“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
“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
“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
“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.”
– Jonathan Sacks
“We are biological creatures. We are born, we live, we die. There is no transcendent purpose to existence. At best we are creatures of reason, and by using reason we can cure ourselves of emotional excess. Purged of both hope and fear, we find courage in the face of helplessness, insignificance and uncertainty.”
– 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
“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.”
– 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
“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 thinking about religion and society in the 21st century, we should broaden the conversation about faith from doctrinal debates to the larger question of how it might inspire us to strengthen the bonds of belonging that redeem us from our solitude, helping us to construct together a gracious and generous social order.”
– 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
“The royals – all of them, especially Prince Philip and Prince Charles – have done outstanding work with the faith communities.”
– 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
“Religiosity turns out to be the best indicator of civic involvement: it’s more accurate than education, age, income, gender or race.”
– 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.”
– Jonathan Sacks
“Jews know this in their bones. Our community could not exist for a day without its volunteers. They are the lifeblood of our organizations, whether they involve welfare, youth, education, care of the sick and elderly, or even protection against violence and abuse.”
– 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.”
– 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.”
– Jonathan Sacks
“We are biological creatures. We are born, we live, we die. There is no transcendent purpose to existence. At best we are creatures of reason, and by using reason we can cure ourselves of emotional excess. Purged of both hope and fear, we find courage in the face of helplessness, insignificance and uncertainty.”
– Jonathan Sacks
“Governments cannot make marriages or turn feckless individuals into responsible citizens. That needs another kind of change agent.”
– Jonathan Sacks
“Much can and must be done by governments, but they cannot of themselves change lives.”
– 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.”
– 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
“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
“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
“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.”
– 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
“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