truth is, God loves diversity.

Now, the point is, you are not going to get that to work in a conflict zone. But you have to be able to train the leaders, take them out of that conflict zone, get them to really rethink their theology. 

Now what will drive them to do this? And I will tell you exactly what will drive them.

You know why what is happening is happening. It is happening because in 1922, the Ottoman Empire was disbanded. That whole vehicle of the Umayyad Caliphate, the visible symbol of Islam in the world, was destroyed, was dismantled.

Six years later, the Muslim Brotherhood was formed. Now you know that initially, the feeling of Kemal Ataturk and many others was, Arab, Muslim societies had to become modern by becoming Western, by becoming secular. And so you had secular nationalist regimes - under Nasser in Egypt, under Assad in Syria, under Saddam Hussein in Iraq.

Those nationalist regimes, secular all of them, failed to deliver human rights, failed to deliver prosperity, failed to deliver the restoration of the honour of Islam. 

What we are witnessing today is a whole series of religious counter-revolutions. But it will not take long for Muslims to discover that life under ISIS is such as to make life under Nasser or Assad look like a paradise.

And at that moment, Muslims are going to say, we tried secularism, it doesn't work. We tried religious fundamentalism, it doesn't work. What does work? And that is the point where a Muslim Milton, Hobbes, Locke, and Spinoza will appear.

Professor Zerubavel: So my last question to you, and then we'll open it to other questions. Have you been working with other theologians or clergymen from other religions to promote this interfaith, having a united voice of people of faith and people of the book, with this message to moderate Christians, Islamists, Jews, in terms of working together? 

Rabbi Sacks: I've been doing this for 25 years and with greater intensity in the last year, in the course of writing the book and in response to the book and having public conversations with leading Christians, leading Muslims. But… I actually took great pleasure in some of the things we were able to do.

I just had a public conversation a couple of days ago at the American University in Washington with Akbar Ahmed, who is today head of Islamic Studies there, but Pakistani High Commissioner in London. 2002, 13 years ago, an American Jewish journalist, Daniel Pearl, was murdered in Karachi. And I brought together Judea Pearl, his father, with Akbar Ahmed, the Pakistani High Commissioner, and the two of them became friends.

And I made a BBC television programme of the two of them together in conversation. Then I took them into a Muslim school, then I took them into a Jewish school, and we filmed the interactions. It was unbelievably redemptive.

Judea Pearl said, “Hate killed my son. Therefore, I dedicate the rest of my life to fighting hate.”

I did a film in a most unusual school, an Orthodox Jewish school in Birmingham, under my aegis, where more than half the pupils are Muslim.

The reason being that there aren't as many Jews in Birmingham as there used to be. They can't fill all the places. So 51% or more are Muslim kids. And we have Sikh kids and we have Hindu kids and we have Chinese kids. 

And I had a Muslim parent on television, very articulate, professor at Birmingham University, Muslim professor, saying, ‘I moved into this area of Birmingham specifically so I could send my children to a Jewish school.’

And I spent the day with the kids, with the school kids. These are 5 to 11-year-olds. And I taught them the Israeli peace song, “Od Yavo Shalom Aleinu,” which they sang in Hebrew, in Arabic, and in English.

And we filmed them. And as the camera panned along these faces - little Muslim kids, little Jewish kids, Chinese kids, Indian kids - the Christian viewers were in tears. 

So you can sometimes create these moments that show the possibility of another kind of world.

Professor Zerubavel: Thank you. And I will call on Professor Rendsburg to come and to introduce questions from the audience. 

Professor Rendsburg: Here we go.

Okay. Several questions of the same order. One member of the audience asks, if we are not ourselves Muslims, how can we create or spur change in this arena, especially because religious violence is so prevalent and really does affect us? 

Or in shorter fashion, perhaps the same question, while we wait for the Muslim Milton, Hobbes, Spinoza, and Locke, what do we (underline), presumably meaning Christians and Jews, do? 

Rabbi Sacks: The short answer is that among the most enthusiastic readers of the book have been Muslims.

