What will our world look like after COVID-19?

Host (Paul): Good morning, it's a real honour to welcome you to our webinar today. For those here in the Mountain West, good morning, good afternoon to our friends in the Eastern United States and in Latin America, and to those joining us from the UK, Europe, and Africa, good evening. My name is Paul Edwards, and I am the director of the Wheatley Institution at Brigham Young University, and it's an honour to welcome you to the Wheatley Institution's Truman G. Madsen lecture for the 2021 academic year.

In the chat section of Zoom, which will be a useful reference for you today, we have a beautifully produced video about the meaningful contributions of Professor Truman Madsen's exploration of faith and intellect, and I'm going to encourage everyone to take the opportunity to look at that at the right time. We're also very grateful to the generosity of Anna and Greg Jackson, who've endowed this lecture series. This year, our Madsen lecturer is Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, who will be visiting with us about his latest book, “Morality, Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times.”

And I'm using the term lecturer a little loosely this year, because in as much as we're connecting online, rather than in the assembly hall of the Hinckley Center on the Brigham Young University campus, we've chosen to make this a conversation rather than a traditional lecture. And so I'm eager to formally introduce Rabbi Sacks, and I will do so momentarily. We've had a little bit of a technical challenge here getting underway with our first Zoom webinar.

But we trust that all things are in place and that we have Rabbi Sacks now from the UK there. But before I make that formal introduction, I'd be remiss if I didn't offer thanks to those who've been working so hard to make this event possible. I'm grateful to Joanna Benarroch and Dan Sacker, who so ably support the work of Rabbi Sacks.

Thanks for your help and your friendship. I'm grateful to the staff at the Wheatley Institution, Marlene Sinclair, Emily Reynolds, Sam Francis, thanks for your efforts behind the scene. And I want to especially recognize the stick-to-itiveness, the problem-solving, the great attitude of Kiki Manning, whose hard work has helped us bring all of this technology together.

It's our tradition to begin and end in prayer for these lectures, and I have asked Dr. Janet Jacob Erickson, a fellow at the Wheatley Institution, to offer an invocation on today's proceedings. Janet? 

Dr. Janet Jacob Erickson: Thank you, Paul. Our beloved Father in Heaven, it is with great gratitude that we welcome Rabbi Sacks to participate with us today in this event sponsored by the Wheatley Institution, that we might learn and understand better how to heal the cracks and fissures among us, that we might know how to restore our moral sense of responsibility for one another, that in the we there is strength and healing.

We're so thankful for the inspiration Thou hast endowed and given to Rabbi Sacks to help guide us at these particularly significant and difficult times. We pray for Thy spirit to be with us, that we might learn and understand, that we will take the truths we hear and internalize and help to strengthen our communities, beginning in our own homes and families. We love Thee.

We ask for Thy spirit to guide us and offer this prayer humbly in the name of the Redeemer of Israel. Amen. 

Paul: Thank you. Thank you, Janet, for that very moving invocation. In addition to being a superb scholar and a beloved teacher, Janet Erickson is a powerful public voice for the institution of the family. And again, over in our chat section, we've provided a link to some of Janet's superb op-eds.

Although the interactive chat function is disabled for this overbooked webinar, we want you to be able to ask questions today. So if you're on Zoom, please use the question-and-answer function. Now, I'm going to again assume that we have everything in place for Rabbi Sacks.

And so I am humbled and honoured to introduce to our Brigham Young University audience really one of the most incandescent moral thinkers of our age. Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks is Emeritus Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom and Commonwealth. By title and disposition, he's an ambassador for his faith and a statesman for his nation.

But he's also a theologian and a philosopher, a social scientist, a superb storyteller, a public intellectual. In a review of his compelling book, “The Home We Built Together” in the Jerusalem Post, they wrote, “For a corpus of writing substantially less ambitious than this, some have received the Nobel Prize.” In 2013, as Rabbi Sacks stepped down from 22 years of service as the Chief Rabbi for the United Kingdom and Commonwealth, His Majesty, the Prince of Wales, praised him for his custodianship of timeless truths and proclaimed Rabbi Sacks “a light unto this nation.”

Among the many things that I appreciate about Rabbi Sacks is what I'll call his multilingualism. I actually have no idea how many languages he speaks, but what I'm referring to is his fluency in that, let's call it the babble of indecipherable tongues that we find in discrete academic disciplines. Somehow, Rabbi Sacks can weave together insight from neural and social psychology, evolutionary biology, cultural anthropology, moral and political philosophy, social and literary criticism, and somehow ground it all in the ancient wisdom of the Torah and translate it back into the most clear and cogent English prose.

