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On Shabbat, all melakha, which is defined as "creative work," is forbidden. On Shabbat we are passive rather than active. We become creations, not creators. We renounce making in order to experience ourselves as made."
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Jonathan Sacks |
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A people driven by hate are not - cannot be - free.
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Jonathan Sacks |
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6215a2e
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God is beyond time, but human beings live within time. We cannot take ourselves out of, say, the twenty-first century and project ourselves a thousand years from now. Inescapably, we live in the now, not eternity.
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Jonathan Sacks |
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379ca8a
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Compare the Torah's treatment of free will with that of the great philosophical or scientific theories. For these other systems, freedom is almost invariably an either/or: either we are always free or we never are.
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Jonathan Sacks |
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The belief that freedom is an all-or-nothing phenomenon - that we have it either all the time or none of the time - blinds us to the fact that there are degrees of freedom. It can be won and lost, and its loss is gradual. Unless the will is constantly exercised, it atrophies and dies. We then become objects, not subjects, swept along by tides of fashion, or the caprice of desire, or the passion that becomes an obsession.
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Jonathan Sacks |
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01cd889
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This is the question of questions for biblical faith. Paganism then, like secularism now, had no such doubt. Why should anyone expect justice in the world? The gods fought. They were indifferent to mankind. The universe was not moral. It was an arena of conflict. The strong win, the weak suffer, and the wise keep far from the fray. If there is no God or (what amounts to the same thing) many gods, there is no reason to expect justice. The qu..
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Jonathan Sacks |
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6fc7d66
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A fundamental principle of Jewish leadership is intimated here for the first time: a leader does not need faith in himself, but he must have faith in the people he is to lead.
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Jonathan Sacks |
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Judaism is a protest: against empires, hierarchical social structures, and the beliefs that held them in place.
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Jonathan Sacks |
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6662f9d
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Sacrifice is at the heart of both politics and family. Both parent and citizen understand themselves as subject to a demand for sacrifice. They recognise the demand as legitimate because they live in the world of meanings that the sacrificial act affirms. Sacrifice is, accordingly, the way of being in a meaningful world. Sacrifice, we say, is an act of love. In love, we are willing to sacrifice, and through that sacrifice we simultaneously ..
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Jonathan Sacks |
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3fa0707
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One of the more surprising things about lashon hara, evil speech, in Judaism, is that it refers to speech that is true. False speech, libel, or slander, are something else and fall under a different prohibition.
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Jonathan Sacks |
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4f9392d
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This paradox suggests that Judaism has a different understanding of language than the one that prevails in the West and had its origins in ancient Greece. The philosophers, heirs to the Greeks, tended to think of language as conveying information. What matters is whether it is true or false.
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Jonathan Sacks |
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394254a
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All social animals need to find ways of keeping the group together, managing disputes, appeasing frayed emotions, helping individuals within the group recover their poise after a bruising encounter. Primates do this by grooming, stroking one another. But this degree of intimacy is possible only in a relatively small group. Humans, by using language as a substitute for embrace, can manage more relationships and thus build larger groups.
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Jonathan Sacks |
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1bf7dab
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speech was seen in Judaism not simply as a means of conveying information, though it is that as well, but also and essentially as a means of holding the group together without coercive force.
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Jonathan Sacks |
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e013d8e
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Evil speech kills three people: the one who says it, the one who listens to it, and the one about whom it is said.
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Jonathan Sacks |
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My thesis that the practice of non-violence requires belief in divine vengeance will be unpopular with many Christians, especially theologians in the West. To the person who is inclined to dismiss it, I suggest imagining that you are delivering a lecture in a war zone.... Among your listeners are people whose cities and villages have been first plundered, then burned and levelled to the ground, whose daughters and sisters have been raped, w..
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Jonathan Sacks |
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224cd7c
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That is because speech is much more than the conveying of information. It is the substance of relationship, and when this is poisoned, trust and the social bond are undermined. We use the phrase "character assassination" precisely because some form of violence is being committed, even if it is verbal rather than physical."
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Jonathan Sacks |
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61e0cce
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the truth that there is not one single system that can do justice to the moral life. What we need is a combination of several. Attempt to reduce them to "one very simple principle," in John Stuart Mill's phrase, and you will fail to do justice to morality itself."
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Jonathan Sacks |
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b88c376
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The concept of equality we find in the Torah specifically and Judaism generally is not an equality of wealth: Judaism is not communism. Nor is it an equality of power: Judaism is not anarchy. It is fundamentally an equality of dignity. We are all equal citizens in the nation whose sovereign is God.
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Jonathan Sacks |
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209b572
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Holiness belongs to all of us when we turn our lives into the service of God, and society into a home for the Divine Presence.
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Jonathan Sacks |
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3b5df63
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as Katharine Hepburn majestically said to Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen, "Nature, Mr Allnut, is what we were put on earth to rise above."
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Jonathan Sacks |
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9f09306
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The rabbinic account of how God taught Adam and Eve the secret of making fire is the precise opposite of the story of Prometheus. God seeks to confer dignity on the beings He made in His image as an act of love. He does not hide the secrets of the universe from us. He does not seek to keep mankind in a state of ignorance or dependence.
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Jonathan Sacks |
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We have no idea where the world is going, except that it's going there very fast.
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Jonathan Sacks |
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Marriage, sanctified by the bond of fidelity, is the nearest life gets to a work of art.
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Jonathan Sacks |
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The twenty-first century is, and will remain, the Age of Insecurity.
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Jonathan Sacks |