‘To accept the Torah is to accept the norms of a universal justice’
(Emmanuel Levinas, Nine Talmudic Readings)

The subject of this symposium – ‘higher roads to peace’ for Arabs and Jews – is of great public interest. It is also of deep personal moment to me. For, as someone who is Jewish, I find myself situated on the inside of the subject. Were this not the case, I am not sure that I would have anything to say about it; or, if I did, it would not be the lecture I am about to give.[1]

If there is animosity between Arabs and Jews today, it is largely on account of a single issue: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, whose roots go back over a hundred years. What does it mean, in the context of this conflict, to speak of peace? There are those on either side who seek to thrust peace down the throat of the other side. On this view, peace is a cessation of hostilities that results from crushing the will of the enemy. I am not sure that this option, if available at all to either party, is equally available to both. For the conflict today is primarily between the State of Israel and the stateless Palestinians who live in the territories occupied by Israel since the end of the 1967 June War; and between a state and the stateless, between occupier and occupied, there is no equal contest.[2] Be that as it may, a peace in which the will of one side has been crushed by the other is like the peace of the dead. It is not, I take it, the kind of peace that is the subject of this symposium. No higher road can lead there.

The kind of peace to which a higher road can lead is not an external place that could be reached by some other route. It is something internal to the road, a result that the road produces of itself. It is more like the yield of a harvest than a destination.

What kind of peace is joined to what road in this manner? On this question, a certain wise Palestinian from antiquity, Rabbi Shimon ben Gamliel, who died in the same year that the temple in Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans (70 CE), has something to say that has a bearing: ‘The world rests on three things: justice, truth and peace …’[3] Some time later, Rav Muna, commenting on this comment (as rabbis are wont to do), observed, ‘The three are one, because if justice is done, truth has been effected and peace brought about …’[4] In other words, peace depends on justice, and justice on truth. Without truth no justice, without justice no peace.

It is no easy thing to follow this bearing. But if what we are looking for is a dignified way out of the current impasse and a higher path to the future for Palestinians and Israelis – a path that elevates those who travel it – then this is the direction to take. The question I wish to raise is this: At its heart, does Judaism itself – by which I mean the broad human tradition which bears this name and not the religion alone – point out this direction?[5]

There is a story that my sister tells that sounds like a Jewish joke, but, funnily enough, it is true. Some years ago, Francesca worked for the London Borough of Hackney, which includes Stamford Hill, an area with a large population of strictly observant Orthodox and Ultra-Orthodox (Haredi) Jews. Hackney Council is controlled by the Labour Party – and probably has been since the creation of the world over five thousand years ago. When my sister was an employee, one of the Labour councillors was a rabbi from Stamford Hill. One day, curious about his left-wing leanings, Francesca approached him with a question. ‘Rabbi,’ she said, ‘Tell me: Where do you get your socialism from?’ ‘From the Torah,’ came the instant reply. Then after a pause he added, ‘Mind you, you can find almost anything you want in the Torah!’

Was he joking or was he serious? Like the challah over which a blessing is made on Shabbos and festivals, the rabbi’s words should be taken with a pinch of salt. I can almost see the twinkle in his eye as he said ‘almost’; the word is dripping with irony. But he was a rabbi – and so his quip made a profound point. On the one hand, what you find in the Torah depends on what you bring to it. On the other hand, you cannot simply impose your will upon it. Reading the Torah is a matter of give and take: the text is a given but how we take it is down to us; ultimately, to each of us, even if we come together to form a denomination or a school of interpretation. Judaism is a configured space; it is an arena of argument, not a body of doctrine. No one speaks for Judaism – except for every Jew. And to the question that I have posed – whether Judaism points us in the direction of a higher road to peace – Jews give more than one answer.

