Jonathan Sacks > Quotes

“We should challenge the relativism that tells us there is no right or wrong, when every instinct of our mind knows it is not so, and is a mere excuse to allow us to indulge in what we believe we can get away with. A world without values quickly becomes a world without value.”
― Jonathan Sacks

“The test of faith is whether I can make space for difference. Can I recognize God's image in someone who is not in my image, who language, faith, ideal, are different from mine? If I cannot, then I have made God in my image instead of allowing him to remake me in his.”
― Jonathan Sacks, The Dignity of Difference: How to Avoid the Clash of Civilizations

“We know – it has been measured in many experiments – that children with strong impulse control grow to be better adjusted, more dependable, achieve higher grades in school and college and have more success in their careers than others. Success depends on the ability to delay gratification, which is precisely what a consumerist culture undermines. At every stage, the emphasis is on the instant gratification of instinct. In the words of the pop group Queen, “I want it all and I want it now.” A whole culture is being infantilised.”
― Jonathan Sacks

“To whom is an international corporation answerable? Often they do not employ workers. They outsource manufacturing to places far away. If wages rise in one place, they can, almost instantly, transfer production to somewhere else. If a tax regime in one country becomes burdensome, they can relocate to another. To whom, then, are they accountable? By whom are they controllable? For whom are they responsible? To which group of people other than shareholders do they owe loyalty? The extreme mobility, not only of capital but also of manufacturing and servicing, is in danger of creating institutions that have power without responsibility, as well as a social class, the global elite, that has no organic connection with any group except itself.”
― Jonathan Sacks

“God has given us many faiths but only one world in which to co-exist. May your work help all of us to cherish our commonalities and feel enlarged by our differences.”
― Jonathan Sacks

“The idols of today are unmistakable -
self-esteem without achievement,
sex without consequences,
wealth without responsibility,
pleasure without struggle and
experience without commitment.”
― Jonathan Sacks

“We encounter God in the face of a stranger. That, I believe, is the Hebrew Bible’s single greatest and most counterintuitive contribution to ethics. God creates difference; therefore it is in one-who-is-different that we meet god. Abraham encounters God when he invites three strangers into his tent.”
― Jonathan Sacks, The Dignity of Difference: How to Avoid the Clash of Civilizations

“In a world without forgiveness, evil begets evil, harm generates harm, and there is no way short of exhaustion or forgetfulness of breaking the sequence. Forgiveness breaks the chain. It introduces into the logic of interpersonal encounter the unpredictability of grace. It represents a decision not to do what instinct and passion urge us to do. It answers hate with a refusal to hate, animosity with generosity. Few more daring ideas have ever entered the human situation. Forgiveness means that we are not destined endlessly to replay the grievances of yesterday. It is the ability to live with the past without being held captive by the past. It would not be an exaggeration to say that forgiveness is the most compelling testimony to human freedom.”
― Jonathan Sacks

“Those who believe that liberal democracy and the free market can be defended by the force of law and regulation alone, without an internalised sense of duty and morality, are tragically mistaken.”
― Jonathan Sacks

“Broadcasting is being replaced by narrowcasting. The difference is that broadcasting speaks to a mixed public, exposing them to a range of views. Narrowcasting speaks to a targeted public and exposes them only to facts and opinions that support their prejudices. It fragments a public into a set of sects of the like-minded.”
― Jonathan Sacks, Not in God's Name: Confronting Religious Violence

“A primordial instinct going back to humanity's tribal past makes us see difference as a threat. That instinct is massively dysfunctional in an age in which our several destinies are interlinked. Oddly enough, it is the market -- the least overtly spiritual of concepts -- that delivers a profoundly spiritual message: that it is through exchange that difference becomes a blessing, not a curse. When difference leads to war, both sides lose. When it leads to mutual enrichment, both sides gain.”
― Jonathan Sacks, The Dignity of Difference: How to Avoid the Clash of Civilizations

“Peace can be agreed around the conference table, but unless it grows in ordinary hearts and minds, it does not last. It may not even begin”
― Jonathan Sacks

