Genesis Quotes

“When human beings try to become more than human, they quickly become less than human.”
― Jonathan Sacks, Genesis: The Book of Beginnings

“If we cannot create peace or justice or compassion within the family we will be unable to do so within the nation or the world. Not until Joseph forgives his brothers and is reconciled with them can the story move on to the larger canvas of history.”
― Jonathan Sacks, Genesis: The Book of Beginnings

“What Jacob learned – and what we learn, hearing his story – is that love is not enough. We must also heed those who feel unloved.”
― Jonathan Sacks, Genesis: The Book of Beginnings

“[Genesis] is not myth. It is not history in the conventional sense, a mere recording of events. Nor is it theology: Genesis is less about God than about human beings and their relationship with God. The theology is almost always implicit rather than explicit. What Genesis is, in fact, is philosophy written in a deliberately non-philosophical way. It deals with all the central questions of philosophy: what exists (ontology), what can we know (epistemology), are we free (philosophical psychology), and how we should behave (ethics). But it does so in a way quite unlike the philosophical classics from Plato to Wittgenstein. To put it at its simplest: philosophy is truth as system. Genesis is truth as story. It is a unique work, philosophy in the narrative mode.”
― Jonathan Sacks, Genesis: The Book of Beginnings

“With Abraham a new faith is born: the faith of responsibility, in which the divine command and the human act meet and give birth to a new and blessed order, built on the principles of righteousness and justice. Judaism is supremely a religion of freedom – not freedom in the modern sense, the ability to do what we like, but in the ethical sense of the ability to choose to do what we should, to become co-architects with God of a just and gracious social order. The former leads to a culture of rights, the latter to a culture of responsibilities: freedom as responsibility.”
― Jonathan Sacks, Genesis: The Book of Beginnings

“We learn, not from our successes but from our failures. We mature and grow strong and become more understanding and forgiving through the mistakes we make. A protected life is a fragile and superficial life.”
― Jonathan Sacks, Genesis: The Book of Beginnings

“Judaism is supremely a religion of freedom – not freedom in the modern sense, the ability to do what we like, but in the ethical sense of the ability to choose to do what we should, to become co-architects with God of a just and gracious social order. The former leads to a culture of rights, the latter to a culture of responsibilities: freedom as responsibility.”
― Jonathan Sacks, Genesis: The Book of Beginnings

“What Genesis is, in fact, is philosophy written in a deliberately non-philosophical way. It deals with all the central questions of philosophy: what exists (ontology), what can we know (epistemology), are we free (philosophical psychology), and how we should behave (ethics). But it does so in a way quite unlike the philosophical classics from Plato to Wittgenstein. To put it at its simplest: philosophy is truth as system. Genesis is truth as story.”
― Jonathan Sacks, Genesis: The Book of Beginnings

“Only looking back do we see God’s providence interwoven with our life”
― Jonathan Sacks, Genesis: The Book of Beginnings

“Non-Jews respect Jews who respect Judaism. They are embarrassed by Jews who are embarrassed by Judaism. Never be ambivalent about who and what you are.”
― Jonathan Sacks, Genesis: The Book of Beginnings

“Babel was the first civilization, but sadly not the last, to begin with a dream of utopia and end in a nightmare of hell.”
― Jonathan Sacks, Genesis: The Book of Beginnings

“The Netziv (R. Naftali Zvi Yehudah Berlin, 1817–1893), writing in Czarist Russia and prophetically foreseeing the worst excesses of communism, sees Babel as the world’s first totalitarianism, in which to preserve the masses as a single entity, all freedom of expression is suppressed (that, for him, is the meaning of “the whole world had one language and a unified speech”).”
― Jonathan Sacks, Genesis: The Book of Beginnings

“One of the great themes of Tanakh is its consistent battle against elites, especially knowledge elites.”
― Jonathan Sacks, Genesis: The Book of Beginnings

“None of Genesis’s stories ends with a simple, “and they all lived happily ever after.” For these are not children’s stories. They are profoundly adult. They tell us that the journey is worth making – none more so – but it did not begin with us, and it will not end with us. “It is not for you to complete the task, but neither are you free to stand aside from it.”[”
― Jonathan Sacks, Genesis: The Book of Beginnings

