Any conviction worth its salt has chosen to cohabit with a piece of mystery.

All of our traditions insist on a reverence for what we do not know now and cannot tie up with explanation in this lifetime.

This is an invitation to bring the particularities and passions of our identities into common life

while honoring the essential mystery and dignity

of the other, and to do so not as an adjunct to faithfulness, but as an article of it.

Unity creates diversity. So don't think of one God, one truth, one way. Think of one God creating this extraordinary number of ways.

The 6,800 languages that are actually spoken.

Don't think there's only one language within which we can speak to God.

This is becoming wise, an inquiry into the mystery and art of living.

I'm Krista Tippett.

Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, who held the august title of Chief Rabbi of the UK for over 20 years until 2013,

is one of our most eloquent thinkers on the multitudinous and redemptive both ands of the religious present.

He finds in Jewish tradition and in the religious enterprise as a whole,

a profound will of tools to

take on the dignity of difference and keep vibrant identities intact across boundaries of faith,

science, and culture. Let's talk about how it is possible in your imagination to retain the essence, the truth claims of Judaism, and also, as you say,

honor the dignity of difference, understand oneself to be enlarged rather than threatened by

religious others.

I use metaphors.

You know, each one may be helpful to some

and not to others.

One way is just to think, for instance, of biodiversity.

...