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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 2f78363 | 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.. | Jonathan Sacks | ||
| af4d6f4 | 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. | Jonathan Sacks | ||
| 311d756 | 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." | Jonathan Sacks | ||
| 7c993b4 | 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 .. | Jonathan Sacks | ||
| a0c4cf2 | 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 .. | Jonathan Sacks | ||
| 1183520 | 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:" | Jonathan Sacks | ||
| d340ba0 | 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.. | Jonathan Sacks | ||
| 43e34e6 | 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.. | Jonathan Sacks | ||
| e802701 | 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.. | Jonathan Sacks | ||
| 684a388 | 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. | Jonathan Sacks | ||
| e2302ce | 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. | Jonathan Sacks | ||
| 0aae454 | 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. | Jonathan Sacks | ||
| a18024c | there is a rabbinic principle: "Scripture does not depart from its plain meaning." | Jonathan Sacks | ||
| 615b237 | That is why three of the four matriarchs found themselves unable to conceive other than by a miracle. | Jonathan Sacks | ||
| b212a9a | 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.. | Jonathan Sacks | ||
| f0feabe | 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. | Jonathan Sacks | ||
| 0d1553e | 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. | Jonathan Sacks | ||
| 0ad4dec | 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. | Jonathan Sacks | ||
| e1ba193 | 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.. | Jonathan Sacks | ||
| c537a84 | 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. | Jonathan Sacks | ||
| 88637d8 | 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. | Jonathan Sacks | ||
| 698e291 | 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. | Jonathan Sacks | ||
| 15fa502 | 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. | Jonathan Sacks | ||
| 7a1e280 | 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." | Jonathan Sacks | ||
| e301122 | A people driven by hate are not - cannot be - free. | Jonathan Sacks | ||
| 6215a2e | 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. | Jonathan Sacks | ||
| 379ca8a | 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. | Jonathan Sacks | ||
| f3cec95 | 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. | Jonathan Sacks | ||
| 01cd889 | 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.. | Jonathan Sacks | ||
| 6fc7d66 | 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. | Jonathan Sacks | ||
| 5f8ab72 | Judaism is a protest: against empires, hierarchical social structures, and the beliefs that held them in place. | Jonathan Sacks | ||
| 6662f9d | 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 .. | Jonathan Sacks | ||
| 3fa0707 | 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. | Jonathan Sacks | ||
| 4f9392d | 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. | Jonathan Sacks | ||
| 394254a | 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. | Jonathan Sacks | ||
| 1bf7dab | 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. | Jonathan Sacks | ||
| e013d8e | Evil speech kills three people: the one who says it, the one who listens to it, and the one about whom it is said. | Jonathan Sacks | ||
| d8d0b9c | 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.. | Jonathan Sacks | ||
| 224cd7c | 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." | Jonathan Sacks | ||
| 61e0cce | 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." | Jonathan Sacks | ||
| b88c376 | 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. | Jonathan Sacks | ||
| 209b572 | 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. | Jonathan Sacks | ||
| 3b5df63 | 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." | Jonathan Sacks | ||
| 9f09306 | 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. | Jonathan Sacks |