LECTURE NOTES

HUMANITIES CORE COURSE,

FALL QUARTER, WEEK FIVE

27-28 OCTOBER 2010

Quote of the Day:

“It’s certain that he loved all three of you, and equally, since he couldn’t treat two of you unfairly to please the third. Let each of you rival the others only in uncorrupted love, free from prejudice.”

From Nathan the Wise

The Tale of the Ring

We begin today with a story, which for the purposes of our class I have entitled The Tale of the Ring:

Once upon a time, many, many years ago in the east, there lived a man who owned a ring of inestimable worth, which someone dear to him had given him. The stone was an opal that sparkled with a hundred beautiful colors and had the mysterious power of making whoever wore it agreeable to God and human beings, as long as the wearer believed in its power. Is it any wonder that the man in the east never let it off his finger, or that he ordered it never to leave the possession of his family?

And this is how it went. He left the ring to his favorite son, and stipulated that this son was also to leave the ring to the son he loved best. And always the favorite, owing only to his possession of the ring and without respect to his birth order, would be the head, the prince of the house.

The ring went in this way from son to son until it came to a father of three sons, all of whom were equally obedient and all of whom he therefore couldn’t help loving equally. Yet from time to time the first one, or the second, or the third—at the moment when he found himself alone with one of them and the other two couldn’t share the outpourings of his heart—seemed more worthy of the ring, and in his gentle weakness he promised it to each of them.

This worked well enough for as long as it worked at all. But then it came time to die and the good father found himself in a difficult position. It grieved him to hurt in this way two of his sons, who had in good faith taken him at his word. What do do? He secretly sent for an artist and ordered, according to the design of his ring, two new ones, and he told the artist to spare no expense at making each of them identical, completely identical to his ring.

The artist succeeded. When he brought the rings, the father himself couldn’t tell which was the original. Happily and cheerfully he called for his sons, one at a time, and gave each one his special blessing, and his ring—and then, he died.

What follows goes without saying. The father was hardly dead when each son came with his ring, and each wanted to be prince of the house. They scrutinized, bickered, complained. In vain. The true ring was indistinguishable.

The sons sued each other, and each swore to the judge that he had gotten the ring directly from his father’s hand—And how True!—long after he had gotten the promise that he would one day enjoy the ring’s privilege. No less true! Each asserted that his father could never have deceived him. And before suspecting such a dear father of this, each said, he was compelled to accuse his brothers of fraud—however ready he normally was to believe the best about them. And each said he wanted to find out who the traitor was, so he could avenge himself.

The judge said, “If you can’t bring your father right here, then I order you away from my bench. Do you think I’m here to solve riddles? Or are you waiting for the true ring to open its mouth? But wait! I hear that the true ring has the miraculous power of making its wearer loved, agreeable to God and human beings. That should decide the matter! For the false rings couldn’t do that! Well, which one of you do the other two love the most? Go ahead, say it! You’re not saying anything? The rings only work in reverse, inwardly and not outwardly? Each of you loves himself the most? Oh, then all three of you are deceived deceivers! None of your rings is the real one. The real ring must have been lost. To hide the loss, to replace it, your father had three made for one.

“And so,” the judge continued, “if you’d rather have my ruling than my advice, then just leave. But my advice is that you take the case purely as it stands. Each of you has his ring from his father, so let each believe that he has the true one. But it’s possible that your father could no longer stand the tyranny of one ring in his house! And it’s certain that he loved all three of you, and equally, since he couldn’t treat two of you unfairly to please the third. Let each of you rival the others only in uncorrupted love, free from prejudice. Let each of you strive to show the power of his ring’s stone. Come to the aid of this power in gentleness, with heartfelt tolerance, in charity, with sincerest submission to God. And should the powers of the stone express themselves in your children’s children’s children, then let them come again before this bench. Then a wiser man than I will sit before them and rule. Go!”

Thus spoke the modest judge, and here ends our story. ¹

This story, The Tale of the Ring, is an allegory—that is, a story in which every element can be made to correspond to an element in another situation than the one in which the story is set. Thus, the father in this allegory is God. The three sons in the story are Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Each wants to be God’s favorite. Each wants to be chosen. The three rings of the story are the three revelations that the three sons have received, each time as a gift from a loving God, who told each son, as he received the revelation, both that had been chosen above his brothers to receive it and that there was not now and never could be its equal in all the world. It was, in all senses, the “last word.” As for the judge in the story, he is humankind, which has no way to consult God directly about which revelation is the true revelation and having heard each religion make its best case still cannot come to a final ruling. What humankind does as the judge in the story is exhort the three religions to please compete with one another in good works and in no other way while postponing a decision among them for some time in the far distant future when one of the religions will want to bring its record of unbroken gentleness and love over many generations to the court of humankind for a final decision. For now, humankind rules, it is just too early to choose.

