Jonathan Sacks Quotes & Sayings

Much can and must be done by governments, but they cannot of themselves change lives. — Jonathan Sacks

Values are tapes we play on the Walkman of the mind: any tune we choose so long as it does not disturb others. — Jonathan Sacks

Happiness is not made by what we own. It is what we share. — Jonathan Sacks

Religiosity turns out to be the best indicator of civic involvement: it's more accurate than education, age, income, gender or race. — Jonathan Sacks

The royals - all of them, especially Prince Philip and Prince Charles - have done outstanding work with the faith communities. — Jonathan Sacks

I fear for the future of the West if it loses its faith. You cannot defend Western freedom on the basis of moral relativism, the only morality left when we lose our mooring in a sacred ontology or a divine-human covenant. No secular morality withstood Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia. No secular morality today has the force to withstand the sustained onslaught of ruthless religious extremism. Neither market economics nor liberal democracy has the power, in and of itself, to inspire people to make sacrifices for the common good. — Jonathan Sacks

Uncritical followership and habits of silent obedience give rise to the corruptions of power, or sometimes simply to avoidable catastrophes. For — Jonathan Sacks

Which European leader today would not relish the wonder-working powers of a Moses? Budget deficit? Unpopular cuts? How about just a little miracle, an overnight increase in gold reserves, a new oil field, or the next world-changing communications technology? Surely that's not too much to ask. — Jonathan Sacks

Parenthood involves massive sacrifice: money, attention, time and emotional energy. — Jonathan Sacks

True freedom requires the rule of law and justice, and a judicial system in which the rights of some are not secured by the denial of rights to others. — Jonathan Sacks

We do not always appreciate the role the Queen has played in one of the most significant changes in the past 60 years: the transformation of Britain into a multi-ethnic, multi-faith society. No one does interfaith better than the Royal family, and it starts with the Queen herself. — Jonathan Sacks

A Martian would think that the English worship at supermarkets, not in churches. — Jonathan Sacks

The faith religious believers have in God is small compared to the faith people put in politicians, knowing how many times they have been disappointed in the past but still insisting that this time it will be different. — Jonathan Sacks

To defend a country you need an army, but to defend a civilization you need education. — Jonathan Sacks

Part of the beauty of Judaism, and surely this is so for other faiths also, is that it gently restores control over time. Three times a day we stop what we are doing and turn to God in prayer. We recover perspective. We inhale a deep breath of eternity. — Jonathan Sacks

When money rules, we remember the price of things and forget the value of things, and that is dangerous. — Jonathan Sacks

Since Hiroshima and the Holocaust, science no longer holds its pristine place as the highest moral authority. Instead, that role is taken by human rights. It follows that any assault on Jewish life - on Jews or Judaism or the Jewish state - must be cast in the language of human rights. — Jonathan Sacks

People are feeling and sensing a return of anti-Semitism - even in Europe, which, seventy years after the Holocaust, is a very scary thing. I think they are feeling that Israel is very isolated and doesn't always get what they see as fair treatment in the European media. — Jonathan Sacks

Without God, there is a danger that we will stay trapped within the prison of the self. As — Jonathan Sacks

Since the 18th century, many Western intellectuals have predicted religion's imminent demise. — Jonathan Sacks

God has given us many faiths but only one world in which to co-exist. May your work help all of us to cherish our commonalities and feel enlarged by our differences. — Jonathan Sacks

A society in which there are high levels of voluntary activity will simply be a better, happier place than one where there are not. — Jonathan Sacks

We have no idea where the world is going, except that it's going there very fast. — Jonathan Sacks

Religious law is like the grammar of language. Any language isgoverned by such rules; otherwise it ceases to be a language. But within them, you can say many different sentences and write many different books. — Jonathan Sacks

Make space in your life for the things that matter, for family and friends, love and generosity, fun and joy. Without this, you will burn out in mid-career and wonder where your life went. — Jonathan Sacks

In Judaism faith means wrestling with God as Jacob once wrestled with an angel ... — Jonathan Sacks

Jews survived all the defeats, expulsions, persecutions and pogroms, the centuries in which they were regarded as a pariah people, even the Holocaust itself, because they never gave up the faith that one day they would be free to live as Jews without fear. — Jonathan Sacks

If we are to cherish freedom, and to guard it, we must remember what the alternative is: the bread of affliction and the bitter herbs of slavery. — Jonathan Sacks

the Internet has a disinhibition effect: you can be ruder to someone electronically than you would be in a face-to-face encounter, since the exchange has been depersonalised. Read any Comments section on the Web, and you will see what this means: the replacement of reason by anger, and argument by vilification. Civility is dying, and when it dies, civilisation itself is in danger. — Jonathan Sacks

