Violence and Law: Ancient and Contemporary Reflections

Introductory remarks

Rabbi Sacks: Thank you. Thank you. Distinguished representatives of Humboldt University, of the Hildesheimer Seminary, of the Lauder Foundation, and Dr. Schuster representing German Jewry, please forgive me if I speak in English. I really don't know any German. But I want to tell you this, that if you don't understand me, please, you're in good company, because quite often I don't understand myself. But it is a great honour and a very emotional one for me this evening.

Let me explain why. Firstly, because for me, Rabbi Dr. Asriel Hildesheimer of blessed memory was my role model. He was the one who showed that you could combine deep erudition in Jewish law and Jewish faith and at the same time the deepest appreciation of German culture at its most elevated academic level.

Before I became Chief Rabbi in Britain, I had the parallel role that he had. I was head of our rabbinical seminary, Jews College, created just 18 years before the Hildesheimer Seminar. The Hildesheimer Seminary was an ideal to aspire to. I don't think any other rabbinical seminary had such greatness intellectually and spiritually. But it was predicated on a dream, a dream that Jews and Judaism, and Germany and German culture, could coexist in mutual regard and respect. That dream seemed to die on Kristallnacht.

And therefore, the fact that this seminary has been recreated in our time is a very special and remarkable testimony to hope. 

Today is the fifth day of the Jewish festival of Chanukah. Commemorating a time 22 centuries ago, when Jews lost their religious freedom, their freedom to practise and live as Jews.

They fought for that freedom and they won it in a great military victory. A small group of dedicated people against one of the greatest empires of the time, the Seleucid branch of the Alexandrian Empire. But what we remember from 22 centuries ago is not the military victory, but a simple story about one pure cruse of oil that was found in the defiled wreckage of the Temple.

One little jar of oil that remained pure. And with that oil Jews were able to relight the Menorah, the candelabrum that stood in the Temple. And that oil, which should have lasted a day, burned for eight. 

Telling us that when you feel that everything has been defiled, something remains that is pure.

And with what remains, you can light a light that banishes some of the darkness of the world. 

And I feel that this coming to life again of the Hildesheimer Rabbinical Seminary is lighting a Chanukah light for all of German Jewry and indeed all of world Jewry. And we thank Humboldt University for this wonderful way of celebrating the rebirth of the Jewish dream and the Jewish hope.

Friends, Chanukah was a celebration of religious freedom. At a time when it was at risk, today in the 21st century, religious freedom is once again at risk. Not just for Jews, who fear the return of antisemitism to Europe within living memory of the Holocaust, but for Christians and Muslims also.

In Syria, and Iraq, and Afghanistan, and Libya, and Somalia, and Yemen, and Sudan. In fact, in one third of the nations of the world. And as we saw in the terrorist attacks in Paris, as we have seen in fact ever since 9/11, religion has often been a source of violence and not of peace, of darkness, and not of light.

And it is threatening freedom. Not just in the Middle East, in Asia and in Africa, but in Europe also. And therefore, I want to ask, if religion is part of the problem, can it also be part of the solution? 

And to reflect on this, I want to reflect tonight on two absolute fundamentals. Aspects of Judaism that proved historically very hard for non-Jews to understand.

Especially in Christianity and Islam. And here they are. Two aspects.

The first is this. The people who studied at Rabbi Ettlinger's rabbinical seminary then in the 19th century, and now in the 21st century, were doing something quite unusual. Why is this lecture being held in the Faculty of Law? Do you have a faculty of Theology in Humboldt University? Or Religious Studies? Why is it being held in the Faculty of Law? And the answer, of course, is that those people who were studying for the rabbinate, then and now, were essentially studying Law.

Because Jews believed something very remarkable. That when God revealed himself to humanity, he did so primarily in the form of law. That, of course, is why there are so many Jewish lawyers.

But that is why we call our holiest book, the Five Books of Moses, Torah, which means many things - teaching, instruction, guidance, but essentially, Law. Now it was this that proved the parting of the ways between Judaism and that great phenomenon we know as Pauline Christianity. 

The first Christian texts were the Letters of Paul. And Paul essentially argued that his new understanding of the Covenant meant that religion was not about what we do, but about what we believe.

It wasn't about works. It was about faith.

It wasn't about justice. It was about mercy. 

It wasn't about retribution. It was about forgiveness. 

It wasn't about law. It was about love.

Now, Paul was, of course, a Jew. Why was it that his fellow Jews did not agree with him? That is one aspect of Judaism that has proved hard for people to understand. 

The second one is that according to the Bible, according to the books of Genesis and Exodus, God did not reveal himself in the form of law once.He did so twice in quite different ways. He did so first to Noah after the Flood, and with him established a law for all humanity. Then a second time, he established a covenant with Moses and the Israelites, the descendants of Abraham and Sarah, and with them established a covenant at Mount Sinai, but this time not with all humanity, but with a small section of it, with the children of Abraham.

