Editor’s note: Just days before the beginning of Rosh Hashanah, Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks visited with Deseret News opinion editor Boyd Matheson and remarked that it would take a lot of the traditional gift of honey cake this year as all who desire to gather in the synagogue won’t be able to. He also discussed why social covenants, not social contracts, are what will save society. Below is a column based on that interview.
Sometimes this column is the place where I come to put thoughts together to make things make sense in my own head and heart and, hopefully, in yours. Other times I just try to get out of the way and let principles, history, mystery and extraordinary people demonstrate the power and inspiration of the human and the divine.
I was recently given great advice by someone I admire greatly. He told me that I needed to set time aside every week to, “Go to the mountain.” He wasn’t telling me to take a physical hike (though I am sure I need that, too). He was encouraging me take an internal trek — mentally, emotionally and spiritually. Making an ascent, he promised, would always be worth the effort.
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Insight and inspiration come when you make the difficult and sometimes daunting climb to the commanding heights. From such a mountaintop, moral imagination is sparked and strengthened while vision is sharpened and stretched. You can perceive, experience and know new things and see thing old things anew in moments spent “higher up.”
My little view from “somewhere” as a writer is always elevated when I get to go to the mountain, someone’s mountain, and learn the lessons of their climb, their view of human potential and their insight for fostering societal strength from the commanding heights of principles and moral imagination.
This week I was able to get a glimpse from the commanding heights in my interview with Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, one of the world’s most respected and revered moral voices. He is clearly one of the keepers of the flame of moral imagination.
With fires raging across the American West, we began with a glimpse into climate change. Not the kind that comes in the form of extreme weather caused by seemingly separate symptoms, but “cultural climate change.” Rabbi Sacks pointed out that, “‘Cultural climate change’ is where symptoms, including divisive politics, inequitable economics, social and racial unrest, threats to free speech and cancel culture, are all intrinsically connected.” The results can be catastrophic and can only be corrected through a renewed moral sense.
It was obvious to me from the pinnacle view Rabbi Sacks was providing that with the heat of political rhetoric rising and the cancer of contempt scorching societal connection, the climate was clearly changing. Then the Rabbi expanded my view by saying that these symptoms were also creating another, equally catastrophic, climate change — cold. An arctic frost of isolation, loneliness and despair is freezing relationships, ruining families and chilling civil society.
It is important to note that the view from higher up isn’t about looking down and passing judgement. The commanding heights, the mountain of moral imagination, is designed to be a place where possibilities are explored and solutions find their summit.
Rabbi Sacks pointed out to me one such solution. He said, “One way to conceptualize the change needed is by moving from a social contract, which invites us to think about what we can gain, to a social covenant, which invites us to think about the impact we can have on others. A contract is a transaction focused on interests and who benefits. A covenant is a relationship focused on identity and what can be transformed.”
When we focus on identity and what can be transformed, we transcend seeing struggling individuals and failing neighborhoods as liabilities to be managed and can begin to see them as individuals with infinite potential and communities of opportunities to be developed. Such a society will embrace the idea that free markets and financial success are unsustainable and worth but little without social capital and moral economics. Rabbi Sacks noted that without a robust civil society, “We will lose not just money and jobs but something more significant still: freedom, trust and decency, the things that have a value, not a price.”
My conversation with Rabbi Sacks continued over a wide array of topics including the limits of self help, the impact of loneliness, the short-sightedness of cancel culture, the need for free speech and the promise of shared responsibility.
“... The result is that the 21st century has left us with a maximum of choice and a minimum of meaning.” — Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks
Our conversation concluded on this thought from Rabbi Sacks on our individual and collective climb in search of meaning: “If there is one thing the great institutions of the modern world do not do, it is to provide meaning. Science tells us how but not why. Technology gives us power but cannot guide us as to how to use that power. The market gives us choices but leaves us uninstructed as to how to make those choices. The liberal democratic state gives us freedom to live as we choose but refuses, on principle, to guide us as to how to choose.
“... The result is that the 21st century has left us with a maximum of choice and a minimum of meaning.”
Society seems to be searching for meaning in all the wrong places. We are endlessly straggling in the foothills chasing the fools gold of 21st century society. I was thankful to find a treasure trove of truth and a fortune of meaning on the peaks and mountaintops with Rabbi Sacks as my guide.
I learned this little quote from Raul Daumal as a young missionary for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Japan and was reminded of it years later after a sunrise climb of a mountaintop in Malaysia: “You cannot stay on the summit forever; you have to come down again. So why bother in the first place? Just this: What is above knows what is below, but what is below does not know what is above. One climbs, one sees. One descends, one sees no longer, but one has seen. There is an art of conducting oneself in the lower regions by the memory of what one saw higher up. When one can no longer see, one can at least still know.”
My visit to the commanding heights of moral imagination with Rabbi Sacks ended and I reluctantly returned to the routine and work of the day. As is always the case after such an ascent, nothing can erase or diminish the memory of what I saw or the power of what I came to know, “higher up.” We all would do well to “go to the mountain” in search of meaning.
We should remember individually and as a society the lessons of history, the timeless principles of the commanding heights and the moral matrix of civil society that bind us together. We live in the midst of difficult days and trying times. From the valley of 2020, filled with the clamor and confusion of our current global challenges, we may not be able to see, but from our “higher up” memory of the mountain, we can at least still know.