Download Ebook Essays on Ethics: A Weekly Reading of the Jewish Bible, by Jonathan Sacks

Download Ebook Essays on Ethics: A Weekly Reading of the Jewish Bible, by Jonathan Sacks

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Essays on Ethics: A Weekly Reading of the Jewish Bible, by Jonathan Sacks

Download Ebook Essays on Ethics: A Weekly Reading of the Jewish Bible, by Jonathan Sacks

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About the Author

Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks is one of the world's leading Jewish thinkers and moral voices of our time, laureate of the 2016 Templeton Prize. Educated at Cambridge University and Jews' College London, Rabbi Sacks served as chief rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth from 1991 until 2013. The author of numerous books on Jewish thought, his work has included a new English translation and commentary for the Koren Sacks Siddur, the first new Orthodox siddur in a generation, as well as powerful commentaries for the Rosh HaShana, Yom Kippur, Pesah, and Shavuot Mahzorim.

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Product details

Hardcover: 384 pages

Publisher: Maggid (September 15, 2016)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 159264449X

ISBN-13: 978-1592644490

Product Dimensions:

5.9 x 1.3 x 8.6 inches

Shipping Weight: 4.5 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)

Average Customer Review:

5.0 out of 5 stars

35 customer reviews

Amazon Best Sellers Rank:

#472,770 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Out of the enormous tragedy of the Holocaust, God has raised up out of his chosen people in the United Kingdom the prolific Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks (born in 1948; married in 1970), the recipient of the 2016 Templeton Prize, who did his undergraduate studies in philosophy at Cambridge University and his doctoral studies in philosophy at Oxford University in 1981-- in political philosophy – and his rabbinical studies at the Jews’ College and Yeshivat Etz Chaim in London.Rabbi Sacks’ new book is titled Essays on Ethics: A Weekly Reading of the Jewish Bible (2016). It includes a foreword by former Senator Joseph I. Lieberman. Unfortunately, it does not include an index. But an index or two would enhance its value.If you like truth in advertising, then I should tell you that the main title and the subtitle accurately advertise the truth of this book. It consists of readings/commentaries on selections from the Hebrew Bible, with special attention to discussing ethics -- and social and political history and philosophy. At times, Rabbi Sacks’ comments involve close etymological and grammatical analysis of certain Hebrew words, which I always find informative and instructive.As I say, Rabbi Sacks always begins with a selected passage from the Hebrew Bible. He explicates its wording and usually tells us how it has been interpreted in different ways over the centuries by various Jewish interpreters. But then he adds his creative interpretation. His creative interpretation is always fun to read. You will probably not be bored by his creative interpretations.But stand forewarned. Rabbi Sacks often refers to Rambam and to Ramban.Rambam is Rabbi Moses ben Maimon, or Maimonides, 1135-1204 (page 4).Ramban is Rabbi Moses ben Nahman, or Nahmanides, 1194-1270 (page 15).Rabbi Sacks’ accessible new book Essays on Ethics is probably not in danger of becoming a best-seller in the United States.My, oh my, Rabbi Sacks is not going to be popular with the political-correctness crowd.In Rabbi Sacks’ estimate, the bonds of collective loyalty were “weakened by the individualism of the 1960s and further damaged by the ill-thought-out multiculturalism of the 1980s” (page xxxiv). We might wonder what a well-thought-out multiculturalism would be.Rabbi Sacks also says, “Community is the antidote to individualism on the one hand and overreliance on the state on the other” (page 143). He credits Alexis de Tocqueville with coining the term “individualism” (page 296). (Individualism in the pejorative sense should not be confused with individuation and individuality.)Rabbi Sacks also says, “In Judaism, it is as a community that we come before God. For us the key relationship is not I-Thou, but We-Thou” (page 143).But Rabbi Sacks says that “the love of God is particular. It is an I-Thou personal relationship” (page 22).Later in his book, Rabbi Sacks says, “One of the aftermaths of Marxism, persisting in such movements as postmodernism and postcolonialism, is the idea that there is no such thing as truth. There is only power. The prevailing ‘discourse’ in a society represents not the way things are, but the way the ruling power (the hegemon) wants things to be. All reality is ‘socially constructed’ to advance the interests of one group or another. The result is a ‘hermeneutic of suspicion,’ in which we no longer listen to what anyone says; we merely ask what interest they are trying to advance. Truth, they say, is merely the mask worn to disguise the pursuit of power. To overthrow a ‘colonial’ power, you have to invent your own ‘discourse,’ your own ‘narrative,’ and it does not matter whether it is true or false. All that matters is that people believe it” (page 242).Now, Aristotle wrote a famous treatise ethics known as the Nicomachean Ethics. But I want to discuss his treatise on civic rhetoric. In it he discusses three different kinds of civic rhetoric: (1) deliberative rhetoric in legislative assemblies, (2) forensic rhetoric in courts of law, and (3) epideictic rhetoric in public ceremonies involving personal and civic values (such as funeral orations).Both Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and Rabbi Sacks’ Essays on Ethics involve epideictic rhetoric about personal and civic values.I should also say that the Hebrew Bible at times features certain passages that biblical scholars refer to as lawsuits, because the passages seem to be conducted as claims and counter-claims in a court of law (Aristotle’s forensic rhetoric). Of course the Hebrew Bible famously features the Mosaic law, as it is called. Incidentally, Moses is not initially portrayed in the Hebrew Bible as a charismatic speaker, but he becomes an effective speaker later on.Make no mistake about it, Rabbi Sacks is British. But he has not neglected to study our American cultural heritage – especially the Calvinists in New England.In his new book The Kingdom of Speech, Tom Wolfe, who holds a Ph.D. in American studies from Yale, lists John Calvin as one of the six most influential persons in world history.The Calvinists in New England came from East Anglia. At the time, Ramist dialectic dominated the curriculum at Cambridge University in East Anglia. Peter Ramus (1515-1572), the French logician and educational reformer and Protestant martyr, was a French Calvinist.The American Jesuit cultural historian and theorist Walter J. Ong’s family ancestors left East Anglia on the same ship that brought Roger Williams to Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1631.Almost all the college-educated men in New England in the seventeenth century were Ramists.When Harvard College was founded in 1636, Ramist dialectic dominated the curriculum.Rabbi Sacks says, “The early settlers were Puritans, in the Calvinist tradition, the closest Christianity came to basing its politics on the Hebrew Bible” (page 92). Elsewhere he characterizes them as steeped in the Hebrew Bible (page 290). No doubt they were steeped in the Hebrew Bible.Rabbi Sacks notes in passing that the Gutenberg printing press emerged in Western culture in the mid-fifteenth century (pages 65 and 81).But Rabbi Sacks does not happen to advert explicitly to Ong’s massively researched book Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason (Harvard University Press, 1958).Rabbi Sacks also does not happen to advert explicitly to the Jewish Harvard sociologist David Riesman’s widely known book The Lonely Crowd: A Study in the Changing American Character (Yale University Press, 1950). In it Riesman discusses three broad character types: (1) outer-directed (also known as tradition-directed), (2) inner-directed, and (3) other-directed. He favors inner-directed types, and he is skeptical about the then-emerging other-directed types.Nevertheless, Rabbi Sacks uses the terminology outer-directed and inner-directed (page 179).Because Rabbi Sacks is conspicuously a Brit, I want to quote one of the more memorable comments he makes: “England is, or was until recently, a tradition-based society” (page 92). It fell to all those British colonists in New England and elsewhere to make American culture famous for producing inner-directed persons. He credits this remarkable development to the Puritans’ fascination with the Hebrew Bible.Rabbi Sacks connects outer-directed types with shame cultures, and inner-directed types with guilt cultures. On the whole, the ancient Hebrews portrayed in the Hebrew Bible pioneered guilt culture – amid a sea of shame cultures in the ancient world.Now, Rabbi Sacks explicitly says, “Jewish thought is counter-philosophical” (page 167) to distinguish it from the Western philosophical tradition of thought.Rabbi Sacks says, “The Jewish mystics, among them Rabbi Shneur Zalman, spoke about two souls that each of us has – the animal soul (nefesh habehemit) and the Godly soul. On the one hand we are physical beings. We are part of nature. We have physical needs: food, drink, shelter. We are born, we live, we die.”He then quotes a passage from Ecclesiastes 3:19 about our animal nature.“Yet we are not simply animals. We have within us immortal longings. We can think, speak, and communicate. We can, by acts of speaking and listening, reach out to others.”I have here quoted from page 154.Rabbi Sacks also mentions “what the Jewish mystics called the nefesh habehemit, the animal soul” parenthetically on page 13.Even though Rabbi Sacks claims that “Jewish thought is counter-philosophical,” I learned in my studies of Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophy at Saint Louis University, where I took English courses from Ong, how to distinguish the specifically human soul from the infra-human soul of the human animal – a distinction that parallels Rabbi Sacks’ distinction. Methinks he doth protest too much about how counter-philosophical Jewish thought is.For example, Rabbi Sacks discusses Rambam’s “two quite different ways of living the moral life”: the way of the saint and the way of the sage (page 223). “The sage follows the ‘golden mean,’ the ‘middle way’ [between the extremes]” (page 223). Rabbi Sacks says, “This is very similar to the vision of the moral life as set out by Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics” (page 223; also see page 246). True enough. However, because Aristotle is a philosopher, the parallel between Rambam’s way of the sage and Aristotle’s vision of the moral life does not exactly support Rabbi Sacks’ claim that “Jewish thought is counter-philosophical.I can attest from the courses in Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophy that I took at Saint Louis University that St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) was a medieval Aristotelian whose vision of the moral life also included the golden mean between the extremes.Before the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) in the Roman Catholic Church down-sized Thomism, many American Catholic undergraduates at Catholic colleges and universities in the United States studied Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophy as part of the required core curriculum and studied Aristotelian-Thomistic ethics.In conclusion, if Americans today are interested in the thought of a Brit born and raised in the tradition-based society of England, they might fascinated with Rabbi Sacks’ creative interpretations of the Hebrew Bible and political thought in Western culture.

