The Troubling Moral Contradictions of Rabbi Jonathan Sacks: Two Articles

[David Shasha]

The Contradictions of Rabbi Jonathan Sacks

By: Anshel Pfeffer

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, who died on Shabbat at the age of 72, had the unlikeliest beginning in life for one the generation’s most renowned Orthodox rabbis and philosophers. Despite growing up in a traditional family, going from his Church of England primary school to Christ’s College high school and then Gonville & Caius College at Cambridge, until his early twenties – when he traveled to Israel and spent time in a Chabad yeshiva – he had no formal Jewish education. 

It would be the Six-Day War that changed everything. At 19, gathered together with other students in Cambridge’s synagogue, he prayed for Israel’s deliverance from a feared second Holocaust. The experience, he said, “planted a seed in my mind that didn’t go away,” and opened up “a burden of responsibility” to the Jewish nation.

He would spend the next decade studying and lecturing on moral philosophy before he finally joined the Rabbinate. But his ascent in his belated vocation was meteoric. His sparkling oratory, natural charisma and the originality of his sermons and books, fusing Jewish canonical texts with a wide range of Western thought, made him just the kind intellectual and spiritual rock star that Britain’s fusty and hidebound Orthodox mainstream United Synagogue sorely needed to raise its stature.

After serving as the rabbi of two synagogues in London, he was selected chief rabbi at the age of 43.

Sacks said he was “reluctant” to accept the position, but his ambition was clear: After taking the reins of the Rabbinate, he outlined a “decade of renewal” for British Jewry. He was very conscious of the fact that he was the rabbi of a community shrinking in number due to assimilation, emigration and lower birth rates, and also shrinking in influence.

Along with post-imperial Britain, the community had lost its centrality as Israel and the United States – two countries he loved and admired – had become the main centers of post-Holocaust Jewry. He set out to be an ambassador for Britain’s Jews to the wider British society, a role he was arguably better at than unifying his deeply divided community.

He was a unique combination of an ultimate communicator and original thinker with an incredible breadth and depth of knowledge. Upon his appointment as chief rabbi, he swiftly learned how to make a deep impression within the short attention span of television, becoming the British media’s most sought-after religious leader.

His mellifluous tones were to become a near-constant feature on BBC Radio 4’s three-minute "Thought For the Day" for many years. His books featured in the bestseller lists, popular among non-Orthodox Jews and non-Jewish readers alike, and his advice was sought by British prime ministers who became his confidants.

The chief rabbi’s wide acclaim made many British Jews proud, and his writings inspired thousands of young Jews – particularly those who had not grown up in religious settings and had no rabbis of their own – with his vivid descriptions of Judaism as an empowering tradition of hope and the original radical faith of freedom.

His books, like his speeches and media appearances, were marked not only by the richness and diversity of his learning, but also catchy sound-bite titles like “Radical Then, Radical Now,” “The Dignity of Difference” and, long before Barack Obama, “The Politics of Hope.”

But his media savviness and scholarly showmanship also provoked the oft-muttered criticism that he was “the chief rabbi of the goyim.” There was some truth to this. While his non-Jewish admirers and listeners always saw him as the leader of all British Jews, his official congregation consisted only of a minority of the community.

He wasn’t the rabbi of the progressive streams and certainly not that of the growing ultra-Orthodox community. He was too aware of his ultra-Orthodox rabbinical critics saying of him that he was “more Cambridge than Etz Chaim” – the small London yeshiva where he studied for a few years for his ordination.

During his 22 years as chief rabbi, he was fearful of crossing the Haredi rabbis, including the members of Beth Din (rabbinical court) of which he was nominally the president. Few if any Jewish intellectuals of the generation could rival his knowledge, but he seemed to suffer from an inferiority complex toward those rabbis who had spent their entire lives in yeshivas and, unlike him, had the self-confidence to issue rulings in halakha (Jewish law).

In an attempt to maintain cordial relations with them, he refused to attend the annual Limmud conference of Jewish learning, due to the presence of Reform, Liberal and Masorti (Conservative) rabbis (despite his having been involved in Limmud before becoming chief rabbi), and referred to them in private letters to the ultra-Orthodox rabbis, which were gleefully leaked, as “intellectual thieves” and “those who destroy the faith.”

He agreed to revise some sentences in “The Dignity of Difference” when ultra-Orthodox rabbis accused him of heresy for implying there that there was truth in other religions besides Judaism.

