Rabbi Sacks: On the eve of the Jewish New Year, I, like so many of us, am still in a state of shock at last Tuesday's tragic events. How we respond to them will define our age. We've seen the worst and the best in humanity. The worst in the sheer blind hate that destroyed so many lives, and the best in the wave of sympathy and solidarity that went around the world.
Before Tuesday's tragedy, in fact, I'd been talking to people about what leads to racial and religious hate. What can we do to live together in a world that's suddenly become so vulnerable?
I used to think that the most important command in the Bible was, “You shall love your neighbour as yourself.”
But I was wrong.
In only one place does the Bible tell us to love our neighbour, but in more than 30 places it commands us to love the stranger. Don't oppress the stranger, because you know what it feels like to be a stranger. You were once strangers yourselves in the land of Egypt.
It isn't hard to love our neighbours, because by and large they're people like us.
What's tough is to love the stranger, the person who isn't like us, who has a different skin colour, or a different faith, or a different background. That's the real challenge. It was in ancient times. It still is today.
Who would have thought that after all the tragedies of the 20th century, the Holocaust, two world wars, and more than 100 million people dead, our world would still be scarred by racial and religious conflict.
In Rwanda, Bosnia, Kosovo, Chechnya, Kashmir, the Middle East. Who would have believed that we'd still be hearing the words, ‘ethnic cleansing’?
And who would have thought that even in Britain this year, we'd still be seeing scenes of violence and prejudice between the different groups in our society?
Why is it that racism, hatred and fear of the stranger are like viruses that mutate, but never seem to die?
The answer lies in the very concept of identity. For every us, there's also a them, the people not like us. And the more strongly we feel connected to people within the group, the more distant and estranged we feel from the people outside the group.
And this, more than anything else, has led us into the great crimes and wrongs of history. The holy wars, the attempted genocides, the feeling that the people not like us are a threat and must be removed, defeated, eliminated, cleansed.
Jews probably know about this as much as anyone. Our ancestors staked their very identity on the right to be different. And they paid a very heavy price for it. That's how words like ‘ghetto,’ ‘pogrom’ and ‘Holocaust’ entered the language. Jews knew that antisemitism might be dormant for a while. But it didn't go away. Racism sleeps lightly. And you never know when it's going to wake again.
I'm standing here in the heart of London, in the Bevis Marks Synagogue that this year celebrates its 300th anniversary. And it was around here that Jews first settled in the city of London when they were readmitted to England by Oliver Cromwell in 1656.
Abraham, tell me a little about the first Jews who came here. I mean, they were refugees, weren't they?
Rabbi Dr. Abraham Levy: They were indeed, Jonathan. What happened was that there was tremendous persecution in Spain and in Portugal, because certain Jews who tried to save themselves from persecution had ostensibly converted to Christianity whilst privately they were observing Judaism. And when the Inquisition got hold of them, things were difficult for them. So they decided to go to a country where the Catholic Church was not dominant. So they came to England and they lived here as Spanish and Portuguese Christians.
And they lived like that for about 50 years or more. But then there was a war between Spain and England, and hence those that suffered were the Spanish Christians living here. So they said, ‘We are not Spanish, we are not Christians, why should we be persecuted?’ So they brought over a very famous rabbi from Amsterdam, Manasseh ben Israel, and asked him to go to Oliver Cromwell to ask for the official readmittance of the Jews to this country.
Oliver Cromwell was exceedingly kind to them. He himself liked the Jews because being a Puritan, a lot of his teachings were based on the Old Testament, which of course we share with the Christian community. And for that reason, he seemed to have given them tacit permission to remain in England, to buy a piece of land for a cemetery and to have a place of worship. And by 1701 we had built this synagogue, and it has been in constant use for all 300 years.
Rabbi Sacks: This is 19 Princelet Street in the East End of London. And it's a fascinating building because it tells the story of successive waves of immigration. In the 18th century, it belonged to a Huguenot merchant, who was escaping persecution in France. In the 19th century, as you can see, it became a synagogue for Jews from Russia and Poland, who were in flight from the pogroms of Eastern Europe. And today, it's set in the heart of London's Bangladeshi community, and shortly it will become Britain's first museum of immigration.
So Nick, we've got some Irish potatoes reminding us that it wasn't only the Jews and the Huguenots but the Irish as well who came to this part of London. Where are they coming from today?
Nick Hardwick, Chief Executive, The Refugee Council: Well, the biggest group of arrivals is now from Afghanistan, with the terrible turmoil there. Still quite large numbers coming from former Yugoslavia, particularly with the new tensions that are happening, and also from some of the African countries where there's strife and persecution.
Rabbi Sacks: Do you think we're open-hearted enough to them?
Nick: I think that if people really understand the circumstances that will cause people to flee and they can begin to relate to them as individual human beings rather than this nameless flood, then I think people do open their hearts and they are generous.
Rabbi Sacks: And once they've had a welcome like that, they do want to give back, don't they?
Nick: Yes, I think they repay, many times over, the little bit of help they need when they first arrive. I mean, we make a mistake if we simply talk about what refugees need.
They're not takers, they're contributors. We talk about them as victims, but they're not victims, they're survivors. And I think they enormously enrich this country they're coming to and are terribly grateful, in my experience anyhow, for the help they've received.
Rabbi Sacks: If you look at history, I suspect you'll find that it was the countries most open to strangers that were also the most successful and creative. Venice, in the 16th century, the Netherlands, in the 17th, and then, of course, Britain and the United States.
They knew that the strength of a society lies in its diversity.
Like an open economy, an open society promotes growth, innovation, creative tension, a mix of ingredients out of which something new and unexpected comes.
