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0872637
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A fellow scientist visited Bohr at his home and saw to his amazement that Bohr had fixed a horseshoe over the door for luck. 'Surely, Niels, you don't believe in that?' 'Of course not,' Bohr replied. 'But you see - the thing is that it works whether you believe in it or not.
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Jonathan Sacks |
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feb7d6c
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Genius is one per cent inspiration, ninety-nine per cent perspiration.
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Jonathan Sacks |
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8b1c615
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The Holocaust did not take place long ago and far away. It happened in the heart of rationalist, post-Enlightenment, liberal Europe: the Europe of Kant and Hegel, Goethe and Schiller, Beethoven and Brahms. Some of the epicentres of antisemitism were places of cosmopolitan, avant-garde culture like Berlin and Vienna. The Nazis were aided by doctors, lawyers, scientists, judges and academics. More than half of the participants at the Wannsee ..
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Jonathan Sacks |
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e03dc3e
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Wisdom tells us how the world is. Torah tells us how the world ought to be. Wisdom is about nature. Torah is about will.
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Jonathan Sacks |
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c0179bf
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Keriat haTorah therefore means not reading, but proclaiming the Torah, reading it aloud. The one who reads it has the written word in front of him, but for the rest of the gathering it is an experience not of the eye, but of the ear. The divine word is something heard rather than seen. Indeed, it was only with the spread of manuscripts, and the invention of printing in the fifteenth century, that reading become a visual rather than auditory..
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Jonathan Sacks |
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86da7ea
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What Jacob learned - and what we learn, hearing his story - is that love is not enough. We must also heed those who feel unloved.
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Jonathan Sacks |
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bf9a839
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It is as if the man said to him, "In the past, you struggled to be Esau. In the future you will struggle not to be Esau but to be yourself. In the past you held on to Esau's heel. In the future you will hold on to God. You will not let go of Him; He will not let go of you. Now let go of Esau so that you can be free to hold on to God."
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Jonathan Sacks |
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1b47100
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We will only understand the Torah if we recall that every other religion in the ancient world worshiped nature. That is where they found God, or more precisely, the gods: in the sun, the moon, the stars, the storm, the rain that fed the earth and the earth that gave forth food.
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Jonathan Sacks |
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a866b39
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To be a leader, you do not need a crown or robes of office. All you need to do is to write your chapter in the story, do deeds that heal some of the pain of this world, and act so that others become a little better for having known you. Live so that, through you, our ancient covenant with God is renewed in the only way that matters: in life. Moses' last testament to us at the very end of his days, when his mind might so easily have turned t..
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Jonathan Sacks |
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8ac1c16
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Undeniably, though, the greatest threat to freedom in the postmodern world is radical, politicised religion. It is the face of altruistic evil in our time.
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Jonathan Sacks |
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8bac488
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Do not think the connection between the law and the reason for the law is always direct, palpable, and immediate. He had taught his students to search for taamei hamitzvot, the reasons for the commands. But now he was teaching them something no less fundamental: the limits of reason. The human mind must learn humility. We cannot understand everything at once. There are elements of existence that, at any given time, are opaque to reason. Wis..
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Jonathan Sacks |
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75a03fc
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century
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Jonathan Sacks |
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2f918ae
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As Jews, Christians and Muslims, we have to be prepared to ask the most uncomfortable questions. Does the God of Abraham want his disciples to kill for his sake? Does he demand human sacrifice? Does he rejoice in holy war? Does he want us to hate our enemies and terrorise unbelievers? Have we read our sacred texts correctly? What is God saying to us, here, now? We are not prophets but we are their heirs and we are not bereft of guidance on ..
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Jonathan Sacks |
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007868d
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Civility is dying, and when it dies, civilisation itself is in danger.
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Jonathan Sacks |
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c1191cd
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The entire drama of Torah flows from this point of departure. Judaism remains God's supreme call to humankind to freedom and creativity on the one hand, and on the other, to responsibility and restraint - becoming God's partner in the work of creation.
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Jonathan Sacks |
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d85d470
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The degree of unity aspired to in the total society is incompatible with human freedom and the right to disagree. Politics should be the mediation, not the suppression, of conflict.
