On Morality, with The Aspen Institute's Gildenhorn Book Series

Hostess, Linda: Good afternoon, I'm Linda Lara from the Aspen Institute and I'd like to welcome you to today's programme, part of the long-running Alma and Joseph Gildenhorn book series, the Institute's premier book series. In addition to our regular attendees, I'd like to welcome new members of our digital audience who are coming to the program via Aspen Ideas Now. At a time when we're facing enormous challenges to our well-being and our sense of community, today's book, “Morality, Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times,” puts the questions we've all been asking ourselves front and centre.

Is it possible to heal the rifts in our society and come together to build a more equitable and just world? The author of today's book, Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, is not afraid to tackle the tough questions in life. An international religious leader, philosopher, and a respected moral voice, he is the award-winning author of over 30 books, including “Not in God's Name, Confronting Religious Violence.” The Chief Rabbi of the UK and Commonwealth from 1991 to 2013, he is a recipient of the 2016 Templeton Prize, given to him in recognition of, quote, “His central message of appreciation and respect of all faiths, with an emphasis that recognizing the values of each is the only path to effectively combat the global rise of violence and terrorism, which sets him apart as one of the world's most respected intellectuals and admired religious leaders.” Rabbi Sacks was knighted by Her Majesty the Queen in 2005 and took his seat in the House of Lords in 2009. 

Our moderator today is the Reverend Dr. Serene Jones, President of the Union Theological Seminary in New York City and the first woman to lead the 182-year-old institution. Dr. Jones also occupies the Johnston Family Chair for Religion and Democracy. A past president of the American Academy of Religion, she was previously the Titus Street Professor of Theology at the Divinity School at Yale University, where she also chaired the university's programme in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. She's the author of several books, including “Trauma and Grace,” and most recently her memoir, “Call It Grace, Finding Meaning in a Fractured World.” And now I'll turn the programme over to Dr. Jones.

Dr. Serene Jones: Thank you, Linda, for that wonderful introduction, and I want to begin by saying how glad I am to be here today with this audience and to be part of the Aspen Institute. I want to say thank you to the Gildenhorn Book Series for making this conversation possible, and I am very honoured, indeed blessed, to be on this programme with Rabbi Sacks, a person for whom I have enormous respect and have followed for many years, so this is a rare and wonderful treat for me. And it's a particular treat today because of this magnificent book that we will be discussing.

I had that unusual experience, at least for me, when I read a theological or political theory book of sitting down and not being able to start once I stopped. The book is compelling. It pulls the reader in.

It's easily comprehensible while at the same time introducing us to a large range of sociological material, philosophical material, and historical material that is brought out to make over and over again, with nuance and growing power, the central claim of the book that the place in which we find ourselves in modern democracies in the West and all of the divisions that I know all of us here today stay awake at night pondering, worrying over, that all of these divisions can be traced back to an over-reliance on the market and the state to define the sphere of morality, and that the challenge for us is to go from being a society made up of I to thinking morally in terms of the we. It may sound like a simple move - replace the word me with the word other - when I speak about the challenges of our times, but Rabbi Sacks has laid this out clear and comprehensively. I urge you strongly to pick up the book and begin now, because the treasures it holds have never been more important to us, and the crisis that we face has never been more urgent.

So I want to start the conversation today by asking Rabbi Sacks, if you could tell us about the process of coming to write this book, and of coming to the really piercing clarity of the core message of the book, and then share with us something about what that message is. 

Rabbi Sacks: Well, thank you, Serene, for that lovely, really lovely and undeserved introduction. Thank you and bless you for that.

I too want to thank the people, everyone at Aspen and Linda and the series of which this is a part. I want to congratulate you on being the first woman head of the Union Theological Seminary in 180 years. You know, fate moves slowly, but it moves and it finally got there.

And what a beautiful name, if I may say so. We don't do serene Judaism. We do anger, we do argumentativeness, we do righteous indignation.

