November 17, 2014<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Among many speeches yesterday following\u00a0Pope Francis\u2019s\u00a0address<\/a>\u00a0to the Humanum colloquium on complementarity, that of Lord Jonathan Sacks, the former Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom, was the standout, bringing the audience of 300 in the synod hall to their feet. Using\u00a0dazzling oratory, he\u00a0offered a magisterial account of the development of marriage from the very start \u2014 a sexual act between fish in Scotland \u2014 right up to the present day, told by means of seven stories, and ending with a spectacular exegesis of the Genesis account. It is a story\u00a0with a tragic end: the dismantling of\u00a0what he calls \u201cthe single most humanising institution in history\u201d resulting\u00a0in a whole new era of poverty and social division. Yet the recovery of that institution offers hope.\u00a0\u00a0<\/em>The full speech follows.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n I want this morning to begin our conversation by one way of telling the story of the most\u00a0beautiful idea in the history of civilization: the idea of the love that brings new life into\u00a0the world. There are of course many ways of telling the story, and this is just one. But to me it is a story of seven key moments, each of them surprising and unexpected.\u00a0The first, according to a report in the press on 20th October of this year, took\u00a0place in a lake in Scotland 385 million years ago. It was then, according to this new\u00a0discovery, that two fish came together to perform the first instance of sexual reproduction\u00a0known to science. Until then all life had propagated itself asexually, by cell division,\u00a0budding, fragmentation or parthenogenesis, all of which are far simpler and more\u00a0economical than the division of life into male and female, each with a different role in\u00a0creating and sustaining life.<\/p>\n When we consider, even in the animal kingdom, how much effort and energy the\u00a0coming together of male and female takes, in terms of displays, courtship rituals, rivalries\u00a0and violence, it is astonishing that sexual reproduction ever happened at all. Biologists\u00a0are still not quite sure why it did. Some say to offer protection against parasites, or\u00a0immunities against disease. Others say it\u2019s simply that the meeting of opposites generates\u00a0diversity. But one way or another, the fish in Scotland discovered something new and\u00a0beautiful that\u2019s been copied ever since by virtually all advanced forms of life. Life begins The second unexpected development was the unique challenge posed to\u00a0Homo<\/em>\u00a0sapiens<\/em>\u00a0by two factors: we stood upright, which constricted the female pelvis, and we had\u00a0bigger brains \u2013 a 300 per cent increase \u2013 which meant larger heads. The result was that\u00a0human babies had to be born more prematurely than any other species, and so needed\u00a0parental protection for much longer. This made parenting more demanding among\u00a0humans than any other species, the work of two people rather than one.\u00a0Hence the very rare phenomenon among mammals, of pair bonding, unlike other\u00a0species where the male contribution tends to end with the act of impregnation. Among\u00a0most primates, fathers don\u2019t even recognise their children let alone care for them.\u00a0Elsewhere in the animal kingdom motherhood is almost universal but fatherhood is rare.<\/p>\n So what emerged along with the human person was the union of the biological mother\u00a0and father to care for their child. Thus far nature, but then came culture, and the third\u00a0surprise.<\/p>\n It seems that among hunter gatherers, pair bonding was the norm. Then came\u00a0agriculture, and economic surplus, and cities and civilisation, and for the first time sharp\u00a0inequalities began to emerge between rich and poor, powerful and powerless. The great\u00a0ziggurats of Mesopotamia and pyramids of ancient Egypt, with their broad base and\u00a0narrow top, were monumental statements in stone of a hierarchical society in which the\u00a0few had power over the many. And the most obvious expression of power among alpha\u00a0males whether human or primate, is to dominate access to fertile women and thus\u00a0maximise the handing on of your genes to the next generation. Hence polygamy, which\u00a0exists in 95 per cent of mammal species and 75 per cent of cultures known to\u00a0anthropology. Polygamy is the ultimate expression of inequality because it means that\u00a0many males never get the chance to have a wife and child. And sexual envy has been,\u00a0throughout history, among animals as well as humans, a prime driver of violence.<\/p>\n That is what makes the first chapter of Genesis so revolutionary with its\u00a0statement that every human being, regardless of class, colour, culture or creed, is in the\u00a0image and likeness of God himself.\u00a0We know that in the ancient world it was rulers,\u00a0kings, emperors and pharaohs who were held to be in the image of God. So what\u00a0Genesis was saying was that we are all royalty. We each have equal dignity in the\u00a0kingdom of faith under the sovereignty of God.