Background: Below is a paper that reflects on the opera La juive , which was staged last September in Amsterdam in connection with a Nexus Institute Conference on the “End of History.” Rabbi Jonathan Sacks (Rabbi for the British Commonwealth) gave the keynote address, which is alluded to in this paper, as is the opera (and a summary of its arcane plot). My paper is a critique of the politics of sacrifice and the type of (to my mind quite false) universalism Rabbi Sacks invoked.
REFLECTION ON LA JUIVE (2009)
Sacrifices are made for the future. Simple, quotidian sacrifices say so in the phrases we use for them: saving for a rainy day, postponing gratification, husbanding resources.
Most are set up in the form of a bargain, with an if-then clause that presumes a negotiation has taken place. But sometimes the sacrifice situation is so deadly urgent that the bargain is proposed on the spot: My kingdom for a horse! Give me Liberty or give me Death!
Sacrifices yield something present –or even the present itself—to an envisioned future where things will be better or something better or worthier will appear. Even a bargain with the Devil is understood to be a sacrifice for a perceived future good –although everyone knows, as Faust did, that such a sacrifice made to a Devil is hardly likely to turn out well. The future good should justify the sacrifice and banish any doubts about its rightness or meaningfulness.
Among the ancients of many cultures, it was clearly recognized that sacrifices also have the function of setting things right with the past for the sake of the better future. They extirpate an unwanted or guilt-inducing past experience or trauma. The sacrifice is a pharmikon (to use the Greek term): an object that represents something bad or unhealthy that needs to be cleansed, purged, killed off. So, when children are viewed as the future of a bad past, they are sacrificed for the sake of a purified future. Or a particular child or an animal can be used to represent symbolically the unhealthy or sinful past that should not carry into the future. The choice of an animal supplied modern languages with words meaning sin-goat: scapegoat, Suedenbock. When Abraham was relieved of the necessity of sacrificing his son Isaac, heir to the history of Abraham’s family’s less than perfect obedience to the Covenant God had made with Noah, he sacrificed a goat instead.
Among the religions human beings have devised, some are more organized around sacrifice for the future good than others. Certainly a religion that proposes an afterlife in which sacrifices made in this life will be redeemed or rewarded—that is, a religion cast radically toward the future and toward absolute divine judgment and reward—differs fundamentally from one more oriented toward eternal nature (for example, as adored by pantheists), as it differs fundamentally from one more oriented toward the immediate present (for example, toward sexual pleasure, fertility and child-birth as many polytheistic religions are). The radically futureward religions tend to be the monotheistic ones: a single –and transcendent—creator Deity does the judging and rewarding at the end of a given life or at the end of time.[1]
Even among monotheistic believers, the future can only be envisioned and never known, hoped for but neither engineered nor gated against unpredictability. So religious sacrifices of all sorts entail, to one degree or another, disappointment. In one way or another, they arouse resentment in those who sacrifice. The result is seldom what it might have been. And, as far as ultimate rewards like eternal residence in Heaven or immortalizaton are concerned, there is no direct evidence on earth of the reward’s delivery. Faith is required to trust that the dead have been properly sorted into those going to a new life in Heaven and those going to Hell. Prophets who are expected to be able to predict the future and its rewards add to the uncertainty, for they are so often revealed to be either false or way off the mark. Often no one who has heard the prophet lives long enough to find out whether he was right. Few are the monotheistically faithful who live without anxiety. So the reward has to be very compelling –for example, “chosen people” status for your whole tribe.
