Jonathan Sacks: The Rabbi Who Stood Up for Faith and Dialogue
Technically speaking, Britain’s chief rabbi is only the leader of the country’s United Hebrew Congregations, an Orthodox minority within a minority. In British public life, however, he serves as the de facto head of, and spokesperson for, the country’s small Jewish community. In his 22 years in the role (1991-2013), Jonathan Sacks grew to become Britain’s preeminent advocate not just for his faith, but for the idea of faith. Internationally, he became one of the world’s best-known rabbis, bringing his wisdom to bear on a wide range of issues, and he was listened to as a moral philosopher and a religious leader by Jews and Gentiles, believers and non-believers alike.
What was it about Lord Sacks, who died at 72 in November, that explained not only his outsized prominence in a largely secular country where less than 0.5 percent of the population is Jewish, but also his global following?
The answer, perhaps, can be illustrated by his contributions to a long-standing BBC Radio Four slot called “Thought for the Day.” For a few minutes at around 7:45 every weekday morning, the presenters on the “Today Programme,” the station’s flagship news show, hand over the mic to a religious figure, usually a Christian, sometimes someone from another faith, to riff on something deeper than the day’s news. Very often these “faith perspectives,” to use the BBC jargon, involve an Anglican vicar coming up with an implausibly trendy interpretation of the Old Testament, or a monotonous, roundabout sermon that says nothing you haven’t heard before. The result is a segment that often achieves little beyond reminding you that you are running late, and that even the show’s own hosts have admitted can be “deeply, deeply boring.”
Lord Sacks was the exception. Without fail, his periodic contributions were clear, two-minute expositions that told a story and said something concrete. He could be accessible without dumbing down, and felt no need to limit himself to traditional rabbinical references, ranging from Shakespeare to soccer to make his point. As a result, people listened, even if they didn’t always agree with him.
Those radio appearances are only a sliver of Rabbi Sacks’ contribution to public life, of course, which included dozens of books, countless speeches and his time as chief rabbi. But they encapsulate his conviction that diversity need not mean dilution, and that conversations between different faiths and different points of view are worth having exactly because some of those differences cannot be reconciled. His contribution to the public conversation was recognized by many in the United States. He held a dual professorship at New York University and Yeshiva University, and was awarded the Templeton Prize, a $1.5 million award that celebrates scientific and spiritual curiosity, in 2016, and the American Enterprise Institute’s Irving Kristol Award in 2017.
The son of a Polish-born Textile trader, Sacks grew up in London’s East End. Unlike preceding chief rabbis, he did not receive a Jewish education, instead attending Christ’s College, the local grammar school (a state-funded, academically selective high school), then studying philosophy at Cambridge. After graduating, he began his rabbinical education and joined a Yeshiva.
This background pointed to a tight rope Sacks would walk as chief rabbi and a public intellectual, balancing the particularism of his own religion with the universalism of his moral philosophy. Sometimes he slipped. In 2002, Orthodox rabbis accused him of heresy after her wrote in his book The Dignity of Difference that “God has spoken to mankind in many languages: through Judaism to Jews, Christianity to Christians, Islam to Muslims. … No one creed has a monopoly on spiritual truth.”
The passage was rephrased in a later edition — but the unfortunate thing about it wasn’t who it offended, so much as the impression it left that Sacks supported a squishy, relativistic view of religion when the opposite was true. He saw no contradiction between his absolute beliefs and the commitment to conversation and debate. “I try very hard to understand and respect positions that are different from mine,” he said in an interview shortly before becoming chief rabbi. “But that doesn’t mean to say that I don’t have an absolute conviction that there is truth and falsity, that there is good and evil. I don’t think all things are true. I don’t think all things are relative.”
He could be as unequivocal on directly political questions. Regrettably, that included the need to fight anti-Semitism, a resurgent force in Europe during his time as chief rabbi. In 2018, five years after he had stepped down from the role, Sacks accused the then-Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn of giving “support to racists, terrorists and dealers of hate who want to kill Jews and remove Israel from the map.” The denunciation was an unusually forthright for a major religious leader, demonstrating how seriously Sacks regarded the problem of anti-Semitism in the Labour Party under Corbyn.
Among all the roles he played, Sacks remained first and foremost a teacher, eager to impart the wisdom he had picked up to whomever would listen. In his maiden speech to the House of Lords in 2009, he said, “Democratic freedom is not just a matter of political arrangements, of constitutions and laws, elections and majorities. It depends, too, on what Alexis de Tocqueville called ‘habits of the heart’: on civility, the willingness to hear the other side, respect for those with whom you disagree, and friendships that transcend the boundaries between different parties and different faiths. And those things must be taught again and again in every generation.”
Sacks taught those habits of the heart in the best way possible: by embodying them in everything he did.