One answer was given by rabbis in the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) during Operation Cast Lead, Israel’s twenty-two day military offensive in the Gaza Strip in December 2008 and January 2009. The rabbis set out to educate Israeli soldiers. Their aim, in the words of Brigadier General Rabbi Avichai Rontzki, the chief army rabbi, was ‘to fill them with yiddishkeit and a fighting spirit’. Yiddishkeit in this context means, roughly, Jewish values or a Jewish way of doing things. So, what values are Jewish according to Rabbi Rontzki? His office sent Israeli soldiers a publication entitled ‘Daily Torah Studies for the soldier and the commander in Operation Cast Lead’. The text told them that there is ‘a biblical ban on surrendering a single millimeter of it [the Land of Israel] to gentiles …’ It went on to avow, ‘We will not abandon it to the hands of another nation, not a finger, not a nail of it’. Since ‘it’ includes the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, there is not much respect here for Palestinian rights. Regarding appropriate conduct in the field, the IDF rabbinate cautioned soldiers thus: ‘When you show mercy to a cruel enemy, you are being cruel to pure and honest soldiers. This is terribly immoral.’[6]

Some religious groups went even further. One flyer, attributed to ‘the pupils of Rabbi Yitzchak Ginsburg’, called on Israeli soldiers ‘to spare your lives and the lives of your friends and not to show concern for a population that surrounds us and harms us.’ In case the point needed clarifying, the flyer added: ‘As for the population, it is not innocent.’[7] So much for the distinction in international humanitarian law between combatant and civilian!

Judged by the standards set by these religious authorities, the IDF acquitted itself rather well. A joint report by Physicians for Human Rights-Israel and the Palestinian Medical Relief Society said: ‘The underlying meaning of the attack on the Gaza Strip, or at least its final consequence, appears to be one of creating terror without mercy to anyone.’[8] ‘Terror without mercy’ seems not a million miles away from the morality that Rabbi Rontzki and others uphold. This casts a new light on something that Defence Minister Ehud Barak said in March 2009: ‘… I have no doubt in my heart that the IDF is the most moral army in the world’.[9] Well, if ‘moral’ means what the IDF rabbinate says it means, he might have a point.

On the other hand, if Barak had taken his moral cue from Rabbis for Human Rights, his verdict on the IDF might have been different. The group, which was founded in 1988, is ‘the only Israeli rabbinical organization comprised of Reform, Orthodox, Conservative, Reconstructionist and Renewal rabbis and students’. It calls itself ‘the rabbinic voice of conscience in Israel’.[10] It describes itself as Zionist; but its idea of appropriate conduct is rather different from that of the IDF rabbinate.[11] Rabbi Arik Ascherman, the executive director, ‘has been at the forefront of resistance to the construction of what Israel calls its “security barrier” penning in and carving up West Bank villages’; he has held up the destruction of ‘illegally built Arab homes in East Jerusalem by standing in front of the bulldozers’; and he ‘has spent years planting himself atop doomed Palestinian homes, reading extracts of international law to Israeli forces as they demolish the buildings beneath his feet’.[12]

The name of Rabbi Ascherman’s group is apposite, for when I speak of justice in this lecture I mean a dispensation in which human rights – basic rights that accrue to each and every one of us purely and simply in virtue of being human – are a fundamental element. For many of us who are Jewish, whether secular or religious or neither (or not-exactly-either), the connection between our Jewish identity and human rights runs deep.[13] There are, broadly, two reasons for this. Partly, it is a matter of collective experience and collective memory. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations on 10 December 1948, was not created in a void. The nations of the world were recoiling from the horrors of the Second World War, as the Preamble indicates when it notes that ‘disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind’.[14]

Barbarous acts were committed on all sides. But this clause alludes, above all, to the Nazi Holocaust. Along with others, six million Jews – two-thirds of the Jewish population of Europe – were murdered by the Nazi German state. Deprived of their liberty, robbed of their belongings, pressed into forced labour, Jews lost every right that makes life worth living before losing the right to life itself. All this took place within living memory – if not our own then that of our parents or grandparents.

