I want to begin by telling the story of the most
beautiful idea in the history of civilization: the idea of
the love that brings new life into the world. There are of
course many ways of telling the story, and this is just one.
But to me it is a story of seven key moments, each of
them surprising and unexpected.
The first, according to a report in the press on
October 20 of last year, took place in a lake in Scotland
385 million years ago. It was then, according to this new
discovery, that two fish came together to perform the
first instance of sexual reproduction known to science.
Until then all life had propagated itself asexually, by cell
division, budding, fragmentation or parthenogenesis, all
of which are far simpler and more economical than the
division of life into male and female, each with a different
role in creating and sustaining life.
When we consider, even in the animal kingdom,
how much effort and energy the coming together of
male and female takes, in terms of displays, courtship
rituals, rivalries and violence, it is astonishing that sexual
reproduction ever happened at all. Biologists are still not
quite sure why it did. Some say to offer protection against
parasites, or immunities against disease. Others say it’s
simply that the meeting of opposites generates diversity.
But one way or another, the fish in Scotland discovered
something new and beautiful that’s been copied ever since
by virtually all advanced forms of life. Life begins when
male and female meet and embrace.
The second unexpected development was the
unique challenge posed to Homo sapiens by two factors:
We stood upright, which constricted the female pelvis,
and we had bigger brains—a 300% increase—which
meant larger heads. The result was that human babies
had to be born more prematurely than any other species,
and so needed parental protection for much longer. This
made parenting more demanding among humans than
any other species, the work of two people rather than
one. Hence, the very rare phenomenon among mammals
of pair bonding (unlike other species where the male
contribution tends to end with the act of impregnation).
Among most primates, fathers don’t even recognise their
children let alone care for them. Elsewhere in the animal
kingdom motherhood is almost universal but fatherhood
is rare.
So what emerged along with the human person was
the union of the biological mother and father to care for
their child. Thus far nature, but then came culture, and the
third surprise.
It seems that among hunter-gatherers, pair bonding
was the norm. Then came agriculture, and economic
surplus, and cities and civilisation, and for the first time
sharp inequalities began to emerge between rich and
poor, powerful and powerless. The great ziggurats of
Mesopotamia and pyramids of ancient Egypt, with their
broad base and narrow top, were monumental statements
in stone of a hierarchical society in which the few had
power over the many. And the most obvious expression
of power among alpha males whether human or primate,
is to dominate access to fertile women and thus maximise
the handing on of your genes to the next generation.
Hence polygamy, which exists in 95% of mammal species
and 75% of cultures known to anthropology. Polygamy is
the ultimate expression of inequality because it means that
many males never get the chance to have a wife and child.
And sexual envy has been, throughout history, among
animals as well as humans, a prime driver of violence.
That is what makes the first chapter of Genesis so
revolutionary with its statement that every human being,
regardless of class, colour, culture or creed, is in the image
and likeness of God himself. We know that in the ancient
world it was rulers, kings, emperors and pharaohs who
were held to be in the image of God. So what Genesis
was saying was that we are all royalty. We each have equal
dignity in the kingdom of faith under the sovereignty of
God. From this it follows that we each have an equal
right to form a marriage and have children, which is why,
regardless of how we read the story of Adam and Eve—
and there are differences between Jewish and Christian
readings—the norm presupposed by that story is: one
woman, one man. Or as the Bible itself says: “That is why
a man leaves his father and mother and is united to his
wife, and they become one flesh.”
Monogamy did not immediately become the norm,
even within the world of the Bible. But many of its most
famous stories, about the tension between Sarah and
Hagar, or Leah and Rachel and their children, or David
and Bathsheba, or Solomon’s many wives, are all critiques
that point the way to monogamy.
And there is a deep connection between
monotheism and monogamy, just as there is, in the
opposite direction, between idolatry and adultery.
Monotheism and monogamy are about the all-embracing
relationship between I and Thou, myself and one other,
be it a human or the divine ‘Other’.
What makes the emergence of monogamy unusual
is that it is normally the case that the values of a society are
those imposed on it by the ruling class. And the ruling class
in any hierarchical society stands to gain from promiscuity
and polygamy, both of which multiply the chances of my
genes being handed on to the next generation. From
monogamy the rich and powerful lose and the poor and
powerless gain. So the return of monogamy goes against
the normal grain of social change and was a real triumph
for the equal dignity of all. Every bride and every groom
are royalty; every home a palace when furnished with love.
