36 | OCTOBER 14 • 2021 

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eaders lead. That does not mean 
to say that they do not follow. But 
what they follow is different from 
what most people follow.
They don’t conform for the sake of 
conforming. They don’t do what others 
do merely because others are doing it. 
They follow an inner voice, 
a call. They have a vision, 
not of what is, but of what 
might be. They think 
outside the box. They 
march to a different tune.
Never was this more 
dramatically signaled than 
in the first words of God 
to Abraham in Parshat Lech Lecha, the 
words that set Jewish history in motion: 
“Leave your land, your birthplace and 
your father’s house and go to the land 
that I will show you.” (Gen. 12:1)
Why? Because people do conform. 
They adopt the standards and absorb 
the culture of the time and place in 
which they live — “your land.” At 
a deeper level, they are influenced 
by friends and neighbors — “your 
birthplace.” More deeply still they are 
shaped by their parents and the family 
in which they grew up — “your father’s 
house.”

I want you, says God to Abraham, to 
be different. Not for the sake of being 
different, but for the sake of starting 
something new: a religion that will 
not worship power and the symbols 
of power — for that is what idols 
really were and are. I want you, said 
God, to “teach your children and your 
household afterward to follow the way 
of the Lord by doing what is right and 
just” (Gen. 18:19).
To be a Jew is to be willing to 
challenge the prevailing consensus 
when, as so often happens, nations slip 
into worshipping the old gods. They did 
so in Europe throughout the 19th and 
early 20th century. That was the age of 
nationalism: the pursuit of power in 
the name of the nation-state that led to 
two world wars and tens of millions of 
deaths.
It is the age we are living in now as 
North Korea acquires and Iran pursues 
nuclear weapons so that they can 
impose their ambitions by force. It is 
what is happening today throughout 
much of the Middle East and Africa as 
nations descend into violence and into 
what Thomas Hobbes in The Leviathan 
called “the war of every man against 
every man.”

WHAT ARE IDOLS?
We make a mistake when we think 
of idols in terms of their physical 
appearance — statues, figurines, icons. 
In that sense they belong to the ancient 
times we have long outgrown. 
 The way to think of idols is in terms 
of what they represent. They symbolize 
power. That is what Ra was for the 
Egyptians, Baal for the Canaanites, 
Chemosh for the Moabites, Zeus for the 
Greeks, and what missiles and bombs 
are for terrorists and rogue states today.
Power allows us to rule over others 
without their consent. As the Greek 
historian Thucydides put it: “The strong 
do what they wish and the weak suffer 
what they must.” Judaism is a sustained 
critique of power. That is the conclusion 
I have reached after a lifetime of 
studying our sacred texts.
It is about how a nation can 
be formed on the basis of shared 
commitment and collective 
responsibility. It is about how to 
construct a society that honors the 
human person as the image and likeness 
of God. It is about a vision, never fully 
realized but never abandoned, of a 
world based on justice and compassion, 
in which “They will neither harm 

Breaking Away 
from the Crowd

Rabbi Lord 
Jonathan 
Sacks

SPIRIT
A WORD OF TORAH