Religious Tolerance, Nathan the Wise, and the Enlightenment

What I have called The Tale of the Ring is a story told during the course of a German play published in 1779 and entitled Nathan the Wise. The title character is a wise and wealthy Jew living in Jerusalem during the time of the Crusades but at a time long after Muslim forces under the great Kurdish commander, the brave and gallant Saladin, have retaken the Holy City. For reasons of his own, Saladin summons Nathan to the palace for a private meeting, in which he asks the Jewish sage to tell him which religion—Islam, Judaism, or Christianity—makes most sense to him. In lieu of a direct and painfully compromising answer, Nathan tells The Tale of the Ring.

The play Nathan the Wise is the work of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, a liberal Christian thinker, the son of a Lutheran pastor, who portrays both Nathan and Saladin with sensitivity and sympathy at a time when sensitive, sympathetic portrayals of Jews and Muslims were rare in European literature. In writing this play, Lessing was a pioneer—or as we might better put it, an early and literally leading light—in the broad cultural movement we call the Enlightenment. Religious tolerance was a distinctive theme in the Enlightenment; and though Enlightenment tolerance would make its way forward only very slowly in Europe, it scored an early, dramatic victory when freedom of religion was built into the American Constitution. You will have noticed that Nathan the Wise was published three years after the Declaration of Independence and eight years before the adoption of the Constitution. The American Constitution may well owe as much to far-sighted Enlightenment writers like Lessing, when it comes to religious tolerance, as it does to any actual European political model. Like the play, the Constitution does not favor any one religion over another, but it is favorably disposed toward religion inasmuch as it stipulates that Congress may make no law abridging the free exercise of whatever religion an American citizen may adopt.

I want to, and will, say more, later in this lecture on the covenant idea as it lived on in new forms in the increasingly secular states of the Enlightenment period and later. First, however, I want to say something about the possibility of religious tolerance among these religions as one might seek to ground it in their own beliefs and their own scriptures rather than in what we might call a new Enlightenment revelation with works like Lessing’s historic play as its scripture. Do the three religions have any native resources for reconciliation among themselves? Perhaps they do not. On p. 73 of the “Core Course Guide & Reader,” Reuven Firestone writes of “Chosenness as a Zero-Sum Situation.” But if not, then how much success can an officially tolerant government hope to have with mutually intolerant citizens?

A Surprising, Scripture-Based Option: Postponement to the End of Time

In speaking of the native—that is, internal—resources for tolerance that are to be found in the three great “western” religions, let me begin in a freely mythological vein by pointing out that two of these three religions believe that Jesus will come at the end of time to render judgment. Christians will be surprised to learn that this is a Muslim belief, but the Qur’an 4:157-59 plainly states that Jesus did not die on the cross, though he seemed to. Instead, God brought him up into heaven, where he awaits the role that he will play at the last judgment:

They did not kill him, nor did they crucify him, though it was made to appear like that to them. Those that disagreed about him are full of doubt, with no knowledge to follow, only supposition: they certainly did not kill him, God raised him up to Himself. God is almighty and wise. There is not one of the People of the Book who will not believe in Jesus before his death, and on the Day of Resurrection he will be a witness against them. ²

Christianity, too, believes that after his resurrection, Jesus ascended into heaven (Acts of the Apostles 1:3-11) and that he will come again at the End of Time. There are many allusions to this Second Coming in the New Testament. The Gospel according to Mark 14:62 is typical. Jesus, on trial before the Sanhedrin, the Jewish court of Jerusalem, is asked: “Are you the Messiah, the Son of the Blessed One?” He replies:

“I Am,” … and you will see [quoting, in the rabbinical way, Daniel 7:13-14] the Son of Man seated at the right hand of the Power and coming with the clouds of heaven.