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Jonathan Sacks |
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13d73f0
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Dualism is what happens when cognitive dissonance becomes unbearable, when the world as it is, is simply too unlike the world as we believed it ought to be. In the words of historian Jeffrey Russell, dualism 'denied the unity and omnipotence of God in order to preserve his perfect goodness'.3 The God
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Jonathan Sacks |
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To the Judaic mind this is paganism, and it is never morally neutral. God creates order; man creates chaos--and the result is inevitably destructive.
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Jonathan Sacks |
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6846405
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When a human being makes many coins in a single mint, they all come out the same. God makes every human being in the same image, His image, yet they all emerge different.
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Jonathan Sacks |
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2370126
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This emphasis on verbal abuse is typical of the sages in their sensitivity to language as the creator or destroyer of social bonds. As Rabbi Eleazar notes, harsh or derogatory speech touches on self-image and self-respect in a way that other wrongs do not. What is more, as Rabbi Samuel bar Nahmani makes clear, financial wrongdoing can be rectified in a way that wounding speech cannot. Even after apology, the pain (and the damage to reputati..
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Jonathan Sacks |
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03b87a7
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The Torah is the world's great protest against empires and imperialism. There are many dimensions to this protest. One dimension is the protest against the attempt to justify social hierarchy and the absolute power of rulers in the name of religion. Another is the subordination of the masses to the state - epitomized by the vast building projects, first of Babel, then of Egypt, and the enslavement they entailed. A third is the brutality of ..
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Jonathan Sacks |
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2f78363
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Enlightenment thought was marked by two great attempts to ground ethics in something other than tradition. One belonged to the Scottish enlightenment - David Hume and Adam Smith - who sought it in emotion: the natural sympathy of human beings for one another.[8] The other was constructed by Immanuel Kant on the basis of reason. It was illogical to prescribe one ethical rule for some people and another for others. Reason is universal, argued..
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Jonathan Sacks |
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af4d6f4
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It is terrifying in retrospect to grasp how seriously the Torah took the phenomenon of xenophobia, hatred of the stranger. It is as if the Torah were saying with the utmost clarity: reason is insufficient. Sympathy is inadequate. Only the force of history and memory is strong enough to form a counterweight to hate.
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Jonathan Sacks |
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311d756
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History has no more unlikely heroes than the Israelites of Moses' day. Capricious, fractious, wayward, hardly able to see tomorrow, let alone the unfolding drama of the centuries, they became, in Herman Melville's evocative phrase, the bearers of "the ark of the liberties of the world."
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Jonathan Sacks |
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7c993b4
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In the American Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson translated this idea into the famous words: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness..." What is interesting about this sentence is that "these truths" are anything but self-evident. They would have been regarded ..
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Jonathan Sacks |
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a0c4cf2
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The Torah asks, why should you not hate the stranger? Because you once stood where he stands now. You know the heart of the stranger because you were once a stranger in the land of Egypt. If you are human, so is he. If he is less than human, so are you. You must fight the hatred in your heart as I once fought the greatest ruler and the strongest empire in the ancient world on your behalf. I made you into the world's archetypal strangers so ..
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Jonathan Sacks |
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1183520
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Her behaviour became a model. Not surprisingly, the rabbis inferred from her conduct a strong moral rule: "It is better that a person throw himself into a fiery furnace rather than shame his neighbour in public."[4] This acute sensitivity to humiliation displayed by Tamar permeates much of Rabbinic thought:"
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Jonathan Sacks |
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If this is so, then the placement of the Mishkan at the heart of the camp suggests that societies need, in the public domain, a constant reminder of the presence of God. That, after all, is why the Mishkan appears in Exodus, not Genesis. Genesis is about individuals, Exodus about societies. Significant thinkers believed likewise. John Locke, the pioneer of toleration, thought so. He considered that atheists were ineligible for English citiz..
