Has Europe Lost its Soul? (Chief Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks)

your eminence your eminence is your excellences friends may I begin by thanking His Eminence Cardinal Kok not only for inviting me to deliver this lecture but being so graciously helpful throughout this trip and the private audience today with His Holiness I want to thank father France was a via du motier rector of the Gregorian University for his kind words of introduction as well as to thank father Phillip wrenches of the cardinal Barre Center for Judaic Studies and dr. ed Kessler of the Wolfe Institute in Cambridge for hosting this lecture and for all their support in arranging this visit these two institutions represent the best of European thought wisdom and spirituality and my hope is that through their collaborative work these two institutions will help build a European platform to showcase and apply the resources that this continent with its rich heritage has to offer to build a better future for this world and His Holiness the Pope this morning added his blessing to the work of your two organizations I'm also honored to see a number of ambassadors and other distinguished guests joining us here this evening I'm sorry I've just lost my identity I thank you all very much for coming so in case you are not familiar with the book of Exodus the second question Moses asked God at the burning bush was who are you but the first question he asked was me enoki Who am I and therefore thank you for reminding me as I will try and remind Europe of its identity friends I am speaking this evening it's a serious lecture so let me just begin with a slightly light word they say in Anglo jury that if the chief rabbi visits you in hospital you must be ill if the Chief Rabbi starts talking about the economy of Europe that too must be in need of a speedy recovery which I wish it with all my heart and soul friends as the political leaders of Europe come together to try to save the euro and with it the very project of European Union I believe the time has come for religious leaders to do likewise and I want to explain why what I want to show in this lecture is first the religious roots of the market economy and democratic capitalism they were produced by a culture saturated with the values of the judeo-christian heritage and market economics was originally intended to advance those values secondly the market never reaches stable equilibrium instead the market itself tends to undermine the very values but gave rise to it in the first place this is called creative destruction and we must constantly be on our guard against it thirdly the future health of Europe politically economically and culturally has a spiritual dimension lose that and we will lose much else beside to paraphrase a famous Christian text what will it profit Europe if it gains the whole world but loses its soul Europe today is in danger of losing its soul but let me first begin just with one simple remark about the relationship between the Vatican and the Jewish people the history of the relationship between the Catholic Church and the Jews was not always a happy one too often it was written in tears yet something extraordinary happened just over half a century ago when on the 13th of June 1960 the French Jewish historian Jules Isaac had an audience with Pope John the 23rd and that set in motion the long journey to Vatican 2 and Nostra I today as a result of which today Jews and Catholics meet not as enemies nor as strangers but as cherished and respected friends that is one of the most dramatic transformations in the religious history of humankind and it lit a beacon of hope not just for us but for the world it was a victory for the God of love and forgiveness who created us in love and forgiveness and asked us to love and forgive others I hope that this visit this morning's meeting audience with His Holiness and this lecture might in some small way mark the beginning of a new chapter in our relationship for half a century Jews and Christians have focused on the way of dialogue that I call face to face the time has come to move on to a new phase the way of partnership that I call side by side for the task ahead of us is not between Jews and Catholics or even between Jews and Christians in general but between Jews and Christians on the one hand and the increasingly even aggressively secularizing forces at work in Europe today on the other challenging and sometimes ridiculing our faith if Europe loses the judeo-christian heritage that gave it its historic identity and its greatest achievements in literature in art in music in education in politics and as we will see in economics it will lose its identity and its greatness not immediately but before this century reaches its end when a civilization loses its faith it loses its future when it recovers its faith it recovers its future for the sake of our children and their children not yet born we Jews and Christian side-by-side must renew our faith and it's prophetic voice and we must help Europe recover its soul that is by way of introduction and now let me begin with a fascinating passage from Neil Ferguson's new book called civilization he tells of how the Chinese Academy for social sciences was given the task of discovering how the West having lagged behind China for centuries eventually overtook it and established a position of world dominance at first said the scholar we thought it was because you had more powerful guns than we had then we concluded it was because you had a better political system than we had then we thought deeper and said no it's because