The fourth remarkable development was the way
this transformed the moral life. We’ve all become familiar
with the work of evolutionary biologists using computer
simulations and the iterated prisoners’ dilemma to explain
why reciprocal altruism exists among all social animals.
We behave to others as we would wish them to behave
to us, and we respond to them as they respond to us. As C.S. Lewis pointed out in his book The Abolition of Man,
reciprocity is the Golden Rule shared by all the great
civilizations.
What was new and remarkable in the Hebrew
Bible was the idea that love, not just fairness, is the
driving principle of the moral life. Three loves. “Love the
Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul and all
your might.” “Love your neighbour as yourself.” And,
repeated no less than 36 times in the Mosaic books,
“Love the stranger because you know what it feels like
to be a stranger.” Or to put it another way: Just as God
created the natural world in love and forgiveness, so we
are charged with creating the social world in love and
forgiveness. And that love is a flame lit in marriage and
the family. Morality is the love between husband and wife,
parent and child, extended outward to the world.
The fifth development shaped the entire structure
of Jewish experience. In ancient Israel an originally
secular form of agreement, called a covenant, was taken
and transformed into a new way of thinking about the
relationship between God and humanity, in the case
of Noah, and between God and a people in the case
of Abraham and later the Israelites at Mount Sinai. A
covenant is like a marriage. It is a mutual pledge of loyalty
and trust between two or more people, each respecting
the dignity and integrity of the other, to work together
to achieve together what neither can achieve alone. And
there is one thing even God cannot achieve alone, which
is to live within the human heart. That needs us.
So the Hebrew word emunah—wrongly translated
as ‘faith’—really means faithfulness, fidelity, loyalty,
steadfastness, not walking away even when the going gets
tough, trusting the other and honouring the other’s trust
in us. What covenant did, and we see this in almost all the
prophets, was to understand the relationship between us
and God in terms of the relationship between bride and
groom, wife and husband. Love thus became not only the
basis of morality but also of theology. In Judaism faith is
a marriage. Rarely was this more beautifully stated than by
Hosea when he said in the name of God: “I will betroth
you to me forever; I will betroth you in righteousness
and justice, love and compassion. I will betroth you in
faithfulness, and you will know the Lord.” Jewish men say
those words every weekday morning as we wind the strap
of our tefillin around our finger like a wedding ring. Each
morning we renew our marriage with God.
This led to a sixth and quite subtle idea that truth,
beauty, goodness, and life itself, do not exist in any one
person or entity but in the “between”, what Martin
Buber called Das Zwischenmenschliche, the interpersonal,
the counterpoint of speaking and listening, giving and
receiving. Throughout the Hebrew Bible and the rabbinic
literature, the vehicle of truth is conversation. In revelation
God speaks and asks us to listen. In prayer we speak and
ask God to listen. There is never only one voice. In the
Bible the prophets argue with God. In the Talmud rabbis
argue with one another. In fact, I sometimes think the
reason God chose the Jewish people was because He
loves a good argument. Judaism is a conversation scored
for many voices, never more passionately than in the Song
of Songs, a duet between a woman and a man, the beloved
and her lover, that Rabbi Akiva called the holy of holies of
religious literature.
The prophet Malachi calls the male priest the
guardian of the law of truth. The book of Proverbs says
of the woman of worth that “the law of loving kindness
is on her tongue”. It is that conversation between male
and female voices—between truth and love, justice and
mercy, law and forgiveness—that frames the spiritual life.
In biblical times each Jew had to give a half shekel to the
Temple to remind us that we are only half. There are some
cultures that teach that we are nothing. There are others that teach that we are everything. The Jewish view is that
we are half and we need to open ourselves to another if
we are to become whole.
All this led to the seventh outcome, that in Judaism
the home and the family became the central setting of
the life of faith. In the only verse in the Hebrew Bible
to explain why God chose Abraham, He says: “I have
known him so that he will instruct his children and his
household after him to keep the way of the Lord by
doing what is right and just.” Abraham was chosen not
to rule an empire, command an army, perform miracles
or deliver prophecies, but simply to be a parent. In one
of the most famous lines in Judaism, which we say every
day and night, Moses commands, “You shall teach these
things repeatedly to your children, speaking of them when
you sit in your house or when you walk on the way, when
you lie down and when you rise up.” Parents are to be
educators, education is the conversation between the
generations, and the first school is the home.
