Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks offers thoughts on how we can navigate the coronavirus pandemic with courage, hope, and empathy. With uncommon wisdom and clarity, he speaks on the leadership, fear, death, hope, and how we could use this moment to build a more just world. Watch for a special, impromptu prayer about halfway through the conversation.
This virtual conversation is part of the TED Connects series, hosted by head of TED Chris Anderson and head of curation Helen Walters.
Chris Anderson:
Hello everyone. Welcome. Here’s the latest of our TED Connects a daily conversation with you, the global TED community in this strange era of the virus. Goodness. I hope everyone’s doing okay. You had a safe weekend. That you’re managing this crazy emotional rollercoaster we’re all on. That your loved ones are safe and that you’re finding at least some new ways to engage that you hadn’t thought about before this all happened. I don’t know, we’re all trying to figure out new things together, like not touching your face like I just did. I’m still. By the end of this, I swear I will have this under control or maybe not.
So last week I was joined here by Whitney Pennington Rodgers. She’ll be back really soon. But because it looks like we’re going to do this for a while yet, we thought it’d be good to share with you some of the broader faces among the TED Curation team. It takes a lot of people, it turns out, to put together wise voices from all around the world. And today my cohost is the head of that team, TED’s Head of Curation, Helen Walters. Helen, where are you?
Helen Walters:
Hi Chris. Great to see you.
Chris Anderson:
There you are. It’s great to have you here, Helen. Helen and I have been working at TED for many years now, and she’s created this extraordinary team of curators specialising in these different areas and holds the thread together, the strategic direction. Helen, it’s been great working with you.
Helen Walters:
You too. Great to see you.
Chris Anderson:
Although you do swear a lot, you promised me that maybe live here, you may succeed in controlling that, but we’ll see.
Helen Walters:
No, I make no promises at all, not a one.
Chris Anderson:
How are you> How have you survived the weekend? What struck you this weekend about this whole bizarre situation we’re in?
Helen Walters:
Whole bizarre situation is right. I am in Brooklyn, I am here with my family and we had a very quiet weekend. The social distancing measures are in place as I went to the pharmacy this weekend and you see the taped out moments on the street where you can stand, but it was pretty quiet here. I actually stayed away from the news as much as possible. I can’t really handle reading the news, so I’m getting news via various groups that I’m in. And also I’m noticing whenever a news announcement is made, there’ll be a flurry of incoming texts and communications from my family in England and elsewhere of like everything of like, “Everything okay? How are you doing?” And so I’m trying to keep my sanity that way. But how about you? How was your weekend, Chris?
Chris Anderson:
Well, I unfortunately haven’t been keeping away from the news and it does make you, lots of emotions including anger, including frustration, including some hope. There seems to be some kind of consensus emerging among many experts as far as I can see of how countries can tackle this, some form of shut down really hard, probably for at least two months. But then you can probably bring people back to work so long as you have massive testing available so that you can quickly find out if someone’s sick, in the bud.
And then maybe also there’s a change in conversation about face masks as well which is interesting in that we were all told in the west, “Don’t bother with them. They don’t really help you, they don’t protect you.” It seems like there’s a lot of people shifting on that now that as a group, if we wear them, we reduce the chances of spreading the bug. That certainly seems to have played a role in Asia. Anyway, that’ll be an interesting conversation for a future one of these. But I am now going to get out of your hair and let you introduce today’s extraordinary guest. So see you all later.
Helen Walters:
Thank you so much for getting out of my hair, Chris. I’ve been waiting for that moment for some time. At last. So it gives me great pleasure to welcome our guest today. He is a Spiritual Leader. He is the former Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth. Sorry, I had to read that to check I didn’t get it wrong. He’s a Writer, he’s a Thinker. He’s a Moral Leader. He’s just an all round wonderful person. I have had the pleasure of working with him on his TED Talk back in 2017. I’d love to welcome Rabbi Sacks.
Rabbi Sacks:
Helen, it’s great to be with you.
Helen Walters:
So good to see you again. I’m sorry it’s in these circumstances.
Rabbi Sacks:
I’m equally sorry, but somehow the technology has arrived at exactly the right time for us to stay in touch virtually, if not physically.
Helen Walters:
That’s right.
Rabbi Sacks:
And this is one of the things you do at TED. Reach out to so many people and connect them with one another.
Helen Walters:
Well, we’re so grateful that you can join us. Where exactly are you right now? And most importantly, how are you?
Rabbi Sacks:
Well, I’m in my study in our home in Golders Green, on the edge of the ‘Jewish ghetto’ and doing fine actually. I’m used to being the lonely man of faith kind of thing. So in a sense I’m used to it. But hearing the real, real pain of our community and of the country who are going through this terrible ordeal.
Helen Walters:
Yeah, it’s real.
So, back in 2017 you opened your TED Talk with a quote from Thomas Paine referring to, “these are the times that try men’s souls.” And Paine, of course, was referring to British tyranny in the 18th century, and you were referring to divided political times in the 21st. It’s not really a stretch, sadly, to shift that from politics to the pandemic. But I wonder, can you give us a sense of what you make of these times and more importantly, what you make of our response to these times?
Rabbi Sacks:
Well, I apologise for 1776. I really do. But-
Helen Walters:
[Laughing] Don’t apologise to me, Rabbi!
