by Rabbi Yisrael Rutman

President Obama’s address to the Muslim world in Cairo did not represent anything new really in terms of foreign policy. The vision of a two-state solution to the Arab-Israel conflict was merely a reiteration of an already stated policy. But there were some surprises in what he had to say about the past, if not the future.

He praised the Islamic contribution to civilization in such areas as algebra, printing, medicine, and the tools of navigation. This may have come as a surprise to those of us who were taught in school that Newton invented algebra, Guttenberg gave us the printing press, and Magellan circumnavigated the globe. Not to mention the inconvenient truth that for many centuries little or nothing has been heard in any of these fields from Cairo University, Al-Azhar, or any other citadel of Islamic learning.

Obama went on to express his admiration for the humanitarian teachings of Islam. Specifically, that “throughout history, Islam has demonstrated through words and deeds the possibilities of religious tolerance and racial equality.” To illustrate, he cited the teaching of “The Holy Koran that whoever kills an innocent, it is as if he has killed all mankind; and whoever saves a person, it is as if he has saved all mankind.”

The President is reaching out to what he perceives to be the moderate majority of the world’s billion-plus Muslims. So he seeks to emphasize those peoples’ own peaceful traditions, contrasting it with the culture of hatred and violence espoused by the likes of Al Quieda. Whether the strategy will work remains to be seen. One thing we can say, however, about this particular quotation is that the White House speechwriters, for all the time and effort they and their boss reportedly devoted to this keynote foreign affairs address, got it wrong.

The sanctity of human life is a cardinal teaching of Judaism, predating the Koran by over two millenia. Anyone familiar with the Torah knows that the quotation in question is almost word-for-word the Mishna in the Talmudic tractate Sanhedrin (37a): “Whoever destroys a life, it is as if he has destroyed an entire world…and whoever saves a life, it is as if he has saved an entire world.”

Given the mood of American-Muslim reconciliation which Obama hopes to create, disputation of the sources would probably not be welcome at the White House. And why quibble over ancient texts anyway? After all, aren’t we all God’s children? Don’t all religions share the same essential belief in God and reverence for the human life He created?

While it is undeniably true that the world’s great religions have much in common, it is equally undeniable that it is owed in no small part to their derivation from Judaism. Both Christianity and Islam grew out of Judaism, and that they share precepts like the sanctity of life is no accident.

That the Koran says what it says there is not a problem. And it is fair to assume that most Muslims would happily subscribe to it. What is troubling is the false impression given that reverence for human life was somehow an Islamic innovation.

Peace is the goal. But we should beward of peace that is built on half-truths. The prophet Zecharia (8:19) said “You shall love truth and peace.” As the nineteenth century scholar Rabbi Samson Rafael Hirsch pointed out, the concepts of truth and peace invariably occur in that order in Tanach (the Jewish bible), truth first and only afterwards peace, “For peace is not a father of truth; peace is a child of truth.” *

While we are on the subject of the Mishna in Sanhedrin, it is worth noting the context of the Jewish sages’ statement. It follows an earlier part of the same Mishna, which asks Why God created Adam, a single human being, rather than, say, a whole community of people right from the start? The answer, says the Mishna, is to teach us that just as a world full of people came from the first man—and his wife, Eve (Chava in the Hebrew)—so too every person contains within himself or herself the procreative potential of an entire world. Thus, to kill a single person is to eradicate a world of potential life.

The prooftext adduced to support the argument comes, interestingly enough, from the account in Genesis of the first murder in history. When Kain killed Abel, it says, “the blood of your brother cried out.” The Mishna notes the grammatical anomaly that in the Hebrew the word for blood is in the plural rather than the singular, “the bloods of your brother.” This is to signify that not only Kain’s blood, but also the blood of his unborn descendants, were crying out for justice. Kain killed his brother Abel—and a whole world perished with him.

Why does the Torah choose to teach the sanctity of life through a passage about murder, rather than through one that speaks of saving life? Perhaps because it is only through the painful experience of the violent taking of life that humankind can eventually reach an appreciation of life’s value. Likewise, we do hope, that the generations of strife in the Mideast, in which so many people, and so many worlds, have been destroyed, will prove to be the source of a new appreciation of the sanctity of human life.

* Rabbi Eliyahu Meir Klugman, Rabbi Samson Rafael Hirsch, P. 314.

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