2020年经济学人 著名的拉比萨克斯勋爵(4)（在线收听）

The task of uniting his co-religionists paled, of course, beside the collapse of society, but this too he had to address. Every man and woman had a duty to care for others, and thus to recreate the bonds that held society together. "I" had to give way to "we". Out of great crises—climate change, coronavirus—that chance might come. Ideally religion could drive this change, with the world's faiths uniting, as they had done, imams and gurus, priests and rabbis, at Ground Zero that day. But his argument in "The Dignity of Difference" that all the major religions were equally valid ways to truth had caused even more trouble with the Haredi. Instead, in his last book, he called for a shared morality: agreed norms of behaviour, mutual trust, altruism, and a sense of "all-of-us-together".

当然，与社会的崩溃相比，联合他的宗教信徒的任务显得微不足道，但这也是他必须解决的问题。每一个男人和女人都有责任关心他人，从而重新建立起维系社会的纽带。“我”不得不让位于“我们”。像气候变化，新冠病毒等重大危机有可能出现。理想的情况下，宗教可以推动这一变化，就如世界的信徒一样，那天在世贸中心遗址联合起来，伊玛目古鲁，牧师和拉比。但他在《差异的尊严》一书中提出，所有主要宗教都是通往真理的有效途径给哈西德教派带来了更大的麻烦。相反，在他的上一本书中，他呼吁建立一种共同的道德观：公认的行为准则，相互信任，利他主义，以及“我们所有人都在一起”的感觉。

The liberty craved by "me" could be sustained only by "us". It was a very long shot, but he was not a pessimist. Part of his job was to cheer people up, and he liked to wear a yellow tie, like sunshine, for his public lectures. If he felt depressed, music soon lifted him out of it. So, too, did his studies. If he was stranded on a desert island, he told a BBC interviewer, he hoped it could be with all 20 volumes of the Talmud and plenty of pencils, in order to write commentaries in the margins. Meanwhile, thinking and writing in his garden study in Golders Green, with or without his invaluable earphones, he could escape the shouting world a little.

“我”渴望的自由只有“我们”才能维持。希望非常渺茫，但他不是一个悲观主义者。他工作的一部分是让人们高兴起来，他喜欢打黄色领带，就像阳光一样，他的公开演讲。如果他感到沮丧，音乐很快就把他从沮丧中解脱出来。他的研究也是如此。如果他被困在一个荒岛上，他告诉BBC记者，他希望能有20卷《塔木德》和大量铅笔，以便在页边空白处写评论。与此同时，他在戈尔德格林的花园书房里思考和写作，不管有没有他那无价的耳机，他都可以逃离喧嚣的世界。

On a visit he made once to Auschwitz, as he wept and asked, like so many others, where God had been in the Holocaust, he seemed to hear an answer: "I was in the words." The words were "You shall not murder." If human beings refused to listen to God, even he was helpless. But if much of the noise that humans made could be cancelled out, they might more often hear what He was saying.

在一次访问奥斯威辛集中营时，他哭了，像许多其他人一样，问上帝在大屠杀中去过哪里，他似乎听到了一个回答：“我在文字里。”那句话是“你不应杀人。”如果人类拒绝听从上帝，即使他也是无助的。但是，如果人类制造的噪音能够被抵消，他们可能会更经常地听到他在说什么。