The Great Partnership Quotes

“In an age of fear, moderation is hard to find and harder to sustain. Who wants to listen to a nuanced argument, when what we want is someone to relieve us from the burden of thought and convince us that we were right all along? So people mock. They blame. They caricature. They demonise. In an age of anxiety, few can hear the still small voice that the Bible tells us is the voice of God.”
― Jonathan Sacks, The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning

“So meaning is made, not just discovered. That is what religion for the most part is: the constant making and remaking of meaning, by the stories we tell, the rituals we perform and the prayers we say. The stories are sacred, the rituals divine commands, and prayer a genuine dialogue with the divine. Religion is an authentic response to a real Presence, but it is also a way of making that presence real by constantly living in response to it. It is truth translated into deed.”
― Jonathan Sacks, The Great Partnership: God, Science and the Search for Meaning

“I fear for the future of the West if it loses its faith. You cannot defend Western freedom on the basis of moral relativism, the only morality left when we lose our mooring in a sacred ontology or a divine-human covenant. No secular morality withstood Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia. No secular morality today has the force to withstand the sustained onslaught of ruthless religious extremism. Neither market economics nor liberal democracy has the power, in and of itself, to inspire people to make sacrifices for the common good.”
― Jonathan Sacks, The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning

“Science takes things apart to see how they work. Religion puts things together to see what they mean. They speak different languages and use different powers of the brain.”
― Jonathan Sacks, The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning

“So, to summarise: Science is the search for explanation. Religion is the search for meaning. Meaning is not accidental to the human condition because we are the meaning-seeking animal. To believe on the basis of science that the universe has no meaning is to confuse two disciplines of thought: explanation and interpretation. The search for meaning, though it begins with science, must go beyond it. Science does not yield meanings, nor does it prove the absence of meanings. The meaning of a system lies outside the system. Therefore the meaning of the universe lies outside the universe. The belief in a God who transcends the universe was the discovery of Abrahamic monotheism, which transformed the human condition, endowing it with meaning and thereby rescuing it from tragedy in the name of hope. For if God created the physical universe, then God is free, and if God made us in his image, we are free. If we are free, then history is not a matter of eternal recurrences. Because we can change ourselves, we can change the world. That is the religious basis of hope. There are cultures that do not share these beliefs. They are, ultimately, tragic cultures, for whatever shape they give the powers they name, those powers are fundamentally indifferent to human fate. They may be natural forces. They may be human institutions: the empire, the state, the political system, or the economy. They may be human collectivities: the tribe, the nation, the race. But all end in tragedy because none attaches ultimate significance to the individual as individual. All end by sacrificing the individual, which is why, in the end, such cultures die. There is only one thing capable of defeating tragedy, which is the belief in God who in love sets his image on the human person, thus endowing each of us with non-negotiable, unconditional dignity.”
― Jonathan Sacks, The Great Partnership: God, Science and the Search for Meaning

“The crucial differentiation between humans and all other animals is that we make meanings, and the name we give to collective systems of meanings is culture.”
― Jonathan Sacks, The Great Partnership: God, Science and the Search for Meaning

“When you stop believing in God, there is no sudden explosion of light or darkness. The world continues on its accustomed course. The sky does not fall. The sun still shines. Life goes on. But something is lost nonetheless, something important that gives life connectedness, depth and a sense of purpose; that gives you a feeling of participating in something vast and consequential.”
― Jonathan Sacks, The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning

“We cannot prove that life is meaningful and that God exists. But neither can we prove that love is better than hate, altruism than selfishness, forgiveness than the desire for revenge. We cannot prove that the hope is truer to experience than the tragic sense of life. Almost none of the truths by which we live are provable, and the desire to prove them is based on a monumental confusion between explanation and interpretation. Explanations can be proved, interpretations cannot. Science deals in explanation. Meaning is always a matter of interpretation. It belongs to the same territory as ethics, aesthetics and metaphysics. In none of these three disciplines can anything of consequence be proved, but that does not make them insignificant. To the contrary, they represent three of the greatest repositories of human wisdom.”
― Jonathan Sacks, The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning

“Which brings me back to Ecclesiastes, his search for happiness, and mine. I spoke in chapter 4 about my first meeting, as a student, with Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneersohn, the Lubavitcher Rebbe. As I was waiting to go in, one of his disciples told me the following story. A man had recently written to the Rebbe on something of these lines: ‘I need the Rebbe’s help. I am deeply depressed. I pray and find no comfort. I perform the commands but feel nothing. I find it hard to carry on.’ The Rebbe, so I was told, sent a compelling reply without writing a single word. He simply ringed the first word in every sentence of the letter: the word ‘I’. It was, he was hinting, the man’s self-preoccupation that was at the root of his depression. It was as if the Rebbe were saying, as Viktor Frankl used to say in the name of Kierkegaard, ‘The door to happiness opens outward.’23 It was this insight that helped me solve the riddle of Ecclesiastes. The word ‘I’ does not appear very often in the Hebrew Bible, but it dominates Ecclesiastes’ opening chapters. I enlarged my works: I built houses for myself, I planted vineyards for myself; I made gardens and parks for myself and I planted in them all kinds of fruit trees; I made ponds of water for myself from which to irrigate a forest of growing trees. I bought male and female slaves and I had homeborn slaves. Also I possessed flocks and herds larger than all who preceded me in Jerusalem. Also, I collected for myself silver and gold and the treasure of kings and provinces. (Ecclesiastes 2:4–8) Nowhere else in the Bible is the first-person singular used so relentlessly and repetitively. In the original Hebrew the effect is doubled because of the chiming of the verbal suffix and the pronoun: Baniti li, asiti li, kaniti li, ‘I built for myself, I made for myself, I bought for myself.’ The source of Ecclesiastes’ unhappiness is obvious and was spelled out many centuries later by the great sage Hillel: ‘If I am not for myself, who will be? But if I am only for myself, what am I?’24 Happiness in the Bible is not something we find in self-gratification. Hence the significance of the word simchah. I translated it earlier as ‘joy’, but really it has no precise translation into English, since all our emotion words refer to states of mind we can experience alone. Simchah is something we cannot experience alone. Simchah is joy shared.”
― Jonathan Sacks, The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning

“There is a Jewish joke, a tragic one. The time, 1938, the place, a travel agency in Germany. A Jew has entered. He tells the woman at the desk that he would like to buy a ticket for a foreign journey. ‘Where to?’ asks the travel agent. ‘What are you offering?’ asks the Jew. The travel agent passes him a globe. He turns the globe slowly, looking at country after country, knowing that each has closed its doors to people of his faith. He pushes the globe back to the travel agent with the words, ‘Don’t you have another world?”
― Jonathan Sacks, The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning

“A fellow scientist visited Bohr at his home and saw to his amazement that Bohr had fixed a horseshoe over the door for luck. ‘Surely, Niels, you don’t believe in that?’ ‘Of course not,’ Bohr replied. ‘But you see – the thing is that it works whether you believe in it or not.”
― Jonathan Sacks, The Great Partnership

“Wisdom tells us how the world is. Torah tells us how the world ought to be. Wisdom is about nature. Torah is about will.”
― Jonathan Sacks, The Great Partnership: God, Science and the Search for Meaning

“The Holocaust did not take place long ago and far away. It happened in the heart of rationalist, post-Enlightenment, liberal Europe: the Europe of Kant and Hegel, Goethe and Schiller, Beethoven and Brahms. Some of the epicentres of antisemitism were places of cosmopolitan, avant-garde culture like Berlin and Vienna. The Nazis were aided by doctors, lawyers, scientists, judges and academics. More than half of the participants at the Wannsee Conference in January 1942, who planned the ‘final solution to the Jewish question’, the murder of all Europe’s Jews, carried the title ‘doctor’. They either had doctorates or were medical practitioners.”
― Jonathan Sacks, The Great Partnership: God, Science and the Search for Meaning

“To believe in God, faith and the importance of religious practice does not involve an abdication of the intellect, a silencing of critical faculties, or believing in six impossible things before breakfast.”
― Jonathan Sacks, The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning

“I come from a religious tradition where we make a blessing over great scientists regardless of their views on religion.”
― Jonathan Sacks, The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning

“Katharine Hepburn said it best. ‘Nature’, she says majestically to Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen, ‘is what we are put in this world to rise above.’ The”
― Jonathan Sacks, The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning

“Faith is the defeat of probability by the power of possibility.”
― Jonathan Sacks, The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning

“When religious faith goes, five things happen, gradually and imperceptibly. First there is a loss of belief in human dignity and the sanctity of life.”
― Jonathan Sacks, The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning

“A civilisation that had space for science but not religion might achieve technological prowess. But it would not respect people in their specificity and particularity. It would quickly become inhuman and inhumane. Think of the French Revolution, Stalinist Russia and Communist China, and you need no further proof.”
― Jonathan Sacks, The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning

“Homo sapiens, discovering God singular and alone, discovered the human being singular and alone. There is no greater dignity than that”
― Jonathan Sacks, The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning

“But beyond a basic minimum, the relationship between income and happiness is slight. Research bears out Maslow’s analysis that the higher needs are love and belonging, esteem and self-actualisation. The most significant determinants of happiness are strong and rewarding personal relationships, a sense of belonging to a community, being valued by others and living a meaningful life. These are precisely the things in which religion specialises: sanctifying marriage, etching family life with the charisma of holiness, creating and sustaining strong communities in which people are valued for what they are, not for what they earn or own, and providing a framework within which our lives take on meaning, purpose, even blessedness.”
― Jonathan Sacks, The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning

“The consumer society, directed at making us happy, achieves the opposite. It encourages us to spend money we do not have, to buy things we do not need, for the sake of a happiness that will not last.”
― Jonathan Sacks, The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning

“Everything I have learned about faith in a lifetime tells me that the science of creation – cosmology – wondrous though it is, takes second place to the sheer wonder that God could take this risk of creating a creature with the freedom to disobey him and wreck his world. There is no faith humans can have in God equal to the faith God must have had in humankind to place us here as guardians of the vastness and splendour of the universe. We exist because of God’s faith in us. That is why I see in the faces of those I meet a trace of God’s love that lifts me to try to love a little as God loves. I know of nothing with greater power to lift us beyond ourselves and to perform acts that carry within them a signal of transcendence. God lives wherever we open our eyes to his radiance, our hearts to his transforming love.”
― Jonathan Sacks, The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning

“Religion has lost many of the functions it once had. To explain the world, we have science. To control it, we have technology. To negotiate power, we have democratic politics. To achieve prosperity, we have a market economy. If we are ill, we go to a doctor, not a priest. If we feel guilty, we can go to a psychotherapist; we have no need of a confessor.”
― Jonathan Sacks, The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning

“Kant had disproved the ontological argument. Hume had shown that for any supposed miracle, the evidence that it had not happened was always greater than the evidence that it had. Darwin had shown the error in the ‘argument from design’.”
― Jonathan Sacks, The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning

“Tolstoy’s point is subtle and substantive. When people begin to lose their religious convictions, often the first thing they stop doing is observing religious rituals. The last thing they lose is their moral beliefs. A whole generation of mid-Victorian English intellectuals, most famously George Eliot and Matthew Arnold, lost their Christian faith but held fast to their Christian ethics.13 But that, implies Tolstoy, cannot last for ever. New generations appear for whom the old moral constraints no longer make sense, and they go. Moralities may be a long time dying but, absent the faith on which they are based,”
― Jonathan Sacks, The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning

“the recent novel by his wife Rebecca Goldstein, entitled 36 Arguments for the Existence of God, subtitled A Work of Fiction). The”
― Jonathan Sacks, The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning

“Einstein said it most famously: ‘Science without religion is lame; religion without science is blind.’1”
― Jonathan Sacks, The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning

“Without God, there is a danger that we will stay trapped within the prison of the self. As”
― Jonathan Sacks, The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning

“Camus’s answer is the Greek myth of Sisyphus. Sisyphus was the king who stole the secrets of the gods, in return for which he was condemned by Zeus to spend his life laboriously rolling an immense boulder up a hill, only to watch it roll down again and having to repeat the labour endlessly, never achieving either the final goal or rest from it. That, says Camus, is life as ‘the absurd’. And that is what we are condemned to. We can either be defeated by it, or we can refuse to be defeated. That refusal, tragic, heroic, defiant, is what gives life its glory and even its brief fragments of happiness.”
― Jonathan Sacks, The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning