A few years ago, I listened to an interview that Krista Tippett did with Rabbi Sacks for On Being. Sacks’s questions about “making room for difference” and “seeing the image of God in one who is not our image” became guiding questions for my life in Peru, for thinking about dignity and difference in a world where George Floyd is murdered by police while the world watches, for the process of learning through travel. I began a doctorate program a few years ago and I chose to research the impact of studying abroad in Arequipa (with Harding University Latin America) in terms of intercultural spiritual formation. That is, spiritual formation in God’s diverse world is intercultural—and travel heightens the opportunity for that. It was only after I finished my research, writing the dissertation, and defending it that I had time to actually read the whole book.
And I loved it.
Every human should at least read the prologue to this book. In 20 pages, Jonathan Sacks does more to center particularity and difference in a world of globalization and universalism than anything else I’ve read. He is inviting, open, and hospitable in his writing. He asks: “Can we make space for difference? Can we hear the voice of God in a language, a sensibility, a culture not our own? Can we see the presence of God in the face of a stranger?” (5). In a world of interconnectedness, new types of tribalism are “driving us ever more angrily apart” (7). He acknowledges the destructive role religious particularity has played in world movements, but calls on people of faith to “be an equal and opposite counter-voice in the name of peace” (9).
Jonathan Sacks is a rabbi and writes from an orthodox Jewish context. “Faced with fateful choices, humanity needs wisdom, and religious traditions, alongside the great philosophies, are our richest resource of wisdom. They are sustained reflections on humanity’s place in nature and what constitute the proper goals of society and an individual life. They build communities, shape lives and tell the stories that explain ourselves to ourselves” (12).
He asks, how do we recover moral responsibility and ethical language “when the link between individual agents, actions and consequences has become so tenuous” in the global market? Sacks is for the free market—it “is the best means we have yet discovered for alleviating poverty and creating a human environment of independence, dignity and creativity” (14). “Difference is the source of value” in a free market world (14). But the market is producing unequal outcomes at an ever-increasing pace and must be framed in the context of biblical justice—tzedakah—to center human dignity. Education, Sacks will argue, “is the single greatest key to human dignity” (15).
“Can we live together? Can we make space for one another?…Can we recognize God’s image in one who is not my image?” (17) In this new universal order of global capitalism, “universalism must be balanced with a new respect for the local, the particular, the unique” (20). “The glory of the created world is its astonishing multiplicity: the thousands of different languages spoken by (hu)mankind, the proliferation of cultures, the sheer variety of the imaginative expressions of the human spirit, in most of which, if we listen carefully, we will hear the voice of wisdom telling us something we need to know” (20-21).
“We must learn the art of conversation, from which truth emerges…from the quite different process of letting our world be enlarged by the presence of others who think, act, and interpret reality in ways radically different from our own.” (23)
