Leviticus Quotes

“If God were always visible, humans could not exist at all. “No one can see Me and live,” says God. “If we continue to hear the voice of God, we will die,” say the Israelites at Sinai. But if God is always invisible, hidden, imperceptible, then what difference does His existence make? It will always be as if He were not there. The answer to this dilemma is holiness. Holiness represents those points in space and time where God becomes vivid, tangible, a felt presence. Holiness is a break in the self-sufficiency of the material world, where infinity enters space and eternity enters time. In relation to time, it is Shabbat. In relation to space, it is the Tabernacle. These, in the Torah, are the epicentres of the sacred. We can now understand what makes them holy. Shabbat is the time when humans cease, for a day, to be creators and become conscious of themselves as creations. The Tabernacle is the space in which humans cease to be masters – “fill the earth and subdue it” – and become servants. Just as God had to practise self-restraint to make space for the finite, so human beings have to practise self-restraint to make space for the infinite. The holy, in short, is where human beings renounce their independence and self-sufficiency, the very things that are the mark of their humanity, and for a moment acknowledge their utter dependence on He who spoke and brought the universe into being. The universe is the space God makes for man. The holy is the space man makes for God. The secular is the emptiness created by God to be filled by a finite universe. The holy is the emptiness in time and space vacated by humans so that it can be filled by the infinite presence of God.”
― Jonathan Sacks, Leviticus:The Book of Holiness

“If God were always visible, humans could not exist at all. “No one can see Me and live,” says God. “If we continue to hear the voice of God, we will die,” say the Israelites at Sinai. But if God is always invisible, hidden, imperceptible, then what difference does His existence make? It will always be as if He were not there. The answer to this dilemma is holiness. Holiness represents those points in space and time where God becomes vivid, tangible, a felt presence. Holiness is a break in the self-sufficiency of the material world, where infinity enters space and eternity enters time. In relation to time, it is Shabbat. In relation to space, it is the Tabernacle. These, in the Torah, are the epicentres of the sacred.”
― Jonathan Sacks, Leviticus:The Book of Holiness

“One of the more surprising things about lashon hara, evil speech, in Judaism, is that it refers to speech that is true. False speech, libel, or slander, are something else and fall under a different prohibition.”
― Jonathan Sacks, Leviticus:The Book of Holiness

“One of the most profound contributions Torah made to the civilisation of the West is this: that the destiny of nations lies not in the externalities of wealth or power, fate or circumstance, but in moral responsibility: the responsibility for creating and sustaining a society that honours the image of God within each of its citizens, rich and poor, powerful or powerless alike.”
― Jonathan Sacks, Leviticus:The Book of Holiness

“Blaming oneself, by contrast, is difficult. It means living with constant self-criticism. It is not a route to peace of mind. Yet it is profoundly empowering. It implies that, precisely because we accept responsibility for the bad things that have happened, we also have the ability to chart a different course in the future. Within the terms set by covenant, the outcome depends on us. That is the logical geography of hope, and it rests on the choice Moses was later to define in these words: This day I call heaven and earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live. (Deut. 30:19)”
― Jonathan Sacks, Leviticus:The Book of Holiness

“The latter leads inescapably to what is today known as the victim culture. It locates the source of evil outside oneself. Someone else is to blame. It is not I or we who are at fault, but some external cause. The attraction of this logic can be overpowering. It generates sympathy. It calls for, and often evokes, compassion. It is, however, deeply destructive. It leads people to see themselves as objects, not subjects. They are done to, not doers; passive, not active. The results are anger, resentment, rage, and a burning sense of injustice. None of these, however, ever leads to freedom, since by its very logic this mindset abdicates responsibility for the current circumstances in which one finds oneself. Blaming others is the suicide of liberty.”
― Jonathan Sacks, Leviticus:The Book of Holiness

“The choice – God is saying – is in your hands. You are free to do what you choose. But actions have consequences. You cannot overeat and take no exercise, and at the same time stay healthy. You cannot act selfishly and win the respect of other people. You cannot allow injustices to prevail and sustain a cohesive society. You cannot let rulers use power for their own ends without destroying the basis of a free and gracious social order. There is nothing mystical about these ideas. They are eminently intelligible. But they are also, and inescapably, moral.”
― Jonathan Sacks, Leviticus:The Book of Holiness

“A number of recent scholars have suggested that the answer lies in the abandonment of the ethics of identity altogether in favour of cosmopolitanism, a world without community.4 But no cosmopolitan society is as tolerant as it seems. In antiquity, both the Greeks and Romans attempted at one time or another to eliminate the practice of Judaism. Europe of the Enlightenment did not end anti-Semitism: it gave rise to a new and violent strain of it.”
― Jonathan Sacks, Leviticus:The Book of Holiness