Rabbi Sacks:
Lin Manuel Miranda got his own back in the musical Hamilton, which was deftly and beautifully done. I think this is a traumatic time for the entire globe and people are going through every dimension of suffering there is. Physical, psychological, economic, the uncertainty and anxiety about the future. They’re not knowing how long the pandemic will last. They’re not knowing how and when or if the economy will ever get back in shape again. These are horrific times, these are collective trauma. And the real distinction is between events that you live through and events that change you. And I’m hoping that this will come under the second category because they really ought to change us. It’s not as if we were in great shape just before all this began. Globally, we weren’t. Nationally, we weren’t. Our politics were dysfunctional, our economics were inequitable and sometimes inequities. So we were in a bad place and now we’ve come through a bad experience together. I think there will be a collective resolve to move to a better place in the future.
Helen Walters:
So you wrote a piece at The Weekend talking about how the response to the coronavirus could, in fact, be similar to the response we saw after World War II. And in Britain, of course, that response included the launch of a national health service which is something I think many countries are sorely in need of today. But if you had your druthers, how would you see leaders step up to both deal with the pandemic in its moment and then also in its aftermath? What would you like to see the leaders do?
Rabbi Sacks:
Well, don’t forget, there’s a difference between two kinds of leadership, the leadership that gets you through the crisis and the leadership that rebuilds after the crisis. One of the strangest phenomena of all was the fact that Winston Churchill, whom everyone knew, had taken Britain triumphantly through World War II, was not elected as Prime Minister immediately after the war. Yes, he was a great leader for war. He was not necessarily a great leader for peace. I don’t think any political leader in the world right now has a mind to think long. And therefore they will get through the crisis living from day to day being guided by scientific experts. And we’ve seen the rebirth of respect for expertise, which is not unimportant, but I hope a new kind of political leader is about to emerge. The young people who really will be changed by this and will say, “I’ve got to give back.”
And the first thing they have to look at is a national health service. We in Britain know the National Health Service is being overwhelmed at the moment, but to think that 27 million Americans don’t have health cover, don’t have health insurance, I’m sorry, that is morally unintelligible to me. And so somehow or other, we need a new politics for the day after, and this will come from places we’re not expecting. They are certainly not going to come from the existing political leadership, but I think that they will have to look at it. They’ll also have to look at the economy as well.
First of all, we were building up an unsustainable level of individual and national debt anyway, and all of that is seeing companies collapsing all over the world. It was untenable before this happened. And finally, we’re seeing an American President sending out checks to people. The beginning of what you’ve spoken about in TED before, you’ve had speakers dealing with this, a guaranteed basic income. Who knows if that’s what are going to emerge from it. New things are going to emerge. No existing leader is going to have the head space to see this, but I expect a new kind of political leadership to emerge in every country where people have really taken this to heart.
Helen Walters:
And I suppose the problem is that no one cannot take this to heart, right? This is really impacting everybody. And some of what’s alarming about some of the antagonistic rhetoric that we’re seeing, say between the US and China or national leaders trying to close their borders or look inwards, is that the virus doesn’t care about borders, it doesn’t care about anything. I’m interested in, do you see any grassroots or shoots of this type of leadership emerging, or have you seen anything that’s given you hope that this might emerge or that maybe there are people who might even be able to overtake some of the national leaders who are maybe not doing what we might think of as the best job?
Rabbi Sacks:
Look, when I was a student which is an awfully long time ago, the early Jurassic age, we had 67, the six-day war. I’m Jewish. We had this nightmare in the weeks leading up to it. We who had been born after the Holocaust were thinking, given NASA’s threats, that we were about to witness another Holocaust. Now that happened in my first year at university. I think if it hadn’t happened, I would be an accountant. I realise the world has changed. You can’t go through an experience like that and stay the same. So it happens to people when they say, “We can’t go back to the way things were.” So I do see this happening. I do not think the political leadership of, let’s say, the United States and China are behaving terribly responsibly, the world is suffering now is not the time to play Ping-Pong.
Helen Walters:
So the word responsibility is important to you. And you have written for years now about the need for a balance between rights and responsibilities. And I wonder how do you define our personal responsibility in this moment?
Rabbi Sacks:
I think a good question to ask, I know it’s a difficult one, is what does this moment ask of me that it wouldn’t have done at some other time? So I’m doing stuff that I never did before. I am using FaceTime live, I’m using Zoom. I never heard of Zoom before. I’m using every means of communication I can to communicate to as many people as possible at different level. And that is what I hear me being called to do. Our neighbours are doing incredible things, just being neighbourly because we’ve got old people living alone here, and they’re just knocking on the doors or getting in touch with them and so on. Just listen to the call. What does this moment ask of me? Why was I put in this place at this time?
Helen Walters:
I love that. And I think it’s one of the things that has been heartening about this crisis is seeing how the community steps up. I’m in Brooklyn and New York and just seeing how people are leaving notes for neighbours and just checking in to see if they’re okay or if they need anything. If those who are able to go out to the pharmacy or whatever can go pick something up, it is heartening, even though we’re all scared, everybody is frightened of what’s happening and what’s to come. And it’s this weird hinterland that we’re all in where you know that a crisis is coming, even if it hasn’t hit. But we’re seeing the news and we’re seeing the overwhelmed health services. Do you as a spiritual leader… ? Oh, sorry, go ahead.
