A Religious Response to Religious Violence Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks New York University Yeshiva University May 2015
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TRANSCRIPT A Religious Response to Religious Violence Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks New York University Yeshiva University May 2015 MICHAEL CROMARTIE: Well, it’s a wonderful honor and a great privilege, and you all have had the opportunity to look at Rabbi Sacks’s new book. And we’ve been trying to have Rabbi Sacks here for several years now, and we were finally able to work out our schedules. He is a man in great demand, as you can imagine, around the world, but we’re thrilled that he has found time to be with us at the Faith Angle Forum. Rabbi Sacks has 16 honorary degrees. Prime Minister Tony Blair called him” an intellectual giant. He has a doctorate from King’s College in London, his undergraduate with Cambridge. He is the author of numerous books. He is the retired Chief Rabbi of Great Britain. But most importantly, he is our next speaker at the Faith Angle Forum. Rabbi, thank you so much for joining us. We’re delighted. Now, before you speak, let me just say the book comes out in late June. Everything he is saying this morning is on the record, but we are going to hold the transcript, Rabbi, until after the book comes out. Thanks for coming. RABBI JONATHAN SACKS: Friends, Michael, friends, it’s been such a privilege to be in your company. I always say that to defend a country, you need an army, but to defend a civilization, you need education, and today our great educators on the issues of the day are our great journalists, and you are the defenders of our civilization. I salute you all and may all you do be blessed. Michael, thank you so much for bringing us together and guiding our deliberations with such grace. We say in Psalm 23, “The Lord is my shepherd,” but no Jew was ever a sheep. TRANSCRIPT “A Religious Response to Religious Violence” Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks May 2015 Laughter RABBI JONATHAN SACKS: And I don’t think any journalist was either, so for shepherding us so graciously through these last 2 days, Michael, we thank you and bless you and may you and the Faith Angle Forum and the Ethics and Public Policy Center continue to be a blessing to us. Friends, let me begin with a story, one of my favorites, because I am -- I was professionally, before I became a rabbi, a philosopher. I love this story about the English philosopher who was invited to give a lecture on metaphysics and epistemology to the University of Beijing. Not being fluent in Mandarin, they arranged for an interpreter, and he came and entered the lecture hall in front of 1,000 students, began his lecture in English and stopped after 2 sentences for the translator to translate, but the translator waved him on and said, “Carry on and I’ll tell you when you need to stop, when I need you to stop.” He continued for 15 minutes, at the end of which the translator held up his hand and said four words to the audience, and then waved him on. The same happened after 30 minutes and the same after 45, and after an hour the translator turned to the lecture hall, said three words in Mandarin, and they all graciously stood up and left the hall. The lecturer went over to the translator and said, “I’m awestruck. I’m amazed. I’ve just given a very, very complex lecture. How did you manage to compress it into so few words?” He said, “It was easy. After 15 minutes, I said, ‘So far he hasn’t said anything new.’” Laughter RABBI JONATHAN SACKS: “After 30 minutes, I said, ‘He still hasn’t said anything new.’ After 45 minutes, ‘I don’t think he is going to say anything new.’ And after an hour,” he said, “‘I was right, he didn’t.’” Laughter 2 TRANSCRIPT “A Religious Response to Religious Violence” Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks May 2015 RABBI JONATHAN SACKS: So one way or another to venture to say something new on such a tired and over-exhausted topic as the connection between religion and violence is hazardous and even hubristic, but the reason I want to do so this morning and in the book is very simple, because after over these past 14 years since 9/11, I’ve tried to read almost everything that’s been written and listened to as much as I could, and I’ve been very disturbed at the superficiality of the responses, you know. One of the advantages of an Oxford education is it gives you a way of being rude terribly politely. Laughter RABBI JONATHAN SACKS: So my favorite academic insult is one academic about another: On the surface, he’s profound, but deep down he’s superficial. Laughter RABBI JONATHAN SACKS: So we’ve had three basic responses. Response one, the Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, et al., response of religion is the source of violence or a source of violence, and therefore if you want to get rid of violence, the first thing you have to do is to get rid of religion. There is the second religious response, which says violence has nothing to do with religion. Violent men exploit religion, they use it, they manipulate it, but that religion per se has nothing to do with violence. And the third response, which is, “Our religion is terrific, it’s their religion that’s the problem.” Now, each of those is palpably false. First of all, the idea that religion is the primary driver of violence is very easily refutable by the standard work on warfare, Philips and Axelrod’s classic Encyclopedia of Wars, that covers 1,800 wars in the course of history and shows, just incidentally, that only 10 percent of them were fundamentally driven by religion. So religion is not the major cause of violence in history. 3 TRANSCRIPT “A Religious Response to Religious Violence” Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks May 2015 Secondly, the idea that religion has nothing to do with violence is equally absurd because, as we heard yesterday from those wonderful presentations from Bernard and from William and from Graeme Wood’s piece in The Atlantic, to understand the violence of ISIS, you have to understand its religious basis, and indeed its religious textual basis, and how religious texts are interpreted. And, thirdly, “Our religion good; their religion bad,” does neglect or overlook a rather tragic history because Judaism and Christianity gave rise to violence of not dissimilar intensity in their time. In fact, I think a clock has ticked in the history of the three Abrahamic monotheisms, and that clock says that in the 15th century of an Abrahamic monotheism violence explodes in the form of religious civil war. It happened in Judaism in the first century, if we are to believe Josephus, that the inhabitants of the besieged Jerusalem were more intent on killing one another than killing the Romans outside. That’s around 1,500 years into the history of Judaism. It happened in Christianity in the 16th century with the Wars of Religion following on the Reformation. That’s around 15 centuries into the history of Christianity. And on the basis of that magnificent wide sample of two, I predicted in 2002 that the 21st century would be the century of civil war within Islam, and I don’t think that was wrong. And I was very interested to hear from Graeme Wood yesterday that indeed one of the main apocalyptic texts of Islam predicts that the 15th century of Islam will be the century of the apocalypse. So in a sense, all the Abrahamic monotheisms have faced it at the same stage in their development. So it’s not, “Our religion good; their religion bad,” it’s that our religion got the bad out of the way before the other lot. So, therefore, all three I think are simply not deep enough, and therefore what I want to do this morning very briefly is to ask three questions. Number one: What is the relationship between religion and violence? Number two: What is the relationship between monotheism and violence? And number three: What is the relationship between the three Abrahamic monotheisms and violence? And those are separate questions. 4 TRANSCRIPT “A Religious Response to Religious Violence” Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks May 2015 So let’s begin with the first. I don’t know if you’ve seen the wonderful film about Alan Turing called The Imitation Game. You know, when Benedict Cumberbatch, who is slightly socially challenged, is told by Keira Knightley, a splendidly attractive mathematician, but I’m a rabbi, so I didn’t notice that. Laughter RABBI JONATHAN SACKS: And she’s telling him, “You’ve got to be a bit more human.” So he does this thing of trying to be human and he tries to tell a joke, and this is the joke he tries to tell. Two men in a jungle. They hear a lion approaching. The first looks around for a place where they can both hide. The second starts putting on his running shoes. The first says to the second, “You’re crazy. What are you doing? You can’t run faster than a lion.” And the second replies, “I don’t need to run faster than the lion, I just need to run faster than you.” That is the joke, but the point is that this actually is key to understanding, not Alan Turing, but Charles Darwin, and the reason is that Charles Darwin was puzzled, and quite explicitly and famously puzzled, by the following thing.