Lambeth - Rabbi Sir Jonathan Sacks, The Relationship between the People and God

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Lambeth Daily
Plenary Monday 28th July
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The Relationship between the People and God.
Lambeth Conference 28th July 2008

Rabbi Sir Jonathan Sacks. Chief Rabbi of the 
United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth

Your Grace, Your Graces and beloved friends,

I did actually say I wasn’t going to tell any 
stories but I am about to break my promise 
because I never knew it was going to be quite 
this hot. And it does remind me of one of my 
favourite stories of all about a really humid 
evening in the lower Eastside of New York where 
there was a Jewish restaurant and one of the 
unruly customers, feeling a little like you are 
feeling at the moment, called the waiter over and 
said ‘ Waiter it’s too hot in here – switch the 
air conditioning on’ and the waiter went 
off.   Ten minutes later he calls the waiter back 
‘Waiter it’s now too cold in here, switch the air 
conditioning off’ and the waiter goes out and ten 
minutes later he calls him back and he say ‘it’s 
now too hot in here – turn the air conditioning 
on again’ and the waiter is just about to leave 
for a third time and one of the customers near 
the door says ‘Waiter, I feel so sorry for you, 
that man must be driving you mad and the waiter 
replies ‘No, actually I’m driving him mad – you 
see there is no air conditioning.’

But Friends -- this is for me personally  a 
profoundly moving moment. You have invited me, a 
Jew, to join your deliberations, and I thank you 
for that, and for all it implies. There is a lot 
of history between our two faiths, and for me to 
stand here, counting as I do  His Grace the 
Archbishop of Canterbury and the Archbishop of 
York as cherished and beloved colleagues, is I 
believe a signal of hope for our children and for our world.

The sages of Judaism of 2000 years ago said, who 
is a hero? Not one who defeats his enemy but one 
who turns an enemy into a friend. That is what 
has happened between Jews and Christians: 
strangers have become friends. And so I think on 
this maybe, I’m not sure, the first occasion a 
rabbi has addressed a plenary session of the 
Lambeth Conference, I want to thank God in the 
words of our traditional Jewish 
prayer,  Shehecheyanu vekiyemanu vehigiyanu 
lazman hazeh. Thank You, God, for bringing us to this time.

I

Friends you have asked me to speak about 
covenant, and that is what I am going to do. We 
will discover in covenant, not only a 
transformative idea, an idea  that changes us as 
we think of it;  and it is not only a way forward 
for faith in the 21st century. But we will also 
find ourselves, when we think about it, better 
able to answer the question: what is the role of 
religion in society, even in a secular society like Britain today.

And I want to begin a little journey with the 
place we passed on that wonderful march we did 
together last Thursday, in Westminster. It was 
such a beautiful day, was it not a beautiful day, 
and it was such a lovely day  that I kind of 
imagined meeting up with my little granddaughter 
on the way back and taking her to see some of the 
sights of London.  And we’d begin where we were, 
outside Parliament, and I imagine her asking what 
happens there, Szaba Grandpa what happens there 
and I'd say what happens there is politics. And 
she'd say, what's politics about, and I'd say: 
it's about the creation and distribution of power.

             And then we'd go to the city, and 
see the Bank of England, and she'd ask what 
happens there and I'd say what happens there is 
economics. And she'd say: what's economics about, 
and I would say economics is about the creation and distribution of wealth.

And then on our way back we'd pass St Paul's 
Cathedral, and she'd ask, what happens there, and 
I'd say what happens there is worship. And she'd 
ask: What does worship produce, create and 
distribute? And that's a good question, because 
you see for the past 50 years, our lives have 
been dominated by those two other institutions: 
politics and economics, the state and the market, 
the logic of power and the logic of wealth. The 
state is us in our collective capacity. The 
market is us as individuals. And the debate has 
been for the past fifty years: which of the two 
is more effective? The left tends to favour the 
state. The right tends to favour the market. And 
there are endless shadings in between.

But that leaves out of the equation a third 
phenomenon of the utmost importance, and I want 
to explain why. The state is about power. The 
market is about wealth. And they’re are two ways 
of getting people to do what we want them to do. 
One of them is to force them to do it  – the way 
of power. The other one is to pay them to – the way of wealth.

But there is a third way, and to see exactly what 
makes the third way different from the other two 
I just want to do a little elementary arithmetic 
with you because elementary arithmetic is about 
as much as I can do. Even my mobile phone gives 
me an inferiority complex so higher mathematics 
is not my style but here it is.  Imagine, for a 
moment, you have total power, and then, in the 
fit of craziness you decide to share it with nine 
other people. How much power do you have 
left?  You have 1/10 of what you began with. 
Supposing you have a thousand pounds, and you 
decide to share it with nine other people. How 
much do you have left? 1/10 of what you had when you began.

But now supposing that you decide to share, not 
power or wealth, but love, or friendship, or 
influence, or even knowledge and you decided to 
share those, with nine others. How much would you 
have left? Would you have less than when you 
began? No, you would have more; and why is that - 
Because love, friendship and influence are things 
that only exist by virtue of sharing them with 
others. And those are the goods I call covenantal 
goods – covenantal goods are the goods that, the 
more I share, the more I have. And that makes 
covenant different from wealth and power.

In the short term wealth and power are zero-sum 
games. That means if I win, you lose. If you win, 
I lose. Covenantal goods are non-zero-sum games, 
meaning, we both win, The more I give away the 
more I have – we both win. And that has huge consequences.

Because you can see with wealth and power, 
economic and politics, the market and the state, 
they must be – they cannot be other than arenas 
of competition,  - that’s right that’s good but 
covenantal goods are arenas of co-operation.

And the question is where will we find covenantal 
goods like love, like friendship, like trust, 
like influence? You won’t find them in the state, 
you won’t find them in the market, you will find 
them in marriages, in families, in congregations, 
in communities – you will find them in 
society,  so long as you remember that society is 
something different from the state.

And that is one way of seeing what is key to 
government. You see there are two words that 
sound as if they were almost the same but they 
are actually very different. I mean the word 
contract and I mean the word covenant.

What’s a contract, a contract is an agreement 
between two or more individuals, each pursuing 
their own interest, and they come together to 
make an exchange for mutual benefit. And so you 
get a commercial contract that creates the 
market, and you get the social contract that creates the state.

A covenant is something different. In a covenant, 
two or more individuals, each respecting the 
dignity and the integrity of the other, come 
together in a bond of love and trust, to share 
their interests, sometimes even to share their 
lives, by pledging our faithfulness to one 
another, to do together what neither of us can do alone.

And that is not the same as a contract at all. A 
contract is a transaction. but a covenant is a 
relationship. Or to put it slightly differently: 
a contract is about interests. but a covenant is 
about identity. And that is why contracts benefit, but covenants transform.

And there it is – as simply as I can put it. 
Economics and politics are about the logic of 
competition, Covenant is about the logic of co-operation.

II

And now I  want to ask a very fundamental 
question, why is it that societies cannot exist 
without co-operation? Why is it that state and 
market alone cannot sustain a society?

And the answer to that is an absolutely 
fascinating story, and it begins with Charles Darwin.

Charles Darwin, if I understand him correctly in 
his book ‘The Descent of Man’ identified a 
problem that he could not solve. According to 
Darwin if I understand him correctly  all life 
evolves by natural selection, which means, by 
competition for scarce resources: food, shelter and the like.

If so, you would expect to find all societies 
valuing the most competitive, maybe even the most 
ruthless individuals .That is what you would 
expect in a Darwinian universe. But  what Darwin 
himself noticed is that it isn't so. In fact, in 
every society of which he knew, it was the most 
altruistic individuals who were the most highly 
valued , not the most competitive. Or, if I can 
put it in the language of Richard Dawkins - the 
paradox is that a bundle of selfish genes get 
together to produce selfless people. That is the 
paradox – how does it happen? That paradox lay unsolved until the late 1970s.

And it was then that three very different 
disciplines converged: one was sociobiology, 
another was a branch of mathematics called games 
theory, and the third was a high-speed computer 
simulation, and they produced something called 
the iterated prisoner's dilemma. If you really 
want to stop a conversation say the words 
‘iterated prisoners’ dilemma’ and they will all start looking for the door.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, what they 
discovered was this that natural selection – yes 
–it  works through the genes of individuals, 
individuals – but individuals, certainly in the 
higher life-forms -- survive only because they 
are parts of groups. And groups only survive on 
the basis of reciprocity and trust, and what I 
have called covenant, the logic of co-operation- 
without co-operation no group and you need a 
group to survive. One human being versus one 
lion, the lion wins. Ten human beings versus one 
lion, and the humans are in with a chance.

And it turns out. It turns out that the very 
things that make Homo sapiens different – our use 
of language, and the size of our brains, even the 
moral sense itself – all of these  have to do 
with the ability to form and sustain groups and 
this phenomenon is called by: 
neo-Darwinians  reciprocal altruism. Sociologists 
call it trust. Economists call it social capital. 
And it is one of the great intellectual 
discoveries of our time. Individuals need groups. 
Groups need co-operation. And co-operation needs 
covenant, bonds of reciprocity and trust.

Traditionally, that was and I believe still is 
the domain of religion. That is what religions 
create and distribute. The very word 'religion' 
itself, as you know, comes from a Latin root 
meaning 'to bind' people or things together. And 
everybody knew this – it’s just that they forgot 
it.  And whether we take someone conservative 
like Edmund Burke, or a radical like Thomas 
Paine, or a social scientist like Emil Durkheim, 
or simply insightful like Alexis de Tocqueville, 
they all saw this. And now it has been 
scientifically demonstrated. If you only have 
competition but not co-operation, if you only 
have the state and the market and not covenant, then society will not survive.

What then happens to society when religion wanes 
and there is nothing covenantal to take its place?

What happens is that relationships break down. 
Marriage grows weak. Families become fragile. 
Communities atrophy. And the result is that 
people feel vulnerable and alone. And they turn 
those feelings outward, and the result is often 
anger which, God forbid, can become violence.  Or 
they can turn those feelings inward, and the 
result, God forbid, is depression, stress related 
syndromes, eating disorders, and drug and alcohol 
abuse. What happens when religion wanes when 
covenant wanes is that you will find spiritual 
poverty in the midst of material affluence.

It doesn't happen all at once, but it happens 
slowly, gradually and inexorably. Societies 
without covenants and without institutions needed 
to inspire and sustain them, gradually 
disintegrate. And the result is a loss of freedom 
and the loss of the dimension of graciousness in 
our lives together. So that is where we are and 
where we are headed – God forbid.

III

And now let's go back to where it all began.

In the ancient Near East, - you know there in the 
ancient Near East covenants existed in the form 
of treaties between tribes or states and they had 
very little to do with religion. To the contrary, 
in the ancient world, religion was about politics 
and economics, religion was about  power and 
wealth. After all the gods were the supreme 
powers. They were also the controllers of wealth, 
in the form of rain and earth and harvests. So, 
if you wanted power or you wanted wealth, you had to get the gods on your side.

The idea that there could be a covenant between 
God and humanity must have seemed absurd. If you 
had told people there could be, between the 
Infinite and the finite, between the eternal and 
the ephemeral, a bond of love and trust, they 
would say to you what my office often says to me 
‘Chief Rabbi  go and lie down until the mood passes.

And if you had gone further and said that God 
loves, not the wealthy and the powerful, but the 
poor and the powerless, they would have thought 
you were mad. But that was the idea that transformed the world.

Covenant is a key word of Tenach, the Hebrew 
Bible, where it occurs more than 250 times. No 
one put it more simply than the prophet Hosea, in 
words which men say every weekday morning when we

  start of our prayers:

I will betroth you to me forever;
I will betroth you to me in righteousness and justice, love and compassion.

I will betroth you to me in faithfulness,
and you shall know the LORD.

That is covenant – a betroth -  a bond of love 
and trust. And the prophet Jeremiah, who in the 
name of God so beautifully spelled out the result 
in a line we read out this Saturday in our synagogues:

I remember the kindness of your youth,
the love of your betrothal,
how you were willing to follow me into the desert,
into an unknown, unsown land.