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Jonathan Sacks |
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43e34e6
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I find it exceptionally moving that the Bible should cast in these heroic roles two figures at the extreme margins of Israelite society: women, childless widows, outsiders. Tamar and Ruth, powerless except for their moral courage, wrote their names into Jewish history as role models who gave birth to royalty - to remind us, in case we ever forget, that true royalty lies in love and faithfulness, and that greatness often exists where we expe..
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Jonathan Sacks |
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e802701
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In this way the emancipated people of Athens became a tyrant; and their government, the pioneer of European freedom, stands condemned with a terrible unanimity by all the wisest of the ancients.[16] In a recent, magisterial work on justice, Yale professor Nicholas Wolterstorff has argued the same proposition on philosophical grounds.[17] Our whole Western concept of justice, founded on the idea of human rights, is built on religious foundat..
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Jonathan Sacks |
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684a388
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The book of Exodus is the West's meta-narrative of hope. It tells an astonishing story of how a group of slaves were liberated from the mightiest empire of the ancient world. Theologically, its message is even more revolutionary: the supreme power intervenes in history in defence of the powerless.
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Jonathan Sacks |
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e2302ce
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Power destroys the powerless and powerful alike, oppressing the one while corrupting the other. If we are to build a society with a human face, we must always choose the way of Exodus, with its message of hope and human dignity.
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Jonathan Sacks |
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0aae454
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The Torah, in other words, offers a striking way out of the dilemmas of multiculturalism. It suggests that the citizens of a nation see themselves as co-creators of society seen as the home we build together.
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Jonathan Sacks |
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there is a rabbinic principle: "Scripture does not depart from its plain meaning."
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Jonathan Sacks |
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That is why three of the four matriarchs found themselves unable to conceive other than by a miracle.
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Jonathan Sacks |
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The story has a sequel. In 1989, the Polish mathematician Martin Nowak produced a programme that beats Tit-for-Tat. He called it Generous. It overcame one weakness of Tit-for-Tat, namely that when you meet a particularly nasty opponent, you get drawn into a potentially endless and destructive cycle of retaliation, which is bad for both sides. Generous avoided this possibility by randomly but periodically forgetting the last move of its oppo..
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Jonathan Sacks |
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The law of the sin offering reminds us that we can do harm unintentionally, and this can have consequences, both physical and psychological. The best way of putting things right is to make a sacrifice: to do something that costs us something.
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Jonathan Sacks |
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0d1553e
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He is announcing to the most powerful ruler of the ancient world that these people may be your slaves but they are My children. The story of the exodus is as much political as theological. Theologically, the plagues showed that the Creator of nature is supreme over the forces of nature. Politically it declared that over every human power stands the sovereignty of God, defender and guarantor of the rights of humankind.
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Jonathan Sacks |
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0ad4dec
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In one of the world-changing moments of history, social criticism was born in Israel simultaneously with institutionalization of power. No sooner were there kings in Israel, than there were prophets mandated by God to criticize them when they abused their power.
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Jonathan Sacks |
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e1ba193
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One way or another, the alphabet created a possibility that never existed before, namely of a society of mass, even universal, literacy. With only twenty-two symbols, it could be taught, in a relatively short time, to everyone. We see evidence of this at many places in Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible. Isaiah says "All your children shall be taught of the Lord and great shall be the peace of your children" (Isaiah 54:13), implying universal educati..
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Jonathan Sacks |
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c537a84
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But it is surely no coincidence that Israel became the first - indeed the only - nation in history to receive its laws before its land. A law that could be easily written and read, and that could be transported anywhere, was the expression of the God who was everywhere, in the desert as well as in the land.
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Jonathan Sacks |
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88637d8
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Functionally, a priest in the ancient world was one who could read and write. A kingdom of priests is therefore a nation of universal literacy.
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Jonathan Sacks |
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698e291
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Torah - God's law and teaching - was not a code written by a distant king, to be imposed by force. Nor was it an esoteric mystery understood by only a scholarly elite. It was to be available to, and intelligible by, everyone.
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Jonathan Sacks |
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15fa502
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A true parent is one who fights battles on our behalf when we are young and defenceless, but who, once we have matured, gives us the inner strength to fight for ourselves.
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Jonathan Sacks |