Promises are also made for the future, but they do not disappoint when they are kept, they only disappoint if they are not kept or not sustained, broken. Like contracts, they are instruments more likely to be used between equals, while sacrifices are usually made by a weaker party to a stronger one who dictates the terms of the bargain –a mere mortal to a deity, for the most common example. The Deity may just demand sacrifice, period. But when a deity is more welcoming of mere mortals into the future, treating them more like citizens in an absolute monarchy than like slaves or dispensable footsoldiers in the deity’s army, the arrangement is called a covenant, a type of promise involving laws. Thus it was a Covenant that God made with Noah, memorialized to this day among the Israelites in each Ark of the Covenant where the Noahidic Law is kept. These seven laws are for all of humankind, all descendents of Noah, and they reflect God’s agreement never again to send a Flood if the seven laws are kept. As Rabbi Sacks reminded us in his commentary on the opera La juive, this Noah Covenant was quite different than the later arrangement God made with Abraham, who had shown himself willing to sacrifice his son Isaac on God’s demand or command.[2] That was an arrangement in which the Israelites, humble before their inexorable, demanding God, were to become God’s chosen people, distinguished from all others whose forbearers in Noah’s family had been saved at the time of the Flood. Rabbi Sacks suggested that we –we all—look to this Covenant as the covenant of humankind’s unity prior to any particularism, any “chosen people” covenant, and take this Noah Covenant as our reference in hoping that humankind now will unite behind tolerant liberal democracy.
But, I found myself thinking as I listened to Rabbi Sacks, wasn’t the Noah Covenant a Covenant that demanded of Noah, first and foremost, that he and his heirs worship no other God than this God? Wasn’t it a Covenant missing any of the basic freedom of religion and tolerance for religious diversity that is presumed by liberal democracy? (or even a cosmopolitan polytheistic society). And, I also thought, isn’t it the case that the exemplary, standard-setting liberal democrats of the American Revolution, authors of the American Constitution, were not people who lived or acted within the Judaeo-Christian fold where, despite the Noah Covenant, Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac was idealized or where the sacrifice of Christ was central to the entire theology and ritual. The Founding Fathers of the American republic were, for the most part, Deists or pantheists. These men of egalitarian ideals were also, as Tocqueville pointed out in Democracy in America, a logically consistent lot in their love of nature, for “nature was the natural and logical religion of democracy.”[3]
Pantheism seemed to De Tocqueville to be the spiritual correlate of democracy, and many pantheists agreed with him. John Muir, the premier naturalist writing in late 19th century America, spoke quite politically of the “divine love [that] spreads through all of nature equally and indiscriminately.” Egalitarianism meant to the Founding Fathers and to the American political figures who were their heirs, like John Muir’s hiking companion Teddy Roosevelt, not only that there were no chosen peoples among humans and no favored regions of the earth, but that there was no covenant –not even a Noah Covenant—that separated believers from non-believers. The divinity of all of nature implied that there was no transcendent Diety who could require that there be no other gods than Him. And the divinity of all nature also implied that no species should arrogate to itself a “chosen species” status, for all species have responsibilities for care and respect to all others, each according to their capabilities
From the point of view of a pantheist –or a Buddhist, or a Taoist, or anyone of a religion in which all creatures are divine and there is no transcendent deity—the Noah Covenant is frightening and not at all conducive to egalitarianism. What the Covenant looks like is an if-then bargain: a frighteningly angry God, who has just covered the earth with a nearly genocidal flood which only one little group on an ark survived, agrees not to send another genocidal flood if the group leader pledges himself and his descendents to obey seven laws. These laws will keep humans from the kind of bad behavior that the flood was meant to punish –especially idolatry, but also certain sexual acts (incest, adultery, male homosexuality) and eating practices. To pantheists and others for whom nature is divine, for whom there cannot be any split between the divinity and nature, this bargain looks like it was made with an imaginary malevolent or monster God who had wanted to destroy nature, imagined as somehow His creation, something He owned, his private property. The whole story makes no sense and feels like a nightmare.