Covenant is what allows us to face the future 
without fear, because we know we are not alone. 
The purest line of covenant says

'Even though I walk through the valley of the 
shadow of death, I will fear no evil for You are 
with me.' Covenant is the redemption of solitude.

IV

Now there are in the Books of Genesis and Exodus three covenants.

Number 1 in Genesis 9, is the covenant with Noah 
and through him with all humanity.

Number 2 in Genesis 17, God’s covenant with Abraham.

Number 3 in Exodus chapters 19-24, God’s covenant 
with the Israelites in the days of Moses and none 
supersedes or replaces the others. And without 
going into detail, I want to look at one 
significant difference between them – between the 
Noah covenant and the Abrahamic and the Sinai covenants.

And to explain this difference I have to use a 
distinction that we owe to a man whom I regard as 
the greatest Jewish thinker of the 20th century, 
his name may not be familiar to you, it was Rabbi 
Joseph Soloveitchik. I want to explain the 
distinction he made between two kinds of covenant.

             And the simplest way of approaching 
it is to ask you a very simple question: when, 
according to the Bible  did the Israelites become 
a nation?  You will find in the Bible two 
apparently contradictory answers to that. If you 
look at Deuteronomy  chapter 26: in the 
declaration an Israelite had to make when 
bringing the first fruits to the Temple he made a 
declaration ‘ my Father was a wandering Aramenian 
and he went down to Egypt and there they became a 
nation'. According to Deuternomy 26 the 
Israelites became a nation in Egypt when they 
were slaves. And then of course according to 
Exodus chapter 19 they only became a nation 
when  they left Egypt and stood at the foot of 
Mount Sinai, and accepted a covenant with God to 
become a Kingdom of priests in the Holy Nation'. 
So where did they become a Nation in Egypt or only when they left.

             Rabbi Soloveitchik said in a 
Rabbinical way they are both true, but they 
involve different kinds of covenant. There is, he 
said, a covenant of fate and there is a covenant 
of faith, and they are different things.

A group can be bound in the covenant of fate when 
the members of that group suffer together, 
or  when they face a common enemy. They have 
shared tears, they have shared fears, they have 
shared responsibility. They huddle together for 
comfort and mutual protection. That is a covenant of fate.

A covenant of faith is different. That is made by 
people who share dreams, aspirations, ideals. 
They don't need a common enemy, because they have 
a common hope. They come together to create 
something new. They are defined not by what 
happens to them by fate but by what they commit 
themselves to do. That is a covenant of faith.

And now we can immediately understand how the 
Israelites had not one foundational moment but 
two, number 1 in Egypt and number two at Sinai. 
In Egypt they became a nation bound by a covenant 
of fate -- a fate of slavery and suffering. But 
at Sinai they became a nation bound by a covenant 
of faith, defined by the Torah and by it’s 
commands. And that distinction is vital to what I have to say today.

I puzzled about this -  that distinction that 
Rabbi Soloveitchik made is so fundamental and it 
so obviously fits how come know one said it or at 
least no one said it so explicitly before, in 
4000 years of Jewish history – how could that 
insight come about only in the lifetime of Rabbi 
Soloveitchik by which, in effect, I mean after 
the 1940s? And the answer is obvious it lies in one word: Holocaust.

You see at the level of faith, in the 19th and 
20th centuries Jews were deeply divided. But in 
the Holocaust they shared the same fate, Orthodox 
and non-Orthodox, religious or secular, 
identifying or totally assimilated. What 
Soloveitchik was doing, within a deeply 
fragmented Jewish world, was to rescue some sense 
of solidarity with the victims – a covenant of 
fate. As soon as we have made this distinction we 
can state a proposition of the utmost importance.

V

If you read Genesis and Exodus superficially, it 
looks as if the three covenants on the one hand 
Noah, and on the other hand Abraham Moses and 
Sinai they look as if they are  the same sort of 
thing but  actually if you think about it 
now  you will see that they are not the same kind of thing at all.

The covenant with Abraham and the covenant with 
Sinai were covenants of faith about believing in 
the one God and about keeping his laws. But if 
you look at Genesis 9  the covenant of Noah says 
not one word  about faith. The world had been 
almost destroyed by a flood. All mankind, all 
life, excluding Noah's Ark, shared the same fate. 
Humanity after the Flood was like the Jewish 
people after the Holocaust. The covenant of Noah 
was not a covenant of faith but a covenant of fate.