Rabbi Sacks:
No, I was just going to say one of our grandchildren, our eight-year-old granddaughter, decided on her own to knock on the doors of all the houses in her street, keeping her social distance. And when the door is open, saying, “We live at number 12, if you need anything, come and knock at our door.” And I thought, that’s what an eight-year-old does spontaneously. I’m feeling quite proud at the moment.
Helen Walters:
That’s wonderful. But I think that there’s a universal fear that everyone is experiencing, even if they’re not experiencing it in the same way. And fear can be paralysing. In your experience, what advice do you have for people who are trying to overcome that fear, who are trying to live in the communal space and not just retreat to themselves?
Rabbi Sacks:
Well, look, the thing to do is to reach out in any way that you can because we know that reaching out and helping someone makes you feel better, makes you feel more confident, boosts your immune system, speeds your recovery from any illness. Huge amount of research has been done on the health benefits of altruism and sometimes it’s nothing but a smile at a passerby at six or eight feet distance. Sometimes it’s nothing. Sometimes it’s sharing a funny story on WhatsApp. We had some friends we went on our holiday with about ’22, ’23, friends we went on a holiday in New Zealand a few months ago. They live all over the world and they’ve been bombarding one another with little photographs and videos and stuff and so on, that everyone has found a way of getting out of their confinement. There’s a line in Psalms, “min hametza karatti ya“, “I called You, God, from my confinement and You answered me with expanses.” Sometimes those expanses are just psychological, but knowing that you’ve communicated with somebody, made someone smile, that’s all you have to do.
Helen Walters:
You’ve written a lot. We talked about it in your Talk and you’ve written about it in your latest book, about the need to move from “I” to “We”. I have a couple of questions around this, but first of all, I wonder if you can describe exactly what you mean by that shift.
Rabbi Sacks:
I mean that any social animal needs to be able to do two things, needs to engage in competition and cooperation. Without competition, die. Without cooperation you can’t have a group, you can’t have a society and we cannot survive on our own. We have today two very powerful arenas of competition, the market and the state, politics and economic, the market competition for wealth, the state competition for power. But what we’ve been losing is our arenas of cooperation, families, communities, charities, volunteering and all the rest of it. Those things where you search not for self-interest but for the common good. Those things have been weakening over the past several decades and the end result is society become much more abrasive and unequal.
Helen Walters:
And so therefore, how do we move away from that? I mean, did we need to have such a shift, such a seismic shift such as this in order to shake us out of our kind of complacency?
Rabbi Sacks:
Well, I always ask, make sure we observe the difference between asking why has this happened and what then should we do.
Helen Walters:
Right.
Rabbi Sacks:
This has not happened in order to make us we conscious. It did not happen in order to boost the sales of my latest book. A virus mutates. That’s how things happen. So I’m not asking why this happened. I’m saying now that this has happened, let us really see if it has unleashed energies – as it has! Because communities have grown up, I mean, virtual communities have grown up at a speed that nobody ever thought they would happen. The National Health Service asked for volunteers to be health auxiliaries. They had over half a million volunteers in one day. Now that’s quite something. We have a conservative Prime Minister right now. You remember Margaret Thatcher famously said, “There’s no such thing as society today.” Boris Johnson said, “You know what? There is such a thing as society after all.” So that’s a big change.
Chris Anderson:
Rabbi, chipping in with a couple of questions from the room. And first of all, a question from our tech department who say we’re getting a bit of noise from the microphone rubbing against your collar. If there’s a way of moving the microphone away from your collar, I don’t know whether you can even do that. It’s not a big deal. If you can’t do it doesn’t matter, but –
Rabbi Sacks:
Chris, I met you halfway. I’m not wearing a tie, Chris (!) [See The Tim Ferriss show episode where Rabbi Sacks elaborates on a story that explains this in-joke.]
Chris Anderson:
If only you’d wear a tie, this probably wouldn’t be a problem. Maybe this is what we’ve got wrong. Anyway, I was doing this the first day and they asked me to correct, but that’s a small thing…
Here’s a question though. After, this is from Jennifer on Facebook: After the 1918 [Spanish] flu epidemic, the world did change, but not [necessarily] for the better. Think of the rise of Fascist ideologies. Why should we be optimistic that the present disruption is leading us to a better place?
Rabbi Sacks:
Chris, I have to make a distinction, which is incredibly important. between optimism and hope. Optimism is the belief that things will get better. Hope is the belief that if we work hard enough together, we can make things better. It needs no courage and a certain naivety to be an optimist, but it needs sometimes a great deal of courage to have hope. I’ve tried to bring a message of hope, not of optimism. We know that World War I was supposed to be the war to end all wars, and it didn’t end all war. We know that the flu epidemic, which may have taken between 20 and 50 million lives, did not suddenly create a “We” society. We know all the bad things that happened, the great Crash, the ’30s Depression and so on, and in the end, the explosion of evil that was World War II.
So I’m not being optimistic here. There could be another road that people will go down, a nationalist road, which sees the rise of far right parties in Europe and the breakup of the European Union, further tensions between the United States and China. Heaven alone knows what Russia will do in all this mix. There are horrendous possibilities here. That’s why we need to work very hard together to make sure that we take the possible good benefits out of this.