So in Judaism, there are two different legal systems, both of them of equal importance. One, a universal set of laws for all humanity. And number two, a particular set of laws that is not meant for all humanity, but just one section of it. 

This idea was not accepted by either Christianity or Islam, both of which emphasise the universal and not the particular.

For both of them, there was one God for all humanity, one truth for all humanity, one way for all humanity. Now, that makes more sense, on the face of it, than the Jewish view. So why was it that Judaism said no? There are two systems of law.

These are the essential foundational questions that make Judaism the religion it is. Number one, that if we search for God, we will find Him in law. And number two, not in one legal system, but in two. 

These are difficult ideas, but I want to suggest they're important ideas, and I want to explain why.

In terms of the work of a man who died, sadly, at the age of 91, just five weeks ago. A French academic who taught in America at Stanford, called René Girard. René Girard was the greatest writer in the 20th century on the relationship between religion and violence. His most famous book was “Violence and the Sacred.”

Girard was a disciple, to some degree, of Sigmund Freud. And one of the interesting things that Freud and Girard held in common was that they reversed the normal relationship that people think of about the relationship between religion and violence. 

Many people think that religion creates violence. Freud and Girard argued that violence creates religion. Very, very radical idea. 

For Freud, famously, the fundamental cause of violence is the Oedipus complex, the tension between fathers and sons.

For Girard, the source of violence was wider than this. He called it “mimetic desire,” and since that is as unintelligible in English as I'm sure it is in German, let me explain what is mimetic desire. Anyone who is a parent of children will know that if you have two children and you give one of them a new toy, the other one immediately wants it.

It becomes the most important thing in the world. I need that. He never thought of it before today, but now he suddenly wants it. Why does he want it? Because his brother or his sister has it. That is mimetic desire. We want what somebody else has.

And ultimately, said Girard, that means we want to be what somebody else is. And that is, for Girard, the source of conflict in human society. 

And you will find it not so much - as Freud thought - between fathers and sons, as, thought Girard, between siblings, between brothers or between sisters.

And if you think about it, that is what the record of human civilisation suggests. In Egypt, it was the conflict between Set and Osiris. In Greece, between Eteocles and Polyneices. In Rome, between Romulus and Remus. And in the Bible, in Genesis, between Cain and Abel, Isaac and Ishmael, Jacob and Esau, Joseph and his brothers, and the two sisters, Leah and Rachel. 

That, said Girard, is the source of violence, sibling rivalry, the desire to have what somebody else has, which sometimes is really the desire to be what somebody else is.

That is the first point that Girard makes. 

The second point is that violence initiates a cycle of retaliation and revenge that has no natural end. That is what we see in Romeo and Juliet, between the Montagues and the Capulets. It's what you see in The Godfather, between the Tattaglia and the Corleones. It is what you see in the Middle East today, almost everywhere. You killed one of my people, so I will kill one of your people. Violence begets violence. 

And the end result is what Hobbes called “the war of every man against every man in which life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” 

Girard then said that there is one thing that stops the violence, which is if the Montagues and the Capulets get together and kill somebody else altogether. That way, violence has been avenged, we've killed somebody in revenge, but because he's not a Montague or a Capulet, he's not going to retaliate against us. 

It's the only way you can safely stop a cycle of retaliation. You kill a third party that belongs to neither of the fighting factions - an outsider, an innocent victim, who can be blamed, once you've killed him, for being the source of the conflict in the first place.

That ends the cycle of violence. 

And that, according to Girard, is how religion was born. 

Girard said the fundamental religious act is a sacrifice, a human sacrifice, and the fundamental form of sacrifice is the scapegoat, the Se’ir HaMishtaleach, the one who dies for somebody else's sin.

That is where religion is born. An innocent victim is killed so that the violence between two factions can come to an end. And that, says Girard, is the role of religion in society. It deflects away violence within a society by projecting it on an innocent victim, who becomes the scapegoat who dies because of other people's sins. 

Now, that famously is Girard's theory. And it speaks to me as a Jew because I think that was the role that Jews played very often in history.

But Girard was a Catholic. And Girard went on to explain what for him was the basis of Christianity. Very profound. He said that is why for Christianity the central event was the scapegoat to end all scapegoats. The sacrifice by God, of the Son of God, so that we would no longer need any other sacrifice, any other scapegoat, any other innocent victim. And that, for Girard, is why he was a Christian.

And I respect that. However, Girard also believed there was another way, a different way. And that, he said, is that a society can end a cycle of violence and retaliation in another way altogether, which is by creating an effective system of law.

