Evolution or Revolution? (Behar 5779)

The Rabbi Sacks Legacy

Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks

Religion & Spirituality

4.8 • 601 Ratings

🗓️ 15 May 2019

⏱️ 11 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

"I am delighted to share with you the newest cycle of Covenant & Conversation essays on the weekly parsha (Torah reading). I am particularly excited to introduce a Family Edition accompaniment to this year's series which has two main aims. First, to present the ideas in Covenant & Conversation in a simplified way, making my ideas more accessible to children and teenagers. Second, to act as an educational resource for parents, teachers and anyone else to engage their children and students in meaningful and stimulating conversations about the parsha." Main edition: rabbisacks.org/behar-5779/ Family edition: rabbisacks.org/cc-family-edition-behar-5779/

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to another episode of Covenant and Conversation with me, Rabbi Sachs.
0:14.6	In each new episode, we'll explore a Jewish idea from the Hebrew Bible based on the Torah reading of the week.
0:27.1	Evolution or revolution. There are, it sometimes said, no controlled experiments in history.
0:33.6	Every society, every age, every set of circumstances is unique.
0:39.7	If so, there's no science of history.
0:43.2	There are no universal rules to guide the destiny of nations.
0:45.1	And yet it's not quite true.
0:51.4	The history of the past four centuries does offer us something close to a controlled experiment.
0:54.0	And the conclusion is surprising. The modern world was shaped by four
0:56.5	revolutions, the English, 1642 to 1651, the American, 1776, the French, 1789, and the Russian,
1:05.6	1917. Their outcomes were radically different. In England, in America, revolution brought war, but led to a gradual growth of civil liberties, human rights, representative government, and eventually democracy. On the other hand, the French Revolution gave rise to the reign of terror between September 5th 1793 and 28th of July 1794,
1:33.3	in which more than 40,000 enemies of the revolution were summarily executed by the guillotine.
1:41.3	The Russian Revolution led to one of the most repressive totalitarian regimes in history.
1:48.4	As many as 20 million people are estimated to have died unnatural deaths under Stalin between
1:54.8	1994 and 1953.
1:58.5	In revolutionary France and the Soviet Union, the dream of utopia ended in a nightmare of hell.
2:05.4	What was the salient difference between them? There are multiple explanations. History is complex,
2:11.8	it's wrong to simplify, but one detail in particular stands out. The English and American revolutions were inspired by the Hebrew Bible, as read and interpreted
2:22.1	by the Puritans.
2:24.1	This happened because of the convergence of a number of factors in the 16th and 17th centuries,
2:29.8	the Reformation, the invention of printing, the rise of literacy and the spread of books, and the
2:36.6	availability of the Hebrew Bible in vernacular translations. For the first time, people could read
	...

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