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Moses’ Death, Moses’ Life. And so Moses dies, alone on a mountain with God as he had been all those years ago when, as a shepherd in Midian, he caught sight of a bush in flames and heard the Call that changed his life and the moral horizons of the world. It is a scene affecting in its simplicity.
Nov 24, 2015 · “Living has yet to be generally recognized as one of the arts,” proclaimed a 1924 guide to the art of living.That one of the greatest scientists of our time should be one of our greatest teacher in that art is nothing short of a blessing for which we can only be grateful — and that’s precisely what Oliver Sacks (July 9, 1933–August 30, 2015), a Copernicus of the mind and a Dante of ...
Judaism has relentlessly sought God in the here-and-now of life on earth. Yes, we believe in life after death, but it is in life before death that we truly find human greatness. Third, we are free. Judaism is the religion of the free human being freely responding to the God of freedom. We are not in the grip of sin.
Aug 30, 2016 · He confronted death directly, with courageous curiosity and radiant lucidity, in one of his New York Times essays posthumously collected in the small, enormously life-affirming book Gratitude (public library) — that great parting gift which gave us Dr. Sacks’s warm wisdom on the measure of living and the dignity of dying, edited by his partner, the writer and photographer Bill Hayes, and ...
- The Power of Empathy
- Power vs. Influence
- Passing on Values
- Gratitude (Paraphrased by Dr. Noam Weissman)
- Listening
- On The Song “Dayenu”
- Anti-Zionism and Antisemitism
- Making Space For Difference
- The Gift of Storytelling
- Israel/Zionism
Rabbi Sacks told a story about the power of empathy: “William Ury, founder of the Harvard Program of Negotiation, tells a marvellous story in one of his books. A young American, living in Japan to study aikido, was sitting one afternoon in a train in the suburbs of Tokyo. The carriage was half empty. There were some mothers with children, and elder...
“Not all of us have power, but we all have influence. That is why we can each be leaders. The most important forms of leadership come not with position, title or robes of office, not with prestige and power, but with the willingness to work with others to achieve what we cannot do alone… Always choose influence rather than power. It helps change pe...
Rabbi Sacks was a strong proponent of education and ensuring that Jewish ideals are passed on to the next generation: “You achieve immortality not by building pyramids or statues, but by engraving your values on the hearts of your children, and they on theirs, so that our ancestors live on in us and we in our children, and so on until the end of ti...
“Here’s a teaching by Rabbi Sacks I’ve repeated at least 100 times in my career as a Jewish educator. During the repetition of the Amidah (the central Standing Prayer), when there is typically passiveness throughout, when we sit and say “amen” to each blessing, there is only one blessing in which the rabbis declare the passivity to be insufficient....
Rabbi Sacks considered listening not only a religious virtue, but a key leadership skill: “Listening is a profound affirmation of the humanity of the other. In the encounter at the burning bush, when God summoned Moses to be a leader, Moses replied, ‘I am not a man of words, not yesterday, not the day before, not from the first time You spoke to yo...
“This song is a tikkun, a making-right, for the ingratitude of the Israelites in the wilderness. At almost every stage of the way, they complained: about the water, the food, the difficulties of the journey, the challenge of conquering the land. It is as if the poet were saying: ‘Where they complained, let us give thanks. Each stage was a miracle. ...
Rabbi Sacks explored the connection between antisemitism and anti-Zionism in this video: “Antisemitism is a virus that mutates so that new antisemites can deny that they’re antisemites at all because their hate is different from the old. In the Middle Ages, Jews were hated for their religion. In the nineteenth and early twentieth century they were ...
“The test of faith is whether I can make space for difference. Can I recognize God’s image in someone who is not in my image, whose language, faith, ideal, are different from mine? If I cannot, then I have made God in my image instead of allowing him to remake me in his.”
Rabbi Sacks taught that the Jewish people are commanded to be a “nation of storytellers”: “The greatest gift we can give our children is not money or possessions, but a story – a real story, not a fantasy, one that connects them to us and to a rich heritage of high ideals… We are heirs to a story that inspired a hundred generations of our ancestors...
“When we consider above all that God has led us ‘upright to our land,’ that there is a Medinat Yisrael[State of Israel] that finally, after the longest exile ever endured by a people, we have a country we can call home, then if we are honest, we know that we have in our time what our grandparents and their grandparents dreamed of, prayed for, but n...
Aug 30, 2015 · At 80, Sacks reflects on what it's like to feel as though life is still just beginning. One has had a long experience of life, not only one’s own life, but others’, too.
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“I believe that we can emerge from the shadow of death if we allow ourselves to be healed by the God of life. To do so, though, we need the help of others. “A prisoner cannot release himself from prison,”” Kohelet, Tolstoy and the Red Heifer (Chukat – Balak, Finding Faith, Covenant & Conversation)