A nation secure in its own identity can absorb many newcomers without feeling threatened, but, on the contrary, enlarged.
Here, in the East End of London, is where my grandparents first came when they arrived in Britain, fleeing from persecution. They faced all sorts of problems - learning a new language, struggling to make a living, and, of course, prejudice. And yet, what they so much wanted was to give, to make a contribution, to belong. They felt an immense gratitude to Britain for giving them a place of refuge.
In some cases, they owed it their lives.
Britain had given something to them, and they gave back in return. Today, there are new immigrant communities here. The faces and accents, the colours and smells have changed, but not the sense of drive and determination to add something to society, to make their way, and, in doing so, to bring new life to this busy centre of enterprise.
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, journalist: I am shocked at how many times in a week I will reject somebody or judge somebody because they happen not to be saying things in the way I want them to say them, or their clothes, or the way they behave.
And for somebody like me, I am a Muslim. I have faith. I'm not a very good Muslim. I fail miserably on all the tests, but I am a Muslim. And I think if I want to... Any credit that accrues comes out of an ability to love people who are not within my inner circle, or even within my outer circle. It's a terribly difficult struggle, I find.
Rabbi Sacks: What do you sense today of the struggles within the Muslim community in Britain?
Yasmin: I think there are certain groups of Muslim communities - and remember, there are many Muslim communities - and class and other things make a lot of difference, but there are certainly, I think, second and third-generation young Muslims, especially young Muslim men, who are in a terrible crisis at the moment, because they have not been allowed to belong by people who see themselves as the true Britons.
It's going to be a big problem in the future, unless we can somehow give this group of people that confidence that they either have an absolute right to this land and get them to imagine themselves into this place instead of somewhere else. That is the challenge.
Rabbi Sacks: So how do we move today towards a more inclusive and diverse society?
Yasmin: It's a huge, huge project. I think most people in positions of influence and power, including religious leaders of all denominations, simply don't understand how huge a challenge this is. And I think we have to remember it's not only a challenge for the so-called minorities. The English at the moment are in the same perilous state of feeling dislocated from an identity.
How you do that is to make sure that every key institution in this country is opening itself up to the stranger.
Rabbi Sacks: Asylum continues to be a controversial issue, and yet I can't help feeling that the great countries, those that welcome strangers and provide a refuge to people fleeing from persecution, as they've done in recent years from countries like Iran, Iraq, Rwanda, Afghanistan, Somalia and Sri Lanka. If our world is to stay a human place, it needs places of refuge for people escaping from torture and violence and sometimes death.
I can identify with much of the fear and insecurity that immigrant groups feel. It's what my parents and their friends went through when Oswald Mosley and the fascists marched here in London in the 1930s.
But of course, there are some groups that have a much tougher time. Because of the colour of their skin, they can't hide their identity.
Rev. Joel Edwards, General Director, Evangelical Alliance, UK: I was one of the second generation of immigrants from the Caribbean. I came along with an incredibly high level of patriotism. You know, this was the mother country. We were coming home to mother. And we were actually coming as a community to contribute to the United Kingdom. We were coming back to give back to mother for all that we felt she'd done to us.
And there was a certain amount of disappointment for many of us as Caribbeans when we came and found blatant racism - through the housing, through bad policing, through very different aspects of marginalisation. And there was a sense in which we had to do a double-take as we recognised that perhaps sometimes mother was not quite as welcoming as we thought she might have been.
We still have a long way to go for the inequalities to sort themselves out. And obviously more recently, things like immigration, asylum, some of the language we use, still suggests that we have some way to go in knowing how to welcome the stranger.
Rabbi Sacks: But, of course, your community has given enormously to British culture. Do you think we do celebrate diversity enough?
Joel: I think, in a sense, Britain's ability to embrace diversity is probably going to be one of the best ways in which we can keep what was best about the former British Empire. And I think we have some way to go in understanding how to nurture, how to cope with some of the creative tensions of being a multicultural and a multi-race society.
I think it has excitement. I think we have a tremendous amount to be benefited if we do the exercise well.
Rabbi Sacks: Sometimes we forget what we should always remember, that the glory of God's world is its diversity - the 250,000 different kinds of leaf, the three billion letters of code in the human genome, the 6,000 languages spoken throughout the world.
All life has a single source, but everything that lives is different.
And just as we need biodiversity to protect the environment, so we need cultural, religious and racial diversity to sustain society. If we were all the same, we'd have nothing unique to contribute. God made us all different so that each of us could say, ‘I have something to give that others don't, and they have something to give that I don't.’
That's what I call the dignity of difference.
One day, future generations will look back and see how much Britain owes its immigrant groups and the different gifts each of them brought. Already, the Asian, African and West Indian communities have enriched our language and music, our food and dress.
They've created new enterprise. They've given Britain a cosmopolitanism it didn't have before. And that's made us richer as a nation, culturally, economically and spiritually.
And that, for me, is the wisdom at the heart of the Bible's command to love the stranger. There's an old rabbinic saying that when a human being makes many coins in the same mint, they all come out the same. God makes every human being in the same image, His image, and yet we all come out differently.
God lives in diversity.
That's why the greatest challenge is to see His image in someone who isn't in my image. To see the face of God in someone whose face is a different colour from mine. To hear the voice of God in someone whose accent is different from mine.
Loving your neighbour is easy. Loving the stranger isn't.
But it's strangers who enlarge our world, who give us something we couldn't make on our own, who add to the rich music of our common life with its complex harmonies and unexpected chords. And that's something to welcome, not fear.
At the end of his life, Moses said, “See I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse. Therefore, choose life.” Since last Tuesday, those words have become suddenly and terribly fateful.
In the coming year, may God give us the strength and the courage to choose life.