“It is only after he gives his wife a proper name that the Torah uses the name Hashem on its own. It is only after he has become aware of his wife as a person that man is capable of understanding God as a “person.”
― Jonathan Sacks, Genesis: The Book of Beginnings

“Suddenly Adam knew that though we die, if we are privileged to have children, something of us will live on: our genes, our influence, our example, our ideals.”
― Jonathan Sacks, Genesis: The Book of Beginnings

“redemption, for if brothers cannot live together, how can nations? And if nations cannot live together, how can the human world survive?”
― Jonathan Sacks, Genesis: The Book of Beginnings

“For Freud, the Oedipus complex – the tension between fathers and sons – is the single most powerful determinant of the psychology of the individual, and of religion as a whole.”
― Jonathan Sacks, Genesis: The Book of Beginnings

“Through halakha, we learn to make choices in the present. Through aggada, we strive to understand the past. Together, these two ways of thinking constitute the twin hemispheres of the Jewish brain. We are free. But we are also characters in a divinely-scripted drama. We choose, but we are also chosen. The Jewish imagination lives in the tension between these two frames of reference: between freedom and providence, our decisions and God’s plan.”
― Jonathan Sacks, Genesis: The Book of Beginnings

“Zechariah gives one of the most concise summaries of the Jewish experience: “Not by might nor by power, but by My spirit, says the Lord Almighty” (Zechariah 4:6).”
― Jonathan Sacks, Genesis: The Book of Beginnings

“But spiritual goods – love, trust, friendship, the pursuit of knowledge – are not zero-sum. The more we share, the more we have.”
― Jonathan Sacks, Genesis: The Book of Beginnings

“Faith is not certainty: it is the courage to live with uncertainty. Indeed that is why we need faith, because life is uncertain.”
― Jonathan Sacks, Genesis: The Book of Beginnings

“adapt to his environment, but to adapt his environment to him; to shape the world; to be active, not merely passive, in relation to the influences and circumstances that surround him: The brute’s existence is an undignified one because it is a helpless existence.”
― Jonathan Sacks, Genesis: The Book of Beginnings

“Abraham’s hopes and fears are ours.”
― Jonathan Sacks, Genesis: The Book of Beginnings

“cooperation is as necessary as competition, that cooperation depends on trust, that trust requires justice, and that justice itself is incomplete without forgiveness. Morality is not simply what we choose it to be. It is part of the basic fabric of the universe, revealed to us by the universe’s Creator, long ago.”
― Jonathan Sacks, Genesis: The Book of Beginnings

“I find it exceptionally moving that the Bible should cast in these heroic roles two figures at the extreme margins of Israelite society: women, childless widows, outsiders. Tamar and Ruth, powerless except for their moral courage, wrote their names into Jewish history as role models who gave birth to royalty – to remind us, in case we ever forget, that true royalty lies in love and faithfulness, and that greatness often exists where we expect it least.”
― Jonathan Sacks, Genesis: The Book of Beginnings

“Her behaviour became a model. Not surprisingly, the rabbis inferred from her conduct a strong moral rule: “It is better that a person throw himself into a fiery furnace rather than shame his neighbour in public.”[4] This acute sensitivity to humiliation displayed by Tamar permeates much of Rabbinic thought:”
― Jonathan Sacks, Genesis: The Book of Beginnings

“It is as if the man said to him, “In the past, you struggled to be Esau. In the future you will struggle not to be Esau but to be yourself. In the past you held on to Esau’s heel. In the future you will hold on to God. You will not let go of Him; He will not let go of you. Now let go of Esau so that you can be free to hold on to God.”
― Jonathan Sacks, Genesis: The Book of Beginnings

“Keriat haTorah therefore means not reading, but proclaiming the Torah, reading it aloud. The one who reads it has the written word in front of him, but for the rest of the gathering it is an experience not of the eye, but of the ear. The divine word is something heard rather than seen. Indeed, it was only with the spread of manuscripts, and the invention of printing in the fifteenth century, that reading become a visual rather than auditory experience. To this day the primary experience of keriat haTorah involves listening to the reader declaim the words from the Torah scroll, rather than following them in a printed book. We miss some of the most subtle effects of Torah if we think of it as the text seen, rather than the word heard.”
― Jonathan Sacks, Genesis: The Book of Beginnings

“there is a rabbinic principle: “Scripture does not depart from its plain meaning.”
― Jonathan Sacks, Genesis: The Book of Beginnings