I work with Holocaust survivors in New York City. After a session, one of my clients handed me this document to read:

Isaac Abravanel was the major figure of the Spanish community during the last decades of the Inquisition of Spain. An ordained Rabbi, master Torah commentator, and an unusual philosopher of the Jewish religion, he was also a confidant of the King and Queen of Spain; Ferdinand and Isabella. He wrote the following response to the Edict of Expulsion which he presented to the royal family as his farewell address.

Edict Response to the King and Queen of Spain

By Isaac Abravanel

“Your Majesties, Abraham Senior and I thank you for this opportunity to make our last statement on behalf of the Jewish communities that we represent. Counts, dukes, and marquees of the court, cavaliers and ladies…it is no great honor when a Jew is asked to plead for the safety of his people. But it is a greater disgrace when the King and Queen of Castile and Aragon, indeed of all Spain, have to seek their glory in the expulsion of a harmless people. I find it very difficult to understand how every Jewish man, woman, and child can be a threat to the Catholic faith. Very, very strong charges.

We destroy you? It is indeed the opposite. Did you not admit in this edict to having confined all Jews to restricted quarters and to having limited our legal and social privileges, not to mention forcing us to wear shameful badges? Did you no tax us oppressively? Did you not terrorize us day and night with your diabolical Inquisition? Let me make this matter perfectly clear to all present: I will not allow the voice of Israel to be stilled on this day. Hear, O heavens, and give ear, King and Queen of Spain, for I, Isaac Abravanel speaks unto you. I and my family are descended directly from King David. True royal blood, the blood of the Messiah, runs in my veins. It is my inheritance, and I proclaim it now in the name of the God of Israel.

On behalf of my people, the people of Israel, the chosen of God, I declare them blameless and innocent of crimes declared in this edict of abomination. The crime, the transgression, is for you, not us, to bear. The unrighteous decree you proclaim today will be your downfall. And this year, which you imagine to be the year of Spain’s greatest glory, will become of Spain’s greatest shame. As honor is the reward of individual virtue, so too worldly renown of kings and queens is their proper due for noble deeds. So, too, when unseemly acts are committed by an individual, that person’s reputation suffers. And when kings and queens commit shameful deeds, they do themselves great harm. As it is said, the greater the person who errs, the greater the error.

Errors, if recognized early, can be corrected. The loosened brick that supports the structure can be reinstated into position. So, too, a mistaken edict if caught in time can be undone. But religious zeal has undermined reason, and misguided counsel has perverted sound judgment. The error of the edict will soon become irreversible as the very deed which it proclaims. Yes, my king and queen, hear me well: error, error, error, profound and uncorrectable, the likes of which Spain has never seen before. You and you alone are responsible.

As arms measure the might of a nation, so arts and letters measure its finer sensibilities. Yes, you have humbled the Moslem infidel with the force of your army, proving yourselves able in the art of war. But what of your inner state of mind? By what right do you Inquisitors go about the countryside burning books by the thousands in public bonfires? By what authority do churchmen now want to burn the immense Arabic library of this great Moorish palace and destroy its priceless manuscripts? By whose rights? By whose authority? Why it is by your authority, my king and queen?

In your heart and hearts, you distrust the power of knowledge, and your respect only power. With us Jews it is different. We Jews cherish knowledge immensely. In our homes and in our prayer houses, learning is a lifelong passion; it is at the core of our being, it is the reason, according our sages for which we were created. Our fierce love of learning could have profited the more from our community’s advancement and exchange of knowledge. I say to you we could have helped each other.

As we are reminded of our own powerlessness, so your nation will suffer from the forces of disequilibrium that you have set in motion. For centuries to come, your descendants will pay dearly for your mistake of the present. As it is might of arms you most admire, you shall verily become a nation of conquerors – lusting after gold and spoils, living by the sword and ruling with a fist of nails. Yet you shall become a nation of illiterates; your institutions of learning, fearing the heretical contamination of alien ideas from other lands, and other people, will no longer be respected. In the course of time, the once great name of Spain will become a whispered byword among the nations: Spain, the poor ignorant has-been Spain, the nation which showed so much promise and yet accomplished so little. And then one day Spain will ask itself: what has become of us? Why are we a laughing stock among nations?
And the Spaniards of that day will look into their past and ask themselves why this came to be. And those who are honest will point to this day and this age as the time when their fall as a nation began. And the cause of their down-fall will be shown to be none other than their revered Catholic sovereigns, Ferdinand and Isabella, conquerors of the Moors, expellers of the Jews, founders of the Inquisition and destroyers of the inquiring Spanish mind.

This edict is a testimony to Christian weakness. It shows that we Jews are capable of winning the centuries – old arguments between the two faiths. It explains why there are “false Christians.” That it, Christians whose faith has been shaken by the arguments by the Jew who knew better. It explains why the Christian nation would be as injured as it claims to be. Desiring to silence Jewish opposition, the Christian majority has decided not to argue any further, but rather to eliminate the source of dangerous counter-arguments. The opportunity to the Jews is not to be granted after today. This is the last opportunity on Spanish soil to state our case. In these last few months of freedom granted to me, by the King and Queen, I as the spokesman of Spanish Jewry – well will dwell in one point of theological dispute. I will leave you with a parting message although you will not like it.