The Holocaust survivors are among the most inspiring people I have had the privilege to meet. — Jonathan Sacks

our views of the natural are shaped by our ideas of the supernatural. — Jonathan Sacks

The first of the request prayers in the daily Amidah is a fractal. It replicates in miniature the structure of the Amidah as a whole. — Jonathan Sacks

Food prices are often kept artificially high. The result is that the Millennium Development Goals set out by the United Nations at the start of the new millennium are not being reached. Fine words have not yet been turned into deeds. — Jonathan Sacks

The message of Passover remains as powerful as ever. Freedom is won not on the battlefield but in the classroom and the home. Teach your children the history of freedom if you want them never to lose it. — Jonathan Sacks

In virtually every Western society in the 1960s there was a moral revolution, an abandonment of its entire traditional ethic of self-restraint. — Jonathan Sacks

The supreme religious challenge is to see God's image in one who is not in our image. — Jonathan Sacks

ISIS is a terrorist entity whose barbarities have been condemned by all those who value our common humanity. In the current political climate, when hate crimes are rising and political rhetoric is increasingly divisive, this is all the more shocking. — Jonathan Sacks

Katharine Hepburn said it best. 'Nature', she says majestically to Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen, 'is what we are put in this world to rise above.' The — Jonathan Sacks

Unless we can restore what George Orwell called patriotism as opposed to nationalism, we will see the rise of the far right, as is happening already in Europe. — Jonathan Sacks

Religion is the best antidote to the individualism of the consumer age. The idea that society can do without it flies in the face of history and, now, evolutionary biology. — Jonathan Sacks

the recent novel by his wife Rebecca Goldstein, entitled 36 Arguments for the Existence of God, subtitled A Work of Fiction). The — Jonathan Sacks

We often suffer from akrasia, weakness of will. So we become good people the way we become good tennis players or violinists, through practice until the behaviour we aspire to becomes natural and instinctive. Being moral means acquiring the habits of the heart we call virtue. — Jonathan Sacks

Science will explain how but not why. It talks about what is, not what ought to be. Science is descriptive, not prescriptive; it can tell us about causes but it cannot tell us about purposes. Indeed, science disavows purposes. — Jonathan Sacks

Whole communities are growing up without fathers or male role models. Bringing up a family in the best of circumstances is not easy. To try to do it by placing the entire burden on women - 91% of single-parent families in Britain are headed by the mother, according to census data - is practically absurd and morally indefensible. — Jonathan Sacks

In an age of fear, moderation is hard to find and harder to sustain. Who wants to listen to a nuanced argument, when what we want is someone to relieve us from the burden of thought and convince us that we were right all along? So people mock. They blame. They caricature. They demonise. In an age of anxiety, few can hear the still small voice that the Bible tells us is the voice of God. — Jonathan Sacks

A primordial instinct going back to humanity's tribal past makes us see difference as a threat. That instinct is massively dysfunctional in an age in which our several destinies are interlinked. Oddly enough, it is the market -- the least overtly spiritual of concepts -- that delivers a profoundly spiritual message: that it is through exchange that difference becomes a blessing, not a curse. When difference leads to war, both sides lose. When it leads to mutual enrichment, both sides gain. — Jonathan Sacks

The meaning of the universe lies outside the universe. — Jonathan Sacks

The idols of today are unmistakable -
self-esteem without achievement,
sex without consequences,
wealth without responsibility,
pleasure without struggle and
experience without commitment. — Jonathan Sacks

The Jewish festival of freedom is the oldest continuously observed religious ritual in the world. Across the centuries, Passover has never lost its power to inspire the imagination of successive generations of Jews with its annually re-enacted drama of slavery and liberation. — Jonathan Sacks

Just as it is necessary to rob your enemies of their humanity, so you have to find a way of relinquishing responsibility for the evil you are about to commit. You must define yourself as a victim. It follows that you, in committing murder, even genocide, are merely acting in self-defence. It is the victim who is responsible. This was Hitler's constant and deeply paradoxical claim. As Jeffrey Herf points out, he and his propagandists had to maintain two completely contradictory ideas: 'one rooted in the grandiose idea of a master race and world domination, the other in the self-pitying paranoia of the innocent, beleaguered victim'.23 In general, as Vamik Volkan notes, dualists tend to combine 'paradoxical feelings of omnipotence and victimization'.24 On the one hand we are masters of the universe; on the other we are the devil's slaves. — Jonathan Sacks

Civil society rests on moral relationships. They are covenantal rather than contractual. They are brought about not by governments but by us a husbands and wives, parents, friends and citizens, and by the knowledge of what we do and what we are makes a difference to those around us. ( ... ) Renewing society's resources of moral energy is the program, urgent but achievable. — Jonathan Sacks

