Recently our adult Sunday School class at Blacksburg Presbyterian has been reading and discussing Jonathan Sacks’ book, The Dignity of Difference. Sacks is the Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth, and Dignity is an excellent and challenging book I can recommend to anyone who takes seriously the role of religion in public life, and is troubled by the new challenges offered by globalization and related trends.
In the last few days, I have had the pleasure of digging into Sacks’ newest book, To Heal a Fractured World: The Ethics of Responsibility. This is a prophetic book and should be read as such by the faithful in any of the Abrahamic traditions. I offer here a brief excerpt (boldface mine) from the opening chaper (p. 9 in the US Hardback edition):
Why [have I written this book] now? Partly because I am troubled by the face that religion often shows to the postmodern world. Too often it appears on the news, and lodges in the mind, as extremism, violence and agression. Tobe sure, religion is not the cause of conflict in the Balkans, the Middle East or elsewhere. Instead it forms the fault-line along which sides divide. But that in itself is serious. When political conflict is religionized, it is absolutized. What in politics are virtues — compromise, the willingness to listen to both sides and settle for less than one would wish in an ideal world — are, in religion, vices. Religion can therefore act not as a form of conflict-resolution, but, rather, conflict-intensification. This work is my personal protest against suicide-bombers, religiously motivated terrorists and preachers of hate of whatever faith. The religios imperative to which I have tried to give voice in these pages is the one that says: create, do not destroy, for it is my world you are destroying, my creatures you are killing. The only force equal to a fundamentalism of hate is a counter-fundamentalism of love.
To this I add a further concern about religion generally. The prophets warned against a rift between the holy and the good, our duties to God and to our fellow human beings. It still exists today. There are those for whom serving God means turning inward — to the soul, the house of worship and the life of ritual and prayer. There are others for whom social justice has become a substitute for religious observance or God. The result, as I put it later in the book, is like a cerebral lesion between the two hemispheres of the brain. The message of the Hebrew Bible is that serving God and serving our fellow human beings are inseparably linked, and the split between the two impoverishes both. Unless the holy leads us outward toward the good, and good leads us back, for renewal, to the holy, the creative energies of faith run dry. For six days, so the first chapter of Genesis tells us, God created a universe and pronounced it good. On the seventh day he made a stillness in the turning world and declared it holy. Unless we reconnect the holy and the good we do less than justice to the unity that is the hallmark of the monotheistic imagination.
Stern stuff, and sensible. I’ll post more about Sacks’ book as I complete more of it. –JA