By F.S. Aijazuddin
03 Dec 2020
I HOPE I
still have the courage to acknowledge the Judaic DNA strain in my faith, for my
spiritual genes are the umbilical thread that links me today through
Christianity, through Judaism, to that figure in indiscernible antiquity — the
prophet Abraham.
I can never
become a Jew. As a human being, though, I ought to have the humility to accept
that the words of a Jewish rabbi can hold meaning even for me, two notches
along the Semitic scale.
A person
whose writings many have long admired was Dr Jonathan Sacks, the chief rabbi of
the United Kingdom. Necessarily orthodox because of his position, but in spirit
uncommonly liberal, Dr Sacks could be described as a modern Martin Luther
without the remonstrance, or perhaps Nelson Mandela without the scars of
incarceration. Dr Sacks belonged to that miniscule Jewish community worldwide,
which the American Milton Himmelfarb once described as “smaller than a
statistical error in the Chinese census”.
Dr Sacks,
in his book The Dignity of Difference: How to Avoid the Clash of Civilisations
(2002), explained that while archaic “Judaism was able to conceive of a
universal God, but not yet of a universal faith …[it] remained a pluralistic and
therefore tribal faith. It was trapped into the parochialism of antiquity”. In
its sequel, To Heal a Fractured World (2005), he makes an observation that
carries a telling resonance amongst Muslims and Christians: “More than other
faiths, the religion of the Hebrew Bible is written in the future tense.
Ancient Israel was the only civilisation to set its golden age in
not-yet-realised time.”
Dr Sacks’
writings will survive as beacons for those floundering in doubt.
Dr Sacks
recognised that “nothing has proved harder in the history of civilisation than
to see God, or good, or human dignity in those whose language is not mine,
whose skin is of a different colour, whose faith is not my faith and whose
truth is not mine”. As a community leader, Dr Sacks recalled the “time, when
people lived in close, ongoing contact with neighbours, creating networks of
shared meaning and reciprocal duty. Nowadays we live anonymously among
strangers whose religious, cultural and moral codes are different from ours”.
To
reinforce his proposition, he marshalled an unlikely support — Prince Albert,
Queen Victoria’s Prince Consort. One is surprised at Albert’s prescience when,
at the opening his brain-child ‘The Great Exhibition’ in 1851, he said: “The
distances which separated the different nations and parts of the globe are
rapidly vanishing before the achievements of modern invention, and we can
traverse them with incredible ease … thought is communicated with the rapidity,
and even with the power of lightning.” This could almost have been a quote from
Bill Gates.
Every year,
as the Nobel prizes are announced, there is a wave of self-recrimination
amongst the Muslim community. One drew this comparison: “Although Muslims
constitute more than 23 per cent of the world’s population [,] only 12 Nobel
laureates have been Muslims, whereas 193 of the total 855 laureates have been
Jewish.”
There can
be only one explanation: Education. Dr Sacks talks of the importance given to
education over a millennium ago: “Already in the third century the rabbis ruled
that any Jewish community that failed to establish a school was to be
excommunicated.” He added: “Education in Judaism, though, is active, not
passive. It is about honing the mind, sharpening the intellect, through
question and answer, challenge and response.” Clearly, obedience and repetitive
ritual do not earn Nobel prizes.
Dr Jonathan
Sacks did not live long enough (he died on Nov 7 this year) to see his
perceptive teachings permeate throughout his community. Nevertheless, his
writings will survive as beacons for those who flounder in the darkness of
doubt. His definition of social responsibilities is concise: “Rights are
passive; responsibilities active. Rights are demands we make on others;
responsibilities are demands others make on us.” His definition of leadership
is equally pithy: “A good leader creates followers. A great leader creates
leaders.”
Dr Jonathan
Sacks’ humanism went beyond the fissures created by generations of
introspective Muslims, Christians and Jews. Addressing them, he asked: “Can we
create a paradigm shift through which we come to recognise that we are
enlarged, not diminished by difference?”
What would
Sacks have made of the now-you-see it, now-you-don’t rapprochement between
Israel and Saudi Arabia? As a Britisher, he would have sided with the ghost of
Arthur Balfour. As a social pragmatist, he would have agreed with Edmund Burke:
“Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only
a little.”
Are we in
Pakistan mature enough to be enlarged by our differences with others, or are we
still expecting doors to open inwards? Sacks offers us the advice of the Danish
philosopher Søren Kierkegaard: ‘The door to happiness opens outwards’.
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F.S. Aijazuddin is an author.
Original Headline:
Source: The Dawn, Pakistan
URL: https://newageislam.com/interfaith-dialogue/my-islamic-spiritual-genes-umbilical/d/123650
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