Failures of the Moral Imagination: Shmuley Boteach and his Critics

Shmuley Boteach’s statements in the wake of the slaughter of Mumbai and his broadside against the way Jesus’ injunction to love one’s enemies is often interpreted struck a nerve with me. I cannot agree with everything Boteach says. But then, I do not agree with everything his critics have offered in reply.

My fundamental objection to the way the debate has gone is the level of abstraction on which it has been pursued. If the issues are carefully contextualized, it is possible to see eye to eye on things more than might seem possible on first blush. Let me explain.

Here is the key graph from Boteach’s op-ed:

As for my Christian brethren who regularly quote to me Jesus' famous saying, "Love your enemies," my response is that our enemies and God's enemies are different parties altogether. Jesus meant to love those who steal your girlfriend, cut you off on the road or swindle you in a business deal. But to love those who indiscriminately murder God's children is an abomination against all that is sacred. Is there a man who is human whose heart is not filled with moral revulsion against terrorists who target a rabbi who feeds the hungry? Would God or Jesus ask me to extend even one morsel of my limited capacity for compassion to fiends rather than saving every last particle for their victims instead? 

Could God really be so unreasonable, could Jesus be so cruel, as to ask me to love baby-killers? And would such a God be moral if He did? Could I pray to a God who loves terrorists? Could I find comfort in Him knowing that He offers them comfort as well? No, such a god would be my enemy. He would abide in Hades rather than heaven. And I would be damned before I would worship him. I will accept an eternity in purgatory rather than a moment of celestial bliss shared with these beasts.

Here are some key graphs from a response by Greg Gilbert (HT: Justin Taylor at Between Two Worlds):

Boteach is wrong to limit Jesus’ command just to minor personal offenses. Jesus says, “Love your enemies and do good to those who hate you. Bless those who persecute you.” Persecution isn’t just stealing your girlfriend. For the early Christians, it was killing them—and/or their families—in often brutal ways.  Those are the enemies Jesus is telling them to love, not just a punk who cuts you off in traffic.

[snip]

Loving one’s enemies does not mean hoping that they will escape justice—either God’s or the state’s.

So what does it mean? Well here’s where we come to the heart of the Christian gospel. I think, at root, loving one’s enemy means genuinely hoping for that enemy’s salvation—even a terrorist’s—and (given the chance) acting in ways consistent with that hope. Now I realize that this is exactly what repulses Rabbi Boteach: Give me purgatory, he says, rather than heaven with a forgiven terrorist. But isn’t that kind of fulmination just born of a boiling self-righteousness? Doesn’t it come from a conviction that the terrorist deserves to be punished, but I don’t?

[snip]

Not many of us will ever have the opportunity to sit face to face with a terrorist and have to decide what loving that person might look like. But we do have to decide whether we’ll take pleasure in the thought of that person being in hell—or whether we’ll pray and genuinely hope for that person’s salvation and forgiveness.

A response to Boteach. I am grateful, first of all, for his unapologetic engagement with Christian doctrine from a committed, Orthodox Jewish point of view. As I imagine he is aware, his words  cited above echo one of the great masterpieces of western literature, written by a tormented but absolutely lucid Christian, Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, and more specifically, the objections of Ivan, the prototype of the person who rails against God out of a commitment to justice, recounted therein. A literate person cannot take in Boteach’s words without being reminded of similar arguments laid out in gut-wrenching detail by Dostoevsky. Let it be said, furthermore, that Dostoevsky’s knowledge of cruelty, terrorism, and primordial evil was first-hand.

What is almost always overlooked is the response Christ gives to the Grand Inquisitor. It is simple: silence, acceptance, a sign of fellowship. A kiss. (I miss no longer living in Sicily in which a kiss given by one male to another can be fraught with friendship and loyalty.)

Generally speaking, furthermore, Alyosha, the prototypical Christian, listens to and accepts Ivan's objections rather than talk back to and contradict them.

There is a similar scene in Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground. In that case, a woman embraces a hateful and self-hating man destroyed by knowledge of sad truth. The embrace is, one might say, the christological moment. It is short and fleeting. Christological moments usually are.  