Only in fiction are the great evils committed by caricatures of malevolence: Darth Vader, Lord Voldemort, Sauron or the Joker. In real history the great evils are committed by people seeking to restore a romanticised golden age, willing to sacrifice their lives and the lives of others in what they regard as a great and even holy cause. In some cases they see themselves as 'doing God's work'. They 'seem happy'. That is how dreams of utopia turn into nightmares of hell. — Jonathan Sacks

Governments cannot make marriages or turn feckless individuals into responsible citizens. That needs another kind of change agent. — Jonathan Sacks

The Hebrew Bible is the supreme example of that rarest of phenomena, a national literature of self-criticism. Other ancient civilisations recorded their victories. The Israelites recorded their failures. It is what the Mosaic and prophetic books are about. — Jonathan Sacks

What creates freedom? A revolution in the streets? Mass protest? Civil war? A change of government? The ousting of the old guard and its replacement by the new? History, more often than not, shows that hopes raised by such events are often dashed, sooner rather than later. — Jonathan Sacks

Islamophobia is a complex phenomenon. — Jonathan Sacks

The Hebrew Bible contains multiple provisions to ensure that no one would go hungry. The corners of the field, forgotten sheaves of grain, gleanings that drop from the hands of the gleaner, and small clusters of grapes left on the vine were to be given to the poor. — Jonathan Sacks

If God were always visible, humans could not exist at all. "No one can see Me and live," says God. "If we continue to hear the voice of God, we will die," say the Israelites at Sinai. But if God is always invisible, hidden, imperceptible, then what difference does His existence make? It will always be as if He were not there. The answer to this dilemma is holiness. Holiness represents those points in space and time where God becomes vivid, tangible, a felt presence. Holiness is a break in the self-sufficiency of the material world, where infinity enters space and eternity enters time. In relation to time, it is Shabbat. In relation to space, it is the Tabernacle. These, in the Torah, are the epicentres of the sacred. — Jonathan Sacks

Giving is what makes a nation great. — Jonathan Sacks

The test of faith is whether I can make space for difference. Can I recognize God's image in someone who is not in my image, who language, faith, ideal, are different from mine? If I cannot, then I have made God in my image instead of allowing him to remake me in his. — Jonathan Sacks

Marriage, sanctified by the bond of fidelity, is the nearest life gets to a work of art. — Jonathan Sacks

When we love and make loving commitments, we create families and communities within which people can grow and take risks, knowing that hands will be there to catch them should they fall. — Jonathan Sacks

[Genesis] is not myth. It is not history in the conventional sense, a mere recording of events. Nor is it theology: Genesis is less about God than about human beings and their relationship with God. The theology is almost always implicit rather than explicit. What Genesis is, in fact, is philosophy written in a deliberately non-philosophical way. It deals with all the central questions of philosophy: what exists (ontology), what can we know (epistemology), are we free (philosophical psychology), and how we should behave (ethics). But it does so in a way quite unlike the philosophical classics from Plato to Wittgenstein. To put it at its simplest: philosophy is truth as system. Genesis is truth as story. It is a unique work, philosophy in the narrative mode. — Jonathan Sacks

God's forgiveness allows us to be honest with ourselves. We recognize our imperfections, admit our failures, and plead to God for clemency. — Jonathan Sacks

Power works by division, influence by multiplication. Power, in other words, is a zero-sum game: the more you share, the less you have. Influence is a non-zero-sum game: the more you share, the more you have. — Jonathan Sacks

Man was not made for the service of economies; economies were made to serve mankind; and men and women were made - so we believe - to serve one another, not just ourselves. — Jonathan Sacks

Why did God create mankind? Because God likes stories. — Jonathan Sacks

Some years ago there was a study to discover the most stressful occupation. It turned out not to be the head of a large business, football manager or prime minister, but rather: bus driver. — Jonathan Sacks

The greatest single antidote to violence is conversation. — Jonathan Sacks

Israel is a democratic state with an independent judiciary, a free press and a diverse population of many cultures, religions and creeds. — Jonathan Sacks

We need to rediscover the idea of the common good and work together to build a home. — Jonathan Sacks

In our interconnected world, we must learn to feel enlarged, not threatened, by difference - that is what I have argued. — Jonathan Sacks

Nowadays ... deals are transactional rather than personal. Instead of placing your faith in a person, you get lawyers to write safeguards into the contract. This is an historic shift from a trust economy to a risk economy. But trust is not a dispensable luxury. It is the very basis of our social life. Many scholars believe that capitalism had religious roots because people could trust other people who, feeling that they were answerable to God, could be relied on to be honest in business. A world without trust is a lonely and dangerous place. — Jonathan Sacks