War is full of horrors. But what made the Nazi Holocaust especially horrifying is that it went beyond warfare. The so-called Final Solution of the so-called Jewish Question was not a move in a wider military strategy, a means to the end of victory over the Allies; it was an end in itself. At the core of the ‘barbarous acts’ committed by the Nazis against the Jews was the doctrine of lebensunwertes Leben, life unworthy of living. The same is true of the murderous Nazi campaigns against the Roma and Sinti (‘Gypsies’), disabled, homosexuals and certain other groups. The aim in each case was to wipe out people who, according to Hitler, belong to groups that are so inherently contemptible that they deserve to die.

The repugnance felt at this Nazi doctrine lies at the heart of the UDHR. The preamble opens with words that repudiate it utterly: ‘[R]ecognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world …’ The inherent dignity of all: this axiom is the antithesis of the Nazi doctrine of the inherent contemptibility of some. And since the idea of inherent dignity is fleshed out in the language of human rights, this language has a special resonance for those groups, such as Jews, who were targeted by the Nazi doctrine.

Furthermore, while the calamity (shoah) of the Nazi period was on an unprecedented scale, Jews, especially in Europe, were for centuries a vulnerable minority who did not enjoy equal status with non-Jews (or specifically Christians) and were frequently subject to oppression, exclusion and persecution. This collective experience has been handed down, from one generation to the next, in collective memory; which, to repeat, is one reason why many of us, as Jews, feel a commitment to human rights.

The other reason – the second part of the answer – goes deeper, in a way, into our Jewish identity: it is not just a reaction to the treatment meted out by others or by fate. For, when the language of human rights is spoken, many of us hear the voices of those Hebrew prophets, rabbis and other Jewish figures down the centuries for whom Judaism means nothing if it does not mean social justice and, in particular, protecting those who are vulnerable. We think, for example, of the reiterated concern for ‘the stranger, the orphan and the widow’ (Deut. 14:29 and passim) and of Amos denouncing ‘those who devour the needy, annihilating the poor of the land’ (Am. 8:4). We recall the passage in the Mishna that says that ‘Adam was created alone to teach you that if anyone destroys one life, Scripture reckons it as if he had destroyed a whole world.’[15] The strength of this admonition reminds us of the right to life.

But are we being anachronistic? Are we reading a modern concept – human rights – into the thought of another era when the concept did not exist? This is a complex question, but the answer, on the whole, is: no, we are not. Let us look briefly at both sides of the argument.

On the one hand, it could be argued that when the Torah enjoins us, say, to care for ‘the stranger, the orphan and the widow’ it is saying that we have a responsibility for their wellbeing, rather than saying that they have a right to our care, let alone a human right in the modern sense. Michael Berger and Deborah Lipstadt maintain that there is ‘a fundamental theoretical difference between Jewish law and modern notions of human rights’.[16] And the Jewish political theorist Milton Konvitz observes, ‘There is no word or phrase for “human rights” in the Hebrew scriptures or in other ancient Jewish texts.’[17]

On the other hand, as Konvitz goes on to say, the absence of the word or phrase does not necessarily mean that ‘the ideas and values’ that we associate with human rights in the modern sense did not exist; he thinks they did exist.[18] Perhaps the committee of Jewish scholars who translated the Tanakh for the Jewish Publication Society, published in 1985, agreed with him.

For, if you consult their widely-respected translation, you will find that Deuteronomy says as follows: ‘You shall not subvert the rights of the stranger or the fatherless…’; ‘Cursed be he who subverts the rights of the stranger, the fatherless, and the widow’ (Deut. 24:17, 27:19). Similarly, Isaiah says, ‘Uphold the rights of the orphan’ (Is. 1:17). And when Jeremiah rebukes King Shallum (Jehoahaz), he contrasts him with his father Josiah who ‘upheld the rights of the poor and needy’ (Jer. 22:16).[19] I assume that the translators chose the word ‘rights’ because they wanted to find a contemporary idiom that would convey ‘the ideas and values’ expressed in the Hebrew text.

