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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

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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
Wealth
Unmistakable
Struggle
Idols
Responsibility
Consequences
Pleasure
Esteem
Experience
Consequence
Today
Achievement
Without
Commitment
Self
Sex

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Science takes things apart to see how they work. Religion puts things together to see what they mean.
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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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When everything that matters can be bought and sold, when commitments can be broken because they are no longer to our advantage, when shopping becomes salvation and advertising slogans become our litany, when our worth is measured by how much we earn and spend, then the market is destroying the very virtues on which in the long run it depends.
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With wealth comes responsibility.
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Why did God create mankind? Because God likes stories.
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Frequent worshippers are also significantly more active citizens. They are more likely to belong to community organizations, especially those concerned with young people, health, arts and leisure, neighborhood and civic groups and professional associations.
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In the post-enlightenment Europe of the 19th century the highest authority was no longer the Church. Instead it was science. Thus was born racial anti-Semitism, based on two disciplines regarded as science in their day - the 'scientific study of race' and the Social Darwinism of Herbert Spencer and Ernst Haeckel.
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We do not always appreciate the role the Queen has played in one of the most significant changes in the past 60 years: the transformation of Britain into a multi-ethnic, multi-faith society. No one does interfaith better than the Royal family, and it starts with the Queen herself.
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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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God is back and Europe as a whole still doesn't get it. It is our biggest single collective cultural and intellectual blind spot.
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The royals - all of them, especially Prince Philip and Prince Charles - have done outstanding work with the faith communities.
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Science will explain how but not why. It talks about what is, not what ought to be. Science is descriptive, not prescriptive it can tell us about causes but it cannot tell us about purposes. Indeed, science disavows purposes.
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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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Hope, even more than necessity, is the mother of invention.
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We believe that what we possess we don't ultimately own. God is merely entrusting it to us. And one of the conditions of that trust is that we share what we have with those who have less. So, if you don't give to people in need, you can hardly call yourself a Jew. Even the most unbelieving Jew knows that.
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Europe is dying. That is one of the unsayable truths of our time. We are undergoing the moral equivalent of climate change and no one is talking about it.
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If you want a free society, teach your children what oppression tastes like. Tell them how many miracles it takes to get from here to there. Above all, encourage them to ask questions. Teach them to think for themselves.
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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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In an ecology of love, people can relate in trust and face the future without fear. They do not need to play it safe. They can take uncertainty in their stride.
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Jews read the books of Moses not just as history but as divine command. The question to which they are an answer is not, What happened? but rather, How then shall I live? And it's only with the exodus that the life of the commands really begins.
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