Rabbi Sacks: Today's children are growing up in an increasingly secular society in which science explains the wonders of the universe. Technology makes the world seem smaller, and our material well-being is greater than it's ever been.
A world in which religion is often portrayed as belonging to the past and irrelevance.
In response, I can paint another picture of the secular world I see around me, driven by individualism and consumerism. A world in which because the individual comes first, there's isolation, loneliness and social breakdown.
In this programme, I want to argue that religion is needed more than ever because religion is about relationships and the common good.
I want to show how religious values to do with family and community can create a healthier society.
To help me debate my case, I'll be joined by two eminent thinkers. Harvard professor Robert Putnam, who spent 25 years documenting trends in modern society. And British academic, Maurice Glasman, a Labour life peer and a leading figure in the argument about the big society idea.
So if you were to ask me what's the point of religion, I'd reply as we approach the Jewish New Year, that faith is a vital antidote to some of society's biggest problems. As politicians continue to debate the big society, or the good society, I put the case for religion.
The subject of society is at the top of today's political agenda. Left and right continue to argue and debate their version of the big society or the good society. But I believe that religion is an important antidote to society's ills.
It's something I've written about a lot and I really believe it's important for the future of our country that we face the reality of what society has become and the kind of society we want to create for the future.
For me, the concept of what a healthy society should look like is best expressed just a few miles from where I live. Regent's Park stretches some 500 acres across northwest London. Designed by John Nash in the early 1800s, it's magnificent. A complex creation of tree-lined avenues, lakes and open spaces.
And it's ours. It belongs to all of us. It's a public place where we can all go. Be enjoyed as individuals but also alongside others. We don't come here as voters or consumers but as equal citizens enjoying a public space.
Our enjoyment depends upon everyone respecting the park and each other. We keep radios quiet, acknowledge strangers, and respect people's privacy. In other words, we keep to a set of unspoken rules, usually without having to be told. Now, if we think of the park as a metaphor for society, we begin to see people not just as a bunch of individuals but as part of a community who share a code of conduct, which has nothing to do with self-interest or power but is built on trust and self-restraint for the benefit of everyone.
And that's where I believe religion comes in.
Outside the park, all is not well. All too often, people put their own interests first. We respect one another less. We trust each other less. Increasingly, we don't share common values.
I want to show you three key areas of modern life, which I believe have broken down and where I believe values based on faith can really make a difference.
I'm going to look at relationships within community between neighbours, acquaintances and strangers. Also, the relationship between generations, young and old.
But first, I'm going to look at the smallest unit in society, the family. It's the fundamental building block of all human society.
Nearly half of children born today will experience family breakdown. Rites of passage that were at one time linked have been cast adrift - like sex and love, marriage and having children, or having children and taking responsibility for their nurture.
So, am I just out of date? Isn't marriage just one option among many? Well, not if we care about society and about what happens to our children.
There's evidence to support my view.
Harvard sociologist, Professor Robert Putnam, has made a 25-year study of American society, interviewing over half a million people. Professor Putnam, why is family so important for community?
Professor Robert Putnam: Well, it's the basis of community, really. It's where we learn our skills of dealing with other people. It's where we learn to care for other people. And it's the model, really, for the way we then reach out to the broader community.
Rabbi Sacks: So do you think the breakdown of the family over the past 50 years has had a negative impact on society as a whole?
Robert: I don't want to get into the mode of being moralistically critical of other kinds of families, single-parent families and so on. But I do think the traditional family had some important advantages in terms of raising kids.
Rabbi Sacks: Maurice Glasman is a leading intellectual in the big society debate. Maurice, you're on record as saying society as a functioning entity has disappeared. What did you mean by that?
Dr. Maurice Glasman: What I meant by that is that the relationships of love have really broken down. I've seen children growing up without fathers. I've seen communities that don't have relationships with each other. At every level, there's a breakdown of trust. There's a breakdown of love. There's a breakdown of solidarity. And that is what society is.
Rabbi Sacks: When there's family breakdown, does that affect other things as well?
Maurice: It affects everything. The way that we treat our parents and the way that we treat our children defines us. So family is the way we learn non-contractual love. It's where we learn sacrifice. It's where we learn loyalty. And in Jewish families, certainly, it's where you learn that it's not that important to be right. It's more important to be true.
Rabbi Sacks: So Robert Putnam and Maurice Glasman agree that the family is the foundation of community.
