This is a podcast from the archives of the BBC Ruth Lectures. This lecture in the series

The Persistence of Faith given by Jonathan Sacks was originally broadcast in 1990.

Philosophers love posing dilemmas. Here's one. You're standing in the National Gallery

at the opening of an art exhibition.

Suddenly a fire breaks out and spreads with enormous speed.

In front of you is a priceless Leonardo.

To your right is one of the country's most respected elder statesman.

To your left is your four-year-old daughter. You can only rescue one of them. Which do you save?

Well, if you emerged into the open air with the painting or the statesman, you might have contributed

to the greater good. But I wonder whether we'd altogether trust you as a human being. Somehow the family goes to the

heart of our sense of moral obligation. Our ties to our children and to our parents are fundamental,

and not as the result of any rule or reflection. Rather, it has to do with who we are, and our peculiar relationship

with those who brought us into the world and those we've brought into being in turn. We'd be

inclined to say it's an instinct, a natural feeling. But it's also a matter of culture, of acquired values. Back in 1976, there was an

earthquake in communist China, and the Chinese press carried a report about a man who'd rescued

a local communist officer from a fallen building. His own child was also trapped, and he'd heard him crying for help.

But he chose instead to save the officer, whose social value he considered to be greater.

By the time he returned to the wreckage for his son, he found him dead.

The communist newspapers wrote about the incident as an

example of proper behaviour. What these examples suggest is that there's more than one way of ordering

our loyalties. We might inhabit a culture in which family ties mattered less to us than they

do now. But what they might also suggest is that such a culture would be an altogether colder

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