Rabbi Sacks Calls for a Return to Tit-for-Tat. Are you kidding me!?!
Jonathan Sacks, the former Chief Rabbi of the British Commonwealth, wrote an op-ed piece for the Wall Street Journal entitled “Swords Into Plowshares” in which he argues that religion is never going to go away because religion, rather than science, is a prime producer of meaning, an ingredient essential to human life.
“Religion has lately demanded our attention not as a still, small voice but as a whirlwind. If Isaiah’s prophecy that nations ‘shall beat their swords into plowshares’ is to be fulfilled, then the essential task now is to think through the connection between religion and violence.”
OK! I’m hooked. Let’s get thinking. Sadly Rabbi Sacks takes a pass on this essential task: “My concern here is less the general connection between religion and violence than the specific challenge of religious extremism in the 21st century.” And by extremism he means Islamic extremism, for he takes no notice of any other kind.
And how does he suggest we face the specific challenge of religious extremism in the 21st century? We must “insist on the simplest moral principle of all: the principle of reciprocal altruism, otherwise know as tit-for-tat. This says: As you behave to others, so will others behave to you.”
To quote outgoing House Speaker John Boehner, “Are you kidding me?!?”
Tit-for-tat is just another way of calling us back to the Iron Age ethic of “an eye for an eye.” Seriously? For every person ISIS beheads, we behead one of theirs? For every woman they rape or sell into slavery, we rape or enslave one of theirs? As Mahatma Gandhi said, “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.” Is this what Rabbi Sacks is advocating?
Probably not, since in addition to an ethic of tit-for-tat he says “we need to recover the absolute values that make Abrahamic monotheism the humanizing force it has been at its best: the sanctity of life, the dignity of the individual, the twin imperatives of justice and compassion, the insistence on peaceful modes of resolving conflicts, forgiveness for the injuries of the past and devotion to a future in which all the children of the world can live together in grace and peace.”
What Abrahamic religion is he talking about?
The values Rabbi Sacks cherishes are the values of 18th century European Enlightenment. There is no evidence that when left to their own devices Judaism, Christianity, or Islam ever achieved the values Rabbi Sacks touts.
Take the dignity of the individual and the full enfranchisement of women that such dignity demands. When have Judaism, Christianity, or Islam embraced this ideal? Never. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam acquiesce to the full enfranchisement of women only when forced to do so by socio-economic and political forces beyond their control. And when they gain control the first thing they do is disenfranchise women.
Rabbi Sacks knows this, and tacitly admits it when he writes that we must maintain the separation of religion and politics, an Enlightenment ideal foreign to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam and forced upon them by the Constitution of the United States.
Rabbi Sacks wants religions to reclaim a set of values they never had. And because they never had them they can’t reclaim them. And because they can’t reclaim them the marriage of religion and violence is forever.
I wish Rabbi Sacks had tackled what he sees as the true problem: the marriage of religion and violence. But to do that he would have to admit that at the heart of Abrahamic religion is a zero–sum game of winners and losers that makes violence the only way to discover who wins and who loses.
What we need is not a return to an imagined past, but to imagine a future where meaning making is not in the hands of the insane who imagine a God in their own image to sanction whatever evil they deem necessary to achieve the goals their imagined God is created to enforce.