When you've got Jews and Christians, Muslims, Sikhs and Hindus removing graffiti from buildings, or getting drug dealers off the street, that's side by side. When you do that, you take it from the very elevated level of interfaith dialogue to the street level of neighbors. You get them working side by side, and they become friends. Friendship sometimes counts for more than interfaith agreement or understanding. Friendship is deeply human.
Jonathan SacksReligiosity turns out to be the best indicator of civic involvement: it's more accurate than education, age, income, gender or race.
Jonathan SacksThose who believe that liberal democracy and the free market can be defended by the force of law and regulation alone, without an internalised sense of duty and morality, are tragically mistaken.
Jonathan SacksISIS is a terrorist entity whose barbarities have been condemned by all those who value our common humanity. In the current political climate, when hate crimes are rising and political rhetoric is increasingly divisive, this is all the more shocking.
Jonathan SacksIf we are to cherish freedom, and to guard it, we must remember what the alternative is: the bread of affliction and the bitter herbs of slavery.
Jonathan SacksStabilizing the euro is one thing, healing the culture that surrounds it is another. A world in which material values are everything and spiritual values nothing is neither a stable state nor a good society. The time has come for us to recover the Judeo-Christian ethic of human dignity in the image of God.
Jonathan SacksThere are hard texts in each tradition which we must confront and ask ourselves, 'Can we reinterpret those texts to allow us to live peaceably, and respectfully, with people of other faiths?' That is a job only Jews can do for Judaism, only Christians can do for Christianity, and only Muslims can do for Islam. But sometimes the sight of someone in one faith wrestling with that faith can empower you to wrestle with another faith.
Jonathan Sacks