Moral vs. Political Decisions (Pinchas 5780)

The Rabbi Sacks Legacy

Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks

Religion & Spirituality

4.8 • 601 Ratings

🗓️ 8 July 2020

⏱️ 14 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Here is the audio recording of Rabbi Sacks' Covenant & Conversation commentary essay on this week's Torah portion of Pinchas 5780. You can download a PDF of this commentary, as well as an accompanying Family Edition, from rabbisacks.org/pinchas-5780/

Transcript

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0:00.0	PINCHUS, moral versus political decisions.
0:04.4	The coronavirus pandemic raised a series of deep moral and political issues.
0:12.0	How far should governments go in seeking to prevent its spread?
0:17.6	To what extent should it restrict people's movements, at the cost of violating their civil
0:23.6	liberties? How far should it go in imposing a clampdown of businesses? At the cost of driving many of
0:31.3	bankrupt, rendering swathes of the population unemployed, building up a mountain of debt for the future, and plunging
0:39.2	the economy into the worst recession since the 1930s. These are just a few of them, any
0:45.8	heartbreaking dilemmas that their pandemic forced on governments and us. Strikingly, almost every country adopted the same measures, social distancing
0:58.2	and lockdown, until the incidents of new cases had reached its peak. Sweden was the most
1:05.0	conspicuous exception. Nations didn't count the cost, virtually unanimously. They placed the saving of life
1:14.2	over all other considerations. The economy may suffer, but life is infinitely precious, and saving it
1:21.7	takes precedence over all else. This was a momentous victory for the value first articulated in the Torah. In the Noah-ahide
1:30.8	covenant, he who sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for in the image of God,
1:37.2	he created man. This was the first declaration of the principle that human life is sacred. As the sages put it, every life is like a
1:46.5	universe, save a life, and it is as if you had saved a universe. In the ancient world, economic
1:53.3	considerations took precedence over life. Great building projects like the Tower of Babel,
1:59.4	and the Egyptian pyramids involved huge loss of life.
2:04.0	Even in the 20th century, lives were sacrificed to economic ideology,
2:09.5	between 6 and 9 million of them under Stalin and between 35 and 45 million under Chinese communism.
2:18.3	The fact that virtually all nations in the face of the pandemic chose life
2:23.3	was a significant victory for the terrorist ethic of the sanctity of life.
2:29.3	That said, however, the former Supreme Court judge, Jonathan Sumpchin, wrote a challenging
	...

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