Rabbi Sacks: In a few days, Jews throughout the world will begin that most intense and dramatic period of the Jewish calendar, the Ten Days of Repentance. They begin on Sunday night with Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, and they reach a climax on the tenth day, Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement.
It isn't surprising that we call these festivals the Yamim Noraim, the Days of Awe, because they are moments of intense solemnity, which remind us that there is a moral law governing the universe.
It isn't a matter of indifference whether we do right or wrong.
[shofar] On Rosh Hashanah, we blow the shofar, the ram's horn, as a summons calling on us to reflect on what we've done in the past year.
On Yom Kippur, we spend the entire day fasting and praying, thinking about the wrong we've done to others or ourselves, and repenting, which means to say regretting our mistakes and somehow gathering the strength to do better in the future.
They're a time of awe because they are, quite simply, days of judgement.
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But how can we survive a Day of Judgement? I don't suppose any of us could say that in the past year we've done nothing wrong, and if we could, there'd be something wrong in our capacity for self-judgement. But how can we face the wrong we did without being overwhelmed by guilt? To this, Judaism gives a simple answer. Repentance.
And that means that if we recognise that we've done wrong, and we set ourselves from here on to do better, we find forgiveness. Or to use another word, atonement, which is why the single most important message of these days of the Jewish year is that when it comes to our lives as individuals, the ending hasn't yet been written.
We aren't held captive by the past. God gives us a second chance. That is the meaning of repentance.
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One of the most successful people I've ever met left school at the age of 16 with a report from his headmaster, which said he'd never amount to anything. He spent the rest of his life proving his headmaster gloriously wrong, and it was from him I learnt how mistaken we are to think that human beings can't change and surprise us all.
The great belief of Judaism is that we have free will, which means that at any moment we can become a different sort of person to the one we've been until now.
It isn't an idea that everyone has shared. The ancient Greeks, for example, believed in fate, which means that the outcome of human affairs is inevitable. The ending has already been written. Our attempt to change what can't be changed always ends in tragedy. And not only the ancient Greeks.
Whenever we think of life as divided into winners and losers, the winners who can't help winning and the losers who can't help losing, we've given in to the same idea.
Think of the young people sleeping on the streets of Britain because they've got no home, no job, and no prospects of either. Think of the victims of famine who, if they survive through our relief, seem only destined to become victims again the next time round.
Think of the various races and ethnic groups throughout the world who've suffered persecution again and again. Were they born to be losers? Has their fate been decreed? For them, has the ending already been written?
The most powerful idea the Bible has ever taught humanity is that the ending hasn't been written. Just because something's happened in the past, it doesn't mean that we're powerless to change the future.
As individuals, God always gives us a second chance, and a third, and as many chances as we need. And because God does that for us, He gives us the courage to build a society that offers people a second chance, and a world in which no one was born to lose.
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In some strange way, what we believe shapes what we become.
The ancient Greeks believed in fate, and they went the way of fate. But the ancient Israelites believed that the ending is never written, and that is why there are still Jews today.
In one of those extraordinary pieces of irony which history sometimes delivers, archaeologists discovered an ancient Egyptian stone on which was inscribed the first known reference outside the Bible to the people of Israel.
It's called the Merneptah Stele, and it dates from the 13th century BCE (before the Common Era), and it says this: “Israel is laid waste. Her seed is no more.”
Someone, more than 3,000 years ago, had decided that this particular people was to be destroyed. Its end had been decreed.
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Having survived more than one decree of genocide, that people still lives. Nothing to me testifies more strongly to the power of faith over fate than that Jews still exist as Jews, still believing what their ancestors believed.
And that faith comes above all from these days, the Ten Days of Repentance, when we sound the shofar to celebrate human freedom, and we fast, knowing that in our determination to change, we find God giving us the courage to change, and that in our turning to God, we find forgiveness.
May this be for you and for all of us, a year in which we find the strength to change suffering into hope and conflict into peace. May it be a year of blessing for us all.