you had a better economic system than we had but concluded the scholar for the past 20 years we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion Christianity the West had Christianity China did not and that is what made the difference that said the Chinese scholar is why the West has been so powerful the Christian moral foundation of social and cultural life was what made possible the emergence of capitalism than democratic politics we don't have any doubt about this the Chinese are discovering what Europe is busy forgetting the Chinese scholar was right and his remarks were followed by by the Harvard economic historian David Landis in his great book the wealth and poverty of Nations Landis too pointed out that China was technically well in advance of the West until the 15th century the Chinese had invented the wheelbarrow the compass paper printing gunpowder porcelain spinning machines for weaving textiles blast furnaces for producing iron yet they never produced a market economy or the rise of science or the Industrial Revolution or until very recently sustained economic growth and Dan a David Landis too concluded that it was the judeo-christian heritage that the West had and China did not now I know the phrase judeo-christian heritage means many different things according to Max Weber it was the Protestant ethic that led to the spirit of capitalism according to Michael Novak it was the Catholic ethic that led to the spirit of capitalism rodney stark pointed out how the financial instruments that made capitalism possible were developed in 14th century banks in christian pre-reformation Florence Pisa Genoa and Venice of course there were people who blamed capitalism on us the Jews and they never meant it kindly whether they were Karl Marx or Verner some but nevertheless it can't be pure coincidence the Jews who number less than one-fifth of 1% of the population of the world have won more than 30% of Nobel prizes in economics and they include John Von Neumanns games theory Milton Friedman's monetary economics Joe Stiglitz his developmental economics Daniel Kahneman's behavioral economics in fact in the Bible Joseph the son of Jacob when he interprets Pharaoh's dreams becomes the world's first economist he invents the theory of trade cycles seven years of plenty followed by seven years of famine the financial state of Europe would be better today if people remembered from Joseph that no economic boom can go on forever there is though enough common ground to speak of shared values why was it only in judeo-christian Europe that market capitalism emerged well first because of the deep biblical respect for the dignity of the human individual regardless of color or creed or class created in the image and likeness of God the free market gives more freedom and dignity to human choice than any other economic system second is the biblical respect for property rights as against the idea in the ancient world that rulers were entitled to treat the property of their subjects as if it were their own whereas Moses when his leadership is judged has to get up and say in front of God I have not taken one ass from them nor have i wronged any of them this integrity of private property is fundamental to Liberty as understood in the Bible and the assault of slavery against human dignity is it deprives me of the ownership of the wealth I create then there is the biblical respect for labor God saves Noah from the flood but now our first has to make the Ark indeed six days shall you labor and do all your work but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God means that we serve God through six days of work not just through one day of rest although of course rabbis work on the seventh day but that's something else job creation in Judaism is the highest charity there is because it gives the people the dignity of not having to rely on charity the third century rabbi Rove said flay carcasses in the marketplace do anything to earn a living and don't say I am a priest and a great man and at his beneath my dignity equally important is Judaism's positive attitude to the creation of wealth the world is God's creation therefore it's good therefore prosperity is a sign of God's blessing asceticism and self-denial have little place in Jewish spirituality the rabbi said that by our labor and inventiveness we become in their lovely phrase God's partners in the work of creation above all from a Jewish point of view the most fundamental thing about market economy is that it allows us to alleviate poverty Judaism never romanticizes poverty in Judaism said there are as poverty is kind of death it's worse than 50 plagues and at the other end of the spectrum they believe that with wealth comes responsibility rich s oblige successful businessmen and women are expected to set an example of philanthropy and take on positions of communal leadership so wealth is a divine blessing and it carries with it the obligation to share it for the benefit of the community as a whole the rabbi's favored markets and competition because they generate wealth lower prices increased choice reduce absolute levels of poverty and they extend humanity's control over the environment narrowing the extent to which we are passive victims of circumstance and fate competition releases energy and creativity and serves the general good so the market economy and modern capitalism emerged in judeo-christian Europe and not in other cultures like China that were more advanced in other ways the religious ethic was one of the driving forces of this once new form of wealth creation however that same ethic that same