He's a font of wise counsel, of moral courage, of good humour, and so I am very honoured to welcome Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks. Rabbi Sacks, it looks like you are there with us. 

Rabbi Sacks: Paul, it is so, so good to be speaking to you.

I tell you, this is just wonderful. Thank you. Thank you, Zoom.

Thank you, God, for creating Zoom. 

Paul: Well, I think you must be exhausted. I think you've been on Zoom for the past two weeks. Is that right? How many of these? 

Rabbi Sacks: It's something like that. But Paul, let me explain why this moment is so special for me. You see, this whole pandemic has not been great. I can think of lots and lots of ways in which we rather it never happened. However, for me personally, it has done something absolutely extraordinary. You see, Paul, it must be at least 20 years ago when the elders of your community came to visit me when I was Chief Rabbi in St. John's Wood and asked me to come to Brigham Young University.

And I was longing to do so, but somehow we never had the time because from London, it's so far. And somehow or other for 20 years, every single year, I would think somehow or other, when am I ever going to get to Brigham Young University? And finally, the Almighty has arranged for it to happen in the most unexpected way. And I cannot tell you how moved I am, because as far as I'm concerned, you, your institution, everything that surrounds your faith, are absolute role models - intellectually, spiritually, morally, and practically.

And I am very, very inspired by all you do. 

Paul: Well, we are touched by those words, and we hope someday that it won't be just through this technology. This time of year is so beautiful. As we step out front here, we look up to beautiful mountain peaks that are now covered in fall foliage. We have a beautiful sunny day here, and we hope that the time will come when not only will we be able to visit this way, but sit down and break bread together again. 

Rabbi Sacks: Amen. Sooner the better. 

Paul: Well, you have some real success with this book, “Morality, Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times.” It is just out in the US. I have my copy right here, dog-eared. And it is so hyper-relevant to the issues that we are facing in society today. I mean, you cover a litany of contemporary social concerns and challenges, and you claim to see a kind of root cause for these. And so many different social challenges, I mean, everything from Cancel Culture and challenges to free speech on our campuses, the hyper materialism that we see, the loneliness that we find facing so many people today. Can they really be traced to a common cause? 

Rabbi Sacks: It's a good question. And my intellectual gamble, as it were, is that you could say they are all connected.

But I'll tell you what the problem was to begin with. First and foremost, I was seeing the gradual erosion of morality in society. And I knew that that has to be bad news, because if we go back to the prophets of the Hebrew Bible, the essential message, whether they were Amos or Hosea or Isaiah or Jeremiah, is that a society flourishes to the extent that its members care about and for one another.

That the moral basis of society is not an option. It's an absolutely central foundation of society. But I have to say, and you may not perhaps find this easy to follow. It's really hard to get that message across in Europe, which has become so secular.

And therefore, I had to really, really search for a way in which I could, as it were, grab people by the throat and say, hang on, this is serious. And of course, we all knew that the most important thing for young people is climate change. It's the thing that really moves them.

And therefore, I thought one way of framing this was by looking at the loss of a shared morality as cultural climate change. 

Paul: Say more about that. 

Rabbi Sacks: What I mean was that climate change can express itself in completely opposite phenomena - extreme heat, extreme cold, extreme drought, extreme floods, and so on. And yet, they are all the result of a single cause, namely the erosion of the natural ecology of Earth. 

And what I argued was that if you look carefully enough at so much of what's going on, whether it's identity politics, or Cancel Culture, or fake news, or competitive victimhood, or what have you, all of those have in common the fact that they're the result of people thinking more about ‘me’ than about ‘us,’ more about my own personal happiness than the things that bind us to one another in a mesh of interlocking moral obligations. So that's basically what the book is.

I go through one after the other of contemporary phenomena and show how they do have to do with too much emphasis on ‘I,’ too little emphasis on ‘we.’ 

There's this wonderful sociologist at Harvard called Robert Putnam. And Robert Putnam did very clever. He did what is called a Google Ngram. You know, Google have digitized everything published in England, in English, since 1800. And you can use this thing called an Ngram to work out the relative frequency of certain words.

Well, he tested them for the relative frequency of the words we and I. And they're pretty much in balance until 1964, when all of a sudden, we get less we and more I. And I thought that was, you know, that's one way of doing something that's empirically demonstrable. But basically, that's what happens. Can I give you an example? 

