peace

World Congress of Faiths YOUNGHUSBAND LECTURE

SEPTEMBER 11TH: THE CASE AGAINST US ALL

by Rabbi Tony Bayfield

THURSDAY 3RD MAY 2002, Sternberg Centre for Judaism

There is a famous passage in a somewhat esoteric tractate of the Talmud called Eruvin, with which I have been working recently . It is marvellous stuff, which will be familiar to some here. It’s about two ‘schools’ – Pharisaic, early rabbinic – founded by two older contemporaries of Jesus called Hillel and Shammai. They were in dispute about a matter of halakhah, Jewish law, and both sides maintained that they alone were right. After three years the situation was finally resolved only by a bat kol, a heavenly voice which declared that “these and these [both views] are the words of the living God”. But, said the voice, there are some matters such as matters of law where we have to have a definitive ruling even though both views are ‘God’s truth’. Because we are forced in this instance to make a decision, we will follow the school of Hillel. Why, asks the Talmud? ‘Because the members of the school of Hillel were kind and modest and studied the rulings of both sides and mentioned the school of Shammai before the school of Hillel and humility, not actively seeking greatness and the power to impose that goes with it, and not being over anxious to win at all costs are virtues that deserve the highest reward’.

It is a marvellous passage and it is one that I as a progressive Jew read as an essential seed of a most profound concept – that different groups hear the voice of the living God in different ways; that only on very limited occasions is it necessary to make a definitive ruling. For the most part we can and must live with the fact that not only do Jews, Christians and Muslims all hear the words of the living God but that we often hear them in different ways. Even when there has to be a single way of doing things that does not invalidate the truth of the other, what matters is humility and respect and not seeking cheap victories or the power to impose our view. It is truly marvellous stuff.

But a few days ago I noticed that this particular section of Talmud ends immediately after the passage I have just quoted with another famous passage. “Our rabbis taught”, it goes on, “for two and a half years the school of Shammai and the school of Hillel were in dispute again, the former asserting that it would have been better for us if human beings had not been created and the latter maintaining that it is better for us to have been created. Finally, they took a vote and decided that it would have been better for us not to have been created but, since we have been created, we should reflect on our past deeds and make amends or, as some say, examine our future actions”.

The Talmud is a literary work. It appears at first glance simply to be the record of debates that took place over a period of some hundreds of years, roughly connected by theme. But that isn’t so. It is a record of discussions and debates over some hundreds of years but very carefully and thoughtfully edited to reflect an overriding argument, to provide an added overall point. So it is quite legitimate to ask why the editors of this section chose to end a sublime, tolerant, exalted view of human debate and dispute, a section advancing an insight so profound about the fragmentary, partial nature of revelation and truth as perceived by human beings, with something which punctures these exalted ideals and brings us down to earth with such a harsh, discordant note of deflation and despondency.

I think there is little option but to conclude that they did so because they knew that we would find the internalisation of such a modest and humble view of what each of us hold dear, to be extraordinarily hard. In fact, they knew that we would fail repeatedly to acknowledge that ‘these and these are both the words of the living God’; that we would not listen respectfully to each other and restrain our desire to ‘win’; that we would become hopelessly entangled in the dilemma of distinguishing that which is relative from that which is universal; that we would become obsessed by the desire to justify ourselves amidst the inevitable dirtying of hands when exercising power; that we would fail the challenge to be humble and self-critical and therefore it would have been better had we not been set the challenge of life in the first place.

As one who simply cannot live up to the standards demanded of me by that passage in the Talmud, as one who has to exercise leadership within the Jewish community, as one who constantly gets his hands dirty because he believes he has to, as one who shares the terror and anger and sense of betrayal and sense of being repeatedly and deliberately misrepresented and misunderstood and experiences the internal conflicts of shame and guilt of most Jews at this time, I simply cannot begin to speak in the spirit of that heavenly voice because I don’t in my innermost heart really believe it. I have never empathised with the note of deflation and despair at the end of that section of Talmud before but there are times now when I do. As Rabbi Tony Bayfield, professional head of the Reform Movement in Britain. I am too angry, too fearful, too hurt, too conflicted and despairing to say anything constructive to you but yet I know there is something that must be said.

I hope you will give me the benefit of the doubt, show me a little compassion in what I am about to do. Even, if I show you and me no compassion at all.

As I am sure you know, the word Satan, Satan or ha-Satan, the Satan is relatively rare in the Hebrew Bible. It is used in a number of ways and developed in different ways within later Jewish, Christian and Muslim traditions. There is, however, no doubt that one of the meanings of Satan in the Hebrew Scriptures is adversary, prosecuting counsel. Satan was the angel who presented before God the case against. The only way that I can escape from my inner conflict and emotional turmoil is to address you, to address us in the guise of the prosecuting angel. It adds hubris as well as cowardice and intellectual dishonesty to my many other sins but remember that I am not playing Satan, just a humble barrister (‘a humble barrister’, now there is an oxymoron for you and I should know because I have fathered a barrister!).