The second you create an effective system of law that is radically impartial between the contending parties, then it's no longer the Montagues against the Capulets, it's no longer the Tattaglias against the Corleones. It is both under the impartial judgement of law. Moreover, law takes the violence and the threat of violence out of the hands of the two parties and places that power in completely different hands which stand above the contending parties. So that justice is no longer a matter of victim and perpetrator, and violence is thereby contained by law.

And when that happens, revenge is turned into retribution. Hostility becomes the desire for justice, and thus order prevails over anarchy and chaos. 

It is fascinating that Girard, the greatest thinker on religion and violence in the 20th century, gave us these two completely different mechanisms. Number one, the scapegoat, the death of an innocent victim, and number two, a mechanism of law. Both of them are ways of ending a cycle of violence. 

And that, without his ever realising it, I think, Girard explained exactly the parting of the ways between Judaism and Pauline Christianity.

Paul - and to some extent, the Church that he founded - was sometimes tempted in his letters to the Galatians, to the Romans, to make a series of difficult contrasts. And they left a very difficult legacy between Jews and Christians. That the God of the Old Testament and the God of the New Testament are different. The God of the Old Testament is the God of Justice. The God of New Testament is the God of Forgiveness. The God of the Old Testament is the God of Law. The God of the New Testament is the God of Love. 

Now, this cannot be so. Many people believe it, but it cannot be so, for one simple reason. In mainstream Christian theology, the God of the Old Testament is the God of the New Testament. The idea that these are two different gods was rejected by the Church as heresy. It was a heresy put forward by Marcion in the second century. It was a heresy articulated in the Gnostic Gospels, discovered as the Nag Hammadi Manuscripts in 1945. Both of them were rejected as heresy. 

So that when Jesus speaks of love, he is speaking as a Jew, by direct quotation from the Torah. Deuteronomy 6, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might.”

Leviticus 19, “You shall love your neighbour as yourself.” When he speaks of forgiveness, he does so in the language of Exodus 34. “The Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger and abounding in love and faithfulness.”

He is speaking out of the tradition that sets as the holiest day of the year, Yom Kippur, the supreme Day of Forgiveness. So the God of the New Testament is the God of the Old Testament. It is the same love. It is the same forgiveness in both faiths. 

What makes Pauline Christianity different from Judaism is that Paul came to the conclusion that if you have love, you do not need law, especially if, as Girard said, you can point to the ultimate scapegoat, the one who died because of other people's sins. That would absorb the violence that would otherwise destroy society.

Why then did Judaism not agree? Why is love not enough? Why do we still need law? 

The Book of Genesis gives a very clear answer, and it is a very unexpected one. Genesis tells us that just as hate creates conflict, love also creates conflict. What are the classic expressions of love in Genesis? Isaac loved Esau. Rebecca loved Jacob. The result was one of the great sibling rivalries of all time. 

Second example, Jacob loved Rachel more than Leah. The end result was strife between sisters. 

Third instance of love, Jacob loved Joseph more than all his other sons. That almost led to fratricide, to the brothers murdering Joseph.

So the antidote to violence is not love. The antidote to violence is law, because love will always generate sibling rivalry, as children compete for the love of their parents. And in truth, the classic expression of sibling rivalry in all of religious history - there is no more remarkable example of this in all of religious history - than the adversarial relationship between the three great Abrahamic monotheisms: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

Each of them traces the same ancestry back to Abraham or Ibrahim. Each of them claims to be Abraham's true successor, his chosen child. And the result has been centuries of crusades, jihads, and holy wars.

And it hasn't ended even today. And it may yet dominate the 21st century. 

Let us listen to the difference between love and law.

Here it is. Genesis 29, “And Jacob went in to Rachel and he loved also Rachel more than Leah.” Genesis 37, “Now Jacob, Israel, loved Joseph more than all his other children.” That is the language of love.

Now let me tell you the same story in the language of law. Deuteronomy Chapter 21. “If a man has two wives, and he loves one but not the other, and both bear him sons, but the firstborn is the son of the wife he doesn't love, when he wills his property to his sons, he must not give the right of the firstborn to the son of the wife he loves, in preference to the actual firstborn, the son of the wife he does not love. He must acknowledge the son of his unloved wife as the firstborn, by giving him a double share of all that he has. That son is the first sign of his father's strength. The right of the firstborn belongs to him.”

These are two different worlds. The love of Genesis, beautiful and transforming, led to the conflict between Rachel and Leah and Joseph and his brothers. And that is why Deuteronomy comes and says no. Law must prevail over Love. 

This is a very, very powerful sentence. Love is poetry. Law is mere prose. Love is exciting. And Law, to those of us who are not blessed to be lawyers, is sometimes the tiniest bit less than exciting.

So love is beautiful, and law is law. But if you want peace, rather than sibling rivalry and violence, you need not just love, but also law. In the language of Exodus 12, “One law, the same law, for the native born and for the stranger who lives among you.”

