Rabbi Sacks: Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. The time when we as individuals rededicate our lives and when, as members of one of the world's oldest faiths, we renew our traditions.
Here, at the opening of the new Hillel Primary School in London, the Jewish community is doing just that.
[at the school] OK, so here is the mezuzah that we're going to fix to the door of the school. We're going to do so because it says in the Shema, in one of our most important prayers, that we shall write these words on the doorposts of our house.
The Bible tells us that we must teach our faith to our children, handing it on through the generations.
That's why schools are our most important religious institution. They're where faith is reborn, where ancient truths become young again. For me, they're the most potent symbol of renewal.
What happens on Rosh Hashanah? We have the beginning of the New Year, right? The beginning of the New Year. So what do we try and do about it? Does anyone know?
Child: Do what we didn't do that was good this year.
Rabbi Sacks: That's right. We try and do a little bit better this year. And when we're sorry for what we've done in the past, and when we try and say we're going to do better this year, does anyone know what that's called in Hebrew?
Child: Teshuva.
Rabbi Sacks: Right, that's teshuva, which means that we're really sorry.
That was one of Anglo-Jewry's newest institutions. And this is one of our oldest, Bevis Marks Synagogue, built in 1701. The Jews who built this synagogue arrived here in London in the middle of the 17th century.
They'd come originally from Spain, and I find their story a remarkable one. Jews had lived in Spain since Roman times, longer than almost anywhere else. They'd made great contributions to its culture as scientists, poets, philosophers, and statesmen.
But then there began a century of religious persecution. Jewish homes and synagogues were set on fire, and many Jews were killed. Those who survived were offered the choice of converting to Christianity or facing death.
Some escaped to other lands, some converted, but even then they found themselves subject to persecution. Many of them were burned at the stake during the Inquisition. And eventually, 500 years ago, in 1492, the remaining Jews were expelled.
[music]
It was a crisis for the Jewish world, the like of which had not been known since the loss of their homeland and Temple in the 1st century. It was a horror the depth of which Jews were not to know again until the Holocaust. Eventually, after much wandering, some of them arrived here in London.
Jews had been expelled from England in the 13th century, but they were readmitted by Oliver Cromwell in 1656, and it was here that they began rebuilding their shattered world, putting back together their lives, their faith, and their community.
They did so with remarkable speed, so that by the 19th century you could find, sitting here, Isaac Disraeli, whose son, Benjamin, was to become one of England's greatest prime ministers, and Sir Moses Montefiore, the great Victorian philanthropist.
How does a people renew itself? How did the Jews of Spain, who'd lost everything, gather the strength to begin again, here? That's the question that haunts me whenever I set foot in this atmospheric synagogue.
[music]
I suspect that the renewal of the Jewish people had a great deal to do with these holy days now approaching - Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, the New Year and the Day of Atonement. Because it's then that we come face to face with the fact that we can rebuild our lives and start anew.
[shofar blowing]On Rosh Hashanah, the Shofar, the ram's horn, summons us to return to God, who believes in us even when we've lost faith in ourselves.
[music]
And on Yom Kippur, we spend the whole day in fasting, prayer, repentance and rededication, knowing that God turns to us when we turn to Him.
Those are powerful truths, and I believe they're the key to the great mystery of Jewish survival.
According to Jewish tradition, it was on Yom Kippur that Moses came down from Mount Sinai with a second set of tablets after the first had been broken, signalling to his people that even after disaster, there was still hope.
It was on Yom Kippur that the Jews of Spain gathered in their synagogues, to summon the hope that God would stay with them and give them the strength to begin again in a new land, free of persecution. And it was on Yom Kippur that the refugees from Spain gathered here nearly 300 years ago in this synagogue in the heart of London, to create what was to become the Anglo-Jewish community.
[music]
For me, one of the surest signs of the presence of God in our lives is our ability to take ancient truths and make them live again in our time.
That's why, when I became Chief Rabbi a year ago, I invited Anglo-Jewry to join me in creating a decade of Jewish history. A decade of renewal. This is one of the results. A study centre in London where young people, most of them university students, spend their evenings rediscovering the vitality of Judaism's religious texts.
For centuries, this is how Jews found guidance and inspiration. In the Beit HaMidrash, the house of study, with the pogroms and the Holocaust and the massive dislocations that Jews experienced in the 20th century, it was a tradition in danger of eclipse. But here and in many other centres throughout the country, it's coming to life again.
That's how an ancient faith is renewed.
[music]
It's been a remarkable year. A year of new schools and youth centres and welfare projects, a year in which we've shown our continuing vitality as a community. And I believe that all this vitality testifies to a faith, one that we're sometimes embarrassed to talk about, one that we sometimes don't even recognise, but which is real nonetheless.
The faith that God is with us in difficult and changing times, giving us the strength to begin again.
For me, the most moving moments of my year are when I visit schools, because it's on the faces of young children that you see most clearly the signals of transcendence, hope, delight, a sense of wonder at the newness of things, the undiminished horizons of possibility. If only we could be young again, seeing the world as they see it.
But the message of the Jewish New Year is that we can. For nearly 4,000 years, religious faith has renewed one of the world's most ancient peoples. And for each of us, it offers the strength to begin again, and so renew our lives.
