The Power of Ideas

Words of Faith and Wisdom

Jonathan Sacks

• Publisher: Hodder Faith
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781399800044
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religious Biographies

Britain's most authentically prophetic voice - The Daily Telegraph 'The choice with which humankind is faced is between the idea of power and the power of ideas.' From his appointment as Chief Rabbi in 1991, through to his death in November 2020, Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks made an incalculable contribution not just to the religious life of the Jewish community but to the national conversation - and increasingly to the global community - on issues of ethics and morality.Commemorating the first anniversary of his death, this volume brings together a compelling selection of Jonathan Sacks' BBC Radio Thought for the Day broadcasts, Credo columns from The Times, and a range of articles published in the world's most respected newspapers, along with his House of Lords speeches and keynote lectures.First heard and read in many different contexts, these pieces demonstrate with striking coherence the developing power of Sacks' ideas, on faith and philosophy alike. In each instance he brings to bear deep insights into the immediate situation at the time - and yet it as if we hear him speaking to us afresh, giving us new strength to face the challenges and complexities of today's world.These words of faith and wisdom shine as a beacon of enduring light in an increasingly conflicted cultural climate, and prove the timeless nature and continued relevance of Jonathan Sacks' thought and teachings.One of the great moral thinkers of our time - Robert D. Putnam, author of Bowling Alone

Part One

Thought for the Day

The following Thought for the Day reflections were first broadcast on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

Religious Tolerance and Globalisation

4 April 2008

‘Our love of God must lead us to a love of humanity.’

Last night Tony Blair gave a major lecture on faith and globalisation, and later this year he’ll be teaching a course on the same subject in America, at Yale University. And it’ll be interesting to compare the responses, because this is one area in which Britain and America are extraordinarily different. In Britain, as Prime Minister, Tony Blair never spoke in public about his religious beliefs despite the fact that he was, and is, a deeply religious man. Famously one of his aides said, ‘We don’t do God.’

In America, despite its principled separation of church and state, the situation is exactly the opposite. Every single American President has spoken about God in their Inaugural Address, from Washington’s first in 1789 to today. So much so that Eisenhower was reputed to have said that an American President has to believe in God – and it doesn’t matter which God he believes in.

Every nation has to find its own way to tolerance. Some find it by talking about God, others by not talking about God. That was the real difference between the French and American revolutions. As Alexis de Tocqueville said in the early nineteenth century: ‘In France I saw religion and liberty marching in opposite directions. In America, I saw them walking hand in hand.’

There is no one way of charting the relationship between religion and public life; but equally there is no way of avoiding the fact that religion has an impact on public life, whether people talk about it or not.

The real question, which has echoed time and again through the corridors of history, is whether we can find ways of living together, despite the fact that we can’t find ways of believing or worshipping together.

That is what the Bible teaches in its very first chapter, when it says that we are all, every one of us, in the image of God. Our love of God must lead us to a love of humanity.

I find it extraordinary that in an age in which globalisation is forcing us together, all too often, across the globe, faith is driving us apart. We should be fighting environmental destruction, political oppression, poverty and disease, not fighting one another, least of all in the name of God whose image we all bear.

That is why I believe the time has now come, even in Britain, to bring a message of religious tolerance into the public square. For if the voice of reconciliation does not speak, the voices of extremism will.

The Age of Greed

3 October 2008

‘The real test of a society is not the absence of crises, but whether we come out of them cynical and disillusioned, or strengthened by our rededication to high ideals.’

Next week in the Jewish community we’ll observe Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the holiest day of the Jewish year. We’ll spend the whole day in synagogue, fasting, confessing our sins, admitting what we did wrong, and praying for forgiveness.

Something like that seems to me essential to the health of a culture. Often, we see things go wrong. Yet rarely do we see someone stand up, take responsibility and say: ‘I was wrong. I made a mistake. I admit it. I apologise. And now let us work to put it right.’

Instead, we do other things. We deny there’s a problem in the first place. Or, if that’s impossible, we blame someone else, or say, ‘It’s due to circumstances beyond our control.’ The result is that we lose the habit of being honest with ourselves.

In America in 1863, in the midst of the civil war, Abraham Lincoln proclaimed a national day of fasting and prayer. It was an extraordinary thing to do. Lincoln, after all, was fighting for a noble cause, the abolition of slavery. What did he or those on his side have to atone for?

