This collection makes Rabbi Jonathan Sacks' brilliant essays on the weekly Torah portion available in book form for the first time. Rabbi Sacks fuses Jewish tradition, Western philosophy and literature to present a highly developed understanding of the human condition under God's sovereignty. This first volume in the five-volume series includes several concise essays for each parasha of Bereshit.

This collection makes Rabbi Jonathan Sacks’ brilliant essays on the weekly Torah portion available in book form for the first time. Rabbi Sacks fuses Jewish tradition, Western philosophy and literature to present a highly developed understanding of the human condition under God’s sovereignty. This final volume of the series contains several concise essays for each parasha of Deuteronomy.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth in the United Kingdom offers a refreshing and insightful commentary to the Koren Haggada, together with illuminating essays on the themes and motifs of the Festival of Freedom. Sensitively translated, the traditional texts are carefully balanced alongside the Chief Rabbi's contemporary ideas, in a modern and user-friendly design. With new interpretations and in-depth analyses of the Passover liturgy an...

Writing with his usual grace and fluency, Jonathan Sacks moves beyond the tired arguments of militant atheists such as Dawkins and Hitchens, to explore how religion has always played a valuable part in human culture and far from being dismissed as redundant, must be allowed to temper and develop scientific understanding in order for us to be fully human. Ranging around the world to draw comparisons from different cultures, and delving deep into the history of language and of western civili...

We are living through a period of cultural climate change. We have outsourced morality to the markets on the one hand, and the state on the other. The markets have brought wealth to many, and the state has done much to contain the worst excesses of inequality, but neither is capable of bearing the moral weight of showing us how to live.This has had a profound impact on society and the way in which we interact with each other. Traditional values no longer hold, yet ...

What is Judaism? A religion? A faith? A way of life? A set of beliefs? A collection of commands? A culture? A civilization? It is all these, but it is emphatically something more. It is a way of thinking about life, a constellation of ideas. One might think that the ideas Judaism introduced into the world have become part of the common intellectual heritage of humankind, at least of the West. Yet this is not the case. Some of them have been lost over time; others the West never fully under...

Why was Abraham ordered to sacrifice his son? Was Jacob right in stealing the blessings? Why were we commanded to destroy Amalek? What was Moses’ sin in hitting the rock? And how did the Ten Commandments change the Jewish people, and humankind, for good?Essays on Ethics is the second companion volume to Rabbi Jonathan Sacks’s celebrated series Covenant & Conversation. Believing the Hebrew Bible to be the ultimate blueprint for Western morality, Rabbi Sacks embarks upon an ethical e...

Rabbi Sacks argues that preoccupation with self is a mistake and that ethics are concerned with the life we live together, talking with as much authority about Sigmund Freud or Karl Marx as he does about the Bible. With a new foreword by Rowan Williams.'The only force equal to a fundamentalism of hate is a counter-fundamentalism of love.'Jonathan Sacks was an outstanding moral authority of our time and bestselling author of The...

'Aims to define nothing less than a basis for religiously sensitive civilisation.'Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury'The Dignity of Difference has a central and compelling vision: the magnificence and inspiring human diversity of our world ... The Chief Rabbi has made a convincing case for respecting people of different faiths and creeds.' Jewish ChronicleThis r...

Time and again, in the midst of troubled times or facing difficult decisions, I’ve found the words of the weekly parasha giving me guidance – or, conversely, the events themselves granting me deeper insight into the Torah text. For that is what ‘Torah’ means: teaching, instruction, guidance. Torah is a commentary on life, and life is a commentary on Torah. Together they constitute a conversation, each shedding light on the other. So wrote Rabbi Sacks in the introduction to his first collec...

Rabbi Sacks' thesis on the future of British society and the dangers facing liberal democracy. With a new foreword by Daniel Finkelstein.Arguing that global communications have fragmented national cultures and that multiculturalism, intended to reduce social frictions, is today reinforcing them, Sacks argues for a new approach to national identity, making the case for "integrated diversity" within a framework of shared political values.Brit...

For too long, Jews have defined themselves in light of the bad things that have happened to them. And it is true that, many times in the course of history, they have been nearly decimated: when the First and Second Temples were destroyed, when the Jews were expelled from Spain, when Hitler proposed his Final Solution. Astoundingly, the Jewish people have survived catastrophe after catastrophe and remained a thriving and vibrant community. The question Rabbi Jonathan Sacks asks is, quite si...