Besides, what exactly are human rights in the modern sense? Berger and Lipstadt follow a well-established path when they go back to the Enlightenment for what they call the ‘philosophical basis of modern human rights’.[20] Roughly, they think that this basis lies in the view that each of us (or each adult human being) is an autonomous individual who, in seeking his or her own interest, comes into conflict with other individuals. Our human rights, on this basis, are the claims that each of us is entitled to make – against each other and the state – in order to promote our own interest and protect our own individual liberty.

This might be the basis for the concept of human rights in the American Declaration of Independence or the American Bill of Rights. But is it the basis for the UDHR (which is the source for subsequent human rights declarations, conventions and covenants)? Is this the view of human beings and the vision of human life that it contains? It is not. Recall the opening of the preamble, which refers to ‘all members of the human family’. In the same vein, Article 1 says that all human beings ‘should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood’. The sense of this is that we ought to matter to each other and not only to ourselves. The implication of Article 1 is that this is a principle that is as fundamental as the principle of equality (that no one matters less than anyone else). Similarly, Rabbi Akiva said nearly two thousand years ago: ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself’ is a fundamental rule of the Torah.[21]

In short, the UDHR model of the human family is strikingly different from the model of universal competition that Berger and Lipstadt (rightly or wrongly) associate with the modern idea of human rights. (Arguably, it is closer to Kant’s concept of a kingdom of ends, a rather different model that also goes back to the Enlightenment; but this is beside the point.) The ‘spirit of brotherhood’ that the UDHR invokes is closer to the spirit of cooperation or at least of mutual concern. Family means kinship; kinship suggests ties; ties imply that we are responsible for each other. (You could say that the ‘R’ in ‘UDHR’ stands for Responsibilities as well as Rights.) With this in mind, Francesca Klug, one of the prime movers behind the UK Human Rights Act of 1998 (and, yes, the sister who used to work for Hackney Council), has argued that the UDHR represents a ‘second wave’ of human rights, the emphasis shifting from liberty to community.[22] This shift has affected the whole sense of the language of human rights today.

Now, just as the UDHR begins with ‘the human family’, so does the human story in the opening chapter of Genesis. Eve and Adam are not just the original couple, they are the originating couple: they are grandma Eve and grandpa Adam, ancestors of us all. Thus, in both texts (the UDHR and Genesis), we are neither, on the one hand, a mere collection of individuals, nor, on the other hand, a set of essentially different kinds (as with any model based on a division of humankind into biological races). In both texts, essentially we are members of a single – universal – extended human family.

Furthermore, in the Genesis account, Adam and Eve are distinguished from all other beings that have the breath of life by a singular point concerning their creation: they are made b’tzelem elohim, in the image of God (Gen. 1:27). From this feature the rabbis in the Talmud derive the principle of kevod habriyos (‘honour of the created’) or kevod haodom (honour of humanity’) or, in idiomatic English, human dignity. This inference assumes that the same quality imparted to Adam and Eve – the image of God – is passed on to all their descendants; that is to say, it is inherited. In other words, human dignity, according to the Talmud, is inherent – which is precisely what the UDHR asserts with its opening words and which grounds the whole of its system of universal human rights.

So, when I, along with many fellow Jews, hear ancient voices from Hebrew scripture and rabbinic literature in the modern language of human rights, are we wrong? I do not think so. This is not to say that the old ideas and values are identical with human rights in the modern sense; they are not. Nor is it to suggest that these are the only voices in the Jewish tradition. Certainly, they are not the loudest. Collectively, they seem to distil into a still, small voice, whose answer to the question that I posed – whether Judaism points us in the direction of a higher road to peace – is a simple ‘Yes’: yes, in a word, to justice, justice at the beating heart of Judaism.

