3 December 2020 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.
3 December 2020 Jonathan Sacks While everyone else is thinking about economics and politics, executive salaries and the future of the euro, do the opposite, even if it’s hard. Invest in the spirit.
3 December 2020 Jonathan Sacks The people of Israel are entitled, as is any other nation, to live in peace and safety.
3 December 2020 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.
3 December 2020 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.
3 December 2020 Jonathan Sacks If you want a free society, teach your children what oppression tastes like. Tell them how many miracles it takes to get from here to there. Above all, encourage them to ask questions. Teach them to think for themselves.
3 December 2020 Jonathan Sacks Jews have deep respect for the Queen and the royal family. We say a prayer for them every Sabbath in synagogue. We recite a special blessing on seeing the Queen.
3 December 2020 Jonathan Sacks The world we build tomorrow is born in the stories we tell our children today. Politics moves the pieces. Education changes the game.
3 December 2020 Jonathan Sacks We from every religion feel comfortable in Britain because there is a host. The Church of England is a good host, it has been a major force in shaping England into such a tolerant society.
3 December 2020 Jonathan Sacks Dreams are where we visit the many lands and landscapes of human possibility and discover the one where we feel at home. The great religious leaders were all dreamers.
3 December 2020 Jonathan Sacks The royals – all of them, especially Prince Philip and Prince Charles – have done outstanding work with the faith communities.
3 December 2020 Jonathan Sacks Britain, relative to the U.S., is a highly secular society. Philanthropy alone cannot fill the gap left by government cutbacks. And the sources of altruism go deep into our evolutionary past.
3 December 2020 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.
3 December 2020 Jonathan Sacks Europe is dying. That is one of the unsayable truths of our time. We are undergoing the moral equivalent of climate change and no one is talking about it.
3 December 2020 Jonathan Sacks Religion survives because it answers three questions that every reflective person must ask. Who am I? Why am I here? How then shall I live?
3 December 2020 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.
3 December 2020 Jonathan Sacks In an ecology of love, people can relate in trust and face the future without fear. They do not need to play it safe. They can take uncertainty in their stride.
3 December 2020 Jonathan Sacks Freedom begins with what we teach our children. That is why Jews became a people whose passion is education, whose heroes are teachers and whose citadels are schools.
3 December 2020 Jonathan Sacks Focus on the mind and the soul. Read. Study. Enrol in a course of lectures. Pray. Become a member of a religious congregation. Study the Bible or other ancient works of wisdom.
3 December 2020 Jonathan Sacks A perfect storm is in the making: financial uncertainty, economic downturn, government cuts, rising unemployment and a future that looks less clear the more we try to fathom it.
3 December 2020 Jonathan Sacks While we can remember the past, we cannot write the future. Only our children, the future of our community, can do that.
3 December 2020 Jonathan Sacks We need to rediscover the idea of the common good and work together to build a home.
3 December 2020 Jonathan Sacks There’s always hope. You can lose everything else in the world, but Jews never lose hope.
3 December 2020 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.
3 December 2020 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.
3 December 2020 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.
3 December 2020 Jonathan Sacks To defend a country you need an army, but to defend a civilization you need education.
3 December 2020 Jonathan Sacks Jews read the books of Moses not just as history but as divine command. The question to which they are an answer is not, ‘What happened?’ but rather, ‘How then shall I live?’ And it’s only with the exodus that the life of the commands really begins.
3 December 2020 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.
3 December 2020 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.