The unity of humankind that the Noah Covenant grounds is a unity of humans who agree to worship the God who made the Covenant. So what this means, in effect, is that those are in charge who arrogate to themselves the right to identify and name this God and judge all other gods that might be proposed to be idols. They will be favored for fulfilling their God’s wishes—that is, they already have a kind of chosen people status long before Abraham. They are the righteous ones. The ancient and the contemporary Jews who have invoked the Noah Covenant have commonly assumed that the keepers of the Noahidic Law are the righteous Jews and then gone on to admit condescendingly that there may also be a few “righteous gentiles.” Rabbi Sacks did not exempt himself from the assumption shared by these Jews that the “righteous gentiles” are completely exceptional among gentiles, the majority of whom live in such a way that it is surprising that God has not long ago sent a second Flood to clean them out. Among the gentiles who know about this “righteous gentiles” idea, it is not be surprising to find it being judged by them a prejudice against gentiles or a kind of patronization of a few exception gentiles. Peace on earth is not really prepared for very well by the Noah Covenant!
In his commentary on La juive, Rabbi Sacks did not mention any of these ancient or contemporary problems with the Noah Covenant (much less any contemporary problem like the singling out in the Noahidic Law of male homosexuals for condemnation or the implication that incest, adultery and homosexuality are all alike as sexual deviancies). What he chose to stress, eloquently, was that this is certainly a Covenant much more universalistic and egalitarianian than the later arrangement with Abraham, so important to the Israelites and also so influential among the Christians who, in their own way, divide up humankind (in their case, into those who follow Christ, the son whose Father actually allowed him to be sacrificed upon a cross, and those who did not and do not follow Christ). But Rabbi Sacks was not very logical in thinking that peoples –either Jews or Christians–organized around child sacrifice, future rewards, and punishments delivered by a transcendent Deity would make very good supporters of liberal democracy. How can you keep the law that says “You shall have no idols before God” and also keep the laws essential to any liberal democracy that separate church and state and guarantee religious freedom, saying you can worship any idol or deity or site of the divine you want to worship as long as you don’t trample on the rights of others while you are doing so and as long as you do not try to make your worship a requirement of citizenship or a civic law. (Liberal democrats look upon states with state religions as not liberal democratic, of course –and it is not anti-Semitic to point out that Israel is such a state. There are many Americans who want the United States of America to be such a state, many Saudi Wahhabi Muslims who want Saudi Arabia to be such a state, and so forth.)
If evidence of the tension between even a somewhat universalistic covenant like the Noah Covenant and liberal democracy were needed, one would only have to remark how many monotheistic believers living in liberal democracies are not liberal democrats and have no feeling for the convictions and ideas that founded liberal democracy – like egalitarianism, like the love of all nature that is “equally and indiscriminately” the site of divinity.
Or one could go on to remark that in the current period of world-wide religious fundamentalist revivalism within the three Abrahamic religions –Judaism, Christianity and Islam—the monotheistic believers who do embrace liberal democracy tend to be believers who actually reject the theologies of their religions. Rabbi Sacks is the exception that proves the rule. (Although he did not explain how he reconciles his theological beliefs with his political ideas, nor did he explain why he has used his rabbinic authority to declare who is and who is not a Jew in Britain and the Commonwealth. His declaration on the last matter means, for example, that a Jewish child of a mother who was not born Jewish but converted to Judaism can be denied admission to state-supported Jewish schools in Britain because the child is not a real Jew. This has not gone over well with more liberal Jews, who do not want to sacrifice their children’s Jewish education to this definition, and it has not gone over well with the British liberal democracy which has brought the Jewish schools to court.)
The religious people who reject theology are (so the nomenclature goes) cultural Jews, cultural Christians, cultural Muslims (or liberal Muslims). They sometimes go to synagoge, church, or mosque but are not devout within the theological frameworks; they suspend their disbelief in one way or another. That is, they are people who have somehow resolved the contradiction between belonging, on the one hand, to a religious group which is non-egalitarian and not organized around divine nature and, on the other hand, belonging to a humankind that they hope is evolving toward liberal democracy. They reach resolution either by ignoring the contradiction or by urging their religious leadership to be more like Rabbi Sacks and less like Pope Benedict or less like the Ayatollahs who are narcissistically identified with Allah.[4] When Rabbi Sacks says “our humanity precedes any religion” and when he admits that moral and religious “truths” are conventional, they are happy with him, for they try to de-emphasize the most intolerant features of covenants of the Abraham sort that emphasize “chosen people” thinking and prepare the chosen to sacrifice their children to the Deity.