The message is simple, the historical people of Israel, as it has traditionally constituted itself, is the final judge of Jesus and his claims to be the Messiah. As the Messiah was destined to save Israel, so it must be for Israel to decide when it has been saved. Our answer, the only answer that matters, is that Jesus was a false Messiah. As long as the people of Israel live, as long as Jesus’ own people continue to reject him, your religion can never be validated as true. You can convert all the peoples and savages of the World, but as long as you have not converted the Jew, you have proved nothing except that you can persuade the uniformed. We leave you with this comforting knowledge; for although you can dispose of our power, we have the higher truth. Although you can dispose of our persons, you cannot dispose of our sacred souls and the historical truth to which only we bear witness.

Listen, King and Queen of Spain, for on this day you have joined the list of evil-doers against the remnant of the House of Israel. If you seek to destroy us, your wishes will come for naught, for the greater and more powerful rulers have tried to finish with us and all have failed. Indeed, we shall prosper in other lands far from here. For wherever we go, the God of Israel is with us. And as for you King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, God’s hand will reach out and punish the arrogance in your heart.

Woe to you, authors of iniquity. For generations to come, it will be told and retold how unkind was your faith and how blind was your vision. But more that your acts of hatred and fanaticism, the courage of the people of Israel will be remembered for standing up to the might of imperial Spain, clinging to the religious inheritance of our fathers, resisting your enticements and your untruths.
Expel us, drive us from this land that we cherish no less than you do. But we shall remember you, King and Queen of Spain, as our Holy Books remember those who sought our harm. We Jews shall haunt your accomplishments on the pages of history – and the memories of our sufferings will inflict greater damage upon your name than anything you can ever hope to do to us.

We shall remember you and your vile Edict of Expulsion forever.

I find this document just as telling today as it was 5 centuries ago. It seems as if we have not come very far in our understanding of religion. We worship, pray, and do what we think is good for our religion, but we still maliciously label and divide each other based on religion.

Back then Christianity had blood on its hands, today radical Islam has blood on its hands. While I find some of the language of Isaac Abravanel haughty regarding Judaism as the sole benefactor of God’s presence and attention and proclaiming Jesus a false messiah, I feel his words are an honest cry for tolerance. What I find interesting is that we shun language that declares one religion, exclusive and true, yet the consequences are the same as they were 500 years ago. We still kill, rape, humiliate, and destroy people for religious beliefs. We still cannot tolerate dissenting opinions. The only difference is semantics. The language is subtler, political, nuanced. And when it’s not, when we see the full wrath of hatred based on religion it usually is accompanied by environmental causes such as poverty, oppressive governments, worthlessness, and their resulting manifestations.

Religion has done nothing but divide. I don’t care if you are Jewish, Christian, Buddhist, Muslim, or Hindu, someone is either on the giving or receiving end of religious hatred. It has been so since time immemorial. It will continue to be so for many years to come.

I am a religious Jew. I converted three years ago. I grew up a Methodist Protestant. I eventually chose Judaism because it worked for me. It made sense. It was not because I believed in the bottom of my soul that Judaism is a superior religion. I converted to Judaism because it’s framework, beliefs, and lifestyle spoke to me. Aside from a spiritual connection, Judaism was very practical for me.

When human beings go through catastrophic times or epochs, we tend to get more religious. We hunker down with like-minded people and put up strong boundaries. It’s the strength in numbers philosophy, it’s mob rules, it’s martial law. We are in one of those epochs right now. All of us.

So the insecurity in such times is not because of a religious danger, it is the very practical dangers of safety for our family and ourselves, finances and money, job security, a roof over our heads, meaning and happiness in our lives, and down-right fear. When we fear, we turn to our different Gods and pray. When we fear we blame, we project, we scapegoat. It is human. I see it everyday with my clients on personal levels. I see it with myself from time to time. It is no different on macro levels between nations and religions.

In order to heal the world from religious hatred that manifest with such historical events as the Inquisition, the Holocaust, and 911, we must not look at religion, but at the happiness and security of the people committing crimes against humanity. It can always be broken down to human indicators such emotions and psychology. Fear, greed, anger. Then you ask why fear, why greed, why anger? Then you say how do we alleviate that fear, greed, or anger? Then we say what do we do to get there? I don’t mean to simplify very complex human and world conditions, but it is that simply.

Radical Islam hates Americans and Jews and they are willing to do anything in their power to destroy us. They do not accept any other religion, they do not accept freedom of speech, they do not accept dissenting opinions. But, below all this virulence there are men, human beings. These are angry men afraid to lose power over themselves and their immediate surroundings. These are angry men who are sexually, spiritually, financial, and culturally frustrated. These are angry men who cannot integrate the break-neck changes that our world is going through and vent their very human frailties in violence. Unfortunately, the inculcation is deep and it will take years, decades, perhaps a century before the many oppressed angry Muslims can differentiate between oppressive propaganda and the faults of themselves. Only then will they be able make changes for the better. We will have to use military force to protect ourselves, but, unless we acknowledge the humanity in their violence, we will only be buying time instead of long-term change.

We have all been inculcated by the beliefs of our parents, religions, cultures, and countries, but when hatred turns violent and consistent, when hatred is couched in religious radicalism, the root causes have nothing to do with religion and everything to do with fear.

We, a democratic society, for better or worse, have climbed on the shoulders of our forbears; we have been entitled to a philosphy and government that has been working towards tolerance for centuries. We have been entitled to a complex society of competing interests that has made our life better. Whoever you are in the United States and whatever your difficulty, there is a support system in place. And if not, you have the freedom to build a support system. And where there is injustice, you have the freedom to take it on and fight. This creates an introspective nation that is always trying to improve itself, warts and all.

For countries with consistent and historic religious violence towards themselves and other, introspection is nurtured through the maturation of democracy.

God Bless America.