<\/p>\n From this it follows that we each have an equal right to form a marriage and have\u00a0children, which is why, regardless of how we read the story of Adam and Eve \u2013 and there\u00a0are differences between Jewish and Christian readings \u2013 the norm presupposed by that\u00a0story is: one woman, one man. Or as the Bible itself says: \u201cThat is why a man leaves his\u00a0father and mother and is united to his wife, and they become one flesh.\u201d<\/p>\n Monogamy did not immediately become the norm, even within the world of the\u00a0Bible. But many of its most famous stories, about the tension between Sarah and Hagar,\u00a0or Leah and Rachel and their children, or David and Bathsheba, or Solomon\u2019s many\u00a0wives, are all critiques that point the way to monogamy.<\/p>\n And there is a deep connection between monotheism and monogamy, just as\u00a0there is, in the opposite direction, between idolatry and adultery. Monotheism and\u00a0monogamy are about the all-embracing relationship between I and Thou, myself and one\u00a0other, be it a human, or the divine, Other.<\/p>\n What makes the emergence of monogamy unusual is that it is normally the case\u00a0that the values of a society are those imposed on it by the ruling class. And the ruling\u00a0class in any hierarchical society stands to gain from promiscuity and polygamy, both of\u00a0which multiply the chances of my genes being handed on to the next generation. From\u00a0monogamy the rich and powerful lose and the poor and powerless gain. So the return of\u00a0monogamy goes against the normal grain of social change and was a real triumph for the\u00a0equal dignity of all. Every bride and every groom are royalty; every home a palace when furnished with love.<\/p>\n The fourth remarkable development was the way this transformed the moral life.\u00a0We\u2019ve all become familiar with the work of evolutionary biologists using computer\u00a0simulations and the iterated prisoners\u2019 dilemma to explain why reciprocal altruism exists\u00a0among all social animals. We behave to others as we would wish them to behave to us,\u00a0and we respond to them as they respond to us. As C S Lewis pointed out in his book\u00a0The<\/em>\u00a0Abolition of Man<\/em>, reciprocity is the Golden Rule shared by all the great civilizations.<\/p>\n What was new and remarkable in the Hebrew Bible was the idea that love, not\u00a0just fairness, is the driving principle of the moral life. Three loves. \u201cLove the Lord your\u00a0God with all your heart, all your soul and all your might.\u201d \u201cLove your neighbour as The fifth development shaped the entire structure of Jewish experience. In\u00a0ancient Israel an originally secular form of agreement, called a covenant, was taken and\u00a0transformed into a new way of thinking about the relationship between God and So the Hebrew word emunah, wrongly translated as faith, really means faithfulness, fidelity, loyalty, steadfastness, not walking away even when the going gets tough, trusting the other and honouring the other\u2019s trust in us. What covenant did, and we see this in almost all the prophets, was to understand the relationship between us and\u00a0God in terms of the relationship between bride and groom, wife and husband. Love thus\u00a0became not only the basis of morality but also of theology. In Judaism faith is a\u00a0marriage. Rarely was this more beautifully stated than by Hosea when he said in the\u00a0name of God:<\/p>\n I will betroth you to me forever; Jewish men say those words every weekday morning as we wind the strap of our tefillin\u00a0around our finger like a wedding ring. Each morning we renew our marriage with God.<\/p>\n This led to a sixth and quite subtle idea that truth, beauty, goodness, and life\u00a0itself, do not exist in any one person or entity but in the \u201cbetween,\u201d what Martin Buber\u00a0called\u00a0Das Zwischenmenschliche<\/em>, the interpersonal, the counterpoint of speaking and The prophet Malachi calls the male priest the guardian of the law of truth. The All this led to the seventh outcome, that in Judaism the home and the family So Jews became an intensely family oriented people, and it was this that saved us And they were renewed every week especially on Shabbat, the day of rest when There she saw the children enacting in advance what they would see that evening So that is one way of telling the story, a Jewish way, beginning with the birth of What made the traditional family remarkable, a work of high religious art, is\u00a0what it brought together: sexual drive, physical desire, friendship, companionship,\u00a0emotional kinship and love, the begetting of children and their protection and care, their\u00a0early education and induction into an identity and a history. Seldom has any institution\u00a0woven together so many different drives and desires, roles and responsibilities. It made\u00a0sense of the world and gave it a human face, the face of love.