## Faith in the Future, Prologue ###### Faith in the Future, Prologue 1 [Faith in the Future, Prologue 1](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Faith%20in%20the%20Future/s/Prologue/r/1) **Maggid Books, 2024:** The thought came, as I knew it would, in Jerusalem. I was sitting one Sabbath afternoon in one of the parks of the rebuilt city, watching children playing. I had come with my family to spend a year in the home of the Jewish soul before taking up office as Chief Rabbi. The responsibility I was about to undertake was heavy, and I knew it. Jews love leadership, but not followership, and as a result we are a fractious people. I felt the need of inspiration to sustain me, and I knew it would come in Jerusalem. Though for centuries it had lain in ruins, Jews never stopped praying towards it. In all that time, wrote Maimonides, the divine presence never left the city. Here, as nowhere else, you are brushed by the wings of eternity. ###### Faith in the Future, Prologue 2 [Faith in the Future, Prologue 2](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Faith%20in%20the%20Future/s/Prologue/r/2) **Maggid Books, 2024:** There is a stillness and peace which exists only in Jerusalem on a Sabbath afternoon. Shops are closed. The streets are free of traffic. The morning prayers are over. The Sabbath meal has been eaten. Rest comes over the city and the setting sun turns the houses red and gold. The only sound came from the children and their games. Then I remembered a moving scene described in the Talmud. It was set in the first century of the Common Era. The Temple had been destroyed by the Romans. Jerusalem lay devastated. It was one of the most tragic episodes of Jewish history, the beginning of an exile and dispersion that were to last almost two thousand years. ###### Faith in the Future, Prologue 3 [Faith in the Future, Prologue 3](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Faith%20in%20the%20Future/s/Prologue/r/3) **Maggid Books, 2024:** The Talmud describes how the great sages, Rabban Gamliel, Rabbi Elazar ben Azariah, Rabbi Joshua and Rabbi Akiva, looked out upon the ruins. Three of them wept. But Rabbi Akiva gave them a message of consolation. The prophets, he said, foresaw this day and it has come to pass. But they also foresaw a later day when the city would be rebuilt. Since one vision has come true, so will the other. The day will come when Zechariah’s prophecy will be fulfilled: “Old men and women will once again sit in the streets of Jerusalem…and the streets of the city will be filled with children playing.” Nineteen hundred years later, I had lived to see Rabbi Akiva’s hope come true. ###### Faith in the Future, Prologue 4 [Faith in the Future, Prologue 4](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Faith%20in%20the%20Future/s/Prologue/r/4) **Maggid Books, 2024:** *If only he had known,* I thought. If only Rabbi Akiva had known how long it would take, how many exiles, expulsions, persecutions, pogroms, blood libels, Inquisitions and Crusades Jews would first have to endure. If only he had known of the Holocaust and its millions of innocent victims gassed and turned to ashes. Would he not have wept? Would he still have kept his faith? In that moment of truth I knew the answer. Yes, *all the more would he have held to his faith,* knowing that God could not have led this people so long through the valley of the shadow of death without one day bringing them to the city of peace. ###### Faith in the Future, Prologue 5 [Faith in the Future, Prologue 5](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Faith%20in%20the%20Future/s/Prologue/r/5) **Maggid Books, 2024:** Peter Berger once called hope a “signal of transcendence,” an intrusion of God into our lives. For Jews hope was more than that. It was life itself. Without it our ancestors could not have stayed Jews, devoting their best energies to passing on their heritage to successive generations. Much of the time they lived in poverty, but even when they knew better days their lives were etched with insecurity, never sure when their buildings would be burned, their property seized, and they themselves sent into exile or worse. But something of Rabbi Akiva’s faith in the future lived on in them. Next year, they said, we will be in Jerusalem; and the next year they said the same. ###### Faith in the Future, Prologue 6 [Faith in the Future, Prologue 6](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Faith%20in%20the%20Future/s/Prologue/r/6) **Maggid Books, 2024:** It sometimes seems as if faith is an empty gesture and prayer a mere striving after wind. It was then in Jerusalem that I knew otherwise. Faith had kept the dream intact across the centuries and had led Jews from seventy countries to come together here in the land of their origins to rebuild themselves as a sovereign State. It had touched the hearts of even assimilated Jews – Moses Hess, Leon Pinsker, Theodor Herzl, Max Nordau, the early protagonists of secular Zionism – as it had touched my great-grandfather, a Lithuanian rabbi, and led him to Jerusalem as one of the early religious advocates of the return to Zion. It had led the Jewish people to begin again after the Holocaust, bringing to pass the most haunting of all biblical