Announcer: Now, BBC 1 reflections on the Jewish New Year and the passage of time.
Rabbi Sacks: Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, the great festivals of the Jewish New Year, are moments when we're most conscious of time itself. We ask God for another year of life and we reflect on how we've used the past year.
Did we use time well? Did we bring blessing into lives other than our own? Did we become agents of hope?
Here at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, I'm at the home of one of the great attempts to measure time precisely that were necessary so that ships at sea could establish their longitude - a challenge eventually won by John Harrison - and this is the timepiece with which he did it.
But the history of time isn't just about how we measure it, but also about how we understand it and use it. Ancient civilisations - Mesopotamia, Egypt of the pharaohs, developed the first ways of measuring time. They tracked the movements of the sun and stars, they invented the first calendars, and they made the first clocks. But for them, time was a circle that went round and then returned, because that's how time is in nature. The cycle of the seasons, the revolutions of the stars, the phases of life.
They believed that all things returned to where they began. They wouldn't have understood words like history or progress. For them, the world didn't change. What would be in the future already had been in the past. There's nothing new under the sun.
It was in ancient Israel, the people of the Bible, that a new idea of time was born. Time as a journey with a starting point and destination. Time as a story with a beginning, middle and end. Time where the future isn't just an action replay of the past.
How did it happen? Well, because of an idea that's central to the Jewish New Year itself.
Teshuvah. The word we translate as repentance, but which actually means turning, changing direction. The idea that by acknowledging our mistakes and committing ourselves to act differently in the future, we can begin again. We have the gift of freedom to change the direction of our lives.
And if we can change ourselves, we can begin to change the world.
That allows us to think in a new way about time. Time is an arena of change where we can make a difference to ourselves and to others.
To try and understand what it means to hope, let me introduce you to Gena Turgel, a survivor of the Holocaust who spent much of her life since working with young people.
Gena Turgel: Well, first we were in Krakow ghetto, then Plaszow, and then we went into Auschwitz, and then Buchenwald, and Bergen-Belsen, which was known to us, as they say in German, Vernichtungslager, 'finish camp'. From there, there's no escape.
We were completely like sardines. And I've seen heaps of bodies lying.
In every sense of the word, there were skeletons. You could not distinguish whether they were men or women. You can't possibly imagine. Whatever you see in films, it's nothing. And I said to myself, I'm not going to die like that.
There were so many difficult times. And what have I been doing? Somehow, I always felt that this is not only me I'm doing. There's some sort of power above me, power over powers, that guided me through those difficult times.
It was really a miracle that we came out alive. God gave me strength to go through that in order to bring... to broaden the people's horizon. And specially young people of today.
Girl: What does that stone represent?
Gena: That stone represents the six million Jewish people who lost their lives, including the children, millions of them. And in order to mark that, we can come and lay a stone out of respect and that we haven't forgotten those unfortunate people.
Rabbi Sacks: Gena, you made the decision to share your memories and experiences with young people. What message do you give them?
Gena: I've given them a message. Life is precious. I'm so thankful to God that I'm alive today and able to contribute something to this society out of pure appreciation that I'm alive.
Rabbi Sacks: What kind of response do you get?
Gena: Wonderful. I received an enormous amount of letters from school children, students, universities, colleges. And I always tell them, respect each other, understand each other, be good to each other and treasure life.
[explaining to children] Hands like that, and we couldn't move left or right. And a scream.
Rabbi Sacks: Gena called her autobiography “I Light a Candle.” And a candle is a symbol of memory and hope. We remember those who died because of their faith by trying to create a world in which people no longer die because of their faith. We share our memories with the young so that they can learn not to repeat the errors of the past.
For me, Gena represents the difference between optimism and hope.
Hope isn't optimism, though we sometimes confuse the two. Optimism is the belief that things are getting better. Hope is the belief that together we can make things better. Optimism is passive, hope is active. It takes no courage to be an optimist, but sometimes it takes a great deal of courage to have hope.
Knowing what we do about the past, no Jew can be an optimist. But Judaism, even after the Holocaust, never gave up on hope.
