#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

[israelseen1]

Jonathan Sacks: The Power of Example LECH LECHA

Jonathan Sacks: The Power of Example LECH LECHA So familiar are we with the story of Abraham that we do not always stop to think about what a strange turn it is in the biblical narrative. If we fail to understand this, though, we may fail to understand the very nature of Jewish identity itself. Here is the problem: Until now the Torah has been concerned with humanity as a whole. Adam and Eve,…

[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

[tristansherwin]

VAPOUR? | INTRODUCTION (Ecc. 1:1-11)

'This piece of writing is a journal of the human cry for meaning.'

Welcome to 2023. Here’s my longer sermon notes from this morning’s Metro Christian Centre service (dated 8th January 2023), kicking off our new series VAPOUR?. This series will explore our search for meaning, journeying through the enigmatic book of Ecclesiastes. You can also catch up with this via MCC’s YouTube channel (just give us time to get the video uploaded ) ‘Once we’re thrown of our…

[naturalpantheist]

"For though my faith is not yours and your faith is not mine, if we are each free to light out own flame, together we can banish some of the darkness of the world."

-- Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks

[loserunpunny]

[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 

[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

[zahut]

“Everything I have learned about faith in a lifetime tells me that the science of creation—cosmology—wondrous though it is, takes second place to the sheer wonder that God could take this risk of creating a creature with the freedom to disobey him and wreck his world. There is no faith humans can have in God equal to the faith God must have had in humankind to place us here as guardians of the vastnesss and splendour of the universe. We exist because of God’s faith in us. That is why I see in the faces of those I meet a trace of God’s love that lifts me to try and love a little as God loves. I know of nothing with greater power to lift us beyond ourselves and to perform acts that carry within them a signal of transcendence. God lives wherever we open our eyes to his radiance, our hearts to his transforming love.”

— Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks Z”L, The Great Partnership: God, Science and the Search for Meaning  

[entheognosis]

For though my faith is not yours and your faith is not mine, if we each are free to light our own flame, together we can banish some of the darkness of the world.

Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks

[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?

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[israelseen1]

Jonathan Sacks z"l: Individual and Collective Responsibility NOACH

Jonathan Sacks z”l: Individual and Collective Responsibility NOACH I once had the opportunity to ask the Catholic writer Paul Johnson what had struck him most about Judaism, during the long period he spent researching it for his masterly A History of the Jews? He replied in roughly these words: “There have been, in the course of history, societies that emphasised the individual – like the secular…