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When those two planes smashed murderously and deliberately into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Centre on September 11th last year, one of the most horrifying things that should have been apparent in an appalling, horrifying event was the failure, the absolute failure of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Dear God, it should have been apparent before in a hundred terrifying, excruciating scenes over the last seventy years. I won’t, at this point, name them because if you do know what they are, my case is proved and if you really don’t know what they are, if you can only see scenes which condemn another faith not your own, then my case is doubly proved.

My first indictment is the failure to recognise that Judaism, Christianity and Islam are siblings yet to continue to act out the worst features of sibling rivalry that even the most dysfunctional family could possibly muster. Let me remind you that you are each the child of Abraham and that rabbinic Judaism, Christianity and Islam all share either the same scriptures or versions of the same scriptures. Yet you do not act with the love that normal, reasonably well-adjusted siblings show towards each other. Nor do you recognise the feelings of jealousy and rivalry that normal siblings also experience and have to recognise if they are to move forward in a constructive way. Where you are so remarkably alike, both in your strengths and in your faults, you show no acknowledgment of this fact. Have you any idea of the similarities between today’s Muslims in Britain and Jews in Britain a century ago – not just socially and economically but in the way you view your sacred scriptures and in your attitudes to the discipline of religious law. Yet you experience all of the murderous and violent feelings of dysfunctional siblings and don’t recognise it.

Let me quote, your Honour, a Jewish scholar, Alan Segal. “Judaism and Christianity designed two different ways of understanding their universal missions….. When Christianity promulgated its doctrine of the salvation of all believers, it understood itself to be the universal proselytising religion for world salvation. By contrast, Judaism understood itself to be a kingdom of priests in a culturally plural world…… Their different histories do not alter the fact of their birth as twins in the last years of Judean statehood. They are both truly Rebecca’s children, but unlike Jacob and Esau, they have no need to dispute their birthright. It can belong to both of them together”. Siblings. No need to dispute their birthright. So, why the patronising and the stereotyping and the scarcely concealed distaste?

Why, dear Christians, do you rush to use the language of your own greatest infamy – holocaust, Nazis, genocide – to describe the behaviour of Jews in Israel and Palestine today? Are you so desperate to prove that Jews are no better than anyone else, no better than you? Do you have any idea of how hurtful and offensive such language is? I suspect you do. And, my dear Jews, do you really think that the past excuses you your continuing contempt for the New Testament as a book of revelation and experience of the Divine, your failure to hold Christian holy places as sacred as your own? You use terms like ‘goyim’ with such contempt; many of you refuse to discuss matters of theology with your siblings; will not enter a church even for a funeral mass; drink wine produced by your own sisters and brothers lest you be drawn into apostasy through socialising.

Nor have I finished my first indictment there. It was Louis IX, ‘Saint’ Louis, King of France, who burnt Jewish books in Paris and then set out on Crusade to attack his Muslim sibling as well. It was in Christian France in 2002 that Muslims attacked synagogues and Christians in their droves voted for Le Pen in a show of Islamophobia that shook even Britain – evidently reminding our Home Secretary of the hordes of Muslim and Hindu bogeymen who threaten to ‘swamp’ us here as well.

Let me continue, from a Jewish prayer book no less. “Ishmael, my brother, how long shall we fight each other? My brother, from times bygone, my brother – Hagar’s son, my brother the wandering one. Time is running out, put hatred to sleep”. If ever words were empty, those are they. If ever words were poisonous they are those in the Saudi press reviving the blood libel which, dear Christian sibling, you invented to demonise the Jew and which is but one example of the wholesale export of the vocabulary of Christian anti-Semitism into the Islamic world in the last decade. Only siblings could show such enduring, murderous hatred.

Now to my second indictment.

None of you have confronted the challenges of your own scriptures. However you wriggle and however you squirm there are passages in the Koran, which have licensed misguided Muslims to claim the superiority of Islam and to use accounts of rebellious Jewish tribes to support anti-Jewish sentiments. There are passages that have been used to justify the fatwah to hound people and call for their murder, the proclamation of Jihad as bloody holy war, the imposition of cruel and violent punishments and the support of governments that set Muslim against Muslim, Sunnis against Shiites and fund and sponsor terrorism. It is no use you saying that people who interpret the Koran in those terms are interpreting it wrongly. Your brilliant and uplifting sacred texts have been misused and abused and you have done nothing effective to stop it.

