Each year, to celebrate Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, the BBC invites me to make a film. This year, I've decided to put my faith as a believer in God on the line, publicly, on television. Why do this? Because faith, especially on the High Holy Days, requires nothing less than total honesty.
And faith is under siege these days from atheists and sceptics. I'll expose my faith to challenge from four of Britain's cleverest and most engaging critics of religion.
Writer Howard Jacobson attacks religion as too bogged down by rules and regulations. Philosopher Alain de Botton doesn't believe that any one religion can be the true faith. Scientist Colin Blakemore insists that science makes religion redundant. And Professor Lisa Jardine maintains that human suffering undermines faith in God.
In putting my faith in God on the line, can I get closer to understanding what faith is?
The novelist Howard Jacobson was brought up in a non-Orthodox Jewish family. He's upset by the rules and rituals of Jewish faith that, to me, are an essential part of our religious practice.
Howard Jacobson: I'm just not comfortable at all with any kind of religious practice. I don't mind watching it. I don't mind, you know, I'll blunder into a mass and think that's, you know, that's a wonderful spectacle, but no thank you. And I'll feel the same at the great Jewish High Holy Days when they blow the shofar and, you know, and the melancholy of Jewish liturgy moves me a lot.
But the business of what I eat, the business of what I wear, the whole business of, you know, the minutiae of a religious life, doesn't suit me. And I also don't like to see it.
Rabbi Sacks: Well, I think that you're coming at it in that kind of way that the couple do, when the husband says, I deal with the big things, she deals with the little things. I deal with world peace and global climate change and she deals with the little things like where our kids go to school. I mean, it's a very, very strange idea that God only worries about the big things. God is in the details.
I think religion is in the details.
Howard: The devil's in the details, Chief Rabbi. What's so crazy about it is I think God loses His, for me, His sonority, His grand dignity. The God that speaks to Job out of the whirlwind is the frightening God I like. I will respond to the idea of the frightening God. I don't want that God then caring if I had a bacon sandwich for breakfast.
I don't want him to worry about that. Not only because I think His mind should be on bigger things, but because I think it shouldn't matter what I have for breakfast.
Rabbi Sacks: Well, I think that religion is, or Judaism is, the poetry of the prosaic. It's about taking that big idea and actually translating it into everyday life.
Howard: It's not just that we make it sacred. We fall out with one another. We argue over it. We erect within our own faith sects because of it.
Rabbi Sacks: Why should God not be part of our daily routine? Why don't we need a regular exercise of the spirit?
Howard: Because He gets lost in it. He gets lost in it. And we forget Him. And those who care about those things, it's very easy for them to be ungodly.
Rabbi Sacks: There are other ways of finding your way to God. There is no one way. But I do think that deep, abiding passion, that love affair, tempestuous, between us and God, with its difficult moments and its internal rows, that is the drama of the Jewish spirit.
And my goodness me, I feel lifted by it. I feel privileged to be part of it, even if it gives me pain, and I'm sorry it gives you some.
Howard: Well, in love affairs, as we all know, it can be very unhappy things. And believing in the Jewish God, it can be a heartbreaking experience for the people, and it can be a desolating experience for the person.
Rabbi Sacks: I don't think the Bible thinks love is easy at all, because love can be painful, and it can give rise to anger and recrimination. But nonetheless, that is, to me, what Judaism is about.
Howard: And this God, with whom you describe our love affair, are you sure He's there?
Rabbi Sacks: I... Well, you know that I believe that faith isn't certainty. Faith is the courage to live with uncertainty. Judaism is a refusal to give way to despair. And that's why I stake my life on that hope that the call God gave us at the beginning of history was the call worth following.
Howard: Can you love a Jew who says to you, I've had it with Jewish self-righteousness, I have just had it, I'm out of there, I'm out of the faith, and I am out of the Jewish God?
Rabbi Sacks: Of course I could love such a Jew. I once thought you were such a Jew, Howard, and I love you, I've got to be blunt.
Howard: And I've disappointed you.
Rabbi Sacks: Not at all, you know, we're still... There you are, forcing me to look at the flaws in my own belief system. And I honestly believe if we don't love the people who oppose everything we stand for - so long as they're willing to talk civilly and listen - if we fail to love them, something's going to go wrong with us. We are all part of the script. And that means that that person is, in ways that I may not fully realise yet, part of the Jewish story.
Howard: Which may be no story and there may be no script.
Rabbi Sacks: There may be no story and there may be no script, but you take the risk of writing stories. And I will continue to take the risk to encourage you to live them as well.
