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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.

Jonathan Sacks

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Jonathan Sacks
Age: 72 †
Born: 1948
Born: March 8
Died: 2020
Died: November 7
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St Pancras
London
Jonathan Henry Sacks
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Dreams are where we visit the many lands and landscapes of human possibility and discover the one where we feel at home. The great religious leaders were all dreamers.
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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 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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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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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.
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Faced with destruction, the Jewish people survived.
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I do not want to suggest that you have to be religious to be moral.
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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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Religion creates community, community creates altruism and altruism turns us away from self and towards the common good... There is something about the tenor of relationships within a religious community that makes it the best tutorial in citizenship and good neighborliness.
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Make space in your life for the things that matter, for family and friends, love and generosity, fun and joy. Without this, you will burn out in mid-career and wonder where your life went.
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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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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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The twenty-first century is, and will remain, the Age of Insecurity.
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Focus on the mind and the soul. Read. Study. Enrol in a course of lectures. Pray. Become a member of a religious congregation. Study the Bible or other ancient works of wisdom.
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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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Values are tapes we play on the Walkman of the mind: any tune we choose so long as it does not disturb others.
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If we are to cherish freedom, and to guard it, we must remember what the alternative is: the bread of affliction and the bitter herbs of slavery.
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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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The idols of today are unmistakable - self-esteem without achievement, sex without consequences, wealth without responsibility, pleasure without struggle and experience without commitment.
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No great achiever - even those who made it seem easy - ever succeeded without hard work.
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