So Jews became an intensely family oriented
people, and it was this that saved us from tragedy. After
the destruction of the Second Temple in the year 70,
Jews were scattered throughout the world, everywhere a
minority, everywhere without rights, suffering some of
the worst persecutions ever known by a people and yet
Jews survived because they never lost three things: their
sense of family, their sense of community and their faith.
And they were renewed every week especially on
Shabbat, the day of rest when we give our marriages and
families what they most need and are most starved of in
the contemporary world, namely time. I once produced
a television documentary for the BBC on the state of
family life in Britain, and I took the person who was then
Britain’s leading expert on child care, Penelope Leach, to
a Jewish primary school on a Friday morning.
There she saw the children enacting in advance
what they would see that evening around the family table.
There were the five year old mother and father blessing the
five year old children with the five year old grandparents
looking on. She was fascinated by this whole institution,
and she asked the children what they most enjoyed about
the Sabbath. One five-year-old boy turned to her and said,
“It’s the only night of the week when daddy doesn’t have
to rush off”. As we walked away from the school when the
filming was over she turned to me and said, “Chief Rabbi,
that Sabbath of yours is saving their parents’ marriages.”
So that is one way of telling the story, a Jewish way,
beginning with the birth of sexual reproduction, then the
unique demands of human parenting, then the eventual
triumph of monogamy as a fundamental statement of
human equality, followed by the way marriage shaped our
vision of the moral and religious life as based on love and
covenant and faithfulness, even to the point of thinking
of truth as a conversation between lover and beloved.
Marriage and the family are where faith finds its home
and where the Divine Presence lives in the love between
husband and wife, parent and child. What then has
changed? Here’s one way of putting it. I wrote a book a
few years ago about religion and science and I summarised
the difference between them in two sentences. “Science
takes things apart to see how they work. Religion puts
things together to see what they mean.” And that’s a way
of thinking about culture also. Does it put things together
or does it take things apart?
What made the traditional family remarkable, a
work of high religious art, is what it brought together:
sexual drive, physical desire, friendship, companionship,
emotional kinship and love, the begetting of children
and their protection and care, their early education and
induction into an identity and a history. Seldom has any
institution woven together so many different drives and
desires, roles and responsibilities. It made sense of the
world and gave it a human face, the face of love.
For a whole variety of reasons, some to do
with medical developments like birth control, in vitro
fertilisation and other genetic interventions, some to
do with moral change like the idea that we are free to
do whatever we like so long as it does not harm others,
some to do with a transfer of responsibilities from the
individual to the state, and other and more profound
changes in the culture of the West, almost everything that
marriage once brought together has now been split apart.
Sex has been divorced from love, love from commitment,
marriage from having children, and having children from
responsibility for their care.
The result is that in Britain in 2012, 47.5% of
children were born outside marriage, expected to become
a majority in 2016. Fewer people are marrying, those
who are, are marrying later, and 42% of marriages end in
divorce. Nor is cohabitation a substitute for marriage. The
average length of cohabitation in Britain and the United
States is less than two years.
The result is a sharp increase
among young people of eating disorders, drug and alcohol
abuse, stress related syndromes, depression and actual and
attempted suicides. The collapse of marriage has created
a new form of poverty concentrated among single parent
families, and of these, the main burden is born by women,
who in 2011 headed 92% of single parent households. In
Britain today more than a million children will grow up
with no contact whatsoever with their fathers.
This is creating a divide within societies the like
of which has not been seen since Disraeli spoke of
“two nations” a century and a half ago. Those who are
privileged to grow up in stable loving association with
the two people who brought them into being will, on
average, be healthier physically and emotionally. They
will do better at school and at work. They will have more
successful relationships, be happier, and live longer. And
yes, there are many exceptions. But the injustice of it all
cries out to heaven. It will go down in history as one of
the tragic instances of what Friedrich Hayek called “the
fatal conceit” that somehow we know better than the
wisdom of the ages, and can defy the lessons of biology
and history. No one surely wants to go back to the narrow
prejudices of the past.
