As we approach Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, join Rabbi Sacks in a series of ten short videos to learn what prayer really is and how it can change your life. To read the transcripts for these videos, please click here.

Below is an embedded playlist featuring all ten videos. You can select a different video from the series by clicking on the menu item in the top left-hand corner of the video. Each video includes subtitles in: French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Russian and Spanish (click on the Settings button in the bottom right-hand corner to select the required language).

(1) Spiritual Exercise – This video focuses on how prayer is to the human spirit what exercise is to the human body.

(2) Thanking & Thinking – This video focuses on the importance of recognising that despite the difficult moments, it is important to remember daily that life is a gift.

(3) Praise – This video focuses on how the concept of praise is central to Jewish prayer.

(4) The Deepest Call – This video focuses on the Shofar and how its sound is a prayer that goes deeper than words.

(5) Family – This video focuses on how we believe that to all humanity, God is a friend. But to us, he’s family.

(6) Mistakes – This video focuses on how Judaism doesn’t believe that anyone is infallible; we all make mistakes and it is how we learn from them that counts.

(7) Growth – This video focuses on the difference between a fixed and a growth mindset, and why Judaism, especially around the High Holy Days, is a sustained tutorial in a growth mindset.

(8) Holy Words – This video focuses on how listening and the idea of holy words, places, time and people are central to Judaism.

(9) Framing Beliefs – This video focuses on how Jewish faith isn’t irrational or naive or pre-scientific, but a framing belief.

(10) The Soul’s Language – This video focuses on Kol Nidre and the power of music to lift the Jewish soul.

We are grateful to our generous sponsors who helped enable us to produce this video series. If you are interested in sponsoring future series, then please feel free to be in touch with here.

The Ten Days of Repentance are the holy of holies of Jewish time. They begin this Wednesday evening with Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, and culminate 10 days later with Yom Kippur, our Day of Atonement. At no other time do I feel so close to God, and I suspect the same is true for most Jews.

These days constitute a courtroom drama like no other. The judge is God himself, and we are on trial for our lives. It begins on Rosh Hashanah, with the sounding of the shofar, the ram’s horn, announcing that the court is in session. The Book of Life, in which our fate will be inscribed, now lies open. As we say in prayer, “On Rosh Hashanah it is written, and on Yom Kippur it is sealed, who will live and who will die.” At home, we eat an apple dipped in honey as a symbol of our hope for a sweet new year.

On Yom Kippur, the atmosphere reaches a peak of intensity in a day of fasting and prayer. Repeatedly we confess our sins, whole alphabetical litanies of them, including ones we probably had neither the time nor the imagination to commit. We throw ourselves on the mercy of the court, which is to say, on God himself. Write us, we say, in the Book of Life.

And at the end of a long and wrenching day, we finish as we began 10 days earlier, with the sound of the ram’s horn—this time not with tears and fears but with cautious yet confident hope. We have admitted the worst about ourselves and survived.

Beneath the surface of this long religious ritual lies one of the more transformative stories of the human spirit. The sociologist Philip Rieff pointed out that the movement from paganism to monotheism was a transition from fate to faith. By this he meant that in the world of myth, people were pitted against powerful, capricious forces personified as gods who were at best indifferent, at worst hostile, to humankind. All you could do was try to propitiate, battle or outwit them. This was a culture of character and fate, and its noblest expression was the literature of Greek tragedy.

Jews came to see the world in a completely different way. The book of Genesis opens with God making humans “in his image and likeness.” This phrase has become so familiar to us that we forget how paradoxical it is, since for the Hebrew Bible, God has no image and likeness. As the narrative quickly makes clear, what humans have in common with God is freedom and moral responsibility.

The Jewish drama is less about character and fate than about will and choice. To the monotheistic mind, the real battles are not “out there,” against external forces of darkness, but “in here,” between the bad and better angels of our nature. As the religion writer Jack Miles once pointed out, you can see the difference in the contrast between Sophocles and Shakespeare. For Sophocles, Oedipus must battle against blind, inexorable fate. For Shakespeare, writing in a monotheistic age, the drama of “Hamlet” lies within, between “the native hue of resolution” and “the pale cast of thought.”

The trouble is, of course, that faced with choice, we often make the wrong one. Given a second chance, Adam and Eve would probably pass on the fruit. Cain might work a little harder on his anger management. And there is a straight line from these biblical episodes to the destruction left by Homo sapiens: war, murder, human devastation and environmental destruction.

That is still our world today. The key fact about us, according to the Bible, is that uniquely in an otherwise law-governed universe, we are able to break the law—a power that we too often relish exercising.

This raises an acute theological dilemma. How are we to reconcile God’s high hopes for humanity with our shabby and threadbare moral record? The short answer is forgiveness.

God wrote forgiveness into the script. He always gives us a second chance, and more. All we have to do is to acknowledge our wrongs, apologize, make amends and resolve to behave better, and God forgives. It allows us to hold simultaneously to the highest moral aspirations while admitting honestly our deepest moral failings. That is the drama of the Jewish High Holy Days.

At the heart of this vision is what the post-Holocaust writer Viktor Frankl called our “search for meaning.” The great institutions of modernity were not constructed to provide meaning. Science tells us how the world came to be but not why. Technology gives us power but cannot tell us how to use it. The market gives us choices but no guidance as to which choices to make. Modern democracies give us a maximum of personal freedom but a minimum of shared morality. You can acknowledge the beauty of all these institutions, yet most of us seek something more.

Meaning comes not from systems of thought but from stories, and the Jewish story is among the most unusual of all. It tells us that God sought to make us His partners in the work of creation, but we repeatedly disappointed Him. Yet He never gives up. He forgives us time and again. The real religious mystery for Judaism is not our faith in God but God’s faith in us.

This is not, as atheists and skeptics sometimes claim, a comforting fiction but quite the opposite. Judaism is God’s call to human responsibility, to create a world that is a worthy home for His presence. That is why Jews are so often to be found as doctors fighting disease, economists fighting poverty, lawyers fighting injustice, teachers fighting ignorance and therapists fighting depression and despair.

Judaism is a supremely activist faith for which the greatest religious challenge is to heal some of the wounds of our deeply fractured world. As Frankl put it: The real question is not what do we want from life but what does life want from us.

That is the question we are asked on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. As we ask God to write us in the Book of Life, he asks us, what have you done with your life thus far? Have you thought about others or only about yourself? Have you brought healing to a place of human pain or hope where you found despair? You may have been a success, but have you also been a blessing? Have you written other people in the Book of Life?

To ask these questions once a year in the company of others publicly willing to confess their faults, lifted by the words and music of ancient prayers, knowing that God forgives every failure we acknowledge as a failure, and that He has faith in us even when we lose faith in ourselves, can be a life-changing experience. That is when we discover that, even in a secular age, God is still there, open to us whenever we are willing to open ourselves to Him.

This article was first published in The Wall Street Journal on 16 September 2017.

To mark the launch of ‘Ceremony and Celebration: An Introduction to the Holidays’ (published by Maggid Books), Rabbi Sacks delivered a pre-Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur shiur entitled ‘Confusing Satan’. A video of the shiur will be made available shortly. An audio recording of the shiur can be found below. Before watching or listening, please download the accompanying source sheet here.

On Monday 2nd October 2017, Rabbi Sacks did a Facebook Live discussion with Nicola Mendelsohn, Facebook’s VP for EMEA, from Facebook’s London office. The conversation began by focussing on technology and community, but touched on a number of other issues as well.

“Dear Lord Rothschild…” These three words helped to change the course of modern Jewish history and ultimately create the State of Israel. As we proudly approach the celebrations of the 100th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration on 2nd November, Rabbi Sacks has recorded a short video reflecting on what this declaration meant in 1917, and what it means for us today.

Transcript

REFLECTIONS ON BALFOUR 100

“Dear Lord Rothschild, I have much pleasure in conveying to you on behalf of His Majesty’s Government, the following declaration of sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations which has been submitted to, and approved by, the Cabinet.”

“His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object.”

WHAT IS THE PLACE OF THE BALFOUR DECLARATION IN THE HISTORY OF ZIONISM?

The Balfour Declaration was the beginning of really a massive new chapter in the 2,000-year longing of the Jewish people for its land. Of course, Jews had never forsaken the dream of return, and that return, Shivat Tzion, the return home to Zion, was written into every Jewish heart.

But it wasn’t until the 19th century that that process of return really gathered momentum. In 1876, the British novelist George Eliot wrote perhaps the first Zionist novel, “Daniel Deronda”. And there was a huge well-spring of feeling in Britain, very much among Christians, that the dawn of the new age would see the return of Jews to their land.

Twenty years later was the first Zionist Congress, Theodor Herzl’s dramatic shift of Zionism from a dream and an aspiration for individuals to a political programme. The fact of the Balfour Declaration was the first shift of this from an aspiration to a real possibility. So this was the first time a national government had said Jews have the right to return home. It was a bold and history transforming act.