We're not terribly good on serene. I'm going to try and learn this from you. And what the book was about was really how can we get to be a little more serene? Because the truth is, that when we work together for a common cause, we actually feel changed.

Great paradox is, when we lift others, we ourselves are lifted. And I've seen this so, so many times. You know, we have a, you have a programme, which is very impressive, called Teach for America, which sends groups of brilliant young graduates to schools in poor districts where they give a couple of years of their time to help people who need help.

And that's a really impressive programme. And I had the privilege, really the privilege of sitting with Tony Blair when he was first Prime Minister and getting him to adopt that programme in Britain as well. And the thing that's striking about the people who do that, that when it's all over, they want to say thank you.

They're the ones who gave, they're the ones who ought to be thanked. But actually, they want to say thank you, because working with others for the sake of others does bring a certain serenity, a certain… a kind of moral beauty into your life, which we have underestimated for a very long time. 

The market economy is all about competition. And about me, it's about self-interest. Liberal democracy is about the battle for power. And it too tends to be about me. The political leaders nowadays tend to talk about me.

They don't tend to talk about us, which would never have happened 20 or 40 years ago. They would have spoken on behalf of all of us together. And that's how they spoke.

And today, it isn't. It's I'm better than he is. And that's not really political leadership. It's a kind of, I don't know what it is, but political politics has become too competitive and too little cooperative.

So what I've really been arguing is for a restoration of the moral dimension in our lives. And that can happen in all sorts of places, you know. But if you take one obvious one, I don't know if you've come across it recently.

But it's got to do with the Cancel Culture. It's got to do with no platforming on universities, and so on and so forth. And we've reached a stage where students, when they feel that somebody really doesn't agree with them, they will try to ban them. This happened to… actually a man I know, a man who helped me on my programme on morality, Jordan Peterson.

He was banned from having a fellowship at Cambridge University Divinity School. Why? Because somebody put on Facebook, a photograph that he hadn't taken of him standing next to somebody with a T-shirt that wasn't terribly nice. And then they banned it.

And I thought, hang on, this is Cambridge University Divinity School. Do they sort of know about this thing called forgiveness? Or doesn't that figure anymore? Has that been abolished? So I think I see a falling apart wherever I look. But you asked what actually started me on this book? Have you ever done TED? 

Dr. Jones: No, I have not.

Rabbi Sacks: Well, okay. In 2017, Chris Anderson asked me to do TED in Vancouver. The most scary thing I have ever done, I have to say. Just nerve wracking beyond belief. Why? I don't know. And I thought to myself, what am I going to talk about? They haven't had a religious leader there for nine years.

And I'm a rabbi, for heaven's sake. I mean, what am I going to talk to these guys about? But it was just after the 2016 American presidential election. And if one thing was clear to me, it is this team and the audience at TED were hurting.

And when I want to really do a speech, I kind of go into a meditation and enter that hurt. And from that deep pit, try and find a way out that I can share with others. And it suddenly occurred to me that incredible line from Psalm 23.

“Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for You are with me.” Now, I know that's a capital Y. But you can do it a lowercase y as well, I said in my talk. We can face the future without fear, if we know we will not face it alone.

And so I gave my talk about the difference between me and us, I and we, and how important it was to develop that openness to others that allows us to enlarge our lives by people not like us. I even told the story of how I met my wife Elaine (we just celebrated a golden wedding in the middle of the lockdown). And I was a student studying philosophy, 50 years ago. And I was into Sartre and Camus and existential angst and totally miserable. And I saw this wonderful young lady, beaming, radiant sunshine. And I thought never in my life have I seen anyone more unlike me. I must marry her. 

I think it took me three weeks to ask her but you know, okay, you're allowed to be slow. And it's been the great thing of our life.

And I said in TED, it's the people not like us who make us grow. 

And once you can construct a moral bond across every dimension, the smallest is marriage, but you've got family, you've got community, you've got all sorts of stuff, academic community. Once you can form a bond that is based on the shared acceptance of ideals, then you find serenity. Otherwise, you find conflict. 

