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''' '' FRACTURED WORLD
FRONTIERS '' ''' : STUDENTS
A GREAT LEADER CREATES LEADERS : A good leader simply and plainly creates dumb followers : On The World Students Society the supreme task before me was to create leaders.
FAITH AND COURAGE : And never forget what Edmund Burke said :''Nobody made a greater mistake than HE who did nothing because he could do only just so little.''
EVERY YEAR - EVERY SINGLE YEAR, as the Nobel Prizes are announced, there is a wave of self-recrimination amongst the Muslim community. One great student - Zilli, drew this comparison : ''Although Muslims constitute more than 23 percent of the world's population, only 12 Nobel laureates have been Muslims, whereas 193 of the total 855 laureates have been Jewish.''
There can be only one explanation : Dr. Jonathan Sacks, the chief rabbi of the United Kingdom, talks of the MIGHTY importance given to education over a millennium ago.
''Already in the third century the rabbis ruled that an Jewish community that failed to establish a school was to be excommunicated.'' He adds :
''Education in Judaism, though, is active, not passive. It is about honing the mind, sharpening the intellect, through question and answer, challenge and response.'' Clearly, obedience and repetitive ritual do not earn Nobel Prizes.
Dr. Jonathan Sacks did not live long enough [he died on Nov 7 last year] to see his perspective teachings permeate.
Dr. Jonathan Sacks whose writings the world has ever and long admired, was by sheer necessity, orthodox because of his position, but in spirit uncommonly liberal.
Dr. Sacks could be described as a modern Martin Luther without the remonstrance or perhaps Nelson Mandela without the scars of incarceration. Dr. Sacks belonged to that minuscule Jewish community worldwide, which the American Milton Himmelfarb and once described as ''smaller than a statistical error in the Chinese census.''
Dr. Sacks in his book The Dignity of Difference : How to Avoid the Clash of Civilizations [2002] explained that while archaic ''Judaism was able to conceive of a universal God, but not yet of a universal faith............ [it] remained a pluralistic and therefore tribal faith.
''It was trapped into the parochialism of antiquity''.
In its sequel, To Heal a Fractured World [2005], he makes an observation that carries a telling resonance amongst Muslims and Christians:
''More than other faiths, the religion of the Hebrew Bible is written in the future tense. Ancient Israel was the only civilization to see its golden age is not-yet-realised time.''
Dr. Sacks recognised that ''nothing has proved harder in the history of civilization than to see God, or good, or human dignity in those whose language is not mine, whose skin is of a different color, whose faith is not my faith and whose truth is not mine''.
As a community leader, Dr. Sacks recalled the ''time, when people lived in close, ongoing contact with neighbors, creating networks of shared meaning and reciprocal duty. Nowadays we live anonymously among strangers whose religious, cultural and moral codes are different from each other.
To reinforce his proposition, he marshalled an unlikely support - Prince Albert, Queen Victoria's Prince Consort. One is surprised at Albert's prescience when, at the opening his brain-child ''The Great Exhibition'' in 1851, he said :
''This distances which separated the different nations and parts of the globe are rapidly vanishing before the achievements of modern invention, and we can traverse them with incredible ease......... thought is communicated with the rapidity, and even with the power of lightning.'' This could almost have been a quote from Bill Gates.
Dr. Jonathan Sacks writings will survive as beacons for those floundering in doubt. His definition of social responsibilities is concise. ''Rights are passive; responsibilities active. Rights are demands we make on others; responsibilities are demands others make on us.
Dr. Jonathan Sacks humanism went beyond the fissures created by generations of introspective Muslims, Christian and Jews. Addressing them, he asked : ''Can we create a paradigm shift though which we come to recognise that we are enlarged not diminished by differences?''
Danish Philosopher Soren Kierkegaard sums up brilliantly : ''The door to happiness opens outwards''.
The Honor and Serving of the Latest Operational Research on World, Fractures and Frames, continues. The World Students Society thanks author F.S.Aijzuddin.
With respectful and loving dedication to the Global Founder Framers of The World Students Society. See Ya all prepare and register for Great Global Elections on The World Students Society : wssciw.blogspot.com and Twitter - !E-WOW! - The Ecosystem 2011 :
''' Great - Glory '''
Good Night and God Bless
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