God says: I promise I will never again destroy 
the world.  But I cannot promise that you will 
never destroy the world -- because you see I gave 
you free will. All I can do is teach you how not to destroy the world. How?

The covenant of Noah has, I think,  three 
essential dimensions. Number one: 'He who sheds 
the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, 
for in the image of God, He made man -. the sanctity of human life.

Number 2: Look carefully at Genesis 9 and you 
will see that Noah spent five times in that one 
chapter emphasizing that God insists that the 
covenant of Noah is not merely with humanity 
alone, but with everything that lives on the face 
of earth. Five times - the covenant is not with 
human beings but with all of nature. So the 
second element of the covenant of Noah is the 
integrity of the created world -  what we call today The Environment.

And Number 3: the sign of the covenant, which is 
a rainbow, the white,  the light of God 
fragmented into all the colours of the spectrum, 
or as I put in the title of one of my books ‘The 
dignity of difference’.    The miracle of 
monotheism is that unity up there creates 
diversity down here. And those three elements, 
the sanctity of human life, the integrity of the 
environment and respect for diversity are the 
three elements of the global covenant of fate 
that God made with Noah and still makes with us.

You know here is a famous prophecy in the 11th 
chapter of Isaiah, you know this as well as we 
do, what is it that one day the wolf will lie 
down with the lamb. I don think it’s happened yet 
(although  I did hear about a zoo in Los Angeles 
where they had a cage where the wolf lies down 
with the lamb and one visitor asked the zoo 
keeper - How do you do that?   The zookeeper 
said: 'Easy  – you just need a new lamb every day').

Actually, for instance there was once, when the 
wolf did lie down with the lamb. Where was that? 
And the answer is in Noah's Ark. And why did the 
wolf lie down with the lamb. Not because they 
liked one another, but because otherwise they 
would drown. That is the covenant of fate – that 
is the global covenant of human solidarity and 
you will note the covenant of fate precedes the 
covenant of faith because faith is always particular but fate is universal.

VI

And with that, I come to the present. We are 
living through one of the most fateful ages of 
change since Homo sapiens first set foot on 
earth. Globalisation and the new information 
technologies are changing everything in our world 
in ways we cannot possibly predict but we can say 
what they are doing already. They are doing two 
things simultaneously. Number One: they are 
fragmenting our world into ever smaller pieces 
into ever smaller sects of the like minded. And 
Number Two:  In the opposite direction 
globalisation is also thrusting us together as 
never before in history. The destruction of a 
rainforests there adds to global warming 
everywhere. Political conflict in one place can 
create a terrorist incident thousands of miles 
away. Poverty there moves consciences here. At 
the very moment that covenants of faith are 
breaking apart, the covenant of fate is forcing 
us together -- and we have not yet proved equal to it.

             All three elements of the global 
covenant are in danger. The sanctity of human 
life is being ravaged by political oppression and 
by terror. The integrity of creation is being 
threatened by environmental catastrophe. And the 
respect for diversity is imperiled by what one 
writer has called a clash of civilisations. And 
to repeat -- the covenant of fate precedes the 
covenant of faith. Because before we can live any 
faith we have to be able to live. And we have to 
have to honour our covenant with future 
generations so that they will be able to 
live.  And that is the call of God in our times.

VII

Friends,  friends I stand before you as a Jew, 
which means not just as an individual, but as a 
representative of my people. And as I prepared 
this lecture, within my soul were the tears of my 
ancestors. We may have forgotten , but for a 
thousand years, between the First Crusade and the 
Holocaust, the word 'Christian' struck fear into 
Jewish hearts. I think of the words the Jewish 
encounter with Christianity added to the 
vocabulary of human pain: blood libel, 
disputations, forced conversions, inquisition, 
auto da fe, expulsion, ghetto and pogrom.

And I could not stand here today in total 
openness, and not mention that book of Jewish tears.
And I have asked myself, what would our ancestors want of us today?