Rabbi Sacks: It was a more open debate than I expected. What did Howard take away from our discussion?
Howard: What surprised me was how open he was to some of my criticism of, not of God, but of Jewish ritual and some of the arguments that Jews, very punishing arguments, that Jews have with one another. He's in a very difficult position, everybody knows he's in a very difficult position. And I thought he was open about some of those difficulties and accepting of the problems.
I was pleased that he did not sweep some of those problems under the carpet.
Rabbi Sacks: Howard…
Howard: Terrific, as always, as always, have a good day, bye.
Rabbi Sacks: Bye, bye. I agree that ritual sometimes descends into routine. Bye, Howard.
But any great achievement requires routine.
Writing a novel means writing a little bit each day. And so having a relationship with God requires praying each day.
But there's a bolder claim made against my faith in God, that it's not so much ritual that's wrong as the idea of truth in a single faith.
My next guest is the writer and philosopher, Alain de Botton. Like many people in this country, Alain was brought up without religion. Unlike Howard, he quite likes ritual. But what Alain wants is the freedom to cherry-pick the best ideas from various faiths. It's a very fashionable position, but I believe it doesn't work.
Alain de Botton: I think that every religion has a certain amount of wisdom in it. There are things that one finds in different religions that are good. And in that sense, I look back to the 19th century, when people like the Unitarians and other world religions asking, ‘What is good here?’ And in a way, that's a very impious thing to do. Because really what you're saying is, I'm going to pick and mix. Now that word, that phrase, ‘pick and mix,’ is one of the most pejorative that's thrown at modern atheists who are interested in religion. You're just wanting to pick and mix. That's heresy.
Rabbi Sacks: The original word, heresy, probably means pick and mix, doesn't it? Believing what you choose.
Alain: That's right. That's right. Believing what you choose. And yet, I'm proud to be a picker and a mixer. I think there are certain things in Catholicism which are fantastic.
One doesn't find those in Judaism. At the same time, things in Catholicism. Well, I think that confession is a fascinating ritual, that idea of the one-on-one contact.
Rabbi Sacks: Look, I love Beethoven's string quartets, Miles Davis' jazz, Simon and Garfunkel, and I just try and think of putting together a piece of music whose first movement is Beethoven and then Miles. It's a mess. It doesn't work as bricolage or a fruit cocktail or anything of the kind.
Alain: When you think of literature, that's precisely what we do with literature. We read Jane Austen sometimes, and at other moods we'll read Schopenhauer, and at other times we'll read Gibbon. And we'll change, and we'll do precisely that.
What's wrong with doing that religiously?
Rabbi Sacks: You read Jane Austen, you put it back on the shelf, and it makes no further demand of you until you feel like reading it again. But you read it, a sacred text, and you put it back on the shelf. It's still making a demand of you. It's saying, this is a truth to be lived, and you can't just put it back on the shelf. And that is the difference between religion and culture.
Alain: My view as an atheist is, why am I forced into this uncomfortable situation? That either I'm a believer, at which point I have to do all these things that I can't quite buy, or I have to just sort of sit at home and read the newspaper or something.
Why can't I have the best of religion without religion? I know that's a deeply impious question, but it's the question that animates me.
Rabbi Sacks: So imagine you have a secular New Year, which you and friends of Alain de Botton all get together once a year and apologise to each other, and it would be great. It will last for five or six years. You wouldn't be able to hand it on to your children. You wouldn't be able to spread it any more widely, because matters of the spirit live on the basis of obligation, or what we call, on the basis of the Bible, command. Unless you hear a command, an obligation, that comes from beyond you and your immediate group, you will not be able to generate sustainable ritual.
Supposing I said to you, Alain, let's meet and agree. You keep the rituals, and I have faith that one day, through those rituals, you will rediscover faith.
Alain: I suppose I would say to that, I'm not interested in rediscovering faith. Now, your view would be, it doesn't matter. The other thing I would say is, many bits of the ritual I like, and some bits I don't.
Rabbi Sacks: You are talking about an openness to some religious ideas, if not to religious belief, that I find refreshing and fascinating. And I'd love to see how it develops in your children when they grow up.
Alain: No doubt they'll be coming to you. Good, thank you.
Rabbi Sacks: I think trying to create a kind of ‘pick and mix’ of the best bits of the different religions will be very hard. Religion involves a strong personal commitment. What I have learned from Alain is that a religion can speak to someone who doesn't share its beliefs. In an age of rapid change, religion is our great treasury of the wisdom of the past.
