Chief Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks on the Environment
Click to read Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks:
The quotes below are taken from The Dignity of Difference: How to Avoid the Clash of Civilizations by Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks
Page 40: “The great metaphors of our time – the supermarket, cable and satellite television and the Internet – put before us a seemingly endless range of options, each offering the great deal, the best buy, the highest specification, the lowest price. But consumption is a poor candidate for salvation. The very happiness we were promised by buying these designer jeans, that watch or this car, is what the next product assures us we do not yet have until we have bought something else. A consumer society is kept going by an endless process of stimulating, satisfying, and re-stimulating desire. It is more like an addiction than a quest for fulfillment.”
Page 45: “Transcendence as the only real alternative to extinction.”
(Václav Havel, The Art of the Impossible)
Page 52: “The men on the plain at Shinar [from the Bible’s story on the Tower of Babel] make a technological discovery. They learn how to make bricks by drying clay. As after so many other technological advances, they immediately conclude that they now have the power of gods. They are no longer subject to nature. They have become its masters. They will storm the heavens. Their man-made environment – the city with its ziggurat or artificial mountain – will replicate the structure of the cosmos, but here they will rule, not God.”
Page 53: “Biblical monotheism is not the idea that there is one God and therefore one gateway to His presence. To the contrary, it is the idea that the unity of God is to be found in the diversity of creation. This applies to the natural world. What is real and the proper object of our wonder is not the Platonic form of a leaf but the 250,000 different kinds there actually are; not the quintessential bird but the 9,000 species that exist today […]”
Page 54: “Unity in heaven creates diversity on earth.”
(Footnote 8: This idea is discussed at length in the literature of Jewish mysticism.)
Pages 69-70: “That is what we now face at ever-increasing speed. It took 38 years for radio to reach 50 million users in the United States. In the case of computers it took sixteen years. The Internet reached 50 million users in four years. Computer power doubles every eighteen months and shows no sign of slackening. The Internet doubles every year. The number of DNA sequences we can analyse doubles every two years. A huge gap has opened up between the transformations happening around us and our ability to respond. Early in the twentieth century, William Ogburn coined the concept of ‘cultural lag’ – a state, like now, in which material culture, such as technology, is being transformed faster than non-material culture such as modes of governance and social norms. When the world out there is changing faster than the world in here – in our mental and emotional responses – our environment becomes bewildering and threatening. Societies take time to change. So do people.”
(Footnote 2: Wright, Robert (2000), Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny. New York: Pantheon. P. 50.)
Page 72: “’Progress’, wrote Robert Bellah, ‘seems less compelling when it appears that it may be progress into the abyss.’”
(Footnote 6: Bella, Robert, Madsen, Richard, Sullivan, William, Swidler, Ann and Tipton, Steven (1988), Habits of the Heart. London: Hutchinson. P. 277.)
Page 76: “Advanced consumer cultures are built on a rapid succession of artificially induced and temporarily satisfied desires. When the market becomes not a mechanism of exchange but the guiding paradigm of life, then meaning itself is undermined.”
Page 99: “What is therefore morally unacceptable about the new economy from a Jewish point of view is not the free market itself, but the breakdown it is creating in the sense of social solidarity, the increasing segregation of the wealthy from the poor, and the waning sense of the responsibilities of success – what J. K. Galbraith called ‘the culture of contentment’.”
(Footnote 39: Galbraith, John Kenneth (1992), The Culture of Contentment. London: Sinclair-Stevenson.)
Page 106: “[…] the second half of the twentieth century, worldwide consumption of goods and services grew six-fold.”
Page 106: “Worldwide, the top 20 per cent of high-income earners account for 86 per cent of all private consumption, while the poorest 20 per cent accounts for only 1.3 per cent. The richest fifth consume sixteen times more meat, seventeen times more energy and 145 times more cars than the poorest fifth. Of the world’s total population, 65 per cent have never made a telephone call; 40 per cent have no access to electricity. Americans spend more on cosmetics, and Europeans on ice cream, than it would cost to provide schooling and sanitation for the two billion people who currently go without both.”
Pages 111-112: “There are no easy solutions, but there are hard questions. What is our responsibility to humanity as a whole? What bonds of obligation link us to those with whom we do not share a country, a political structure, a language or culture? What proportion of our wealth, if any, are we duty-bound to share?”
Page 114: “It arises from the theology of Judaism, which insists on the difference between possession and ownership. Ultimately, all things are owned by God, creator of the world. What we possess, we do not own – we merely hold it in trust for God. The clearest example is the provision in Leviticus: ‘The land must not be sold permanently because the land is Mine; you are merely strangers and temporary residents in relation to Me’ (Leviticus 25:23).”
Page 155: A consumer-driven, advertising-dominated culture militates daily against ongoing attachments. It is constantly inviting us to switch to a different brand, try something new, go for a better deal elsewhere. It should not come as a surprise that this begins to affect human relationships as well. A society saturated by market values would be one in which relationships were temporary, loyalties provisional and commitments easily discarded. It would, in short, be one in which marriage made little sense – and that, by and large, is what has happened.”