prophecies, Ezekiel’s vision of the resurrection of a nation, the valley of dry bones which came together and grew flesh and lived. And it had led me here in the still of a Sabbath afternoon to see Zechariah’s prophecy and Rabbi Akiva’s hope fulfilled: the streets of Jerusalem filled with children playing. ###### Faith in the Future, Prologue 7 [Faith in the Future, Prologue 7](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Faith%20in%20the%20Future/s/Prologue/r/7) **Maggid Books, 2024:** Faith is the space where God and humanity touch. For Jews it has always been symbolised by a journey, the journey begun by Abraham when he left his country and his father’s house to travel to an unknown land, the journey taken by the Israelites as they left Egypt for the promised land, the journey each of us could trace if we could follow our grandparents and theirs back through the generations as they wandered from country to country in search of refuge. The way is always further than we thought, the route more complicated and beset with obstacles. But we continue it knowing, sometimes obscurely, sometimes with blazing clarity, that this is what God wants us to do. For we know that so long as the way the world is, is not the way it ought to be, we have not yet reached our destination. ###### Faith in the Future, Prologue 8 [Faith in the Future, Prologue 8](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Faith%20in%20the%20Future/s/Prologue/r/8) **Maggid Books, 2024:** The path we have travelled since the biblical exodus is not just to a land but to a society built on human dignity and compassion and law-governed liberty and justice. The Jewish journey is not just a physical one but a spiritual, moral and political one as well. That is what has long given it a significance beyond itself. It is not just a Jewish journey, but the human journey in a particularly vivid form. It has inspired not only Jews, but all those who, having read the Hebrew Bible, have come to the conclusion that our lives have a moral purpose, that redemption can be sought in this world with all its imperfections, and that by our efforts we can leave society better than we found it. The Mosaic books and those of the prophets have echoed throughout human history, moving men and women to dedicate their lives to the uncertain proposition that by constant struggle we can reduce suffering and enhance dignity not for ourselves alone but for all those amongst whom we live; that we can, in William Blake’s phrase, “build Jerusalem.” Whenever that journey is undertaken it testifies to faith: faith that our hopes are not illusions, that something beyond us answers to our trust, that as we reach out our hand to God, His reaches out to us, giving us the strength to continue though the way is dark. To a Jew in this strange century, surveying the collapse of fascism in Germany and communism in Eastern Europe, the rebirth of Israel as a nation in its own land and its steps towards peace, faith in the future can sometimes seem the strongest thing there is. ###### Faith in the Future, Prologue 9 [Faith in the Future, Prologue 9](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Faith%20in%20the%20Future/s/Prologue/r/9) **Maggid Books, 2024:** • ###### Faith in the Future, Prologue 10 [Faith in the Future, Prologue 10](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Faith%20in%20the%20Future/s/Prologue/r/10) **Maggid Books, 2024:** We undervalue faith. My grandparents arrived in this country as refugees. On my father’s side they came from Poland, part of the vast migration of Jews in flight from the pogroms and antisemitism of Eastern Europe at the turn of the century. My mother’s family came from what was then Palestine. My maternal great-grandfather had gone there in the 1870s and eventually founded an agricultural settlement, *Petach Tikvah,* “the gate of hope.” After some years he encountered hostility from the local Arabs and was forced to flee, arriving in England in 1894. I was born in the East End of London, the point of arrival for many Anglo-Jews and for other immigrant groups since. By the time I made my appearance most Jews had already left on their slow journey outward toward the suburbs. But there were still enough of them there to give me a sense of what had once been a busy centre of Jewish life. ###### Faith in the Future, Prologue 11 [Faith in the Future, Prologue 11](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Faith%20in%20the%20Future/s/Prologue/r/11) **Maggid Books, 2024:** Judaism is a future-oriented religion, and Jews are not prone to nostalgia. But I am surely not alone in thinking that our grandparents had something that we have lost. No one who has even the vaguest memories of the East End would wish to return there. Accounts of it in Victorian times portray it as a festering inner-city ghetto rife with poverty, illiteracy and crime. Nonetheless the Jews who arrived there, though they lacked all else, had three extraordinarily powerful assets: a sense of community, of family and of religious tradition. Together, these helped them to preserve their dignity and sense of hope under what might otherwise have been hopeless conditions. ###### Faith in the Future, Prologue 12 [Faith in the Future, Prologue 