Quotes from Jonathan Sacks

S]ocial life cannot be reduced to a series of market exchanges. We need covenants as well as contracts; meanings as well as preferences; loyalties, not just temporary associations for mutual gain. These things go to the heart of who we are. They are the 'signals of transcendence' in the midst of a fast-paced world. For life to have personal meaning, there must be people who matter to us, and for whom we matter, unconditionally and nonsubstitutably.

Indeed there is none so self-righteous as one who carries the burden of self-perceived victimhood.

Only in a just society can justice flourish. Only in a free society can individual liberty be sustained.

Rashi notes that the mourning for Aaron was more widespread than for Moses (of Aaron it says, "The entire house of Israel grieved" [Num. 20:29]; in the case of Moses the word "entire" is missing [Deut. 34:8]). The reason is that Aaron was a man of peace; Moses was a man of truth. We love peace, but truth is sometimes hard to bear. People of truth have enemies as well as friends.

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.

May God give you Of the dew of the heavens, And the richness of the earth, And abundant grain and wine. May nations serve you And peoples bow down to you. Rule over your brothers, And may your mother's sons bow down to you. (Gen. 27:28–29)

Faith is not certainty. It is the courage to live with uncertainty.

When religion turns men into murderers, God weeps.

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 those who need our love.

In a previous essay, I pointed to the strange fact that biblical Judaism, a religion of 613 commands, contains no word that means "obey." Instead, it uses the word shema, which means, to hear, to listen, to attend, to understand, to internalise, and to respond.

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.

Religion' comes from the Latin ligare, meaning to join or bind. Religion binds people within the group – Christian to Christian, Muslim to Muslim, Jew to Jew.

The people he is addressing are the children of those he led out of Egypt. They are more used to freedom than their parents, who were slaves. But they have not yet entered the land, or created a society, or been forced to work for a living. For forty years they have had their needs supplied by God. So he speaks to them in very simple terms. Follow God and be blessed, or follow your own inclinations and be cursed. This is the way one might speak to a child. As

In general, in the Mosaic books, style mirrors substance. The way something is said is often connected to what is being said.

Judaism is supremely a religion of freedom – not freedom in the modern sense, the ability to do what we like, but in the ethical sense of the ability to choose to do what we should, to become co-architects with God of a just and gracious social order. The former leads to a culture of rights, the latter to a culture of responsibilities: freedom as responsibility.

So, for instance, the law of the red heifer – purification from contact with the dead – occurs just before the death of Miriam and Aaron, as if to say: Bereavement and grief interfere with our contact with God but this does not last forever. We can become pure again. The story explains the law, and the law illuminates the story.

But few nations other than Israel set it as their highest task to understand why the law is as it is. Shema is the Torah's call to moral growth.

If God created the world, then his existence must be compatible with the world. If he created human intelligence, his existence must not be an insult to the intelligence. If the greatest gift he gave humanity was freedom, then religion could not establish itself by coercion.

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:

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.

The corrupt not only believe they can fool their fellow humans; they believe they can fool God as well. When moral standards begin to break down in business, finance, trade, and politics, a kind of collective madness takes hold of people. The sages said Adam bahul al mamono (Pesa?im 11b), meaning, roughly, "Money makes us do wild things.

Memory is my story, the past that made me who I am, of whose legacy I am the guardian for the sake of generations yet to come. Without memory, there is no identity, and without identity, we are mere dust on the surface of infinity.

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.

For each of us there is a Jordan we will not cross. Once