WHAT WAS SO UNIQUE ABOUT THE BALFOUR DECLARATION?

What was unique about the Balfour Declaration was I think three things. First of all, this was the ultimate anti-imperialist gesture. Don’t forget, between the Roman Conquest and the First World War, Israel had simply been a part, an administrative district, in an empire. Christian empires, and then the various Islamic empires, ultimately by the Ottoman Empire. So it had never been a nation in its own right. So as part of this new world brought into being in the First World War, one consequence of which was the final death of the Ottoman Empire, was the sense of giving lands back to their original inhabitants. All the lands given back to Arabs, given back to Jews. So it was the anti-imperialist gesture.

Secondly, it was the only bit of this gesture covering all the regions which actually reaffirmed a historically grounded state, the Biblical State and land of Israel. All the others, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, were all artificial creations that had never existed as nation-states in their own right. And that is one of the reasons why even today all those areas are riven by ancient tribal and civil animosities. Whereas Israel was the only country that had been a nation-state of its own for a thousand years, from the days of the Judges to the final Second Temple period. So it was a beautifully anti-imperialist gesture, and it was the restoration of a historic nation to its historic homeland.

And the third thing that was so powerful, but tragically not fully realised, was that it provided Jews with a place of refuge. Now, had there been open access of Jews to the land of Israel, I don’t know how many millions of Jewish lives might have been saved during the Holocaust. But of course, what happened during the Holocaust was that Jews realised there was nowhere they would freely go. But the fact remains that the Balfour Declaration recognised that Jews as a nation subject to a thousand years of persecution needed a place that they could call home in the Robert Frost sense of the place where when you have to go there, they have to let you in.

WHAT WAS THE SITUATION IN BRITAIN IN NOVEMBER 1917?

In 1917, Britain was still deep into World War One, and it would have been so easy for it to ignore the long-term vision and focus instead on the immediacies of war. And it says something for the vision and moral courage of Britain’s political leadership at the time that it said no, this war that we are fighting is not for ourselves alone, but to create a more just and secure world, and for it to be able to say to Jews and indeed to the Arab world as well – let us not forget that this was part of a larger picture – the Age of Empire is over, we want to give back these lands to their original inhabitants. That was visionary and moral politics of a high order, and we should salute it in retrospect.

WHAT ARE THE LESSONS OF THE BALFOUR DECLARATION ONE HUNDRED YEARS ON?

The Balfour Declaration was very clear, in a rather murky area, that it recognised the rights of Jews to a homeland, but it also respected the rights of the other people who were living there at the time. So it was predicated on some peaceful coexistence of Jews and Arabs in the land. And for a moment it seemed as though that might happen, because two years after the Balfour Declaration, Chaim Weizmann, who was the leader of the Zionist movement at the time, and Emir Faisal, who was the leading Arab politician at the time, came to an agreement in which Jews recognised the claim of Arab nationalism and Muslims recognised the claim of Jewish nationalism. It was a very blessed moment, in which both sides saw that they would both gain from a Jewish presence in the region.

And therefore, it is the sense of possibility that we need to recapture, because the reasons for coexistence have not diminished in a hundred years, but what has diminished is the sense that each is willing to make space for the other.

On the Jewish side, we’ve always been willing to make space. Weizmann was, Ben-Gurion was. There have been key moments when Israel offered peace and statehood to the Palestinians, and unfortunately met with very uncompromising attitudes. I don’t want to level blame in any direction here. But the dream of the Balfour Declaration, of this coexistence of two distinct groups of people, remains the dream today, and I don’t think we should waste another hundred years in unrealised dreams. My plea is that finally we make space for one another.

WHAT DOES THE BALFOUR DECLARATION TEACH US ABOUT THE POWER OF THE INDIVIDUAL?

The Balfour Declaration does dramatically illustrate the power of a single individual, let alone a small group, to change history. Don’t forget, the return to Zion had been a dream for 2,000 years, but it took Theodor Herzl to turn it into an effective political movement. It took Chaim Weizmann, an extraordinarily charismatic figure, to persuade leading figures in Britain to issue the Balfour Declaration. It took David Ben-Gurion to provide that visionary leadership that brought the state into being. Here are three individuals who changed the pattern of history. And one shouldn’t forget the role of women in this story, like Dorothy de Rothschild, Dorothy Pinto as she was before she was married, was a key factor in helping Weizmann achieve these results with the British cabinet. So here are individuals who really by the force and courage of their conviction brought others with them and changed the world.

I believe that the world is a better place with the State of Israel. It’s not just Jews who have benefited from the return of a people to its land, even the return of a language, the language of the Bible, to everyday use, the extraordinary achievements of the State of Israel. And one element of that was the Balfour Declaration, so in looking back at this seminal moment in history, we have to say thank you to the vision of the British government then, and we hope the world will come to see how Israel is a symbol of hope for any small and much-persecuted people when given the chance to create a new chapter in the story of humankind, which is what Israel is in today’s world.

On 23rd October 2017, Rabbi Sacks engaged in a public conversation with Dr. Carol Gilligan, the revolutionary psychologist and author of the landmark book, In A Different Voice, which transformed feminist thinking. The evening was hosted at 92nd St Y in New York and was co-presented with the Edgar M. Bronfman Center for Jewish Student Life at NYU. Please scroll to 6.50mins in to watch the beginning of the conversation.

On 24th October in Washington DC, Rabbi Sacks received the Irving Kristol Award, the highest honour bestowed annually by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) to individuals “who have made exceptional practical and intellectual contributions to improve government policy, social welfare, or political understanding.” Previous recipients include Henry Kissinger, Ronald Reagan, Alan Greenspan and in 2015, Benjamin Netanyahu.

Described by AEI President Arthur Brooks, “as one of the world’s greatest living public intellectuals, [whose] work has influenced a generation of scholars and leaders across multiple fields and religious traditions,” Rabbi Sacks said he was “deeply honoured” to receive the AEI’s Irving Kristol Award from “an organisation that is dedicated to defending human dignity and expanding human potential.”

In his keynote address accepting the award, Rabbi Sacks spoke about the current dangers threatening Western freedom and the importance of civil society to liberty. He highlighted how a “politics of anger” was corroding the fabric of American society and that this breakdown was leading to narrower and narrower identities that nurtured a “culture of grievances.” This in turn was impacting on the notion of “a social contract” and “a social covenant” to the point at which “the social contract is still there, but the social covenant is being lost.”

Transcript

Beloved friends, I want to thank you from the depths of my heart for your generosity tonight. I was almost about to say that I’m moved beyond words, but the truth is no rabbi ever was moved beyond words. (Laughter.) At the Burning Bush, Moses, the first rabbi of all time, said, “I am not a man of words,” and then proceeded to speak for the next 40 years. (Laughter.) So let me say briefly how grateful I am for three things.

Number one, for the company I now join of outstanding individuals and especially last year’s winner, who’s just so embarrassed me, Robbie George, who’s done so much as the voice of vision and moral courage that lies at the very heart of his and your and our vision of American life.

Second, for the American Enterprise Institute itself, one of the very greatest think tanks in the entire world and one from whom I have learned more than any other. And I salute Arthur Brooks for his wonderful leadership of this institution, and I wish all of you blessing and success. (Applause.)

But lastly, and perhaps most importantly because of the name that the award bears, the late Irving Kristol of blessed memory. Elaine and I were privileged to count Irving, of blessed memory, and his incredible wife, Bea, Gertrude Himmelfarb, who is here with us tonight, as precious and cherished friends. Whenever we were in Washington, they invited us to their home. They always encouraged me and my work. They were so kind, they were so gracious, they were so generous of spirit. I always had this cognitive dissonance because Irving was so vigorous, indeed sharp, in his writing and so gentle and loving in his personality that he and Bea were role models who lifted our hearts and expanded the horizon of our aspirations.

There’s a prayer we say whenever we say grace after meals – [Hebrew] ve’nimtzachein v’sechel tov b’einei Elokim v’adam – let us find grace and good intellect in the eyes of God and our fellow human beings. Irving had great outstanding intellect, but even before and above that, he had grace. So I dedicate my words tonight to his blessed memory, and we wish Bea and Bill and all their wonderful family long life and blessing for many years to come. (Applause.)

Friends, these are really tempestuous times. A few months ago, I asked a friend in Washington, “What’s it been like living in America today?” And he said, “Well, it’s a little bit like the man standing on the deck of the Titanic with a glass of whiskey in his hand and he’s saying, ‘I know I asked for ice, but this is ridiculous.’” (Laughter.)

So we’ve seen the emergence of what I call a politics of anger. We have seen the culture of competitive victimhood. We have seen the emergence of identity politics based on smaller and smaller identities of ethnicity and gender. We’ve seen the new politics of grievance.