12](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Faith%20in%20the%20Future/s/Prologue/r/12) **Maggid Books, 2024:** Within the space of a generation, those families had broken free of the chains of deprivation. Their mobility, physical, social and intellectual, was little short of astonishing. Search back into the history of today’s Jewish academics, professionals and businesspeople and, as likely as not, you will find a family story not unlike mine, of immigrant grandparents barely able to speak the language or make a living. Their faith, solidarity and pride were all they could confer on their children. But it was enough. It made the difference between hopelessness and hope. And that, in the human situation, is the greatest difference there is. ###### Faith in the Future, Prologue 13 [Faith in the Future, Prologue 13](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Faith%20in%20the%20Future/s/Prologue/r/13) **Maggid Books, 2024:** There is a truth here which touches on the future of Britain and the liberal democracies of the West. The vast increase of wealth in the past century has not made us overwhelmingly happier, nor has it solved society’s ills and discontents. Walk through the scarred inner-city areas of Liverpool, Manchester or Newcastle, or return to the East End of London itself, and you will today discover a far more hopeless environment than the one my grandparents inhabited. Poverty, under-education and crime exist now as they did then, but they are set against a background of despair that is both new and chilling. The American writer Charles Murray has introduced into our vocabulary the provocative word “underclass” to characterise the new groups of urban poor whom every political experiment, from the maximalist to the minimalist state, has failed to help. None of us can be comfortable with such a situation. Whatever our political stance, the sight of today’s homeless, and the blighted lives of too many of our children, must move us no less than Dickens’ portraits of another age and its heartlessness moved a generation more than a century ago. ###### Faith in the Future, Prologue 14 [Faith in the Future, Prologue 14](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Faith%20in%20the%20Future/s/Prologue/r/14) **Maggid Books, 2024:** I am no less troubled by another kind of poverty which affects even children from relatively affluent homes: a poverty of moral imagination. Many of the young people I meet – advantaged, articulate and well-educated, apparently with everything to look forward to – face the future with surprising apprehension. They are fearful about the erosion of the environment. They are anxious about their careers, knowing how unpredictably markets, technology, industries, exchange-rates and the economy can change, leaving people stranded and their life’s work gone. They are uncertain about personal relationships, reluctant to commit themselves to marriage, seeing around them the human wreckage of discord and divorce. ###### Faith in the Future, Prologue 15 [Faith in the Future, Prologue 15](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Faith%20in%20the%20Future/s/Prologue/r/15) **Maggid Books, 2024:** This new fearfulness was brought home to me in an unexpected way. In September 1993, Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat shook hands on the White House lawn signalling the fateful decision of Israelis and Palestinians to embark on a process of peace. Just before and after that day, I had occasion to visit a number of schools and I was taken aback by the response of the children to the initiative. They were convinced it would not work. They were full of foreboding. Hatred and violence had scarred the relationship between Jews and Arabs for so long that they were convinced that nothing would change. The peace process was doomed to failure. ###### Faith in the Future, Prologue 16 [Faith in the Future, Prologue 16](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Faith%20in%20the%20Future/s/Prologue/r/16) **Maggid Books, 2024:** They may have been right: it is still too early to say. Certainly most of us witnessing the handshake knew the risks both sides were taking. We knew that hostility takes generations to heal, and that there would be attempts by extremists on both sides to sabotage any proposals for co-existence. The schoolchildren were not naive. To the contrary, they were formidably well informed. But they lacked one thing, without which no great initiative can be undertaken. They lacked hope. They were world-weary before their time. They had seen too many political ventures fail, too many expectations dashed. It was as if, to protect themselves against disappointment, they had grown a carapace of pessimism. They had formulated an unspoken rule: Nothing works. They had lost faith in the future. ###### Faith in the Future, Prologue 17 [Faith in the Future, Prologue 17](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Faith%20in%20the%20Future/s/Prologue/r/17) **Maggid Books, 2024:** This loss of faith has been much commented on. One politician recently called it the “new British disease: the self-destructive sickness of national cynicism.” Merely calling for confidence and a willingness to trust, though, does not bring them