S.5 #3 | In God's Image: Antisemitism explained

This episode is a Bible-based explanation for why hatred exists amongst religious groups, ethnic groups, and amongst people in general. Besides the Bible, I bring forth important commentary from some of the most influential spiritual leaders, historians and psychologists of our time. All agree that the only way to combat hatred in the world is through love and the understanding of our oneness - we are all equal under the skin, we all have a spark of God in us and have a purpose here on earth. It's time we let go of our hate and look to the future instead of the past. It's time we stop blaming the "other" for our problems and instead unite with the "other" to create a diverse and accepting society.

Mentions:
Martin Luther King
French historian and literary critic Rene Girard
Former Prime Minister of Israel David Ben Gurion
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks
Book: Girl in the blue coat
Quote by Psychologist Viktor Frankl

Transcript

A few weeks ago, my step daughter recommended I read a book titled “Girl in the Blue Coat”. The story takes place in Amsterdam during the Holocaust, and it’s about young love and friendship. At first, I didn’t really feel like reading this book, I hadn’t read a book about the Holocaust probably since High school, avoiding this depressing topic at all costs. But eventually I did decide to read it and I am glad I did because it went hand in hand with the books I had just finished called “Not in God’s Name” and “Morality” by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, who explains very nicely why the Holocaust came to be and why Jews have been hated all over the world ever since the beginning of their existence.

So, in this episode, I’d like to share what I’ve learned, and add my 2 cents, on the subject of hatred amongst religious groups, ethnic groups and any and all types of groups. I will address the question where much of the hatred comes from and the only way to combat it.

Being a Jew, and having recently reconnected with my ethnicity on a new spiritual level, I know how it feels to be the outsider, how it feels to have hidden my true identity for a good chunk of my life, and I now, more than ever, feel for the Jewish people as a whole, lamenting the centuries upon centuries of hatred and violence towards the Jews, which still continues to this day. Today I wish to defend my people, stand by them, be a proud member of them, but also to spread the message that 1- diversity is necessary for humankind’s survival, unlike believed by Hitler, for example. 2-  no matter our differences, whether they be religious, physical, mental, etc., we all have a spark of God in us, which means we all have the right to exist, to live, to love and we all, absolutely all of us, have a purpose here on earth. 

The first point I will address is the common misconception, and one that gives rise to a lot of animosity towards jews - that of the jewish people being the chosen people. Those who have actually studied the bible, not just skimmed over it, will know that being chosen does not in any sense signify that Jews are better than the rest or more special in the eyes of the Creator. Being chosen simply means that God chose the jews to be spiritual and intellectual leaders. He chose other nations to lead in power, strength and numbers. God, as our parent, saw the beauty of diversity in his children and assigned responsibilities to each one according to his abilities. To compare this to today’s world, imagine if we were all doctors…we would have no infrastructure, no restaurants, no one to protect us during war… in other words, diversity is essential for the development of any society. 

And this difference in abilities and the explanation for why God chose to have a spiritual covenant with Jews was made clear in the stories of Isaac and Ishmael, and Jacob and Esau. At the same time, it is also due to these stories of sibling rivalry that much of the hatred between Muslims and Jews, for example, began. In the case of Isaac and Ishmael, Ishmael was the son of Abraham and a maidservant, since Sarah was unable to conceive at the time. But some 13 years later, Sarah did conceive Isaac, with whom God established his covenant. Isaac became Abraham's sole heir, and Ishmael and his mother Hagar were banished to the desert, though God promised that Ishmael would raise up a great nation of his own, which he did-  His children multiplied and became known under the name of Ishmaelites, or Arabs.….The difference between the brothers was evident and important to note here because it explains why Isaac was chosen to have the spiritual covenant with God. First of all, Isaac's birth is seen as supernatural- a symbol of God's miraculous intervention and faith, while Ishmael represents the natural order; Second of all, Ishmael was portrayed as the stronger one, a man of nature: An angel told Hagar before Ishmael was born that he would be “a wild donkey of a man, his hand against everyone, and everyone’s hand against him” (Gen. 16:12). He became an expert archer (Gen. 21:20). Esau, red-haired, physically mature at a young age, was “a skilful hunter, a man of the field” (Gen. 25:27). Ishmael was at home in nature. He was strong and unafraid of the wild. In contrast, Isaac was not a man of nature who could survive by his own strength and skill; he was a man who needed God’s spirit to survive. The same descriptions apply to brothers Jacob and Esau, but more on that later.  And to this day, As David Ben-Gurion said, “In Israel, to be a realist you have to believe in miracles.”Jews are one of the world’s smallest people, and our survival is miraculous. As Joanthan Sacks explains: “Jews have consistently shown that you can make a contribution to humanity out of all proportion to your numbers, and that a small nation can outlive every empire that sought its destruction. They have shown that a nation is strong when it cares for the weak, and rich when it cares for the poor. Jews are the people through whom God has shown that the human spirit can rise above nature, testifying that there is something real that transcends nature.” 

