Introductory remarks
Rabbi Sacks: Thank you. Sir John had this combination of awe in the presence of the cosmos, of generosity and what we call chesed, loving kindness, toward other people and humility toward himself. And somehow he had the wisdom and grace to take these principles and by investing in people and programmes bring them from the margins to the mainstream of academic life, of scientific investigation.
So here is a foundation and a person and a set of principles that I so admire and to have this chance to be associated with them is deeply appreciated.
I think we're at a turning point in the history of civilisation and turning points happen when there's a revolution in information technology. We are living through now instantaneous global communication and we have not yet learnt to turn that into a spiritual blessing.
On the contrary, the best users of the Web right now are the people of anger and violence and hate. And I have to say that to my mind one of the most beautiful things that our hero, Moses, did at the end of his life is at the age of 119 and 11 months, when most of us are thinking of taking things a little bit more slowly, he turned to his followers the next generation and said to them in Deuteronomy 23, “Don't hate an Egyptian because you were strangers in his land.”
Now the Egyptians oppressed and persecuted and enslaved the Israelites. Moses' whole role was taking them out of there to freedom. So why was he telling them not to hate the Egyptians?
Answer, because if he didn't do that he would have taken the Israelites out of Egypt but he wouldn't have taken Egypt out of the Israelites.
He was teaching them what I see as the most important spiritual message of the 21st century, which is to be free you have to let go of hate. There is no other way.
And that is what we as a global community should be urging in the education of all the world's children. Not to hate those with whom we must one day learn to live.
Thank you.
Moderator, Edward Stourton: Okay, well we get to the meaty part I suppose. Now it's your chance to grill Lord Sacks on some of his ideas. Yes.
Questioner: There's no doubt that you're spiritually rich, you're now cash rich. Can you clarify how you are going to use the prize?
Rabbi Sacks: Yeah we are two and a half years ago I left the Chief Rabbinate to try and do these three things: Number one, take the message globally. Number two, speak to young people and number three, use the new technologies to take that message globally, and hopefully to inspire young people to lead in the kind of open and other-directed ways that I've been trying to teach.
So, we have been doing this in a very limited way thus far, and this wonderful prize will allow us to develop that work in many directions.
Moderator: You want to say something about that Jennifer? Does that sound like good use of the money?
Jennifer Templeton Simpson, Chair of the Templeton Foundation Board of Trustees: It sounds like a fantastic use of money and something that was very near and dear to my father's heart. I mean these were, I think that he strongly believed that Sir John left us with a mission and vision but that it wasn't supposed to be just a mission and vision that was in communication with people up at the top or with academics or elites.
It was a message that needed to be shared for the mass public in order to create sort of the changes that were interesting to my grandfather. So we applaud your choice of what to do.
Moderator: Yeah, it touches very much on the subject of this book, “Not In God's Name,” about religious violence and I got the feeling that although in many ways it's an optimistic vision there is a strongly pessimistic strand to it because you are saying that religion has in some way failed, that we've left this gap that's filled by extremism.
Rabbi Sacks: We have failed. So I really want to make a distinction that to me is absolutely fundamental between two ideas that are often confused. One is called optimism and the other is called hope and they are very different things.
Optimism is the belief that things are going to get better.
Hope is the belief that if we work hard enough together we can make things better.
It needs no courage, only a certain naivety, to be an optimist but it sometimes needs a great deal of courage to have hope.
And I've said that no Jew, knowing what we do of history, can be an optimist but no Jew worthy of the name ever lost hope.
Questioner: Do you think we're on the cusp of some kind of new form of religion in the world today?
Rabbi Sacks: No, no we're very very far from it. We are in very early days indeed. The truth is that religions, historically, certainly the Abrahamic monotheisms, were very very good at reaching out to people and inviting them to become members of their faith, but very bad at dealing with people of other faiths. And none of us is free of that historic guilt, Jews, Christians and Muslims. We've all had violent periods in our history.
And we know what it is that leads us beyond it.
What leads us beyond it is when members of a faith suddenly realise that actually we're not killing people of other faiths. The real people we're killing are the people of our own faith. This is undoubtedly going to happen within Islam in the 21st century, as Sunni and Shia realise that their primary victims are Muslims. They may be Muslims of a different kind but they're primarily Muslims.
When faiths reach that realisation, they say this cannot be the way that God wants us to take. And then they come up with a solution. And it's always the same solution, which is the formal or substantive separation between religion and power. Not always between Church and State but always between religion and power.
Questioner: So I'm just wondering about whether secularism itself has spiritual values that's part of this turbulence that we need to try and bring together?
Rabbi Sacks: First of all, I absolutely agree secularism has spiritual value. Atheism has spiritual value. Sometimes atheists are very spiritual human beings, but what the spirituality of secularism brings is a refusal to accept religious justification for suffering in the world, for hierarchy in the world, for exclusion in the world.
Those are the points where I always feel that the secularist is His Majesty's loyal opposition and they are formulators of great spiritual truths.
Closing remarks
