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| Home » Writings, Speeches, Broadcasts » Thought for the Day |
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| Never underestimate the power of a story to enlarge the moral imagination of a child. |
| 26/3/2010 |
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On Monday night we, the members of the Jewish community, will be sitting down with our families to begin perhaps the oldest continuously observed religious ritual in the world, Pesach, Passover, the time when we remember the journey of our ancestors 33 centuries ago from slavery to freedom.
We don’t just remember. We re-enact, eating matzah, the unleavened bread of affliction, tasting maror, the bitter herbs of oppression, and drinking four cups of wine, each a stage ... |
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| Perhaps we should all read our own obituaries |
| 11/12/2009 |
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Yesterday President Barack Obama was in Oslo to receive the Nobel Prize for peace. And behind that story lies a fascinating one about the man himself, not Barack Obama but Alfred Nobel, the man who created the world’s biggest prize for peace.
It happened in 1888. Nobel, the man who invented dynamite, was reading his morning papers when, with a shock, he found himself reading his own obituary. It turned out that a journalist had made a simple mistake. It was Nobel’s brother who had... |
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| Not everything we can do, should we do |
| 4/12/2009 |
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Next week the international conference on climate change begins in Copenhagen, and I’ve asked all the synagogues under my aegis to make tomorrow a special environmental Sabbath in which through prayer we commit ourselves to sustainable habits of consumption and energy use.
We know that there are deep disagreements about climate change: is it real, and is it because of what we’re doing to the planet? But it seems to me that there are some risks you just don’t take, even u... |
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| We don't own what we possess, we merely hold it in trust |
| 27/11/2009 |
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Yesterday in both Britain and America banks and courts were in the news, but for different, even opposite reasons.
In Britain the Supreme Court ruled against the office of fair trading which had challenged what it saw as unfair bank charges on overdrafts. In New York, by contrast, a judge ruled against a bank which was claiming mortgage payments from a couple that simply couldn’t pay them. The bank had rejected the couple’s request to find other ways of repaying the loan,... |
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