Ancient Holy Books, Modern Dilemmas

Holy books are like mirrors that reflect us back to ourselves. The loving hear calls to love more deeply; the hateful are confirmed in their hate. It is not the text that makes the religion what it is; it is the reader.

I find few religious scenes more inspiring than a synagogue on a morning when we read one of the more grisly bits of scripture. Samuel 15:3, for example: "Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass." I glance down-and there are the rabbinical footnotes in the text, explaining that the passage does not mean what it seems to mean. The reason Israel is to kill all the Amalekites, even the animals (which the Israelites might easily have plundered for their own use), is to remove any taint of self-interest from the attack, demonstrating IsraelÕs purely defensive intentions.

I glance up-and there are doctors and lawyers, accountants and businessmen, psychologists and teachers, warm-hearted, public-spirited people from every walk of life chanting along. It would never occur to a single one of them to walk out of the social hall after coffee and cake and try to transform the words they are reading into any kind of action.

Indeed, one can almost say that the supreme intellectual project of the Jewish people over the past 25 centuries has been to wrestle the often terrifying, sometimes bizarre words of the ancient holy books into a humane and attractive ethical system. This is a project that began in the time of the prophets and continues into our own time.

This project has taken on wider relevance in the past decade. After the 9/11 terror attacks, Americans understandably felt a new surge of curiosity about Islam. In response, scholars and writers have offered two broad types of answer.

The first answer is defensive and apologetic. As typified, for example, in the work of the scholar John Esposito and the popularizer Karen Armstrong, this school denies any special connection at all between Islam and violence. To the extent that it acknowledges Islamic violence at all, it condones it as response to the aggressions of others. The logical implication of this work: If we want terrorism to stop, we must change our own behavior to stop provoking it.

The opposing answer is accusatory. As typified by the work of the scholar Bat YeÕor and the popularizer Robert Spencer, it locates the sources of Islamic violence in the Koran itself, in the person of Muhammad, and in the core teachings of the Muslim faith. The logical implication of this work: Islamic violence will continue so long as Islam itself plagues the earth.

Let me suggest another way to think about this dilemma. The Koran is certainly a troublesome book. Hastily compiled over a period of probably less than a century (as compared to almost a millennium for the Tanakh and three hundred years for the Christian scriptures), it is a weird and often contradictory agglomeration. Ancient Arabic poetry is shoved together with primitive legal rulings. Garbled accounts of obscure military triumphs are thrown in alongside apocryphal literature translated from the Aramaic. Calls to arms appear among preachings of brotherhood. The whole is then interspersed with repeated threats of eternal damnation to anyone who doubts the literal truth of all that is said therein.

It is an easy task for the modern polemicist to choose one of the harsher Wahhabi translations, pluck the most lurid verses and frame an indictment. But doing so does not correspond to the human realities. Millions of human beings over hundreds of years have been inspired to lead better and more moral lives by their Islamic faith. Like the doctors and lawyers, accountants and businessmen, psychologists and teachers of my synagogue, they have nodded their heads over shocking words-and then reinterpreted them, allegorized them or simply ignored them.

Holy books are like mirrors that reflect us back to ourselves. The peaceful man finds words of reconciliation, the vindictive woman reads a summon to revenge. The loving hear calls to love more deeply; the hateful are confirmed in their hate. It is not the text that makes the religion what it is; it is the reader.

If one goes back into Islamic history, one encounters many devout Muslims who read their religion in ways that seem impressively modern. They recognized that the Koran was a work of human origin, a product of its times. They applied the techniques of skeptical historiography to the legends of the life of Muhammad, the hadiths, eliminating thousands of them as spurious. Muslims called this approach "ijtihad," the application of human reason to religious revelation.

Catastrophic events in Islamic history-and perhaps also a gathering awareness that the skeptical method might cut much deeply than even its first practitioners anticipated-led to the famous "closing of the gates of ijtihad" almost one thousand years ago. But now the pressure of modernity is forcing those gates open again. Many Muslims experience this opening as deeply threatening. Reactionary Islam promises to relieve those feelings by slamming the gates shut forever, with all the force derivable from hundreds of billions of dollars of oil wealth.

Yet against these reactionaries stand many other Muslims to whom free inquiry offers emancipation and progress. Like you and me, they believe that they can sift enduring ethical truths from the accidents and accretions of tradition; that they can extract moral lessons from stories even after they have ceased to believe in their literal truth; that they can judge their religion as well as be judged by it.

The Koran is their book, too. They donÕt have to rewrite it. Just reread it.