Number one, the understanding that the whole of humanity has been brought to its knees by one tiny virus. We feel the “We” of humanity as a whole.
Number two, that in the end, the only effective political force that’s worked is the nation. Let’s have one nation and not a divided nation.
And number three, we’ve seen the growth locally of community spirit like we’ve never had before. That’s the “We” of community.
I don’t think any of these things are automatic. I think they will require determination, wisdom, and great courage. They will require leadership.
Chris Anderson:
(By the way, that question wasn’t from Jennifer on Facebook. Jennifer is a member of our tech team who forwarded the question to me. But…) Here’s another question from Facebook, which is: what coping strategies can religion offer in the current circumstances?
Rabbi Sacks:
Well, prayer helps. It actually helps. If you want specifically to know what to say, read the book of Psalms. Book of Psalms is the greatest source of comfort. It certainly was to me when I’ve been ill, was to my late father when he went through the many operations at the end of his life. I think faith that God is with you, giving you the strength to come through this, faith that you place your life in his hands. These are powerful things. They help me go through a number of life challenging illnesses. That and marrying the right woman, of course. But I mean I think faith helps.
The other thing that’s worth listening to is, now that so many people are living in isolation, somebody had the bright idea of asking Natan Sharansky, who was in pretty much solitary confinement for nine years by the KGB, what did he do to stay sane? And he came up with some pretty good principles that I think he’d want to share with you. Number one, focus on what you control. Don’t worry about the rest. Number two, keep your mind active. Number three, never lose your sense of humour. Number four, think of the group that you are a member of even if you can’t physically be in their company. And number five, think of the bigger picture. And for him too, that came from the Book of Psalms.
Chris Anderson:
Last question. And you mentioned prayer. Someone’s asking, would you be willing to… you could say no to this? Would you be willing to lead us in a prayer or invocation offering to help or guide us to get on the right track? Maybe now or towards the end of this…
[Rabbi Sacks pauses for a moment, and then invokes his prayer…]
Rabbi Sacks:
God on high, please be with us all in this hour of trial.
Heal those who are sick.
Give strength to those who give them comfort.
Be with those heroes and heroines who manage our medical systems: the doctors, the nurses, the medical auxilaries.
Give strength to all those who sustain our essential services, who stock our supermarkets, who dispense the medicines we need.
Extend to us your love.
Remove from us all hate.
Let us be joined in this time of trial in our sense of belonging to one another,
And help us, when all this is over, to build a better, more just, and safer world.
Chris Anderson:
Thank you, Rabbi.
Rabbi Sacks:
Helen, it’s over to you.
Helen Walters:
I’m here. I’m here. Thank you so much for doing that. That was beautiful. So I think it’s important when you talk about, you mentioned the healthcare workers, you mentioned the people who are stocking shelves, who are out there every day despite the recommendations that we socially distance or in certain cases we just stay home and don’t go out. So I guess my concern and worries are with them and how they maintain calm and peace in a time when they are sustaining all of us. How can we help them? How can we think about doing what is right for those people? And there are also, of course there are cultures in which social distancing is just simply not possible. Society was designed in such a way that social distancing is not possible. So I guess I’m thinking about this a lot and I wonder what your thoughts are about how we can help or how we can think about that.
Rabbi Sacks:
It’s tremendously helpful for employers, and if not employers, then the government, to provide them with whatever safety equipment they can have, whether it’s gloves, whether it’s face masks, whether face masks have been found to work and so on. It’s appalling that governments were not prepared for this. And because South Korea and China and Hong Kong and Singapore had had SARS and other epidemics recently, they really were prepared. And you can see the difference in state. But otherwise it’s really, really important that we help those people by keeping our social distance. Otherwise we are a health hazard to them. And that’s just incredibly important. So that’s the best we can do to make sure that they are prioritised with the provision of whatever safety procedure, especially the doctors, nurses, and hospitals. In Italy, there’s been a huge percentage of the casualties have been doctors, nurses. I mean that’s really tragic. And in Britain, people are working very hard, very fast to make sure it doesn’t happen here.
Helen Walters:
And what do you think is the moral imperative for executives or for leaders in that position who are maybe running the warehouses or overseeing the places where these people are working?
Rabbi Sacks:
Well, I mean here the whole wartime ethos is absolutely essential. Chief executives have to be down there on the ground with the workers. They can’t be running companies from a distance. They have to be there sharing the same risks, suffering the same fears as their employees. Otherwise, I think they’re just morally unfit for the job.
Helen Walters:
Certainly, I think related to the “We” and the “I” that you have written about, there’s a kind of a rise over the last decades of individualism and a sense that personal freedom matters more than anything else. I think that we’ve all seen unfortunate stories of people who are putting their personal freedom above others. What do you say to them and how can, personally, if we see people who are perhaps not taking these restrictions seriously, should we get involved? How do we respond to seeing people out in society who are not perhaps taking this as seriously as we believe that everyone should?