<\/p>\n For a whole variety of reasons, some to do with medical developments like birth\u00a0control, in vitro fertilisation and other genetic interventions, some to do with moral\u00a0change like the idea that we are free to do whatever we like so long as it does not harm The result is that in Britain in 2012, 47.5 per cent of children were born outside\u00a0marriage, expected to become a majority in 2016. Fewer people are marrying, those who\u00a0are, are marrying later, and 42 per cent of marriages end in divorce. Nor is cohabitation a\u00a0substitute for marriage. The average length of cohabitation in Britain and the United\u00a0States is less than two years. The result is a sharp increase among young people of eating\u00a0disorders, drug and alcohol abuse, stress related syndromes, depression and actual and\u00a0attempted suicides. The collapse of marriage has created a new form of poverty\u00a0concentrated among single parent families, and of these, the main burden is born by\u00a0women, who in 2011 headed 92 per cent of single parent households. In Britain today\u00a0more than a million children will grow up with no contact whatsoever with their fathers.<\/p>\n This is creating a divide within societies the like of which has not been seen since\u00a0Disraeli spoke of \u201ctwo nations\u201d a century and a half ago. Those who are privileged to\u00a0grow up in stable loving association with the two people who brought them into being\u00a0will, on average, be healthier physically and emotionally. They will do better at school\u00a0and at work. They will have more successful relationships, be happier and live longer.<\/p>\n And yes, there are many exceptions. But the injustice of it all cries out to heaven. It will\u00a0go down in history as one of the tragic instances of what Friedrich Hayek called \u201cthe\u00a0fatal conceit\u201d that somehow we know better than the wisdom of the ages, and can defy\u00a0the lessons of biology and history.\u00a0No one surely wants to go back to the narrow prejudices of the past.<\/p>\n This week,\u00a0in Britain, a new film opens, telling the story of one of the great minds of the twentieth century, Alan Turing, the Cambridge mathematician who laid the philosophical\u00a0foundations of computing and artificial intelligence, and helped win the war by breaking\u00a0the German naval code Enigma. After the war, Turing was arrested and tried for\u00a0homosexual behaviour, underwent chemically induced castration, and died at the age of\u00a041 by cyanide poisoning, thought by many to have committed suicide. That is a world to\u00a0which we should never return.<\/p>\n But our compassion for those who choose to live differently should not inhibit us\u00a0from being advocates for the single most humanising institution in history. The family,\u00a0man, woman, and child, is not one lifestyle choice among many. It is the best means we\u00a0have yet discovered for nurturing future generations and enabling children to grow in a\u00a0matrix of stability and love. It is where we learn the delicate choreography of relationship\u00a0and how to handle the inevitable conflicts within any human group. It is where we first\u00a0take the risk of giving and receiving love. It is where one generation passes on its values\u00a0to the next, ensuring the continuity of a civilization. For any society, the family is the\u00a0crucible of its future, and for the sake of our children\u2019s future, we must be its defenders.<\/p>\n Since this is a religious gathering, let me, if I may, end with a piece of biblical\u00a0exegesis. The story of the first family, the first man and woman in the garden of Eden, is\u00a0not generally regarded as a success. Whether or not we believe in original sin, it did not\u00a0end happily. After many years of studying the text I want to suggest a different reading.<\/p>\n The story ends with three verses that seem to have no connection with one\u00a0another. No sequence. No logic. In Genesis 3: 19 God says to the man: \u201cBy the sweat of\u00a0your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were What is the connection here? Why did God telling the man that he was mortal\u00a0lead him to give his wife a new name? And why did that act seem to change God\u2019s\u00a0attitude to both of them, so that He performed an act of tenderness, by making them If we read the text carefully, we see that until now the first man had given his\u00a0wife a purely generic name. He called her\u00a0ishah<\/em>, woman. Recall what he said when he\u00a0first saw her: \u201cThis is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be\u00a0called woman for she was taken from man.\u201d For him she was a type, not a person. He\u00a0gave her a noun, not a name. What is more he defines her as a derivative of himself:\u00a0something taken from man. She is not yet for him someone other, a person in her own As long as the man thought he was immortal, he ultimately needed no one else.\u00a0But now he knew he was mortal. He would one day die and return to dust. There was\u00a0only one way in which something of him would live on after his death. That would be if\u00a0he had a child. But he could not have a child on his own. For that he needed his wife.