#Jonathan Sacks

[litverve]

“Around us everywhere, flooding us with its light, is the dazzling goodness of creation — order instead of chaos, diversity not monotony, the brilliant colors and intricacy of the natural world and the hundred acts of human grace for every one of gracelessness.”

Jonathan Sacks, Celebrating Life

[mishpacha]

Why, if things are so good, are they so bad?  The shortest, simplest answer is that we have lost out way.  We have focused on the how but not the why.  In achieving material abundance we have begun to lose our moral and spiritual bearings.  In achieving technical mastery we have lost sight of the question - to what end?  Valuing science at the expense of ethics, we have unparalleled knowledge of what is and unprecedented doubts about what ought to be."

Celebrating Life by Jonathan Sacks; pgs 172-173

[joemerl]

"Crowds are moved by great speakers, but lives are changed by great listeners."

— Rabbi Jonathan Sacks

[cynicalclassicist]

It's a good statement this.

It's a shame that Sacks didn't really live up to this, and is hardly a good indicator in practise regarding religion. He was actually a massive bigot and proud of it. He praised the Death to Arabs march in Jerusalem. He was criticising Trump, then as soon as they got in he began fawning all over them, even writing a speech for Mike Pence. He screams about Corbyn, then said that Rabbis shouldn't get involved in politics when asked about Trump before the 2020 election, instead praising him. Then there was his endorsement of Douglas Murray's enormously bigoted work, cheering on what was basically white replacement conspiracy theory trash, from a man who denies that Islamophobia exists and snarls that hatred towards Muslims is good. So no, Sacks is not someone to take moral direction from, but a classic religious hypocrite.

I suppose that this demonstrates that bad people can say good things.

Living traditions constantly interpret their canonical texts. That is what makes fundamentalism — text without interpretation — an act of violence against tradition. In fact, fundamentalists and today’s atheists share the same approach to texts. They read them directly and literally, ignoring the single most important fact about a sacred text, namely that its meaning is not self-evident. It has a history and an authority of its own. Every religion must guard against a literal reading of its hard texts if it is not to betray God’s deeper purposes.

      — Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks zt”l, in The Great Partnership: God, Science and the Search for Meaning

[israelseen1]

Jonathan Sacks: Freedom and Truth VAERA

Jonathan Sacks: Freedom and Truth VAERA Why did Moses tell Pharaoh, if not a lie, then less than the full truth? Here is the conversation between him and Pharaoh after the fourth plague, arov, “swarms of insects”[1]: Pharaoh summoned Moses and Aaron and said, “Go, sacrifice to your God here in the land.” But Moses said, “That would not be right. The sacrifices we offer the Lord our God would be…

[mental-mona]

“The Jewish response to trauma is counter-intuitive and extraordinary. You defeat fear by joy. You conquer terror by collective celebration. You prepare a festive meal, invite guests, give gifts to friends. While the story is being told, you make an unruly noise as if not only to blot out the memory of Amalek, but to make a joke out of the whole episode. You wear masks. You drink a little too much. You make a Purim spiel.” Precisely because the threat was so serious, you refuse to be serious – and in that refusal you are doing something very serious indeed. You are denying your enemies a victory. You are declaring that you will not be intimidated. As the date of the scheduled destruction approaches, you surround yourself with the single most effective antidote to fear: joy in life itself. As the three-sentence summary of Jewish history puts it: “They tried to destroy us. We survived. Let’s eat.” Humour is the Jewish way of defeating hate. What you can laugh at, you cannot be held captive by.

Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks zt"l, "The Therapeutic Joy of Purim," article published 1 March 2015

[loserunpunny]

[hailruth]

finally starting rabbi jonathan sacks' (z"l) series covenant & conversation: a weekly reading of the jewish bible with his book on genesis!

[askjumblr]

Hello! I've been reading Morality by Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, and it's a bit of a letdown. The book is (a) more politically conservative, (b) more political, (c) less theological, and (d) less original than I'd been hoping.