We’ve seen the silencing of free speech in our universities in the name of safe spaces. Just a few weeks ago, Balliol College Oxford, Balliol College Oxford, the home of three prime ministers, of Adam Smith, of Gerard Manley Hopkins, barred a Christian union for having a stall to recruit new students on the grounds that a mere presence of a Christian in a group of students could be construed as a microaggression.

We have seen public discourse polluted by fake news and the manipulation of social media. Not by accident did the Oxford English Dictionary chooses its word that we would remember from 2016 as “post-truth.” And we’ve seen the reemergence in the West, certainly in Europe, of the far right and the far left. And today, according to the rather expert survey that Bridgewater Capital did recently, populist politics throughout the West is measurably at its highest levels since the early 1930s.

Hegel said that modern man has taken to reading the daily newspaper in place of morning prayer. Today, when you finished reading the daily newspaper, you need morning prayer. And all this is serious. Richard Weaver once said the trouble with humanity is that it forgets to read the minutes of the last meetings. And so for anyone who actually remembers history, the politics of anger that’s emerged in our time is full of danger – if not now, then certainly in the foreseeable future.

And although this is affecting the whole of the West, I want tonight, for reasons which will become quite clear, to focus my remarks on you and the United States of America. And the reason is that I want to give an analysis that I think the late Irving Kristol would have understood because a love of Judaism was absolutely central to his life. And because he knew that in America, democratic capitalism had its roots in the Judeo-Christian heritage, specifically in the Hebrew Bible.

You know, we often think of the Hebrew Bible as simply a religious book, but it is actually a political text. I used to study Bible with Tony Blair in 10 Downing Street when he was prime minister. It was done under the strictest possible secrecy because God forbid the prime minister should read the Bible. And he once turned to me and said, “Jonathan, how come your book is more interesting than our book?” (Laughter.) And I replied, “Prime Minister, obviously, because there’s more politics in our book than in your book.”

So I want to just look at one little element of biblical political theory, which I think is unique and which shows remarkable relevance to the situation we’re in today. And I want to begin at a strange point, at a key moment in political history in biblical Israel. You remember when the people came to Samuel and said, “Appoint us a king.” And Samuel got really upset because he thought the people were rejecting him and God said, “That’s nothing. I’m even more upset they’re rejecting me.” They sound very much like two Jewish mothers sitting together discussing their children. But God said to Samuel, “Spell out what having a king will actually mean. He’ll seize your sons, your daughters, your produce, your land, i.e., taxes, and if they’re still willing to pay the price, give them a king,” which is what happened.

And the commentators were all puzzled by this, and rightly so because does the Bible approve of kings or not? If it does, why does God say that they’re rejecting him? And if it doesn’t, why did God say give them one if they ask for it? And the reason the biblical commentators were puzzled is because by and large, they weren’t political scientists. But, actually, the meaning of that narrative is very simple.

What happened in the days of the Prophet Samuel is precisely a social contract, exactly on the lines set out by Thomas Hobbes in “The Leviathan.” People are willing to give up certain of their rights, transfer them to a central power, a king, a government, who undertakes to ensure the rule of law internally and the defense of the realm externally. In fact, One Samuel, Chapter Eight is the first recorded instance in all of history of a social contract.

But what makes the Hebrew Bible unique and really fascinating and makes it completely different from Hobbes and Locke and Jean-Jacque Rousseau is that this wasn’t the first founding moment of Israel as a nation, as a political entity. It was in fact the second because the first took place centuries earlier in the days of Moses at Mount Sinai when the people made with God not a contract but a covenant. And those two things are often confused, but actually they’re quite different.

“The market is about the creation and distribution of wealth. The state is about the creation and distribution of power.”– Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks

In a contract, two or more people come together to make an exchange. You pay your plumber – I have a Jewish friend in Jerusalem who calls his plumber Messiah. (Laughter.) Why? Because we await him daily, and he never turns up. (Laughter.) So in a contract, you make an exchange, which is to the benefit of the self-interest of each. And so you have the commercial contract that creates the market and the social contract that creates the state.

A covenant isn’t like that. It’s more like a marriage than an exchange. In a covenant, two or more parties each respecting the dignity and integrity of the other come together in a bond of loyalty and trust to do together what neither can do alone. A covenant isn’t about me. It’s about us. A covenant isn’t about interests. It’s about identity. A covenant isn’t about me, the voter, or me, the consumer, but about all of us together. Or in that lovely key phrase of American politics, it’s about “we, the people.”

The market is about the creation and distribution of wealth. The state is about the creation and distribution of power. But a covenant is about neither wealth nor power, but about the bonds of belonging and of collective responsibility. And to put it as simply as I can, the social contract creates a state but the social covenant creates a society. That is the difference. They’re different things.

Biblical Israel had a society long before it had a state, before it even crossed the Jordan and enter the land, which explains why Jews were able to keep their identity for 2,000 years in exile and dispersion because although they’d lost their state, they still had their society. Although they’d lost their contract, they still had their covenant. And there is only one nation known to me that had the same dual founding as biblical Israel, and that is the United States of America which has – (applause) – which had its social covenant in the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and its social contract in the Constitution in 1787.

And the reason it did so is because the founders of this country had the Hebrew Bible engraved on their hearts. Covenant is central to the Mayflower Compact of 1620. It is central to the speech of John Winthrop aboard the Arbela in 1630. It is presupposed in the most famous line of the Declaration of Independence.

Listen to the sentence. See how odd it might sound to anyone but an American. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.” Those truths are anything but self-evident. They would have been unintelligible to Plato, to Aristotle, or to every hierarchical society the world has ever known. They are self-evident only to people, to Jews and Christians, who have internalized the Hebrew Bible. And that is what made G. K. Chesterton call America “a nation with the soul of a church.”

Now, what is more, every covenant comes with a story. And the interesting thing is the Hebrew Bible and America have the same story. It’s about what Lincoln called a new birth of freedom or, by any other name, what we know as an exodus. The only difference is, in America, instead of the wicked Egyptians, you had the wicked English. (Laughter.) Instead of a tyrant called Pharaoh, you had one called King George III, and instead of crossing the Red Sea, you crossed the Atlantic. But it’s OK. As a Brit, I want to say, after 241 years, we forgive you. (Laughter.)

But that is why Jefferson drew as his design for the great seal of America the Israelites following a pillar of cloud through the wilderness. It is why Lincoln called Americans the “almost chosen people.” It is what led Martin Luther King on the last night of his life to see himself as Moses and to say, “I’ve been to the mountaintop and I have seen the Promised Land.”

Now, why does this matter to America and to the American Enterprise Institute? Because America understands more clearly than any other Western nation that freedom requires not just a state, but also and even more importantly a society, a society built of strong covenantal institutions, of marriages, families, congregations, communities, charities, and voluntary associations.

Alexis de Tocqueville rightly saw that these were the buffers between the individual and the state and that what essentially thought to democratic freedom, he thought all that exercise of responsibility and families and communities was in his lovely phrase our “apprenticeship in liberty.” And we can now say exactly what has been going wrong in American life in recent times and indeed throughout Europe.

But, in America, the social contract is still there, but the social covenant is being lost. Today, one half of America is losing all those covenantal institutions. It’s losing strong marriages and families and communities. It’s losing a strong sense of the American narrative. It’s even losing e pluribus unum because today everyone prefers pluribus to unum. So in place of the single collective identity, you find a myriad of ever smaller identities, local ones based on gender, whatever it is next week.

Instead of a culture of freedom and responsibility, we have a culture of grievances that are always someone else’s responsibility. Because we no longer share a moral code that allows us, in Isaiah’s words, to reason together, in its place has come something called emotivism, which says, I know I’m right because I feel it. And as for those who disagree, we will shout down or ban all those dissenting voices because we each have a right not to feel we’re wrong.
“We need people willing to stand up and say, rich and poor alike, we all have collective responsibility for the common good. And we need a culture of responsibility, not one of victimhood, because if you define yourself as a victim, you can never be free.”– Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks

And because half of America doesn’t have strong families and communities standing between the individual and the state, people begin to think that all political problems can be solved by the state. But they can’t. And when you think they can, politics begins to indulge in magical thinking. So you get the far right dreaming of a golden past that never was and the far left yearning for a utopian future that never will be. And then comes populism, the belief that a strong leader can solve all our problems for us. And that is the first step down the road to tyranny, whether of the right or of the left.

But there is good news, which is that covenants can be renewed. That’s what happened in the Bible in the days of Joshua and Josepha and Ezekiel and Josiah and Ezra and Nehemiah. It happened in America several times. Nations with covenants can renew themselves, and that has to be our project now and for the foreseeable future. We need to renew the covenant, which means standing with Robbie George and friends and strengthening marriage and the family. It means rebuilding communities.

And I don’t know if you noticed, significantly, just recently, Mark Zuckerberg has changed the mission statement of Facebook from connecting friends to building communities. And, of course, you need communities if you ever are to have friends. You know, a British charity six years ago did a survey – medical charity, called Macmillan Nurses, did a survey six years ago, in 2011, and it came up with the discovery that the average Brit between the ages of 18 and 30 has 237 Facebook friends. When asked on how many of those could you count in an emergency, the average answer was two. When you belong to a church or a synagogue or a real community, you have real friends, not just Facebook friends. And now, Facebook itself is beginning to realize this.

It means – and forgive me for saying this – but it means teaching every American child the American story without embarrassment. (Applause.) Because you and I remember what people forget – namely, the distinction made by George Orwell between nationalism and patriotism. Nationalism is about power. Patriotism is about pride. Nationalism leads to war. Patriotism works for peace. We can be patriotic without being nationalistic. (Applause.)

It means enlisting not just our cultural heroes but our children and grandchildren’s cultural heroes. I mean, you know why we have grandchildren: because they tell us how these [smartphones] things work. And they have icons, and we need to find their peers of stage or screen or sports who are willing to say, we believe in e pluribus unum. We believe, like the University of Chicago, in free speech on campus because we believe that the only safe space there is is one in which we give a respectful hearing to views unlike our own. That is what a safe space actually is. (Applause.)

We need people willing to stand up and say, rich and poor alike, we all have collective responsibility for the common good. And we need a culture of responsibility, not one of victimhood, because if you define yourself as a victim, you can never be free. (Applause.) We have to have people to have the courage to get up and say that earned self-respect counts for more than unearned self-esteem. And we have to say the fundamental truth that is at the heart of the Hebrew Bible and of American politics that the state exists to serve the people. The people don’t exist to serve the state. (Applause.)

Friends, those are the values that made America great. And they are still what make America the last best hope of freedom in a dark, dangerous, and sometimes despairing world riven by those who fear and fight against freedom.

Friends, you have been so generous to me tonight. The American Enterprise Institute has given an award to someone who is not American, not terribly enterprising, and in the words of the great philosopher Marx – I mean, of course, Groucho, not Karl – I’m not yet ready to be an institution. (Laughter.)

So, therefore, let me as an entirely unworthy outsider beg you, don’t lose the American covenant. It’s the most precious thing you have. Renew it now before it’s too late. Thank you. (Applause.)

(END)

Yesterday a major British dictionary named as its 2017 word of the year the phrase “fake news.” At least I think it did, unless that too was fake news. And when you recall that last year another dictionary chose as its word of the year “post truth,” you realise that we’re in trouble. It’s all a long way from the lost innocence of the Edwardian era, when Bertrand Russell could say about the philosopher G E Moore that he only once heard him tell a lie, which was when he asked him, “Moore, have you ever told a lie?” and he replied, “Yes.”

How has it happened? Fake news is as old as time, and it can have devastating consequences. Jews suffered for centuries because of a fake news item known as the blood libel, accusing them of using the blood of Christian children. And despite the fact that it was denounced as untrue by several Popes, that didn’t stop it being told and believed.

Fake news is used as propaganda in war, and it was used to stoke fears in Bosnia and Rwanda where it led straight to bloodshed. It flourishes today because increasingly we’re getting our news from the social media where it’s hard to check whether a story is fact, fiction or fantasy. And there’s convincing evidence that it’s increasingly being used by foreign powers to manipulate opinion and distort the democratic process.

And it works, because the human brain is ultra-sensitive to threats of danger, so it’s easy to spread paranoia. And because there’s a psychological phenomenon known as the confirmation bias, which leads us to believe stories that confirm our prejudices. By the time truth emerges, the lie has already done its harm.

The deepest insight into the fragility of truth was given by the philosopher Nietzsche, who warned that even science takes its fire from “the flame lit by a faith that is thousands of years old, that Christian faith which was also the faith of Plato, that God is the truth, that truth is divine.”

Of course, you don’t need to be religious to value truth, because without it there’s no trust and without trust there’s no society. But it does mean that we need a strong shared moral code, because if all we have is individuals pursuing self interest, people will deceive whenever it’s in their interests to do so and can get away with it. Fake news erodes the moral ecology on which liberty depends. We really do need truth if we’re to stay free.

People in their hundreds camped out overnight in central London to be among the first to buy the new iPhone X last week. I love my smartphone, not least because it’s smarter than me. But still, people used to fall in love with people. Now they fall in love with phones. I’m not the only one to find this a little disturbing.

In her new book, iGen, American psychologist Jean Twenge documents the infatuation that children born after 1995 have with smartphones and social media. According to her research, teenagers are spending between five and six hours a day looking at a screen.

They are going out with friends less and texting them more. The effects, according to Twenge, are disastrous. Teenagers’ self-reported levels of life satisfaction have plummeted, while rates of depressive illness have rocketed. In unprecedented numbers, today’s teens feel lonely and anxious. That is just one of the consequences of the new media.

Another can be seen in the fact that Collins English Dictionary has just named as the 2017 Word of the Year the phrase “fake news”.

A year ago the Oxford English Dictionary chose “post-truth”. This has happened because increasingly we are getting our news from social media sites rife with sensationalism, false facts and deliberate manipulation of opinion. This too is dangerous, because where there is no truth there is no trust and no society.

When we rely exclusively on smartphones, algorithms and filters, we find ourselves fed with the news we want to hear, interpreted in a way that confirms our prejudices. This fragments society into a series of sects of the like-minded, and as Professor Cass Sunstein of Harvard has shown, when we associate exclusively with people who share our views, we become ever more extreme.

One symptom of the new extremism is the progressive denial of free speech in our universities in the name of safe space, trigger warnings and the outlawing of “micro-aggressions”, meaning views that might offend even if the offense was manifestly unintended. It was against such high-minded totalitarianism that John Stuart Mill wrote his great essay On Liberty, in which he protested “the mischief of denying a hearing to opinions because we, in our own judgment, have condemned them”.

The irony is that all this is happening during the 500th anniversary of the Reformation, which arose in similar circumstances. Then as now there was a revolution in information technology, in that case Gutenberg’s printing press. There was a feeling that ruling elites had become self-indulgent and corrupt, and that a world order that had prevailed for centuries was nearing its end. Something new and unpredictable was about to take its place.

Between the Reformation and now, the ethic that bound society together was drawn from religion in one or other of its Judeo-Christian forms.

Yes, there was a progressive secularisation of power. But religion had a huge influence on society, some of it harsh and hypocritical, but much of it admirable and altruistic.

It strengthened the bonds of family and community, encouraging personal and social responsibility. It spoke of virtue, fidelity and service to others. It told stories that made sense of our place in the universe and enacted rituals that inspired humility in the face of eternity.

For 50 years the West has been embarked on an experiment whose true cost we are only beginning to realise, namely the creation of a society without a shared moral code, an ethic known to academics as “expressive individualism,” which roughly means “do whatever you want and can get away with”.

People believed that the collateral damage could be dealt with by the state. It would care for the children of broken or abusive families. Its regulatory bodies would enforce financial and business ethics. Its tax regime would guarantee fairness in the distribution of rewards.

But the state is no substitute for an internalised code of honour and personal responsibility. Unfettered freedom still means today what it meant to Thucydides long ago: the strong do what they will and the weak suffer what they must.

The “selfie” culture is harming us. The new information technology is as empowering as was the invention of printing in its day. Alongside it, though, we need a new Reformation, drawing on the best of our Judeo-Christian heritage together with the great secular humanist traditions, that will restore our sense of collective belonging.

Hyper-individualism has had its day. We need a new code of shared responsibility for the common good.

This article was first published in The Sunday Telegraph on 5th November 2017.

Coming in to Broadcasting House this morning I saw for the first time the statue unveiled this week, of George Orwell, with its inscription on the wall behind, “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” How badly we need that truth today.

I’ve been deeply troubled by what seems to me to be the assault on free speech taking place in British universities in the name of “safe space,” “trigger warnings,” and “micro-aggressions,” meaning any remark that someone might find offensive even if no offence is meant. So far has this gone that a month ago, students at an Oxford College banned the presence of a representative of the Christian Union on the grounds that some might find their presence alienating and offensive. Luckily the protest that followed led to the ban being swiftly overturned. But still …

I’m sure this entire movement has been undertaken for the highest of motives, to protect the feelings of the vulnerable, which I applaud, but you don’t achieve that by silencing dissenting views. A safe space is the exact opposite: a place where you give a respectful hearing to views opposed to your own, knowing that your views too will be listened to respectfully. That’s academic freedom and it’s essential to a free society.

And it’s what I learned at university. My doctoral supervisor, the late Sir Bernard Williams, was an atheist. I was a passionate religious believer. But he always listened respectfully to my views, which gave me the confidence to face those who disagree with everything I stand for. That’s safety in an unsafe world.

And it’s at the very heart of my faith, because Judaism is a tradition all of whose canonical texts are anthologies of arguments. In the Bible, Abraham, Moses, Jeremiah and Job argue with God. The rabbinic literature is an almost endless series of Rabbi X says this and Rabbi Y says that, and when one rabbi had the chance of asking God who was right, God replied, they’re both right. “How can they both be right?” asked the rabbi, to which God’s apocryphal reply was: “You’re also right.” The rabbis called this, “argument for the sake of heaven.”

Why does it matter? Because truth emerges from disagreement and debate. Because tolerance means making space for difference. Because justice involves Audi alteram partem, listening to the other side. And because, in Orwell’s words, liberty means “the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”

In this new series of six whiteboard animation videos to be published online during the coming year, Rabbi Sacks takes a look at some of the key challenges facing our global society today. Each seeks to use some of key ideas contained in much of Rabbi Sacks writings over the past 30 years, but present these ideas in a dynamic and engaging way. Learn more about the series here.

In this first video, based on his book called ‘The Politics of Hope’ published in 1997, Rabbi Sacks analyses the rise in the ‘politics of anger’ in the West today and explores whether it might be possible to create a different kind of politics: the ‘politics of hope’.

Future videos will focus on (though not necessarily in this order): the dignity of difference, integrated diversity, the relationship between religion and science, understanding and confronting religious violence, and the ethics of responsibility.

Please note that this video contains subtitles in: Chinese, English, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish (please click on the ‘Settings’ button on the video below to select your preferred language).

Rabbi Sacks said:

“Too often in recent years, the West has been preoccupied with the idea of power as opposed to the power of ideas. Throughout my life, I have been excited and inspired by ideas, and this is a challenge I have set myself and my team: how can we continue to present ideas – whether they are particular to Jews and Judaism or more universalistic in their appeal – in the most engaging and appealing ways. The whiteboard animation technique is one we have found to be a wonderful way of presenting concepts and ideas, particularly in an age of social media. I hope that this series will highlight some of the ideas I have thought most deeply about over the past 30 years, and present them to a new and younger generation in a dynamic and inspiring way.”

TRANSCRIPT

In recent years societies in Europe and America have become far more divided. The gap between left and right has become deeper. There’s been a rise in populist parties of the far right and far left. The extremes are growing and the centre ground is being abandoned. This is the politics of anger. Why has it happened and can we create a different kind of politics: the politics of hope?

The starting point has to be the fact that for the past fifty years societies in the West have been dominated by two institutions, the state and the market – politics and economics, the logic of power and the logic of wealth. The state is us in our collective capacity. The market is us as individuals. And the great debate has been about which is more effective in creating a better future. The left tends to favour the state. The right tends to favour the market.

But what if this entire way of thinking leaves out something essential? We can see this by asking some simple questions. Suppose there’s an organisation in which you have total power. One day you decide to share it with nine others. How much power do you have left? One-tenth of what you began with.

Now suppose you have £1,000 and you decide to share that with nine other people. How much do you have left? A tenth of what you had before.

That’s because in the short term, power and wealth are zero sum games. If I win, you lose. If you win, I lose. In zero sum games, the more we share, the less we have. That’s why politics and economics, the state and the market, are arenas of competition.

But now suppose you decide to share with nine others not power or wealth but love, or friendship, or influence. How much do you have left? Not less. You have more; perhaps even ten times more. That’s because love, friendship and influence are social goods, and social goods are non-zero-sum games. If I win, you also win. With social goods, the more we share, the more we have. That’s because social goods are not about competition. They’re about co-operation.

We find social goods, not in the state or the market but in families, communities, neighbourhoods, voluntary groups and the like. And they’re essential to any human group because we are social animals, and what gives us our strength is our ability to co-operate as well as compete. A world with competition but no co-operation would be lonely, nasty, and fraught with conflict.

To understand the difference between these two kinds of interaction, we need to make a distinction between two ideas that sound similar but are actually not, namely a contract and a covenant.

In a contract, two or more individuals, each pursuing their own interest, come together to make an exchange for mutual benefit. So, for instance, when I buy something from you, you give me the item or the service I want, and in exchange I pay you. That’s a commercial contract, and that’s what makes the market economy.

Or, I pay taxes in return for the services provided by the government. That’s the social contract, and it creates the state.

But a covenant is different. The simplest example of a covenant is a marriage. Two people, each respecting the dignity and integrity of the other, come together in a bond of loyalty and trust, to share their lives, by pledging their faithfulness to one another to do together what neither can achieve alone.

A contract is about interests, but a covenant is about identity. It’s about you and me coming together to form an “us.”

The difference is huge. The social contract creates a state. But the social covenant creates a society. A society is about all the things that bind us together as a collective group bound to the common good, without transactions of wealth or power. In a society we help our neighbours not because they pay us to, or because the state forces us to, but simply because they’re part of the collective “us.”

We can now see why politics in the West have become more divided, abrasive and extreme. For at least a half century we’ve focused on the market and the state while ignoring the third dimension called “society.” We’ve focused on contracts while ignoring covenants. Our sense of competition is strong; but our bonds of co-operation have grown weak, as families and communities have fractured.

This can work for a while, during times of economic growth and peace, when most people feel that life is getting better for them and their children. But when they feel that life is getting tougher for them and their children, it all begins to go wrong. People see around them the zero-sum games of the market and the state. A few gain, many lose, and everything is about competition and self interest. That’s when you get the politics of anger.

The only real antidote is to renew the social covenant that says, we are bound by bonds that go deeper than self interest. We share an identity and a fate and we are collectively responsible for the common good. We need to remember that societies are strong when they care for the weak. They are rich when they care for the poor. And they are invulnerable when they care for the vulnerable. When we restore the social covenant, we defeat the politics of anger and re-create the politics of hope.

Following on from the success of his videos on Jewish identity, the BDS movement, and the mutation of antisemitism, Rabbi Sacks has launched a new six-part whiteboard animation video series. Each video, being released periodically during the coming year, will focus on some of the key themes of Rabbi Sacks’ work over the past three decades which are connected to many of the key challenges facing our global society today.

In the first video, based on his book called ‘The Politics of Hope’ published in 1997, Rabbi Sacks analyses the rise of the ‘politics of anger’ in the West today and explores whether it might be possible to create a different kind of politics: the ‘politics of hope’. This video has been released today on Rabbi Sacks’ website and across his various social media channels. The video includes subtitles in: Chinese, English, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish.

Future videos will focus on (though not necessarily in this order): the dignity of difference, integrated diversity, the relationship between religion and science, understanding and confronting religious violence, and the ethics of responsibility.

Rabbi Sacks said:

“Too often in recent years, the West has been preoccupied with the idea of power as opposed to the power of ideas. Throughout my life, I have been excited and inspired by ideas, and this is a challenge I have set myself and my team: how can we continue to present ideas – whether they are particular to Jews and Judaism or more universalistic in their appeal – in the most engaging and appealing ways. The whiteboard animation technique is one we have found to be a wonderful way of presenting concepts and ideas, particularly in an age of social media. I hope that this series will highlight some of the ideas I have thought most deeply about over the past 30 years, and present them to a new and younger generation in a dynamic and inspiring way.”

Notes to editor:

The first video in this new series is called ‘The Politics of Hope’. It is available to watch online at http://rabbisacks.org/the-politics-of-hope/ and on Rabbi Sacks’ Facebook page (www.Facebook.com/RabbiSacks/), on Twitter (@RabbiSacks) and YouTube channel (www.youtube.com/RabbiSacks/). A transcript of the video is also available on Rabbi Sacks’ website at the address above.

For further details, please contact Dan Sacker on dan@rabbisacks.org or +44(0)20 7286 6391.

On 23rd October 2017, Rabbi Sacks engaged in a public conversation with Dr. Carol Gilligan, the revolutionary psychologist and author of the landmark book, In A Different Voice, which transformed feminist thinking. The evening was hosted at 92nd St Y in New York and was co-presented with the Edgar M. Bronfman Center for Jewish Student Life at NYU. Please scroll to 6.50mins in to watch the beginning of the conversation.

On 24th October in Washington DC, Rabbi Sacks received the Irving Kristol Award, the highest honour bestowed annually by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) to individuals “who have made exceptional practical and intellectual contributions to improve government policy, social welfare, or political understanding.” Previous recipients include Henry Kissinger, Ronald Reagan, Alan Greenspan and in 2015, Benjamin Netanyahu.

Described by AEI President Arthur Brooks, “as one of the world’s greatest living public intellectuals, [whose] work has influenced a generation of scholars and leaders across multiple fields and religious traditions,” Rabbi Sacks said he was “deeply honoured” to receive the AEI’s Irving Kristol Award from “an organisation that is dedicated to defending human dignity and expanding human potential.”

In his keynote address accepting the award, Rabbi Sacks spoke about the current dangers threatening Western freedom and the importance of civil society to liberty. He highlighted how a “politics of anger” was corroding the fabric of American society and that this breakdown was leading to narrower and narrower identities that nurtured a “culture of grievances.” This in turn was impacting on the notion of “a social contract” and “a social covenant” to the point at which “the social contract is still there, but the social covenant is being lost.”

Transcript

Beloved friends, I want to thank you from the depths of my heart for your generosity tonight. I was almost about to say that I’m moved beyond words, but the truth is no rabbi ever was moved beyond words. (Laughter.) At the Burning Bush, Moses, the first rabbi of all time, said, “I am not a man of words,” and then proceeded to speak for the next 40 years. (Laughter.) So let me say briefly how grateful I am for three things.

Number one, for the company I now join of outstanding individuals and especially last year’s winner, who’s just so embarrassed me, Robbie George, who’s done so much as the voice of vision and moral courage that lies at the very heart of his and your and our vision of American life.

Second, for the American Enterprise Institute itself, one of the very greatest think tanks in the entire world and one from whom I have learned more than any other. And I salute Arthur Brooks for his wonderful leadership of this institution, and I wish all of you blessing and success. (Applause.)

But lastly, and perhaps most importantly because of the name that the award bears, the late Irving Kristol of blessed memory. Elaine and I were privileged to count Irving, of blessed memory, and his incredible wife, Bea, Gertrude Himmelfarb, who is here with us tonight, as precious and cherished friends. Whenever we were in Washington, they invited us to their home. They always encouraged me and my work. They were so kind, they were so gracious, they were so generous of spirit. I always had this cognitive dissonance because Irving was so vigorous, indeed sharp, in his writing and so gentle and loving in his personality that he and Bea were role models who lifted our hearts and expanded the horizon of our aspirations.

There’s a prayer we say whenever we say grace after meals – [Hebrew] ve’nimtzachein v’sechel tov b’einei Elokim v’adam – let us find grace and good intellect in the eyes of God and our fellow human beings. Irving had great outstanding intellect, but even before and above that, he had grace. So I dedicate my words tonight to his blessed memory, and we wish Bea and Bill and all their wonderful family long life and blessing for many years to come. (Applause.)

Friends, these are really tempestuous times. A few months ago, I asked a friend in Washington, “What’s it been like living in America today?” And he said, “Well, it’s a little bit like the man standing on the deck of the Titanic with a glass of whiskey in his hand and he’s saying, ‘I know I asked for ice, but this is ridiculous.’” (Laughter.)

So we’ve seen the emergence of what I call a politics of anger. We have seen the culture of competitive victimhood. We have seen the emergence of identity politics based on smaller and smaller identities of ethnicity and gender. We’ve seen the new politics of grievance.

We’ve seen the silencing of free speech in our universities in the name of safe spaces. Just a few weeks ago, Balliol College Oxford, Balliol College Oxford, the home of three prime ministers, of Adam Smith, of Gerard Manley Hopkins, barred a Christian union for having a stall to recruit new students on the grounds that a mere presence of a Christian in a group of students could be construed as a microaggression.

We have seen public discourse polluted by fake news and the manipulation of social media. Not by accident did the Oxford English Dictionary chooses its word that we would remember from 2016 as “post-truth.” And we’ve seen the reemergence in the West, certainly in Europe, of the far right and the far left. And today, according to the rather expert survey that Bridgewater Capital did recently, populist politics throughout the West is measurably at its highest levels since the early 1930s.

Hegel said that modern man has taken to reading the daily newspaper in place of morning prayer. Today, when you finished reading the daily newspaper, you need morning prayer. And all this is serious. Richard Weaver once said the trouble with humanity is that it forgets to read the minutes of the last meetings. And so for anyone who actually remembers history, the politics of anger that’s emerged in our time is full of danger – if not now, then certainly in the foreseeable future.

And although this is affecting the whole of the West, I want tonight, for reasons which will become quite clear, to focus my remarks on you and the United States of America. And the reason is that I want to give an analysis that I think the late Irving Kristol would have understood because a love of Judaism was absolutely central to his life. And because he knew that in America, democratic capitalism had its roots in the Judeo-Christian heritage, specifically in the Hebrew Bible.

You know, we often think of the Hebrew Bible as simply a religious book, but it is actually a political text. I used to study Bible with Tony Blair in 10 Downing Street when he was prime minister. It was done under the strictest possible secrecy because God forbid the prime minister should read the Bible. And he once turned to me and said, “Jonathan, how come your book is more interesting than our book?” (Laughter.) And I replied, “Prime Minister, obviously, because there’s more politics in our book than in your book.”

So I want to just look at one little element of biblical political theory, which I think is unique and which shows remarkable relevance to the situation we’re in today. And I want to begin at a strange point, at a key moment in political history in biblical Israel. You remember when the people came to Samuel and said, “Appoint us a king.” And Samuel got really upset because he thought the people were rejecting him and God said, “That’s nothing. I’m even more upset they’re rejecting me.” They sound very much like two Jewish mothers sitting together discussing their children. But God said to Samuel, “Spell out what having a king will actually mean. He’ll seize your sons, your daughters, your produce, your land, i.e., taxes, and if they’re still willing to pay the price, give them a king,” which is what happened.

And the commentators were all puzzled by this, and rightly so because does the Bible approve of kings or not? If it does, why does God say that they’re rejecting him? And if it doesn’t, why did God say give them one if they ask for it? And the reason the biblical commentators were puzzled is because by and large, they weren’t political scientists. But, actually, the meaning of that narrative is very simple.

What happened in the days of the Prophet Samuel is precisely a social contract, exactly on the lines set out by Thomas Hobbes in “The Leviathan.” People are willing to give up certain of their rights, transfer them to a central power, a king, a government, who undertakes to ensure the rule of law internally and the defense of the realm externally. In fact, One Samuel, Chapter Eight is the first recorded instance in all of history of a social contract.

But what makes the Hebrew Bible unique and really fascinating and makes it completely different from Hobbes and Locke and Jean-Jacque Rousseau is that this wasn’t the first founding moment of Israel as a nation, as a political entity. It was in fact the second because the first took place centuries earlier in the days of Moses at Mount Sinai when the people made with God not a contract but a covenant. And those two things are often confused, but actually they’re quite different.

“The market is about the creation and distribution of wealth. The state is about the creation and distribution of power.”– Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks

In a contract, two or more people come together to make an exchange. You pay your plumber – I have a Jewish friend in Jerusalem who calls his plumber Messiah. (Laughter.) Why? Because we await him daily, and he never turns up. (Laughter.) So in a contract, you make an exchange, which is to the benefit of the self-interest of each. And so you have the commercial contract that creates the market and the social contract that creates the state.

A covenant isn’t like that. It’s more like a marriage than an exchange. In a covenant, two or more parties each respecting the dignity and integrity of the other come together in a bond of loyalty and trust to do together what neither can do alone. A covenant isn’t about me. It’s about us. A covenant isn’t about interests. It’s about identity. A covenant isn’t about me, the voter, or me, the consumer, but about all of us together. Or in that lovely key phrase of American politics, it’s about “we, the people.”

The market is about the creation and distribution of wealth. The state is about the creation and distribution of power. But a covenant is about neither wealth nor power, but about the bonds of belonging and of collective responsibility. And to put it as simply as I can, the social contract creates a state but the social covenant creates a society. That is the difference. They’re different things.

Biblical Israel had a society long before it had a state, before it even crossed the Jordan and enter the land, which explains why Jews were able to keep their identity for 2,000 years in exile and dispersion because although they’d lost their state, they still had their society. Although they’d lost their contract, they still had their covenant. And there is only one nation known to me that had the same dual founding as biblical Israel, and that is the United States of America which has – (applause) – which had its social covenant in the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and its social contract in the Constitution in 1787.

And the reason it did so is because the founders of this country had the Hebrew Bible engraved on their hearts. Covenant is central to the Mayflower Compact of 1620. It is central to the speech of John Winthrop aboard the Arbela in 1630. It is presupposed in the most famous line of the Declaration of Independence.

Listen to the sentence. See how odd it might sound to anyone but an American. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.” Those truths are anything but self-evident. They would have been unintelligible to Plato, to Aristotle, or to every hierarchical society the world has ever known. They are self-evident only to people, to Jews and Christians, who have internalized the Hebrew Bible. And that is what made G. K. Chesterton call America “a nation with the soul of a church.”

Now, what is more, every covenant comes with a story. And the interesting thing is the Hebrew Bible and America have the same story. It’s about what Lincoln called a new birth of freedom or, by any other name, what we know as an exodus. The only difference is, in America, instead of the wicked Egyptians, you had the wicked English. (Laughter.) Instead of a tyrant called Pharaoh, you had one called King George III, and instead of crossing the Red Sea, you crossed the Atlantic. But it’s OK. As a Brit, I want to say, after 241 years, we forgive you. (Laughter.)

But that is why Jefferson drew as his design for the great seal of America the Israelites following a pillar of cloud through the wilderness. It is why Lincoln called Americans the “almost chosen people.” It is what led Martin Luther King on the last night of his life to see himself as Moses and to say, “I’ve been to the mountaintop and I have seen the Promised Land.”

Now, why does this matter to America and to the American Enterprise Institute? Because America understands more clearly than any other Western nation that freedom requires not just a state, but also and even more importantly a society, a society built of strong covenantal institutions, of marriages, families, congregations, communities, charities, and voluntary associations.

Alexis de Tocqueville rightly saw that these were the buffers between the individual and the state and that what essentially thought to democratic freedom, he thought all that exercise of responsibility and families and communities was in his lovely phrase our “apprenticeship in liberty.” And we can now say exactly what has been going wrong in American life in recent times and indeed throughout Europe.

But, in America, the social contract is still there, but the social covenant is being lost. Today, one half of America is losing all those covenantal institutions. It’s losing strong marriages and families and communities. It’s losing a strong sense of the American narrative. It’s even losing e pluribus unum because today everyone prefers pluribus to unum. So in place of the single collective identity, you find a myriad of ever smaller identities, local ones based on gender, whatever it is next week.

Instead of a culture of freedom and responsibility, we have a culture of grievances that are always someone else’s responsibility. Because we no longer share a moral code that allows us, in Isaiah’s words, to reason together, in its place has come something called emotivism, which says, I know I’m right because I feel it. And as for those who disagree, we will shout down or ban all those dissenting voices because we each have a right not to feel we’re wrong.
“We need people willing to stand up and say, rich and poor alike, we all have collective responsibility for the common good. And we need a culture of responsibility, not one of victimhood, because if you define yourself as a victim, you can never be free.”– Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks

And because half of America doesn’t have strong families and communities standing between the individual and the state, people begin to think that all political problems can be solved by the state. But they can’t. And when you think they can, politics begins to indulge in magical thinking. So you get the far right dreaming of a golden past that never was and the far left yearning for a utopian future that never will be. And then comes populism, the belief that a strong leader can solve all our problems for us. And that is the first step down the road to tyranny, whether of the right or of the left.

But there is good news, which is that covenants can be renewed. That’s what happened in the Bible in the days of Joshua and Josepha and Ezekiel and Josiah and Ezra and Nehemiah. It happened in America several times. Nations with covenants can renew themselves, and that has to be our project now and for the foreseeable future. We need to renew the covenant, which means standing with Robbie George and friends and strengthening marriage and the family. It means rebuilding communities.

And I don’t know if you noticed, significantly, just recently, Mark Zuckerberg has changed the mission statement of Facebook from connecting friends to building communities. And, of course, you need communities if you ever are to have friends. You know, a British charity six years ago did a survey – medical charity, called Macmillan Nurses, did a survey six years ago, in 2011, and it came up with the discovery that the average Brit between the ages of 18 and 30 has 237 Facebook friends. When asked on how many of those could you count in an emergency, the average answer was two. When you belong to a church or a synagogue or a real community, you have real friends, not just Facebook friends. And now, Facebook itself is beginning to realize this.

It means – and forgive me for saying this – but it means teaching every American child the American story without embarrassment. (Applause.) Because you and I remember what people forget – namely, the distinction made by George Orwell between nationalism and patriotism. Nationalism is about power. Patriotism is about pride. Nationalism leads to war. Patriotism works for peace. We can be patriotic without being nationalistic. (Applause.)

It means enlisting not just our cultural heroes but our children and grandchildren’s cultural heroes. I mean, you know why we have grandchildren: because they tell us how these [smartphones] things work. And they have icons, and we need to find their peers of stage or screen or sports who are willing to say, we believe in e pluribus unum. We believe, like the University of Chicago, in free speech on campus because we believe that the only safe space there is is one in which we give a respectful hearing to views unlike our own. That is what a safe space actually is. (Applause.)

We need people willing to stand up and say, rich and poor alike, we all have collective responsibility for the common good. And we need a culture of responsibility, not one of victimhood, because if you define yourself as a victim, you can never be free. (Applause.) We have to have people to have the courage to get up and say that earned self-respect counts for more than unearned self-esteem. And we have to say the fundamental truth that is at the heart of the Hebrew Bible and of American politics that the state exists to serve the people. The people don’t exist to serve the state. (Applause.)

Friends, those are the values that made America great. And they are still what make America the last best hope of freedom in a dark, dangerous, and sometimes despairing world riven by those who fear and fight against freedom.

Friends, you have been so generous to me tonight. The American Enterprise Institute has given an award to someone who is not American, not terribly enterprising, and in the words of the great philosopher Marx – I mean, of course, Groucho, not Karl – I’m not yet ready to be an institution. (Laughter.)

So, therefore, let me as an entirely unworthy outsider beg you, don’t lose the American covenant. It’s the most precious thing you have. Renew it now before it’s too late. Thank you. (Applause.)

(END)

Yesterday a major British dictionary named as its 2017 word of the year the phrase “fake news.” At least I think it did, unless that too was fake news. And when you recall that last year another dictionary chose as its word of the year “post truth,” you realise that we’re in trouble. It’s all a long way from the lost innocence of the Edwardian era, when Bertrand Russell could say about the philosopher G E Moore that he only once heard him tell a lie, which was when he asked him, “Moore, have you ever told a lie?” and he replied, “Yes.”

How has it happened? Fake news is as old as time, and it can have devastating consequences. Jews suffered for centuries because of a fake news item known as the blood libel, accusing them of using the blood of Christian children. And despite the fact that it was denounced as untrue by several Popes, that didn’t stop it being told and believed.

Fake news is used as propaganda in war, and it was used to stoke fears in Bosnia and Rwanda where it led straight to bloodshed. It flourishes today because increasingly we’re getting our news from the social media where it’s hard to check whether a story is fact, fiction or fantasy. And there’s convincing evidence that it’s increasingly being used by foreign powers to manipulate opinion and distort the democratic process.

And it works, because the human brain is ultra-sensitive to threats of danger, so it’s easy to spread paranoia. And because there’s a psychological phenomenon known as the confirmation bias, which leads us to believe stories that confirm our prejudices. By the time truth emerges, the lie has already done its harm.

The deepest insight into the fragility of truth was given by the philosopher Nietzsche, who warned that even science takes its fire from “the flame lit by a faith that is thousands of years old, that Christian faith which was also the faith of Plato, that God is the truth, that truth is divine.”

Of course, you don’t need to be religious to value truth, because without it there’s no trust and without trust there’s no society. But it does mean that we need a strong shared moral code, because if all we have is individuals pursuing self interest, people will deceive whenever it’s in their interests to do so and can get away with it. Fake news erodes the moral ecology on which liberty depends. We really do need truth if we’re to stay free.

People in their hundreds camped out overnight in central London to be among the first to buy the new iPhone X last week. I love my smartphone, not least because it’s smarter than me. But still, people used to fall in love with people. Now they fall in love with phones. I’m not the only one to find this a little disturbing.

In her new book, iGen, American psychologist Jean Twenge documents the infatuation that children born after 1995 have with smartphones and social media. According to her research, teenagers are spending between five and six hours a day looking at a screen.

They are going out with friends less and texting them more. The effects, according to Twenge, are disastrous. Teenagers’ self-reported levels of life satisfaction have plummeted, while rates of depressive illness have rocketed. In unprecedented numbers, today’s teens feel lonely and anxious. That is just one of the consequences of the new media.

Another can be seen in the fact that Collins English Dictionary has just named as the 2017 Word of the Year the phrase “fake news”.

A year ago the Oxford English Dictionary chose “post-truth”. This has happened because increasingly we are getting our news from social media sites rife with sensationalism, false facts and deliberate manipulation of opinion. This too is dangerous, because where there is no truth there is no trust and no society.

When we rely exclusively on smartphones, algorithms and filters, we find ourselves fed with the news we want to hear, interpreted in a way that confirms our prejudices. This fragments society into a series of sects of the like-minded, and as Professor Cass Sunstein of Harvard has shown, when we associate exclusively with people who share our views, we become ever more extreme.

One symptom of the new extremism is the progressive denial of free speech in our universities in the name of safe space, trigger warnings and the outlawing of “micro-aggressions”, meaning views that might offend even if the offense was manifestly unintended. It was against such high-minded totalitarianism that John Stuart Mill wrote his great essay On Liberty, in which he protested “the mischief of denying a hearing to opinions because we, in our own judgment, have condemned them”.

The irony is that all this is happening during the 500th anniversary of the Reformation, which arose in similar circumstances. Then as now there was a revolution in information technology, in that case Gutenberg’s printing press. There was a feeling that ruling elites had become self-indulgent and corrupt, and that a world order that had prevailed for centuries was nearing its end. Something new and unpredictable was about to take its place.

Between the Reformation and now, the ethic that bound society together was drawn from religion in one or other of its Judeo-Christian forms.

Yes, there was a progressive secularisation of power. But religion had a huge influence on society, some of it harsh and hypocritical, but much of it admirable and altruistic.

It strengthened the bonds of family and community, encouraging personal and social responsibility. It spoke of virtue, fidelity and service to others. It told stories that made sense of our place in the universe and enacted rituals that inspired humility in the face of eternity.

For 50 years the West has been embarked on an experiment whose true cost we are only beginning to realise, namely the creation of a society without a shared moral code, an ethic known to academics as “expressive individualism,” which roughly means “do whatever you want and can get away with”.

People believed that the collateral damage could be dealt with by the state. It would care for the children of broken or abusive families. Its regulatory bodies would enforce financial and business ethics. Its tax regime would guarantee fairness in the distribution of rewards.

But the state is no substitute for an internalised code of honour and personal responsibility. Unfettered freedom still means today what it meant to Thucydides long ago: the strong do what they will and the weak suffer what they must.

The “selfie” culture is harming us. The new information technology is as empowering as was the invention of printing in its day. Alongside it, though, we need a new Reformation, drawing on the best of our Judeo-Christian heritage together with the great secular humanist traditions, that will restore our sense of collective belonging.

Hyper-individualism has had its day. We need a new code of shared responsibility for the common good.

This article was first published in The Sunday Telegraph on 5th November 2017.

Coming in to Broadcasting House this morning I saw for the first time the statue unveiled this week, of George Orwell, with its inscription on the wall behind, “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” How badly we need that truth today.

I’ve been deeply troubled by what seems to me to be the assault on free speech taking place in British universities in the name of “safe space,” “trigger warnings,” and “micro-aggressions,” meaning any remark that someone might find offensive even if no offence is meant. So far has this gone that a month ago, students at an Oxford College banned the presence of a representative of the Christian Union on the grounds that some might find their presence alienating and offensive. Luckily the protest that followed led to the ban being swiftly overturned. But still …

I’m sure this entire movement has been undertaken for the highest of motives, to protect the feelings of the vulnerable, which I applaud, but you don’t achieve that by silencing dissenting views. A safe space is the exact opposite: a place where you give a respectful hearing to views opposed to your own, knowing that your views too will be listened to respectfully. That’s academic freedom and it’s essential to a free society.

And it’s what I learned at university. My doctoral supervisor, the late Sir Bernard Williams, was an atheist. I was a passionate religious believer. But he always listened respectfully to my views, which gave me the confidence to face those who disagree with everything I stand for. That’s safety in an unsafe world.

And it’s at the very heart of my faith, because Judaism is a tradition all of whose canonical texts are anthologies of arguments. In the Bible, Abraham, Moses, Jeremiah and Job argue with God. The rabbinic literature is an almost endless series of Rabbi X says this and Rabbi Y says that, and when one rabbi had the chance of asking God who was right, God replied, they’re both right. “How can they both be right?” asked the rabbi, to which God’s apocryphal reply was: “You’re also right.” The rabbis called this, “argument for the sake of heaven.”

Why does it matter? Because truth emerges from disagreement and debate. Because tolerance means making space for difference. Because justice involves Audi alteram partem, listening to the other side. And because, in Orwell’s words, liberty means “the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”

In this new series of six whiteboard animation videos to be published online during the coming year, Rabbi Sacks takes a look at some of the key challenges facing our global society today. Each seeks to use some of key ideas contained in much of Rabbi Sacks writings over the past 30 years, but present these ideas in a dynamic and engaging way. Learn more about the series here.

In this first video, based on his book called ‘The Politics of Hope’ published in 1997, Rabbi Sacks analyses the rise in the ‘politics of anger’ in the West today and explores whether it might be possible to create a different kind of politics: the ‘politics of hope’.

Future videos will focus on (though not necessarily in this order): the dignity of difference, integrated diversity, the relationship between religion and science, understanding and confronting religious violence, and the ethics of responsibility.

Please note that this video contains subtitles in: Chinese, English, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish (please click on the ‘Settings’ button on the video below to select your preferred language).

Rabbi Sacks said:

“Too often in recent years, the West has been preoccupied with the idea of power as opposed to the power of ideas. Throughout my life, I have been excited and inspired by ideas, and this is a challenge I have set myself and my team: how can we continue to present ideas – whether they are particular to Jews and Judaism or more universalistic in their appeal – in the most engaging and appealing ways. The whiteboard animation technique is one we have found to be a wonderful way of presenting concepts and ideas, particularly in an age of social media. I hope that this series will highlight some of the ideas I have thought most deeply about over the past 30 years, and present them to a new and younger generation in a dynamic and inspiring way.”

TRANSCRIPT

In recent years societies in Europe and America have become far more divided. The gap between left and right has become deeper. There’s been a rise in populist parties of the far right and far left. The extremes are growing and the centre ground is being abandoned. This is the politics of anger. Why has it happened and can we create a different kind of politics: the politics of hope?

The starting point has to be the fact that for the past fifty years societies in the West have been dominated by two institutions, the state and the market – politics and economics, the logic of power and the logic of wealth. The state is us in our collective capacity. The market is us as individuals. And the great debate has been about which is more effective in creating a better future. The left tends to favour the state. The right tends to favour the market.

But what if this entire way of thinking leaves out something essential? We can see this by asking some simple questions. Suppose there’s an organisation in which you have total power. One day you decide to share it with nine others. How much power do you have left? One-tenth of what you began with.

Now suppose you have £1,000 and you decide to share that with nine other people. How much do you have left? A tenth of what you had before.

That’s because in the short term, power and wealth are zero sum games. If I win, you lose. If you win, I lose. In zero sum games, the more we share, the less we have. That’s why politics and economics, the state and the market, are arenas of competition.

But now suppose you decide to share with nine others not power or wealth but love, or friendship, or influence. How much do you have left? Not less. You have more; perhaps even ten times more. That’s because love, friendship and influence are social goods, and social goods are non-zero-sum games. If I win, you also win. With social goods, the more we share, the more we have. That’s because social goods are not about competition. They’re about co-operation.

We find social goods, not in the state or the market but in families, communities, neighbourhoods, voluntary groups and the like. And they’re essential to any human group because we are social animals, and what gives us our strength is our ability to co-operate as well as compete. A world with competition but no co-operation would be lonely, nasty, and fraught with conflict.

To understand the difference between these two kinds of interaction, we need to make a distinction between two ideas that sound similar but are actually not, namely a contract and a covenant.

In a contract, two or more individuals, each pursuing their own interest, come together to make an exchange for mutual benefit. So, for instance, when I buy something from you, you give me the item or the service I want, and in exchange I pay you. That’s a commercial contract, and that’s what makes the market economy.

Or, I pay taxes in return for the services provided by the government. That’s the social contract, and it creates the state.

But a covenant is different. The simplest example of a covenant is a marriage. Two people, each respecting the dignity and integrity of the other, come together in a bond of loyalty and trust, to share their lives, by pledging their faithfulness to one another to do together what neither can achieve alone.

A contract is about interests, but a covenant is about identity. It’s about you and me coming together to form an “us.”

The difference is huge. The social contract creates a state. But the social covenant creates a society. A society is about all the things that bind us together as a collective group bound to the common good, without transactions of wealth or power. In a society we help our neighbours not because they pay us to, or because the state forces us to, but simply because they’re part of the collective “us.”

We can now see why politics in the West have become more divided, abrasive and extreme. For at least a half century we’ve focused on the market and the state while ignoring the third dimension called “society.” We’ve focused on contracts while ignoring covenants. Our sense of competition is strong; but our bonds of co-operation have grown weak, as families and communities have fractured.

This can work for a while, during times of economic growth and peace, when most people feel that life is getting better for them and their children. But when they feel that life is getting tougher for them and their children, it all begins to go wrong. People see around them the zero-sum games of the market and the state. A few gain, many lose, and everything is about competition and self interest. That’s when you get the politics of anger.

The only real antidote is to renew the social covenant that says, we are bound by bonds that go deeper than self interest. We share an identity and a fate and we are collectively responsible for the common good. We need to remember that societies are strong when they care for the weak. They are rich when they care for the poor. And they are invulnerable when they care for the vulnerable. When we restore the social covenant, we defeat the politics of anger and re-create the politics of hope.