And there’s the rub. For the position with Judaism today is this: there are two suitors seeking to win its heart. One is the principle of unconditional support for Israel, the other is the principle of unconditional commitment to justice. Judaism cannot have both these principles at its heart, any more than the Israelites could have more than one God (or a God who is not one) and still retain the identity they acquired when, speaking in unison (for once and once only), they signed on the dotted line at Sinai to become ‘the people of God’ (Ex. 19:8, Ex. 24:3, Deut. 27:9).

So sharp is the clash between these two principles that there comes a point where the conversation over Israel breaks down and the arena of argument turns into a battlefield. At stake in this battle is the very idea of the Jewish people, of belonging to the House of Jacob, of being a Jew. Several years ago, when Israel carried out Operation Defensive Shield in the West Bank, someone close to me wrote as follows: ‘I would go so far [sic] to say – speaking entirely for myself – that it is getting hard to hold on to any Jewish identity at all when it bears no relation whatsoever to the mindless nationalism one is forced to listen to from Jews round the world every day.’ Though speaking for herself, her words spoke for many others who felt (as another friend put it at the time) ‘the untenable position of being Jewish today’.[23] Similar feelings resurfaced last year during Operation Cast Lead in Gaza. One friend wondered out loud if she could ‘resign’ from being Jewish. She was not alone. In the same week, the rabbi of a large and prominent North London congregation devoted his weekly message to ‘those who said to me, “I wish I could resign from being Jewish.”’ He added, ‘These were not people who come from the fringe but people with a sore heart.’[24]

The clash of principles vying for the heart of Judaism has become sharper with the passage of time. Never has it been sharper than at the time of writing. Operation Cast Lead, like a powerful earthquake, continues to produce
aftershocks – not only on the ground in Gaza and the region but also in the Jewish world. One such aftershock was the Goldstone Report and its reception.

The UN Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict, headed by Judge Richard Goldstone, published its report in September 2009. The mission investigated the conduct of the war in Gaza and concluded that ‘actions amounting to war crimes and possibly, in some respects, crimes against humanity, were committed by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF)’.[25] It also found that the firing of mortars from Gaza into Israel ‘would constitute war crimes and may amount to crimes against humanity’.[26] But this did not soften the blow for Israel in the report. Nor did it diminish the blows that rained down upon Goldstone’s head for the crime of suggesting that a crime had been committed by Israel. Michael Oren, Israel’s ambassador to the United States, said the report ‘goes further than Ahmadinejad and the Holocaust deniers’ and that ‘it portrays the Jews … as Nazis’.[27] Alan Dershowitz described the report as ‘a defamation written by an evil, evil man’ and called its author ‘a traitor to the Jewish people’.[28] Testifying before the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, Anne Bayefsky, a senior fellow of the Hudson Institute, compared the report with the notorious Protocols of the Elders of Zion and accused Goldstone of using his Jewishness ‘to jeopardize the safety and security of the people of Israel’.[29]

That he is a member of the Board of Governors of the Hebrew University, Jerusalem (from whom he has received an honorary doctorate) and that he has spoken of his ‘love for Israel’: these are seen more as aggravating than mitigating factors by those who vilify Goldstone. Goldstone, for his part, told CNN that, as a Jew, he has ‘an even bigger duty to investigate war crimes’. The author of For Humanity: Reflections of a War Crimes Investigator (2001) observed, ‘I probed war crimes in other countries … so why should Israel be different?’[30] Speaking precisely as a Jew, he was asserting the principle of unconditional commitment to justice as against the principle of unconditional support for Israel.

For this very reason – because he put justice first – others of us have spoken up in his defence, speaking out against the vilifiers.[31] There is a battle of voices within the Jewish world, which ultimately affects the outcome of the conflicts between Arabs and Jews, Israelis and Palestinians. For you cannot gain access to a higher road to peace by leaving your own identity behind, as though in order to reach the plane of the universal you must give up the place of the particular. And those who say they wish to resign from being Jewish, heard slightly differently (which is how I hear them), mean almost the opposite: what they want is to re-sign: to sign on again, to reclaim the deeds to the title ‘Jewish’ and to their joint tenancy in the House of Jacob.

