Is God a Fanatic? by Eli Bar Navi 

The God of Israel is, of course, a jealous God:  “For I , the Lord thy God, am a jealous God, punishing the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of those that hate me.."(Exodus, 20,5)
He demands total fidelity from his chosen people, is extremely angry when  his sons follow strange gods, and to bring home the lesson, punishes them severely. His servants should be no less jealous, in fact the more jealous the better. One of my favourites is Pinhas ben Elazar ben Aharon the priest who, zealous for the Lord, attacked Zimri ben Salu who was whoring with a daughter of Midyan, killed them both with his spear, and for this act of purification was awarded eternal priesthood.(Numbers, 25,7-8)
The God of Israel has expanded his dominions (for Christianity and Islam are no more than the extended victory of Judaism, albeit somewhat bitter to the Jews, but nonetheless most prolific, eastward and westward) and his zealotry has become the battlecry of all monotheists. Truth, one and absolute by its own definition, has always been chaotic, elusive, multifaceted.  But as its manifestations multiplied, each one claimed to be unique and inerrant. Ever since the dawn of history,  the paradigmic  war cry of the Albigensian crusades has rung forth:
Tuez-les tous, Dieu reconnaitra les siens-kill them all, God will recognise his own.!
However to ask if God is zealous, is  the question of the theologian, one who posits the existence of God and seriously considers his qualities. These are sometimes quaintly anthropomorphic, and  few theologians have been able to free God from fleshly limitations.This is not my aim as I am not a theologian, for the simple reason that I do not accept the existence of God. For a person such as myself, a sceptical observer of humanity who has come to terms with the difficulty of life in this world without hoping for an afterlife,  a zealous God has no meaning.At most it is a metaphor, a literary cliche like "the cruelty of war" or  "the revolution that devours its children". Because one knows that it was not  God who created Man in his image, but rather that Man created God in his passion.So, not war is cruel, but the warrior, neither does the revolution devour, but its sons who so do- in fratricide- and it is not God who is  jealous, but his followers. The question at hand then is not God but religion. And religion, being a human institution of historical proportions, is  susceptible to change.
This may seem banal, and so it ought to be, but too often the facts elude us.

Whenever a fanatic Jew kills someone in the name of the God of Israel, the rabbis explain that Judaism sanctifies life - as if any organised religion sanctifies death and exhorts its adherents to kill. On the other hand there is always someone to assert that all religions, being absolute, are inevitably intolerant, and consequently must lead to murder, as if history has never known periods of tolerance, or that all religions today are of  necessity fanatic.
I have two arguments: first, that religions (mainly the major monotheisms) are (at total variance with their reputations)  in fact neutral in the political-social field of activity. Also, that it is possible to define those conditions in which religion can become pathogenic, and so to neutralise or limit its harmful potential.
To say that religion is neutral does not mean that religion is morally neutral. On the contrary, religion is a normative world-view with a moral code. The interesting question is what people do with this code. They do what they can within the limitations of time and space..  Religion is of itself neutral, politically and socially, in the sense of its practical effect on human behaviour.Therefore when comments are made about Islam, Judaism or Christianity I ask: which Islam, Judaism or Christianity? Is it the Islam of Ibn Khaldun or  that of Khomeini, the Judaism of  Martin Buber  - or Rabbi Levinger, the Christianity of Torquemada or  of Pope John 23rd? I think that we Israelis should understand this better than Westerners ,  because our culture is steeped in Biblical similes and parables.Our political left and right, Peace Now or Gush Emunim, each have their own bible. Who will aver that Jeremiah was less "religious" than Joshua ben Nun?
Religion then is no different than any other total world view system- nationhood, or class, or even liberty. "O Liberty, how many crimes are committed in your name", sighs Mme Roland as she goes to the guillotine set up by the Jacobins in revolutionary Paris. That was in the beautiful Place de la Concorde where liberty now smiles tolerantly.
One may also argue that major secular ideologies function as alternative religions, and this seems to be true. But this is tautological and therefore unconvincing, because if all is religion, where is religion, and how to counter the excesses of fanaticism? 

So to my other contention: at a post-graduate seminar at Tel Aviv University we sought a universal definition of  religious fundamentalism within 16th century  Christian Europe,a time of unbridled religious passion and  great barbarity. It is sufficient to recall that in one massacre during the religious wars of France, about 3000 Protestants were killed in Paris, and about 30,000 in the whole country (Saint Bartholomew's night, 1572). The anachronistic use of "fundamentalism" is deliberate, in that it enables us to identify structures across space and time as collective, religiously-inspired behaviour.The question is , is religious fundamentalism political or not? It is never a matter of theological content. The proof  lies in that out of those horrors, and based too on religious thought , we see at that time the emergence of religious Christian tolerance( c.f.: Miri Eliav Faldon and Eli Bar Navi, "The roots of religious tolerance in western culture", Zmanim, Historical Quarterly,Tel Aviv University and Zmora Beitan, no 57, winter 1996-7,pp 59-66).
The operative conclusion to be reached is to divorce politics from religion and religion from politics. Members of  the French "Catholic League" at the end of the 16th century  were political creatures, no less than the fanatics of the armed Islamic militias of Algeria or the Cahanists in Israel. None of them accept the existence of an autonomous  political arena, as  defined by Macchiavelli about 500 years ago.
The solution lies in preserving this arena for the political activity of the individual. In the Israeli reality it is difficult to attempt a separation of religion from politics, and not just because of coalition horse-trading or narrow-minded politicians.These are but symptoms of a complex reality, a legacy of our peculiar Jewish history.
Unlike  Christianity,  Judaism is a totally national religion, in which the very distinction between what is God's and what is Caesar's, between the spiritual and earthly swords, is foreign to its experience and spirit.Therefore our national identity is ethnic/religious. closer to a Serbian jus sanguinis than to the modern jus solis as derived from the French Revolution. This is why our constitution is a jumble of western liberalism and talmudic archaism, the result of weary compromises between the contradictory elements of our collective identity.This is why the hoped-for separation cannot be achieved surgically as in the West, but only through a  long and painful process which cannot but be a veritable kulturkampf.
Secular Israelis must internalise liberal and democratic values, study and defend them with no less passion than evinced by  religious Israelis in defence of their values.      The task is not easy,both because of the shallowness of Israeli secular culture, and because of the very nature of liberalism. After all, the liberal is by definition a rational being, one who doubts and is open to self-criticism. He lacks the herd instinct,  is not easily swayed and avoids the barricades. But he must understand that his  very existential shyness is a liability.His tolerance is misread as weakness, his readiness to listen to others understood as spinelessness, his rationalism held to be emptiness. The parable of the two wagons* genuinely worries him, as he is not  always sure of the contents of his own wagon. He must learn this, or he will forfeit the right to live in his own country.
Is God, then, a fanatic? Only if we permit him to be.