This is the first book I've read by Jonathan Sacks. Is there another of his books I might get more out of?

.

[eretzyisrael]

“Sukkot is the festival of insecurity. It is the candid acknowledgment that there is no life without risk, yet we can face the future without fear when we know we are not alone. God is with us, in the rain that brings blessings to the earth, in the love that brought the universe and us into being and in the resilience of spirit that allowed a small and vulnerable people to outlive the greatest empires the world has ever known.

Sukkot reminds us that God’s glory was present in the small, portable Tabernacle that Moses and the Israelites built in the desert even more emphatically than in Solomon’s Temple with all its grandeur. A temple can be destroyed. But a sukkah, broken, can be rebuilt tomorrow. Security is not something we can achieve physically but it is something we can acquire mentally, psychologically, spiritually. All it needs is the courage and willingness to sit under the shadow of God’s sheltering wings.

For the sukkah, that quintessential symbol of vulnerability, turns out to be the embodiment of faith, the faith of a people who forty centuries ago set out on a risk-laden journey across a wilderness of space and time, with no more protection than the sheltering existence of the Divine presence.

To know that life is full of risk and yet to affirm it, to sense the full insecurity of the human situation and yet to rejoice: this, for me, is the essence of faith and the heart of Sukkot. Judaism is no comforting illusion that all is well in this dark world. It is instead the courage to celebrate in the midst of uncertainty, and to rejoice even in the transitory shelter of the Sukkah, the Jewish symbol of home.”

Source: Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks z”l

Humans of Judaism

[slyandthefamilybook]

Just a quick vid but I adore Rabbi Lord Sacks' speeches. Hopefully this Tisha B'Av we can truly take his words to heart and grow stronger together

[girlactionfigure]

The deepest question any of us can ask is: Who am I? To answer it we have to go deeper than, Where do I live? or What do I do? The most fateful moment in my life came when I asked myself that question and knew the answer had to be: I am a Jew. This is why.

I am a Jew not because I believe that Judaism contains all there is of the human story. I admire other traditions and their contributions to the world. Nor am I a Jew because of anti-Semitism or anti-Zionism. What happens to me does not define who I am: ours is a people of faith, not fate. Nor is it because I think that Jews are better than others, more intelligent, creative, generous or successful. It’s not Jews who are different, but Judaism. It’s not so much what we are but what we are called on to be.

I am a Jew because, being a child of my people, I have heard the call to add my chapter to its unfinished story. I am a stage on its journey, a connecting link between the generations. The dreams and hopes of my ancestors live on in me, and I am the guardian of their trust, now and for the future.

I am a Jew because our ancestors were the first to see that the world is driven by a moral purpose, that reality is not a ceaseless war of the elements, to be worshipped as gods, nor history a battle in which might is right and power is to be appeased. The Judaic tradition shaped the moral civilisation of the West, teaching for the first time that human life is sacred, that the individual may never be sacrificed for the mass, and that rich and poor, great and small, are all equal before God.

I am a Jew because I am the moral heir of those who stood at the foot of Mount Sinai and pledged themselves to live by these truths for all time. I am the descendant of countless generations of ancestors who, though sorely tested and bitterly tried, remained faithful to that covenant when they might so easily have defected.

I am a Jew because of Shabbat, the world’s greatest religious institution, a time in which there is no manipulation of nature or our fellow human beings, in which we come together in freedom and equality to create, every week, an anticipation of the messianic age.

I am a Jew because our nation, though at times it suffered the deepest poverty, never gave up on its commitment to helping the poor, or rescuing Jews from other lands, or fighting for justice for the oppressed, and did so without self-congratulation, because it was a mitzvah, because a Jew could do no less.

