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the recent novel by his wife Rebecca Goldstein, entitled 36 Arguments for the Existence of God, subtitled A Work of Fiction). The
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Jonathan Sacks |
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Torah is God's book of humanity, and each of us is a chapter in its unfinished story.
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Jonathan Sacks |
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In an age in which rulers wrote history in the form of triumphal inscriptions, the Israelites alone recorded their failures more vividly than their successes.
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Jonathan Sacks |
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A decent society will be one in which enemies do not allow their rancour or animosity to prevent them from coming to one another's assistance when they need help.
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Jonathan Sacks |
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all the bad things that had happened to him were necessary if the intended outcome was to occur.
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Jonathan Sacks |
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Why is it that we say we see something distinctive in these lives and not, say, in a politician hoping for our vote, or a lawyer doing her job, or even a soldier risking his life for the sake of his country? Because the scientists and philosophers are to this extent right, that people generally act on the basis of rational self-interest. Consciously or otherwise, we seek to hand on our genes to the next generation. Individually and as group..
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Jonathan Sacks |
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A civilisation that had space for science but not religion might achieve technological prowess. But it would not respect people in their specificity and particularity. It would quickly become inhuman and inhumane. Think of the French Revolution, Stalinist Russia and Communist China, and you need no further proof.
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Jonathan Sacks |
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throughout the contemporary world, the more religious the group the higher its birth rate, and we see the power of religion to sustain community over time.
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Jonathan Sacks |
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Although we looked hard at all the available data and case studies back to early Greece and India, we still have not been able to identify a single case of any non-religious population retaining more than two births per woman for just a century. Wherever religious communities dissolved, demographic decline followed suit.
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Jonathan Sacks |
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Everything I have learned about faith in a lifetime tells me that the science of creation - cosmology - wondrous though it is, takes second place to the sheer wonder that God could take this risk of creating a creature with the freedom to disobey him and wreck his world. There is no faith humans can have in God equal to the faith God must have had in humankind to place us here as guardians of the vastness and splendour of the universe. We e..
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Jonathan Sacks |
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First, in the seventeenth century, came the secularisation of knowledge in the form of science and philosophy. Then in the eighteenth century came the secularisation of power by way of the American and French Revolutions and the separation - radical in France, less doctrinaire in the United States - of church and state. In the nineteenth century came the secularisation of culture as art galleries and museums were seen as alternatives to chu..
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Jonathan Sacks |
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Homo sapiens, discovering God singular and alone, discovered the human being singular and alone. There is no greater dignity than that
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Jonathan Sacks |
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Religion was the robe of sanctity worn to mask the naked pursuit of power.
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Jonathan Sacks |
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Dualism, as we have noted, comes in many forms: between mind and body, in-group and out-group, and between the higher and lower instincts between which we must constantly choose. It may be that binary opposition is one of the fundamental ways in which we understand the world. But divide humanity into absolute categories of good and evil, in which all the good is on one side and all the evil on the other, and you will see your own side as go..
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Jonathan Sacks |
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Faith is about seeing the miraculous in the everyday, not about waiting every day for the miraculous.
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Jonathan Sacks |
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If God created the world, then his existence must be compatible with the world. If he created human intelligence, his existence must not be an insult to the intelligence. If the greatest gift he gave humanity was freedom, then religion could not establish itself by coercion.
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Jonathan Sacks |
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our views of the natural are shaped by our ideas of the supernatural.
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Jonathan Sacks |
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the simplest definition of the Abrahamic faith. It is not our task to conquer or convert the world or enforce uniformity of belief. It is our task to be a blessing to the world. The use of religion for political ends is not righteousness but idolatry.
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Jonathan Sacks |
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It was Machiavelli, not Moses or Mohammed, who said it is better to be feared than to be loved: the creed of the terrorist and the suicide bomber. It was Nietzsche, the man who first wrote the words 'God is dead', whose ethic was the will to power. To invoke God to justify violence against the innocent is not an act of sanctity but of sacrilege. It is a kind of blasphemy. It is to take God's name in vain.
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Jonathan Sacks |
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Douglas Mock has assembled the animal behavioural evidence in More than Kin and Less than Kind.6 In the Galapagos Islands young fur seals attack their newborn siblings, seizing them by the throat and tossing them into the air, killing them unless the mother seal intervenes.
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Jonathan Sacks |
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The consumer society, directed at making us happy, achieves the opposite. It encourages us to spend money we do not have, to buy things we do not need, for the sake of a happiness that will not last.
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Jonathan Sacks |
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But beyond a basic minimum, the relationship between income and happiness is slight. Research bears out Maslow's analysis that the higher needs are love and belonging, esteem and self-actualisation. The most significant determinants of happiness are strong and rewarding personal relationships, a sense of belonging to a community, being valued by others and living a meaningful life. These are precisely the things in which religion specialise..
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Jonathan Sacks |
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In Gwoza, Nigeria, one of the survivors of a massacre by the Islamist group Boko Haram described to a reporter how the radicals calmly killed their fellow Muslims one by one. 'They told us they were doing God's work even though all the men they shot in front of me were Muslims. They seemed happy.'7
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Jonathan Sacks |
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Just as it is necessary to rob your enemies of their humanity, so you have to find a way of relinquishing responsibility for the evil you are about to commit. You must define yourself as a victim. It follows that you, in committing murder, even genocide, are merely acting in self-defence. It is the victim who is responsible. This was Hitler's constant and deeply paradoxical claim. As Jeffrey Herf points out, he and his propagandists had to ..