Dr. Jones: That's a beautiful story about your wife and also a painful story about Jordan, both of which I encourage readers to read the book because they're very beautifully laid out there. And one thing in the book that struck me so powerfully was you show not only the sort of broad social costs of this obsessively I-focused culture and inability to see you, and to feel your pain and to understand something about how you view the world and what matters to you, is the isolation, the loneliness, but also the degree to which we've become a shaming culture, desirous to sort of destroy the other, which is the opposite of learning to have empathy and connection.

And you just give such a powerful existential account of what it means to live in these harshly divided times and isolated within the self as we sit in this space. And by doing that, you make the pull of moving out of that space so appealing, that there is hope and the hope lies in us, in the we, in the connections between us. 

Rabbi Sacks: Sorry.

Dr. Jones: No, no, go ahead. You know, to my mind, one of the most beautiful things that unites Judaism and Christianity is this emphasis on forgiveness. We're just coming up to our New Year, Rosh Hashanah and our Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur.

And Yom Kippur is the day of forgiveness. We stand in the synagogue, pretty much day and night, 25-hour fast. And we go through every conceivable sin in the lexicon, many of which we have neither the time nor the energy to commit, but never mind, we confess to them.

And somehow or other, you know, it's what you would call in Christianity, a baptism. You go through this and you emerge purified. And what's happening and that, of course, technically, belongs to the logic of a guilt culture.

A guilt culture distinguishes between the sinner and the sin. So the sin is bad, but the sinner is still okay. 

We are moving. We have moved from a guilt culture to a shame culture.

And shame cultures have no space for forgiveness because they don't make that distinction between the sinner and the sin. So in the end, there's no way out. I gave an example in the book of Professor Ian Hunt, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who happened to be at a little conference for physicists in South Korea and was asked to give an after-dinner talk.

And in the course of that talk, he made a joke, which was in bad taste, but that's all it was. It was a joke. It was implying that women aren't such good scientists as men.

But later on in the talk, he said they are just as good. And what is more, his wife is a distinguished scientist, just as good as he is. But somebody picked it up somewhere and it went viral.

And in the end, he was stripped of everything - of his professorship at University College London, his position on endless numbers of honorary bodies, and so on. And he was turned into a pariah. And of course, he apologised many, many times.

He didn't mean to upset anyone. But he became a pariah and he never found his way back. That was essentially the end of his life.

Hannah Arendt was right when she said in “The Human Condition” that forgiveness is what allows us to break free of the hold of the past. Because without forgiveness, we would never ever escape from a consciousness of what we did. So I think forgiveness is an absolute essential of a good society, and we seem to be losing it.

Dr. Jones: And you so rightly point out that the inability to forgive imprisons the person who cannot forgive. We too rarely talk about the kind of emotional and intellectual shutdown that the inability to forgive creates within us. It holds us captive.

In Christianity, a similar version is that very basic… in my Protestant tradition claim, you can't say it enough that all of us equally are saints and sinners. And that the sort of fundamental foundation of that is where forgiveness comes from. You can't divide the world up into the good and the bad. It's much more complicated, and we are much more fragile and yet miraculous creatures than that. 

Rabbi Sacks: Yes, the nature of this theology is almost mind-boggling. Here we read in Chapter One already, that every one of us is in the image and likeness of God. And then Chapter Two, we discover that every one of us is a sinner, and we all get expelled from the Garden of Eden. 

Dr. Jones: We mess it up. 

Rabbi Sacks: I love it, you know, because when you know that we are loved, that we are special, that we are beloved in the eyes of God, then we can admit that we're not perfect.

And it's that honesty. I mean, my goodness me, what the Bible has to say about King David, for instance, or King Solomon, would any public figure allow that to be said about them today? You know, these are people who the Bible just tells us the truth about these people. And yet, despite all their failings, King David still wrote the most beautiful religious poetry I know, the Book of Psalms.

And King Solomon was a very, very wise man, even if he didn't always listen to himself. 