Paul: Yeah, please do. I've heard you talk about your own way of looking at this from the perspective of what happens in St. John’s Wood. Is that the name of the neighbourhood where Abbey Road is found? 

Rabbi Sacks: Oh you heard that? You must be the only person in the universe. 

Paul: Yeah, tell us about this.

Rabbi Sacks: You see, when I was Chief Rabbi, the official residence to which your colleagues came all those years ago, was in St. John's Wood, and parallel to a road called Abbey Road. And every day, when I went to the synagogue, I walked across a zebra crossing, which is the most famous in the world, because still every single day, everyone wants to be photographed there. So I had an interest in that.

Paul: That's because of the Beatles and their famous Abbey Road album. 

Rabbi Sacks: So the Beatles, so I thought, let's have a look. Because all of this happened in the 60s, or it began to happen in the 60s.

So here's an interesting test. Google, Google Images, Beatles 1963. And you will see every single photograph shows four people wearing the same suit, the same shirt, the same haircut, and the same smile.

The most wee thing you will ever come across in your life. Whereas if you Google Images, Beatles’ last photo shoot, and that's 1969, you'll see the four Beatles, not looking at one another, all dressed differently, all looking as if what are we doing here? And looking very, very miserable with one another. And to my amazement, the last record they ever made in Abbey Road Studios, in 1969, was a song by George Harrison, called I, Me, Mine.

So I kind of rest my case there. 

Paul: So you and Putnam have found the same trajectory in the 1960s. And you're trying to reach a broad popular culture with this book. And I think it really is intended to reach young people. And we have a lot of students on today, listening. They're in their 20s. And facing a lot of choices in their lives. They're looking forward. I have to say, if they read a few of the chapters in the book, and they didn't get to the end, what they'd see is this litany of challenges that we're facing. And I'm just wondering, Rabbi Sacks, is all of this social unraveling, is it inevitable? And what as a young person, what would a young person do to help contribute to, you know, stopping this unraveling and doing something constructive? 

Rabbi Sacks: What I pointed out is this. Any human group depends on two things. It depends on habits of competition, and habits of cooperation.

And what we have at the moment is two arenas of competition. And they are the market and the state. The competition for wealth, and the competition for power. Now, those are fine, they're creative.

But all human groups need one other thing, which is habits of cooperation, where I learn to take the interests of others as seriously as I do my own. And if you lose those habits of cooperation, then society will eventually unravel. I saw something in the press today. And I hope I'm not treading on… territory because I really, really don't understand American politics. However, today, the Attorney General in the States said that a lockdown, a total lockdown, would be the worst infringement of human liberty since slavery. 

Can you hear that? That's an extraordinary statement.

I thought, well, actually, no. Because it may be an infringement on my rights as an I. But they are certainly not an infringement on our rights as we. Let me give you a simple example.

I would have thought that the right to drive is fairly fundamental in contemporary society. But there is no right to drive dangerously. And if we call in people for driving dangerously, we are not infringing their liberty. Rather, we are protecting the public interests.

So, you know, you can get somebody saying something really quite extraordinary, because they can't hear the importance of the interests of others. 

Paul: Let me follow up on that. And actually, I have a question posed by someone from our listening audience, from Professor George Handley, who teaches Comparative Literature here at Brigham Young University, and also - and I think it's relevant to this question - sits on the city council in Provo, Utah.

And he asks, and I'll just read the question. It's a little lengthy here, but it'll allow you to elaborate on some important points in the book: “Given the difference between French and Anglo-American rights, what explains the American difficulty in buying into and complying with health guidelines regarding the pandemic? Why do we seem so ill-equipped to respond collectively? Is it just individualism gone awry? Or is it a weakness in our American understanding of rights? We seem to have profound distrust of government, but not full citizen responsibility.”

Rabbi Sacks: Yeah, I mean, the truth is, that what matters is individual responsibility here. And we have to take that seriously. And if people are not taking it seriously, then there is clearly, I would call in the doctor, you know, there's something completely dangerous here.

Imagine the following. You go in the subway, in London, the subway in London, public transport in general, there is a requirement that everyone using public transport use a face mask. Now, it's very, very interesting to think about the philosophy of face masks.

Because a face mask does not necessarily protect you against others. But it does protect others against you. So any country where altruism matters, people will not have a problem wearing a face mask.

