“Lord Sacks said that advertising only made shoppers aware of what they did not own, rather than feeling grateful for what they have,” Jonathan Wynne-Jones and Martin Beckford report for The Telegraph.
“He insisted that a culture in which people cared solely about themselves and their possessions could not last long, and that only faith and spending time with family could bring true happiness,” Wynne-Jones and Beckford report. “The Chief Rabbi’s comments are likely to raise eyebrows because he singled out for blame Jobs – the co-founder of Apple who died last month – by likening his iPad tablet computers to the tablets of stone bearing the Ten Commandments given by God to Moses.”
Wynne-Jones and Beckford report, “Speaking at an interfaith reception attended by the Queen this week, Lord Sacks said, ‘The consumer society was laid down by the late Steve Jobs coming down the mountain with two tablets, iPad one and iPad two, and the result is that we now have a culture of iPod, iPhone, iTune, i, i, i. When you’re an individualist, egocentric culture and you only care about ‘i,’ you don’t do terribly well.'”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take:
Advertising’s function is to describe or draw attention to a product, service, or event in a public medium in order to promote sales or attendance, not to spread grateful feelings of Thanksgiving among God’s wonderful children. Now that we’ve got the semantics settled, more importantly: Neither Steve Jobs nor anyone else who creates products for sale is to blame for self-centeredness and/or materialism. The blame for that lies with parents, teachers, and, yes, rabbis and their ilk. If all your kids care about are iPads, Mercedes, flat screen HDTVs, and McMansions, then you (parents, teachers, rabbis, etc.) failed your children. Not Steve Jobs.
Let’s apply the esteemed rabbi’s “logic” to another case in order to test its validity. We’ll use one he should know: “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife.” Applying the rabbi’s “logic,” when the rabbi encounters someone who covets his neighbor’s wife, the rabbi would have to blame God for creating her.
Dear rabbi, your logic sucks.
Who’s to blame? Look directly in the mirror, buddy boy.
Finally, regardless of who deserves blame, why does a so-called man of faith feel it’s proper to publicly piss on a dead man’s grave?
[Thanks to MacDailyNews readers too numerous to mention individually for the heads up.]