Bible taught the limits of capitalism capitalism is great for generating wealth but it's not so good at distributing wealth some gain much more than others with wealth comes power over others unequal distribution means some condemned to poverty and poverty is not just a physical disaster it is a psychological disaster it humiliates and it forces the poor into a cycle of dependency the Hebrew Bible refuses to see this as a law of nature refuses to see the economy as a kind of Darwinian system in which the strong do what they want and the weak suffer what they must that is the ethics of ancient Greece not the ethics of ancient Israel so we find in the Bible an entire structure of welfare legislation the corner of the field the Forgotten chief other parts of the harvest left for the poor the sabbatical year in which all produce is available for everyone and debts are canceled and slaves are set free and the Jubilee year in which ancestral land returned to its original owners this is a very sophisticated system and it aims at two things first that even the poor should have a means of a livelihood and second there should be every seven and fifty years periodic redistribution to correct the inequalities of the market and establish a level playing field and what was done in biblical times in an agricultural economy was done in post biblical times through a vast extension of the laws of tadaka which is a word you can't translate into English I'm not sure even if you can translate it into Italian because Saddam means both charity and justice Caritas and you stood here and that's there's no English or Italian word that sticks them together with superglue anyway every Jewish community in the Middle Ages had an elaborate system of sadaqa that was in effect a mini welfare state there was a heifer a fellowship for gathering and distributing funds for every conceivable purpose there was a group of people who raised money for poor brides for the sick for education for burial so that no one was deprived of the means of a dignified existence and what made that structure remarkable even unique was not only was it the first of its kind a precursor of the modern welfare state but also it was entirely voluntary it was the collective decision of the community that had no governmental power and often no legal rights in a recent and impressive study Harvard historian Eric Nelson has shown that it was the Hebrew Bible as read by Christian he brace in the 16th and 17th century that was the source of the idea that today we take for granted that it is part of the business of his society to engage in the redistribution of wealth through taxation to ensure the welfare of the poor such an idea could not be found in the Greek or Roman classics that inspired the Renaissance the concept of welfare is Judaic in origin and flows ultimately from the same principle as the free market itself namely that every individual must be given dignity as the image of God and it is our purpose to develop a social structure that honors and enhances that dignity so not only is the market the outcome of the judeo-christian ethic so too is a sense of the limits of the market and the need to supplement it with a system of welfare itself funded by the market so however as critics of the capitalism pointed out the market never creates a stable equilibrium it engages in creative destruction or as Daniel Bell put it capitalism contains cultural contradictions it tends to erode the moral foundations on which it was built specifically as is clear in contemporary Europe it erodes the judeo-christian ethic that gave birth to it in the first place instead of seeing the system as Adam Smith did as a means of directing self-interest to the common good it can be a means of empowering self-interest to the detriment of the common good instead of the market being framed by moral principles it comes to substitute for moral principles so if you can buy it negotiate it on it and afford it then you are entitled to it as the advertisers say because you're worth it the market ceases to be merely a system and becomes an ideology in its own right the market gives us choices so morality itself comes to seem like just a set of choices in which there is no right or wrong beyond the satisfaction or frustration of desire the thing that uniquely makes humans different from other species is what is called second-order evaluations we not only have desires we ask is it right that I should satisfy this desire now we find it increasingly hard to make second-order evaluations we find it hard to understand why there might be things we want to do we can afford to do we have a legal right to do and yet nonetheless we should not do because they are unjust or dishonorable or disloyal or demeaning and when Homo economicus displaces Homo sapiens market fundamentalism rules there is a wise American saying never waste a crisis and the current financial and economic crisis affords us a rare opportunity to pause and reflect on where we have been going and where it leads let us begin with the current crisis and what led to it first of all the sheer complexity of the financial instruments involved in subprime mortgages and their security of risk was so great that for many years the regulatory authorities had no idea of what was going on and they continued to give firms involve triple-a ratings despite the fact that as early as 2002 Warren Buffett who knew more about these things than I do called subprime mortgages weapons of mass financial destruction governments and sometimes even the bankers themselves didn't fully understand the risks involved