Perhaps the greatest lesson of those years is that we can't be bystanders when we see other people suffering.
We have to become agents of hope.
Pam Wisnia, Rainbow Project: What's the theme of your bedroom?
Resident: Madonna.
Pam: Madonna? It's not Madonna!
Rabbi Sacks: Here at the Rainbow Project, part of the Leeds Jewish Welfare Board, people are giving a home and love to adults who have a variety of learning disabilities and mental health problems.
Pam: There's two arms to the project. There's a residential service for some 20 people, adults who have learning disabilities, and there is a community project which provides support to some 40-odd people who live in a variety of settings, and not necessarily in the Jewish community, but outside the community, and we provide support to them. And then we have a very small service where we provide a home-based respite service for families who've got children who are learning disabled.
When we built this particular house that we're in now in 1976, somebody moved in here. His name was Uriel. He's passed away now. He was in his 80s, and he'd lived in an institution since he was a child. And when he came here, he was so proud and so excited. And everybody that he used to meet, he used to tell them he was going to live in a Jewish house and that the water that he had a bath in was Jewish water, and he was going to have Jewish jam on his bread and eat Jewish bread and use Jewish cups and saucers.
I don't know how much he really understood about being Jewish, but for him it was an opportunity to have a sense of belonging and live in an ordinary house, in an ordinary street, something that he'd never experienced but something that I and you, I'm sure, just take for granted.
Good Yom Tov, everybody. You're going to wait for everybody else, yeah? Hang on two minutes.
Resident: I can't wait two minutes.
[laughter]
Pam: A sweet New Year. A sweet New Year. A sweet year, please, God.
Rabbi Sacks: Pam, when you started this work, there was something about the way people with disabilities were treated that made you angry, didn't it?
Pam: Yes, it made me very angry because they were seen very much as a group apart from mainstream society. And I think we kid ourselves if we think that that still doesn't happen, because it does. For us, for the Rainbow Project, it's about giving people the opportunity to become citizens. People who came to us who didn't know how to switch on a kettle. The people who live here now can do so much. It's about promoting their independence.
Rabbi Sacks: And they have a sense of achievement.
Pam: Very much a sense of achievement and about giving people an opportunity, enabling people. It's not about doing it for them. It's about enabling people to reach their potential because that's something that we all want to do. And why shouldn't people who have a learning disability do exactly the same? It's important. They're people.
[with Jack, a resident]
Pam: Happy birthday, Jack.
Jack: Thank you.
Pam: How old are you now?
Jack: I'm 49.
Pam: You're 49. And a little bit more?
Jack: 40. I forgot.
Pam: You're 69.
Jack: 69. 69.
Pam: You look absolutely marvellous.
Jack: I have got a lovely present on me.
Pam: What have you got?
Jack: A Magen David.
Pam: You've got a Magen David? Oh, Jack, isn't that nice? Let's have a look. Move your hand away. Oh, isn't that beautiful? Oh, I wish you health to wear it, Jack.
Jack: Thank you.
Pam: Happy birthday. That's beautiful.
Rabbi Sacks: It's in places like this that you see truth in action.
Not the things we currently seem to worship - wealth, fame, success, pleasure, but things that change lives.
For me, places like the Rainbow Project are about giving strength to the vulnerable and a sense of community to those who might otherwise be alone. And although those are Jewish values, they're also universal ones.
Andrew Mawson left school at 16 and became a telecommunications technician. But then he decided to change direction. One of the things he did was to set up in South London a club and hostel accommodation for young people.
Eventually, he created this, the Bromley-by-Bow Community Centre, home to a vast range of programmes and facilities.
Andrew Mawson: When I first came here, you had, if you can imagine, a pulpit and choir stalls, and then the traditional pews coming back, and the two side doors. This wasn't open. And then oak doors here, just like a lobby. And everyone thought it was closed. And when I first came here, I had to stand in this pulpit and give words of wisdom to people who were three times my age.