Finally, the third distinction between brothers Isaac and Ishmael, and Jacob and Esau too, is that the weaker of the two was favored by the mother.  It was Sarah who saw the need to protect her boy Isaac and send Ishmael away; Abraham did not want to see his firstborn gone, he only sent him away when God told him to listen to Sarah. As for the story of Jacob and Esau, let me remind you of what happened: they were  twin brothers and Esau, the elder, carelessly sold  his birthright to Jacob for a meal, and later Jacob deceived their blind father Isaac into giving him the birthright blessing instead of Esau. Note that it is Jacob who represents the dignity of the weak and the refugee and it was Jacob’s mother, Rebekah, who helped deceive their father Isaac,  leading to a lifelong conflict between the two brothers. French historian and literary critic Rene Girard argues that the root cause of violence is mimetic desire - the wish to have what someone else  has and, ultimately, be what someone else is. But this is completely futile because each person has his or her own life purpose; one can never be happy with that which was not destined for him or her; to take something away from someone by force or to pretend to be someone he or she is not does not lead to success in any shape or form. And this is especially evident in the story of Jacob and Esau. We realize, when reading the Bible, that there was no need for deception because Isaac did not intend to disinherit Jacob, nor did he mean to pass the covenant to Esau. The blessing Isaac had reserved for his elder son was the one he knew was right for him. Esau was a man of nature, physical, strong, a hunter, which Isaac loved in him. Isaac understood though that the covenant was not right for him and planned to give him the appropriate blessing- wealth and power- natural goods, not spiritual. Isaac understood that his two sons were different and thus merited different blessings. The blessing Jacob forcibly took from Isaac was not meant for him; the blessing he was supposed to receive was to continue the covenant of Abraham, to teach his children to be heirs of the covenant, to create a society based on the covenant of law and love. Jacob was nothing like Esau - he was to live for something other than wealth and power, namely, for the human spirit  as the breath of God and human dignity as the image of God. And two decades later, Jacob did give back Esau the blessing, because he realized it was not for him. 

So now that I’ve explained the origin of sibling rivalry and that in both stories it is clear that God and then Isaac love their sons equally but also love and respect them for their differences, I must point out that the notion of the chosen people is actually the opposite of the master race. First, because it is not a race but rather a covenant - an agreement, which, and to the 2nd point, exists to serve God and not to master others. The children of Israel are, in a nutshell, a servant community that was and will be dependent on forces beyond themselves. In other words, no one can say that God’s special or favorite people are Jews because we were not blessed with numbers, power, or wealth-other people were. So the word chosen definitely doesn’t mean better, it just means different. And as I said before, diversity is what makes societies thrive.

All throughout history, we have seen much violence, as some say ‘in the in the name of God’, but in reality, those who kill and say they do so in God’s name are speaking and thinking blasphemy because nowhere in the Bible does God commend murder or violence, but most importantly, as Jonathan Sacks explains in his book, the whole of Genesis is “God’s reply to those who commit violence in his name- God does not prove his love for someone by hating others. Neither, if we follow him, may we.” It’s as simple as that. Genesis demonstrates through story after story that we must love one another, that we are all equal under the skin, and we are equally loved by God, we are created in His image. The Bible proposes that every life is sacred and each life is like a universe, and God asks us to respect the stranger, to love our neighbor, because despite our differences in race, faith, culture or whatever it may be, they are in God’s image. 

Again, Jonothan Sacks puts it so eloquently that “the narrative of Genesis begins with the universal archetypes - Adam, Eve, Cain, Abel, the Flood, the covenant with Noah and the critique of Babel, and only then turns to the particularity of the Abrahamic covenant to tell us that our common humanity precedes our religious differences. Any religion that dehumanises others merely because their faith is different has misunderstood the God of Abraham.” Moreover, you cannot love God without first honoring the universal dignity of humanity as the image and likeness of the universal God. 

When I say this book “Not in God’s Name” opened my eyes and changed my life, I really mean it. I wish you could see how many bookmarks and notes fill hundreds of pages that spoke to me and made things so clear. I can’t help but read a few quotes from this book because I can’t say it any better myself:

“To be a child of Abraham is to be open to the divine presence wherever it reveals itself. The faith of Abraham’s children is told in a series of stories about how strangers turned out to be not what they seemed. Tamar is not a prostitute. Ruth is not an alien. Moses is not an Egyptian. Abraham’s three visitors are not mere men. Strangers can turn out to be angels. Pharaoh’s daughter may be a heroine. David, the inconsequential child, becomes the greatest of Israel’s kings. The ethical imperative to emerge from such a faith is: search for the trace of God in the face of the Other. Never believe that God is defined by and confined to the people like you.”

That is why there exist two types of covenants- the universal and the particular. The Noah covenant speaks to our commonality, the Abraham and Sinai covenants - to our differences. And only a faith that recognises both types is capable of understanding that God’s image may be present in the one whose faith is distinct and whose relationship with God is unlike mine. Think about it, if we were completely different, we would be unable to communicate. If we were completely alike, we would have nothing to say to each other. We would not want to exist in a world of tribalism - each nation with its own God, but we would also not want to exist in a world of universalism, where it’s one God, and therefore one way. With tribalism, we would always be at war, with universalism, we would be back to the times of holy wars, crusades and jihads because this view promotes duality/division between the saved and the damned. It’s equally important, by the way, to remind ourselves that however perfect our faith may seem to us, there is something of God that lies beyond, which is known to Him but cannot be known to us - the finite, fallible humans that we are.