Exactly the same is true of the New Testament text which still serves as a vehicle for those who would argue in favour of Christian superiority and supercession, who would seek to deny their siblings their share of the birthright and inheritance. You cannot reasonably suggest that the very text of the New Testament as it is read so often without explanation is kind to your Jewish sisters and brothers, the heirs of the Pharisees. And let me remind you of that most dangerous of passages in the Gospel of St. John (Ch.8 v.44) which describes Jews as children of the devil – your devil, not Satan!

And, finally, back to the Jews. Let me refer you to the story of Pinchas, which you read with such reverence and often so little commentary publicly, each year. Pinchas who took the law into his own hands and murdered a Jew and a non-Jew. Pinchas who was rewarded for extra-judicial murder with hereditary priesthood. Remember Yigal Amir who took the law into his own hands and murdered Yitzhak Rabin in the name of Judaism. Remember Baruch Goldstein who rose in the night after reading the book of Esther and murdered Muslims at prayer.

Each of you has failed to confront the real challenges of your scriptures, the terrifying passages and the passages that can be used to license the murder of siblings.

Remember the story of Abraham and Sarah and Hagar and Ishmael in the Hebrew bible. The very text prefigures the desperate, sinful struggle based upon ignoble fears, jealousies and passions that you have read instead as license and justification.
Indictment three. You have been seduced by Graeco-Roman and later notions of imperialism into thinking that you alone are ‘the way and the truth and the light’, into thinking that your story is the only story, into thinking not only that yours is the only family on earth but that you are the only child who is loved by God, the only child who really matters, the only child who is the true heir of Abraham. Where is the modesty? Where is the humility? You make truth claims as if you were God. Is it not enough that each of you has the most wonderful story, a fragment of history touched by God? Is it not enough that each of you has a precious strand of the covenant made originally through Noah with the whole of humanity? Why have you been insatiable? Why do you continue to fight battles against each other for power and control over the whole world? Why do you still fight the Crusades? Were they not monstrous and appalling enough? Your Honour, do I really need to detail what Karen Armstrong has called the contempt for Islam that has disfigured the thinking even of liberal western intellectuals in the twentieth century – the support of colonialisation from Algiers to Damascus, the fantasies, the stereotypes, the belittling. Today you reap huge anger, radicalisation, the desire for revenge – are you surprised? But does that make it right?

When will your misguided lust for empire and power end? Why is it not possible for Christian and Muslim to be content with what they have? Why do you need to own the whole world, which is actually God’s? Why can the three of you not allow each other to be – with Christian or post-Christian lands in which Muslims and Jews are respected minorities; Muslim lands with Christians and Jews as respected and un-persecuted minorities and Jews in their tiny land side by side with a Palestinian land in which minorities can live without fear or hindrance – in which Palestinians do not still secretly or openly covet Tel Aviv and in which dreams of a Greater Israel are simply shameful memories.

Indictment four. Since the 1960s we have seen the rise of the most disfiguring feature on the face of world religion and particularly amongst you three that even I can remember in my long and distinguished career. It is called fundamentalism. Before you start protesting that Judaism or Islam cannot be fundamentalist, let me tell you that fundamentalism has little or nothing to do with a literal reading of scripture. Though fundamentalism has its origins, I accept, in a series of pamphlets written in the United States ninety years ago, I am not talking pamphlets. If religion is not about facing up to the challenges of the present; if it is not about leading people resolutely into a future, into a world in which nature in every sense is transformed, in which justice rolls down like waters and righteousness as an everlasting torrent; if it is not about building a world in which every human being can sit under their vine and under their fig tree and no one will terrorise them; if it is not about creating a world in which, as the prophet Micah says, each person walks in the way of their God, a God who is Herself a manifestation of that which is shared, unnameable and Without End; if it is not about that true peace which fills the world as the waters cover the sea – then it has no meaning and no value. Yet fundamentalists are afraid of the present and terrified of the future; fainthearted in the face of their mission, they run away from the challenge of reality. They build an imaginary world which they think resembles the Christianity of the New Testament or eighth century Islam or eighteenth century Poland, but which doesn’t and has no authenticity. Fundamentalists, in their fear and in their insecurity claim to have a monopoly on truth and more, they seek to seize power and so impose their authority on others. It is a desperate and disastrous phenomenon.

