The Rabbi Sacks Legacy Profile picture
Mar 29, 2018 14 tweets 2 min read Read on X
(#Pesach / #Passover thread...) When people talk about religion, they tend to speak about beliefs. Which, for Jews, is very odd.
Yes, belief is important, but for us, religion is fundamentally about rituals, the things we do together as an expression of collective memory and shared ideals.
Ritual is the poetry of deed, the choreography of faith, and nowhere is this clearer than on Pesach.

On it, we tell the story of the framing event of Jewish history, the exodus from Egypt and the long walk from slavery to freedom.
We tell it around the dinner table, usually in extended families, and we don’t just tell it:
we taste it as well, eating matzah, unleavened bread, and maror, bitter herbs, to remind us of what it felt like to be oppressed, and we drink wine and sing songs to celebrate the fact that we’re here to tell the tale.
What gives Pesach its enduring power is that it’s a way of handing on our memory and identity across the generations.
It begins with a series of questions asked by the youngest child, and I can still remember when I asked them all those years ago when I was four or five in the company of my grandparents.
It’s a bit of a shock to realise that now I’m the grandparent and the young people doing the asking are my grandchildren.
But what continuity that represents, seeing in the course of my life five generations telling the same story, asking the same questions, singing the same songs, learning what freedom means and what losing it feels and tastes like.
That’s the power of ritual, simple deeds that we do as children because it’s fun, and as adults, because we know that the battle for freedom and human dignity is never over and we must be prepared to fight for them in every age.
Rituals are how civilisations preserve their memory, keeping faith with those who came before us and handing on their legacy to the future.
The most important thing my parents gave me and the thing I most tried to give our children was ideals to live by. Everything else was just gift wrapping, briefly enjoyed then forgotten.
Beliefs inspire our children and eventually change the world when they’re translated into the songs we sing, the stories we tell and the rituals we perform.
The proof is Pesach, the story that has given Jews hope for more than three thousand years, and continues to inspire us and the world today.

Together with Elaine, I wish you all a Chag Kasher v'Sameach!

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More from @rabbisacks

Sep 6, 2021
As we approach Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur and the start of the Jewish year, here are ten short ideas from Rabbi Sacks zt"l which might help you focus your davening and ensure you have a meaningful and transformative experience.
(1) Life is short. However much life expectancy has risen, we will not, in one lifetime, be able to achieve everything we might wish to achieve. This life is all we have. So the question is: How shall we use it well?
(2) Life itself, every breath we take, is the gift of God. Life is not something we may take for granted. If we do, we will fail to celebrate it. Yes, we believe in life after death, but it is in life before death that we truly find human greatness.
Read 12 tweets
Oct 1, 2020
THREAD -> #Succot is the festival of insecurity. It is the candid acknowledgment that there is no life without risk, yet we can face the future without fear when we know we are not alone. Image
God is with us, in the rain that brings blessings to the earth, in the love that brought the universe and us into being and in the resilience of spirit that allowed a small and vulnerable people to outlive the greatest empires the world has ever known.
Succot reminds us that God’s glory was present in the small, portable Tabernacle that Moses and the Israelites built in the desert even more emphatically than in Solomon’s Temple with all its grandeur. A temple can be destroyed. But a succah, broken, can be rebuilt tomorrow.
Read 9 tweets
Sep 30, 2020
THREAD -> #Succot is the time we ask the most profound question of what makes a life worth living.
Having prayed on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur to be written in the Book of Life, Kohelet (the book we read on Succot) forces us to remember how brief life actually is, and how vulnerable. “Teach us rightly to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom” (Ps. 90:12).
What matters is not how long we live, but how intensely we feel that life is a gift we repay by giving to others. Surely this is a message that resonates even more forcefully this year as we approach Succot in the midst of the global coronavirus pandemic.
Read 6 tweets
Sep 29, 2020
THREAD -> More than any other festival, #Succot (which begins on Friday evening) represents the dual character of Jewish faith. We believe in the universality of God, together with the particularity of Jewish history and identity. Image
All nations need rain (which we pray for on Succot). We are all part of nature. We are all dependent on the complex ecology of the created world.
We are all threatened by climate change, global warming, the destruction of rain forests, the overexploitation of non-renewable energy sources and the mass extinction of species.
Read 9 tweets
Sep 26, 2020
There is an old story that I find incredibly moving and powerful, particularly as we approach #YomKippur in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic (and which appears in my 'Ceremony & Celebration' educational resource for Yom Kippur -> rabbisacks.info/2E0XMhR). Image
One Yom Kippur, the Baal Shem Tov was praying together with his students, and he had a worrying sense that the prayers were not getting through, and the harsh heavenly decree against the Jewish people was not being overturned.
As Ne’ila approached, and with it the final opportunity for the Jewish people to avert this harsh judgement, he and his students increased their fervour and passion in their prayers, but to no avail.
Read 12 tweets
Sep 25, 2020
“Wherever you find God's greatness,” said Rabbi Yohanan, “there you will find His humility.” And wherever you find true humility, there you will find greatness.
That is what #YomKippur is about: finding the courage to let go of the need for self-esteem that fuels our passion for self-justification, our blustering claim that we are in the right when in truth we know we are often in the wrong.
Most national literatures, ancient and modern, record a people's triumphs. Jewish literature records our failures, moral and spiritual. No people has been so laceratingly honest in charting its shortcomings. In Tanakh there is no one without sin.
Read 10 tweets

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