Quotes from Rabbi Sacks

• “Antisemitism is never ultimately about Jews. It is about a profound human failure to accept the fact that we are diverse and must create space for diversity if we are to preserve our humanity.”

• “To ask is to believe that somewhere there is an answer. The fact that throughout history people have devoted their lives to extending the frontiers of knowledge is a compelling testimony to the restlessness of the human spirit and its constant desire to go further, higher, deeper. Far from faith excluding questions, questions testify to faith – that history is not random, that the universe is not impervious to our understand, that what happens to us is not blind chance. We ask, not because we doubt, but because we believe.”

• “Change has become part of the texture of life itself, and there are few things harder to bear than constant flux and uncertainty.”

• “I know of nothing more moving than watching children pray. When I visited synagogues I always try to spend a few moments in the children’s service, seeing the faces of young girls and boys as they say the Shema, or listen to stories taken from the weekly Sidrah, or sing their first Jewish songs. Here as nowhere else I witness the miracle of Jewish continuity, the simple yet infinitely subtle way in which we pass on our faith to our children. There is nothing more precious we can give them. One day they will discover – as we who have been there before them discovered – that the siddur is nothing less than our route to the Divine presence.”

• “The message of the Hebrew Bible is that serving God and our fellow human beings are inseparably linked, and the split between the two impoverishes both.”