Treatise on Tolerance
In Toulouse, France, lived a man named Jean Calas (1698 - 1762). Calas was a Protestant, a status which brought daily persecution and discrimination upon him and his family in Catholic France.
Unable to advance in life, Calas’ younger son converted to Catholicism. His older son, however (who might have gotten himself into a gambling debt), committed suicide by hanging.
An angry Catholic mob accused Calas of murdering his own son in order to prevent him from converting to Catholicism like his younger son.
Calas was arrested and tortured in unimaginably brutal ways with the intention of forcing him to admit his crime. He only screamed his innocence. A court was assembled and, despite not having evidence, he was sentenced to death by torture.
His younger son brought the matter to the hands of a man who was known for his animosity toward the church, power and injustice. That man was Voltaire, a well-established noble rebel.
Voltaire looked into the Calas case. He was so outraged that he used a considerable amount of his own funds to hire lawyers and investigators. The case was reviewed and the government of King Louis XV posthumously exonerated Calas and his family. The family was paid an indemnity in the amount of 36,000 livres.
The unprecedented admittance by the King turned Voltaire into a hero and led him to write one of his most important pieces: “Treatise on Tolerance” in 1763.
“The law of intolerance is . . . absurd and barbaric. It is the law of the jungle and, indeed, it is even worse because wild animals kill others only to eat, while we human beings are exterminating each other for the sake of a few paragraphs.”
In his treatise, Voltaire wrote against religious intolerance and the fanaticism of the church. He claimed that religious intolerance is the cause of war and bloodshed, not, as the state put it, a means to preserve peace and stability.
Born 1694 as François-Marie Arouet in Paris, Voltaire is considered one of the most prominent voices of the Enlightenment. He dedicated his entire life speaking truth to power, challenging the authority of the church and government. He advocated for the use of reason in civil and individual thinking. His writings about liberty and the separation of church and state inspired both the French and American revolutionaries, and contributed to liberal thinking as a whole.
Despite Voltaire's tremendous contribution and the significant social progress achieved in the centuries since, religious fanaticism is unfortunately not a thing of the past.
Our Torah portion this week, Pinchas, bears the name of a religious zealot, or fanatic if you will. The previous portion, Balak, ends with a chapter telling about the Israelites becoming involved with certain Moabite women and worshiping their gods. In response, God instructs Moses to have all the leaders slain and a plague begins killing the Israelites. Just then, an Israelite man brought a Midianite woman to the entrance of the Tent of Meeting and performed a ritual with her, perhaps sexual, in front of Moses and the entire community. Pinchas, who is a grandson of Aaron, stabbed both of them to death.
On the surface level, the Torah seems to preach religious intolerance of the worst kind. One of brutally killing anyone who dares to sway from the one and only permitted faith.
Voltaire himself, who was known for his unfavorable and even anti-Semitic views, accused the Torah and hence the Jews of being the source of religious fanaticism.
A deeper look into our tradition, of course, proves more complex as we find that religious fanaticism is highly criticized and spoken against.
Around 200 years after Voltaire, Rabbi Naftali Zvi Yehuda Berlin, also known as the Netziv of Volozhin, wrote the following in his Torah commentary Haamek Davar:
‘‘A person is permitted to harbor zeal for the Lord of Hosts only if he is free of all human jealousy; for one who is zealous for the Lord of Hosts must take care that this zeal does not burn within him like "strange fire"— ensuring, rather, that his zeal for the Lord stems from a pure desire for the "flame of the Lord" (*shalhevet-Yah*). Yet even regarding such fire, one must exercise great caution, for without it, it causes significant harm.”
The Netziv makes a very important point here. Religious fanaticism is wrong and dangerous, because most of the time it is enacted by people who don’t necessarily care about defending the Godly path. Rather, they use the name of God to hurt anyone who is not in their “camp.” There is a very fine line between those who protect God’s ways by correcting wrong and those who use God to do wrong. The latter is what prevails in our world.
In our portion, the following verses are written about the action Pinchas takes to avenge God’s wrath and check the plague.
"פִּֽינְחָ֨ס בֶּן־אֶלְעָזָ֜ר בֶּן־אַהֲרֹ֣ן הַכֹּהֵ֗ן הֵשִׁ֤יב אֶת־חֲמָתִי֙ מֵעַ֣ל בְּנֵֽי־יִשְׂרָאֵ֔ל בְּקַנְא֥וֹ אֶת־קִנְאָתִ֖י בְּתוֹכָ֑ם וְלֹא־כִלִּ֥יתִי אֶת־בְּנֵֽי־יִשְׂרָאֵ֖ל בְּקִנְאָתִֽי׃
“Phinehas son of Eleazar, the son of Aaron, the priest, has turned my anger away from the Israelites. Since he was as zealous for my honor among them as I am, I did not put an end to them in my zeal.
לָכֵ֖ן אֱמֹ֑ר הִנְנִ֨י נֹתֵ֥ן ל֛וֹ אֶת־בְּרִיתִ֖י שָׁלֽוֹם׃
Therefore, tell him I am making my covenant of peace with him.’’
The Netziv explains that Pinchas deserved the “covenant of peace” because his action, even though violent, came out of pure intentions and stopped more bloodshed and suffering. He further explains that this covenant was given in order to repair Pinchas’ soul after the violent act that he committed.
The Jewish approach to religious intolerance is complicated. The Torah is indeed extremely particular and won’t accept the integration of different faiths and idol worshipers. At the same time, our sages never wished, nor ordered, the conversion of any other people into Judaism, making it non-missionary and tolerant.
Our sages famously state in the Tosefta Sanhedrin:
יש צדיקים באומות שיש להם חלק לעולם הבא.
"The righteous of the nations have a share in the World to Come."
Voltaire’s “Treatise on Tolerance” recently became a repeat bestseller in France following the 2015 terrorist attack of twelve employees in the Paris office of the satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo. These employees lost their lives due to portraying a cartoon of the prophet Muhammad a few years earlier.
I think that Voltaire would have been saddened to know that his book was unfortunately still relevant. Religious fanaticism and intolerance still exist to our dismay in many factions of Christianity, Islam and Judaism today.
Not just the words of Voltaire, but also those of the Netziv should ring loudly in our ears. The warning is to beware of those who pretend to protect God’s ways all while using the name of God to harm those whom they cannot tolerate.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Ye’ela Rosenfeld
