The Dignity of Difference Quotes

“The test of faith is whether I can make space for difference. Can I recognize God's image in someone who is not in my image, who language, faith, ideal, are different from mine? If I cannot, then I have made God in my image instead of allowing him to remake me in his.”
― Jonathan Sacks, The Dignity of Difference: How to Avoid the Clash of Civilizations

“We encounter God in the face of a stranger. That, I believe, is the Hebrew Bible’s single greatest and most counterintuitive contribution to ethics. God creates difference; therefore it is in one-who-is-different that we meet god. Abraham encounters God when he invites three strangers into his tent.”
― Jonathan Sacks, The Dignity of Difference: How to Avoid the Clash of Civilizations

“A primordial instinct going back to humanity's tribal past makes us see difference as a threat. That instinct is massively dysfunctional in an age in which our several destinies are interlinked. Oddly enough, it is the market -- the least overtly spiritual of concepts -- that delivers a profoundly spiritual message: that it is through exchange that difference becomes a blessing, not a curse. When difference leads to war, both sides lose. When it leads to mutual enrichment, both sides gain.”
― Jonathan Sacks, The Dignity of Difference: How to Avoid the Clash of Civilizations

“Just as the natural environment depends on biodiversity, so the human environment depends on cultural diversity, because no one civilization encompasses all the spiritual, ethical and artistic expressions of mankind.”
― Jonathan Sacks, The Dignity of Difference: How to Avoid the Clash of Civilizations

“The universality of moral concern is not something we learn by being universal but by being particular. Because we know what it is to be a parent, loving our children, not children in general, we understand what it is for someone else, somewhere else, to be a parent, loving his or her children, not ours. There is no road to human solidarity that does not begin with moral particularity - by coming to know what it means to be a child, a parent, a neighbour, a friend. We learn to love humanity by loving specific human beings. There is no short-cut.”
― Jonathan Sacks, The Dignity of Difference: How to Avoid the Clash of Civilizations

“There are indeed moral universals — the Hebrew Bible calls them ‘the covenant with Noah’ and they form the basis of modern codes of human rights. But they exist to create space for cultural and religious difference…”
― Jonathan Sacks, The Dignity of Difference: How to Avoid the Clash of Civilizations

“The men on the plain at Shinar make a technological discovery... As after so many other technological advances, they immediately conclude that they now have the power of gods. They are no longer subject to nature. They have become its masters. They will storm the heavens. Their man-made environment - the city with its ziggurat or artificial mountain - will replicate the structure of the cosmos, but here they will rule, not God. It is a supreme act of hubris, committed time and again in history - from the Sumerian city-states, to Plato's Republic, to empires, ancient and modern, to the Soviet Union. It is the attempt to impose a man-made unity on divinely created diversity. That is what is wrong with universalism.”
― Jonathan Sacks, The Dignity of Difference: How to Avoid the Clash of Civilizations

“A consumer-driven, advertising-dominated culture militates daily against ongoing attachments. It is constantly inviting us to switch to a different brand, try something new, go for a better deal elsewhere. It should not come as a surprise that this begins to affect human relationships as well. A society saturated by market values would be one in which relationships were temporary, loyalties provisional and commitments easily discarded.”
― Jonathan Sacks, The Dignity of Difference: How to Avoid the Clash of Civilizations

“[S]ocial life cannot be reduced to a series of market exchanges. We need covenants as well as contracts; meanings as well as preferences; loyalties, not just temporary associations for mutual gain. These things go to the heart of who we are. They are the 'signals of transcendence' in the midst of a fast-paced world.
For life to have personal meaning, there must be people who matter to us, and for whom we matter, unconditionally and nonsubstitutably.”
― Jonathan Sacks, The Dignity of Difference: How to Avoid the Clash of Civilizations

“Indeed there is none so self-righteous as one who carries the burden of self-perceived victimhood.”
― Jonathan Sacks, The Dignity of Difference: How to Avoid the Clash of Civilizations

“The test of faith is whether I can make space for difference. Can I recognize God's image in someone who is not in my image [...]?
If I cannot, then I have made God in my image instead of allowing him to remake me in his.”
― Jonathan Sacks, The Dignity of Difference: How to Avoid the Clash of Civilizations

“The test of faith is whether I can make space for difference. Can I recognize God's image in someone who is not in my image, who language, faith, ideal, are different from mine?”
― Jonathan Sacks, The Dignity of Difference: How to Avoid the Clash of Civilizations