The Dignity of Difference
by Jonathan Sacks
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.