Rabbi Sacks:
This is a serious problem. And interestingly, we have some really good social science research on this. There’s something called the social goods game. I don’t know if you’ve come across this. Let me explain. Three players are given, let’s say, $30 each, and they’re told that they can contribute as much as they want to, a communal chest and the money will then be doubled and returned to them. So three people are sitting around the table, they’ve each been given $30, they each put $30 in the communal chest that is double to $180 and they all get $60 left. The next round, somebody decides to be clever and he doesn’t put his $30 in, but the other two do. So now they’re $60 double to 120. Everyone gets 40. So two get 40 but the third who didn’t put his money in now has 70. He gains by putting self-interest above the common good.
What happens? The short answer is within a few rounds, everyone stops putting money in the collective thing. The whole common good disappears. Number two, when asked if they would be willing to pay money to punish the non-contributor, they all agree. They’re willing to make a sacrifice to punish the guy who puts his self-interest over the common good. So we have huge research on this. So what happens of course is that if lots of people panic by and hoard and stockpile supermarket goods or drugs or what have you, or they don’t keep their social distance, then we all suffer. The whole thing suffers. That’s why everyone is in lockdown in Britain today because people weren’t following the rules. So the whole common good disappears because a few people pursue their own interests. And the truth is that in the fullness of time, somebody’s going to take their own back on those non-compliant individuals because everyone suffers. So do get involved, unless getting involved means getting less than six feet close to them, in which case, look after your own health first.
Helen Walters:
Get involved, but stay back.
Rabbi Sacks:
Yeah.
Helen Walters:
And I think-
Rabbi Sacks:
Judgement will come.
Helen Walters:
It’s probably worth-
Rabbi Sacks:
Sorry, judgement …
judgement on.
Helen Walters:
Go ahead. Oh no, go ahead. Go ahead.
I was just going to say, I think it’s worth if we will take care of ourselves and our own behaviours before really applying ourselves to others. Of course, that’s kind of how we can at least contribute meaningfully to what’s happening in society.
Rabbi Sacks:
To what they say on the plane first, fix your own mask before fixing someone else’s.
Helen Walters:
That’s right? I mean, the numbers that we’re seeing, Rabbi are so eye-wateringly, horrifying. We’re seeing them coming out of countries such as Italy. They’re happening in the US right now. The one thing that seems clear is that death, we’re all going to have a closer connection to death sooner than later… and generally, death. I mean, of course, it comes for us all, but generally, death is more of a personal experience. We deal with it in our own ways. I don’t think, in this generation, we’ve had to deal with death at this scale. What words of advice or wisdom do you have to share to help us as we all collectively have to manage, if not with direct deaths in our families, but the direct deaths of many millions potentially of people around the world?
Rabbi Sacks:
It’s terribly scary what’s happening and the scale of what’s happening, but in some respects, it’s even worse because, I mean, I had to do a funeral a week or two ago where normally there would’ve been hundreds of people, a well-known, well-loved individual. Everyone would’ve wanted to come to see them off, and almost nobody was there because it was too much of a health risk. We have something called sitting shiva. You sit for seven days, and friends and family come and comfort you. They can’t do that anymore. They can only do that through social media. So, even the traditional comforts that we had in the face of death are being removed from us. The end result is that we will be left with a trauma that will probably stay with us to the end of our days.
People will never forget World War II, those who lived through it. People will certainly never forget the Holocaust, those who lived through it. We will never forget this. We will live despite this. We will just say, as Moses said, “Choose life.” Nothing can make good that loss. We are going to lose people who are very precious to us. We are going to lose people who are very close to us, and we are not going to try and diminish that pain. That pain is real and we have to feel it, and then we have to get up the next day.
Helen Walters:
I think it’s also going to be strange too, to kind of readapt, should we be lucky enough to be able to readapt at the end of this. Already you go outside, it’s so quiet. How are we going to readjust when this is over? Or what are we going to readjust to? It’s difficult to know in this time.
But Chris, you’re back with questions.
Chris Anderson:
Well, there’s a provocative question here, which I’m intrigued just how you respond to it. From Facebook. “Rabbi, it may not be coincidental that the pandemic happened before Passover, Easter. What do you think the meaning of this plague is? In the context of what happened millennia ago in Egypt. Is the whole humanity getting out of the tyranny of materialism, of symbolic Egypt?” There you go.
Rabbi Sacks:
No, sorry. I’m not going to have the whole world eating unleavened bread after this. If you want a real answer, if you can handle this close bit of biblical exegesis, I would say this. If you read the Exodus account, there are 10 plagues. The first two, the water turns to blood and the country is full of frogs. The Egyptian magicians can replicate, so they say that’s nothing, that’s just magic. The third plague is a plague of lice, of microscopic little organisms. Now, on this one, the Egyptian magicians can’t replicate it, and they say to the Pharaoh, “[foreign language],” “It’s the finger of God.”
This is the Bible making fun of Egyptian civilization. Egyptian civilization said, “What’s divine is massive.” Look at the temples, look at the Great Pyramid of Giza. For 4,000 years, the highest man-made structure on Earth. And along comes plague three, this tiny microscopic little organism, and brings Egypt to its knees.
It’s what T.S. Eliot meant when he said, “I will show you fear in a handful of dust.” So, if I were to take any biblical significance, it would not be in the context of the Book of Exodus, but it would be in the sense of teaching all of us humility. This tiny little microscopic virus has brought humanity to its knees, despite all our wealth, all our scientific expertise, and all our technological prowess. Let us have a little humility from here on.
