thought for the day, Radio 4

Thought for the Day, 26 September 2008

Chief Rabbi Dr Jonathan Sacks

We're approaching Rosh Hashanah the Jewish New Year, which begins this Monday night. On Tuesday we'll sound the shofar, the ram's horn. It's a wake up call, a warning that we stand in judgment before God who asks us to give an account of what we've done with what He's given us.

This year, the warning is sounding loud and clear. There could be no greater contrast than between the billions of pounds being speculated on the stock exchanges of the world, and yesterday's meeting of world leaders, including the prime minister, at the United Nations to discuss the millennium development goals, and the state of the world's poor.

While speculators have been selling short, making a profit out of other people's loss, much of the world still lives in dire and desperate poverty. 980 million live on less than a dollar a day. 1.6 billion have no access to basic sanitation. 10 million children die before the age of 5, often from preventable disease. 33 million people are living with HIV, and more than a million die of malaria every year. Whatever this is, it is not a just and equitable world.

The fault is not markets but morals. Markets remain the best way we know of harnessing human creativity for the benefit of all. Economic liberalization has taken 500 million people out of poverty in China, and 130 million in India. They're also the best antidote to war. As Montesquieu pointed out in the eighteenth century, when two nations come into contact with one another, they can either fight or trade. If they fight, both lose; if they trade, both gain.

What's wrong and unacceptable is the unbridled pursuit of short term gain at the expense of long term economic health, financial greed at the cost of moral responsibility.

The shofar on Rosh Hashanah reminds us that what we possess we do not own; we merely hold it in trust from God; and what matters is how we use it for the benefit of others.

One of the first things we did when I took up office was to start a Jewish Association of Business Ethics, which now offers its programme, Markets and Morals, to all British schools. This summer, representatives of all the faiths in Britain marched together with the Archbishop of Canterbury in support of the Millennium Development Goals. Markets need morals. Trade needs responsibility. God's gifts must be for the benefit of all.