But a completely individualistic culture will find it very irksome to wear a face mask. And any culture in which you find it irksome to care about the health and safety of others is a culture in need of serious medical assistance. This is something way, way wrong about this.

Paul: So let me probe a little bit on this. You talk in this book, and it elaborates on a point brought up in that great book, “The Home We Built Together.” You talk about a distinction between a social contract, and the idea of a social covenant.

And, of course, contract is based on interest, but you have some thoughts about how the idea of covenant can provide a richer way for us to engage with one another. Say a bit about that as a possible way of getting out of the predicament we find ourselves in. 

Rabbi Sacks: A contract is about self-interest, a transition, a transaction, that helps my self-interest and your self-interest.

So if I need a mechanic to mend my car, I'd make a contract with him. He mends my car, I pay him, and we're both happy, because my car now works, and he now has the money that he wanted. So that contract is in both our self-interests, but it does not create any kind of lasting relationship. Once it's been achieved, it's done, and that's the end of it. 

A covenant is completely different. A covenant is like a marriage.

A covenant is a situation in which two individuals come together to pledge themselves to one another in loyalty and fidelity to achieve together what neither could achieve alone. So a covenant isn't about interest. It's about identity. And it does actually transform me because something about my identity is now changed. I am open-endedly connected to someone with whom I've made that covenant, most obviously in the context of marriage. 

Now, what I love about America, except that not all Americans love about America, is that America is the most covenant society in all of history. I mean, totally amazing that it was begun with covenants.

The Mayflower Compact of 1620 is a covenant. John Winthrop's speech aboard the Arbella is a covenant beautifully defined by Lyndon Baines Johnson's 1965 inaugural address: “They came here, the exile and the stranger, and they made a covenant with this land.”

Now, what a treasure this is. I don't know how on earth America can just let it slip because it has this rich, beautiful intellectual history. And I'm really sorry that people have forgotten it.

The thing about a covenant is that it binds us to one another in the shared enterprise of building a society for the sake of our grandchildren yet unborn. 

Paul: So let me ask, Rabbi Sacks, and you may not be aware, today is Constitution Day in the United States, which marks the date on which they finished the work of the Constitutional Convention in 1787 in Philadelphia. And as you know, when you look at that, we could say that that comes out of kind of a Lockean social contract idea that we've come together, laid down our weapons, so that we can have productive society together. Do you see the American Constitution in social contract or social covenant language? 

Rabbi Sacks: The American Declaration of Independence, the 1776 document, that's a covenant, full stop. That is a covenant. And the sheer and the clear mark of that is that it is couched in moral terms. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and are endowed by the Creator with certainly inalienable truths, among them, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Of all the things that Thomas Jefferson could have written, the most unlikely is we hold these truths to be self-evident. There's nothing remotely self-evident about them. Tell Plato that all men are created equal. Tell Aristotle, I mean, they think you're mad, you know.

And therefore, even though we all know that Thomas Jefferson was a deist, nonetheless, I still find it significant that he gives America its covenantal context in his second inaugural, Jefferson's second inaugural - 1805, I think - where he says, I too shall need that help of that providence that has led us as our ancestors in the part. Basically, he says, we are the new Israel, and this is the new promised land. And that is Jefferson. 

Paul: So do you think that there's something special then about a kind of biblical perspective in thinking about how to create a productive society? I mean, aren't there other kinds of moral systems out there that bring people together and have them think in terms of we rather than I? 

Rabbi Sacks: 100%. I don't say you have to be biblical on this one at all. You really don't. The question, though, is what is biblical there? And the short answer, I think, is this. Throughout history, societies have been held together by religion. 

Along comes Locke, the doctrine of toleration. And he says, in effect, that we do not need society to be held together by religion. We need society to be held together by morality. And for that reason, Locke is the first person who says that a Jew or a Muslim can have civil rights, even in a Christian state.

And that, of course, is what makes Locke the first liberal. And in a sense, the real American founding is much more specific than biblical. It's a particular reading of the Bible that we get to in Locke. I mean, historically, it is born after the Reformation in Calvinism. So it first appears in Geneva, then in Holland, then in Scotland, and then in England and America. So there's something really quite specific about it. It's quite Calvinist. Does that mean every free society has to be Calvinist? I hope not. I think the Almighty is more generous than that.

