Muslims around the world are preparing for Eid Al-Adha, which commemorates the binding of Ishmael. This is similar to the biblical narrative known as the Akeidah, the binding of Isaac, and both traditions return to the same story. A father, a son, a knife, a mountain and God — who, at the last possible moment, refuses sacrifice.
This is not a story of sacrifice. It is a story of a sacrifice that did not happen.
In the Qur’an, Ibrahim is tested with the willingness to give up his son, Ishmael. In the Torah, Abraham is tested with the willingness to give up his son, Isaac. The two traditions diverge on the name. They converge, completely, on the ending. A ram is provided. The knife is lowered. The angel calls out. Life is preserved. The lesson, in both inheritances, is unmistakable. God does not want blood. God wants moral elevation.
This is the deepest theological claim in the Abrahamic tradition and it is shared in equal measure by Islam and Judaism. Faith, at its deepest level, is not measured by what we are willing to destroy in the name of God. It is measured by what we refuse to destroy.
We need this lesson now.
We live in an age of escalating hatred. Antisemitism is at levels not seen in living memory. Islamophobia is rising in tandem, in the same Western capitals, often from the same political movements that traffic in both. The two hatreds are often described as separate. They are not. They share a single root, the baseless hatred of a people for being who they are. A society that tolerates one will, in time, produce the other. A leader silent in the face of one is preparing the ground for the other.
Faith is not measured by what we are willing to destroy in the name of God. It is measured by what we refuse to destroy.
Rabbi Marc Schneier
This is why moral courage in religious leadership is not optional in this age. It is the test. Imams must denounce antisemitism in their own mosques, where silence costs something. Rabbis must denounce Islamophobia in their own synagogues, where silence costs something. The courage to defend one’s own is not courage. The courage this age demands is the courage to defend the other.
I have spent more than 20 years building Muslim-Jewish relationships across the Muslim world, work that has brought me into close adviser relationships with many Gulf leaders. I say in each of those capitals what I say in synagogues in New York: criticism of Israel that denies the Jewish people alone the right of self-determination granted to every other nation is a form of antisemitism. I also say, in each of them, that the conflation of Islam with terror, of every Muslim with the worst actor who has ever invoked the name of Islam, is a form of Islamophobia that no faithful Jew can tolerate. I say both because both are true.
Examples of this courage exist and they deserve to be named. The Muslim World League, under the leadership of Dr. Mohammed bin Abdulkarim Al-Issa, a cherished colleague who has partnered in our Muslim-Jewish initiatives, has named antisemitism as a sin against Islam, led a delegation of Muslim leaders to Auschwitz and convened rabbis and imams on the explicit premise that hatred of Jews is incompatible with Islam.
Antisemitism and Islamophobia are not separate. They share a single root, the baseless hatred of a people for being who they are.
Rabbi Marc Schneier
There are parallel acts of courage on the Jewish side that deserve the same recognition — rabbis who have stood at mosques after attacks in Christchurch and Pittsburgh’s mirror image moments, who have refused to let Islamophobic speech go unchallenged in their own communities.
The fight against hatred, in this age, is itself an act of faith. When an imam stands beside a rabbi after an antisemitic attack, that is faith. When a rabbi refuses to allow Islamophobic speech in his synagogue, that is faith. When the Muslim World League names antisemitism as a sin, that is faith. None of these acts involve a sacrifice on a mountain. All of them involve the same theological discipline that the Akeidah and Eid Al-Adha hold sacred. The discipline of refusal. The refusal to destroy what God has commanded us to preserve.
This Eid Al-Adha, the question is not what we are willing to give up for our faith. It is what we are willing to refuse to do, in its name, to one another. To refuse the slur muttered in the synagogue lobby. To refuse the sermon that flattens a billion Muslims into a caricature. To refuse, in the small daily moments where no one is watching, to lower the knife our tradition has commanded us to lower.
God stopped the knife. So must we.
• Rabbi Marc Schneier is President of the Foundation for Ethnic Understanding and a noted adviser to many Gulf states.
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