Judaism, of course, does not believe in any Second Coming of the Messiah since it awaits a First Coming. However, that very waiting period has long been associated with another figure now, according to the mythology, also up in heaven with God waiting until the end of time to come down. This is Elijah, the Tishbite (from the town of Tishbe), perhaps the most powerful of the prophets, who at the end of his career did not die but was taken up to heaven in a fiery chariot (2 Kings 2:11-12). Elijah is not the promised Messiah Son of David, but Elijah’s return to Earth will signal the imminent arrival of that Messiah. Elijah, in the name of God, will resolve all differences and correct all errors. During the centuries when the Talmud was being written, a one-word shorthand designation came into use for those moments when a question too difficult for final resolution came up for discussion in the beit midrash (study center). The expression was teyku, an acronym for T-ishbi Y-etarez K-ashkioth V-’abayoth, “The Tishbite [Elijah of Tishbe] will resolve difficulties and troubles.” An acronym made up of just the four indicated capital letters, TYKU,³ was developed as a term for such agreements to disagree and not to declare anyone the winner of the debate. In Israel today, teyku the modern Hebrew word for “tie,” as in a soccer match.

By using these resources for postponement, there is scarcely an issue dividing the three traditions that they could not put off indefinitely. Take, for example, the question: Who is the true Messiah? Jews are not awaiting the second coming of the Messiah but the first. But they could agree with Christians to await that day and then ask Messiah (or Elijah the Tishbite, his precursor) : “Is this Messiah’s first visit to Earth or his second?” When it comes to the question of judging entire classes of people as guilty or innocent, bad or good, Christianity and Islam both have resources to draw on. In the Qur’an, Sura 2, verse 148, which we have already considered in class reads: “Each community has its own direction to which it turns: race to do good and wherever you are, God will bring you together.” The translator adds in a footnote, “on the Day of Judgment” and refers us to Sura 5, 48:

If God had so willed, He would have made you one community but He wanted to test you through that which He has given you, so race to do good: you will all return to God and He will make clear to you the matters you differed about.

A comparable Christian scripture is Matthew 13:24-30. Jesus tells a parable of a farmer who seeds a field with wheat. By night, an enemy sows weeds among the wheat. When the farmer’s slaves see the weeds growing among the wheat, they ask their master whether they should pull out the weeds. He replies:

“No, for in gathering the weeds you would uproot the wheat along with them. Let both of them grow together until the harvest; and at harvest time I will tell the reapers. Collect the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn.” (13:29-30, New Revised Standard Version)

The parable is another allegory. God is the farmer. The wheat and weeds are the good and bad people of the world. The slaves are the angels who serve the Lord. The harvest is the last judgment. The barn is heaven. The fire prepared for the bundles of weeds is hell. The parable introduces a new consideration: At any moment short of the End of Time, trying to definitively get rid of the bad people and care only for the good will end up doing as much harm to the good as to the bad. In any case, we have clearly another vote in favor of postponing the most difficult questions.

How soon will time end?

The scriptures say: Only God knows, so don’t try to guess, just be patient & wait

Do the three traditions claim any way to know when the End of Time is at hand? Judaism originated the tradition of looking for “signs and portents” of the imminent End of Time in contemporary events interpreted through verses in the Bible. However, when this kind of apocalyptic reading and thinking lead to sixty years of ultimately catastrophic war, the rabbis turned decisively against this mode of thinking, which had come to be seen as an attempt to “force God’s hand,” when God’s is a hand that can never be forced. The proper attitude—one of indefinite waiting for an event whose time could never be known—came to be expressed in a poetic and superficially inappropriate verse from the Song of Songs:

I make you swear, O daughters of Jerusalem, by the gazelles and by the hinds of the field, do not wake or rouse love until it is wished (2:7, 3:5, and 8:4)

Reuven Firestone in an unpublished manuscript comments:

The consensus understanding of this verse among the rabbis is that God is making the daughters of Jerusalem, a metaphor for Israel, swear not to wake or rouse love—understood as attempting to bring the messiah—until it is wished, meaning until God decides the time is right.

Doing otherwise, “forcing God’s hand,” would only bring further divine wrath and punishment upon God’s people.

A comparable Christian scripture is Matthew 25:1-13, a parable in which Jesus compares faithful believers waiting for the coming of the Lord to wedding attendants awaiting the arrival of a tardy bridegroom. The proper attitude on their part is to be ready at any moment. “Stay awake,” the parable concludes, “for you know neither the day nor the hour.”

