Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks

The only way to understand leadership is to lead. The only way to understand marriage is to get married. The only way to understand whether a certain career path is right for you is to actually try it for an extended period.

Envy, covetousness, desiring what someone else has, is an emotion, not a thought, a word, or a deed. And surely we can’t help our emotions.

What Shabbat gave – and still gives – is the unique opportunity to create space within our lives, and within society as a whole, in which we are truly free.

Jews became famous throughout the ages for putting education first. Where others built castles and palaces, Jews built schools and houses of study.

The well-being of the soul is something inward and spiritual, but the well-being of the body requires a strong society and economy, where there is the rule of law, division of labor, and the promotion of trade.

Where did it come from, this Jewish ability to turn weakness into strength, adversity into advantage, darkness into light?

We make the future by our choices. The script has not yet been written. The future is radically open.

If we change the way we think, we will change the way we feel.

To understand the power of this anti-climax, we must remember that only since the invention of printing and the availability of books have we been able to tell what happens next merely by turning a page.

We can make a difference, and it is potentially immense. That should be our mindset, always.

According to Rashbam, despite G-d’s assurances, Jacob was still afraid of encountering Esau. His courage failed him and he was trying to run away. G-d sent an angel to stop him from doing so.

We find G-d not only in holy or familiar places but also in the midst of a journey, alone at night.

Isaac surely knew that his elder son was a man of mercurial temperament who lived in the emotions of the moment.

How did Abraham overcome the trauma and the grief? How do you survive almost losing your child and actually losing your life-partner, and still have the energy to keep going? What gave Abraham his resilience, his ability to survive, his spirit intact?

It is the space we create for one another that allows love to be like sunlight to a flower

We are too young to venture into the world on our own. It is precisely the stable, predictable presence of parents in our early years that gives us a basic sense of trust in life.

Faith is the courage to take a risk for the sake of God or the Jewish people

...we can now understand the story of the first sin: It is all about appearances, shame, vision, and the eye. 

Simchat Torah was born when Jews had lost everything else, but they never lost their capacity to rejoice.

Speaking of the three pilgrimage festivals – Pesach, Shavuot and Sukkot – Deuteronomy speaks of “joy.” But it does not do so equally.

What have you achieved this past year with the help of God, and what would you like to achieve with His help next year?

How does Yom Kippur help us focus on the future and on making a change?

The decisive points of the narrative alone are emphasized, what lies between is non-existent; time and place are undefined and call for interpretation...

Choose life. No religion, no civilization, has insisted so strenuously and consistently that we can choose.

When we focus on the moment, allowing ourselves to dance, sing, and give thanks, when we do things for their own sake not for any other reward, when we let go of our separateness and become a voice in the holy city's choir, then there is joy.

What is at stake is the deep understanding of the scope of responsibility we bear if we take seriously our roles as parents, neighbors, townspeople, citizens and children of the covenant.

The Torah is concerned with what we would nowadays call ‘sustainability.’

Tocqueville believed that democracy encouraged individualism. As a result, people would leave the business of the common good entirely to the government, which would become ever more powerful, eventually threatening freedom itself.

The more positive emotions – such as contentment, gratitude, happiness, love and hope – they expressed in their autobiographical notes, the more likely they were to be alive and well 60 years later.

There are important features of the moral life that are not universal but have to do with specific circumstances and the way we respond to them.