Rabbi Sacks: On the Jewish High Holy Days, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, we enter a world of moral drama. Now the synagogue is empty, but over the next few days it'll be full of people reviewing what we've done in the past year. We'll confess our sins and pray for forgiveness.
Because these are the days when we stand before God and give an account of our lives. We use words like good and evil, sin and transgression, repentance and atonement. We stand in the presence of absolute values.
Up there above the Ark is one of the great symbols of that world, the Ten Commandmentsת given to Moses at Mount Sinai - thou shall and thou shall not. Moral certainty engraved in stone and carved on the hearts of a hundred generations.
But are there such things anymore?
Out here on the street, that world seems long ago and far away. Here amidst the noise and the bustle, we seem to be in a different kind of universe. Hereת you can buy what you want, go where you want and, within limits, be whatever you like.
Once, people went on pilgrimages. Today, we go on holidays. Once, service meant serving God. Today, it means serving the customer.
And there are people who argue that morality is like that. It's whatever we choose it to be. And isn't this a kinder, more human world without the intimidating thunder of heavenly commands?
But there's another face of society and you don't have to go far to find it.
The homeless, the poor, the unemployed. People without hope.
And here you can see the new commandments:
Thou shalt not fail.
Thou shalt not be unemployed.
Thou shalt not be unlucky.
In a world of physical attraction, thou shalt not be plain.
In a world of success, thou shalt not be a loser. In a world of shopping, thou shalt not be unable to afford.
That seems to me a much harsher, arbitrary, unjust set of rules than the ones engraved in our houses of prayer.
Sometimes, resentment can turn to violence. Here, at St. George's School, Maida Vale, just around the corner from where I live, a young headteacher was trying to stop a fight in the playground. A pupil was being attacked by a gang of young people.
And as he went to his defence, one of the gang stabbed him and he died from the wounds. The headteacher's name was Philip Lawrence. And to many people, his death seemed to symbolise much of what was going wrong.
His widow is Frances. And this is the plaque?
Frances Lawrence: Yes, that's right.
Rabbi Sacks: And they really did respond, didn't they? I mean, their headteacher told me there's been no graffiti in the school since then.
Frances: Yes.
Rabbi Sacks: Isn’t that extraordinary? Perhaps we'll walk in, shall we?
Frances: Philip built this atrium because he wanted to bring light into the school, both physically and because he felt that he wanted to bring light into his pupils' lives.
Rabbi Sacks: How did he try and sort of communicate those values to the kids?
Frances: I think he tried to show them that they were worth more probably than they knew that they were. And I don't know whether he even consciously thought that, but by being so very interested in them and by loving them, he made them feel very special. And when he died, so many of them wrote to me and spoke to me and said, I always felt better after meeting him and he was so very special that I felt special. And he was really interested in everything they did, not their academic success necessarily, although obviously that helped, but in the whole of their lives.
Rabbi Sacks: And he thought that by giving people a very strong framework of clear guidance, they would be able to grow as people.
Frances: Yes.
Rabbi Sacks: Together with the love and the belief in them as individuals.
Frances: Yes. It's only with those boundaries that right is right and wrong is wrong that they can learn, I think, to be free.
[music]
Rabbi Sacks: The death of Philip Lawrence was a shocking reminder of the stark contrast between good and evil, violence and love.
Another shocking death moved virtually the entire nation and made us think again about the values for which we live.
What was it about Diana, Princess of Wales, that led so many of us to feel that when she died, we were bereaved. As I read the notes that people had left, along with the flowers and the candles, I realised she'd become a symbol of the power of a simple human gesture to change lives.
Throughout the world, there were thousands of people to whom she gave just one visit, one letter, one handshake, a single smile, and they never forgot it. It gave them strength. It showed them that someone cared and they carried the memory with them through the years.
The warmth we felt for the Princess of Wales reminded me that a single act of kindness has more of eternity than wealth or power or beauty or fame. Her greatest courage lay in reaching out to what her brother called “the constituency of the rejected,” and that work continues in a thousand places, wherever people care enough to give other people hope.
(Did you see it on television?)
I've come to one of them, Lorne House, a drug rehabilitation centre.