\u00a0She alone could give birth. She alone could mitigate his mortality. And not because she\u00a0was like him but precisely because she was unlike him. At that moment she ceased to be,\u00a0for him, a type, and became a person in her own right. And a person has a proper name. At that moment, as they were about to leave Eden and face the world as we\u00a0know it, a place of darkness, Adam gave his wife the first gift of love, a personal name.\u00a0And at that moment, God responded to them both in love, and made them garments to And so it has been ever since, that when a man and woman turn to one another\u00a0in a bond of faithfulness, God robes them in garments of light, and we come as close as\u00a0we will ever get to God himself, bringing new life into being, turning the prose of biology\u00a0into the poetry of the human spirit, redeeming the darkness of the world by the radiance\u00a0of love.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" November 17, 2014 Among many speeches yesterday following\u00a0Pope Francis\u2019s\u00a0address\u00a0to the Humanum colloquium on complementarity, that of Lord Jonathan Sacks, the former Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom, was the standout, bringing the audience of 300 in the synod hall to their feet. Using\u00a0dazzling oratory, he\u00a0offered a magisterial account of the development of marriage from … Continue reading Jonathan Sacks on human ecology<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[46],"tags":[1728,2779,32046,1700],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/communio.stblogs.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32055"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/communio.stblogs.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/communio.stblogs.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/communio.stblogs.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/communio.stblogs.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32055"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/communio.stblogs.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32055\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32056,"href":"https:\/\/communio.stblogs.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32055\/revisions\/32056"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/communio.stblogs.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32055"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/communio.stblogs.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32055"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/communio.stblogs.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32055"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nwhen male and female meet and embrace.<\/p>\n
\nyourself.\u201d And, repeated no less than 36 times in the Mosaic books, \u201cLove the stranger\u00a0because you know what it feels like to be a stranger.\u201d Or to put it another way: just as\u00a0God created the natural world in love and forgiveness, so we are charged with creating\u00a0the social world in love and forgiveness. And that love is a flame lit in marriage and the\u00a0family. Morality is the love between husband and wife, parent and child, extended\u00a0outward to the world.<\/p>\n
\nhumanity, in the case of Noah, and between God and a people in the case of Abraham\u00a0and later the Israelites at Mount Sinai. A covenant is like a marriage. It is a mutual\u00a0pledge of loyalty and trust between two or more people, each respecting the dignity and\u00a0integrity of the other, to work together to achieve together what neither can achieve\u00a0alone. And there is one thing even God cannot achieve alone, which is to live within the\u00a0human heart. That needs us.<\/p>\n
\nI will betroth you in righteousness and justice, love and compassion.
\nI will betroth you in faithfulness, and you will know the Lord.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\nlistening, giving and receiving. Throughout the Hebrew Bible and the rabbinic literature,\u00a0the vehicle of truth is conversation. In revelation God speaks and asks us to listen. In\u00a0prayer we speak and ask God to listen. There is never only one voice. In the Bible the\u00a0prophets argue with God. In the Talmud rabbis argue with one another. In fact I\u00a0sometimes think the reason God chose the Jewish people was because He loves a good\u00a0argument. Judaism is a conversation scored for many voices, never more passionately\u00a0than in the Song of Songs, a duet between a woman and a man, the beloved and her\u00a0lover, that Rabbi Akiva called the holy of holies of religious literature.<\/p>\n
\nbook of Proverbs says of the woman of worth that \u201cthe law of loving kindness is on her
\ntongue.\u201d It is that conversation between male and female voices, between truth and love,
\njustice and mercy, law and forgiveness, that frames the spiritual life. In biblical times
\neach Jew had to give a half shekel to the Temple to remind us that we are only half.