Chris Anderson:
But what would you say to someone who takes almost the opposite stance, and say that actually, to try to understand this remotely in terms of ancient myths and stories, and that that whole worldview has kind of failed in the current context? The only story we should be paying attention to is the story of science, the story of knowledge, the story of learning that random, horrifying things can happen on the planet, can spread out of control. And that, yes, maybe we can get a sense of community and connection from religion, but in terms of an explanation of what’s happened, to get it, we must pay more attention to science.
Rabbi Sacks:
A hundred percent. Totally and absolutely. I wrote a book on this called The Great Partnership, saying, “Don’t think of religion and science as two opposite things.” The greatest Rabbi of the Middle Ages, Moses Maimonides, was one of the greatest doctors of the Middle Ages, author of eight medical textbooks. I think it’s a religious imperative to study medicine, to develop new cures, to save lives thereby. And the idea that religion is a substitute for science is outrageous. I’m sorry, I have no patience for that view whatsoever.
Chris Anderson:
Okay, and finally, another question about your comments about a divisive society. I mean, it is divisive, it’s us versus them. So, how do you dialogue with people on the other side who are only used to talking with people who agree with them?
Rabbi Sacks:
It’s called role reversal. Somebody asked me, “What do you say to a guy who’s just coming out of the supermarket with, I don’t know, a hundred rolls of toilet paper and leaving this old lady behind with nothing in her basket?” I said, “What I would say to him is just think what she is thinking right now. Put yourself in her position.” That’s the simplest way of learning how to be moral I know.
Now, what I saw in the United States just defied belief. You had, what, one month ago, a poll that said that 45% of Americans no longer talk politics to a close friend or a member of the family because they are worried that that would break up the relationship. And I’m thinking to myself, “Have we suddenly become such superheroes that we can dispense with the need for empathy, the need to understand how the world looks like from somebody who’s looking at it from another perspective from us?” For heaven’s sake, that’s ridiculous. Civilization depends, and morality depends on our being able to see through other people’s eyes.
And I’m going to quote the Bible at you, Chris, “Do not harm a stranger because you know what it feels like to be a stranger. You will want strangers in the land of Egypt. You know what it feels like to be on the other side.” We need that in politics right now.
Chris Anderson:
Thank you, Rabbi. A hundred percent agree on that point for sure. I’ll be back at the end.
Rabbi Sacks:
Okay.
Helen Walters:
So, Rabbi, you turn to religious texts obviously for comfort and [foreign language]. What advice do you have for those who don’t have spiritual beliefs?
Rabbi Sacks:
Don’t have spiritual beliefs? Poetry and music. Those are the finest expressions of the human spirit. Just read Shakespeare’s sonnets, read Wordsworth, read Yeats, read whoever. And look, music is such a personal taste. I mean, I try and go all the way from Eminem to [inaudible] and so on, but I never know what speaks to people. But there are words of the language of the mind, and music is the language of the soul. And don’t tell me that there are too many human beings who can’t be moved by music. There are some, but very few. So basically, that’s it. Poetry and music.
Helen Walters:
I’m not going to lie, Rabbi, I have great delight in seeing you rocking out to Eminem. That gives me great pleasure. So, thank you for that.
Rabbi Sacks:
Yeah, lose yourself. Let’s sing that once a day.
Helen Walters:
So, you mentioned shiva earlier, and I know also that you have, or you have had, up until now, a family Sabbath meal every Friday. What part or what role can ritual play at this moment? And how are you redefining ritual in a virtual world?
Rabbi Sacks:
Well, number one, we get together with the family on a programme that, whose name I forget… Is it Guestroom or something like that? Some subsidiary of Zoom. I don’t know. They’re all on the screen together. And we have family times when we just come together as a family. So, everyone’s there. And, of course, our grandchildren love this stuff. They grow up with this stuff. They add all sorts of special effects while we’re talking. And that’s number one.
Number two, obviously physically we can’t be with them on… Well, we can’t be with them, full stop. But especially on Friday night, which is family time. So, we have one of those electronic picture frames where you can store lots of pictures. They change every few seconds. So, as we are bringing in the Sabbath, Elaine and I stand by that picture frame, and we just stand there looking at our grandchildren. And it’s very, very moving, I have to tell you. So, we manage.
Helen Walters:
I love that. Where do you see hope or light in this moment?
Rabbi Sacks:
Helen, because I was Chief Rabbi for a long time, I got to know Holocaust survivors. And I wanted to know how did they carry on living? And some of them didn’t. Some of them committed suicide, even Primo Levi committed suicide in his eighties. And I just thought, “How on earth did they survive?” And then I thought of Yisrael Kristal, who died about three years ago, one month short of his 114th birthday, the world’s oldest living man, a Holocaust survivor who had his bar mitzvah on his 113th birthday. Lived in Haifa. He made chocolates. He liked making people happy. Made liqueur chocolates.
Edith Eger wrote the book, The Choice, survivor of Auschwitz. Survivor of the Death March, which was worse than Auschwitz, who writes her first book at the age of 90, called The Choice. And it’s an international bestseller. And she emerges as a female Viktor Frankl, who used her pain at Auschwitz to speak to and heal the pain of others.
