Not in God's Name: Confronting Religious Violence by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks

A couple of years ago, my sis-in-law, Tiffany, recommend this book by Sacks and it sounded so intriguing that I wanted to get my hands on it. I finally finished it the other day and I'm so glad I read it.

This took me a long time to get through but it's still worth it. It's his philosophy of why there is religious violence and how to combat it. In the end, the main gist of what I got was, put yourself in someone's else shoe. Don't look to your past of how you were treated and make avenge. Rather, use the past experiences as a way to say "we can't let that happen again." He referred to Jews he met who were survivors of the concentration camp. They were ones to easily put their past behind them and say "never again."

"Jewish law forbids human beings from bearing a grudge or taking vengeance: 'You shall blog [any offenses against you] our of your mind and not bear a grudge. For as long as one nurses a grievance and keeps it in mind, one may come to take vengeance. The Torah therefore emphatically warns us not to bear a grudge, so that the impression of the wrong should be completely obliterated and no longer remembered. This is the right principle. It alone makes civilized life and social interaction possible. ' This is the corollary of belief in divine justice. If vengeance belongs to God, it does not belong to us." pg. 246

I was just thinking about the call to help refugees in "I was a stranger" initiative that the LDS church has put on. Dating back to our history, we should know what it means like to be a stranger and a refugee because of the pioneers. We don't want to seek revenge on those who have hurt us in the past but rather realize we can't do this to anyone else.

All of his philosophy was in the backdrop of Biblical narratives like Abraham, sibling rivalry with Esau and Jacob, role reversal, the covenant people, etc. I could see this book being part of a college class. It was so deep. In my mind, Sacks is a genius.

Because I have to take the book to the library today, I thought I would write down passages from the book as a way of reminding myself what I liked. 

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"Violence has nothing to do with religion as such. It has to do with identity and life in groups. Religion sustains groups more effectively than any other force." pg. 39 A world without identities will be a world without war.

"The last chapter argued that violence is born of the need for identity and the formation of groups. These lead to conflict and war. But war is normal. Altruistic evil is not normal. Suicide bombings, the targeting of civilians and the murder of schoolchildren are not normal. Violence may be possible wherever this is an Us and a Them. But radical violence emerges only when we see the Us as all-good and the Them as all-evil, heralding a war between the children of light and the forces of darkness. That is when altruistic evil is born." pg. 48

"Pathological dualism does three things. It makes you dehumanize and demonize your enemies. It leads you to see yourself as a victim. And it allows you to commit altruistic evil, killing in the name of the God of life, hating in the name of the God of love and practicing cruelty in the name of the God of compassion." pg. 54

"Defining yourself as a victim is a denial of what makes you human. We see ourselves as objects, not subjects. We become done-to, not doers; passive, not active. Blame bars the path to responsibility...blame cultures perpetuate every condition against which they are a protest." pg. 61 

"When dehumanization and demonization are combined with a sense of victimhood, the third stage comes possible: the commission of evil in an altruistic cause." pg.61-62 (Think Nazi's for example).

Idea of scapegoat: "is both all-powerful and powerless. If the scapegoat were actually powerful, it could no longer fulfill its essential function as the-victim-of-violence-without-risk-of-reprisal...but if the scapegoat were believed to be powerless, it could not plausibly be cast as the cause of our present troubles...for a thousand years the scapegoat of choice in Europe and the Middle East has been the Jews. They were the most conspicuous outsiders: non-Christians in a Christian Europe, non-Muslims in an Islamic Middle East...Jews are its victims but they are not its cause. The cause is conflict within culture." pg. 76

Sibling rivalry: "It is now clear why Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have been locked in a violent, sometimes fatal embrace for so long. Their relationship is sibling rivalry, fraught with mimetic desire: the desire for the same thing, Abraham's promise." pg. 98

"The way we learn not to commit evil is to experience an event from the perspective of the victim." pg. 158

"Dividing the world into saints and sinners, the saved and the damned, the children of God and the children of the devil, is the first step down the road to violence in the name of God." pg. 169

"God does not prove his love for some by hating others. Neither, if we follow him, may we." pg. 173

"To be cured of potential violence towards the Other, I must be able to imagine myself as the Other." pg. 179

"What is difficult is loving the stranger. We are genetically disposed to defensive-aggressive conduct when faced with someone not like us, outside the group, not bound by its code of mutual identity and reciprocity. The stranger is always potentially a threat." pg. 181

"To one who has a hammer, said Abraham Maslow, every problem looks like a nail. Politics is about power, but not every political problem has a solution that involves power. Failure to see this can cost a civilization dear. It almost cost Judaism its life." pg. 220

"It makes space for difference. It recognizes that within a complex society there are many divergent views, traditions and moral systems...All it seeks to do is ensure that those who have differing views are able to live peaceably and graciously together, recognizing that none of us has the right to impose our views on others." pg. 230

"Religion is at its best when it relies on strength of argument and example. It is at its worst when it seeks to impose truth by force." pg. 234

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Really, this book is packed with so many insights and I could have written down more. Highly recommend taking time to read this book. You'll gain a lot from it.