…the ideas of Rabbi Sacks and encourage others to continue these conversations with the next generation, as we share the stories and ideas of Rabbi Sacks scholars. Dr. Erica Brown is the Director of the Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks-Herenstein Center for Values and Leadership. A Closer Look Delving deeper into the thoughts shared by Rabbi Sacks on Noach, Dr Erica…
Following the publication of the government’s policy document, “This Common Inheritance”, which set out Britains’s environmental strategy, Rabbi Sacks, then the Chief Rabbi-elect, wrote an article for the Jewish Chronicle examining the Jewish approach to ecological issues. Towards the end of the 1980s, environmental concerns moved fast from obscurity to the top of the political agenda. Throughout Europe, green parties…
…a Jew. A human being, yes, brit bnei Noach, but not a Jew. Who does God choose? He chooses the man who gets up and says, “Challilah lecha meassot kadavar hazeh. [Genesis 18:25].” When God tells Abraham he’s about to destroy Sodom and Amorah, Abraham gets up and says, “God forbid that you should do such a thing.” Abraham stands…
The year 2001 began as the United Nations Year of Dialogue between Civilizations. By its end, the phrase that came most readily to mind was ‘the clash of civilizations.’ The tragedy of September 11 intensified the danger caused by religious differences around the world. As the politics of identity begin to replace the politics of ideology, can religion become a…
QUOTES Chiefly Quotes: A collection of quotes from Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks zt”l The Rabbi Sacks Legacy is delighted to share ‘Chiefly Quotes’, an inspirational PDF collection of 1600 quotes collated by Rabbi Johnny Solomon through his research of Rabbi Sacks’ canon of written work, and then arranged by theme. You can also find our growing bank of Rabbi Sacks…
The Hebrew Bible is a book whose strangeness is little understood. It tells the story of God who makes a covenant with an individual, Abraham, whose children become a family, then a tribe, then a collection of tribes, then a nation. It is the narrative of a particular people. Yet the Bible does not begin with this people. Instead it…
The essential message of the Hebrew Bible is that universality – the covenant with Noah – is only the context of and prelude to the irreducible multiplicity of cultures, those systems of meaning by which human beings have sought to understand their relationship to one another, the world, and the source of being….
Philosophical ethics, true to its Platonic origins, focuses on what we have in common: rationality (Kant), emotion (Hume), or our desire for pleasure and aversion to pain (Bentham). Duty, obligation, sympathy, solidarity – these are the things we share in virtue of our universality. They belong to Man, not men; Humanity, not individual human beings; the unity of the moral…
God, the Maker of all, has set His image on the person as such, prior to and independently of our varied cultures and civilisations, thus conferring on human life a dignity and sanctity that transcends our differences. That is the burden of His covenant with Noah and thus with all humankind. It is the moral basis of our shared humanity,…
Difference does not diminish; it enlarges the sphere of human possibilities. Our last best hope is to recall the classic statement of John Donne and the more ancient story of Noah after the Flood and hear, in the midst of our hyper-modernity, an old-new call to a global covenant of human responsibility and hope. Only when we realise the danger…