The culturally religious do not have to go along with Spinoza and preach against the particularities or conventional truths of religions, leaving themselves no familiar or comfortingly familial tribe to belong to. Nor do they have to put their shoulders to the wheel of secularization. Like Rabbi Sacks, they can be very excited to learn that some contemporary historians have argued persuasively that “liberty of conscience” was born in the 17th century run-up to the era of revolutions, at a time when dogmatic believers abounded and faith was held to be supremely important. Liberty of conscience was not born of skepticism or waning of beliefs, but of the conviction that each person must be allowed to live in the faith and among the tribal faithful important to him or her. (There is certainly rightness to this historical claim, but it does ignore the fact that the great exponents in the revolutionary period of liberty of conscience were the ones in America who separated church and state, requiring the state to protect religious freedom but hoping, thereby, to keep the monotheistic religions away from the political realm. They thought that these religions, unlike Deism or pantheism, were antithetical to liberal democracy.)
Rabbi Sacks is certainly aware that people –like himself–brought up in religions in which a narrative of faithful sacrifice is crucial tend to idealize or romanticize sacrifices. Sacrifices seem to show seriousness, purposefulness, even noble purposefulness or intrinsic connection to the envisioned worthy future. Idealizers of sacrifice say: this person must be serious if he is willing lay down his goods, his power, even his life –or the life of his child. The sacrifice seems to be morally good, certainly deriving from an attitude that is the opposite of self-serving or self-absorbed or caught up in the present moment or hobbled to the past.
Personally, I identify with those who are frightened by any degree of idealization of sacrifices framed by the kind of narrative of sacrifice I have just described. It impresses me enormously when someone gives up something important –even life itself—in order for someone else to thrive or survive. When parents sacrifice for their children (as opposed to sacrificing their children) in order for their children not to starve or suffer or be shamed or humiliated or not to get an education—and when they teach their children to sacrifice altruistically in turn. But these are not sacrifices justified with a narrative of sacrifice. They come from an “I chose…” not a “God requires…” or a “for the sake of future reward for our group…” They come from “I could not live with myself if I did not do this” or “it would seem to me unnatural, out of tune with nature and my human nature, not to sacrifice for your sake.” What is at stake is a matter of inner peace and unity, lack of contradiction, and respect for another, especially a child who incarnates the future; not self-righteous assertion, obedience or revenge.
Feeling as I do, the opera La juive filled me with fear and a kind of shame over the endless murderousness toward inner group “heretics” and toward each other of the monotheistic religions. It is the same mix of fear and shame that I feel reading the newspaper each and every morning in this era we live in, over-brimming as it is with the destructiveness wrought in the name of all three of the Abrahamitic religions by people who are so ready to sacrifice huge numbers of their fellow humans and of their own children. This is not the “end of history,” it is an era of nearly unbearable weight of compulsively repetitive history.
In La juive you have a plot that involves two men, one a powerful Catholic, one a rich but powerless Jew, who are both ready, willing and able to sacrifice a child who is, it turns out, the daughter of both of them.[5] The biological father, Cardinal Brogni, is ready to sacrifice any Jew to his vision of the Christian future, when all Christian critics of the theology he subscribes to, and especially all non-Christians like the Jews, will have been purged, sacrificed (and, a psychoanalyst might add, scapegoated). Rachel is such a one, a Jew, who, further, has been seduced by a Christian prince. So, along with her, the Cardinal will sacrifice the prince, too, for his misceganastic sin. When the prince’s fiancé appeals to Rachel for mercy, Rachel takes the whole responsibility for the sexual sin on herself to exculpate the prince–in effect sacrificing herself for this prince, who is a model of dishonesty and manipulation, someone who had no compunction about betraying his Christina fiancé or disguising himself as a Jew to carry out his seduction. The opera presents Rachel’s self-sacrifice as an inspiration, a model of womanly love. The fiancé, too, is inspirational for forgiving the prince’s betrayal. The two women, La juive and the epynomically named Christian Princess Eu-doxie, Right Opinion, sing a lovely duet about their ecumenical sharing of the right opinion that they should efface themselves and save this reprehensible sexist (to use a word that needed a whole political movement to get coined one hundred years after the premier of this opera).