So what is the answer to all the hatred in the world? As Martin Luther King once said, “ Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate:only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness.” You probably guessed it. Love is the only answer. But how do we get to love? First, we have to get rid of the hate, and that’s a scary thing. For many, it means vulnerability, dealing with pain, confronting fears... For the Biblical guidance on love, let’s take a look at Deuteronomy, which contains the word ‘love’ more than any other Mosaic books. Abrahamic  monotheism was the first moral system to be based not solely on justice and reciprocity - do for others what you would like them to do for you - but also on love. An important passage by Moses reads: “Do not hate an Egyptian, because you were a stranger in his land”. (Deut. 23:7) If you recall what happened, the Egyptians had enslaved the Israelites and killed many. And even so, Moses says not to hate the Egyptians? Why? Because in order to be free, you must let go of hate. Even before I began to study the Bible, I spoke in podcast repeatedly of how the negative feelings that remain in our soul poison us, how they affect our physical and mental health. And now I see that this is not just a personal victory, for one to let go of the past, it’s a victory for a whole people. If we to this day continued to hate the Egyptians and even the more recent Nazis, we would still be there mentally, slaves to the past, prisoners of the memories. So the Bible teaches us to let go, to move on, to forgive and to not hold a grudge. Yes, the past is part of who we are, we live with it, but not IN it. It is not possible to achieve freedom of any kind if we let our past enemies define us. The Torah teaches us to never take revenge. Rectifying the past by avenging it only perpetuates the past instead of healing it. What we can do is apologize, atone, and acknowledge people’s sense of suffering but there is no perfect justice, so we must leave the rest to God.

Something else that the Bible teaches is not to be a victim. Judaism, as a whole, is the story of an inner struggle. Instead of asking “who did this to me and why me? We are taught to ask “what should I do now that this happened? And what can I learn from it”? Instead of looking for someone to blame, and this means looking at the past, we look to the future and actively seek an internal response. We ask God for forgiveness for having done something wrong and then we ask Him for strength to change for the better and to make things right. This is how we preserve freedom and dignity. Again, as Jonathan Sacks, so wonderfully puts it “ Atonement is the ultimate expression of freedom because it brings together the two mental acts - repentance and forgiveness - that have the power to break the iron grip of the past... Instead of waging war on the children of darkness, make sure that you and your children are the sources of light. “

Coming back to hatred one more time. Antisemitism is  a very interesting concept and one that very clearly demonstrates how blame works. The anti semites see themselves as  victims, they believe that Jews are at fault for everything that is wrong with the world, believing that they control it. When a country is having problems, let’s say economic, in order to avoid civil or internal conflict, it looks for a scapegoat-and what better scapegoat than a small group, a minority-like the Jews- that will have a hard time fighting back. In the words of Jonathan Sacks, “Doing this deflects internal criticism away by projecting it onto an external scapegoat. This tactic is deployed in country after country to direct attention away from real internal problems of poverty, unemployment and underachievement. Antisemitism is used to sustain regimes without human rights, the rule of law, an independent judiciary, a free press, liberty of association or accountable government.”  Antisemites in the middle ages went as far as spreading libels, or false statements, asserting that Jews murdered  Christian children and used their blood as an ingredient in ritual breads. And people believed it! Even though this is completely absurd since The Torah forbids the consumption of blood. Blood is not kosher because it is considered the essence of life and is reserved for God. This is why observant jews only eat Kosher meat - meat that has been drained of blood. In any case, you can see how being different from the majority of the population can make you a target for blame. Interestingly enough, even the root of the word Hebrew has the root ‘eber’.  In the language spoken by Abraham, "eber" means the other side of the river. The other side of the river is a perfect metaphor for where the monotheistic tribe descended from Abraham stood in relation to the polytheistic idol-worshippers around the Middle East. From the very beginning, Jews were considered the “other”, the different one, and to this day it remains true.

But even though this is what antisemites do - find  weaker, smaller group for a scapegoat - they are acting as victims, which actually makes them the weaker of the two. This is why historically, scapegoating has never worked out in the antisemite’s favor. Antisemitism did not help Christians win the Crusades, or the Nazis win the 2nd World War, and it will not help Muslims in the Middle East, Africa and Asia build societies that will honour God and his image in humankind. Those who wish to eliminate Jews, also wish to eliminate freedom. And while this hate may harm the Jews, it will undoubtedly destroy the hater.

Today, more than ever, God is calling us to let go of hate and to remember that we are brothers and sisters regardless of our differences. We are a blessing to each other and we must honor God’s name by honoring his image - humankind.

To conclude today’s episode I will leave you with a quote by Austrian neurologist and psychologist Viktor Frankl . Enjoy and until next time.

“The truth—that Love is the ultimate and highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love.”