I have nothing to add. Perhaps one day, when every tear has been wiped away, we will all see what we cannot see here and now. In the meantime, praying for vengeance is clearly something God permits, here and now and beyond the grave, both in the Old and New Testaments (e.g., Gen 4:10; Psalm 137:9; Job 16:18; Romans 12:19-21; Revelation 6:10-11). Whenever Christians try to be better Christians than the New Testament authors were, they make a hash of things. Every attempt to leave behind the complexio oppositorum (union of opposites) which is the New Testament and the Bible for something purer and more refined, has, historically speaking, created savage contradictions of its own.

At the same time, the injunction to love one’s enemies needs to be given far wider scope than Boteach allows. To begin with, the teaching of Jesus made excellent sense in context. The wording makes it clear that Jesus meant it to apply in particular to the approach to take to the Roman occupation: if you are conscripted to go one mile, go two. The Romans, of course, could be cruel and capricious. They committed atrocities. Minor offenses alone are not in view. It is not too much to say that if Jesus’s words had been heeded by his generation, the entire course of Jewish history would have been altered. The civil war and the revolt against the Romans which resulted in the destruction of the Second Temple would never have taken place.

Even so, nascent Christianity survived these disasters. By the grace of God - I mistrust Christians unable to see God’s hand in this - so did rabbinic Judaism. Literally more than symbolically, the great Yohanan ben Zakkai left Jerusalem in a coffin, and began all over again in a state of Galut which continues to this day, despite and even within the context of a renewed state of Israel (Avot deRabbi Nathan, chapter 4, Michael Pitkowsky signals the appearance of the best edition here).

It is precisely face to face with an enemy who can squish you at will that non-resistance to the enemy often – not always – is the only constructive option available. To be sure, in view of another situation, Jesus recommends flight: Matthew 24:16. Woe, indeed, to the one who does not flee, according to that passage.

Gilbert seems to think that it is unlikely that we will ever sit face-to-face with a terrorist, and be called upon to respond appropriately. Boteach does not discuss the situation. This is a sin of omission on Boteach’s part, and a miscalculation on Gilbert’s part.

Many of us have or will, at some point in our lives, sit face-to-face with a terrorist, or wannabe terrorist, while waiting for an international flight, on a subway ride, or what have you. Most of the time, it will not be clear who we are dealing with, but that just makes it all the more important that we think through our actions.

I have sat face-to-face with a terrorist. I befriended a terrorist, and worked for years with young Muslims who were excellent candidates for becoming terrorists.

This was during my years in Sicily, when the Italian Methodist Church I pastored, in conjunction with the Caritas, the Focolare Movement, Catholic parishes, and public and private funding, opened up a youth center for Arab migrant workers. I was the center’s director. A family from Tunisia had escaped by boat to Sicily (the distance is not far; like going from Cuba to Florida). They left because their lives, that of a well-educated engineer, his wife, and young children, were in danger. For this reason: the soft-spoken young man was part of a terrorist organization whose goal was to topple the Tunisian government by means of violent acts. I arranged for him and his family to acquire political refugee status through the UN. Believe me, the representative of the UN in Rome I worked with, myself, and the few others in on what was happening, we knew what we were doing and for whom we were doing it. My entire goal was to love this enemy of mine, to be, in Will Campbell’s immortal words, a brother to a dragonfly.

I will never forget the times I had with him and his family and other young Tunisians, Algerians, and Moroccans, many of whom were being swept up in the Islamic revival that rolled across the Arab world and expatriate communities at the time. Sharing  Id-al-Fitr with them at their invitation. Helping others, surreptitiously, figure out what to do given a conversion to Christianity that had to be hidden from the public (the Muslim Brotherhood has eyes and ears everywhere). Being referred to as a “muslim pastor” – their words, not mine, to describe the fact that they knew me to be a friend of Muslims; I enjoyed asking them to give me lessons in the Koran. They were newbie Muslims, all of them raised by secularized parents, with a fierce desire to appropriate their ancestral faith in a positive and personal way. At the same time, the center was being flooded with literature printed in London calling them to jihad against Jews, Israel, Great Britain, and the USA.

Surely it is obvious what love of one’s enemies means in that context, and why it is the only sensible attitude to take, precisely because, in ways that cannot be seen by the naked eye, life and death were being chosen every day.