At least Howard and Alain see some point in religion. Some critics say it no longer has any.
My next guest is the distinguished scientist, Professor Colin Blakemore. He believes the rational explanations provided by science make religious faith obsolete. It's one of the most dangerous attacks that can be levelled at faith in God.
What bothers me so often is the view of science that once you've explained something, you've explained it away.
Professor Colin Blakemore: I don't quite understand what you mean by explaining away. There are explanations which are accounts, testable, verifiable accounts of how things happen. What more is there? That is an explanation. Isn't that enough?
Rabbi Sacks: Not remotely. It's worth asking of anything that we know how that happened. Let us suppose that Beethoven wrote symphonies because he needed to pay his bills, especially if his nephew was always getting into trouble. At the end of the day, we know exactly why Beethoven wrote music, and we can, through his biography, tell you how he wrote music. But when all the facts are in, there's a beauty to that music that is not explainable away, however elaborate the scientific explanations are for that music centre in the brain.
Colin: I think we should all wait and see what science is capable of delivering. There are many things now that you would accept that science has given a beautifully rich - and I use the word beauty advisably - I think science is a beautiful process, for which there could have been no concept of an explanation in conventional terms in the past. Let's take inheritance or life.
Most biologists these days would say that we know what life is. We know what the particular amazing complexities of molecules working together is, that makes a collection of those molecules have what we call life, and you don't need anything else. There is no life force that you need to explain these things.
Rabbi Sacks: Do you seriously believe, Colin, that this entire Professor Colin Blakemore, who takes moral stands on the integrity of science and medical research, is actually a self-flattering myth that you are weaving around yourself, because actually all those little grey cells in your brain have worked this out long before and you never had a choice. You couldn't have been other than a Professor of Science.
Colin: Yeah, I do believe it. I mean, I believe that I am the sum total of all of the causal influences on me at the moment, and that is not a trivial issue.
Rabbi Sacks: So you really believe that you're deceiving yourself?.
Colin: The really interesting question is if it were true, then we'd have to abandon everything that we believe about the causal universe, about one event causing another, by all events having antecedent causes, and say that human beings are set aside from the rest of the physical world, and yet we know we're made up of the bits and stuff that the rest of the world is made up of… all the molecules in you were once upon a time in a star somewhere, and they've ended up in you by chance. So why not believe that we could also give an account of how those molecules working inside them produce their actions, and produce this curious impression that we have of the sense of self and choice, as if there's this kind of helmsman inside there, really deciding absolutely what they're going to do, irrespective of what the world tells them.
Rabbi Sacks: What you've been saying is beautiful, magnificent, and it's pure reductivism.
Colin: Yes.
Rabbi Sacks: It is the idea that at the end of when all's said and done, a symphony is just a reproducible sequence of sound waves registered on our oral equipment, that a painting is just a display of pigments on canvas, and that human beings are just electrical impulses in the brain.
Colin: Well, I agree with all of that, except the word ‘just.’ I mean, you diminish it by suggesting that to believe that we are causal machines, where we are simply caused by events of the past, is trivial. It's unbelievably complex, and very surprising, and really quite remarkable.
Rabbi Sacks: We do have free will, and you cannot seriously, consistently believe that you don't, even though your argument that there's a little fellow in there telling you all the time, this is really you, Colin, this is the real you, but actually you and I and our selfish genes here are actually controlling and pulling all the levers. So really the question, I suppose, that I ask you is, what space left do you have for human dignity?
Colin: This is really very important, because what you imply is that without religious belief, people can't be good. They can't have a moral code, they can't have a compass, they can't have respect for other people. I think that's quite wrong. There's a great tradition of humanism with very strong moral underpinning, perfectly capable of assembling and operating laws and conventions of action, good behaviour, without being guided by religious tracts and by religious dogma.
Rabbi Sacks: On this, I'm going to agree with you. I think it's outrageous.
Colin: Actually, you've agreed on an awful lot, which we must talk about…
Rabbi Sacks: Listen, I bless you and I bless science for giving us the kind of complex insight into the nature of life, the nature of the human brain, and I find this wondrous, and I think you find it wondrous, and we both react with something like awe, which I give a religious name to and you don't.
Colin: I agree with the Chief Rabbi, the biggest challenge to science. I mean, he would say it's off limits. I would say it's very much within our limits… is to explain human beings as thinking, reasoning, loving, fearing creatures. All of those things, I think, are within the territory of scientific explanation. And I would say if we could do that, then what would be left for religion to have faith in? Why would we need faith in anything anymore?
