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Rabbi Wildes and Emmy Award Wining TV Writer David Sacks reveal the deeper meaning behind the suffering in this world and where God is hiding during all the ...
Ten Days, Ten Ways: Paths to the Divine Presence, Tishrei 5768. “For ten days, beginning on Rosh Hashanah and reaching a climax on Yom Kippur, we have prayed, ‘Remember us for life, O King who desires life, and write us in the book of life – for Your sake, O God of life.’.
The holy is the space within which we redeem our existence from mere contingency and know that we are held within the “everlasting arms” (Deut 33:27) of God. Read Rabbi Jonathan Sacks' Torah reflections on Emor Eternity and Mortality in Covenant and Conversation.
Life Before Death “Other religions have sought God in heaven, or in the afterlife, the distant past or the distant future. Here there is suffering, there reward; here chaos, there order; here pain, there balm; here poverty, there plenty.
- 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...
Dec 4, 2020 · “For we defeat death, not by living forever but by living by values that live forever.” — Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, Rosh Hashana Machzor. In the face of death, words generally are inadequate. But...
Oct 26, 2021 · Rabbi Sacks had a profound impact on the Jewish world, with his eloquent words giving a voice to many. He has spoken at length about how to construct a good and meaningful life using Judaism, as well as about morality, consumerism, spiritual truth, politics, and antisemitism.