And the answer to that lies in the scene that 
brings Genesis to a climax and a closure. You 
remember the scene: it happens after the death of 
Jacob, and the brothers fear that Joseph will 
take revenge. After all, they had sold him into slavery in Egypt.

Instead, Joseph forgives -- but he does much more 
than  forgive. I want us to listen carefully to his words:  He said

You intended to harm me,
but God intended it for good,
to do what is now being done,
to save many lives.

Joseph does more than forgive. He says look, out 
of all that bad has come good. It has allowed me 
to save many lives. Which lives was he referring 
to?  He was certainly not to the lives of his 
brothers only, he was referring to the lives of 
the Egyptians, the lives of strangers. And look 
he says I have been able to feed the hungry. I 
have been able to honour the covenant of fate -- 
and by honouring the covenant of fate between him 
and strangers, Joseph was able to mend the broken 
covenant of faith between him and his brothers.

In effect, Joseph says to his brothers: we cannot 
unwrite the past, but we can redeem that past – 
if we take our tears and use them to sensitise us to the tears of others.

And I want you now to see a remarkable thing. 
Just think carefully about the Book of Genesis. 
Although Genesis is centrally about the covenant 
of faith between God and Abraham,  none the less 
it begins and ends with the covenant of fate: it 
begins the covenant in the days of Noah, and it ends with Joseph.

Look at the similarities and the differences both 
of these lives both of these covenantal moments 
involve water: in the case of Noah, there is too 
much, a flood; in the case of Joseph, too little, a drought.

Both involve saving human life. But look at the 
difference. In human terms Noah saves only his 
family. Joseph saves a whole nation – a nation of strangers, not his people.

Both involve forgiveness. But in the story of 
Noah it is God that forgives. In the story of 
Joseph, it is a human being who forgives.

And both involve a relationship with the past. In 
the case of Noah, the past is obliterated. In the 
case of Joseph, the past is redeemed.

VIII

In the case of Jews and Christians, that past is 
being redeemed. In 1942, in the midst of 
humanity's darkest night, a great Archbishop of 
Canterbury, William Temple, and a great Chief 
Rabbi, J. H. Hertz, came together in a momentous 
covenant of fate, called the Council of 
Christians and Jews. And since then, Jews and 
Christians have done more to mend their 
relationship than any other two faiths on earth, 
and today we meet as beloved friends.

And now we must extend that friendship more 
widely. We must renew the global covenant of 
fate, the covenant that began with Noah and 
reached a climax in the work of Joseph, the work of saving many lives.

And friends, that is what we began to do last 
Thursday when we walked side-by-side: Christians, 
Jews, Sikhs, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Jains, 
Zoroastrians and Baha'i. And yes we don’t share a 
faith, but we surely share a fate. Because 
whatever our faith or lack of faith, hunger still 
hurts, disease still strikes, poverty still 
disfigures, and hate still kills.  And few put it 
better than that great Christian poet, John 
Donne, the perfect epitomy of the covenant of 
fate: 'Every man's death diminishes me, for I am involved in mankind.'

Friends, if you have a chance to look  at Genesis 
50, you will see that just before he says the 
great words of reconciliation, the text says: 
'Joseph wept.' Why did Joseph weep? He wept for 
all the needless pain he and his brothers had 
caused one another. And shall we not weep when we 
see the immense challenges that humanity has been 
faced with in the 21st century – the challenge of 
poverty, hunger, disease, of environmental 
catastrophe. And what has the face religion all 
too often shown to the world? The face of 
conflict -- between faiths, and sometimes within faiths.

And we, Jews and Christians, who have worked so 
hard and so effectively at reconciliation, and 
reached it, we must now take the lead in showing 
the world there is another way.: the way of the 
covenant of fate - honouring humanity as God's 
image, protecting the environment as God's 
creation, respecting diversity as God's will, 
keeping the covenant as God's word.

Friends, too long we have dwelt in the valley of tears.
Let us walk together towards the mountain of the Lord,
Side-by-side,
Hand in hand,
bound by a covenant of fate that has the power to turn strangers into friends.
In an age of fear, let us be agents of hope.
Together let us be a blessing to the world.

Thank you.