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| Home » Writings, Speeches, Broadcasts » Credo » 2001 |
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| Tears are the Universal Language, Help the Universal Command |
| 1/12/2001 |
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Chief Rabbi Professor Jonathan Sacks
Ansel Harris, who died earlier this year, was one of Anglo-Jewry’s unforgettable characters. Obstinate, single-minded, impossible to argue with and equally impossible not to admire, he had what Albert Einstein called that “almost fanatical love of justice” that went with being a Jew.
It was something he learnt from his parents, who had set up a refuge for immigrant children fleeing Nazi Germany. Throughout his adult life that memo... |
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| Plato was Wrong. Searching for Universal for Universal Truth Threatens Us All |
| 1/11/2001 |
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It may seem bizarre to suggest a connection between the tragedy of 11 September and a Greek philosopher who lived almost 2,500 years ago, yet that is what I am going to claim. I call it Plato's ghost, and it has haunted the Western imagination ever since.
Plato, one of the greatest thinkers who ever lived, was driven by the search for knowledge and truth. How, in this world of chance and change, can we arrive at knowledge that is beyond chance and change? His answer was that reality is... |
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| The Human Spirit is Too Resilient to be to be Intimidated for Too Long |
| 1/10/2001 |
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If there is one festival that's made for our time, it's the one Jews have been celebrating this week. We call it Sukkot or in English, Tabernacles. For seven days we leave the security of our homes and live in a sukkah - a shed or shack open to the sky, with only a covering of leaves for a roof. It's a vivid re-enactment of the forty years the Israelites spent wandering in the desert on their way from Egypt to the promised land, without a roof over their heads or protection against th... |
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| Judaism Remains as Quarrelsome & Vibrant as Ever |
| 1/9/2001 |
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I have on my shelves a dictionary of American Jewish quotations. It's called Two Jews, Three Opinions, which is a way of saying that we can sometimes be a disputatious people. Jews have disagreements the way the English have cricket, the Welsh choirs and the Scots malt whisky.
Abraham argued with God. So did Moses and Jeremiah and Job. It was the rabbis who coined the concept of an "argument for the sake of Heaven". The great philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre once wrote: "Traditions, when... |
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