nor did they understand the way in which failure in word in any part of the banking system can cause the entire system to collapse now that is in clear contravention of the principles of transparency and accountability in the book of Exodus there's an entire section devoted to a set of accounts as to how every item donated to the building of the tabernacle was spent to establish the principle that those in charge of public funds must be transparently above suspicion second many people especially in America but also in Europe were encouraged to take out mortgages often with low initial repayment rates that they could not repay and that those encouraging them to take them out should have no may could not repay except under the most optimistic and unlikely scenario of continued low interest rates and continually rising house prices this is forbidden in Jewish law under the biblical prohibition you shall not put a stumbling block before the blind thirdly bankers themselves not only awarded themselves disproportionately high salaries but also provided themselves with golden parachutes insulating them from the very risks they were exposing both their customers and their shareholders almost 2000 years ago the rabbi's established a series of enactments precisely to avoid the possibility that somebody could benefit from failure or from dereliction of duty forth no one who reads the Bible with its provisions for the remission of debts every seventh year could fail to understand how morally concerned it is to prevent the build-up of indebtedness of mortgaging freedom tomorrow for the sake of liberty today the unprecedented levels of private and public debt in the West should have sent warning signals long ago that such a state of affairs was unsustainable in the long run the Victorians knew what we have forgotten that spending beyond your means is morally hazardous however attractive it may be and no system should encourage it then there are larger is yes there is a fundamental question who can control today the modern International Corporation and to whom is it accountable in medieval times however much the owners of land abuse those who work for them there was some connection between them the landowner had some interest in the welfare of those who work for him for if they were well unhappy they worked reasonably well in the 19th century industrialists may have created appalling working conditions but at least some enlightened employers like Robert Owen or the Cadbury's or the Roundtree's knew that satisfied employer employees produce good work their example together with the 19th century social reformers eventually led to more humane working conditions to whom other than its shareholders is an international corporation answerable often they don't anymore employ workers they outsource manufacturing to places far away if what wages rise in one place they can almost instantly transfer production to somewhere if the tax regime in one country becomes burdensome they can relocate to another to whom then are they accountable by whom are they controllable for whom are they responsible the extreme mobility of capital and also of manufacturing and servicing is in danger of creating institutions that have power without responsibility as well as a social class the global elite that has no organic connection with any other group except itself as for moral responsibility it seems that we can outsource that as well it's somebody else's problem not mine now this has profound moral consequences George Soros once wrote of how in his early years as an investment manager he had to spend immense energy and time proving his credentials his character his integrity before people would do business with him nowadays he says deals are transactional so instead of placing your faith in a person you get lawyers to write contracts that make sure that they build in safeguards in the contract now that is a historic shift from an economy based on trust to an economy based on risk and the truth is that you can't get rid of trust trust is the very basis of our social life many scholars believe the capitalism had religious roots because people could trust other people who because they believed they were accountable to God could be relied on to be honest in business a world without trust is a lonely and dangerous place it was precisely the breakdown of trust that caused the banking crisis in the first place we sometimes make the mistake of thinking that a market the market is a shrine to material ilysm and we forget that it's keywords are deeply spiritual credit comes from the latin credo which means I believe confidence comes from the Latin meaning shared faith trust is a word with deeply religious resonance try running a bank a business or an economy without confidence or trust and you will know that it can't be done in the end we do not put our faith in systems but in the people responsible for those systems and without morality responsibility transparency accountability honesty and integrity the system will fail and as it happens it did fail and with this we come to perhaps the most profound thing that you Judaism and Christianity taught the world their ethic based on justice compassion and respect for human dignity took moral restraint from out there and put it in here or in here good conduct in Judaism and Christianity wasn't dependent on governments laws police inspector 'it's regulatory bodies civil courts and legal penalties it depended on the still small voice of God in the human heart it became part of character virtue an internalized sense of obligation Jews and Christians