Food prices are often kept artificially high. The result is that the Millennium Development Goals set out by the United Nations at the start of the new millennium are not being reached. Fine words have not yet been turned into deeds.
— Jonathan Sacks
What I find fascinating about Hanukkah, the Jewish festival of lights we celebrate at this time of the year, is the way its story was transformed by time.
Religion creates community, community creates altruism and altruism turns us away from self and towards the common good... There is something about the tenor of relationships within a religious community that makes it the best tutorial in citizenship and good neighborliness.
In our interconnected world, we must learn to feel enlarged, not threatened, by difference - that is what I have argued.
Freedom begins with what we teach our children. That is why Jews became a people whose passion is education, whose heroes are teachers and whose citadels are schools.
We need to rediscover the idea of the common good and work together to build a home.
Europe is dying. That is one of the unsayable truths of our time. We are undergoing the moral equivalent of climate change and no one is talking about it.
There's always hope. You can lose everything else in the world, but Jews never lose hope.
People are feeling and sensing a return of anti-Semitism - even in Europe, which, seventy years after the Holocaust, is a very scary thing. I think they are feeling that Israel is very isolated and doesn't always get what they see as fair treatment in the European media.
I think our people in Britain have a normative expectation of ethical conduct.
Governments cannot make marriages or turn feckless individuals into responsible citizens. That needs another kind of change agent.
Technology gives us power, but it does not and cannot tell us how to use that power. Thanks to technology, we can instantly communicate across the world, but it still doesn't help us know what to say.
Religiosity turns out to be the best indicator of civic involvement: it's more accurate than education, age, income, gender or race.
Religion is the best antidote to the individualism of the consumer age. The idea that society can do without it flies in the face of history and, now, evolutionary biology.
The Hebrew Bible contains multiple provisions to ensure that no one would go hungry. The corners of the field, forgotten sheaves of grain, gleanings that drop from the hands of the gleaner, and small clusters of grapes left on the vine were to be given to the poor.
Jews survived all the defeats, expulsions, persecutions and pogroms, the centuries in which they were regarded as a pariah people, even the Holocaust itself, because they never gave up the faith that one day they would be free to live as Jews without fear.
The evidence shows that religious people - defined by regular attendance at a place of worship - actually do make better neighbors.
The message of Passover remains as powerful as ever. Freedom is won not on the battlefield but in the classroom and the home. Teach your children the history of freedom if you want them never to lose it.
Freedom is not won by merely overthrowing a tyrannical ruler or an oppressive regime. That is usually only the prelude to a new tyranny, a new oppression.
Cyberspace can't compensate for real space. We benefit from chatting to people face to face.
Parenthood involves massive sacrifice: money, attention, time and emotional energy.
The market economy is very good at wealth creation but not perfect at all about wealth distribution.
We believe that what we possess we don't ultimately own. God is merely entrusting it to us. And one of the conditions of that trust is that we share what we have with those who have less. So, if you don't give to people in need, you can hardly call yourself a Jew. Even the most unbelieving Jew knows that.
I do not want to suggest that you have to be religious to be moral.
Whole communities are growing up without fathers or male role models. Bringing up a family in the best of circumstances is not easy. To try to do it by placing the entire burden on women - 91% of single-parent families in Britain are headed by the mother, according to census data - is practically absurd and morally indefensible.
Science will explain how but not why. It talks about what is, not what ought to be. Science is descriptive, not prescriptive; it can tell us about causes but it cannot tell us about purposes. Indeed, science disavows purposes.
The people of Israel are entitled, as is any other nation, to live in peace and safety.
Since the 18th century, many Western intellectuals have predicted religion's imminent demise.
Close to a billion people - one-eighth of the world's population - still live in hunger. Each year 2 million children die through malnutrition. This is happening at a time when doctors in Britain are warning of the spread of obesity. We are eating too much while others starve.
Britain, relative to the U.S., is a highly secular society. Philanthropy alone cannot fill the gap left by government cutbacks. And the sources of altruism go deep into our evolutionary past.
I see in the rising crescendo of ethnic tensions, civilization clashes and the use of religious justification for acts of terror, a clear and present danger to humanity.
To defend a country you need an army, but to defend a civilization you need education.
We from every religion feel comfortable in Britain because there is a host. The Church of England is a good host, it has been a major force in shaping England into such a tolerant society.
God is back and Europe as a whole still doesn't get it. It is our biggest single collective cultural and intellectual blind spot.
Europe today is the most secular region in the world. Europe is the only region in the world experiencing population decline. Wherever you turn today the more religious the community, the larger on average are their families.
Islamophobia is a complex phenomenon.
With wealth comes responsibility.
Much can and must be done by governments, but they cannot of themselves change lives.
In virtually every Western society in the 1960s there was a moral revolution, an abandonment of its entire traditional ethic of self-restraint.
Religion survives because it answers three questions that every reflective person must ask. Who am I? Why am I here? How then shall I live?
The meaning of the universe lies outside the universe.