Paul: Well, I'm going to have to encourage our audience again. You know, so many of these themes are dealt with in great detail. I mean, the time is just passing so fast here with you, Rabbi Sacks. Encourage people to take a look at the book “Morality” that has just come out. And again, over in the chat, there's a link that shows you more information about the book. 

Rabbi Sacks, I do want to get to some questions here from our audience. I did just want to ask, I don't know if you remember, but we first met at that extraordinary colloquium on marriage at the Vatican in 2015. 

Rabbi Sacks: Sure.

Paul: And it was following actually a little reception event that was a few blocks away from the conference center. And we were chatting on the way back to the Vatican. And I've often thought that that must be the beginning of some kind of a joke, a Jewish rabbi and a Latter-day Saint elder walk into the Vatican. But I've never quite worked out the punchline. I haven't figured out the punchline.

 But that was such a meaningful gathering all around the idea of the complementarity of marriage. And I understand that you and Lady Sacks have just recently celebrated your 50th wedding anniversary this year. Congratulations.

Rabbi Sacks: Thank you. 

Paul: Again, we have a lot of Brigham Young University students participating today. And you may not know this, but courtship with all its ups and downs occupies a lot of mind share for a student at Brigham Young University.

And I thought it would be enlightening if you could share just a little bit about your courtship with Lady Sacks and how your relationship has been able to thrive for these past five decades. 

Rabbi Sacks: Yeah, look, here's the truth. I was a second-year undergraduate at university. I was studying philosophy. I was studying the French existentialist, Sartre, Camus, etc. And therefore, I was deeply into existential angst and all the stuff.

I was metaphysically miserable in the most wonderful way. And one day, I just happened to be walking through King's College, Cambridge. And there in the distance was a young lady who was the most unlike me I've ever encountered.

So instead of being miserable, she radiated sunshine and joy. I thought this is it. Or as I said, when I tell this story at TED, it's the people not like us who make us grow.

Well, it took me all of three weeks to propose. And 50 years on, it was the most wonderful decision I ever made. But I never doubted that it was going to be the most beautiful decision I ever made.

Because this is… Elaine is somebody who lifts me emotionally and morally every single day of those 50 years. And I just thought, you know, this was so beautiful. We never doubted it for one second.

Paul: Well, we actually have a few questions from our audience that want to know a little bit more about your home life, as it were. So here's… Mary Gray is asking, “As someone who is trying to do a better job with Sabbath worship with teenagers and young children at home, I'm wondering what advice you would have or what kinds of things worked for you and your wife to help your children enjoy the Sabbath?”

Rabbi Sacks: Well, look, Mary, I mean, the Sabbath is the heart of our week. And the fact that we enjoyed it so much meant that our children saw that we enjoyed it. And they are fabulous when it comes to everything to do with the Sabbath, everything to do with Judaism. Because obviously, though they had this handicap of me as a dad, they had this great joy of Elaine as a mom. But I will tell you that something has changed.

There was a lady, I'm not sure if she ever kept anything Jewish before in her life. She was from the Bay Area. Is that right? In San Francisco? She got in touch with me and said, “Rabbi Sacks, we have a problem in our family, which is that our kids are on the internet, on the smartphone the whole time, absolutely the whole time. Even when we are sitting together having a meal around the family table, the kids have their smartphones underneath the table, and they're texting their friends. And we decided this is ridiculous, because it's ruining our family life. It's ruining their social skills. It's ruining their ability to concentrate.” So she said, “We sat down as a family. And we took a decision. A screen-free day, once a week. That day, no laptops, no smartphones, no tablets. And just us together.” She said, “You will like what we called it. We called it the Sabbath.”

And I'm finding more and more and more parents are saying for the sake of their kids and their family, they will once a week do a digital detox. And I think even, what's her name? Even Arianna Huffington said something in praise of that.

So I think the Sabbath is taking on an entirely new meaning. Three and a half thousand years ago, Moses gave us the Sabbath to liberate us from slavery. And now he has given it to us to liberate us from tyranny to the smartphone.

Paul: You know, in the book, you talk so much about the challenges posed by economic inequality. And here's a question. And I think you'll like the tenor of this. Because it's looking about personal responsibility. It says, “You talk in the book about how people with fewer resources and less education have a harder time swimming against the tide of destructive cultural change. Can you talk about why you think that's the case? And what those of us with more resources can do day to day to enable swimming against the tide for those less fortunate around us?”

Rabbi Sacks: One of the most extraordinary phenomena of Jewish life throughout the Middle Ages is that in every single Jewish community that there was, there was a charitable trust, a charitable box, as it were, to support people in need.