In the Qur’an, as we noted in class, references to the Last Days and the Last Judgment are extremely frequent. There is no doubt that judgment is coming, but God instructs Muhammad to admit that God has not told him when it will come:

“Say, ‘It is revealed to me that your God is one God—will you submit to Him?” But if they turn away, say, ‘I have proclaimed the message fairly to you all. I do not know whether the judgment you are promised is near or far.’” (21:109)

And in a different sura:

“Say, ‘I do not know whether what you have been promised is near, or whether a distant time has been appointed for it by my Lord. He is the One who knows what is hidden. He does not disclose it except to a messenger of His choosing” (72:25),

and on this occasion it appears that Muhammad is not that messenger. In short, by statements like these, the three traditions turn postponement into indefinite postponement.

That there are resources for the indefinite postponement of divisive questions in all three of the traditions that we have considered does not, of course, mean that there are no resources for other approaches. Each of the traditions has familiar, even classic statements claiming that its revelation is beyond correction or improvement. Deuteronomy 31:10-12—a comment inserted into the text just after the death of Moses by an anonymous voice from long, long after that death—asserts that in all of the rest of Israelite/Jewish history, the equal of Moses never appeared. A kind of Jewish proverb asserts lo yaqum camoshe ‘od: There will never arise another Moses, which is to say, of course: There will never be another Torah. The same claim of absolute finality as well as absolute priority for Jesus Christ comes in the Book of Revelation 22:13: “Behold, I am coming soon, and my reward is with me, to repay everyone according to their deeds. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End.” Jesus as the Word of God Incarnate is both the alpha, the first letter of the Greek alphabet, and the omega, the last letter. After him, everything has been said that could be said. There is nothing to add. Finally, the Qur’an at Sura 33: 40 is awarded the title “Seal of the Prophets.” In antiquity, a wax seal with the imprint of the sender’s ring was placed on a scroll to indicate that the sender had said all he wanted to say and that no one had added anything to the message. These quotes are clearly resources for the hardening of religious lines at any point and at every point. My suggestion then amounts to pointing out that any major scripture, and certainly in any long-lasting and still living religious tradition, will offer resources for more than one solidly grounded position. The question, then, for adherents of a tradition is: Which of these shall I embrace at this point in my life and in the life of our world community?

Postponement and the enlightened way in European religion

Let me remind you, now, that postponement was the advice that the judge in The Tale of the Ring gave to the three brothers. Lessing, the author of Nathan the Wise, wrote during the long period of gradual secularization in European institutions that began just after one-and-half centuries of ferocious religious warfare. The religious civil war in the British Isles that followed the assassination of the Anglican king and the creation of a Puritan commonwealth cost more British lives than were lost in World War I. One third of the population of Germany died during the Thirty Years War, the great continental religious war of this period. The result, in Europe, was something of a “Never again!” revulsion toward the notion that war could or should ever be waged by or about a religion. And in fact, though severe discrimination on religious grounds continued throughout the 19^th century, Europe never again had to live through either an international religious war or a religious civil war. The suggestion seems to have been lodged in some European minds, such as Lessing’s, that if religious war could but be postponed or stalled indefinitely by tolerance, the will to wage it would die of its own accord. There were certainly some in the Enlightenment who expected that religion itself would die a natural death. And there were others who actively, even aggressively, entertained the thought that it should be, as it were, put to death since it had no effect other than the sowing of darkness and murderous dissension. But the dominant view was an attempt, in Lessing’s manner, to enlist religion in various Enlightenment causes—humane treatment of prisoners, humane treatment of the handicapped, equal rights for women, the abolition of slavery, and others—than it was an attempt to make the suppression or defeat of religion itself into a dominant or central Enlightenment cause.

Nationalism as a uniquely European and American alternative to religion

Meanwhile, as part of the same process that muted the differences among religions and fostered mutual tolerance among them, there arose another, allegedly secular source of collective identity capable of making the same staggeringly large claims on European allegiance that Christianity had made. This new source of identity was nationalism.

Nationalism emerged in Western Europe in the aftermath of the religious wars as a land- and ethnicity-based ideology distinguishable from Christian internationalism. The pope had been by definition an international figure, regarded by all Christians in the Latin West until the Reformation as the successor to St. Peter, the principal disciple of Christ himself and the representative of Christ on Earth. The papacy had symbolized and helped to keep alive a genuine sense among Europeans that their collective identity as Christians was distinguishable from and indeed superior to their many local ethnic or political identities. With the success of Protestantism in the 16^th century in establishing an alternate or indeed several alternate forms of Christian identification, common international Christian identity fragmented in the West. The pope now spoke only for Europeans who remained loyal to the older form of Christianity, now distinguishable from Protestants with their new loyalties, and the stage was set for the 16^th-17^th century Protestant-Catholic religious wars just mentioned.