I am a Jew because I cherish the Torah, knowing that God is to be found not just in natural forces but in moral meanings, in words, texts, teachings and commands, and because Jews, though they lacked all else, never ceased to value education as a sacred task, endowing the individual with dignity and depth.

I am a Jew because of our people’s passionate faith in freedom, holding that each of us is a moral agent, and that in this lies our unique dignity as human beings; and because Judaism never left its ideals at the level of lofty aspirations, but instead translated them into deeds which we call mitzvot, and a way, which we call the halakhah, and thus brought heaven down to earth.

I am proud, simply, to be a Jew.

I am proud to be part of a people who, though scarred and traumatised, never lost their humour or their faith, their ability to laugh at present troubles and still believe in ultimate redemption; who saw human history as a journey, and never stopped traveling and searching.

I am proud to be part of an age in which my people, ravaged by the worst crime ever to be committed against a people, responded by reviving a land, recovering their sovereignty rescuing threatened Jews throughout the world, rebuilding Jerusalem, and proving themselves to be as courageous in the pursuit of peace as in defending themselves in war.

I am proud that our ancestors refused to be satisfied with premature consolations, and in answer to the question, “Has the Messiah come?” always answered, “Not yet.”

I am proud to belong to the people Israel, whose name means “one who wrestles with God and with man and prevails.” For though we have loved humanity, we have never stopped wrestling with it, challenging the idols of every age. And though we have loved God with an everlasting love, we have never stopped wrestling with Him nor He with us.

I admire other civilizations and traditions, and believe each has brought something special into the world, Aval zeh shelanu, “but this is ours.” This is my people, my heritage, my faith. In our uniqueness lies our universality. Through being what we alone are, we give to humanity what only we can give.

This, then, is our story, our gift to the next generation. I received it from my parents and they from theirs across great expanses of space and time. There is nothing quite like it. It changed and still challenges the moral imagination of mankind.

I want to say to Jews around the world: Take it, cherish it, learn to understand and to love it. Carry it and it will carry you. And may you in turn pass it on to future generations. For you are a member of an eternal people, a letter in their scroll. Let their eternity live on in you.

(Thank you The Rabbi Sacks Legacy this is incredible!)

Rabbi Yisroel Bernath 

[elliebelliegirl]

"All Jews who are at all conscious of their identity as Jews are steeped in history,” wrote Isaiah Berlin. “They have longer memories, they are aware of a longer continuity as a community than any other which has survived.”

He was right. Judaism is a religion of memory. The verb zachor appears no fewer than 169 times in the Hebrew Bible. “Remember that you were strangers in Egypt”; “Remember the days of old”; “Remember the seventh day to keep it holy”; Memory, for Jews, is a religious obligation.

This is particularly so at this time of the year. We call it the “three weeks” leading up to the saddest day in the Jewish calendar, the Ninth of Av, anniversary of the destruction of the two Temples, the first by Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon in 586 BCE, the second by Titus in 70 CE.

Jews never forgot those tragedies. To this day, at every wedding we break a glass in their memory. During the Three Weeks, we have no celebrations. On the Ninth of Av itself, we spend the day fasting and sitting on the floor or low stools like mourners, reading the Book of Lamentations. It is a day of profound collective grief.

Two and a half thousand years is a long time to remember. Often I’m asked — usually in connection with the Holocaust — is it really right to remember? Should there not be a moratorium on grief? Are not most of the ethnic conflicts in the world fuelled by memories of perceived injustices long ago? Would not the world be more peaceable if once in a while we forgot? Yes and no. It depends on how we remember. My late predecessor, Lord Jakobovits, used to point out that three times in the Book of Genesis God is spoken of as remembering. “God remembered Noah” and brought him out of the Ark onto dry land. “God remembered Abraham” and saved his nephew Lot from the destruction of the cities of the plain. “God remembered Rachel” and gave her a child. When God remembers, He does so for the future and for life.

