Exodus Quotes

“God does not want us to understand the suffering of the innocent but to fight for a world in which the innocent no longer suffer.”
― Jonathan Sacks, Exodus: The Book of Redemption

“Through constant creation of dissatisfaction, the consumer society is in fact a highly sophisticated mechanism for the production and distribution of unhappiness. That”
― Jonathan Sacks, Exodus: The Book of Redemption

“Judaism is”
― Jonathan Sacks, Exodus: The Book of Redemption

“That is why Exodus culminates in the construction and placement of the Tabernacle at the centre of the camp. Without the visible presence of God, there is no justice. Without justice, there is no human equality and dignity. Without reverence for heaven, society becomes the rule of the strong over the weak.”
― Jonathan Sacks, Exodus: The Book of Redemption

“If you do not believe in the people, eventually you will not even believe in God. You will think yourself superior to them, and that is a corruption of the soul.”
― Jonathan Sacks, Exodus: The Book of Redemption

“Lord Acton, Philip Rieff and Nicholas Wolterstorff”
― Jonathan Sacks, Exodus: The Book of Redemption

“Within us is the breath of God. Around us is the presence of God. Near us is the home we build for God. Ahead of us is the task set by God: to be His agents of justice and compassion. Never has a nobler account been given of the human condition, and it challenges us still.”
― Jonathan Sacks, Exodus: The Book of Redemption

“The home God makes for humanity is counterbalanced by the home humanity makes for God.”
― Jonathan Sacks, Exodus: The Book of Redemption

“In this way the emancipated people of Athens became a tyrant; and their government, the pioneer of European freedom, stands condemned with a terrible unanimity by all the wisest of the ancients.[16] In a recent, magisterial work on justice, Yale professor Nicholas Wolterstorff has argued the same proposition on philosophical grounds.[17] Our whole Western concept of justice, founded on the idea of human rights, is built on religious foundations and cannot survive without them. If we become a secular society, there is no long-term future for either rights or justice. This is his conclusion: Our Judaic and Christian heritage neither denies nor overlooks the flaws of humankind; some strands in the heritage appear even to revel in them. But in the face of all the empirical evidence, it nonetheless declares that all of us have great and equal worth; the worth of being made in the image of God and of being loved redemptively by God. It adds that God holds us accountable for how we treat each other – and for how we treat God. It is this framework of conviction that gave rise to our moral subculture of rights. If this framework erodes, I think we must expect that our moral subculture of rights will also eventually erode and that we will slide back into our tribalisms.[18”
― Jonathan Sacks, Exodus: The Book of Redemption

“If this is so, then the placement of the Mishkan at the heart of the camp suggests that societies need, in the public domain, a constant reminder of the presence of God. That, after all, is why the Mishkan appears in Exodus, not Genesis. Genesis is about individuals, Exodus about societies. Significant thinkers believed likewise. John Locke, the pioneer of toleration, thought so. He considered that atheists were ineligible for English citizenship since membership was gained by swearing an oath of allegiance, and an oath, being a vow to God, could not be sworn by an atheist.[10] In his farewell address, George Washington said: Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports…let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.[11”
― Jonathan Sacks, Exodus: The Book of Redemption

“The Torah, in other words, offers a striking way out of the dilemmas of multiculturalism. It suggests that the citizens of a nation see themselves as co-creators of society seen as the home we build together.”
― Jonathan Sacks, Exodus: The Book of Redemption

“In the American Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson translated this idea into the famous words: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness…” What is interesting about this sentence is that “these truths” are anything but self-evident. They would have been regarded as subversive by Plato, who held that humanity is divided into people of gold, silver and bronze and that hierarchy is written into the structure of society.[7] They would have been incomprehensible to Aristotle who believed that some were born to rule and others to be ruled.[8] They are “self-evident” only to one steeped in the Bible.”
― Jonathan Sacks, Exodus: The Book of Redemption

“The Torah asks, why should you not hate the stranger? Because you once stood where he stands now. You know the heart of the stranger because you were once a stranger in the land of Egypt. If you are human, so is he. If he is less than human, so are you. You must fight the hatred in your heart as I once fought the greatest ruler and the strongest empire in the ancient world on your behalf. I made you into the world’s archetypal strangers so that you would fight for the rights of strangers – for your own and those of others, wherever they are, whoever they are, whatever the colour of their skin or the nature of their culture, because though they are not in your image, says God, they are nonetheless in Mine. There is only one reply strong enough to answer the question: Why should I not hate the stranger?”
― Jonathan Sacks, Exodus: The Book of Redemption

“It is terrifying in retrospect to grasp how seriously the Torah took the phenomenon of xenophobia, hatred of the stranger. It is as if the Torah were saying with the utmost clarity: reason is insufficient. Sympathy is inadequate. Only the force of history and memory is strong enough to form a counterweight to hate.”
― Jonathan Sacks, Exodus: The Book of Redemption

