Dear Friends

Many people were shocked at the sudden death of Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, a great religious leader and philosopher, earlier this month. He was Chief Rabbi from 1991-2013 and was a prolific author and marvelous speaker. No doubt many of you will have read his obituaries.

I have only read one or two of his books but have just started reading his most recent one: Morality – Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times, which has had tremendous reviews and speaks to many of us far beyond the Jewish community. In this book he repeats something he said first at a TED talk in Canada in 2017 (you can Google the whole talk if you are interested) which I think rings even more true for us in the challenging circumstances of our world today. This is what he said:      

‘The paradoxical truth is that….the only people who will save us from ourselves is we the people, all of us together. And when we do that, and when we move from the politics of me to the politics of all of us together, we rediscover those beautiful, counter intuitive truths: that a nation is strong when it cares for the weak that it becomes rich when it cares for the poor, it becomes invulnerable when it cares about the vulnerable. That is what makes great nations.’

With every blessing

Mother Eileen