“We will never forget you, we will never cease to mourn you, we will not let you down.” At the end of the book of Genesis, Joseph makes one deeply poignant request. Though I die in exile, God will bring you back to the land, and when he does so, vehaalitem et atzmotai mizeh, “Carry […]

To launch the new Koren-Sacks Shavuot machzor, Rabbi Sacks delivered a keynote shiur in London on 7 June 2016 to a packed room in Finchley United Synagogue. Rabbi Sacks talked about the similarities between Ruth and Tamar, and what we can learn from their experiences about our identity as a Jewish people. The event was […]

Hanukkah is the festival on which Jews celebrate their victory in the fight for religious freedom more than two thousand years ago. Tragically that fight is no less important today, and not only for Jews, but for people of all faiths. The Jewish story is simple enough. In around 165 BCE Antiochus IV, ruler of […]

God doesn’t expect us to be perfect, but when we err He expects us to do Teshuva. Free will can lead us to make a mistake but it can also lead us to repent. As we approach Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, join Rabbi Sacks on an intellectual journey to explore the concept and deep […]

Bamidbar takes up the story as we left it toward the end of Shemot. The people had journeyed from Egypt to Mount Sinai. There they received the Torah. There they made the Golden Calf. There they were forgiven after Moses’ passionate plea, and there they made the Mishkan, the Tabernacle, inaugurated on the first of […]

Many commentators, among them the Vilna Gaon, have drawn attention to the influence of the number four in connection with the Haggadah. There are four fours: The four questions The four sons The four cups of wine The four expressions of redemption: ‘I will bring you out from under the yoke of the Egyptians and […]

I don’t know whether you ever noticed, but teshuvah, the whole cycle of repentance and forgiveness, plays no part in the early dramas of humankind. It doesn’t in the story of Adam and Eve. As for Cain, God mitigates his punishment but he doesn’t forgive him for his crime. There is no call to repentance […]

Professor Reuven Feuerstein who died aged 92 in April 2014 was one of the great child psychologists of the world, a man who transformed lives and led severely brain-damaged children to achievements no one else thought possible. I knew him and admired him, and I was recording a tribute to him when his son told […]

There’s an old and totally apocryphal story about the nineteenth century French Jewish aristocrat Baron de Rothschild, whose wife was in her bedroom with a nurse, in the last stages of delivery while he was sitting downstairs playing a game of cards with his friends. Suddenly they heard her cry, ‘Mon Dieu, Mon Dieu.’ ‘Baron,’ […]

It’s strange, very strange. Rosh Hashanah is the beginning of the aseret yemei teshuvah, the ten days of repentance. We reflect on the past year, recall the bad we did and the good we failed to do, apologise, confess and ask for forgiveness. Yet there’s almost none of this on Rosh Hashanah. There is no confession, […]