To Heal a Fractured World

Rabbi Jonathan Sack responds to Karl Marx:

Opium of the people? Nothing was ever less an opiate than this religion of sacred discontent, of dissatisfaction with the status quo. It was Abraham, then Moses, Amos, Isaiah, who fought on behalf of justice and human dignity -- confronting priests and kings, even arguing with God himself. That note, first sounded by Abraham, never died. It was given its most powerful expression in the book of Job, surely the most dissident book ever to be included in a canon of sacred scriptures ... In Judaism, faith is not acceptance but protest, against the world that is, in the name of the world that is not yet but ought to be. Faith lies not in the answer but the question -- and the greater the human being, the more intense the question. The Bible is not metaphysical opium but its opposite. Its aim is not to transport the believer to private heaven. Instead, its impassioned, sustained desire is to bring heaven down to earth. Until we have done this, there is work still to do.
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It is impossible to be moved by the prophets and not have a social conscience. Their message, delivered in the name of God, is: accept responsibility. The world will not get better of its own accord. Nor will we make it a more human place by leaving it to others -- politicians, columnists, protestors, campaigners -- making them our agents to bring redemption on our behalf. The Hebrew Bible begins not with man's cry to God, but with God's cry to us, each of us, here where we are. "If you are
silent at this time", says Mordekhai to Esther, "relief and deliverance will
come from elsewhere ... but who knows whether it was not for such a time as this that you have attained royalty?" (Esth. 4:14). That is the question God poses to us. Yes, if we do not do it, someone else may. But we will then have failed to understand why we are here and what we are summoned to do. The Bible is God's call to human responsibility.

I read these words and I am thrilled by them. And I am dismayed also. I have been introduced to the Bible and to the God of Israel through Christianity, which began with the experience of the Jewish prophet Jesus. There is nothing in the record of his life in the gospels that contradicts the words of Rabbi Sacks, at least it seems so to me. Yet so much of what is Christianity does contradict what Rabbi Sacks has said. Or if it does not contradict, it simply runs off in another different and wasteful direction. What has gone wrong? So much of what is happening in evangelical Christianity appears misguided, if not fundamentally counter to this. I often wonder that Christianity, in its separate existence from Judaism, is a vast historic mistake.