Quotes from Jonathan Sacks

No one emerges well in this story, which is there to tell us that in the long run, individual piety is unsustainable without collective moral responsibility.

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.

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.

This is one of only two instances in the whole Torah in which the words lo tov, "not good," appear. The other is in Genesis (2:18), where God says, "It is not good [lo tov] for man to be alone." We cannot lead alone. We cannot live alone. To be alone is not good.

Douglas Mock has assembled the animal behavioural evidence in More than Kin and Less than Kind.6 In the Galapagos Islands young fur seals attack their newborn siblings, seizing them by the throat and tossing them into the air, killing them unless the mother seal intervenes.

Religion has lost many of the functions it once had. To explain the world, we have science. To control it, we have technology. To negotiate power, we have democratic politics. To achieve prosperity, we have a market economy. If we are ill, we go to a doctor, not a priest. If we feel guilty, we can go to a psychotherapist; we have no need of a confessor.

The Hebrew Bible is a sustained protest against empires and their attempt to impose a human unity on God's created diversity.

Katharine Hepburn said it best. 'Nature', she says majestically to Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen, 'is what we are put in this world to rise above.' The

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.

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 question does not arise.

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 these fateful issues.

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.

Power works by division, influence by multiplication. Power, in other words, is a zero-sum game: the more you share, the less you have. Influence is a non-zero-sum game: the more you share, the more you have.

Civility is dying, and when it dies, civilisation itself is in danger.

Kant had disproved the ontological argument. Hume had shown that for any supposed miracle, the evidence that it had not happened was always greater than the evidence that it had. Darwin had shown the error in the 'argument from design'.

Abraham's hopes and fears are ours.

Seek the welfare of the city to which I have exiled you and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its prosperity you shall prosper" (Jer. 29:7) – the first statement in history of what it is to be a creative minority.

When Jacob was chosen, Esau was not rejected. God does not reject. "Though my mother and father might abandon me, the Lord will take me in" (Psalms 27:10). Chosenness means two things: intimacy and responsibility. God holds us close and makes special demands on us. Beyond that, God is the God of all mankind – the Author of all, who cares for all.

Always choose influence rather than power. It helps change people into people who can change the world.

We have become lonely selves in search of purely personal fulfilment. But that surely must be wrong. Life alone is only half a life. One spent pursuing the satisfaction of desire is less than satisfying and never all we desire. So it is worth reminding ourselves that there is such a thing as ethics, and it belongs to the life we live together and the goods we share – the goods that only exist in virtue of being shared.

The consumer society, directed at making us happy, achieves the opposite. It encourages us to spend money we do not have, to buy things we do not need, for the sake of a happiness that will not last.

Jewish law is concerned not only with protecting the rights of those who have been wronged, but also helping wrongdoers rebuild their future. Guilt, in Judaism, is about acts, not persons. It is the act, not the person, that is condemned.

He once said: "In Israel, in order to be a realist, you must believe in miracles."3 To put it at its simplest: In Egypt, where the source of life was the Nile, you looked down. In Israel, where the source of life is rain, you had no choice but to look up.

is not necessary to delegitimize, call out, or cancel your opponents. It is better, simply, to persuade them.