“Wrangham estimated that around thirty per cent of adult male chimpanzees had died as the result of violence by another member of their own species.”
― Jonathan Sacks, Leviticus:The Book of Holiness

“Parashat Behar sets out a revolutionary template for a society of justice, freedom, and human dignity. At its core is the idea of the Jubilee, whose words (“Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof”) are engraved on one of the great symbols of freedom, the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia.”
― Jonathan Sacks, Leviticus:The Book of Holiness

“My thesis that the practice of non-violence requires belief in divine vengeance will be unpopular with many Christians, especially theologians in the West. To the person who is inclined to dismiss it, I suggest imagining that you are delivering a lecture in a war zone…. Among your listeners are people whose cities and villages have been first plundered, then burned and levelled to the ground, whose daughters and sisters have been raped, whose fathers and brothers have had their throats slit. The topic of the lecture: a Christian attitude towards violence. The thesis: that we should not retaliate since God is perfect noncoercive love. Soon you would discover that it takes the quiet of a suburban home for the birth of the thesis that human nonviolence corresponds to God’s refusal to judge. In a scorched land, soaked in the blood of the innocent, it will invariably die. And as one watches it die, one would do well to reflect about many other pleasant captivities of the liberal mind.9”
― Jonathan Sacks, Leviticus:The Book of Holiness

“the truth that there is not one single system that can do justice to the moral life. What we need is a combination of several. Attempt to reduce them to “one very simple principle,” in John Stuart Mill’s phrase, and you will fail to do justice to morality itself.”
― Jonathan Sacks, Leviticus:The Book of Holiness

“Holiness belongs to all of us when we turn our lives into the service of God, and society into a home for the Divine Presence.”
― Jonathan Sacks, Leviticus:The Book of Holiness

“The concept of equality we find in the Torah specifically and Judaism generally is not an equality of wealth: Judaism is not communism. Nor is it an equality of power: Judaism is not anarchy. It is fundamentally an equality of dignity. We are all equal citizens in the nation whose sovereign is God.”
― Jonathan Sacks, Leviticus:The Book of Holiness

“That is because speech is much more than the conveying of information. It is the substance of relationship, and when this is poisoned, trust and the social bond are undermined. We use the phrase “character assassination” precisely because some form of violence is being committed, even if it is verbal rather than physical.”
― Jonathan Sacks, Leviticus:The Book of Holiness

“Evil speech kills three people: the one who says it, the one who listens to it, and the one about whom it is said.”
― Jonathan Sacks, Leviticus:The Book of Holiness

“speech was seen in Judaism not simply as a means of conveying information, though it is that as well, but also and essentially as a means of holding the group together without coercive force.”
― Jonathan Sacks, Leviticus:The Book of Holiness

“All social animals need to find ways of keeping the group together, managing disputes, appeasing frayed emotions, helping individuals within the group recover their poise after a bruising encounter. Primates do this by grooming, stroking one another. But this degree of intimacy is possible only in a relatively small group. Humans, by using language as a substitute for embrace, can manage more relationships and thus build larger groups.”
― Jonathan Sacks, Leviticus:The Book of Holiness

“This paradox suggests that Judaism has a different understanding of language than the one that prevails in the West and had its origins in ancient Greece. The philosophers, heirs to the Greeks, tended to think of language as conveying information. What matters is whether it is true or false.”
― Jonathan Sacks, Leviticus:The Book of Holiness

“The rabbinic account of how God taught Adam and Eve the secret of making fire is the precise opposite of the story of Prometheus. God seeks to confer dignity on the beings He made in His image as an act of love. He does not hide the secrets of the universe from us. He does not seek to keep mankind in a state of ignorance or dependence.”
― Jonathan Sacks, Leviticus:The Book of Holiness

“The law of the sin offering reminds us that we can do harm unintentionally, and this can have consequences, both physical and psychological. The best way of putting things right is to make a sacrifice: to do something that costs us something.”
― Jonathan Sacks, Leviticus:The Book of Holiness

“as Katharine Hepburn majestically said to Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen, “Nature, Mr Allnut, is what we were put on earth to rise above.”
― Jonathan Sacks, Leviticus:The Book of Holiness

“Sacrifice is at the heart of both politics and family. Both parent and citizen understand themselves as subject to a demand for sacrifice. They recognise the demand as legitimate because they live in the world of meanings that the sacrificial act affirms. Sacrifice is, accordingly, the way of being in a meaningful world. Sacrifice, we say, is an act of love. In love, we are willing to sacrifice, and through that sacrifice we simultaneously create and discover the subject that we are.”
― Jonathan Sacks, Leviticus:The Book of Holiness

“Judaism is a protest: against empires, hierarchical social structures, and the beliefs that held them in place.”
― Jonathan Sacks, Leviticus:The Book of Holiness