Sacks (2 of 5) : On Responsibility

“There have been five universalist cultures in the history of the West –cultures that imposed their way of life on others through conquest, conversion… They were the empires of ancient Greece and Rome, medieval Christianity and Islam, and the European Enlightenment. Globalisation is the sixth, the first to be driven not by power or ideology but by the neutral, impersonal forces of the market.

There is a personal dimension to existence. We are not powerless in the face of fate. Every technological advance can be used for good or evil. There is nothing inevitably benign or malign in our increasing powers. It depends on the use we make of them. What we can create, we can control. What we initiate, we can direct. With every new power come control, responsibility, and exercise of the moral imagination. Global capitalism is not a juggernaut that no one can steer. It can be turned this way or that by collective consent. Our aim must be to maximize human dignity and hand on to future generations a more gracious, less capricious world."

(from Jonathan Sacks 'A Jewish Perspective' contribution to "Making Globalisation Good", Oxford, Dunning, 2003)

[1508:4820]

Sacks (1 of 5) : On Co-Existence

“Judaism is that rarest of phenomena: a particularist monotheism. The God of Abraham, according to the Hebrew bible, is the God of all humanity, but the faith of Abraham is not the faith of all humanity. So strange is this idea that it was not taken on by the two daughter monotheisms to which Judaism gave rise, Christianity and Islam. These faiths are both universalist monotheisms, holding that since there is only one God, there is only one true religion, one path to salvation, to which ideally all mankind will be converted.

To attempt to eliminate diversity (by conversion, missionary activity, or holy war) is to fail to understand the dignity of difference. Hence the great command in the Bible is ‘Love the stranger', the person who is not like yourself. Fundamentalism –the attempt to impose a single truth on a plural world- is religiously misconceived. The spiritual challenge is to recognise God’s image in one who is not in my image."

(from Jonathan Sacks 'A Jewish Perspective' contribution to "Making Globalisation Good", Oxford, Dunning, 2003)

[1502:4768]