“God does not want us to understand the suffering of the innocent but to fight for a world in which the innocent no longer suffer.”
― Jonathan Sacks, Exodus: The Book of Redemption

“In an age of fear, moderation is hard to find and harder to sustain. Who wants to listen to a nuanced argument, when what we want is someone to relieve us from the burden of thought and convince us that we were right all along? So people mock. They blame. They caricature. They demonise. In an age of anxiety, few can hear the still small voice that the Bible tells us is the voice of God.”
― Jonathan Sacks, The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning

“So meaning is made, not just discovered. That is what religion for the most part is: the constant making and remaking of meaning, by the stories we tell, the rituals we perform and the prayers we say. The stories are sacred, the rituals divine commands, and prayer a genuine dialogue with the divine. Religion is an authentic response to a real Presence, but it is also a way of making that presence real by constantly living in response to it. It is truth translated into deed.”
― Jonathan Sacks, The Great Partnership: God, Science and the Search for Meaning

“Why did God create mankind? Because God likes stories.”
― Jonathan Sacks

“If we cannot create peace or justice or compassion within the family we will be unable to do so within the nation or the world. Not until Joseph forgives his brothers and is reconciled with them can the story move on to the larger canvas of history.”
― Jonathan Sacks, Genesis: The Book of Beginnings

“When human beings try to become more than human, they quickly become less than human.”
― Jonathan Sacks, Genesis: The Book of Beginnings

“DO YOU believe,” the disciple asked the rabbi, “that God created everything for a purpose?”
“I do,” replied the rabbi.
“Well,” asked the disciple, “why did God create atheists?”
The rabbi paused before giving an answer, and when he spoke his voice was soft and intense. “Sometimes we who believe, believe too much. We see the cruelty, the suffering, the injustice in the world and we say: ‘This is the will of God.’ We accept what we should not accept. That is when God sends us atheists to remind us that what passes for religion is not always religion. Sometimes what we accept in the name of God is what we should be fighting against in the name of God.”
-Chief Rabbi Emeritus [of the United Synagogues of the British Commonwealth] Jonathan Sacks”
― Jonathan Sacks

“Just as the natural environment depends on biodiversity, so the human environment depends on cultural diversity, because no one civilization encompasses all the spiritual, ethical and artistic expressions of mankind.”
― Jonathan Sacks, The Dignity of Difference: How to Avoid the Clash of Civilizations

“One who is not in my image is nonetheless in God’s image”
― jonathan sacks, Not in God's Name: Confronting Religious Violence

“I fear for the future of the West if it loses its faith. You cannot defend Western freedom on the basis of moral relativism, the only morality left when we lose our mooring in a sacred ontology or a divine-human covenant. No secular morality withstood Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia. No secular morality today has the force to withstand the sustained onslaught of ruthless religious extremism. Neither market economics nor liberal democracy has the power, in and of itself, to inspire people to make sacrifices for the common good.”
― Jonathan Sacks, The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning

“Now is the time for Jews, Christians and Muslims to say what they failed to say in the past: We are all children of Abraham. And whether we are Isaac or Ishmael, Jacob or Esau, Leah or Rachel, Joseph or his brothers, we are precious in the sight of God. We are blessed. And to be blessed, no one has to be cursed. God’s love does not work that way. Today God is calling us, Jew, Christian and Muslim, to let go of hate and the preaching of hate, and live at last as brothers and sisters, true to our faith and a blessing to others regardless of their faith, honouring God’s name by honouring his image, humankind.”
― Jonathan Sacks, Not in God's Name: Confronting Religious Violence

“Science takes things apart to see how they work. Religion puts things together to see what they mean.”
― Jonathan Sacks

“When my late father died — now I'm in mourning for my late mother — that sense of grief and bereavement suddenly taught me that so many things that I thought were important, externals, etc., all of that is irrelevant. You lose a parent, you suddenly realize what a slender thing life is, how easily you can lose those you love. Then out of that comes a new simplicity and that is why sometimes all the pain and the tears lift you to a much higher and deeper joy when you say to the bad times, "I will not let you go until you bless me.”
― Jonathan Sacks

