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Tag Archives: The Great Partnership

Why Radicals Always Target the Family

07 Sunday Jun 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Political Philosophy, Speeches

≈ Comments Off on Why Radicals Always Target the Family

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Alexis de Tocqueville, BBC, culture, family, Jonathan Sacks, politics, Reith Lectures, religion, science, society, speech, The Great Partnership, The Great Partnership: Science

Norman Rockwell Thanksgiving

“As our families fragment, so do the deepest structures of our consciousness. When a certain kind of family breaks down, so do the values which once linked parents and children, and gave continuity and character to our inherited world.

Which is precisely why ideological radicals have focused on the family. Change it, and you change humanity. But let’s turn the argument around: if changing the family would change the world, protecting the family might be the best way of protecting our world.

Which is, I believe, what our religious tradition has been doing until now — because the Bible is above all a book about the family. It begins with one: Adam and Eve, and the command to bring the next generation into being. And from then on the book of Genesis never relaxed its grip on the subject. It endlessly turns to some new variation in the relationship between husbands and wives, parents and children. Abraham and Sarah; Isaac and Rebecca; Jacob, Rachel and Leah: these aren’t miracle workers or agents of salvation. The heroes and heroines of Genesis are simply people living out their lives in the presence of God and the context of their families.

And we can perhaps now see that this forms the foundation of the Bible’s larger moral and social themes. The family is the matrix of individuality. It’s that enclosed space in which we work out, in relation to stable sources of affection, a highly differentiated sense of who we are. It’s hard to imagine a culture which didn’t possess a close family structure arriving at the breathtaking idea that the human individual is cast in the image of God.

De Tocqueville once wrote that ‘as long as family feeling is kept alive, the opponent of oppression is never alone.’ By which he meant that the family is the great protection of the individual against the state. It’s no coincidence that totalitarian regimes have often attacked the family. Against this, it was the Bible that gave rise to the great prophets who dared to criticize kings. The family is the birthplace of liberty.

Not only that, it’s where we care for dependents — the very young and the very old, those to whom we gave birth and who gave birth to us. And it’s a short step from this to the biblical vision of society as an extended family, in which the poor and powerless make a claim on us, by virtue not of abstract principle but of feelings of kinship. It’s this that lies behind the prophetic identification with the widow, the orphan, and the stranger. They’re not merely people with theoretical rights. They’re part of the family.”

__________

Pulled from part three of Jonathan Sacks’s 1990 Reith Lecture for the BBC.

You can find this and the rest of Sack’s excellent, six-part lecture in his book The Persistence of Faith: Morality and Society in a Secular Age. As with anything from Sacks, however, try to enjoy it in audio form. His voice makes Morgan Freeman sound like Gilbert Gottfriend.

More:

  • Peter Hitchens: why we all wish to be children again
  • MLK riffs on the moral of the good Samaritan story
  • Theodore Roosevelt on the need to set a strong example as a man

Jonathan Sacks

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Do the Jews Prove God’s Existence?

23 Thursday Apr 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Religion

≈ Comments Off on Do the Jews Prove God’s Existence?

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and the Search for Meaning, Communism, David Brooks, Faith, Frederick the Great, God, Jewish History, Jews, Marxism, Nikolai Berdyaev, Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, religion, Russian Revolution, The Great Partnership, The Great Partnership: Science, The Meaning of History, Zimmermann of Brugg-in-Aargau

Chief Rabbi

“How probable is it that a tiny people, the children of Israel, known today as Jews, numbering less than a fifth of a per cent of the population of the world, would outlive every empire that sought its destruction? Or that a small, persecuted sect known as the Christians would one day become the largest movement of any kind in the world?

Nikolai Berdyaev (1874-1948) was a Russian Marxist who broke with the movement after the Russian Revolution and its aftermath. He became an unconventional Christian — he had been charged with blasphemy for criticising the Russian Orthodox Church in 1913 — and went into exile, eventually settling in Paris. In The Meaning of History, he tells us why he abandoned Marxism:

I remember how the materialist interpretation of history, when I attempted in my youth to verify it by applying it to the destinies of peoples, broke down in the case of the Jews, where destiny seemed absolutely inexplicable from the materialistic standpoint… Its survival is a mysterious and wonderful phenomenon demonstrating that the life of this people is governed by a special predetermination, transcending the processes of adaptation expounded by the materialistic interpretation of history. The survival of the Jews, their resistance to destruction, their endurance under absolutely peculiar conditions and the fateful role played by them in history: all these point to the particular and mysterious foundations of their destiny.

Consider this one fact. The Bible records a series of promises by God to Abraham: that he would become a great nation, as many as the stars of the sky or the sand on the sea shore, culminating in the prophecy that he would become ‘the father of many nations’…

Somehow the prophets of Israel, a small, vulnerable nation surrounded by large empires, were convinced that it would be eternal.

‘This is what the Lord says, he who appoints the sun to shine by day, who decrees the moon and stars to shine by night… ”Only if these decrees vanish from my sight,” declares the Lord, “will Israel ever cease being a nation before me” (Jeremiah 31:35-6).

There was nothing to justify that certainty then, still less after a thousand years of persecution, pogroms and the Final Solution. Yet improbably, Jews and Judaism survived.

King Frederick the Great once asked his physician Zimmermann of Brugg-in-Aargau, ‘Zimmermann, can you name me a single proof of the existence of God?’ The physician replied, ‘Your majesty, the Jews.’”

__________

The distinguished and unfailingly charismatic Chief Rabbi of England, Jonathan Sacks, writing in The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning.

I know nothing about Berdyaev, but in the two minutes I spent looking him up I ran across three quotes of his that are worth filing away in the bank:

“Bread for me is a material question. Bread for my neighbor is a spiritual one.”

“Every single human soul has more meaning and value than the whole of history.”

“There is a tragic clash between truth and the world. Pure undistorted truth burns up the world.”

Not a fool.

Last month, Sacks sat down with David Brooks for a wide-ranging conversation about spirituality and meaning. It’s worth a watch.

Learn more:

  • ‘We are the people who sanctify life’: Sacks on the moral meaning of Israel
  • Galileo squares faith and reason
  • Viktor Frankl affirms the significance of life — even in a death camp

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