The Chief Rabbi today launched an eyebrow-raising attack on late Apple founder Steve Jobs - who he says helped create a selfish consumer culture that has only brought unhappiness.
Lord Sacks, who represents Britain's 300,000 Jews, singled out Jobs for blame likening his iPad tablets to the tablets of stone bearing the Ten Commandments given by God to Moses.
He said advertising only made shoppers aware of what they did not have - rather than feeling grateful for what they did - and warned a culture where people only worried about themselves could not last long.
Faith and spending time with family, he said, were the only way to true happiness.
Religious leaders have condemned banks and politicians in recent years to criticise the growing gap between the rich and poor.
But this is one of the first times a private individual has been blamed.
Speaking at an interfaith reception attended by the Queen this week, he said: 'People are looking for values other than the values of a consumer society.
The values of a consumer society really aren’t ones you can live by for terribly long.
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.
Jobs died aged 56 in October, prompting an outpouring of grief from across the world.
Sacks added: 'What does a consumer ethic do? It makes you aware all the time of the things you don't have instead of thanking God for all the things you do have.
If in a consumer society, through all the advertising and subtly seductive approaches to it, you've got an iPhone but you haven’t got a fourth generation one, the consumer society is in fact the most efficient mechanism ever devised for the creation and distribution of unhappiness.
The Chief Rabbi, who is due to step down from his post in 2013, added: 'Therefore the answer to the consumer society is the world of faith, which the Jews call the world of Shabbat, where you can't shop and you can't spend and you spend your time with things that matter, with family.
Unless we get back to these values we will succeed in making our children and grandchildren ever unhappier,' the Telegraph reported him as saying
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