The Dignity of Difference
A few years ago, I listened to an interview that Krista Tippett did with Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks for On Being. I listened to it again after his death near the end of 2020. Sacks’s questions about “making room for difference” and “seeing the image of God in one who is not our image” became guiding questions for my life in Peru, for thinking about dignity and difference in a world where George Floyd is murdered by police while the world watches, for the process of learning through travel.
One of the lines of the interview that sticks with me the most is about unity creating diversity:
All life, everything — all the three million species of life and plant life — all have the same source. We all come from a single source. Everything that lives has its genetic code written in the same alphabet. Unity creates diversity. So don’t think of one God, one truth, one way. Think of one God creating this extraordinary number of ways, the 6,800 languages that are actually spoken. Don’t think there’s only one language within which we can speak to God.
I began a doctorate program a few years ago and I chose to research the impact of studying abroad in Arequipa in terms of intercultural spiritual formation, with Sacks’s questions as guiding emphases. That is, spiritual formation in God’s diverse world must be intercultural, it must orient us toward seeing God in people who are different than us. Travel heightens the opportunity for that type of growth. It was only after I finished my research, writing the dissertation, and defending it that I had time to actually read Sacks’s entire book.
And I loved it.
In The Dignity of Difference, Jonathan Sacks goes big, taking on globalization, social responsibility, capitalism and the market economy, justice, education, ecology, forgiveness, and hope.
Every human should at least read the prologue to this book. In 20 pages, Sacks does more to center particularity and difference in a world of globalization and universalism than anything else I’ve read. He is inviting, open, and hospitable in his writing. He asks: “Can we make space for difference? Can we hear the voice of God in a language, a sensibility, a culture not our own? Can we see the presence of God in the face of a stranger?” (5). In a world of interconnectedness, new types of tribalism are “driving us ever more angrily apart” (7). He acknowledges the destructive role religious particularity has played in world movements, but calls on people of faith to “be an equal and opposite counter-voice in the name of peace” (9). Jonathan Sacks was a rabbi and writes from an orthodox Jewish context.
Faced with fateful choices, humanity needs wisdom, and religious traditions, alongside the great philosophies, are our richest resource of wisdom. They are sustained reflections on humanity’s place in nature and what constitute the proper goals of society and an individual life. They build communities, shape lives and tell the stories that explain ourselves to ourselves (12).
This is particularly interesting to me because I teach a class on wisdom and justice, using the Bible’s wisdom books (Job, Ecclesiastes, Proverbs) and prophets (Amos and Isaiah) as a lens for those explorations. What Sacks argues for here is how this ancient Hebrew understanding of wisdom and justice might lead the way in a global conversation that our world needs.
He asks about how we recover moral responsibility and ethical language “when the link between individual agents, actions and consequences has become so tenuous” in the global market? Sacks is for the free market—it “is the best means we have yet discovered for alleviating poverty and creating a human environment of independence, dignity and creativity” (14). “Difference is the source of value” in a free market world (14). But the market is producing unequal outcomes at an ever-increasing pace and must be framed in the context of biblical justice—tzedakah—to center human dignity. Education, Sacks will say, “is the single greatest key to human dignity” (15).
“Can we live together? Can we make space for one another?…Can we recognize God’s image in one who is not my image?” (17) In this new universal order of global capitalism, “universalism must be balanced with a new respect for the local, the particular, the unique” (20).
The glory of the created world is its astonishing multiplicity: the thousands of different languages spoken by [hu]mankind, the proliferation of cultures, the sheer variety of the imaginative expressions of the human spirit, in most of which, if we listen carefully, we will hear the voice of wisdom telling us something we need to know (20-21).
And,
We must learn the art of conversation, from which truth emerges…from the quite different process of letting our world be enlarged by the presence of others who think, act, and interpret reality in ways radically different from our own (23).
Sacks talks about the benefits of and problems with globalism, capitalism, universalism and particularity. He’s fair and level-headed, sober about the problems our world is facing. If you think about it, he wrote soon after 9/11, and event which underscored just how destructive our lack of understanding one another can be. “Inequalities within and between countries has existed before. What is new in our situation is our consciousness of it” (30).
My recommendation is that you read the prologue, and see if that sparks a desire to dig into the meat of the book. Bafflingly, this book is not available electronically (not on the Kindle Store, Google Books, Kobo). Enter Open Library, which magically has it available to borrow. Or just take my word for it, order it, and know that you’ll be underlining it from start to finish.
Speaking of the finish, the final chapter is solid gold, tying his entire argument together. I sent a picture of the final two pages to my family, so that they could read this closing parable about faith:
Many years ago I had the privilege of meeting one of the great religious leaders of the Jewish world. He was the head of a large group of Jewish mystics. I was inspired by his teachings and impressed by the spirituality of his followers. But I had a question about the way of life he advocated. It seemed exclusive. In its intense and segregated piety it shut out the rest of the world. Was there not—I asked him—beauty and value outside the narrow walls in which he lived? He answered me with a parable.
Imagine, he said, two people who spend their lives transporting stones. One carries bags of diamonds. The other hauls sacks of rocks. Each is now asked to take a consignment of rubies. Which of the two understands what he is now to carry? The man who is used to diamonds knows that stones can be precious, even those that are not diamonds. But the man who has carried only rocks thinks of stones as a mere burden. They have weight but not worth. Rubies are beyond his comprehension.
So it is, he said, with faith. If we cherish our own, then we will understand the value of others. We may regard ours as a diamond and another faith as a ruby, but we know that both are precious stones. But if faith is a mere burden, not only will we not value ours. Neither will we value the faith of someone else. We will see both as equally useless. True tolerance, he implied, comes not from the absence of faith but from its living presence. Understanding the particularity of what matters to us is the best way of coming to appreciate what matters to others.
Difference does not diminish; it enlarges the sphere of human possibilities. Our last best hope is to recall the classic statement of John Donne and the more ancient story of Noah after the Flood and hear, in the midst of our hypermodernity, an old-new call to a global covenant of human responsibility and hope. Only when we realize the danger of wishing that everyone should be the same…will we prevent the clash of civilizations, born of the sense of threat and fear. We will learn to live with diversity once we understand the God-given, world-enhancing dignity of difference.
In short, start with the episode of On Being (🎧 Overcast), then move on to the book.