The question, of course, is how you build up and sustain family. My argument is that religion plays a vital role. Faith and its rituals help keep families strong and a force for good in society.
And my family history is testament to that. Just over a hundred years ago, these streets were home to thousands of Jewish families who'd fled here from across Europe, including my own family.
That building over there used to be my grandmother's wine shop. My father worked just down there. There wasn't enough money for him to be educated, so he had to leave school at the age of 14. And he had a little shop where he sold cloth.
Hardly any customers came into the shop, and I remember how I felt sitting with him day after day. But not only did my family survive, they broke free of the cycle of poverty and deprivation that threatened them. I and my three brothers all went to university.
This isn't an exceptional story. There were many families like ours. What's important is what lies behind the stories.
Our survival and success depended on two things. First, on a strong civil society ethos enshrined in our families, our congregations, and our communities. And second, on the values embodied in our faith.
In Judaism, faith brings family together. And it's best expressed in Sabbath rituals, like Havdalah, which marks the end of the Sabbath. They're exactly the same rituals that our parents and grandparents did before us.
It's sacred, dedicated time, time for us to focus on being together. It's what binds us. That's what I believe.
But what do my guests think? For Robert Putnam, there are many ways of strengthening family ties. The key is making connections, and religion is very good at doing that. Do you think religious communities and traditions can help strengthen families?
Robert: Yeah, I think there's no doubt that they do. I think that both in the United States and in Britain, according to recent research we've done, being involved in a religious community increases your connections with other people. It builds a supportive web of close friends, and I would guess I would say, a supporting web of love, that are important for families, and important for kids, and important for the broader society.
Rabbi Sacks: Because what strikes me about religion and families is it kind of consecrates family moments, like the Jewish Sabbath and that kind of thing.
Robert: Sure.
Rabbi Sacks: Which you don't particularly find in the secular culture out there, is that right?
Robert: Well, that's true, and during the life course of kids growing up, either in the Jewish community or in other religious communities, we celebrate these great moments of transition. The family gets together, and it reinforces that sense of not just of camaraderie, but of mutual responsibility, and the fact that really we are in this together, and I don't think there's any doubt that that has a powerful effect.
Of course, that's not the only way we can make connections. We don't want to say that religion is the only way to build strong families and strong communities, but it's an important and valuable way.
Rabbi Sacks: Like Putnam, Maurice Glasman believes that family is fundamental to a society. But for him, it's belief in the family rather than religion itself that matters, and he speaks from personal experience. I had the usual crisis of faith when I was about 15, and I said to my dad, I said, ‘Dad, I don't think I believe in God.’ And my dad said, ‘Well, does that matter? Just be nice to your mother, and come home on Friday night, and be nice.’ And I would say, ‘Oh, how trivial, how superficial.’
But that's not the point. Not the point at all. The point is to honour your relationships. Honour your relationships first, even when they clash with your principles. It's to make sure that you honour your parents, even if, let's say, they hold different political views or have different attitudes. And it's to show love and loyalty through difficult times. Now, this is what family is about.
Rabbi Sacks: So both Professor Putnam and Lord Glasman believe that strong family bonds can be made simply through family members being there for one another.
Father: What is this?
Daughter: It's a ram's horn.
Father: What's it called in Hebrew?
Daughter: Shofar.
Father: And when do we blow the shofar?
Daughter: Rosh Hashanah,
Father: Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year.
Rabbi Sacks: Of course, I believe religion is particularly good at strengthening family ties. It's the first building block in creating a healthy society.
But I would say that family on its own isn't enough.
My second ingredient for the creation of a strong society is community. And I'm afraid it's in crisis. We see the results of this in tragic reports of neglect and social abandonment. And we see signs of alienation and loneliness expressed in rather desperate ways by people who hold up their private lives to public gaze.
How often do we hear people say that they don't even know their own neighbours, let alone others in their street or village or town? The result of community breakdown is a network of strangers.
Again, I want to use my own family's history to show that within the Jewish faith, there's a long and continuing tradition of creating networks of people who aren't strangers to each other.
My grandmother's shop used to be on Commercial Road. It was a kosher wine shop selling to the local jewry of the East End. But it was also the centre of a network.
My grandmother came to Britain from Russia as a child in 1902. She couldn't read or write, but somehow she ran the family business from the 1920s right through to the 60s. In her hands, the wine shop was always more than just a business, as anyone who came into the shop would tell you.
