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Rosh Hashanah - My Brother's Keeper
大象传媒 ONE, Sunday 2 October
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Following the London suicide bombings, Chief Rabbi Sir Jonathan Sacks asks how it is that religion so often gets disconnected from humanity and goodness and what can be done to re-connect it.
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In his annual message for the Jewish New Year, the Chief Rabbi pins his own hopes on what he calls 'the ethics of responsibility', drawing inspiration from a number of people who have responded to the needs of others and, in so doing, have found their own lives enriched.
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Sir Jonathan talks individually to Chancellor Gordon Brown and Sir Bob Geldof about the roots of their support for the Make Poverty History campaign.
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He asks them how much, or how little, religious belief has contributed to their moral framework and finds that both men are driven by a combination of anger and compassion - anger at injustice and compassion for its victims.
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Gordon Brown says: "I was brought up by a father who kept telling me that 'You can make your mark for good or for bad.' And he always focused me and our family and, I suppose, all his parishioners, on the idea of personal responsibility.
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"And I think social justice advances when you combine a sense of anger and outrage about what is wrong with an acceptance that things will not change fully unless people - yourself and others - accept full responsibility for their lives.
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"So, on the one hand, there was always compassion, but there's also anger if there's an injustice. And it's the combination of these two which is the sort of value that I was brought up to respect.
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"And I owe that to the faith in which I was brought up and to the influence of my parents."
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Sir Jonathan says that anger and piety may sound a world apart, but in fact they are not.
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He says: "In many ways I wish more religious people would feel the anger which drives Bob Geldof to take on injustice. But anger isn't the only way to change the world..."
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Rosh Hashanah - My Brother's Keeper
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To prove this point, Sir Jonathan meets Chava Lehman, who is founder of the Kisharon School and Tikvah support group in North London.
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These two Jewish charities insist on seeing beyond the 'special needs' of disabled children to what they describe as their 'specialness'.
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Chava focusses on the children's ability (or Kisharon) rather than their disability and places an emphasis on the hope (or Tikvah) which they can bring to others.
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Amanda Simons and Daryl Phillips are more accidental heroes. Last December, they were on holiday in Thailand when the tsunami struck. Amanda was pushed underwater by debris and was only saved when a local man reached underwater to grab her arm. She later found his dead body.
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Despite their trauma, or rather because of it, they returned to Kao Lak with a Jewish relief operation to help local people rebuild their shattered lives. For them, the main question raised by the tsunami wasn't, "How could God allow this happen?" but rather, "What are we going to do about it?"
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That, for the Chief Rabbi, is the crucial element of any morality - secular or religious.
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Instead of asking why bad things happen, he says that people need to ask themselves what they can do to redeem the situation.
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He says: "There is no life without a task, no person without a talent, no place without a fragment of God's light waiting to be discovered and redeemed.
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"If we are where we are because God wants us to be, then there must be, in every situation, something he wants us to do..."
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