A Mutual Light for the World

For though my faith is not yours and your faith is not mine, if we each are free to light our own flame, together we can banish some of the darkness of the world. 

Here is an excerpt from "On the Dignity of Difference," by  Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks 

Judaism like Christianity and Islam is full of diversity. One of the things I admire, the people who put the Hebrew Bible together is that they put in it such dissident works. Ecclesiastes, Job, remarkable. They wanted to hear the counter voice. They wanted to hear more than one voice and that has been the case ever since. In Israel where there’s a certain divide between religious and secular, I wanted to show that we can talk together with mutual respect and so I had a public discussion with the secular Israeli novelist Amos Oz. I will never forget his opening sentence. It is one of the most Jewish sentences I ever heard. He said, “I don’t think I’m going to agree with Rabbi Sacks about everything, but then on most things I don’t agree with myself.”

Of course the Koran celebrates the fact that God created many nations so that we may know one another and Gospel embraces Jew and Greek, slave and freemen, man and woman. This is what made Judaism, Christianity and Islam, the great forces that they are. The basis of this spiritually is that resonant line in the first chapter of the Bible when God says, “Let us make man in our image according to our likeness,” because if we believe that, then the greatest religious challenge is can I see God’s image in someone who is not in my image? Whose colour, culture, or class is not mine.