Dr. Jones: Yes, no, the Bible is a series of stories about very flawed, very human and, and beloved people. You know, the word for that, that I use out of my tradition is that that recognition that we're all equally beloved by God is, that's the reality of grace.

And once one understands and accepts that reality, then forgiveness, the ability to forgive, shifts with… inside you and you are able to. It's a… it's the great freeing moment and the great equalising moment. And it is something that while our religious communities are struggling to hold on to as a society as a whole. We've lost a sense for.

I know we don't have a lot of time today, I have so many questions I want to ask you. But at the very end of your book, in its US publication, you take all of the work that you've done in the many chapters of the book, covering this wide range of topics. And you say, look, I finished this right before the COVID-19 pandemic began.

And you rightly say, through the pandemic, it's only intensified our sense of the very troubles that you identify. But also, it is a moment at which we could hope for and work towards, because of the collapse we've seen real change, deep change. So I wonder if, speaking to an audience here in the US today, if you could say something about that epilogue, because I think it's so immediately present to us.

Rabbi Sacks: Okay. Let me say something in general and something in particular. I wanted to know, when the pandemic began, do societies change through an experience like this? So I did a tiny bit of research. And I realised that we had two precedents. Number one was 1918, World War One and the Spanish flu pandemic. And the other one was 1945, World War Two.

Both of those were, you know, world-defining moments. And the question is, did people change as a result? The answer is that often in 1918, they did not change. They stayed an I society. We had the Roaring Twenties, we had the Great Gatsby, we had, you know, wild dances and even wilder parties.

And the end result of this continued I society was the Great Crash of ‘29, the Great Depression of the 1930s, the rise of Nazism and fascism in mainland Europe, and a mere 21 years after the war to end all wars, yet another world war. That was 1918. 

1940s, exact opposite. People moved, Britain and America certainly, from an I society to a we society. Britain passed the 1944 Education Act that opened up secondary education to every single person in Britain. It created the National Health Service. It created the welfare state.

America did the GI Bill and various other things that to help people who had served in the war. But in addition, it did probably the most inspired piece of foreign policy ever undertaken, namely the Marshall Plan, whereby the United States funded Europe - including Germany itself - to rebuild itself, the exact opposite of the punitive conditions of the Treaty of Versailles of 1919. So 1945 shows it can be done, we can move from I to we.

What would I do now? I think there are lots of things I would do now. But the one thing that is so possible right now, that people have been dreaming about for years, but was never possible until now, is national service. Because you've got all these young people who are not going to get jobs until the economy recovers itself. And you have all these needs in society right now, not least test and trace, which will need in America 300,000 people to administer it. And you could actually take that cohort of young people and put them in really helping positions, altruistic ones, and they will be changed forever. 

And they will then change American society.

And that is what I would do because lots of people have spoken about it before. But this is an opportunity that will never come again quite like this. And it has to be seized now.

Dr. Jones: I just could not agree with you more. It not only has all of the advantages that you just named, but so much of moving from an I to a we culture involves stepping over these divides that separate us. And imagine having all of these young people out of high school, mixed up together, across lines that they would never simply in the course of a regular day step across.

Just think that the sheer familiarity and friendships that could come out of a national service, where we didn't respect those boundaries and require people to work together for the good. I think that it's an exciting moment in that regard. But I think you're right, we're at a moment where we could go the way of 1918, or the way of post-World War Two. And all of us together for the good, need to hope that we choose that second path. 

I also just wanted to ask you, you know, the other in the United States right now… we have this confluence of the pandemic. And you can see so clearly the I-We conflict bearing itself out over the question of, you know, whether or not you should wear a mask. I mean, if there was ever an example to make crystal clear the points of your book, it is this… 

Rabbi Sacks: The best example ever. 

Dr. Jones: And it's almost, it's mind-boggling, when you think about the loss of a sense of a common good.