The timing of this symposium is auspicious. It is taking place during the festival of Pesach, which, for Jews, is the festival of freedom – but not only for Jews, as the late Rabbi John Rayner, former President of Liberal Judaism in the UK, once remarked in his Passover sermon to his London congregation. He said, ‘[I]f the Exodus from Egypt is a liberation paradigm for us, it can also serve that purpose for other peoples, and it has done so. Almost every national liberation movement in Europe, America and Africa has invoked the Exodus, drawn inspiration from it, and used its slogans, as in the spiritual, “Let My people go”.’ Quoting the nineteenth-century German Romantic poet, he added: ‘As Heinrich Heine famously said, “Since the Exodus, Freedom has always spoken with a Hebrew accent.”’ But Rabbi Rayner was conscious of the irony of this remark in the circumstances of our times. Pointing out that the Palestinians ‘are still awaiting their national liberation’, he commented acidly: ‘[T]o their ears freedom speaks with anything but a Hebrew tongue.’[32]

In the end, the accent that matters is not the way we pronounce our words but where we place the emphasis when we speak. No Jew consulting the diversity of sources within the broad Jewish tradition, no rabbi delivering a sermon, can escape the necessity of deciding what to accentuate. And if you regard the text you are reading as authoritative, as many Jews see the Torah, then the burden of responsibility that falls on your shoulders is this: how to take what is given. So, in what direction does Judaism point? Here is the answer that Rabbi Elizabeth Tikvah Sarah gave last Tuesday (the first day of Pesach) to her Brighton congregation on the south coast of England. By a stroke of good fortune (which my grandmother would have called b’sheht, meaning it is not a stroke of good fortune at all but an act of divine providence), her sermon landed in my email inbox three days ago. Remembering that we were ‘strangers in the land of Egypt’, she points out, is what this festival is all about. ‘But why? Why do we need to remember?’ That is the question she poses and this, in a nutshell, is her answer: Once an oppressed group, such as the Jews, are no longer oppressed, but, on the contrary, in a position of dominating others, ‘there is the danger of becoming forgetful’.

Perhaps we could add the danger that is the other side of the same coin: remembering so narrowly that our memories are only for ourselves and our suffering. Calling to mind those ancient Hebrew voices that some of us hear when the language of human rights is spoken today, she places the emphasis, clearly and boldly, on a Judaism of justice:

“So, what would Isaiah and Jeremiah and Micah and Amos be saying to the government of Israel today? What would they say about the forty-two year occupation of the West Bank and the continuing domination of another people against their will? What would they say about house demolitions in East Jerusalem and the destruction of Palestinian neighbourhoods to make room for the ever-expanding Jewish settlements? Would they not call the government to account and rail against injustice?”[33]

When Rabbi Arik Ascherman sits on the roofs of Palestinian homes in the teeth of the bulldozers sent in by the IDF, it is as if he were simultaneously protecting the House of Jacob from demolishing itself. And when Jews around the world speak out about Israel, condemning its breaches of human rights and denouncing policies that are inimical to peace, peace based on the principle of kevod habriyos and not on superiority of arms or the crushing weight of oppression, we are not turning against our Jewish identity: we are turning towards it. We are seeking to mend its breaking heart by affirming a Judaism of justice. Being Jewish, we are heeding the directive that Moses gave to am Yisroel, the people of Israel, who, standing at Sinai, suspended between the house of bondage and the Promised Land, heard the words pointing out a higher road to life, ‘Justice, justice shall you pursue’ (Deut. 16:20): words that ever since, resounding down the centuries like the blast of the shofar, remind the people who they are.

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