Published: 9 November 2020
Last updated: 4 March 2024
AFTER A SUDDEN DIAGNOSIS of cancer only a month ago and a savagely short illness, Jonathan Sacks died on Shabbat, November 7.
Rabbi Sacks was born in South London and after a successful school career at north London’s Christ’s College school, he went to Cambridge University to read philosophy from which he emerged with a first-class honours degree. Subsequent study secured him a PhD but he had already considered pursuing a rabbinic rather than an academic path.
By his own account, an encounter during his student days, and further correspondence with the Lubavitcher Rebbe prompted the thought that he should seek to be a Jewish leader first and foremost.
He first became rabbi of the Golders Green Synagogue and then the Western Marble Arch synagogue in London’s West End.
But such congregational roles could not contain him. It was not long before he was distinguishing himself on a larger stage. As Principal of Jews College, UK Jewry’s rabbinic training college and a college of London University, he organised a series of robustly assertive conferences bringing to the UK some of the finest thinkers and strongest communicators of the concept of ‘Torah im Derekh Eretz’, or ‘Torah together with contemporary culture and knowledge’, in summary, the ‘slogan’ of the Modern Orthodox position.
I was first aware of meeting him at one of the early Limmuds and, at that time, he was also teaching Talmud at the Leo Baeck College, the flagship seminary for the training of Reform and Liberal Rabbis. His readiness to teach wherever good quality Jewish learning was wanted remained the watchword of all he did thereafter.
As soon as he took up the Chief Rabbinate, he marked out what was for him a central facet of his approach to life. He was relentlessly positive and upbeat and he was, to his very core, a unifier.
I worked again with him when he was seeking to clarify the educational philosophy of a planned new Jewish school, Immanuel College. He mastered the field of curricular and educational philosophy impressively and his guidance helped to create a school with a distinctive and thoughtful ethos.
With commendable intellectual clarity, he saw with certainty that, if anyone was going to try to learn Talmud, it was best if they learnt it from someone like him.
But the divisions in UK and world Jewry would not accommodate such intellectual clarity. In preparation for a probable run at the Chief Rabbinate, he dropped that class and was never again to be seen at Limmud either.
Such “political” adjustments paid off. In September 1991, Jonathan Sacks became Chief Rabbi of the United Synagogue, the largest federation of modern Orthodox synagogues anywhere in the world, confirmed in its existence by Parliamentary statue in the UK. It also made him, by the way, Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth.
He soon published a number of pamphlets under the general heading of Will we have Jewish grandchildren?, in which he examined the state of contemporary Jewry and proposed the creation of an agency to intervene in the community and liberate energies and possibilities that the current architecture and arrangements of the community did not promote.
The pamphlets and subsequent book galvanised the energies and imagination of a swathe of new enthusiasts for contributing new things to the community. Soon a new organisation, Jewish Continuity, was born (of which I became Chief Executive) and a range of new and established donors gathered round to make a difference.
Characteristically, Sacks had attracted enthusiasts from across the spectrum of the community, from every denomination as well as secular and unaffiliated Jews, to seek to turn his clarion call into a program of activity.
He was both resilient and philosophical. He (more or less) a book a year and in so doing, frequently went over the heads of the petty politicking of some in the UK Jewish community not only to appeal to any thoughtful Jew but to the wider world.
As soon as he took up the Chief Rabbinate, he marked out what was for him a central facet of his approach to life. He was relentlessly positive and upbeat and he was, to his very core, a unifier. He announced a Decade of Renewal with a flurry of initiatives to help the community celebrate itself, and its under-sung but evident qualities, in a range of ways to lead all the Jews of Britain to see themselves as fortunate and worthy, and that it was exciting to be among their community.
But others rapidly moved in to seek to smash up every one of these attempts. He was accused of not caring about the differences between the different denominations to the point of implying that they didn’t matter. He was challenged from both right and left for not including their sensibilities sufficiently. Occasionally, in trying to manage the vicious partisanship of some segments of the community, he mis-stepped and his critics pounced.
