## Rabbi Sacks on Yom Kippur Mahzor, Shaharit, Offerings

###### Rabbi Sacks on Yom Kippur Mahzor, Shaharit, Offerings 1
[Rabbi Sacks on Yom Kippur Mahzor, Shaharit, Offerings 1](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Rabbi%20Sacks%20on%20Yom%20Kippur%20Mahzor/s/Shaharit,_Offerings/r/1)

**English Edition; Koren Publishers Jerusalem, 2017:**
OFFERINGS
There now follows a second cycle of study, with the same structure as the first, with passages from: (1) the Torah, (2) the Mishna, and (3) the Talmud (see below). The passages from the Torah relate to the daily, weekly and monthly sacrifices because, in the absence of the Temple, the sages held that study of the laws about sacrifice was a substitute for sacrifice itself (*Ta’anit*27b). The passage from the Mishna (*Zevaḥim* 5) is also about sacrifices, and was chosen because it does not contain any disagreement between the sages, and thus accords with the rule that one should pray “after a decided halakha,” that is, an item of Jewish law about which there is no debate.
There are different customs about how many and which passages are to be said. The passages in large type represent the text as it exists in the earliest siddurim, those of Rabbi Amram Gaon and Rabbi Sa’adia Gaon.


###### Rabbi Sacks on Yom Kippur Mahzor, Shaharit, Offerings 11
[Rabbi Sacks on Yom Kippur Mahzor, Shaharit, Offerings 11](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Rabbi%20Sacks%20on%20Yom%20Kippur%20Mahzor/s/Shaharit,_Offerings/r/11)

**English Edition; Koren Publishers Jerusalem, 2017:**
אַתָּה הוּא יהוה אֱלֹהֵֽינוּ *You are the*LORD*our God.* A prayer for the end of exile, culminating with the verse from Zephaniah (3:20) which speaks of the ingathering of Jews and of a time when “I will give you renown and praise among all the peoples of the earth.” This entire sequence of prayers is eloquent testimony to how Jews sustained faith and hope, dignity and pride, during some of the most prolonged periods of persecution in history.
From the dawn of civilization to today, mankind has reflected on its place in the universe. Compared to all there is, each of us is infinitesimally small. We are born, we live, we act, we die. At any given moment our deeds are at best a hand waving in the crowd, a ripple in the ocean, a grain of sand on the human beach. The world long preceded us, and it will survive long after we die. How is our life related to the totality of things? To this, there have always been two answers, fundamentally opposed.
There have been cultures, ancient and modern, that saw the world in terms of vast impersonal forces. For the ancients they were earthquakes, floods, famines, droughts, together with the processes of nature: birth, growth, decline and death. Today, we are more likely to identify those forces with the world economy, international politics, the environment and global media. What is common to them is that they are impersonal. They are indifferent to us, just as a tidal wave is indifferent to what it sweeps away.
Seen in this perspective the forces that govern the world are essentially blind. They are not addressed to us. We may stand in their path; we may step out of the way. But they are unmoved by our existence. They don’t relate to us as persons. In such a world, hubris (the idea that we can change things) is punished by nemesis. Human hope is a prelude to tragedy. The best we can aim for is to seize what pleasure comes our way and make ourselves stoically indifferent to our fate. This is a coherent vision, but a bleak one.
In ancient Israel, a different vision was born, one that saw in the cosmos the face of the personal: God who brought the universe into being as parents conceive a child, not blindly but in love. We are not insignificant, nor are we alone. We are here because someone willed us into being, who wanted us to be, who knows our innermost thoughts, who values us in our uniqueness, whose breath we breathe, and in whose arms we rest; someone in and through whom we are connected to all that is.
That discovery – that we are the image of, the trace left by God – was utterly explosive in its implications. It meant that the key to interpreting the universe is not force or power, but the personal; and the personal is anything but blind. Everything else in the Torah flows from the attempt to make this fact the foundation of a new social order. The question becomes: What relationships and what kind of society honor the dignity of the person – of all persons in their dependence and independence? We redeem the world to the degree that we personalize it, taming the great forces so that they serve rather than dominate humanity. That was and remains a marvelous vision. It changed and still changes the world.
Finding God, our ancestors discovered something new about themselves. Hearing God reaching out to us, they began to understand the significance of human beings reaching out to one another. They began, haltingly at first, to realize that God is not about power but relationship; that religion is not about control but about freedom; and that God is found, less in nature than in society, in the structures we make to honor His presence by honoring His image in other human beings.
This much can never be made redundant by science. For God is dispensable only if humanity is. God is reality with a loving face, the mirror without which we cannot see ourselves.