Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, 2016 Templeton Prize Laureate. (Photo credit: Templeton Prize / Tony Isbitt)
Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks Wins the Prestigious Templeton Prize
WEST CONSHOHOCKEN, Pa. – Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, the former Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth who has spent decades bringing spiritual insight to the public conversation through mass media, popular lectures and more than two dozen books, has been awarded the 2016 Templeton Prize.
Rabbi Sacks, 67, first gained attention by leading what many consider the revitalization of Britain’s Jewish community during his service as Chief Rabbi from 1991 to 2013, a feat he accomplished in the face of dwindling congregations and growing secularization across Europe. During his tenure he catalyzed a network of organizations that introduced a Jewish focus in areas including business, women’s issues and education, and urged British Jewry to turn outward to share the ethics of their faith with the broader community.
Central to his message is appreciation and respect of all faiths, with an emphasis that recognizing the values of each is the only path to effectively combat the global rise of violence and terrorism.
In his most recent book, Not in God’s Name: Confronting Religious Violence, Rabbi Sacks writes: “Too often in the history of religion, people have killed in the name of the God of life, waged war in the name of the God of peace, hated in the name of the God of love and practiced cruelty in the name of the God of compassion. When this happens, God speaks, sometimes in a still, small voice almost inaudible beneath the clamor of those claiming to speak on his behalf. What he says at such times is: ‘Not in My Name.'”
He also boldly defends the compatibility of religion and science, a response to those who consider them necessarily separate and distinct. “Science takes things apart to see how they work. Religion puts things together to see what they mean,” he wrote in his book, The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning.
The Templeton Prize, valued at £1.1 million (about $1.5 million or €1.4 million), is one of the world’s largest annual awards given to an individual and honors a living person who has made exceptional contributions to affirming life’s spiritual dimension, whether through insight, discovery, or practical works. The announcement was made at a news conference today at the British Academy in London by the John Templeton Foundation, based in West Conshohocken, Pennsylvania. The Prize anchors the Foundation’s international efforts to serve as a philanthropic catalyst for discoveries relating to human purpose and ultimate reality.
That catalyst includes presenting each year’s Prize Laureate with a series of what the foundation calls Big Questions, a tradition that echoes the legacy of founder Sir John Templeton, the legendary investor and philanthropist who sought to foster and recognize spiritual progress. In videos on the Prize website, www.templetonprize.org, Rabbi Sacks tackles many issues, including the recent spread of religious violence which he argues has been sparked by the export of Western secularization.
Unfortunately, he says, that secularization has failed to provide guidance on core issues of human identity, creating a vacuum being filled by religious fundamentalism that often stokes hatred. The parallel rise of social media has engulfed an ever larger swath of the population, especially youth.
The solution, he contends, is to match the violence with “a message of love as powerful as the message being delivered by the preachers of hate,” adding, “it really has to speak to young people and we have to use the same social networking, the same technology as the extremists and we’ve got to do it as well and better than they do.”
In remarks prepared for today’s press conference, Rabbi Sacks says: “Religion, or more precisely, religions, should have a voice in the public conversation within the societies of the West, as to how to live, how to construct a social order, how to enhance human dignity, honour human life, and indeed protect life as a whole …. Each religion, and each strand within each religion, will have to undertake this work, because if religion is not part of the solution it will assuredly be a large part of the problem as voices become ever more strident, and religious extremists ever more violent.”
Jennifer Simpson, Chair of the John Templeton Foundation Board of Trustees, notes that Rabbi Sacks epitomizes future-mindedness, a characteristic revered by her grandfather, Sir John Templeton and father, the late Foundation president and chairman Dr. Jack Templeton. “After 9/11, Rabbi Sacks saw the need for a response to the challenge posed by radicalization and extremism and he did so with dignity and grace,” she notes. “He saw the need for the strengthening of ethics in the marketplace long before the financial crisis.”
She adds, “He has always been ahead of his time and, thanks to his leadership, the world can look to the future with hope, something we are very much in need of right now.”
In nominating Rabbi Sacks for the Prize, former Archbishop of Canterbury Lord George Carey wrote: “There are public intellectuals and religious leaders, but few who are both at the same time. There are academic scholars and popular communicators, but he is both, reaching out far beyond his own constituency through the spoken, written and broadcast word.”
Rabbi Sacks joins a distinguished group of 45 former recipients, including Mother Teresa, who received the inaugural Prize award in 1973, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1983), and philosopher Charles Taylor (2007). Last year’s Prize winner was Canadian theologian Jean Vanier, the founder of L’Arche, an international network of communities where people with and without intellectual disabilities live and work together as peers. The 2014 Laureate was Czech priest and philosopher Tomáš Halík, following Desmond Tutu, the former Anglican archbishop of Cape Town, in 2013 and the Dalai Lama in 2012.
Rabbi Sacks was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 2005 and awarded a Life Peerage in the British House of Lords in 2009. He has been married to the former Elaine Taylor since 1970. They have three children and eight grandchildren.
He will be formally awarded the Templeton Prize at a public ceremony in London on May 26.
Prepared Remarks by Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks
Templeton Prize Press Conference, British Academy, London, March 2, 2016
The receipt of this Prize is one of the great moments in my life, and I am surprised, grateful and humbled all at once. Not only because of what the Prize represents but also because of the man whose name it bears. Sir John Templeton was a remarkable human being who brought the same acumen that made him so successful an investor in financial capital to his philanthropic work that
faithfully continued by his family, and we think today in great sadness of Dr Jack Templeton, no longer with us, and wish his widow Pina long life. It continues today into the third generation and beyond, and by The John Templeton Foundation itself.