As chief rabbi, he repeatedly delayed a report on the role of women in religious services and prevented the participation of Jewish LGBTQ groups in communal events he endorsed. His successor, Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis, would be the first chief rabbi to attend Limmud and issue groundbreaking (by Orthodox standards) guidelines on the duty of care for Jewish schools and institutions toward LGBTQ students.

Sacks may have been the most prominent and influential Modern Orthodox rabbi, way beyond the British Isles. But he also personified the contradictions and limitations of Modern Orthodoxy, especially in the Diaspora – not being frum (traditional) enough for the ultra-Orthodox; too cautious for non-Orthodox Jews; and too foreign for Israelis.

While some of his books were translated in Israel, he himself was surprisingly stilted in Hebrew, and frustrated that he never achieved anything near the recognition there that he had in English-speaking countries.

Sacks never lost his talent to inspire thousands of Jews with his speeches and writings, but also for dismaying many Jews when they felt he let them down. In November 2016, five days after Donald Trump’s surprise victory in the U.S. presidential election, he roused a shell-shocked audience as the keynote speaker at the General Assembly of the Jewish Federations of North America (JFNA) when he spoke of the “acrimonious” nature of the election campaign (without mentioning Trump) and told them that the Hebrew word for “crisis” – mashber – originally meant a birth stool. “Every crisis, for Jews, is chevlei leida (the pains of childbirth), something new is being born,” he explained. A year later, many were disappointed to discover that Sacks had helped Vice President Mike Pence write the speech he had delivered during his visit to Jerusalem.

Perhaps it was too much to expect. As it was, few if any rabbi ever succeeded in navigating far away from his home community and comfort zone, and communicating with as diverse a range of audiences, as Sacks.

“He had a status that perhaps no other rabbi in the world attained – a wide global Jewish voice, in demand from Jewish and non-Jews,” said Yair Ettinger, one of Channel 11’s state and religion commentators and author of “Unraveled: The Disputes that Redefine Religious Zionism.”

“Unlike anyone else, he was listened to both by Orthodox and Reform Jews, a cosmopolitan rabbi, revered by the widest range of Jews,” Ettinger added.

Sacks fully came in to his own at the age of 65, when he finally retired from the Rabbinate and became a globe-trotting public intellectual, freed from the restraints of office. He still wouldn’t challenge Orthodoxy, but he had been evolving.

Much of his early writing had focused on advancing the cause of Jewish Orthodox tradition. In later books, he broadened his theme to arguing in favor of all monotheistic religions as a bulwark against the modern crises of society, caused in his view by secular moral relativism, as he claimed in one his last books, “Not in God’s Name – Confronting Religious Violence,” a response to popular militant atheists like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins.

Israeli philosopher and author Micah Goodman, an admirer of the former chief rabbi, said that “in his philosophical writing over the last 15 years, Rabbi Sacks transformed from being just a Jewish theologian to becoming a major Western philosopher, without losing his Jewish patriotism in the process.”

From Haaretz, November 9, 2020

 

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, the Modern Orthodox Ideal Who Couldn't Thwart Orthodoxy's Slide to the Right

By: Samuel Heilman

Lord Jonathan Sacks, who died Saturday after a third bout with cancer at the age of 72, represented what had once been the ideal of modern Orthodoxy: a religious leader who was both rabbi and Ph.D, with a foot firmly placed in both the worlds of Jewish and secular learning, and who excelled at both, demonstrating that these two universes could co-exist and inform each other.

Despite the confidence in which he inhabited this space, it was not always an easy ride; the secular world honored him, but some of the compromises he made with religious conservatives to his right laid him open to charges of appeasement.

Sacks, chief rabbi of the United Kingdom from 1991 to 2013, and a member of the House of Lords from 2009, was in many ways the epitome of a modern Orthodox rabbi. 

Steeped in Torah learning, he both attended the Etz Chayim Yeshiva in Golders Green, London, where he received his semicha (rabbinic ordination), and Jews' College. But he also received a proper "English" education at St. Mary’s Primary School and Christ’s College, and went on Caius College at the University of Cambridge gaining first class honors. 

He received his doctorate in 1982 from the University of London, and taught at Kings College, London, Yeshiva University, New York University as well as the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. 

He began his career as a rabbi of the Golders Green synagogue, but soon became the rabbi of the prestigious Marble Arch Synagogue in central London as well as the Principal, or head, of Jews' College (now the London School of Jewish Studies) a seminary for Orthodox rabbinical studies and a college in the liberal academic tradition. 

It was in this capacity that I first met him during the 1980s and was powerfully impressed by his genuineness, knowledge, and powerful commitment to the synthesis of critical thinking and Torah. 

He went on to be a prolific author of more than 24 books, spanning the range from prayer books including the Koren series for the High Holy Days, a Haggadah and books on the weekly Torah portion to volumes about God, science and the search for meaning as well as the persistence of faith, tradition modernity and Jewish unity.

Rabbi Sacks became an outstanding embodiment of outward-looking Orthodoxy, a religious identity that saw its responsibility to serve not only the community of those who believed as he did, but also to speak to the world at large and show what Judaism had to offer to general culture.

Indeed, his book "The Dignity of Difference" articulated this view most vividly. He wrote there: "No one creed has a monopoly on spiritual truth." That sentence triggered a controversy with the religious right.

At the same time, Sacks often saw himself as reaching out to the general society to offer the wisdom of Judaism as a spiritual guide for all people. This was the essence of his message during the years he served as a commentator on BBC 4’s widely heard program "Thought for the Day." 

And it undoubtedly was an important part of the reason he was awarded the £1 million Templeton Prize in 2016, one of many trophies he collected that included, in 1995, the Jerusalem Prize, the prestigious Grawameyer Prize for religion in 2004, and the Kuyper Prize from the Princeton Theological Seminary, as well as many others. 

His success in elucidating Jewish thought, not least to a largely unaware UK audience, can be clearly seen in the tributes that have come from all corners of Britain.

The Prince of Wales called him "a steadfast friend" and "a valued adviser" and praised his "spiritual awareness and [his] comprehensively informed philosophical and historical perceptiveness," while Prime Minister Boris Johnson described him as having "a profound impact on our whole country and across the world." Labor leader Keir Starmer called him "a towering intellect whose eloquence, insights and kindness reached well beyond the Jewish community."

But while he championed modern Orthodox principles, he also – as so many of today’s Orthodox rabbis – was powerfully aware of the slide to the right in Orthodoxy and often tried to placate, if not bend to, the demands of Haredi Orthodoxy. 

Thus, after his comment about no creed having a monopoly on spiritual truth was attacked by several UK Orthodox rabbis, who demanded that he "repudiate the thesis of the book" in which the statement appeared, and withdraw it from circulation, they were joined by Rabbi Yosef Elyashiv of Jerusalem, a leading Haredi rabbi in Israel.

Sacks backed down, and issued a revised edition of his "The Dignity of Difference" book (ironically perhaps, in the light of events, subtitled, "How to Avoid the Clash of Civilizations") in which he removed statements suggesting that Christianity and Islam are as valid as Judaism, and with that any doubt that he was relativizing Judaism's message. 

That reversal sat uncomfortably with many in the modern Orthodox community, and with the title of the book itself, a phrase that he had made his own.

Perhaps even more significantly, while Sacks was Chief Rabbi he refused to attend Limmud, the worldwide cross-denominational Jewish educational program which was founded in the UK that seeks to educate, inspire and entertain people of all levels of observance on their Jewish journeys, with lecturers on Jewish topics from the broadest range of backgrounds. 

The Haredi rabbinate has consistently refused to participate, and Sacks joined that snub (even though his son-in-law was a leader of the conference). His successor as Chief Rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis, defied the pressures of right wing Orthodoxy from the start of his tenure and made a point of attending Limmud. In an echo of the book affair, Sacks was accused by some of lacking the courage of his modern Orthodox convictions.

Nevertheless, no contemporary Orthodox rabbi maintained more universal respect and affection in the English-speaking world. No doubt his presence and his ideas will be missed by many in the modern Orthodox world as a model for Jews who wish to remain steadfastly attached to halakha and Jewish tradition, yet neither remote from nor untouched by the modern world – rather, enthusiastically engaged with it.

Whether Sacks managed to (re)establish a sufficiently robust outward-looking form of modern Orthodoxy that can survive his passing, and what the chances are for this worldview to survive the polarization of the Jewish world, are open questions that only the next few years, or decades, will answer.

Samuel Heilman is Emeritus holder of the Harold Proshansky Chair in Jewish Studies at the Graduate Center and Distinguished Professor of Sociology at Queens College of the City University of New York

From Haaretz, November 9, 2020