“Enlightenment thought was marked by two great attempts to ground ethics in something other than tradition. One belonged to the Scottish enlightenment – David Hume and Adam Smith – who sought it in emotion: the natural sympathy of human beings for one another.[8] The other was constructed by Immanuel Kant on the basis of reason. It was illogical to prescribe one ethical rule for some people and another for others. Reason is universal, argued Kant; therefore an ethic of reason would provide for universal respect (“Treat each person as an end in himself”).[9] Neither succeeded. In the twentieth century, villages and townships where Jews had lived for almost a thousand years witnessed their mass murder or deportation to the extermination camps with little or no protest. Neither Kantian reason nor Humean emotion were strong enough to inoculate Europe against genocide.”
― Jonathan Sacks, Exodus: The Book of Redemption

“The Torah is the world’s great protest against empires and imperialism. There are many dimensions to this protest. One dimension is the protest against the attempt to justify social hierarchy and the absolute power of rulers in the name of religion. Another is the subordination of the masses to the state – epitomized by the vast building projects, first of Babel, then of Egypt, and the enslavement they entailed. A third is the brutality of nations in the course of war (the subject of Amos’ oracles against the nations). Undoubtedly, though, the most serious offence – for the prophets as well as the Mosaic books – was the use of power against the powerless: the widow, the orphan and, above all, the stranger.”
― Jonathan Sacks, Exodus: The Book of Redemption

“This emphasis on verbal abuse is typical of the sages in their sensitivity to language as the creator or destroyer of social bonds. As Rabbi Eleazar notes, harsh or derogatory speech touches on self-image and self-respect in a way that other wrongs do not. What is more, as Rabbi Samuel bar Naĥmani makes clear, financial wrongdoing can be rectified in a way that wounding speech cannot. Even after apology, the pain (and the damage to reputation) remains. A stranger, in particular, is sensitive to his or her status within society. He or she is an outsider. Strangers do not share with the native-born a memory, a past, a sense of belonging. They are conscious of their vulnerability. Therefore we must be especially careful not to wound them by reminding them that they are not “one of”
― Jonathan Sacks, Exodus: The Book of Redemption

“A decent society will be one in which enemies do not allow their rancour or animosity to prevent them from coming to one another’s assistance when they need help.”
― Jonathan Sacks, Exodus: The Book of Redemption

“On Shabbat, all melakha, which is defined as “creative work,” is forbidden. On Shabbat we are passive rather than active. We become creations, not creators. We renounce making in order to experience ourselves as made.”
― Jonathan Sacks, Exodus: The Book of Redemption

“Torah – God’s law and teaching – was not a code written by a distant king, to be imposed by force. Nor was it an esoteric mystery understood by only a scholarly elite. It was to be available to, and intelligible by, everyone.”
― Jonathan Sacks, Exodus: The Book of Redemption

“Functionally, a priest in the ancient world was one who could read and write. A kingdom of priests is therefore a nation of universal literacy.”
― Jonathan Sacks, Exodus: The Book of Redemption

“But it is surely no coincidence that Israel became the first – indeed the only – nation in history to receive its laws before its land. A law that could be easily written and read, and that could be transported anywhere, was the expression of the God who was everywhere, in the desert as well as in the land.”
― Jonathan Sacks, Exodus: The Book of Redemption

“One way or another, the alphabet created a possibility that never existed before, namely of a society of mass, even universal, literacy. With only twenty-two symbols, it could be taught, in a relatively short time, to everyone. We see evidence of this at many places in Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible. Isaiah says “All your children shall be taught of the Lord and great shall be the peace of your children” (Isaiah 54:13), implying universal education.”
― Jonathan Sacks, Exodus: The Book of Redemption

“A true parent is one who fights battles on our behalf when we are young and defenceless, but who, once we have matured, gives us the inner strength to fight for ourselves.”
― Jonathan Sacks, Exodus: The Book of Redemption

“God is beyond time, but human beings live within time. We cannot take ourselves out of, say, the twenty-first century and project ourselves a thousand years from now. Inescapably, we live in the now, not eternity.”
― Jonathan Sacks, Exodus: The Book of Redemption

“A people driven by hate are not – cannot be – free.”
― Jonathan Sacks, Exodus: The Book of Redemption

“The belief that freedom is an all-or-nothing phenomenon – that we have it either all the time or none of the time – blinds us to the fact that there are degrees of freedom. It can be won and lost, and its loss is gradual. Unless the will is constantly exercised, it atrophies and dies. We then become objects, not subjects, swept along by tides of fashion, or the caprice of desire, or the passion that becomes an obsession.”
― Jonathan Sacks, Exodus: The Book of Redemption

“Compare the Torah’s treatment of free will with that of the great philosophical or scientific theories. For these other systems, freedom is almost invariably an either/or: either we are always free or we never are.”
― Jonathan Sacks, Exodus: The Book of Redemption

“This is the question of questions for biblical faith. Paganism then, like secularism now, had no such doubt. Why should anyone expect justice in the world? The gods fought. They were indifferent to mankind. The universe was not moral. It was an arena of conflict. The strong win, the weak suffer, and the wise keep far from the fray. If there is no God or (what amounts to the same thing) many gods, there is no reason to expect justice. The question does not arise.”
― Jonathan Sacks, Exodus: The Book of Redemption

“A fundamental principle of Jewish leadership is intimated here for the first time: a leader does not need faith in himself, but he must have faith in the people he is to lead.”
― Jonathan Sacks, Exodus: The Book of Redemption