Following the Enlightenment it was assumed that religion would die out and the world would become completely secularized. That has not happened and, in fact, religion has reemerged as a powerful, and sometimes destructive, force -- not the actual source of conflict but the fault line along which people take sides in a conflict. Because of the growing significance of reli-gion in world events, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks believes that the twenty-first century will be dominated by a "politics of identity": The important questions for which people will increasingly be seeking answers are "Who am I?" and "Why am I here?" The difficulty that arises, however, when people try to answer questions of identity is that they inevitably do so in terms of "us" and "them."

Rabbi Sacks pointed out that for most of recorded history most people lived among other people who were much like themselves. Now, however, people "live in the constant and conscious presence of difference." The current world situation, he said, is not unlike the situation in Europe after the Refor-mation, when the great wars of religion were fought. That fighting was ultimately controlled by the rise of secular nation states, which contrived to get the people of each country to live together under one government in a state of civil peace.

In an age of globalization a similar solution is not available to us because there is no possibility of having one world govern-ment. Moreover, the wars we are fighting now are not like the earlier religious wars because they are not always waged along distinct lines of national boundaries, and they are being fought with weapons that were never intended to be weapons -- like jumbo jets flown into buildings. Doctrines of toleration and the separation of church and state that have kept the peace in the United States will not work in the cultural, economic, and political climate of the twenty-first century; and recent inter-ventions in Lebanon, Bosnia, the Sudan, and Iraq demonstrate that these doctrines are not easily transplanted to other parts of the world.

Human beings have always found it difficult to live with difference. Two responses to difference have been tried in the past, without success. The most ancient response to differ-ence is tribalism: my tribe, my nation, my god against your tribe, your nation, your god. Tribalism turns difference into a source of conflict.

The second response to difference, going back to Plato, is universalism. Universalism proposes that there is only one truth about the essential nature of things, true for all people in every time and place. Universalism levels difference. Univer-salism, which Rabbi Sacks refers to as "Plato's ghost," is not only an inadequate response in our present situation, it is also a very dangerous one, and always has been. Whose truth is the universal truth?: "If I am right, then you are wrong, and you must be converted to my way of thinking." Out of this point of view comes the worst kind of injustice -- crusades, forced baptisms, inquisition, pogroms, and genocide. Two universal civilizations clashed on September 11, 2001.

Rabbi Sacks suggests that we may discover what God is ask-ing of us in this new and dangerous situation by hearing something new in the ancient stories that the three Abra-hamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) share. He believes that we may find in these sacred stories the answer that tribalism and universalism failed to provide. He proposes that we listen specifically to the first twelve chapters of the Book of Genesis.

The Hebrew Bible "tells the story of a rather tempestuous love affair between God and a particular people," but the first eleven chapters of Genesis are not about this people at all; the first eleven chapters are about a universal society, and the Bible begins with two universal premises: Every human being is created in the image of God, and God has made a covenant with every human being. The movement in Genesis from the universal to the particular is, in fact, the opposite of Plato's move from the particular to the universal. The Hebrew Bible is "the great counter-Platonic narrative in Western civilization." The Hebrew Bible is the first statement of monotheism in human history, but Judaism is a "particularist monotheism": The God of Abraham is the God of all humanity, but the religion of Abraham is not the religion of all humanity.

Chapter eleven of Genesis provides the vital transition from the universal to the particular in the story of the Tower of Babel, which is the subject of the illustration on the cover of The Dignity of Difference. Those who aspired to build the Tower represented the first totalitarian, imperialist, funda-mentalist society because they attempted to impose a single truth on the entire world. Such a unity of belief was never God's intention, so God once again called upon one man and one woman. This time he separated them from their home and asked them to embark on a journey that would render them different. God asked Abraham and Sarah to "bear the burden of difference." Through this distinct covenantal relationship with God, Abraham and Sarah were called to teach the world the importance and the value of difference.

God created human beings in God's image, but each human being is different. The great religious challenge that faces our world is to see God's image in someone who is not one's own image. God wants all people to be unique and to have a unique relationship with God. That is the "dignity of difference." Living in the world that God wants, a world in which differences are respected, would be like living in security in one's own home while being moved by the beauty of other places.

Rabbi Sacks concluded his remarks by affirming that "one who is confident in his own faith is not threatened by another faith, but is enlarged by it."