\nThere are some cultures that teach that we are nothing. There are others that teach that\u00a0we are everything. The Jewish view is that we are half and we need to open ourselves to\u00a0another if we are to become whole.<\/p>\n
\nbecame the central setting of the life of faith. In the only verse in the Hebrew Bible to
\nexplain why God chose Abraham, He says: \u201cI have known him so that he will instruct
\nhis children and his household after him to keep the way of the Lord by doing what is
\nright and just.\u201d Abraham was chosen not to rule an empire, command an army, perform
\nmiracles or deliver prophecies, but simply to be a parent.\u00a0In one of the most famous lines in Judaism, which we say every day and night,\u00a0Moses commands, \u201cYou shall teach these things repeatedly to your children, speaking of\u00a0them when you sit in your house or when you walk on the way, when you lie down and\u00a0when you rise up.\u201d Parents are to be educators, education is the conversation between\u00a0the generations, and the first school is the home.<\/p>\n
\nfrom tragedy. After the destruction of the Second Temple in the year 70, Jews were
\nscattered throughout the world, everywhere a minority, everywhere without rights,
\nsuffering some of the worst persecutions ever known by a people and yet Jews survived
\nbecause they never lost three things: their sense of family, their sense of community and
\ntheir faith.<\/p>\n
\nwe give our marriages and families what they most need and are most starved of in the
\ncontemporary world, namely time. I once produced a television documentary for the
\nBBC on the state of family life in Britain, and I took the person who was then Britain\u2019s
\nleading expert on child care, Penelope Leach, to a Jewish primary school on a Friday
\nmorning.<\/p>\n
\naround the family table. There were the five year old mother and father blessing the five
\nyear old children with the five year old grandparents looking on. She was fascinated by
\nthis whole institution, and she asked the children what they most enjoyed about the
\nSabbath. One five year old boy turned to her and said, \u201cIt\u2019s the only night of the week
\nwhen daddy doesn\u2019t have to rush off.\u201d As we walked away from the school when the
\nfilming was over she turned to me and said, \u201cChief Rabbi, that Sabbath of yours is saving
\ntheir parents\u2019 marriages.\u201d<\/p>\n
\nsexual reproduction, then the unique demands of human parenting, then the eventual
\ntriumph of monogamy as a fundamental statement of human equality, followed by the
\nway marriage shaped our vision of the moral and religious life as based on love and
\ncovenant and faithfulness, even to the point of thinking of truth as a conversation
\nbetween lover and beloved. Marriage and the family are where faith finds its home and
\nwhere the Divine Presence lives in the love between husband and wife, parent and child.
\nWhat then has changed? Here\u2019s one way of putting it. I wrote a book a few years
\nago about religion and science and I summarised the difference between them in two
\nsentences. \u201cScience takes things apart to see how they work. Religion puts things
\ntogether to see what they mean.\u201d And that\u2019s a way of thinking about culture also. Does it
\nput things together or does it take things apart?<\/p>\n
\nothers, some to do with a transfer of responsibilities from the individual to the state, and\u00a0other and more profound changes in the culture of the West, almost everything that\u00a0marriage once brought together has now been split apart. Sex has been divorced from\u00a0love, love from commitment, marriage from having children, and having children from\u00a0responsibility for their care.<\/p>\n
\ntaken; for dust you are and to dust you will return.\u201d Then in the next verse we read: \u201cThe\u00a0man named his wife Eve, because she was the mother of all life.\u201d And in the next,\u00a0\u201cThe Lord God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them.\u201d<\/p>\n
\nclothes, almost as if He had partially forgiven them? Let me also add that the Hebrew\u00a0word for \u201cskin\u201d is almost indistinguishable from the Hebrew word for \u201clight,\u201d so that\u00a0Rabbi Meir, the great sage of the early second century, read the text as saying that God\u00a0made for them \u201cgarments of light.\u201d What did he mean?<\/p>\n
\nright. She is merely a kind of reflection of himself.<\/p>\n
\nThat is what he gave her: the name Chavah, \u201cEve,\u201d meaning, \u201cgiver of life.\u201d<\/p>\n
\nclothe their nakedness, or as Rabbi Meir put it, \u201cgarments of light.\u201d<\/p>\n