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Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks

The Heart of Judaism

eventy years since the totality of truth and each demonstrating was to be a small land, but a significant one,
establishment of the modern State that truth by attempting to conquer or for it was there, and there alone, that they
S of Israel is a fitting moment to convert everyone else. If there is only one were to live their destiny.
remind ourselves of a mystery at the heart truth, and you have it, then others do not.
of Judaism. They are living in error. That has been the That destiny was to create a society that
justification of many crimes in the course would honour the proposition that we are
Why Israel? Why does the Hebrew Bible of history. all created in the image and likeness of God.
so resolutely and unerringly focus on this It would be a place in which the freedom of
place, what Spinoza called a mere ‘strip of If on the other hand there are only some would not lead to the enslavement of
territory’? The God of Abraham is the God particulars – only a multiplicity of cultures others. It would be the opposite of Egypt,
of the whole world, a God unbounded by and ethnicities with no universal moral whose bread of affliction and bitter herbs
space. Why then does He choose any par- principles to bind them – then the natural of slavery they were to eat every year on the
ticular space, let alone one so small and state of the world is a ceaseless proliferation festival of Passover to remind them of what
vulnerable? of warring tribes. That is the risk today, in they were to avoid. It would be the only
a post-modern, morally relativist world
The question, ‘Why Israel?’ is the with ethnic conflicts, violence and terror
geographical way of asking ‘Why the Jews?’ scarring the face of many parts of the globe.
The answer lies in the duality that defines Yet the God they worship is the God of "
The Abrahamic covenant as understood
Jewish faith and constitutes one of its most by Judaism is the only principled way
important contributions to civilization. of avoiding these two scenarios. Jews Judaism
Judaism embodies and exemplifies the belonged somewhere, not everywhere.
necessary tension between the universal embodies and
and the unique, between everywhere in everywhere, not just somewhere. So Jews
general and somewhere in particular. were commanded to be neither an empire exemplifies
If there were only universals, the world nor a tribe, harbouring neither universal
would consist of empires, each claiming the aspirations nor tribal belligerence. Theirs the necessary
tension

between the

universal and

the unique,

between

everywhere in

general and

somewhere in

particular

“Doing good” for the elderly in Lod

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