In fact, though the two are often confused, memory is different from history. History is someone else’s story. It’s about events that occurred long ago to someone else. Memory is my story. It’s about where I come from and of what narrative I am a part. History answers the question, “What happened?” Memory answers the question, “Who, then, am I?” It is about identity and the connection between the generations. In the case of collective memory, all depends on how we tell the story.

We don’t remember for the sake of revenge. “Do not hate the Egyptians,” said Moses, “for you were strangers in their land.” To be free, you have to let go of hate. Remember the past, says Moses, but do not be held captive by it. Turn it into a blessing, not a curse; a source of hope, not humiliation.

To this day, the Holocaust survivors I know spend their time sharing their memories with young people, not for the sake of revenge, but its opposite: to teach tolerance and the value of life. Mindful of the lessons of Genesis, we too try to remember for the future and for life.

In today’s fast-moving culture, we undervalue acts of remembering. Computer memories have grown, while ours have become foreshortened. Our children no longer memorise chunks of poetry. Their knowledge of history is often all too vague. Our sense of space has expanded. Our sense of time has shrunk.

That cannot be right. One of the greatest gifts we can give to our children is the knowledge of where we have come from, the things for which we fought, and why. None of the things we value — freedom, human dignity, justice — was achieved without a struggle. None can be sustained without conscious vigilance. A society without memory is like a journey without a map. It’s all too easy to get lost. I, for one, cherish the richness of knowing that my life is a chapter in a book begun by my ancestors long ago, to which I will add my contribution before handing it on to my children. Life has meaning when it is part of a story, and the larger the story, the more our imaginative horizons grow. Besides, things remembered do not die. That’s as close as we get to immortality on earth.

-Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks

[al-kol-eleh]

What is Antisemitism?

“We still have not understood what antisemitism is and the role it plays in the legitimation of evil. It is the first warning sign of a culture in a state of cognitive collapse. It gives rise to that complex of psychological regressions that lead to evil on a monumental scale: splitting, projection, pathological dualism, dehumanisation, demonisation, a sense of victimhood, and the use of a scapegoat to evade moral responsibility. It allows a culture to blame others for its condition without ever coming to terms with it themselves. The antisemitism flooding through the Arab and Islamic world today is as widespread and virulent as it was in Europe between 1880 and 1945, and it is being disseminated worldwide through the Internet. Antisemitism is only contingently related to Jews. The real targets of Christians in the age of the Crusades were the Muslims, not the Jews. The targets of Nazi Germany were the European nations that had defeated it in the First World War and humiliated it thereafter. The real targets of the Islamists are secular Islamic regimes and the West, especially those who defeated the Ottoman Empire in 1922 and divided up its spoils. Jews, however, played an essential function in the group psychology of these movements. By fulfilling the role of the scapegoat, they could be blamed for everything bad that happened to the group. As the mysterious, omnipotent, all-embracing enemy, they united the group, silenced dissent, distracted the mind from painful truths and enabled otherwise utterly incompatible groups to become allies. Today, for example, Islamist groups find it hard to win Western support for the imposition of Sharia law, the beheading of captives, the forced conversion of Christians or the sentencing to death of blasphemers. But when they criticise Israel, they find they no longer stand alone. This brings within the fold such strange fellow travellers as the far right, the anti-globalisation left, and some notoriously politicised human rights organisations, surely the oddest coalition ever assembled in support of people practising terror to bring about theocracy. Note that antisemitism, to succeed, must always disguise its motives. It did so in the Middle Ages by accusing Jews of killing Christian children and spreading the plague. It did so in Nazi Germany in terms drawn from medicine. Jews were the cancer in the midst of the Aryan nation. Today it does so by blaming Israel or Jews, in classic Blood Libel/Protocols of the Elders of Zion style, for controlling America, dominating Europe, manipulating the economy, owning the media, perpetrating 9/11 and all subsequent terrorist attacks, creating AIDS, Ebola, the 2004 tsunami and global warming”

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks