Published: 31 August 2020
Last updated: 4 March 2024
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks on cancel culture, restoring morality and Israel’s missed opportunities (JTA)
Jonathan Sacks, the former chief rabbi of Great Britain, has written dozens of books about religion and politics — but he also believes that mixing the two leads to “terrible politics and even worse religion.”
It’s a tough line to toe, especially when you’ve just written a book highlighting the decline of fundamental values in society that for most of human history have been inextricably linked to religion.
In Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times, Sacks makes the case that society has undergone what he calls “cultural climate change,” in which individualism has eroded collective morality. As with meteorological climate change, he argues, there are forces fuelling a dangerous shift — he points to social media as a leading one — but there is also time to avert disaster.
The way to become moral, Sacks writes, is both simple and a great challenge: “We need direct encounters with other human beings. We have to be in their presence, open to their otherness, alert to their hopes and fears, engaged in the minuet of conversation, the delicate back-and-forth of speaking and listening.”
Sacks: 'big, big mistake' for American rabbis to endorse political candidates (Jewish Chronicle)
Former British chief rabbi said he never backed a political leader during his tenure
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks on cancel culture, restoring morality (Forward)
Photo: Rabbi Jonathan Sacks and his book Morality, which will be available September 1 in the United States. (Courtesy Office of Rabbi Sacks)