I look at the photograph, Last Summer, of a lady in Israel called Shoshana Ovitz, another Auschwitz survivor, celebrating her 104th birthday. And she invited her family, her children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren to come together to celebrate with her. And they took a photograph of them against the Western Wall. There were almost 400 of them. I thought, “What courage does it take to bring 400 lives into a world that you know contains [inaudible]?”
And I’ve just studied these people. I haven’t read philosophical theories. I just studied these people. These people live from day to day, they affirm life, they celebrate life, they look forward. They wrestle with their memories, and they try not to load them on others. And they are joyous people, but a very hard-won joy. A lot of jagged edges. And I always think, “If they could get through what they had to go through, so can I.”
Helen Walters:
Beautiful. And I think that will speak too to the many parents I’m sure who are watching and listening and worrying about the fact that their children are home or their children are not having an education right now. Any other thoughts that you have about how to involve and include children in this moment, without filling them with the fear that I think so many of us are feeling?
Rabbi Sacks:
Well, I’ve seen some very innovative approaches at education classrooms, virtual classrooms, and the teachers seem to be working through the idea that you have to keep kids physically active quite a lot because it’s quite difficult to sit still in your own house, in your own front room. And it gets quite boring. So, they seem to have worked out more interactive and more active lessons, learning through game playing in some cases.
And that seems to work. I would also think around Easter, around Passover, to get children to do a little Passover, or a word, a little poem, a little play, a little something filmed on your smartphone, and send it to their grandparents. Make them feel that they’re the teachers, not just the pupils.
Helen Walters:
And how much do you advise honesty with children, which I don’t mean to sound as it sounds, but how much do we involve children in what is happening here? There’s so much uncertainty around. And children don’t necessarily thrive on uncertainty, but at the same time, you don’t necessarily want to disguise the fact that this is super odd for everybody. How do you think about talking to children about what’s happening?
Rabbi Sacks:
Kids find out anyway, they’re extremely well-informed these days. So, at such times you have to be very open and honest. You have to answer questions. You have to never, ever induce fear or uncertainty. You have to say, “It’s going to be okay. We’re all in this together. We’re going to come through this.” You’ve got to explain to them why they have to keep certain distances, and they can’t go to certain places. All children respond to discipline when it is accompanied with explanation, but I’ve never known that keeping things from children is terribly helpful and they’re getting so much more mature so much earlier these days, and so much better informed, that it’s better for them to confront their fears, for you to confront their fears and to reassure them. And that reassurance must be rock solid, not the slightest room for doubt there.
Helen Walters:
What happens if you don’t feel rock solid?
Rabbi Sacks:
You have to, for their sake. Sorry about that. And once you’ve done it, you will feel rock solid. It’s the way you combat fear. When you have to be fearless for the sake of your children, you become fearless. It’s a very strengthening and reinforcing phenomena. And at such moments, families huddle together in very beautiful ways. And I remember, it wasn’t the same in any way, but when our kids were young, we were in Israel for the whole of the first Gulf War, 39 Scud missiles, any one of which could have contained chemical or bacterial weapons. We had these big, big gas masks. It was very scary for all of them, but we were very together as a family then.
Helen Walters:
Chris.
Chris Anderson:
Rabbi, just as you know, it looks like the online audience has been super appreciative, they’ve learned so much from you. There’s an interesting question here this week, towards the end of this hour together, of what role can beauty play in helping us manage our lives at this time? Can connecting with beauty help us or is that a luxury when people are suffering and dying?
Rabbi Sacks:
Sorry, I’m thinking. I’m not a great beauty guy. I’m a fairly ugly sort of guy, but I’m trying to wrestle with this one, Chris, and I’m thinking of Rainer Maria Rilke’s line in the first of the Duino Elegies, beauty is the beginning of terror that we are just able to bear.
So, Rilke seemed to say that beauty is this side of fear. Maimonides says that beauty is a wonderful antidote to anxiety and depression. I just love beauty for the sake of loving beauty, but I also believe, and I don’t know whether this resonates with anyone, but I don’t know if you’ve listened, for instance, the late quartets of Beethoven and, in particular the late music of Schubert, the last three quartets and the quintet, and to me, Schubert is taking pain and turning it into beauty. And therefore, whenever I’ve felt pain or fear, I tend to listen to those late Schubert quartets or the quintet. And he takes you on this journey from pain to beauty and you feel transformed by the experience. So I’m not sure if musical beauty was what your questioner was asking about, but beauty is much to be recommended at such a time.
Chris Anderson:
Is it fair to say that beauty is connected quite closely to two other words; yearning, which is in the case of music, I think you outlined there very eloquently, that feeling of, this is beautiful, but it’s painful. It’s expressing a pain in me, there’s almost a contradiction there that is powerful. But then another word as well of gratitude. For me, when you just take a moment, I don’t know, to get outside if you can and see a piece of nature or see something, that moment of saying, “Oh my goodness, that’s beautiful. Oh my goodness, now that I think about it, I do have a lot of things to be grateful for,” and that there’s some sort of mental health nourishment in that?
Rabbi Sacks:
Can I tell you a story? Do we have a moment? Do we have time?
Chris Anderson:
Tell us your story.
