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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 25e8bdc | 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 | Jonathan Sacks | ||
| 92e30c5 | 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 .. | Jonathan Sacks | ||
| 6b7bd05 | 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. | Jonathan Sacks | ||
| d0ef28d | 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.. | Jonathan Sacks | ||
| ffa3c03 | 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. | Jonathan Sacks | ||
| 66f01fa | 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.. | Jonathan Sacks | ||
| 905e792 | Leadership demands two kinds of courage: the strength to take a risk, and the humility to admit when a risk fails. | Jonathan Sacks | ||
| 5403fe5 | 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.. | Jonathan Sacks | ||
| c9cd059 | 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, | Jonathan Sacks | ||
| c8b6f9d | 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. | Jonathan Sacks | ||
| 849cd3a | 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 | Jonathan Sacks | ||
| 53f9b0b | 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. | Jonathan Sacks | ||
| 2cb0aa5 | 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.. | Jonathan Sacks | ||
| 899dec4 | Winston Churchill's great remark that "success is going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm." | Jonathan Sacks | ||
| 205168d | 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.. | Jonathan Sacks | ||
| 1c4770f | 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.. | Jonathan Sacks | ||
| 3bc7d9f | 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. | Jonathan Sacks | ||
| ea17045 | For each of us there is a Jordan we will not cross. Once | Jonathan Sacks | ||
| 52aa68f | 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. | Jonathan Sacks | ||
| da5c20b | 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 | Jonathan Sacks | ||
| bfcee49 | 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.. | Jonathan Sacks | ||
| 2d8c1ec | 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. | Jonathan Sacks | ||
| 0872637 | 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. | Jonathan Sacks | ||
| feb7d6c | Genius is one per cent inspiration, ninety-nine per cent perspiration. | Jonathan Sacks | ||
| 8b1c615 | 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 .. | Jonathan Sacks | ||
| e03dc3e | Wisdom tells us how the world is. Torah tells us how the world ought to be. Wisdom is about nature. Torah is about will. | Jonathan Sacks | ||
| c0179bf | 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.. | Jonathan Sacks | ||
| 86da7ea | What Jacob learned - and what we learn, hearing his story - is that love is not enough. We must also heed those who feel unloved. | Jonathan Sacks | ||
| bf9a839 | 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." | Jonathan Sacks | ||
| 1b47100 | 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. | Jonathan Sacks | ||
| a866b39 | 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.. | Jonathan Sacks | ||
| 8ac1c16 | 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. | Jonathan Sacks | ||
| 8bac488 | 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.. | Jonathan Sacks | ||
| 75a03fc | century | Jonathan Sacks | ||
| 2f918ae | 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 .. | Jonathan Sacks | ||
| 007868d | Civility is dying, and when it dies, civilisation itself is in danger. | Jonathan Sacks | ||
| c1191cd | 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. | Jonathan Sacks | ||
| d85d470 | 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. | Jonathan Sacks | ||
| 13d73f0 | 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 | Jonathan Sacks | ||
| 551bcc4 | 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. | Jonathan Sacks | ||
| 6846405 | 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. | Jonathan Sacks | ||
| a504c59 | Most significant of all, perhaps, is that, of the 613 laws in the Torah, Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks points out, not one uses the word obey. God, the rabbi says, does not impose the intractable on Israel. God uses the word shema. Attend to. | Joan D. Chittister | ||
| 2370126 | 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.. | Jonathan Sacks | ||
| 03b87a7 | 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 .. | Jonathan Sacks |