Jo Searle, Manager, Lorne House: I think the most important thing is that we give them a safe place, somewhere where they can be and hopefully be safe and people around them will respect them. What we're saying to them is, we want you to be here if you want to sort your drug or alcohol problem out, and we're going to be here for you. We're not just saying this, and it doesn't matter if you stomp about a bit.
In a way, we're giving them the boundaries to push up against, which a lot of them feel they haven't had, to prove that someone cares.
Rabbi Sacks: You mean that saying ‘no’ sometimes, giving people clear rules, helps them?
Jo: Without a doubt. I think sometimes it's the only way to show someone that you're really that interested, is to say, ‘No, I won't let you do that.’
Woman showing Rabbi Sacks the gym: This was donated by Boy George.
Jo: Once they've worked out that there are reasons for us being a bit, not awkward, but sometimes saying ‘No, you can't do that,’ or ‘You have to negotiate this. You can't do this.’ Sometimes they say ‘Why?’ And they can't understand the reason, and then they'll look back a week later and say, ‘I understand that now.’
We take on, in some ways, a real parenting role, but in other ways, we're not at all. We're not their parents, and we offer something very, very different to their parents. In a way, I think they don't feel they have the same obligations as they might do to their parents, so it's more of an equal relationship, possibly, but we do have power.
Rabbi Sacks: What does caring do for them, the fact that somebody cares unconditionally?
Jo: It starts to make them ask questions about why they don't care for themselves. Most of the young people that come into here, their self-esteem is absolutely minimal, and they have very little care or respect for themselves. They often think they're worthless.
When you're faced with a staff team and other people constantly saying, ‘You are worth it,’ and ‘That was good,’ and ‘You thought of doing that,’ it gets more and more difficult as each day goes by to keep believing that you're not worth it.
Rabbi Sacks: Just tell me again what it is about friendship that makes it important, but important not to be too dependent.
Woman: Sometimes you get really close to someone, then they leave, so it does hurt you getting too close to people here.
Rabbi Sacks: And we learn that from the hedgehogs, because you know what hedgehogs do in winter. They have to get very close to each other to give each other warmth, but if they get too close, they hurt each other with the spines. So hedgehogs manage to keep close enough to stay warm, but far enough apart not to injure each other.
Woman: Yes, that’s a good point.
Jo: They have to believe they're worth it, otherwise anything else that anybody gives them is not a lot of use really. We could give them all jobs, wonderful places to live, cars, but they'll still destroy that if they don't think they deserve it, if they don't think that they're worth it. So, what we have to do is get them to start to believe that they're worth it, and then they can accept what they have and haven't got.
Rabbi Sacks: I've been thinking a lot recently about faith and values and human courage, because in this past year my father died, and it made me wonder about the life he lived. He came here as a refugee at the age of two. His parents were poor and so, at the age of 14, he had to leave school to help support the family.
Most of his life he worked here, in Commercial Road in London's East End. In worldly terms, he was never a success, and yet all his life I never heard him complain.
What gave my father strength was his family and community, and above all, his faith.
He lived for his parents and his children. He loved the synagogue and Jewish prayer. He never really had an education - not secular or Jewish - but he made sure that we did.
He couldn't afford to give us much, but he gave us something far more precious than money. He gave us his faith, his values, his pride in being a Jew, and we tried to do things that would give him pride.
And this is where he found his world of meaning. For him, Jewish faith was about simple things - home, the family, prayer, charity, keeping as much as he could of our religious rituals, enjoying life and making a blessing over it.
For him, good things came from God, and so you had to share them with others. And as for bad things, well, God was there to share them with you, and somehow that made them easier to bear.
And I learned from him that the world of the Jewish New Year is real and it makes a difference. There are absolute values. There are right and wrong ways to live.
I learned that each of us is measured not by what we get, but by what we give to others. And that however many mistakes we make, all we have to do is to admit them in our hearts to God and we find the strength to begin again.
And that, to me, is a more human world than one in which the only faith we have is in our own wants and desires. And it's still there, whenever we hear within ourselves the voice of something greater than ourselves, giving us the courage to hope, the strength to give, and the humility to forgive and be forgiven.
This New Year, may we find God and may God find us, because in God is the humanity of our world.