Page 156: “The great public arenas have become shopping malls and entertainment complexes, but these are not civic spaces. We go there as consumers, not as fellow citizens.”
Page 167: “Though we must exercise caution when reading twenty-first century concerns into ancient texts, there seems little doubt that much bibilical legislation is concerned with what we would nowadays call ‘sustainability’.”
Page 167: “[Shabbat] is a day that sets a limit to our intervention in nature and the pursuit of economic activity. We become conscious of being creations, not creators. The earth is not ours but God’s. For six days it is handed over to us, but on the seventh day we symbolically abdicate that power. We may perform no ‘work’, which is to say, an act that alters thes tae of something for human purposes. The Sabbath is a weekly reminder of the integrity of nature and the boundaries of human striving.”
Page 167: “What the Sabbath does for human beings and animals, the sabbatical and jubilee years do for the land.”
Pages 167-168: “As Maimonides points out, land which is over exploited is eventually eroded and loses its fertility. The Israelites were therefore commanded to conserve the soil by giving it periodic fallow years and not pursue short-term gain at the cost of long-term desolation. The second, no less significant, is theological: ‘The land’, says God, ‘is Mine; you are but strangers resident with Me’ (Leviticus 25:23). We are guests on the earth.”
Page 168: “It calls these rules chukkim or ‘statutes’. The thirteenth-century scholar Nahminades understood this term to mean laws which respect the integrity of nature. To mix different species, he argued, was to presume to be able to improve on the order of creation, and thus an affront to the Creator. Each species has its own internal laws of development and reproduction, and these must not be tampered with: ‘One who combines two different species thereby changes and defies the work of creation, as if he believe that the Holy One, blessed be He, has not completely perfected the world and now wishes to improve it by adding new kinds of creatures.’”
Page 170-171: “The power of the religious imagination is not that it has easy answers to difficult questions, but that it provides a framework of thought for such large and intractable issues. It is easier to understand the moral constraints on action when we believe that there is someone to whom we owe responsibility, that we are not owners of the planet, and that we are covenantally linked to those who will come after us. Like the planter of the carob tree, we act so that those who come after us will have a world to enjoy as we did. Hilary Putnam points out that no less important to ethics than abstract concepts like rights and duties, is what he calls a ‘moral image’, a picture that gives shape to the whole. That is what we need now. The simplest image, and surely the most sensible one, in thinking about our ecological responsibilities is to see the earth as belonging to the source of being, and us as its trustees, charged with conserving and if possible beautifying it for the sake of our grandchildren not yet born. Nor is this all. As I pointed out in an earlier chapter, religions are not philosophical systems. They are embodied truths, made real in the lives of communities. It is one thing to have an abstract conception of ecological responsibility, another to celebrate the Sabbath weekly – to renounce our mastery of nature one day in seven – and to make a blessing, as Jews do, over everything we eat or drink to remind ourselves of God’s ownership of the world. Prayer, ritual and narrative are ways we shape what Tocqueville called ‘habits of the heart’. They form character, create behavioural dispositions and educate us in patterns of self-restraint.”
Page 171: “We will need cultivated instincts of caution if we are to hold ourselves back from patterns of production and consumption that threaten the future of the planet.”
Page 171: “All of the world’s great faiths embody a sense of respect for nature, and thus constitute an important counterbalance to the indifference bordering on arrogance that has been one of the less lovely legacies of the Enlightenment.”
(Footnote 13: See, for example, the series of books on World Religions and Ecology: M. Batchelor and K. Brown (eds), Buddhism and Ecology; E. Breuilly and M. Palmer (eds), Christianity and Ecology; R. Prime (ed.), Hinduism and Ecology; F. Khalid and J. O’Brien (eds) Buddhism and Ecology; A. Rose (ed.), Judaism and Ecology (London: Cassell, 1992).
Page 172: “The great faiths teach a different kind of wisdom: reverence in the face of creation, responsibility to future generations, and restraint in the knowledge that not everything we can do, should we do.”
Page 175: “Freedom means restraint. It means not doing everything we can do […]”
Page 207: “Hope is the knowledge that we can choose; that we can learn from our mistakes and act differently next time; that history is not what Joseph Heller called it, a ‘trashbag of random coincidences blown open by the win’, but a long, slow journey to redemption, whatever the digressions and false turns along the way.”
Page 207: “Hope is a human virtue, but one with religious underpinnings. At its ultimate it is the belief not that God has written the script of history, that He will intervene to save us from the error of our ways or protect us from the worst consequences of evil, but simply that He is mindful of our aspirations, with us in our fumbling efforts, that He has given us the means to save us from ourselves; that we are not wrong to dream, wish and work for a better world.”
Page 207: “To one who believes that we can rewrite the script, history reveals itself as a series of slow, faltering steps to a more gracious social order.”