Rabbi Sacks: We'll have to agree to disagree about whether science can really explain things like meaning, morality and beauty.
What I can't accept is that human beings don't have free will. That's a denial of what makes us human.
But of all the attacks from atheists and agnostics, there's one that no believer can hide from.
My next guest is the historian and Chair of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, Professor Lisa Jardine. She's the eldest child of the late academic, Jacob Bronowski, presenter of the television series “The Ascent of Man,” a Polish Jew who lost many relatives in the Second World War. Lisa poses the hardest question of all, why God allows suffering?
Professor Lisa Jardine: I think that World War II was more of a watershed for Judaism than perhaps Judaism is prepared to admit. What I learned from my father is he combined two fundamental beliefs: optimism for the human race, which is there in that Ascent of Man title, and remorse for what, on both sides, had been perpetrated in World War II. He was sent into Hiroshima and Nagasaki three months after the bombs were dropped as part of a fact-finding mission.
Now, as Chief Rabbi, how did the faithful community respond to not just what was perpetrated on the Jewish people, but also what was perpetrated on 80,000 Japanese in three seconds?
Rabbi Sacks: We recognise that the Holocaust, perhaps together with what was done to bring the war to an end, those are critical moments. And I know Jews who lost their faith in the Holocaust; those who lost their faith because of the Holocaust. But with me, I lost another kind of faith when I began, in my late teens, to reflect on the Holocaust.
I lost faith in humanity. I lost faith in the ability of a purely secular civilisation to contain the destructive energies that we know are there in our midst. For me, the thing I can never get over is that the Holocaust took place at the very heart of liberal, post-Enlightenment, scientifically-oriented Europe.
I never lost faith in God because I never saw God as a strategic intervener who stopped us from exercising our freedom.
Lisa: I believe devoutly that in extremis, human beings behave with integrity, with compassion towards themselves and complete strangers.
Rabbi Sacks: Human beings do behave very beautifully. And I see traces of God, of the Divine Presence, in all sorts of human beings, simple human acts of kindness. But I can't be an optimist, knowing what I do about history, but I know that ordinary human beings, when they assemble in crowds, can do terrible things.
Lisa: But where is God in the crowd? You know, there's a wonderful scene in “To Kill a Mockingbird” when the crowd assembles to lynch the black man. And the child steps forward and addresses a civil word to a man in the crowd. And the crowd is overcome with shame, faced with a child whose values are intact and real. That I can understand.
But where in those terrible crowds, in those perpetrators of terrible deeds, tell me where God is for you.
Rabbi Sacks: God, for me, is the protest against the crowd. I think, for me, religious faith is that courage to stand out against the crowd because God isn't in the crowd. He's in that prophetic voice that is willing to challenge the crowd.
Lisa: That raises the question of how God tolerates so much suffering in the world.
Rabbi Sacks: It's the question of questions. If God exists, how does evil exist? And to me, this really separates out the religions or even different strands within a religion. There are religions of acceptance. It's God's will. We have to live with it. There are religions of comfort. It'll all be okay in another life. And there are religions of protest. And Judaism really is a religion of protest. And somehow or other, evil pains God as much as it pains us.
And He calls out to us, ‘Help me eliminate evil from the human heart because that's the one thing you have to do. I can't do it for you.’ And Jewish faith has been that sustained craziness of 4,000 years saying, ‘No, we are not going to accept and no, we are not going to be consoled.’
We are going to fight for a world in which there is less evil and less suffering. And that's an unusual religion.
Lisa: So you've explained that I grew up in the religion of struggle.
Rabbi Sacks: Yeah.
Lisa: I rather like that.
Rabbi Sacks: Keep struggling.
Lisa: Well, of course, what was perhaps perturbing for me was how extraordinarily close the belief systems, the value systems, of the Chief Rabbi and myself are. So after a lifetime of being a secular Jew, that's an admission I have to make.
Rabbi Sacks: Well, this has been a challenging programme to make, putting my faith on the line against some of today's finest atheist minds.
I've become more aware of some of the problems sceptics have with faith, but we've also found important areas of common ground. For me, what these interviews have confirmed is that when it comes to faith, you have to take a risk, the risk of commitment.
Religion isn't easy.
Nothing worthwhile is.
In Judaism, faith means wrestling with God, as Jacob once wrestled with an angel. And through it, we emerge stronger, humbler, and I hope kinder.
That's what Rosh Hashanah is about.
At this dawn of a new Jewish year, I pray, may we be true to our faith and a blessing to others, regardless of their faith. As we live in God, may God live in us.
