The former Chief Rabbi deploys all his exegetical subtlety on the foundational texts of Abrahamic monotheism in the Hebrew Bible, especially the Book of Genesis, to show us how figures such as Ishmael and Esau, ancient archetypes of divine rejection, are in fact the opposite. All faiths have “hard texts” that are too dangerous to read literally, Sacks suggests, but Judaism, Christianity and Islam at least share a Biblical basis for mutual toleration.
The thrust of Sacks’s book is all the more powerful because he eschews the wishful thinking that bedevils both sides of the secular/religious conflict. He makes no attempt to play down the pathology of terrorism and war inspired by the anger of those, especially Muslims, who “are determined to defeat the world by means of the word”. Now freed from the obligations of office, he can speak frankly about the betrayal by the secular West of its Judaeo-Christian values, the moral relativism that fails to defend freedom, and the “altruistic evil” of radical, politicised religion. The failure of the secular West to provide identity and meaning combines with the brute facts of demography to produce hydra-headed movements that defy even the smartest weapons and the most intelligent intelligence. After centuries of secularisation, we are witnessing the return of religion with a vengeance. The answer to the Islamists who love death more than life cannot be solely military; it has to be theological too.
This is not an argument for failing to confront the terrorists, as well as the demagogues who inspire and the states that sponsor them. The weakest chapter of Solomon, Greenberg and Pyszczynski comes when they try to explain the response to 9/11 as the Bush administration’s “terror management” of “death fears” that “intensified Americans’ zeal to derogate, dehumanise, demonise, assimilate, and destroy.” Such views are commonplace in the academic world: Oxford’s new Vice-Chancellor Louise Richardson recently outraged Americans by contrasting British resilience with American hysteria: “The scale of the over-reaction to the 9/11 atrocity was a reflection of the fact that it was such a new experience for the US.” Both the terror management theorists and the Vice-Chancellor are mistaken. As Alexander Woolfson shows elsewhere this issue ("Rescue Iraq From Obama's Folly"), the Islamists are indeed a mortal threat to the West that cannot be appeased, but must be defeated. Victory, however, will only be final when the West wins the battle of ideas. Jonathan Sacks gives us the intellectual tools to finish the job.
The thrust of Sacks’s book is all the more powerful because he eschews the wishful thinking that bedevils both sides of the secular/religious conflict. He makes no attempt to play down the pathology of terrorism and war inspired by the anger of those, especially Muslims, who “are determined to defeat the world by means of the word”. Now freed from the obligations of office, he can speak frankly about the betrayal by the secular West of its Judaeo-Christian values, the moral relativism that fails to defend freedom, and the “altruistic evil” of radical, politicised religion. The failure of the secular West to provide identity and meaning combines with the brute facts of demography to produce hydra-headed movements that defy even the smartest weapons and the most intelligent intelligence. After centuries of secularisation, we are witnessing the return of religion with a vengeance. The answer to the Islamists who love death more than life cannot be solely military; it has to be theological too.
This is not an argument for failing to confront the terrorists, as well as the demagogues who inspire and the states that sponsor them. The weakest chapter of Solomon, Greenberg and Pyszczynski comes when they try to explain the response to 9/11 as the Bush administration’s “terror management” of “death fears” that “intensified Americans’ zeal to derogate, dehumanise, demonise, assimilate, and destroy.” Such views are commonplace in the academic world: Oxford’s new Vice-Chancellor Louise Richardson recently outraged Americans by contrasting British resilience with American hysteria: “The scale of the over-reaction to the 9/11 atrocity was a reflection of the fact that it was such a new experience for the US.” Both the terror management theorists and the Vice-Chancellor are mistaken. As Alexander Woolfson shows elsewhere this issue ("Rescue Iraq From Obama's Folly"), the Islamists are indeed a mortal threat to the West that cannot be appeased, but must be defeated. Victory, however, will only be final when the West wins the battle of ideas. Jonathan Sacks gives us the intellectual tools to finish the job.
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