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Jonathan Sacks |
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When religious faith goes, five things happen, gradually and imperceptibly. First there is a loss of belief in human dignity and the sanctity of life.
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Jonathan Sacks |
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Camus's answer is the Greek myth of Sisyphus. Sisyphus was the king who stole the secrets of the gods, in return for which he was condemned by Zeus to spend his life laboriously rolling an immense boulder up a hill, only to watch it roll down again and having to repeat the labour endlessly, never achieving either the final goal or rest from it. That, says Camus, is life as 'the absurd'. And that is what we are condemned to. We can either be..
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Jonathan Sacks |
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Applying inflexible rules to a constantly shifting political landscape destroys societies. Communism was like that. In free societies, people change, culture changes, the world beyond a nation's borders does not stand still. So a politician will find that what worked a decade or a century ago does not work now. In politics it is easy to get it wrong, hard to get it right.
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Jonathan Sacks |
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The emphasis on choice, freedom and responsibility is one of the most distinctive features of Jewish thought. It is proclaimed in the first chapter of Genesis in the most subtle way. We are all familiar with its statement that God created man "in His image, after His likeness." Seldom do we pause to reflect on the paradox. If there is one thing emphasized time and again in the Torah, it is that God has no image. Hence the prohibition agains..
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Jonathan Sacks |
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Leadership demands two kinds of courage: the strength to take a risk, and the humility to admit when a risk fails.
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Jonathan Sacks |
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Religion in the form of polytheism entered the world as the vindication of power. Not only was there no separation of church and state; religion was the transcendental justification of the state. Why was there hierarchy on earth? Because there was hierarchy in heaven. Just as the sun ruled the sky, so the pharaoh, king or emperor ruled the land. When some oppressed others, the few ruled the many, and whole populations were turned into slave..
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Jonathan Sacks |
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The trouble was that they also argued that the worst thing you can have is certainty. Conviction, they said, leads to tyranny. On this they were wrong, indeed self-contradictory. Hayek was certain that freedom was preferable to slavery,
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Jonathan Sacks |
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Who am I? Why am I here? How then shall I live? These are questions to which the answer is prescriptive not descriptive, substantive not procedural. The result is that the twenty-first century has left us with a maximum of choice and a minimum of meaning.
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Jonathan Sacks |
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What all four stories tell us is that there comes a time for each of us when we must make an ultimate decision as to who we are. It is a moment of existential truth. Lot is a Hebrew, not a citizen of Sodom. Eliezer is Abraham's servant, not his heir. Joseph is Jacob's son, not an Egyptian of loose morals. Moses is a prophet, not a priest. To say yes to who we are, we have to have the courage to say no to who we are not. Pain
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Jonathan Sacks |
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A leader should never try to be all things to all people. A leader should be content to be what he or she is. Leaders must have the strength to know what they cannot be if they are to have the courage to be themselves.
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Jonathan Sacks |
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Judaism, Christianity and Islam are not just three different religions or civilisations. Had this been so, the devotees of each might still consider themselves a chosen people. More generously, each might have come to Niels Bohr's conclusion that the opposite of a trivial truth is a falsehood, but the opposite of a profound truth may be another profound truth. There is more than one way of being-in-the-world under the sovereignty of God. Mo..
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Jonathan Sacks |
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Winston Churchill's great remark that "success is going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm."
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Jonathan Sacks |
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To understand a book, one needs to know to which genre it belongs: Is it history or legend, chronicle or myth? To what question is it an answer? A history book answers the question: what happened?; a book of cosmology - be it science or myth - answers the question: how did it happen? [...]if we seek to understand the Torah, we must read it as Torah - as law, instruction, teaching, guidance. Torah is an answer to the question: how shall we l..
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Jonathan Sacks |
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The message of listening to and wrestling with God] is conveyed in a series of passages whose meaning does not lie on the surface of the text, but discloses itself only to those who listen to what is going on beneath the words: the unspoken cry, the implicit appeal, the unheard tears, the unarticulated pain. Those who wish to learn to listen to God must learn to listen to other people - to the kol demama daka, "the still, small voice" of th..
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Jonathan Sacks |
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Religion in the form of polytheism entered the world as the vindication of power. Not only was there no separation of church and state; religion was the transcendental justification of the state.
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Jonathan Sacks |
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For each of us there is a Jordan we will not cross. Once
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Jonathan Sacks |
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the Internet has a disinhibition effect: you can be ruder to someone electronically than you would be in a face-to-face encounter, since the exchange has been depersonalised. Read any Comments section on the Web, and you will see what this means: the replacement of reason by anger, and argument by vilification. Civility is dying, and when it dies, civilisation itself is in danger.
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Jonathan Sacks |
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The rights of man come not from the generosity of the state but from the hand of God. John F. Kennedy, Inaugural Address, 20 January 1961
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Jonathan Sacks |
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A free political order is possible only when the fundamental political act is a mutual promise between governor and governed. But no human being can be trusted to keep his or her word when he or she has access to power - a power not available to opponents. Sooner or later, if not in the lifetime of the ruler, then in that of his or her descendants, there is an inescapable risk of tyranny. Freedom can only be guaranteed in a political system..
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Jonathan Sacks |
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As Talmon writes, 'When a regime is by definition regarded as realizing rights and freedoms, the citizen becomes deprived of any right to complain that he is being deprived of his rights and liberties.'21 Whereas English liberty set limits to the state, French liberty was to be imposed by the state. If need be, said Rousseau, we must force people to be free.
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Jonathan Sacks |