Tag: Rabbi Jonathan Sacks

Here are two sober notes from the late Rabbi Sacks which are at the same time uplifting and heartwarming.

""My Lords, it pains me to speak about antisemitism, the world’s oldest hatred. But I cannot keep silent." Here is my speech from today's debate in the House of Lords about #antisemitism in Britain."

The parents of two of three Israeli teens kidnapped and murdered by Hamas last summer will join a UJA-Federation of New York Jewish Unity...

When a Muslim won’t look at a woman, it is called respect. When a Jew won’t shake her hand, it is called sexism.

If you want to move de line, you have to let go of hurt and anger.

British Chief Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks paid tribute to Margaret Thatcher on the day of her funeral, saying that “in public, her leadership style...

The episode of the spies has rightly puzzled commentators throughout the centuries. How could they have got it so wrong? The land, they said, was as Moses had promised. It was indeed “flowing with milk and honey.” But conquering it was impossible. “The people who live there are powerful, and the cities fortified and very large. We even saw descendants of the giant there … We can’t attack those people; they are stronger than we are … All the people we saw there are of great size. We saw the titans there … We seemed like grasshoppers in our own eyes, and so we seemed in theirs” (Numbers 13:28-33).

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It is simply not the same to put on tefillin or keep kashrut or observe Shabbat in the Diaspora as in Israel. The Torah is the constitution of a holy people in the holy land. Only in Israel is the fulfillment of the commands a society-building exercise, shaping the contours of a culture as a whole. Only in Israel does the calendar track the rhythms of the Jewish year.

The name Bezalel was adopted by the artist Boris Schatz for the School of Arts and Crafts he founded in Israel in 1906, and Rav Kook wrote a touching letter in support of its creation. He saw the renaissance of art in the Holy Land as a symbol of the regeneration of the Jewish people in its own land, landscape and birthplace. Judaism in the Diaspora, removed from a natural connection with its own historic environment, was inevitably cerebral and spiritual, “alienated.”