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Religious ritual is a way of structuring time so that we, not employers, the market or the media, are in control. Life needs its pauses, its chapter breaks, if the soul is to have space to breathe.

Jonathan Sacks

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Jonathan Sacks
Age: 72 †
Born: 1948
Born: March 8
Died: 2020
Died: November 7
Clergyman
Politician
Rabbi
Theologian
University Teacher
St Pancras
London
Jonathan Henry Sacks
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks
Jonathan H. Sacks
Baron Sacks
Yaakov Zvi
Jonathan Henry Sacks
Baron Sacks
Soul
Breaks
Needs
Breathe
Way
Market
Structuring
Time
Media
Chapter
Life
Control
Employers
Break
Pauses
Religious
Chapters
Space
Ritual

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Religiosity turns out to be the best indicator of civic involvement: it's more accurate than education, age, income, gender or race.
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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
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Israel is a democratic state with an independent judiciary, a free press and a diverse population of many cultures, religions and creeds.
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Happiness is not made by what we own. It is what we share.
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The message of Passover remains as powerful as ever. Freedom is won not on the battlefield but in the classroom and the home. Teach your children the history of freedom if you want them never to lose it.
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When we love and make loving commitments, we create families and communities within which people can grow and take risks, knowing that hands will be there to catch them should they fall.
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Volunteering has been undervalued in Britain for a long time. Often it has been seen as a kind of cut-price, amateur version of work that would be better done by the state. When politicians speak about it, people hear in the background the sound of budgets being cut.
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Governments cannot make marriages or turn feckless individuals into responsible citizens. That needs another kind of change agent.
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Marriage, sanctified by the bond of fidelity, is the nearest life gets to a work of art.
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Part of the beauty of Judaism, and surely this is so for other faiths also, is that it gently restores control over time. Three times a day we stop what we are doing and turn to God in prayer. We recover perspective. We inhale a deep breath of eternity.
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The Jewish festival of freedom is the oldest continuously observed religious ritual in the world. Across the centuries, Passover has never lost its power to inspire the imagination of successive generations of Jews with its annually re-enacted drama of slavery and liberation.
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A society in which there are high levels of voluntary activity will simply be a better, happier place than one where there are not.
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The meaning of the universe lies outside the universe.
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Britain, relative to the U.S., is a highly secular society. Philanthropy alone cannot fill the gap left by government cutbacks. And the sources of altruism go deep into our evolutionary past.
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Cyberspace can't compensate for real space. We benefit from chatting to people face to face.
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As the political leaders of Europe meet to save the euro and European Union, so should religious leaders.
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Jews know this in their bones. Our community could not exist for a day without its volunteers. They are the lifeblood of our organizations, whether they involve welfare, youth, education, care of the sick and elderly, or even protection against violence and abuse.
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Yahoo has gone too far in wrongfully accusing us of a conspiracy that doesn't exist. If they are having problems retaining engineers, they should be looking at the internal sources of employee dissatisfaction rather than trying to cover that up with this legal action.
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Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, is the holy of holies of Jewish time. It is that rarest of phenomena, a Jewish festival without food. Instead it is a day of fasting and prayer, introspection and self-judgment when, collectively and repeatedly, we confess our sins and pray to be written into God's Book of Life.
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