She'd start asking about the family - how are the children? How are you settling in? How's the new job? And if somebody had a problem, she'd immediately pick that up and somehow she knew somebody who would help them with it. She wasn't just a businesswoman, she was a social worker, a community activist, a counsellor, all sorts of things.
And so a network of strangers became a network of friends all helping each other.
Today, the breakdown of family life and the fragmentation of society make community building more urgent than ever.
Nine years ago, the congregation of Finchley Synagogue realised it needed to do more for its local community. And so it started a series of weekly educational talks.
As with my grandmother's wine shop, there's more to these evenings than meets the eye.
Guest Speaker, Sarah Brown: Downing Street is a building, it's like a rabbit warren, and I'm not sure, even by the end of it, I actually would know my way around the whole space there now.
Rabbi Sacks: The event I attended was with ex-Prime Minister's wife, Sarah Brown, one of a series of weekly conversations with public figures.
But it soon became apparent this was also an opportunity for people from the community to socialise, to network. And for a few hours it turned the synagogue into something more than a place of prayer and worship.
Synagogue member 1: It's informal, it's inclusive, and it has a broad range of topics available for all ages.
Synagogue member 2: They can come on their own and they don't feel uncomfortable, they feel that someone will recognise them, someone will notice them and ask them what they're interested in.
Synagogue member 1: The diversity of people that it attracts makes it a very homely environment to be in.
Rabbi Sacks: This has become a community centre.
Synagogue member 2: There's everything going on here actually.
Rabbi Sacks: Of course, there are plenty of such events organised around the country with great effort and commitment by secular bodies. But I believe religion can offer something extra.
Robert Putnam's research points to religion as a massive force for cohesion, paradoxically, even if you're not a believer yourself. Is religion a very important part of the total ecology of a healthy society?
Robert: It is. It's important to add, our work suggests that belonging matters much more than believing. We ask dozens of questions about the details of theology, beginning with whether you believe in God or not, and it turns out those theological beliefs aren't the story. It's not that that predicts whether you're going to become a nicer person, be involved in community and volunteering and so on. It's your ties to your religious community that really matter.
It's even true - you can tell from our data - that if you're an atheist, but you have a lot of church friends, or maybe you go to church because your spouse is religious, but you don't believe in God, the data says you're just as nice as someone who's deeply religious. And in fact, nicer than someone who is deeply devout, prays all the time, firmly believes in God, only thinks about religion, but doesn't have any friends at church.
Maurice Glasman also thinks community is in need of repair, but doesn't agree that religion is the only force that can do the job.
He firmly believes that secular organisations can become the focus for community.
Maurice: Trade unions are often viewed by the public as places that defend bad work and are involved with militancy and against innovation, but this is not the case. Trade unions were the way that working people came together to protect their status as human beings from a merciless market that was sending their children up the chimneys and degrading people at work.
And pubs, we view them as places where people get drunk and get into fights, or we could see them as one of the few places left, public houses, where people get together sociably to talk, to be friends. And then the thing is, is to get together, the union and the pub with the mosque and the church, is to get things that are divided and to engage them to protect the places and the people that they love, the places that they live in, their families, their neighbours, and that's real politics. So I do have a belief in politics, that politics is the way that you build a home together.
Rabbi Sacks: I can see that secular bodies have offered shared friendship and loyalty as a means of building society, but arguably, religion has an inbuilt advantage. At its very core, are the moral and spiritual values needed to create a strong society.
And I believe that we can see that in a third key area of social crisis, the relationship between young and old.
One of the saddest results of the collapse of family and community has been the neglect and isolation of the old and vulnerable. There isn't a week goes by without news of someone dying because no one knew they were there, or vulnerable people coming under attack from gangs of intolerant youths.
The extended family is fragmenting. There's an ever-widening generation gap, a disconnection, even suspicion between the young and the old. And I'm convinced that religion can help here too. The Maurice and Vivienne Wohl Campus in the heart of Golders Green is a community within a community.
As part of its work, it recognises the importance of communication between all age groups as a means of creating strong community.
And it achieves that through an army of volunteers.
Volunteer 1: Oh, what were you doing in the army?
Elderly gentleman 1: Well, when Hitler heard that I was in the army, that's when he gave up.
Elderly gentleman 2: First move, two or one?
Volunteer 2: I'm gonna go in front there.
