Quotes from Jonathan Sacks

At three in the morning we finished by dancing together. We knew we were different, we knew that there were deep divides between our respective faiths, but we had become friends. Perhaps that is all we should seek. Friends do not have to agree in order to stay friends. And friendships can sometimes help heal the world.

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.

Physically, the taller you are the more you look down on others. Morally, the reverse is the case. The more we look up to others, the higher we stand. For us, as for God, greatness is humility.

Our contemporary consumer is constructed in the first-person singular: I want, I need, I must have. There are many things we can achieve in the first-person singular but one we cannot, namely, sim?a – because sim?a is the joy we share, the joy we have only because we share.

Moses would not have won an election. He was not that kind of leader. Instead Moses summons the people to humility and responsibility.

Moses insists on three things. First, we are free. The choice is ours. Blessing or curse? Good or evil? Faithfulness or faithlessness? You decide, says Moses. Never has freedom been so starkly defined, not just for an individual but for a nation as a whole.

In this world, the optimists have it, not because they are always right, but because they are positive. Even when wrong, they are positive, and that is the way of achievement, correction, improvement, and success. Educated, eyes-open optimism pays; pessimism can only offer the empty consolation of being right.

Without law, society becomes chaos. But without narrative, law itself loses contact with the realities of human life. It becomes impersonal and at times inhuman.

The appearance of antisemitism in a culture is the first symptom of a disease, the early warning sign of collective breakdown.

Moses' words still challenge us today. God has given us freedom; it is for us to use it to create a just, generous, gracious society. God does not do it for us but He teaches us how it is done.

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.

Winston Churchill's great remark that "success is going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.

Life expectancy in the UK in 1900 was forty-seven years for men, fifty for women, and in 2017, seventy-nine years for men and eighty-three for women, an increase of between two and three extra years in every decade. We are, quite simply, better off, better-informed, healthier and freer than any previous generation.

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.

all the bad things that had happened to him were necessary if the intended outcome was to occur.

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 education.

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.

What would be seen as charity in other legal systems is, in Judaism, a strict requirement of the law, enforceable by the courts.

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.

Torah is God's book of humanity, and each of us is a chapter in its unfinished story.

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.

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.

the one thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history.

Cruelty to animals is wrong, not because animals have rights but because we have duties. The duty not to be cruel is intended to promote virtue, and the primary context of virtue is the relationship between human beings. But virtues are indivisible.