Yet America was being torn apart, so he asked the nation to set aside one day for reflection and prayer. ‘It is the duty of nations as well as of men’, the proclamation said, ‘to confess their sins and transgressions, in humble sorrow, yet with assured hope that genuine repentance will lead to mercy and pardon.’ It was America’s Day of Atonement.

The result was that two years later Lincoln was able, in his Second Inaugural, to deliver one of the great healing speeches of all time, calling on Americans ‘to bind up the nation’s wounds’, and care for those who had suffered during the war and were still suffering.

We’re living through tough times globally, and we’ll need all the inner strength we have to survive the turbulence, learn from the mistakes of the past, and begin again. The real test of a society is not the absence of crises, but whether we come out of them cynical and disillusioned, or strengthened by our rededication to high ideals.

The age of greed is over. Will the age of responsibility now begin? That will depend on whether we are capable of admitting our mistakes and renewing our commitment to the common good. Atonement, the capacity for honest self-criticism, is what allows us to weather the storm without losing our way.

Holocaust Memorial Day

30 January 2010

‘Faith in God after the Holocaust may be hard; but faith in humanity is harder still, knowing the evil people do to one another, and the hate that lies dormant but never dead in the human heart.’

Today is National Holocaust Memorial Day, and this year the focus will be on one small group of people in the Warsaw Ghetto and the astonishing task they took on themselves for the sake of future generations.

The Warsaw Ghetto, into which hundreds of thousands of Jews were herded, was not some remote spot far from public gaze. It was near the centre of one of Europe’s capital cities. There 100,000 Jews died of starvation and disease; 270,000 were taken in cattle trucks to Treblinka and other camps to be gassed, burned and turned to ash. Eventually in April 1943 the Nazis gave the order that everyone left should be killed and it was there that the ghetto inhabitants mounted an extraordinary act of resistance, keeping the German army at bay for five weeks until they were overcome.

But by then a quite different act of resistance had taken place, and it’s this we’re going to remember this year. It was the brainchild of a Jewish historian, Emanuel Ringelblum, who realised that the Nazis were unlike any previous group bent on conquest. All others had preserved a record of their victories for posterity. But the Germans were intent on obliterating or falsifying every trace of their mass exterminations of Roma, Sinti, homosexuals, the mentally and physically disabled and the Jews.

Ringelblum understood that they were preparing a systematic denial of the Holocaust at the very time it was taking place. So in the ghetto he brought together a group of academics, teachers, journalists, religious leaders, artists and the young to gather testimonies from people in the ghetto, so that the world would one day know what happened. Unbelievably, they gathered 35,000 documents, stories, letters, poems and records. They hid them in tin boxes and milk churns, where they lay for years until the handful of survivors led the way to their location.

What an astonishing act of faith: that evil would ultimately be defeated, that the documents would be found and not destroyed, and that truth would win out in the end. Faith in God after the Holocaust may be hard; but faith in humanity is harder still, knowing the evil people do to one another, and the hate that lies dormant but never dead in the human heart.

Ringelblum and his friends had faith in humanity, and they left us a legacy of hope preserved intact in the very heart of darkness. In our still tense and troubled age, may we be worthy of that faith, that hope.

Interfaith Relations

19 November 2010

‘. . . tolerance was born when people with strong beliefs recognised that others who disagreed with them also had strong beliefs and they too should have, as far as possible, the right to live by them.’

Starting this Sunday, the various religious communities in Britain will be coming together in a series of events to mark Interfaith Week, the latest chapter in the history of British tolerance. But it wasn’t always so.

Britain was the first country to expel its Jews, in 1290. They weren’t allowed back until 1656. And the Pilgrim Fathers who set sail from Britain to America in the early seventeenth century were Calvinists, fearing persecution here and seeking liberty there.

What changed Britain, leading it to become the birthplace of the doctrine of religious liberty, was one transformative insight. For years Catholics and Protestants had fought each other throughout Europe, each convinced that it had the truth, each seeking the power to impose it. The destructiveness of this was immense.

Eventually people realised that instead of saying, ‘Religious convictions are important, therefore everyone should have the correct ones,’ you could draw a different conclusion. ‘Religious convictions are important; therefore, everyone should have the rig...