devoted immense energies to training their young in the ways of the righteous and the good a moral vision a clear sense of right and wrong was there in the stories they told the text they read the rituals they perform the prayers they said the standards the community expected from one another if you are Jewish you know what it feels like to be a slave in Egypt eating the bread of affliction and the bitter herbs of slavery you know what it feels like to be homeless for forty years when your ancestors wandered through the desert you know by heart the call of Isaiah to learn to do good seek justice the oppressor defend the fatherless and plead for the widow you have social justice engraved in your neural pathways when I asked the developmental economist Jeffrey Sachs what drove him to do what he did helping poor economies in Africa he replied without hesitation tikkun olam the Jewish imperative of healing a fractured world Christians do likewise they don't need regulatory bodies to ensure that they work for the common good Jews and Christians knew and still know that we are morally responsible even if we are not legally liable for the consequences of our decisions on the lives of others economists call this social capital but it is not a given of the human condition society is where self-interest is more powerful than the common good eventually disintegrate that is why societies when they reach a peak of affluence usually have just begun the slope down to inevitable decline it was the 14th century Islamic thinker eben alduin who argued that when a civilization becomes great its elites get used to luxury and comfort and the people as a whole lose their Srbija their social solidarity Geum Battista Vico said something very similar people first sense what is necessary then consider what is useful then attend to comfort then delight in pleasures then grow dissolute in luxury and finally go mad squandering their estates this was said first and most powerfully by Moses long ago what Moses was saying to the next generation in the book of Deuteronomy is you think poverty was the real challenge no the real challenge is affluence affluence makes you grow complacent you no longer have the more and mental energy to make the sacrifices necessary for the defense of freedom inequalities grow the rich become self-indulgent the poor feel excluded there are social divisions resentments in Justices society no longer cures people don't feel bound to one another by a bond of collective responsibility individualism prevails trust declines social capital wanes and when that happens as Moses you will be defeated those who believe that liberal democracy and the free market can be defended by the force of law and regulation alone without an internalized sense of duty and morality are tragically mistaken and at the most basic level the consumer society is sapping our moral strength it is produced a society obsessed with money with salaries bonuses the cost of houses expensive luxuries we could live without when money rules we remember the price of things and we forget the value of things and that is dangerous the financial crisis was caused at least in part by banks and mortgage brokers lending people so much money at so low rates of interest to buy houses that house prices rose rapidly until at least in England investing in a house seemed the best you could make so more people borrowed more money and house prices rose even higher until everyone felt they were richer but in real terms they weren't and if you forget about value and concentrate on price you mortgage your future to feed a fantasy it was a moment of collective madness of the essentially magical belief that there can be gains without losses forgetting that the larger the gain the bigger the risk and that the price is often paid by those who can least afford it in general the build-up of personal debt happened because the consumer society encouraged people to borrow money they didn't have to buy things they didn't need to achieve a happiness that wouldn't last the sages of Judaism long ago said who is rich one who rejoices in what he has the consumer society says who is rich one who can buy what he doesn't yet have now by relentlessly focusing on what we don't have but other people do have the consumer society encourages a feeling of inadequacy that is wage by buying a product to make me happy which it does until tomorrow when the next best thing comes along and makes me feel inadequate all over again it is no accident that despite the fact that until quite recently we were more affluent than any generation since Homo sapiens first set foot on earth were we happier while our children weren't we turned our children into many consumers we gave them mobile phones instead of time and the result in Britain is a generation of children more unhappy more prone to depression stress eating disorders drug and alcohol abuse that then they were 50 years ago we reached the conclusion that the consumer society turns out to be the most efficient system yet devised for the production and distribution of unhappiness and it goes deeper still we know many experiments have shown this the children with strong impulse control grow up to be better adjusted more dependable they do better at school and at university and they have more success in their career than other people success depends on the ability to delay gratification and that is exactly what a consumer society undermines at every stage the emphasis all is on the instant gratification of instinct in the immortal words of the pop group Queen do English pop groups get get to this part