That is what makes law holy. And that is why in Judaism we believed that when God revealed Himself to humanity, He did so in the form of law. Law without Love is harsh. But love without law leads to violence. The violence born of sibling rivalry. What René Girard called “mimetic desire.”

And the history of Jews, Christians, and Muslims, each claiming to be Abraham's favourite son, is a history written in tears. Law has to prevail over Love. That is the first point.

The second one I can answer very immediately. The second question was, why does God say, why does the Bible say that God made two covenants? One with Noah and all humanity, and the other with Sinai, with the Israelites, with the people we call the Jewish people. 

And I can answer that very simply.

Every human association, whether it be a marriage, a family, a community, a society, a nation, or an international arena, is a fugue, a counterpoint, between what we have in common and what makes us different. And they are both essential. 

If we were completely different, we could not communicate. But if we were completely the same, we would have nothing to say. 

So, the Hebrew Bible constructs this dual structure of law. The first kind of law applies to all humanity, regardless of our differences. The Noahide Law. The universal. But secondly, the Mosaic Law, that applies to this particular community of faith. Specifically as a code of difference. 

Why? Because the Bible wants to speak to that dual nature of the human condition. And that is what it is trying to tell us. That the human condition is a fugue between the universality of Justice and the particularity of Love. 

Imagine confusing justice and love, law and love. Imagine a judge who sits and declares the accused innocent because he's the son of a friend. I let love affect my decision as a judge. That is a perversion of justice. But if I do the other way around, and I act like a judge with children so that I behave to other people's children the way I behave to my own, that is a failure of love.

Law is about detachment. Love is about attachment. Law is universal. Love is particular. 

And because the Hebrew Bible wants us to take both seriously, the universality of justice and the particularity of love, it has to create two structures of law, two covenants. And we even have in the Hebrew Bible two names for God. The Bible scholars call them E and J. I don't know why they call them E and J, but they call them E and J. Elokim and Hashem. Elokim is God in his universal relation to all humanity. Hashem, J, is God in his particular relationship of love to the Children of Israel.

And now we begin to see something incredibly important. 

The Hebrew Bible places the covenant with Noah prior to the covenant with Moses and the Israelites. To say that we are all - regardless of our colour, our culture, our class, or our creed - in the image and likeness of God, all human life is sacred. Before we even begin to think about the particularities of love and what makes one faith different from others, our common humanity precedes our religious differences.

And that itself is a religious statement. And unless we recognise that our common humanity precedes our religious differences, we will commit violence in the name of religion. We will hate in the name of the God of Love. We will kill in the name of the God of Life. We will wage war in the name of the God of Peace. And we will practise cruelty in the name of the God of Compassion.

And that is no mere theoretical possibility. It is happening right now, and our very future as a free humanity is at stake. 

So I want to sum up my argument.

In Judaism, God reveals himself in the form of law because law, we believe, is the ultimate antidote to violence. Because just as hate can lead to conflict, love, sadly, can do so likewise. And I have tried to explain why in biblical law, law itself takes two forms, one applying to all of us, in virtue of our shared humanity, and the other which applies to those within my particular community of faith, or those in my particular nation.

And the first is prior to the second. The universal law of humanity is prior to the law of the state or the law of my particular religious faith. That is the religious basis of human rights.

It was John F. Kennedy who said, “Ich bin ein Berliner,” (the only words of German that I actually know), who said in his inaugural address, he spoke of “The same revolutionary beliefs for which our forebears fought are still at issue around the globe. The belief that the rights of Man come not from the generosity of the State but from the hand of God.” 

And just before he said that sentence, he said, “Man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life.”

That sentence has never been more true than it is today. 

It is my belief that the religion of Abraham, which took historically three forms: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the Abrahamic monotheisms. This family of faith is in the 21st century facing its supreme test. 

Do I truly believe that those whose faith is not the same as mine are unredeemed, are the infidel, are the antichrist, are the greater or lesser Satan? 

Or do I have the humility and the openness to understand what Genesis is saying to us in its very opening chapter? That the great challenge God is setting us is to see His image in one who is not in our image.

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

Can I realise that the real message of monotheism is that unity up there creates diversity down here? 

And to realise that those who seek freedom for their own faith must, in consistency, grant it to those of other faiths. That to win honour, we have to honour others. To win respect, we need to respect others.

To be entitled to toleration, we have to tolerate others. That is the test God is setting us right now. Can we combine law and love? Can we live with the duality of the human condition, what we share as a universal humanity, and what separates us into our different families of faith? That is the challenge that the Abrahamic monotheisms, that the God of Genesis is setting us now.

And therefore, as we celebrate this Jewish festival of freedom called Chanukah, let us work for a world in which all faiths find their freedom. And let us light a menorah, a candelabra of many candles, of many colours, and of many faiths, and thereby light up the darkness of this sometimes all-too-violent world. Thank you very much indeed.

Closing remarks