Yael Simon: Chief Rabbi, we use the term 'the chosen people' but yet, in our vocabulary, we effortlessly use the words 'Jew' and 'non-Jew' suggesting perhaps that there is 'Jew' and then everyone else is almost a negative identity as a 'non-Jew'. How can you address this?
Chief Rabbi: I just did. It took me 75 minutes. I really tried so hard tonight to turn our conventional understanding upside-down in all sorts of ways. I said at the end of my book Radical Then, Radical Now that Jews did not write Shakespeare's sonnets. We didn't write Mozart's symphonies. We did not design the formal perfection of a Japanese garden. I admire all those things. I am enlarged by them. I don't believe a people secure in its own identity need ever negate or put down anyone else's identity. I've really been fighting against what I think is a laziness of mind which has developed over the last hundred or two hundred years. And it comes in two shapes and sizes, which appear to be opposite to one another but actually are two sides of the same coin.
One is a sense of Jewish inferiority and the other is a sense of Jewish superiority. They are both bad news. And I have been trying to explain how neither has a place in Jewish thought if we really wrestle with Jewish thought.
When I finish this glass of water I am going to make a bracha. Do you know what the bracha is? Boreh nefashot rabot - it begins - vechesronan. Now this is a very strange blessing. It means: God who creates many kinds of being - vechesronan - which means? Their 'lacks'. Their inadequacies. It is the only blessing I know in which we thank God for giving us inadequacy. It is a very odd thing to thank God for. Why do we thank God for it? I'll tell you: very simple. If I had no inadequacies (somebody would remind me otherwise) - if I had no inadequacies, I would never need anyone else. There would never be human society. It is the fact that I have hesronot - inadequacies. But the fact that God created nefashot rabot - many different kinds of human beings - that tells me that somebody else has what I lack. And somebody else lacks what I have. And that is why our coming together in friendship generates a win-win scenario. It's good for both of us. That is why human society exists. And I wish we could understand this, because I've got to tell you: it is so rare a message in the history of world religions. It is a very rare message. It's a deeply Jewish message.
And what I have been trying to do in these lectures is to go back to the very basics of Jewish thought as I think Jewish thought has been encrusted, distorted, by all sorts of loose thinking. And it is horrendous that Jews should think - and, you know, some religious Jews think this - that secular Jews are somehow morally inferior to them. One of the besetting risks of any faith - and we are not short of it - is self-righteousness. And that is very bad news. As a famous chassidic saying says: 'In the name of the Almighty I prefer a rosho who knows he's a rosho - I prefer a wicked person who knows he's a wicked person - to a tzaddik who thinks he's a tzaddik."
Are you with me? So what I've really been trying to is that I know exactly what you mean and I really have been fighting it for the course of this lecture. Because it is bad for us and bad for the world. I think that if we are true to ourselves, we will learn all sorts of things from other people. But we will never abandon our own heritage which is unique to us. Ok?
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