*A review of 'Faith in the Future' by Jonathan Sachs (Darton, Longman and Todd, 1995), written late 1990s* Being somewhat contrasuggestible, I must confess to a flicker of cynicism on reading in the foreword that 'there can be few more important books published this decade'. After reading it, my agreement is wholehearted. Having, I hope, caught your interest, I trust I won't lose it when I tell you that _Faith in the Future_ is a book about politics, morality and religion. Politics not in the sense of narrow wheeler-dealing in the corridors of Parliament or Congress, but as the process by which conflicting interests (at all levels of human society) are reconciled; morality not as restrictive codes of behaviour, but as the infrastructure of values on which all human activity is founded; and religion not as some exclusive dogma, but as our relationship with the transcendental Creator of all that is. Anyone who isn't interested in these things, must be leading a desertified life. Jonathan Sachs is Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth. He is a scholar of moral and Jewish philosophy, and as an Englishman wholly familiar with Western patterns of thought. Judging from this book he has that rare combination of great learning with an ability to express insights in simple language. The book has many layers. Its second half is a description of some of Judaism's leading themes and of how it lives out its beliefs. For anyone who wants to learn about the rich faith and tradition which is Judaism, these pages are a gold mine. The book's second quarter is an eloquent plea for greater understanding, tolerance and respect for one another's traditions - if humankind is to find fresh ways of living together on this minute speck of the universe which is earth. But it is the book's first section - 'the moral covenant' - which really caught my attention. I have read no more pungent and intellectually satisfying diagnosis of the increasingly recognised breakdown in the social fabric of our Western civilisation. The Chief Rabbi's argument, in brief summary, is this. Human society is meant to be a covenant between God and man - a collaborative enterprise, based on shared values and vision. Instead, it has become 'an aggregate of individuals pursuing private interest, coming together temporarily and contractually, and leaving the State to resolve their conflicts on value-neutral grounds'. Attractive as this scenario may appear, with its promise of freedom, in practice 'the individual loses his moorings in a shared moral order and becomes prone to a sense of meaninglessness and despair.' But there is a way back from the abyss; it lies in restoring our conception of society as a community of communities, 'to renew the covenant which turns competing strangers into the shared enterprise that we call society'. If that sounds too simplistic, read the book. Sachs argues his case tightly and clearly, passionately but without invective. He avoids the trap of throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Enlightenment thinking, he readily agrees, has brought many priceless benefits, freeing energies which produced the modern democratic state. But it also set in motion processes which 'eroded the beliefs, communities and institutions within which we found meaning and common purpose'. The State has come to take responsibility for things that were once the province of families and communities. The individual freedom thus conferred - with its moral relativity - has been accompanied by the disintegration of the bonds which bind society together. Chief among them is the family which is not 'one lifestyle choice among many [but] the best means we have yet discovered for nurturing future generations'. It is on this subject that Sachs is perhaps at his most devastating. Take the following passage: 'We have deconstructed the mechanism of primary socialisation. We have abandoned the task of teaching our children a clear sense of right and wrong, perhaps because we are no longer sure that there is such a thing. When our children need us, we are not there. We have given them videos, but not our time, computer games, but not our guidance, condoms, but not an ethic of self-restraint. We have placed the full burden of the maintenance of social order on external agencies. We have moved the enforcement of law from "in here" to "out there". In the name of liberating our children we have done what a future age will surely see as abandoning our children.' Sachs is unequivocating in his attack on the 'fallacies' of our modern society: among them, that 'what I _have_ a right to do' is 'what I _am_ right to do'; that there is no connection between what we do and what happens to us (that connection is, according to Sachs, 'the essence of moral responsibility'); and the use of the word 'judgemental' to rule out in advance the offering of moral judgement ('to send off children...on a journey without a map on the grounds that this will inhibit their choice would in any other civilisation be seen as a dereliction of duty of the worst kind'). For all his criticism of much of modern thought, the book's title reflects Sachs's irrepressible faith in the future. 'Just as the optimism of the Enlightenment proved to be exaggerated,' he says, 'so too will the pessimism of those who speak today of the "new dark ages".' Morality still matters to us, he asserts, because the noble values of life are important to us. 'We remain moved by altruism. We are touched by other people's pain. We feel enlarged by doing good, more so perhaps than by doing _well_, by material success.' Beneath the moral language Sachs uses in this book lies, as he says himself in the introduction, 'a simple religious conviction, that God is to be found...in the relationships we make, the institutions we fashion, the duties we share, and the moral lives we lead.' . Our need, he asserts, is to rebuild a sense of the "We" alongside the "I" of modern society. This book will surely have a significant share in that task.