Cardinal Brogni does not know that Rachel is his own daughter, who, so he thought, had died in a fire, along with her mother, when she was a child. The Jew Eleazar, who rescued and adopted the girl, raising her as a Jew, holds this historical secret. When his adopted daughter is condemned to death by burning, and he with her, as her father, Eleazar does not reveal who she is. He makes no effort to save her from this fire –he will sacrifice her to his desire to revenge himself as a Jew on Brogni and the Christians by having Brogni sacrifice her. Eleazar’s is the revenge of a persecuted minority with no power, no army, just a piece of knowledge he can withhold; having a secret is one way for the powerless to have power. He also refuses to save himself by taking up the Cardinal’s offer that he convert to Christianity. Insulted by the Cardinal’s lure, prideful, he decides to refine the revenge he is taking by revealing the secret –too late to help her, as Rachel is on her way to her death–that she is the Cardinal’s daughter. When he learns the truth, that he is killing his own child, the Cardinal does not relent and try to rescue her–he lets his daughter burn. And she is glad to be sacrificed, as a benevolent lover of the prince, and as a Jew. She dies against a backdrop of the Cardinal’s faithful mob shouting by the pyre “We have taken revenge on the Jews!” (that is, they have burnt a Christian girl).
There is no narrative voice in the opera commenting on its plot and what Rob Reiman called the “passion for death” in it. To my mind, the characters do not have a passion for death, they have a passion for sacrificing and being sacrificed. They are all, to use the terms of my profession, psychoanalysis, sadomasochists. Even the Cardinal, while he sacrifices his daughter so sadistically, sacrifices his fatherhood to his religion and to the conviction in it that heretics and non-believers deserve death. A notion like Freud’s that there is an innate death instinct, manifest as aggression, is not necessary to think about this passion for sacrificing and being sacrificed. Only people traumatized by living in communities where some people are judged worthless and others chosen for special love by a vengeful Father Deity would behave like this, working so hard, as they do, to please the Deity (whether the Jewish one or the Christian one) by doing as the Deity does, wrecking vengence, demanding sacrifice. (In psychoanalytic theory, this root of sadomascochism is called “indentification with the aggressor” or, to compass the masochistic side of the coin, “identification with the aggression of a parent or among the parental figures or of a parental symbol either by being aggressive or by being aggressively the victim.”)
Rabbi Sack’s commentary implied –very honestly–that all this passion for sacrifice resulted in nothing. He expressed no admiration for Eleazar or for Rachel. Perhaps he thought they were as entangled in the Israelite’s covenant through Abraham as the Cardinal was caught up in his mental arrangement with St. Peter, who had a “special dispensation” arrangement with his God. But I did not hear Rabbi Sacks being troubled that these people –Jews and Christians alike, despite their worldly powerlessness or power—had no sense for the common humanity he was evoking with his reference to the Noah Covenant. They were not going to inspire liberal democrats with what we expect from tragedies and operatic tragedies –insight, at the end, into the beginning of the road on which everything went wrong.