about. There is such a thing as an ecology of hope. There are environments in which it flourishes and others in which it dies. Hope is born and has its being in the context of family, community and religious faith. ###### Faith in the Future, Prologue 18 [Faith in the Future, Prologue 18](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Faith%20in%20the%20Future/s/Prologue/r/18) **Maggid Books, 2024:** In stable families, nurtured by those who brought us into existence, we learn to give and receive love. There is no greater crucible of trust than the family bond, for it is here in early infancy that we learn to risk our human vulnerability on the answering affection of others. We find, if we are lucky, that love given is not given in vain, and on this much else in later life depends. ###### Faith in the Future, Prologue 19 [Faith in the Future, Prologue 19](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Faith%20in%20the%20Future/s/Prologue/r/19) **Maggid Books, 2024:** In communities we receive our most practical tuition in the concept of the common good. They are our closest approximation to the extended families of the Bible or the small city-states of ancient Greece, where the concept of virtue was born and our ethical tradition had its origins. Communities are where we acquire a sense of place and belonging. They are usually small enough to allow us to recognise one another, to value the contribution of each to the welfare of all, to bring comfort and support to those who need it, and to extend our horizons from private to collective gain. The local synagogue or church, the parent-teacher association and neighbourhood watch scheme are powerful schools of virtue precisely because they are personal and face-to-face. They are not remote and abstract like the modern state. They are where we speak of duty, not rights; where we focus on what we can give, not claim. As a result they are the best antidote there is to the disillusion that always follows the politics of self-interest. ###### Faith in the Future, Prologue 20 [Faith in the Future, Prologue 20](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Faith%20in%20the%20Future/s/Prologue/r/20) **Maggid Books, 2024:** Families and communities are in turn undergirded by religious faith. In Judaism, at least, the three go hand in hand. Religious faith suggests that our commitments to fidelity and interdependence are not arbitrary, a matter of passing moral fashion. They mirror the deep structure of reality. The bonds between husband and wife, parent and child, and us and our neighbours partake of the covenantal bond between God and humanity. The moral rules and virtues which constrain and enlarge our aspirations are not mere subjective devices and desires. They are “out there” as well as “in here.” They represent objective truths about the human situation, refracted through the prisms of revelation and tradition. ###### Faith in the Future, Prologue 21 [Faith in the Future, Prologue 21](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Faith%20in%20the%20Future/s/Prologue/r/21) **Maggid Books, 2024:** Faith, family and community are, I suspect, mutually linked. When one breaks down, the others are weakened. When families disintegrate, so too does the sense of neighbourhood and the continuity of our great religious traditions. When localities become anonymous, families lose the support of neighbours, and congregations are no longer centres of community. When religious belief begins to wane, the moral bonds of marriage and neighbourly duty lose their transcendental base and begin to shift and crumble in the high winds of change. That is precisely what has happened in our time and the loss, though subtle, is immense. ###### Faith in the Future, Prologue 22 [Faith in the Future, Prologue 22](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Faith%20in%20the%20Future/s/Prologue/r/22) **Maggid Books, 2024:** For these are more than just three aspects of our busy and varied lives. They are the matrix of all else. Without them we will find, like the author of Ecclesiastes, that the more we pursue pleasure the less we find happiness. Our relationships will become more fractured. We will retreat into private worlds of solace: the Walkman, the television screen and the computer terminal, the icons of our time. We will build a world of private affluence and public squalor. And we will fail to give our children what they most deserve: a map of meaning by which to chart their way through a confusing and chaotic world. ###### Faith in the Future, Prologue 23 [Faith in the Future, Prologue 23](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Faith%20in%20the%20Future/s/Prologue/r/23) **Maggid Books, 2024:** There is such a thing as an ecology of hope, and it lies in restoring to our culture a sense of family, community and religious faith. The great question facing the liberal democracies of the West is whether it can be done. I believe it can, and that is the theme of many of the chapters in this book. These values never die, though occasionally – as now – they suffer an eclipse. If Judaism and the history of the Jewish people have a message for our time, it is surely this. Faith in the future changes lives and rebuilds the ruins of Jerusalem.