Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks

Kayin does not deny personal responsibility. He does not say, “It was not me,” or “It was not my fault.” He denies moral responsibility.

Sukkot celebrates the dual nature of Jewish faith: the universality of G-d and the particularity of Jewish existence.

This is a doctrine fundamental to Judaism and its understanding of evil and suffering in the world: G-d is just.

It follows therefore that if vengeance is wrong, it could not have been commanded by G-d – not to Christians, and not to Jews. If it was commanded, we must be able to make some moral sense of it, whether we are Jews or Christians.

Note the inclusivity of the event. It would be anachronistic to say that the Torah was egalitarian in the contemporary sense.

For me, one of the gifts of this strange, difficult time has been the ability to slow down the prayers so that I am able to listen to them speaking to me. Praying is as much about listening as speaking. And faith itself is the ability to hear the music beneath the noise.

Says the Torah: When love is likely to be the cause of conflict, it must take second place to justice.

What for the prophets was a dazzling vision of a distant future of peace was, for the Sages, a practical program of good community relations.

The test of a society is not military, political, economic or demographic. It is moral and spiritual.

Chessed has no if-then quality. It is given out of the goodness of the giver, regardless of the worth of the recipient.

Finite games are played to win. Infinite games are played for their own sake. Finite games are usually performed in front of an audience of some kind. Infinite games are participative.

Here is a short message as we head towards Tisha B'Av and will be marked in strange and difficult circumstances because of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.

When ten of the men came back with a demoralizing report and the people panicked, at least part of the blame lay with Moshe.

Only in Israel can the Jewish people construct a political system, an economy, and an environment on the template of Jewish values.

We have moral duties as individuals, and we make political decisions as nations. The two are different.

Science deals in causes and effects, not purpose and meaning. In the end, he concluded that only religious faith rescues life from meaninglessness.

Their aim was to discredit Moshe, damage his credibility, raise doubts among the people as to whether he really was receiving his instructions from G-d.

They were about to enter a land they had not seen. They had no idea what they were fighting for.

: I was not alone in feeling alone. Other people had been here before me.

I believe that isolation contains, within it, spiritual possibilities.

Why does this command and no other require love?

The Jewish people had universal compulsory education 18 centuries before England did.

The whole idea contained in the 13 Attributes of Compassion is that G-d’s love and forgiveness are stronger than His justice and punishment.

There is something very strange about the festival of Succot, of which our parsha is the primary source. On the one hand, it is...

Kedoshim contains the two great love commands of the Torah. What are they?

A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood shows how good speech can heal where evil speech harms.

Fasting is of no use if at the same time you do not act justly and compassionately to your fellow human beings.

They were not criticizing the institution of sacrifices. They were criticizing something as real now as it was in their time. What distressed them to the core of their being was the idea that you could serve G-d and at the same time act disdainfully, cruelly, unjustly, insensitively or callously toward other people.

What united them was not the dynamic of the crowd in which we are caught up in a collective frenzy but rather a sense of common purpose, of helping to bring something into being that was greater than anyone could achieve alone. Communities build; they do not destroy. They bring out the best in us, not the worst.

According to the Sages the original act of Divine forgiveness on which Yom Kippur is based came about through the annulment of a vow, when Moses annulled the vow of G-d.