So it was all a bit eccentric. And they were sort of all sat where they'd always sat, you know. And how we got into developing a nursery in here was that a group of families had been running a nursery in a house down the street, and they wanted to develop a nursery. So myself and some of the church members and these families got together and came up with this idea, why not rip out the church and just leave the walls, create a beautiful church in the round for 40 people rather than 200. A bit more realistic when a third of our population are Muslim. You know, so let's get real.
Let's build an art gallery around here and show some of the creative work that people were doing here, that this community was full of creativity, actually. Full of possibility. And then here we built the first integrated nursery in Britain.
I mean, the children are now playing outside, but this is where the nursery is. And at certain points in the week, there's 11 creches a week. And this all lifts up and can become a theatre or the place where we celebrate Jewish Passover or Bengali Eid.
And the idea of the tent, of course, was that it's not about permanence, because one of the problems in our society is that we get stuck into things and we think the world always has to operate like this and we put our roots down and nothing can change.
This is the health centre. And again, unusually, you come into a health centre that is an art gallery. And very light. And this is the integrated reception, so you can come here for everything from health to access, setting up your own business to our art courses. There's an exhibition in here at the moment that you can see that's about asthma, teaching children about their airwaves, about breathing.
And these are some of the children on here. These are some of their pictures. And we brought children, parents,, and medical students together to learn about asthma, connecting art, health, medical, educational issues together. Learn by doing.
Rabbi Sacks: So tell me, what's the key to creating a community of hope?
Andrew: I think the key is to believe in people. It's to believe that people themselves have it within themselves to change the world.
And that it's a bit like the tent in the church, that all of us can pull up the pegs and move on. That we can change the way we see each other, the way we relate to the world. Many of our bureaucracies in our society have tied us into the world in a way that we feel cannot be changed, and many people get very frustrated by it.
What I knew that we wanted was a tent, where the pegs could be pulled out and we could move on together. Because when that can happen, as we travel together, we build relationships together.
Rabbi Sacks: And it's about time as a journey, and we're all travelling together.
Andrew: It's about time as a journey and life as a journey, and I think all of us experience this journey in many different ways. And journeys, of course, always have side roads and opportunities appearing all the time. But to embrace that journey, one has to know one's on the journey.
Rabbi Sacks: Gena, Pam, and Andrew, in their different ways, have asked the ultimate question. What do we do with God's greatest gift, time itself? A span of years that, however long we live, is all too brief. Do we use it for ourselves, or do we share our time with others? Do we leave the world as we found it, or do we try to make a difference? Do we believe that nothing changes, or do we understand that if we can change ourselves, we can begin to change the world?
One of the greatest of our rabbis, Moses Maimonides, said that the shofar, the ram's horn we blow on the New Year, is God's alarm clock waking us up from the sleepwalking routine that seems to fill so many of our days.
Whatever you do, says God, don't take time for granted. Don't waste it. Use it to make a difference wherever you can, however you can.
And there isn't one of us who can't make a difference.
One of the finest men I knew, the late David Baum, dedicated his life to children and paediatric medicine. He made several medical discoveries that lowered the rate of infant mortality. He died from a heart attack in 1999 while taking part in a sponsored cycle ride. But there was a story he used to tell, a famous story, and one he lived by.
David Baum: You, as a young girl, are on the beach in the early morning sun, and there are thousands upon thousands of starfish on the beach, and you're picking them up and throwing them back in the sea.
And an old grumpy guy comes along and says, ‘What did you do that for? You're throwing them back in the sea? It won't make any difference. There are thousands and thousands of starfish on this beach.’ And you say, ‘But if I wait till the sun comes up at midday, they'll die.’
And he says, ‘Well, you're not making any difference. There are thousands and thousands of starfish on the beach.’ And you take the starfish in your hands and say, ‘Well, it will make a difference to this one.’
Rabbi Sacks: That's what David believed.
It's what I believe. You don't have to save the world all together in one go. You do it a day at a time, an act at a time.
A single life, said the rabbis, is like a universe. Save a life, and you save a world. Change a life, and you begin to change the world.
In the coming year, let us be agents of hope.