 But we also have happening simultaneously, this powerful, peaceful protest movement for Black Lives Matters, which is sort of bringing up in the midst of COVID. The long history of anti-black violence. And these two pandemics are unfolding before us simultaneously.

I wonder if you had any thoughts to share with us from across the pond on that piece of the struggle that this nation is in the grips of right now. 

Rabbi Sacks: Actually, I don't because we don't have a similar kind of tension. That doesn't mean to say that we don't have racial prejudice. I'm sure we do. But somehow in America, it is bound up with that long, long, long history of slavery. And with so much else that goes with it.

And there comes a time when you have to say, you know, I'm from Britain. I do not necessarily understand a political problem that's not a British problem. A lot of political problems are culturally and historically determined.

But I will, if I may, just explain to you, one thing that I tried for so many years to do. I used to discuss the whole issue of social cohesion, tolerance, racial tensions, and British identity with the four Prime Ministers, under whom I served as Chief Rabbi. In particular, John Major and Gordon Brown, both of whom were really interested in that. They really, really wanted to talk about it. And I felt that there has to be actually quite some quite significant moment in the life vision. We make a clear statement. 

And I suggested the following because it was minimalist. We have in Britain something in November called Remembrance Sunday, where we remember the people who fought in the world wars, and who died in them. The Queen is there. All the royal family is there. The Prime Minister and all previous Prime Ministers, all the heads of everything you can think of are there.

It's a big, big televised event. And I said to both John Major and Gordon Brown, why don't we take Remembrance Sunday and simply divide it in two? And let the morning be about war and the past. And the afternoon be about peace and the future. And at midday, the older generation takes the flame and hands it down the generations until it reaches the young generation. And then they, the young people, from every ethnic group, from every religious group, do something to tell us about what their dream of Britain is.

This would be a huge, huge televised event. And it would be so simple a way of showing that we are as proud of our Black, our Asian, our Muslim, etc, as all the others. It's very simple.

And somehow or other, you could do that in America, perhaps. On Martin Luther King Day, I've no idea when exactly. You would have to utilise a little bit of Lin-Manuel Miranda's Hamilton, because he has a very inclusive way, and an unusual way of telling the American story. You have to do this. You have to give, you know, it's almost a photo opportunity, but you have to take an image that is burned on everyone's consciousness. Does that make sense to you?

Dr. Jones: Oh, absolutely. And it is the work of the moral imagination. And how do we shift and change that history and how it's burned into the consciousness of our nation and begin to redefine that in profound ways. 

Rabbi Sacks: Sorry, you've got to go back to the friendship of Martin Luther King, and Robert F. Kennedy and see whether there's something there that can give you some new starting point. I think you've got to identify some new leaders. And, you know, the younger, the better, actually.

You know, the people who still have hope. 

Dr. Jones: There are many of those, and so many of them are in the streets, and so many of them are first responders. So many of them are now sitting in their bedrooms with their laptops doing college and trying to figure out how to finish high school.

So I could… I have so many more questions, but I think we should open up to our audience and get Linda back in here and see what questions are coming for Rabbi Sacks from our community of watchers. 

Linda: We've got a lot of them. Let me start with one from Paul. He says, “Rabbi Sacks, you've said many times that most religions are about acceptance. In contrast, Judaism is about protest. Given all the different fractures in the world today, what is the role of constructive protest in confronting those challenges? And when does protest risk becoming counterproductive?”

Rabbi Sacks: I think protest has to be very, very carefully nonviolent. Because the second protest becomes violence, you lose. I mean, there's just no, it's a no-win scenario, unless you're prepared to do a Russian Revolution of 1917 all over again. So protest works when it touches on something that everyone can understand. And that people feel I have a share of responsibility with. 

And I've engaged in protest on many occasions, on world poverty, on United Nations development goals, on the 100 million people who have no education at the moment, maybe it's slightly less now. I have joined with - and I always do this with other faith leaders - the heads of the Christian communities, and the Sikhs and the Hindus and the Muslims and the Jains and the Zoroastrians and the Baha'i. And we walk together, and we protest, and it makes the news. And we make our point.