Those wars were finally ended by the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, which stipulated that the ruler in any nation, and in that era the major rulers were kings, would determine the religion of his realm. What followed on this major reorganization of political and religious life in Western Europe was the doctrine, arising in the late 17^th century, of the divine right of kings. Before the Reformation, the principle had been honored, at least in the abstract, that the monarchs of Europe received divine authorization through the pope, who at various highly symbolic moments had actually placed crowns on royal heads. Now, the monarchs claimed that their authorization came directly from God without papal or parliamentary or any other mediation. To be a loyal subject of the King of England at the time of the American Revolution was to believe in the grace of God in the solemn phrase “George, by the grace of God, King of….” This was a large step toward sacralized nationalism—that is, nationalism turned into a new supreme commitment, faith of a new kind, but there was a further large step still to be taken.

Staying with monarchy for the moment, if we ask what form of inherited religious covenant Europe’s monarchs-by-divine-right would have found most congenial, it is obviously the Davidic model. David had been chosen directly by God to rule and had been promised that his would be an eternal dynasty. Divine-right monarchs understood themselves to have been similarly chosen by God, and they all certainly wished their dynasties to last forever. Ironically, however, the abuses of absolute monarchy in France soon provoked a massive reaction in the form of the 1789 French Revolution, a movement that was not merely post-Christian in some vague way but self-consciously and aggressively anti-Christian because of the support that the Church was understood to have given to the Crown. As for the authority for the French Republic that was established after the slaughter of the French royal family and much of the French hereditary nobility, it was understood to be not God but the people as a whole.

The classic phrase vox populi vox dei applied increasingly as the influence of the French Revolution spread: “The voice of the people is the voice of God,” which was to say that there was no higher authority than the collectively expressed will of the people. Their only covenant, then, was with themselves, difficult or impossible as many then believed it to be for any such covenant to hold together as a basis for governance. Rule by the people is, of course, the core principle of democracy, and the French Revolution a great leap forward for that democratic idea in Europe. The French revolutionaries substituted the identity of citizen of France, eventually to be symbolized by the passport that any French citizen could carry with him around the world, for the identity as Christian that the faithful Christian had once carried with him as a kind of sacred, global super-citizenship in the universal (“catholic”) church.

Note, however, that there was no fully reliable way, even now but especially then, to determine what the “voice of the people” was actually saying. Moreover, there existed, then as now, no world state, to which world citizenship could be linked. Though in their Declaration of the Rights of Man, the French revolutionaries addressed themselves grandly to the entire world, as the American revolutionaries had done before them in the Declaration of Independence, the citizenship that the Republic of France conferred could only be French citizenship. And when, no surprise, the monarchies of Europe turned on France and sought to crush this terrifying threat to monarchy itself, it was as Frenchmen, not as citizens of the world, that the French fought back. Defending the new republic called on huge sacrifices from the French. It called on many of them to surrender their very lives as soldiers fighting to defend the country they loved. And why should they love France? Had France ever loved them? Their devotion was predicated on a new kind of faith, a new covenant binding them mystically to their patrie, to use what became a very solemn French word, their “fatherland.” As they did so, they established love for one’s country itself, belief in the destiny of one’s country itself, as a powerful new model for all Europe of an emotional location and a source of personal and collective identity that was like a religion but, on its own terms, not a religion. Here was a new way of relating oneself to the world, and grounded upon it there arose a new kind of heroism as extreme in its demands as any religious fervor. Statues and memorials were now erected to honor patriot fallen for France rather than for martyrs dying for Christ. Patriot and patriotism were new terms introduced into Europe at this time to designate a new allegiance, a new commitment, a new covenant, a new secular faith.