And the reason is because they have felt devoiced. They haven't heard moderates speaking up for them. And they feel here is somebody who's speaking the religious truth as they see it.

So one of the reasons you do this as a Jew - because only Muslims can do it for Islam, but because they are so easily intimidated - is that you do it, and you thereby empower Muslims to say, you know what, we will say this as well. You have to lead from the front, by example. 

Professor Rendsburg: You've already answered the question, but I will just mention it because one of the questions was, a number of us heard your National Public Radio interview with Robert Siegel, and you in fact mentioned that one of your targeted audience were young Muslims.

And the question was, to what extent have you reached that community? And you're informing us now that as far as you know, it's having that reach and impact. 

Rabbi Sacks: Young Muslims and not so young Muslims have been the most enthusiastic readers of the book. The guys who threw it straight into the trash can didn't communicate with me, but among the responses that I know of, the warmest came from Muslims and also from Christians.

Professor Rengsburg: Thank you. Whom do you see as the Muslims who could convene the transformational conversation you are speaking about? I think we might, right now, think of a precedent here. You know, it sounds utopian, you make a small theological change and the world changes.

That sounds ridiculous. The kind of thing a rabbi would say. 

So let me just show you how it happens.

50 years ago, almost exactly, we've just commemorated the 50th anniversary, the Catholic Church issued a document called Nostra Aetate. That made a tiny change to Catholic doctrine and Catholic liturgy. Very, very small.

That one change transformed Catholic-Jewish relations, replacing a history of 17 centuries of estrangement and hostility to one in which today we meet as cherished and respected friends. 

It can be that simple and that effective. 

And therefore, I would suggest that instead of waiting for a Muslim to do it, the heads of the world faiths should convene Nostra Aetate II, extending its embrace to all faiths.

Out of the conviction that we all are in danger. 

It is not just Muslims who are suffering, it is Jews who are suffering from the return of anti-Semitism, Christians who are suffering from the massacre of Christian communities throughout the Middle East. And it is much easier for us to do it in such a way that leaders of Islam can join in company with those of other faiths and make this a global effort covering all the faiths.

Professor Rengsburg: Thank you. A number of people have asked some questions here concerning dualism, especially in the Jewish tradition, such as how do you reconcile the thoughts that you presented this evening with the Talmuds and other classical Jewish sources mention of Satan as an antagonistic force in the world? 

Rabbi Sacks: The idea of Satan as an antagonistic force in the world is extremely tendentious Jewishly, because Satan is, as you know, the chief advocate of persecution in the heavenly court. He is not a force of independent evil.

That appears in early Christian texts and in some intertestaments which were excluded from the canon. So you get Mastema or Satan or what have you as a force of evil. All of the texts that speak in those terms are regarded as devarim chitzoni’im, as apocryphal, and as heretical from a Jewish perspective.

So for us, Alan Dershowitz has just published a book entitled “Abraham, the First Jewish Lawyer,” and in brackets, But Not the Last. And Satan just happens to be another Jewish lawyer who is counsel for the prosecution. 

Professor Rengsburg: Thank you. A number of people are taking the opportunity of your presence here this evening to ask questions on a broader nature other than your topic this evening. So with your permission, I will just ask several of these, one of which is a question about something which you have written, an entire book. 

How do you respond to questions of scientific evidence that contradicts classical understandings of biblical creation? 

Rabbi Sacks: I respond to scientific explanations of the origins of the universe that contradict the plain sense of the Bible the way that Judah HaLevi, Saadia Gaon, and Maimonides did, respectively Saadia in the 10th century, Yehuda HaLevi in the 11th, Maimonides in the 12th.

They all said the same thing. If the plain sense of a verse is incompatible with established scientific truth, that is proof that we need to read the text in something other than its plain sense. 

Professor Rengsburg: Thank you. A question asks - I'm going to go back with one question to the main topic of the evening - Judaism, to some extent, went through its time period of the Maccabean Revolt and the Great Revolt and the Bar Kochba Revolt, and Christianity went through the Crusades and, as you mentioned, the religious wars of the 16th and 17th centuries, and now we have the present condition within the orbit of Islam. Is it just something that all these monotheistic religions need to endure before they move on to a different phase?