of the world there was somebody called Freddie Mercury it's it's it's not on every rabbinical theological or seminar is reading list but in the immortal words of Freddie Mercury and Queen I want it all and I want it now a whole culture is being infantilized my late father came to Britain at the age of six fleeing from persecution in Poland he knew poverty he lived it but he and his contemporaries had a rich cultural and communal and spiritual life he loved classical music he loved the great painters he loved the synagogue he loved his faith as a Jew the Jewish communities of the East End of London like many Asian communities today had strong families supportive networks high aspirations if not for them than for their children of the gifts of the Spirit they had an embroidery chess can we really say that the world of brands and status symbols of what you own rather than what you are is better and what about the future if we really are fated two years of recession what will that mean for a culture where happiness is defined by material possessions it will mean the maximum of disappointment combined with the of consolation whether our social structures are strong enough to survive this is open to doubt so a good ëcoz a good society has its own ecology which depends on sources of meaning that are not all to do with the market and I want to just mention five things that Jews and Christian should emphasize because they were always the point where we said not everything is defined by the market the first is the Sabbath what makes the Sabbath special the day when you can't earn can't spend can't shop and in Judaism at least cannot answer a mobile phone and if there is any greater contribution to happiness I would like to know what it is why is the Sabbath the antidote to a consumer society because if a consumer society focuses on the price of things not the value of things the Sabbath is the day when we focus on the things that have value but not a price on family on eating together on community on joining the community in prayer on thank in thanking God for what we have instead of not of worrying about what we don't have the Sabbath is an antidote to the consumer society second marriage and the family you know that Judaism is focused on the family many of our supreme religious moments take place in the home between husband and wife parent and child for us marriage is where love and loyalty combine to bring new life into the world and I tell you that if Jews have survived tragedy and found happiness and contributed a little to the world it is because of the sanctity with which they endowed marriage and the way they saw parent as our greatest responsibility thirdly education since the days of Moses Jews predicated their very survival on education I know of no other religion that says that study is holier even than prayer and because of that Jews became the people whose Citadel's were schools whose heroes were teachers and whose passion was the life of the mind I tell teachers in England that the greatest Jew there ever was was Moses and what title do we confer on Moses we did not call him Lord or king or lawgiver we called him Moshe Rabbeinu Moses our teacher for us to be a teacher is the highest honor you can achieve in the world education should not serve the market the market should serve education fourthly the concept of property itself property we believe is not something we ultimately own everything in the world ultimately belongs to God and he is merely lent it to us and that loan comes with the condition that when we have more than we need we share some of it with those who have less than they need somebody once asked the great Victorian philanthropist sir Moses Montefiore so Moses Montefiore I should tell you made early in life a very good career move he married a Rothschild and somebody once Arthur Moses Montefiore so Moses how much are you worth and he gave them a figure and the person said come on Moses we know you're worth 10 times that much and Moses said you didn't ask me how much I owe you ask me what am i worth so I told you how much I've given to charity so far this year because he said we are worth what we are willing to share with others and finally the Jewish tradition of law itself his holiness earlier today reminded us of the way we both value the 10 commandments and then in ten commandments many of them say thou shalt not what in our culture today says thou shalt not sometimes we need to hear that there are things we can do but should not do and that discipline is supplied by religious obligation by law so all of these ways the Sabbath the family the educational system sharing with others and the discipline of religious law are a way of saying even though we value the market we say thus far shall the market come but no further there are things that into which the values of the market may not intrude the concept of the holy is the domain in which the worth of things is not determined by their market price or their economic value that fundamental inside of Judaism and Christianity is all the more striking given their respect for the market judaism christianity resisted the temptation that to believe that the market governs all of our lives when actually it only governs as limited part of it those bits those goods which are subject to production and exchange there are things fundamental to being human that we do not produce that we instead receive from those who came before us and from God himself and there are things that we may not exchange however high the price when everything that matters can be bought and sold when commitments