I think by and large, protest does have an effect, unless it's too extreme, unless it's asking for things that really are simply beyond us as a society.

But other than that, stand up and protest. 

Linda: We have a question from Beth. “This year, many Jews around the world, including most American Jews, will spend their first High Holy Days outside of a synagogue, either in smaller groups or alone. How do you see the role of technology as a tool for unity in these circumstances? And can that be reconciled with rules that forbid certain technologies on holidays?”

Rabbi Sacks: Well, look, it depends what kind of Jew you are. And I can't answer for all Jews. Orthodox Jews don't use electronic technology on Shabbat, on the Sabbath or festivals. So that does rather limit things. But truth is, the Orthodox Jewish community throughout the world have been incredibly inventive, ever since the lockdown began, in reaching out through Zoom and through similar technologies. Every synagogue has reached out to its members.

We've had educational events running all the way through, really global ones. I've been able to speak to people around the world. I've been astonished at the reach of these technologies.

So, you know, those technologies have been very useful. They're not all that helpful on the day itself. But leading up to the day, up to the day's beginning, I would certainly urge you to use the technology to listen, to watch some of the videos of the chazanut, of the cantorial music of the High Holy Days. You will find it very, very inspiring. And you will carry that inspiration with you into the day itself. 

I cannot hide from you the fact that Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur this year are going to be harder than they have ever been before. I can't think of any precedent for something like this. But on the other hand, the world has been facing an enemy that has not been a human enemy. So we've all been on the same side.

There have been no shots fired in the coronavirus front. One way or another, it's painful. But at least let us be thankful that it wasn't what it might have been, which is a whole lot worse.

Linda: Mary-Anne asked the question, “How can we work harder to teach our children, no matter how old they are, to be more forgiving?”

Rabbi Sacks:  I think the best way, really and truly, is to be more forgiving. I think children pick this up just by watching what you do. I think I mentioned before that I married a very, very sunshiny kind of person. So, Elaine is as non-judgmental as you will find in the universe. And so we've had a very, very, very forgiving atmosphere in our family. And it is just lovely now to watch our children, all of whom have children of their own, develop that forgiveness among themselves.

It's something you don't have to teach them. It's just something you have to model in your own behaviour. 

Linda: And Stuart and Wilma, adding on to that, ask, “How do we get our political community to understand what you're saying?”

Rabbi Sacks: Ha! That's the tough one, isn't it? That's the really, really tough one. I think something like this book is a way of saying, let's start something, and let's see what happens as a result. And then, you know, little by little by little, you try and extend that message a little further. 

I don't know how the American political system works. I know how the British system works. The British system is really very, very easy. And that is because there's something called the BBC. So you can broadcast, whether on radio or on television, about matters like this. And you can write in the national press, something like the London Times. And if you really do something that's good, it does make an impact. You pick up that politicians have heard what you're saying, and they're thinking about it. 

So… I spent five, six years in America, from 2013 to 2018. And asking every American I met, please show me the Archimedean point from which I can move the world.

And after five years, I discovered there isn't one. I may have missed it. But I think there isn't one.

So I think in America, it's just a little more fragmented, which makes getting a message across a little more difficult. But I do not despair at all, because there are so many good, concerned Americans who've resonated to the message of this book. But I think over the next year or two, it will have ripples.

Linda: Well, unfortunately, we're out of time, but we have a lot more questions. But thank you both, Dr. Jones, Rabbi Sacks, for a very enlightening and I think very important conversation. And I want to give a special thanks to Alma and Joseph Guildenhorn for making such conversations possible.

I also want to let our viewers know that tomorrow they will be receiving an email with a special code to purchase Rabbi Sacks' book at a special rate, thanks to our friends at Politics and Prose. So we will see you again on October 6, when our next book event will be with Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, Martin Sherwin. And information on that will be sent your way soon.

So thank you both very much. And thank you everybody for coming and attending.