The tragedy of nationalism was and remained at least until the end of the Cold War in Europe the fact that it created a new map of warring national identities even more destructive in the end that the old map of warring religious identities. And for better or worse, one can only note that within each European national identity the familiar shapes of the ancient western religious covenant in one form or another often lived on. European and American nationalism has certainly manifested on many occasions an Abrahamic sense of common physical descent and a physically felt, ostensibly unbreakable connection to a place taken on secular faith to be one’s only proper homeland. There has often been as well a Mosaic sense that national identity must be expressed in writing—if not in solemn declarations and constitutions, though these have become virtually an obligatory feature of national identity, then at least in a body of written law preserved and studied with rabbinical exactitude. This strand of biblical influence has been particularly strong in the United States, where exceptional reverence is accorded to, for example, surviving signed copies of the Declaration of Independence. Nationalism has made room as well for periodic prophetic figures who have arisen to summon a nation back to the moral truth and greatness of its earliest founders and to warn of imminent destruction if their advice is not taken. Most important of all, perhaps, is the sense that the creation and preservation of national identity rests upon collective commitment: citizenship may include entitlement, but it is, in the first instance, obligation. Just as the Israelites had to ratify the covenant that Moses brought down from Sinai, so the signers of the Declaration of Independence concluded, just above their signatures, “…with a firm reliance on the protection of divine providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor,” this “sacred honor” being a concept virtually without precedent in Jewish or Christian scripture but crucial to patriotism as Euro-America’s new alternative religion. Just as the Founding Fathers had to pledge and sign, so also a new citizen of the American republic must take, and sign, an oath of citizenship. By that ceremony, the nation, in the role of quasi-God, accepts the newcomer as one of his own, and the newcomer accepts the authority of this quasi-God—vox populi, vox dei—as legitimately active in the many ways in which government does indeed exercise a life-and-death authority over the citizenry.

Now, the exploration of political society is the proper subject matter of the later, winter and spring quarters of Humanities Core Course. Suffice it to say at this point, then, with the wars of the twentieth century behind us, that the lesson Nathan the Wise tried to teach in The Tale of the Ring is one that applies to nations no less than to religions. And to end this portion of Core Course on a positive note, let me go so far as to suggest that peacemaking among religions can even serve as a model for peacemaking among nations. I mean to suggest, to anticipate a bit, that postponement can be a good idea for nations as well as for religions.

There is under way as we speak an interesting and rather large project in which Muslim and Christian are working collaboratively to formulate a common path forward that takes their respective scriptures into account. This undertaking is known as the Common Word project, and a book by that title, A Common Word: Muslims and Christians on Loving God and Neighbor, is one of the first fruits of this effort. Let me quote to you from the jacket.

In late 2007 Muslim leaders from around the world together issued in the pages of The New York Times an open letter to Christian leaders inviting cooperation as a step toward peace. That letter, “A Common Word between Us and You,” acknowledged real differences between the two faiths but nonetheless contended that “righteousness and good works” should be the only areas in which they compete. The 138 signatories included over a dozen grand muftis, an ayatollah, and a Jordanian prince, and the document was widely considered a groundbreaking step toward reconciliation between Islam and Christianity—two major religions with a great deal in common.

“Righteousness and good works,” the advertisement specified, in an invitation alleging that these were the only proper areas for competition. Recall that in The Tale of the Ring good works were the one area in which the judge, standing for humankind, called on the three brothers and their descendants to compete in a competition that would take generations to produce a result.

The world has no majority religion. Religiously speaking, my friends, we are all minorities with only unimportant local majorities. Worldwide, however, Islam and Christianity together do constitute almost half of the world’s seven billion people. Peace between them is thus no minor matter for the future of the planet. If, however haltingly, a new and common understanding of covenant can arise among them, one that tactically and tactfully postpones the most divisive questions among them to the End of Time on scriptural grounds separately available to each, if doing this they can find a common path forward, then the world will have taken a significant step toward global religious reconciliation and therewith laid the foundation for a common approach to global problems that truly can have only a common solution.

Having acknowledged at various points my debt to Reuven Firestone, let me conclude this final lecture in the current series with the words that he uses to conclude his book Who Are the Real Chosen People?

An old dictum teaches that a minority of one is only a fool. But we are all, when naked and alone at the end of our natural lives, a minority of one. No matter what we profess, our essential, unique, individual nature is known only to the One who created all.

In the same way that we are unique in our individuality, we are also unique in our small communities, and in those conglomerates of communities that make up our unique religious affiliations. Every religion is unique, and each has access to wisdom, including wisdom about God and eternity. But no religion has wisdom about which all of us can agree, and none has the right to be confident that it has a monopoly on truth. If God created everyone to be absolutely unique, are we not all chosen?

¹ Excerpted and adapted from Nathan the Wise, by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, with related Documents. Translated, Edited, and with an Introduction by Ronald Schechter. The Bedford Series in History and Culture. New York and Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2004.

² Scripture translations are all from the versions referenced in the “Core Course Guide and Reader,” though not every verse quoted in this lecture is occurs on the printed pages of the reader.

³ In the Hebrew alphabet, the letter vav or waw is represented variously as v, u, and w in English transcription.