Rabbi Sacks: What might be surprising is that the volunteers get as much out of their involvement as those they seek to help.
Volunteer 2: It's nice to speak to the older people because I can talk to them about how I'm growing up now and I can see how different it was to when they were growing up. It's always nice to hear the stories they have and it's good fun to talk to them as well.
Elderly gentleman 3: t's a nice place for me to come and have a break. Otherwise I'm literally in the prison at home or going up and down the street.
Elderly lady: I live on my own and I come twice a week. I find it beneficial. I'm with people, talk about your children, your grandchildren, your great-grandchildren. Just fantastic. The whole concept is amazing. I love it, really love it.
Volunteer 3: Seeing the people enjoying themselves and getting out and about in a social environment and that it's good for them makes me feel good that I'm doing something for them, you know, on a weekly basis or a twice-weekly basis. So it's fulfilling for us.
Elderly lady: You know, I've seen it as we've passed it.
Volunteer 3: You know Orli restaurant?
Elderly lady: Yeah, yeah.
Volunteer 3: Just up there.
Rabbi Sacks: Conversation between the generations is such an important part of a healthy society.
It's not just the joy of seeing kindness and trust between young and old. It's also about the sharing of emotions and hope. I believe it's about continuity and the handing on of the wisdom of experience to the future.
Elderly lady 2: I can teach you.
Rabbi Sacks: Again, this is all about effort and commitment and religious people don't have a monopoly on that. But I'm convinced faith does help go the extra mile.
I caught a glimpse of that when I joined these young people baking cakes with some elderly residents suffering from dementia.
Here, I witness people with faith, bringing hope where there seemed to be no hope at all.
Well, I found that very moving. And it reminded me of one of the most powerful lines in our prayers on the High Holy Days. “Cast us not away as we grow old, as our strength fails, don't forsake us.” Here are people with mild dementia, wonderfully aged - some of them 98, 99, the two ladies I was sitting between - but isolated by their condition and to see young people relating to them with such patience shows what it is to create a caring society.
So faith, I believe, can help build a strong society where the young and old are in daily contact with each other. And on this particular issue, both my guests are on the same wavelength.
Maurice: I mean, my favourite place in the whole world, if you want to know, is Nightingale Home. The Nightingale Home is a Jewish old age home. I just go for inspiration and young people visit and there's a genuine love and support for old people. It's a magnificent community achievement.
And we've got to be thinking about how that gets maintained and to share that with the country, so that we can be a blessing in that way.
Robert: Religiously involved people are more likely to work on community problems. They're more likely to get involved in social justice or social reform movements. Now, exactly why that's true is still a matter of some debate and investigation. And we're working on that question, too. My hunch is that virtually all religions have that notion of helping other people as a core element in their teachings. And I think that must be the case.
Rabbi Sacks: Of course, it's been argued by many sceptics that religion is actually a divisive force within communities. That's a real issue, one I'm all too aware of.
But Maurice Glasman has found that religions can work together without fighting. And he's had 15 years experience working with different religious groups in London.
Maurice: It's not a discussion of theology. It's a discussion about what's better, Torah or Koran. It's never discussed. What's discussed is how can we engage together on what are our interests and concerns.
And out of that comes forward something I found quite beautiful, which is people who are divided find a common ground outside the usual areas. And usually, I mean, our issues were living wage, family housing, affordable housing, safer streets. These were the areas we found agreement.
And whenever it got more into the theological or ideological side, nothing happened and it broke down.
Robert: Religion is a powerful medicine, in social terms. That is, it has powerful effects. But taken in high doses, it can also be lethal for a civic community. And I think people in faith communities need to be attentive, not only to the ways in which religion contributes powerfully to our civic community and to our own lives and to our own well-being and happiness, but also to ways in which we can reduce or minimise or eliminate the downside, which is namely this tendency to kind of have a love inside, hate outside view. So the more friendships you have outside your immediate community, the more open-minded and tolerant you are.
Rabbi Sacks: I'm under no illusion. The task of rebuilding society isn't an easy one. But I believe that the values needed to do so are deeply enshrined in religion.
The Jewish community should be proud of its achievements. A Jewish presence in society makes a difference. Our task is to be true to our faith and a blessing to others. A blessing to others because we're true to our faith.
Today's children are growing up in a world that's telling them that religion is increasingly irrelevant. My message is that it's more relevant than ever.