The work of the Foundation, not only in the Prize but equally in the research the foundation funds, has generated a real and perceptive climate change for the good in the academic world, in the relationship between science and the great questions of existence, the study of character and virtue, the interconnections between individual, economic and social freedom, the development of
creativity, and the ethical implications of our developing understanding of genetics. Our world has been changed for the better by the Templeton family and The John Templeton Foundation, and I regard it as a great and humbling honour to count myself among the many charged with taking that work forward.
Sir John was fascinated among other things by the inter-relationship between religion and science, believing that the two would always prove to be compatible, since the God of revelation is also the God of creation. He was fascinated in both directions: by the religious implications of science, and the scientific implications of religion. How does our view of the cosmos help us better understand ourselves, and how does our understanding of ourselves affect our view of the cosmos.
We recently had a stunning example of this in the form of the detection of gravitational waves, finally confirming a prediction Einstein made a century ago. It would be something of an exaggeration to say that I understand the science involved. But the poetry is a thing of stark and stunning beauty. It
took instruments of enormous sensitivity to detect a cosmic ripple of almost unimaginable smallness, yet which testifies to an enormous collision between two black holes that had been circling one another ever closer until they merged in an enormous event whose ripples can still be detected more than a billion years later. Einstein was right in his prediction of gravitational waves even if there were times later in his life when he doubted it and even sought to retract it. Gravity is not, as it were, a simple linear phenomenon, and its tremors, however slight, testify to vast explosive forces in the cosmos.
This strikes me as a powerful metaphor of the human universe the West has been constructing for the past four centuries. It seemed for a long time to be a simple linear equation. The world was becoming ever more secularized. Civilization was a one way road from the age of many gods to that of one God to that of none. The seventeenth century saw the secularization of knowledge in the form of Newtonian science and Cartesian philosophy. The eighteenth century saw the secularization of power, in the form of the American and French revolutions and the separation of church and state. The nineteenth century saw the secularization of culture, as museums, art galleries and concert
halls took the place of churches as houses of the human spirit. And the twentieth century saw the secularization of morality as one by one the nations of the West slowly abandoned the Judeo- Christian ethic of the sanctity of life and of the marital bond. And it began not because people stopped believing in God. Newton believed in God very much indeed. It happened after almost a century of wars of religion because people lost faith in the ability of people of different faiths to live peaceably together.
However, the linear theory of secularization always was an over-simplification. First, it failed to take account of the persistence of faith. None of the four great institutions of the modern age science, technology, the market economy or the liberal democratic state offers a compelling answer to the three great questions every reflective human being will ask at some stage in life: Who am I? Why am I here? How then shall I live?
These belong to a different universe of discourse to that charted by science. As I put it in The Great Partnership: Science takes things apart to see how they work. Religion puts things together to see what they mean. We will always inhabit a world of the spirit that searches not just for explanation but
meaning of human means No less significant, though, is that there always was a danger that extremism in one direction would generate a counter-extremism in the opposite direction. Like two black holes they might begin to circle one another, generating enormous turbulence. That, it seems to me, is the danger we face at present in many parts of the world: an extreme secularism facing extreme expressions of religion seeking to undo the work of four centuries of the West, threatening to take us back to the age of wars of religion. If these two powerful forces were to collide, the explosion would send ripples through the human universe for centuries to come.
This concern has driven much of my own work for the past quarter century, in three directions.
First I believe that religion, or more precisely, religions, should have a voice in the public conversation within the societies of the West, as to how to live, how to construct a social order, how to enhance human dignity, honour human life, and indeed protect life as a whole from environmental hazard. We are about to be challenged by huge questions. How shall we use the ever greater power of medical technology through active intervention in the human genome? How shall we structure a global economy without generating almost unbearable inequalities within and between nations? How shall we confront the challenge artificial intelligence will pose to traditional patterns of employment? And so on. Our powers are growing almost faster than we can understand, let alone control, and we faiths are among our richest heritages of wisdom. Religion must have a voice in the public conversation, but it must be a reasoned and reasonable voice and one that makes space for other voices also.
Second, in a culture of global communication and interconnectedness, we need to work as hard as we can to enhance mutual respect and friendship between faiths. There is no one formula as to how to do this. I have argued, for example, that the message of monotheism is not, one God, one truth, one way, but rather the miracle that unity in heaven creates diversity on earth. I have argued that the book of Genesis, from which Judaism, Christianity and Islam all take inspiration, tells us that our shared humanity precedes and transcends our religious differences. More recently I have argued that we may have to reread the narratives of Genesis if we are to overcome the sibling rivalry that has all too often characterized the relationship between, and sometimes within, these three great faiths. Each religion, and each strand within each religion, will have to undertake this work, because if religion is not part of the solution it will assuredly be a large part of the problem as voices become ever more strident, and religious extremists ever more violent.
Third, I have tried within my own faith to do what I can to help turn religion outward. At times of great turbulence and change cultures become hedgehogs. They roll up and focus all their energies inward, presenting only sharp, prickly spines to the world outside. That is a symptom of fear and faith should be the great antidote to fear. The imperative of the God of Abraham, as I understand it, is to be true to your faith while being a blessing to others regardless of their faith. The God of Abraham asks us to turn our face outward to the world, recognising His image even in the people who are not in our image, whose faith is not mine, whose colour and culture are not mine, yet whose humanity is as God-given and consecrated as mine.
These then have been the avenues I have sought to explore, and the Templeton Prize will both enable and encourage me to continue and intensify that work, seeking to find kindred spirits around the world, inspire young leaders to take the work forward into the future and doing all I can to honour the challenge of the prize itself, which is to make progress in religion, understanding that faith is a not-yet completed journey to a world awed by the cosmos as the work of God, and humbled in the face of our shared humanity as the image of God.