Rabbi Sacks suggested that, in the era of the Dreyfus Affair, the composer Halevy wanted to be able to be an Israelite, not a Juif; a Frenchman of Jewish persuasion, not a Jew separated by history and prejudice from Frenchmen of Catholic or Protestant persuasion. But is there really anything in the opera itself that raises the question of what such a religious identity could mean? Is there anything in the opera other than varieties of fanaticism and varieties of the fantasies of omnipotence that are the hallmark of sadomasochism? To me, it seems a tribute to what progressivism there was in Europe when this opera premiered that it sank into oblivion, for there is nothing in it that stands as a protest to the rising tide of political anti-Semitism. There is no J’accuse. The opera is obviously critical of the Christian Cardinal, but isn’t it anti-Juif as well? The Jew is just as sadistic as the Christian, and the Jewess is just as masochistic as the Princess. They are not beyond the crazy sadomasochistic dungeon-like atmosphere of the opera, presented so well in the Amsterdam staging; they are deeply within it and there is no voice of a Frenchman of Jewish persuasion reflecting on them. I would think that many who attended the opera in Amsterdam, 2009, felt as I did that it was a frightening and shameful nightmare that even Rabbi Sacks’ commentary could not redeem, even though his commentary at least suggested that there is another way for human beings to relate to one another than this orgy of sacrifice in a dungeon-like scene.
Rabbi Sacks wants religions to solve the problems of particularist religions: by supporting liberal democratic political movements and institutions, religious people will keep religions from supporting authoritarian political movements and institutions—and perhaps liberalization in politics will effect religions, too, reducing their need for defensiveness. As I have been suggesting, this seems to me an unlikely curative or therapeeutic program because even the most “unity of humankind” visions of the monotheistic religions are authoritarian. To my psychoanalytic understanding, monotheism is intrinsically, inherently, authoritarian and more conducive to sadomasochist ways of life than preventative of them. Even when the transcendent Deity is described as compassionate He is still the judge and the punisher; He is still the absolute ruler over all of nature, and all humans are His slaves, even the chosen ones.
I have no interest whatsoever in debates about the existence or non-existence of God; these debates seem to me to be misconceived and futile, as there is no way to “prove” the matter one way or the other, theologically or scientifically. What concerns me is the use people make of their religions (or their science) to legitimate their actions and their words, and the way their religions do or do not encourage them to harm and murder others. Religions with transcendent deities seem to me to have consistently been used by their faithful—or the leaders among their faithful—for sacrifice of humans not agreeing with them and their religious laws. And that justificatory use of religions includes, even emphasizes, sacrifice of children, who represent the future of us all and whose sacrifice can very well mean not the end of history, but the end of the future.
[1] An underworld like the one Odysseus visited is not a place for an afterlife; he encounters only bloodless shades that can speak only when spoken to by a living visitor. For the polytheistic Homeric Greeks, immortality was earthly immortality in the form of fame echoing down through the generations, broadcast by singing songs as Homer did of heroic human deeds and speeches. Sacrifices are made to powerful and immortal but quite fallible, non-creator deities, for specific purposes –to gain a good wind from Poseidon before a naval expedition, to cite the example of the sacrifice of Iphigenia.
[2] Of course, Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac was the subject of many, many later ameliorating commentaries and interpretations that cast the episode as merely a test that God would not have let end in sacrifice, or that showed Abraham doing everything he could to prevent the sacrificial outcome, or that carefully indicated that God did not demand child sacrifices as Moloch did, and so forth
[3] This quote and the next are from a recent biography of John Muir, Passion for Nature (Oxford University Press, 2009), by the environmental historian Donald Worster, who cites De Tocqueville’s discussion on American pantheism from Democracy in America.
[4] At the Nexus Conference, Ladan Boroumand made a good case for the undisguised narcissistic identification with Allah Ayatollah Khomeini and perhaps others in the higher reaches of his regime. Such ayatollahs could not be any more unegalitarian.
[5] Neither the Christian biological mother, who has died, nor the Jewish step-mother (if there was one) are part of the story; so we are not confronted with a mother who is willing to sacrifice her child or a mother who might protest the sacrifice of her child.
Sacrifice is a male enterprise, part of (unquestioned) patriarchal privilege. Having no mothers around raises no questions –not even questions like Clytemnestra’s about the sacrifice of Iphigenia, which were raised and then settled in favor of patriarchal privilege.