But he was both resilient and philosophical. He frequently regrouped and tried another tack. Already a regular writer, he wrote (more or less) a book a year and in so doing, he frequently went over the heads of the petty politicking of some in the UK Jewish community not only to appeal to any thoughtful Jew who wanted to hear from him directly what he actually meant to say but also the wider world for whom his books, unashamedly written from within the Jewish tradition, were also always designed for uplift and inspiration.
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It is no surprise that Prince Charles called him “a light unto this nation” and the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, later to be Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, felt him to be the country’s foremost moral teacher and philosopher.
It is no surprise that Prince Charles called him “a light unto this nation” and the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, later to be Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, felt him to be the country’s foremost moral teacher and philosopher.
While still Chief Rabbi, he became a Professor at Kings College London and was knighted. After retirement, he was elevated to the House of Lords and was rapidly retained as a visiting professor at a number of universities, both in the UK and abroad, not least Yeshiva University in the United States.
The incident surrounding his book, The Dignity of Difference, is indicative and typical of his singular character and conviction. After its publication in 2002, some Haredi rabbis condemned the book for saying that non-Jews could also find their way to God and salvation. They felt this implied that Judaism wasn’t special or unique. Rather than tough it out, Sacks sought to conciliate them, even went up to Manchester to meet their leaders over the issue and agreed to amend one or two sections to blunt their criticisms.
He never retracted the central thesis but, by the slight amendments he made, he silenced his critics from the Right. Immediately though, critics from the Left jumped in to say that he had compromised ignominiously and undermined the essence of his original inspiring message.
Overall, no amount of protestation on Sacks’s part led people to re-read what was still published in his name, nor did they seem to notice that he never withdrew or repudiated the first edition of the book which remains on bookshelves all around the world.
Jonathan Sacks was equally comfortable between the pages of a Talmud volume or in the corridors of academia. But perhaps even more rarely, he was also entirely comfortable in front of a microphone or a camera. He was a consummate communicator, a brilliant orator and a wonderfully creative thinker.
He never sought to present himself as a halakhist or judge, and it would be hard to find a ruling he made on his own of any great significance. One can only speculate as to the creativity he might have brought to the halakhic process had he felt less constrained.
But like Maimonides – and I don’t shrink at all from that comparison – he made sense of Jewish stuff for the average person in a way no-one else of this or the last century has done. His masterful introduction to the Siddur (prayer book) and his commentaries on the Torah and festival prayers shine sparkling new light on well-worn material. He scintillated.
He never sought to present himself as a halakhist or judge, and it would be hard to find a ruling he made on his own of any great significance. One can only speculate as to the creativity he might have brought to the halakhic process had he felt less constrained.
Jonathan Sacks made no apology for his insistence that the world could learn from Jewish ideas and teachings but at the same time he made sure he was fully informed of contemporary ideas and developments. Part of his skill was drawing into his frame ordinary things that so many of us lived with and making us view them again from a new perspective or through a Jewishly refracted lens.
He was sure that his ideas would outlast the small minded who could not understand the great and uplifting edifices he constructed with the use of brilliant insights into the implications of classic Jewish thought and teaching. He was a unifier of ideas and a teacher of the world.
It is customary to say of someone deceased ‘zikhron livrakha’ ‘May his memory be a blessing’. It already is.
READ MORE
Prince Charles mourns UK’s Rabbi Jonathan Sacks: ‘He spanned sacred and secular’ (Times of Israel)
Charles calls Sacks ‘a leader whose wisdom, scholarship and humanity were without equal’; Netanyahu cites his ‘insights on the heritage of the Jewish people and on anti-Semitism’
Lord Sacks obituary (Guardian)
Former chief rabbi who was admired far beyond the Jewish world for his intellect and warmth
The contradictions of Rabbi Jonathan Sacks (Haaretz)
ANSHEL PFEFFER: As one of the stream’s most prominent and influential rabbis, he personified the contradictions and limitations of Modern Orthodoxy, especially in the Diaspora – not being traditional enough for Haredim, too cautious for non-Orthodox Jews, and too foreign for Israelis
Photo: Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks in 2015 (Blake Ezra/Courtesy)
