Rabbi Sacks on Future Tense

JInsider (March 2010)

I’ve had this feeling that the Jewish people is marching boldly in the wrong direction. We’ve had a very negative view of Jewish life. We think about the Holocaust. We think about antisemitism. We think about the isolation of Israel. We think about the Jews who are marrying out, and the whole assimilation thing. So whenever you hear something Jewish, it’s negative. Now, that can very easily become a self-fulfilling prophecy because people don’t identify with negative. Now, how did we, the people who celebrate life, who see God down here in the pleasures and delights of this world, how did we ever get into this negative mindset? So my feeling was I had to write something to say, “Guys, this is the wrong way of understanding what it is to be a Jew. And if we understand that the wrong way, we will take our people in the wrong direction.”