At this year’s TED conference Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks’ explained that we’ve become so good at thinking about the self and unwilling to listen to people of differing views that we’re becoming isolated and afraid of the future. But he also offered a solution: put the ‘us’ back in relationships, identity, and responsibility.
On relationship, he says, “We need to renew those face-to-face encounters with the people not like us in order to realize that we can disagree strongly and still stay friends … In those encounters, we discover that the people not like us are just people, like us.
Fear doesn’t come from disagreement, fear comes from being unwilling to listen to those we disagree with.
On identity he says, essentially, look back to your history. Do we remember the ideas that America was founded on? “When you tell the story and your identity is strong, you can welcome the strangers. But when you stop telling the story, your identity gets weak and you feel threatened by the stranger.”
On responsibility, he says reject ‘magical thinking’. Don’t assume your elected leader wields all the power – it’s in your own two hands to start working–– “The only people that will save us from ourselves is we, the people — all of us together.”
Our homework from today’s lesson? Replace all I’s with Us’s and see what happens.
