Another Thought for the Day extract from Chief Rabbi Dr Jonathan Sacks, one of the great apologists for religious faith in our secular age.
"Tonight is Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. For ten days, culminating in Yom Kippur, the day of atonement, we reflect on our lives, apologising for the wrongs we've done, and seeking forgiveness from God and our fellow human beings. It's a fixed time in the Jewish calendar for trying to put things right in our lives, and it involves an immensely powerful set of rituals and prayers.
I've been fascinated by the recent spate of books casting doubt on religious faith, as if religion meant believing six impossible things before breakfast. Well, religion is a matter of holding certain beliefs, but that's not the only or even the most important thing about it. Religion is also about ritual; and ritual is about taking certain beliefs and making them real in the way we behave.
Would my life be the same without the Jewish New Year? No. I might still believe that life has a purpose, that what matters is not how much we earn but the good we do. I might still be convinced that it's important to apologise for the wrong I do and try to make amends. But those beliefs would have no fixed date in my diary and I might never get round to acting on them at all.
Religion isn't the only way of thinking about ultimate questions. There are others, philosophy for example, or science. But philosophy and science never created rituals. And when you lose ritual you lose much else besides.
When people pray, they ritualise the sense that there is someone watching over what we do, and that creates internal restraints. When we lose that, we have to invent another form of watching, closed circuit video cameras, and that's the beginning of a loss of privacy.
When we have the Sabbath, we have dedicated family time. Lose the Sabbath and a generation later families begin to fracture. Ritual structures time the way music structures sound. It turns life into a work of art, giving it shape, proportion, grace and beauty.
In English the world secular comes from seculum meaning worldly, so religion signifies something other-worldly. But the Hebrew word for secular, chol, actually means sand. And that, without ritual, is what we can sometimes become: a grain of sand blown by the shifting winds of moment and mood. Rituals help us consecrate time, weaving into our lives the things that are important, not just urgent. And with that, may I wish you shanah tovah, a good new year."
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