And being an administrator of charity was held to be the highest honour in the Jewish community. So it would be the really, really outstandingly successful business people or doctors or what have you, they would be the chair of the charitable distribution. The end result, of course, was that the most successful people within the community had a daily and weekly engagement with the least successful in the community.

Don't forget, those communities were very small. So it was up close and personal. So everyone knew, from the richest to the poorest, that the people who have more than they need have a commitment to the people who have less than they need. And that's, that's really, really impressive. Now, that, of course, was medieval. The question is, of course, you had similar thing in New York, between 1818-1914, when people were coming over from the little Russian townships, and they created their own fellowships, meant to people help people in need.

But over the last couple of months, the Jewish community in Johannesburg, put together, deliberately, some really, really successful business people, and philanthropists, and formed them into a group to help the people whose business is under threat during the economic collapse brought about by the pandemic. So this medieval institution is still functioning today, in a new form, but very impressive. So you've got to institutionalize it, don't rely on people's good graces.

I really think that idea, that if you are the really most successful person, you have to show the way in helping others. 

Paul: And this point about institutionalizing our morality in some way, I just, if I could just take a moment here, we, I know that recently, you were in conversation with Yuval Levin, at the American Enterprise Institute, about your work. We're really fortunate in a month, Yuval will be in conversation with us in the same way, talking about his book, “A Time to Build,” which looks very closely at the challenges facing institutionalization, or the lack thereof, of these kinds of virtues.

You know, we're, I, I hate to say this, we're coming towards the end of our time together. Let me grab one more quick question here from our audience. And I want to give you a little context for this.

Within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the president of our church, Russell M. Nelson, has asked us to be more careful and attentive and intentional about how it is that we hear the Lord's voice in our lives. And Eamon Johnson is posing that question to you. “How or when have you heard the Lord's guidance in your life?”

Rabbi Sacks: I always ask the following question, “Why has this happened to me here now?” In other words, the question that I pose, and to which I attempt to listen to an answer, is what does God want of me in this situation? So to give you the obvious example with which I began, I suddenly realized that all of this bad stuff that I've been complaining about happens so that you and I could have the conversation that we should have had all those years ago.

Always, I can hear God asking me to do something, something that I could only do under these circumstances. And basically, that is, it's almost, it's almost a discipline. Do you know what I mean? You can actually ask, what, this terrible situation, what does it make possible? 

Paul: So instead of why me, it's what can I learn? 

This has been such a delight.

I know that you and I are both big fans of Lin-Manuel Miranda's musical “Hamilton.” There's a refrain in there about Hamilton's writing, and I think it could apply almost to you, Rabbi Sacks. Talks about how do you write like you're running out of time? Write day and night like you're running out of time.

You write like you need it to survive. How do you write every second you're alive? I think this is well into the, what, 31st or more books of yours that you've written. Incredibly prodigious output of just fabulous work that's blessed all our lives.

What's the next project? What are you working on? 

Rabbi Sacks: Really and truly, I want to write a commentary to the Mosaic books, because they are not easy to understand sometimes. And yet they are a key text for anyone who's Jewish. So, this is fairly new. I haven't written that kind of commentary before. I am finding it quite difficult. But in the end, I just get this feeling that if I need to do it, somehow God will give me the strength to do it.

Paul: Well, we hope that He does grant you that strength. This has been such a pleasure and an honour. We wish we could do this more regularly. And we do hope that the time will come, Rabbi Sacks, when you'll be able to join us here on our campus and meet with us face to face. 

We know that you're going into the most holy days of your calendar. Our tradition, Rabbi Sacks, is to end our conversations in prayer.

And we were wondering if you might offer a brief benediction on today's meeting together. 

Rabbi Sacks: Beloved God, thank you for the beauty and grace of this encounter. Thank you for teaching me how much I have to learn from everything that Brigham Young University has to teach. Teach us to listen to one another. Teach us to value one another. Teach us to inspire one another. Teach us to love one another. May Your blessings always be with us all. And may You bless us for good, for peace, for health, and for understanding.

May all our faiths, strength to each other, and through one another, may we grow in love of You. 

Paul: Amen. Thank you. Thank you, Rabbi Sacks, for a beautiful hour together. We hope your holidays are meaningful. God be with you till we meet again.

And Shana Tova. 

Rabbi Sacks: Thank you so much. Shana Tova. A good year for all of us.