The connections between religion and violence

Susannah Heschel is the Eli Black Professor of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College. Like her famous theologian father, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, she became a notable thinker on religion. She has written books comparing Judaism with Christianity and is now looking at the history of Jewish scholarship and Islam.

At the 3rd Global Conference on World's Religions After September 11, Heschel spoke about the relationship between violence and religion.

When people use violence in the name of God and religion, Heschel says, they are forgetting that God's greatest wish for us is compassion.

"When I look at a fanatic I am not reminded of God. Instead I am afraid…of the rage, the power. Fanaticism takes our attention away from God and brings it instead to human beings who are trying to usurp the position of God. They want to be the arbiter of truth. They want to be the ones who declare God's will. They want to be the judges. The moral authority. The ones who bestow reward and punishment."

In Hebrew, the word for fanatic, comes from the root that means jealousy. And jealousy stems from intimacy.

"Intimacy is actually at the heart of violence, even as intimacy is also a hope for peace... And so perhaps we should worry about the passages in our scriptures that don't just speak of terror or violence or war or cruelty, but also the passages in our scriptures that speak of love."