Rabbi Sacks: If you analyse the time lapse between the birth of Judaism, which is difficult to establish, but its earliest origins, and the internecine violence in Jerusalem in the first century, it's about, give or take, one and a half millennia. 15 centuries. 

If you analyse the time lapse between the birth of Christianity and the Thirty Years' War, it's 15 centuries. Now you know why it took Islam to the 21st century, because that's 15 centuries after the birth of Islam.

So there seems to be this inner mechanism in the Abrahamic monotheisms that causes them, every 1,500 years, to explode. I'm not quite sure why this is, but I just noted that it is. 

Professor Rengsburg: Yael just said it's a very hopeful narrative, and I was going to say something very similar to that.

Again, moving outside the somewhat related perhaps, how can Israel, the modern State of Israel, bridge the gap between its secular population and the growing ultra-Orthodox population? Is the Israeli society destined to have this schism permanently? 

Rabbi Sacks: Well, you know, you're asking me to solve the problems of world peace, that's easy. To get to the other, that's difficult. 

But, you know, at the end of the day, I do think that slowly we are beginning to realise that our destinies are interlinked.

And I do see, among young Israelis, a move by secular young Israelis to recover their sense of tradition. Among some young Haredim, and I work with young Haredim in Israel who work with secular Jews, among some young Haredim to realise that the sheer demographic growth of their community is such that it will be economically unsustainable unless they or their children engage in a productive economy. And some of them, as you know, in what's called the Nachal Charedi, the Charedi unit in the army, are engaging in the army. So I see enormous signs of hope in Israel.

And the great thing is that at the end of the day, you know, that Judaism is... It was this thing that was this big advertising slogan in the 1980s, big posters, saying, “You have a friend in the Chase Manhattan Bank.” And underneath, one Israeli had written, “But in Bank Leumi, you have mishpacha.” 

So Jews are all one big family.

Now, the big thing about a family is if you have an argument with a friend today, tomorrow he may not be your friend. But if you have an argument with your brother or sister, tomorrow they're still your brother and sister. So I think because we are one family, we will not be split apart by our disagreements.

Professor Rengsburg: And one final question, which again brings us back to your topic this evening, but also both broadens and focusses the topic as follows. Religion has often been used as an excuse for violence perpetrated against gays and lesbians, as we've seen in many places in the world, including in Israel, where an ultra-Orthodox Jew stabbed and killed people at the Jerusalem Gay Pride Parade. As one of the leading voices in the Jewish Orthodox world and as someone who embraces both the science and the history, have you spoken out and written about this issue? Could you share your thoughts with us on that topic? 

Rabbi Sacks: Every single National Holocaust Memorial Day in Britain, January the 27th, I speak about the fact that in Auschwitz, were not only Jews, were not only Roma and Sinti gypsies, but also homosexuals. They too were persecuted. 

And we, a people who have known persecution over the centuries, should be able to empathise with others who were persecuted and not, God forbid, to become one of the persecutors. 

I saw a film… I had a privilege of speaking in the Vatican last November, a year ago. They were kind enough to ask me to give the opening keynote at a conference opened by the Pope. There are not many matters on which you would expect the Roman Catholic to think a rabbi might know slightly more than the Pope, but it would not surprise you to understand that the theme of the conference was marriage. 

So, you know, we spoke about the union of male and female and how important that is to our development of the moral sense.

But I wanted the Vatican to know that the fact that we support traditional marriage should not, God forbid, allow us to abuse or demean those whose nature is different. And I told them that I had just watched a film about the codebreaker, Alan Turing, called “The Imitation Game.” And the film ends with his dying through chemical poisoning.

And it only hints at the fact, that you and I know, that Alan Turing was homosexual in an age, in 1951, when it was illegal in Britain and that caused him to commit suicide. 

None of us should ever go down that road again. Let our compassion extend to everyone and let us not condemn those who live differently from us because at the end of the day, we worship the God whose compassion is on all creatures and on all human beings. Thank you.

Professor Zerubavel: Amen.

Closing comments