Rabbi Sacks is always wonderful in his insights and this book outdoes even his stellar record. Each chapter corresponds to a chapter in the Torah. A perfect book for discussion around the Sabbath table as well as for people who are not religious but are concerned with leading an ethical liefe..

A vital work Rabbi Sacks, the author of "To Heal a Fractured World:,The Ethics of Responsibility." Together, a reader can find a world-class course on serving humanity and making a difference.

I am a big fan of reading Jewish Theology and Philosophy even though I am a Christian. I have found some profound insights into life and the Bible through exploring those outside of my own tradition. I recommend this book to anyone who wants to understand the "why" of some passages in the Torah. Rabbi Sachs writes in a way that is accessible to the layman, but deep enough to inform even those familiar with the Torah and Biblical ethics.

As a secular, cultural Jewish male I went through the years of Hebrew school before my Bar Mitzvah without knowing very much about what the Torah meant or stood for. We concentrated, like many I'm sure, on learning, by rote, the ritual, but not the "back story." Rabbi Sacks' book is that "back story" I missed then and have missed since. I can't thank him enough.

Rabbi Sacks' writings have helped me tremendously to recapture the relevance of spirituality in my day-to-day life and outlook.

Excellently written, the essays are are engaging and though provoking. It brings the weekly biblical portion (Parsha) to life. It makes you be connected to Judaism and to live life authentically. At the same it asks tough questions that may come up when reading the Parsha.

Rabbi Sacks is a wonderful writing with a sharp mind. If you've ever struggled with violence within the Hebrew Bible then this is a great resource. Rabbi Sacks brings new perspectives to a number of stories within the text that illuminates old stories in a new way. Absolutely terrific series!

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