In her religious role, the Queen is head of the Church of England, but in her civic role she cares for all her subjects, and no one is better at making everyone she meets feel valued. — Jonathan Sacks

Faced with destruction, the Jewish people survived. — Jonathan Sacks

Technology gives us power, but it does not and cannot tell us how to use that power. Thanks to technology, we can instantly communicate across the world, but it still doesn't help us know what to say. — Jonathan Sacks

The people of Israel are entitled, as is any other nation, to live in peace and safety. — Jonathan Sacks

When everything that matters can be bought and sold, when commitments can be broken because they are no longer to our advantage, when shopping becomes salvation and advertising slogans become our litany, when our worth is measured by how much we earn and spend, then the market is destroying the very virtues on which in the long run it depends. — Jonathan Sacks

There's always hope. You can lose everything else in the world, but Jews never lose hope. — Jonathan Sacks

If the history of the Day of Atonement has anything to say to us now it is: never relieve individuals of moral responsibility. The more we have, the more we grow. — Jonathan Sacks

We believe that what we possess we don't ultimately own. God is merely entrusting it to us. And one of the conditions of that trust is that we share what we have with those who have less. So, if you don't give to people in need, you can hardly call yourself a Jew. Even the most unbelieving Jew knows that. — Jonathan Sacks

Religious ritual is a way of structuring time so that we, not employers, the market or the media, are in control. Life needs its pauses, its chapter breaks, if the soul is to have space to breathe. — Jonathan Sacks

It is through exchange that difference becomes a blessing, not a curse. — Jonathan Sacks

Religion in the form of polytheism entered the world as the vindication of power. Not only was there no separation of church and state; religion was the transcendental justification of the state. — Jonathan Sacks

Volunteering has been undervalued in Britain for a long time. Often it has been seen as a kind of cut-price, amateur version of work that would be better done by the state. When politicians speak about it, people hear in the background the sound of budgets being cut. — Jonathan Sacks

If God created the world, then his existence must be compatible with the world. If he created human intelligence, his existence must not be an insult to the intelligence. If the greatest gift he gave humanity was freedom, then religion could not establish itself by coercion. — Jonathan Sacks

Defining yourself as a victim is ultimately a diminution of what makes us human. It teaches us to see ourselves as objects, not subjects. — Jonathan Sacks

Cyberspace can't compensate for real space. We benefit from chatting to people face to face. — Jonathan Sacks

the simplest definition of the Abrahamic faith. It is not our task to conquer or convert the world or enforce uniformity of belief. It is our task to be a blessing to the world. The use of religion for political ends is not righteousness but idolatry. — Jonathan Sacks

As Shakespeare said, 'The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.'4 — Jonathan Sacks

Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, is the holy of holies of Jewish time. It is that rarest of phenomena, a Jewish festival without food. Instead it is a day of fasting and prayer, introspection and self-judgment when, collectively and repeatedly, we confess our sins and pray to be written into God's Book of Life. — Jonathan Sacks

The market economy is very good at wealth creation but not perfect at all about wealth distribution. — Jonathan Sacks

I do not want to suggest that you have to be religious to be moral. — Jonathan Sacks

Peace comes when we see our reflection in the face of God and let go of the desire to be someone else. — Jonathan Sacks

As part of the logic of human sociality, the internal cohesion of a group is in direct proportion to the degree of threat it perceives from the outside. It follows that anyone who wants to unite a nation, especially one that has been deeply fractured, must demonise an adversary or, if necessary, invent an enemy. For the Turks it was the Armenians. For the Serbs it was the Muslims. For Stalin it was the bourgeoisie or the counter-revolutionaries. For Pol Pot it was the capitalists and intellectuals. For Hitler it was Christian Europe's eternal Other, the Jews. — Jonathan Sacks

Freedom is not won by merely overthrowing a tyrannical ruler or an oppressive regime. That is usually only the prelude to a new tyranny, a new oppression. — Jonathan Sacks

The consumer society, directed at making us happy, achieves the opposite. It encourages us to spend money we do not have, to buy things we do not need, for the sake of a happiness that will not last. — Jonathan Sacks

The evidence shows that religious people - defined by regular attendance at a place of worship - actually do make better neighbors. — Jonathan Sacks

God is back and Europe as a whole still doesn't get it. It is our biggest single collective cultural and intellectual blind spot. — Jonathan Sacks

It was Machiavelli, not Moses or Mohammed, who said it is better to be feared than to be loved: the creed of the terrorist and the suicide bomber. It was Nietzsche, the man who first wrote the words 'God is dead', whose ethic was the will to power. To invoke God to justify violence against the innocent is not an act of sanctity but of sacrilege. It is a kind of blasphemy. It is to take God's name in vain. — Jonathan Sacks