This week, in Britain, a new film opens, telling
the story of one of the great minds of the 20th century,
Alan Turing, the Cambridge mathematician who laid the
philosophical foundations of computing and artificial
intelligence, and helped win the war by breaking the German naval code “Enigma”. After the war, Turing was
arrested and tried for homosexual behaviour, underwent
chemically induced castration, and died at the age of 41 by
cyanide poisoning, thought by many to have committed
suicide. That is a world to which we should never return.
But our compassion for those who choose to live
differently should not inhibit us from being advocates
for the single most humanising institution in history. The
family, man, woman, and child, is not one lifestyle choice
among many. It is the best means we have yet discovered
for nurturing future generations and enabling children to
grow in a matrix of stability and love. It is where we learn
the delicate choreography of relationship and how to
handle the inevitable conflicts within any human group. It
is where we first take the risk of giving and receiving love.
It is where one generation passes on its values to the next,
ensuring the continuity of a civilization. For any society,
the family is the crucible of its future, and for the sake of
our children’s future, we must be its defenders.
Since this is a religious gathering, let me, if I may,
end with a piece of biblical exegesis. The story of the first
family, the first man and woman in the Garden of Eden,
is not generally regarded as a success. Whether or not we
believe in original sin, it did not end happily. After many
years of studying the text I want to suggest a different
reading. The story ends with three verses that seem to
have no connection with one another. No sequence. No
logic. In Genesis 3:19 God says to the man: “By the sweat
of your brow you will eat your food until you return to
the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you
are and to dust you will return.” Then in the next verse
we read: “The man named his wife Eve, because she was
the mother of all life.” And in the next, “The Lord God
made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed
them.”
What is the connection here? Why did God telling
the man that he was mortal lead him to give his wife a
new name? And why did that act seem to change God’s
attitude to both of them, so that He performed an act of
tenderness, by making them clothes, almost as if He had
partially forgiven them? Let me also add that the Hebrew
word for “skin” is almost indistinguishable from the
Hebrew word for “light”, so that Rabbi Meir, the great
sage of the early 2nd century, read the text as saying that
God made for them “garments of light”. What did he
mean?
If we read the text carefully, we see that until now
the first man had given his wife a purely generic name.
He called her ishah, woman. Recall what he said when he
first saw her: “This is now bone of my bones and flesh
of my flesh; she shall be called woman for she was taken
from man.” For him she was a type, not a person. He gave
her a noun, not a name. What is more he defines her as a
derivative of himself: something taken from man. She is
not yet for him someone other, a person in her own right.
She is merely a kind of reflection of himself.
As long as the man thought he was immortal, he
ultimately needed no one else. But now he knew he was
mortal. He would one day die and return to dust. There
was only one way in which something of him would live
on after his death. That would be if he had a child. But
he could not have a child on his own. For that he needed
his wife. She alone could give birth. She alone could
mitigate his mortality. And not because she was like him
but precisely because she was unlike him.
At that moment
she ceased to be, for him, a type, and became a person
in her own right. And a person has a proper name. That
is what he gave her: the name Chavah, “Eve”, meaning,
“giver of life”.
At that moment, as they were about to leave Eden
and face the world as we know it, a place of darkness,
Adam gave his wife the first gift of love, a personal name.
And at that moment, God responded to them both in
love, and made them garments to clothe their nakedness,
or as Rabbi Meir put it, “garments of light”.
And so it has been ever since, that when a man
and woman turn to one another in a bond of faithfulness,
God robes them in garments of light, and we come as
close as we will ever get to God himself, bringing new life
into being, turning the prose of biology into the poetry of
the human spirit, redeeming the darkness of the world by
the radiance of love.
______________________
*Sir Jonathan Sacks was formerly the Chief Rabbi of the British
Commonwealth. This article is based on a speech he gave to the
international colloquium “Humanum”, convened by Pope Francis
on the topic of ‘The Complementarity of Man and Woman”,
held November 17-19, 2014, in Vatican City. It has been
reprinted with the kind permission of the Office of the Chief Rabbi.
Additional information about Rabbi Sacks’ work and instructions
on how to join his mailing list can be found on the website: www.
rabbisacks.org
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