It has led to fifteen or twenty thousand fundamentalist Jews clinging to land which must, in justice, become part of the State of Palestine. It has led to coalition governments in Israel, which reflect neither the democratic will nor the ideals of Judaism.
It has led to a situation in the United States where the Churches have been captured and seduced by men like Pat Buchanan and have become a major obstacle to American participation in aid, in development, in the eradication of poverty in the Third World.
Fundamentalism has led to the defacing and defaming of everything that is good and just and life enhancing in Islam so that the term ‘Muslim fundamentalist’ now, tragically, seems synonymous with ‘Muslim’ in the minds of many ordinary people in the West, fuelling the present scandal of Islamophobia and bringing libel, pain, discrimination and suffering to ordinary Muslims in Britain.
Brainwashing young, deprived and discriminated against young people into thinking that becoming a suicide bomber and killing innocent civilians - men, women and children - is not what Islam is about even in extremis. Terrorism can never, never be justified and fundamentalism has scarred the reputation of religion in a way that makes my task, Your Honour, so delightfully easy. The failure of Jewish, Christian and Muslim leaders alike to denounce fundamentalism and to stand together in affirmation of shared values, in particular values relating to the sanctity of life and the central role of religion to challenge power, not to seize it for coercive purposes – that is my penultimate indictment.

My final indictment relates to the rape of the Third World. There is no doubt that the Christian and post-Christian west is carrying out a process of exploitation of the Third World, which is a scandal and a disgrace. Whole swathes of the world have been exploited economically primarily for the benefit of developed countries. Whole swathes of the world have been left to deal with the legacy of colonialism and imperialism. Whole swathes of the world have been exploited by the Abrahamic faiths which showed no respect whatsoever for the faiths of the indigenous peoples. His Honour once implored you to ‘take care of your own soul and another person’s body, not your own body and another person’s soul’ . You took no notice and did the reverse.
You have made globalisation a nightmare by making it an instrument, not for spreading education and welfare and eliminating hunger, but for trampling the brotherhood and sisterhood of humanity, each person’s precious individuality, under foot. You have sought to impose democracy, free trade and human rights primarily to win economic and political advantage. You have resisted democracy, free trade and human rights, protesting that they are part of Western imperialism, because they threaten your hegemony and stand as an implied criticism of your culture.

That exploitation, that cynicism, that venality, that failure of responsibility, that use of alliances for strategic and economic reasons even if it has meant supporting oppressive regimes with no regard for human rights, whether they be defined by Judaism, Christianity or Islam, has sown seeds in which fundamentalism, fanaticism and terrorism – absolutely and completely unjustified though they are – have as a terrible matter of fact found fertile breeding grounds in which they too can abuse and betray the starving, the uneducated, the defenceless and the impoverished.

There is my indictment. For many centuries you could, to some extent at least, have been excused – ‘Father forgive them for they know not what they do’; you were the tinok shenishba, the child blinded by the limited values of the world around you. But since the emergence of the global village, since the development of universal communications, since the unlearned lessons of world war, since the tremendum of the Shoah – there can be no alibi. You reveal only arrogance. You show no humility. You have not been prepared to be even moderately self-critical, let alone radically self-critical which alone could save you. You have performed small acts of goodness and kindness but you have failed when it comes to the big picture and the tough issues. You speak of peace but you train children to hate and arm them with terrible weapons.

You do not know who you are – siblings, siblings, siblings. You treat each other abominably yet you have no insight at all into the origins of your murderous feelings towards each other, which you deny even as you are exhibiting them. You allow your scriptures to be the mandate for violence, hatred and contempt. You have been seduced by political notions of empire into the conquest of land and souls. You have allowed fundamentalists and fanatics to perform your dirty work and fulfil your base ambitions. You have raped and exploited the Third World and created the conditions in which despair and terror are rife.

Now you will instantly resort to self-justification or pay lip service to my criticisms whilst mounting an uncompromising defence and justification of your conduct in your heart.

Your Honour, your children out there, Jews, Christians and Muslims are suffering and dying yet their leaders are fiddling the books of cheshbon nefesh, of true accounting whilst the three Abrahamic faiths, their cities, their people and their souls burn. September 11th did indeed change the world forever. It finally made apparent the abject failure of religion, the farce of religion, the moral bankruptcy of religion. Your Honour, I rest my case.

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Satan slumps into his seat with a hypocritical inner smile of satisfaction. Or is the awful smile mine? Has he indeed, cruelly but necessarily, spoken the words of Adonai, of Allah, of Christ, of the living God? Or has he been a vehicle too clever by half for saying what a Jew and a Christian and a Muslim must say in public for themselves?
Better to have been created or not created? I cannot believe that I am so depressed that I can even contemplate the Talmudic answer. But it is the qualification to that answer with which I will end: ‘We should reflect on our past deeds or, as some say, examine our future actions’. I am so desperate that I do not think that there is any point in calling upon us to reflect upon our past deeds, such is the extent to which we are bound up with our own stories and our own telling of history. If history does indeed teach that history teaches the three Abrahamic faiths nothing, then the only thing we can do is to examine our future actions and, starting from this very moment, resolve to act to save our faiths and the world.