can be broken because they are no longer to our advantage when shopping becomes salvation and advertising slogans become our Lytton when our worth is measured by what we earn and spend then the market is destroying the very virtues in which on the long run it depends that is the danger that advanced economies now face and at that time the voice of our great religious traditions need to be heard warning them warning us of the gods that devour their own children and the ruins of civilizations that once seemed invulnerable in their time so to sum up I have argued that the market economy originated in Europe in the Fertile environment of judeo-christian values sympathetic to hard work industry frugality diligence patience discipline and a sense of duty capitalism was seen by its early proponents as a profoundly moral Enterprise it generated wealth it softened manners it tamed unruly passions it diminished the threat of war two nations can either fight or trade from fight both lose from trade both gain the markets invisible hand turn the pursuit of self-interest into the common good the wealth of nations capitalism has enhanced human dignity leaving us with more choices and a longer life expectancy than any generation of those who came before us but there is no stable equilibrium in human affairs there is an in a chiral tendency for institutions in the ascendancy to invade territories not rightly or fully their own with disastrous consequences in religious ages the culprit was usually religion at times religion sought political power and became an enemy of Liberty there were times when it sought to control this dissemination of ideas and became an enemy of the unfettered pursuit of truth today in Europe a Europe more secular than it has been since the days of pre-christian Rome the culprits are in a massive scientific atheism tone-deaf to the music of faith a reductive materialism blind to the power of the human spirit global corporations uncontrolled by and sometimes more powerful than national governments forms of finance so complex as to surpass the understanding of bodies charged with their regulation a consumer driven economy that is shriveling the imaginative horizons of our children and a fraying of all social bonds from family to community that once brought comfort and redeemed individuals from solitude to re replace by virtual networks mediated by smartphone that leave us in a wonderful phrase alone together what can we do we who because we have faith in God have faith in God's faith in us there is a significant phrase the Pope Benedict the 16th has often used creative minority if there's one thing Jews know how to be it's a creative minority so my proposal is that Jews and Catholics should seek to be creative minorities together a duet is more powerful than a solo renouncing any aspiration from par for power we should encourage the single most neglected source of energy in our society which is a little thing called altruism we should in less business leaders to help teach that markets need morals that without a strong ethic there may be short term success but no long term viability and that conscience is not for wimps whatever that is in Italian it is the basis of trust and confidence on which business and financial institutions and the economy depend we should use this moment of recession to restore to their rightful place in society the things that have value but not a price marriage family home dedicated time between parents and children the face-to-face friendships that make up community the celebration of what we have not the road splits pursuit of what we don't a sense of gratitude and Thanksgiving and a willingness to share some of God's blessings with those who have less these are the true sources of lasting happiness and have time and again proved to be so we should seek to recover the alternative world created by the Sabbath one day in seven in which we set limits to the power of market to enslave us with its siren song and instead give our relationships the chance to mature and our souls the chance to breathe the pure air they need we should challenge the moral relativism that tells us there is no right or wrong when every instinct of our mind knows it isn't so and knows that saying so is a mere excuse to allow us to indulge in what we believe we can get away with a world without values quickly becomes a world without value economic superpowers have a short shelf life Spain in the 15th century Venice in the 16th Holland in the 17th France in the 18th Britain in the 19th America in the 20th they last on average a hundred years meanwhile Christianity is survived for two thousand years and Judaism twice as long as that the judeo-christian heritage is the only system known to me capable of defeating the law of entropy that says all systems lose energy over time stabilizing the euro is one thing healing the culture that surrounds it is another a world in which material values are everything and spiritual values nothing is neither a stable state nor a good society the time has come for us to recover the jannettek of human dignity in the image of God when Europe recovers its soul it will recover its wealth creating energies but first it must remember Humanity was not created to serve markets markets were created to serve humankind thank you

Channel: UniGregoriana

Views: 45,379

Keywords: Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, Europe, Centro Cardinal Bea, United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth

Id: y3XMUeAenA0

Length: 53min 41sec (3221 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 21 2011