The injunction to love one’s enemies has far wider scope than either Boteach and Gilbert seem to imagine. Terrorists of various kinds are a dime a dozen. It’s about time people woke up to the fact. More often than not, the terrorist will be domestic in nature, a neighbor of yours, a co-worker, someone you go to church or shul with, an abuser who takes out his or her frustrations on others in terribly hurtful ways. Someone who may one day go postal, or not, if not on others, on herself “alone.” The woman who tried to commit suicide by cop with “the help” of a parishioner of mine, a police officer who was forced to fire on her to save his own life and those of others. The young man who took his own life after he broke up with his girlfriend. The attractive young man whose love for another man, or woman, in a moment of rage or depression, transmogrifies into violence. Toxic love. Toxic death.

It’s not about hoping and praying for the salvation of others. Sometimes that is appropriate. Sometimes, it is not. “Let the evildoer still do evil; let the filthy still be filthy (that they may be repaid for what they’ve done)” (Rev 22:10-11). Gilbert’s final answer fails to be faithful to the entire biblical witness.

It’s also not about accusing Boteach or anyone else of self-righteousness because they cry out for God’s vengeance though they, no less than anyone else, must pray as David does in Psalm 51: “You, you alone have I offended, / I have done evil in your eyes.” It is possible to do both.

The facts are these. The injunction to love one’s enemies is practical advice. To this day, in an airport, if I see a young Muslim reading his Koran or accomplishing the requirement of prayer as unobtrusively as possible, I will walk over and ask, “So you believe in God? I agree with you that God, Allah as you say, is As-Salam, the source of peace; Al-Quddus, the Holy; Al-Malik, the Sovereign Lord; Ar-Rahim, the Merciful; Ar-Rahman, the Beneficent; Al-Basir, the All-Seeing; As-Sami, the All-Hearing; Al-Muzill, Giver of Dishonor, Al-Mu’izz, Giver of Honor. I thank you for your witness to this faith. May God bless you in every way.

A conversation sometimes begins, and even if it doesn’t, I know myself as acting in light of the injunction to love my enemies, which I find already in the Torah (Lev 19:18), though of course I have no way of knowing whether the person I’m talking to is, in fact, my enemy. Still, better safe than sorry. Loving one’s enemies is a proactive endeavor.

I wrote up my response to the Mumbai slaughter here.

Comments

[Justin (koavf)]

John,

On the one hand, I speak as someone who has never directly encountered evil (as far as I'm aware): I have never seen a massacre or participated in one, and I haven't seen sheer brutality or cruelty against another person. At the same time, I am also someone who has hated his brother; I am a murderer. I have had violence in my heart.

We have to value justice and side with victims. It would be a mockery to God and those affected by tragedy if we ignored justice. Conversely, we must believe in reconciliation. If it is impossible to overcome our differences, repent, and most importantly, to forgive, then we are doomed.

God is righteous and demands righteousness of us as well. The divine has imposed law upon a thoroughly wicked world and in the world to come, there will be reward and punishment. At the same time, God is abounding in grace and mercy. We have been enemies of the divine and God has sent the prophets to urge us and plead with us to love God and man instead.

Neither of these poles can be ignored. In this world, it is necessary to live in the tension of justice versus grace and mercy, or identifying with victims and forgiving oppressors. Just like we live within that tension ourselves and just like how God deigns to live in that tension with the creation.

There are no easy answers to how you love God and man. This is mostly a product of how difficult man makes it. Both of these respondents are right in as much as if we gave up loving the victims, we would give up loving justice and if we gave up loving the oppressors, we would give up loving grace and mercy.

Tragedy makes me eagerly await a world in which every tear will be wiped away and God will be the all in all, restoring everything. Until then, it is our mission to faithfully insist on righteousness as well as universal love, primarily within ourselves.

-JAK

[John]

Hi again!

I don't know if you'd be interested, but here's a really interesting debate, Shmuley and a Messianic Jewish fellow:

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach on Jesus (1of2) - DEBATE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Km9Up16oa7A&feature=related

Dr. Michael Brown Responds to Rabbi on Jesus (2of2) - DEBATE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKvbNh3Xg7Q&feature=related

I would also be interested in your comments if you have things to add or insight. : )

[John Hobbins]

Justin and John,

Thanks for your comments and suggestions. Note that Michael Pitkowsky at Menachem Mendel has an excellent follow-up post to this one.

He also references an important essay entitled, "The Virtue of Hate" I want to look at.