“Nowadays… deals are transactional rather than personal. Instead of placing your faith in a person, you get lawyers to write safeguards into the contract. This is an historic shift from a trust economy to a risk economy. But trust is not a dispensable luxury. It is the very basis of our social life. Many scholars believe that capitalism had religious roots because people could trust other people who, feeling that they were answerable to God, could be relied on to be honest in business. A world without trust is a lonely and dangerous place.”
― Jonathan Sacks

“Theology creates an anthropology. Discovering God, singular and alone, the first monotheists discovered the human person singular and alone. Monotheism internalises what dualism externalises. It takes the good and bad in the human situation, the faith and the fear, the retribution and the forgiving, and locates them within each of us, turning what would otherwise be war on the battlefield into a struggle within the soul. ‘Who is a hero?’ asked the rabbis, and replied, ‘One who conquers himself.’ This is the moral drama that has been monotheism’s contribution to the civilisation of the West: not the clash of titans on the field of battle, but the quiet inner drama of choice and will, restraint and responsibility.”
― Jonathan Sacks, Not in God's Name: Confronting Religious Violence

“Love your neighbor. Love the stranger. Hear the cry of the otherwise unheard. Liberate the poor from their poverty. Care for the dignity of all. Let those who have more than they need share their blessings with those who have less. Feed the hungry, house the homeless, and heal the sick in body and mind. Fight injustice, whoever it is done by and whoever it is done against. And do these things because, being human, we are bound by a covenant of human solidarity, whatever our color or culture, class or creed. These are moral principles, not economic or political ones. They have to do with conscience, not wealth or power. But without them, freedom will not survive. The free market and liberal democratic state together will not save liberty, because liberty can never be built by self-interest alone. I-based societies all eventually die. Ibn Khaldun showed this in the fourteenth century, Giambattista Vico in the eighteenth, and Bertrand Russell in the twentieth. Other-based societies survive. Morality is not an option. It’s an essential.”
― Jonathan Sacks, Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times

“Only in fiction are the great evils committed by caricatures of malevolence: Darth Vader, Lord Voldemort, Sauron or the Joker. In real history the great evils are committed by people seeking to restore a romanticised golden age, willing to sacrifice their lives and the lives of others in what they regard as a great and even holy cause. In some cases they see themselves as ‘doing God’s work’. They ‘seem happy’. That is how dreams of utopia turn into nightmares of hell.”
― Jonathan Sacks, Not in God's Name: Confronting Religious Violence

“If God were always visible, humans could not exist at all. “No one can see Me and live,” says God. “If we continue to hear the voice of God, we will die,” say the Israelites at Sinai. But if God is always invisible, hidden, imperceptible, then what difference does His existence make? It will always be as if He were not there. The answer to this dilemma is holiness. Holiness represents those points in space and time where God becomes vivid, tangible, a felt presence. Holiness is a break in the self-sufficiency of the material world, where infinity enters space and eternity enters time. In relation to time, it is Shabbat. In relation to space, it is the Tabernacle. These, in the Torah, are the epicentres of the sacred. We can now understand what makes them holy. Shabbat is the time when humans cease, for a day, to be creators and become conscious of themselves as creations. The Tabernacle is the space in which humans cease to be masters – “fill the earth and subdue it” – and become servants. Just as God had to practise self-restraint to make space for the finite, so human beings have to practise self-restraint to make space for the infinite. The holy, in short, is where human beings renounce their independence and self-sufficiency, the very things that are the mark of their humanity, and for a moment acknowledge their utter dependence on He who spoke and brought the universe into being. The universe is the space God makes for man. The holy is the space man makes for God. The secular is the emptiness created by God to be filled by a finite universe. The holy is the emptiness in time and space vacated by humans so that it can be filled by the infinite presence of God.”
― Jonathan Sacks, Leviticus:The Book of Holiness