Rabbi Sacks:
It was our honeymoon, 50 years ago, and we were in a little Italian town called Paestum, which has some Roman ruins, but it also has a beach, lovely beach. And it was glorious day and I longed to go into the water, except for the fact that I can’t swim. And I was looking at the people and they were about 200 yards out, but they were only up to their knees. So I said to Elaine, “I’m going to paddle out up to my knees and that’ll be that.” So I paddled out up to my knees and then I turned around and started coming back and suddenly I found myself out of my depth. There was no one near. And as I went under for the fifth time, I remember thinking two thoughts. Number one, what a way to start a honeymoon, and number two, what’s the Italian for help?
Somehow or other, somebody must’ve seen me because somebody rescued me. To this day, I don’t know who, deposited me pretty much unconscious at Elaine’s feet, and that was our honeymoon. Ever since then, I have said with special concentration, the first prayer the Jews say in the morning before they do anything else, [foreign language], “Thank you God for giving me back my life.” And that’s what I feel every day.
The point I’m making though is the first word we say on waking up in the morning, is [foreign language], thank. In Judaism, we thank before we think, and I commend this to everyone right now. Think of the wonderful things to say thank you for and they will lift your spirits.
Chris Anderson:
And I’ll ask one last question from online. You spoke of a just world. Could you elaborate on that? What does that just world look like and what steps, maybe just one key step to get there?
Rabbi Sacks:
Well, my main thoughts are about individual nations. I think we really have reached the outer limit of inequality. I don’t know, did you see that South Korean film that won the Oscar? Was it called Parasite?
Helen Walters:
Parasite.
Rabbi Sacks:
I don’t know if you saw the American film that had most nominations called The Joker. Completely different films, but from both of them, cries of anger from the people who are left out towards the people who are at the top of society. And they are violent films, both of them, really violent films. And I can’t imagine either of them being made in the past in quite that way. There could have been a lot of anger in the 30s and 40s, but it would’ve been working class solidarity type anger, not individual revenge type anger.
So I think we need economic justice. We cannot have X million of people in the States and elsewhere outside adequate health service. We can’t have gross inequalities such that, whether you are Robert Putnam on the sort of middling left or Charles Murray on the far right, they are saying the American Dream no longer plays anymore. The social mobility has declined. Those things, I mean Ray Dalio, you remember Ray Dalio, we were part of the same TED conference together. Ray Dalio, last year, called income inequality in the States, a national emergency and an existential threat to the future of America.
So it is that individual justice that I can make sense of. The more global justice is a really difficult one because, how do you reform failed and failing states? How do you deal with corrupt rulers and essentially corrupt economies? So for these, I wish I had an answer, I really don’t. I’ve discussed them with people who should have an answer, with people from the World Bank and what have you, and they find it very difficult to give me an answer. So I’ll settle for local, national justice and for the rest, needs a bigger brain than I have.
Chris Anderson:
I mean do you hold any hope of the fact that the reset we’re all facing right now is so dramatic that it will force this kind of thinking, the kind of radical rethinking that we need to do about… And we have the time to do it and almost the absolute essential need to do it, to rethink these things, that people will do it in a million conversations around the world, that basically we reassess what really matters and the words you’ve just used are a powerful motive for us to do that. Can this actually happen?
Rabbi Sacks:
I think, Chris, you yourself have a very, very important platform to play, because I don’t think this coming together will necessarily happen through conventional political avenues, but it can come together through platforms like TED. It can come together through World Health Organisations and scientific cooperation and so on, the kind that we are still waiting for on climate change.
I think we have reached the point at which, though our politics are all national, our problems are almost all global, and there is a big mismatch and hence, I think TED has a very, very important role to play in this.
Chris Anderson:
Well, we hugely appreciate you coming and sharing these words. That was something. Thank you. Wow.
Helen Walters:
Thank you so much.
Rabbi Sacks:
Thank you. Great to be with you. I always said, remember Chris, you get the best speakers because you’re the best listeners.
Chris Anderson:
Some days, some days. And look, for all of you watching this, thank you for being great listeners and for coming with us on this journey of wonders and stresses and learnings through this strange era of the virus. Well, I loved what you said, Rabbi there, we’re all in this together. That’s very much our spirit right now. It’s how we feel towards our global community. We’re all in this together. Let’s continue to talk together, learn from each other, do this together.
We have another one of these tomorrow at noon, US Eastern Time, same time where it’s actually, it’s a double act tomorrow. We’re starting with 15 minutes from a statistician, a journalist statistician, a data journalist on The Financial Times who’s created these graphs that really give an extraordinary understanding of how different countries are doing. And I’m excited for him to share a few of those graphs with you and to explain them. And Helen, talk about the other half.
Helen Walters:
So the other half will be a conversation between TED Science curator, David Biello, and Sonia Shah, who is also a science journalist and a communicator whose latest book was called Pandemic, published in 2017, but it’s something that she has been studying for many years. And so they are going to talk about some of the ways that we might come through this as well as some of the ways that we have been responding so far. It should be a great conversation.
Chris Anderson:
And more to come during the rest of the week. So, calendar the slot, come and join us again, share this with others if you found it helpful. You will be able to share a link with this whole hour archived, and someone will tell me the web address where that’s at, you’ll be able to find it just by coming to ted.com and following the lines to Ted Connects where we’ll have it posted or on our Facebook page, facebook.com/ted. And the talks from last week are there as well. Thank you so much for your company and see you all again very soon.
Helen Walters:
Thanks, Rabbi. Thanks, everyone.