I remember Rabbi Sacks as always dressed like an English gentleman, but with a colossal spiritual presence. He was a towering intellectual figure with a command across faiths, philosophy, history and public policy. He was Britain’s best export to America in recent years as he toured campuses and communities.
We met in 2007 for the first time when a mutual friend, Stuart Roden, took me to the rabbi’s home in London. There were books everywhere and, while the rabbi was warm, welcoming, energetic, it felt as if meeting humans was what he did between his studies of Torah, reading and writing books. We were a tea break for him.
Despite his global fame, presidents and prime ministers seeking his counsel, he would talk about our common roots in the East End of London. “Is that bakery still there?” he asked. He never forgot his roots. The cockney slipped through occasionally. When honoured as a peer of the realm, he chose to be Lord Sacks of Aldgate.
It was his great, inquiring mind that took him to the Lubavitcher Rebbe to ask about God. It was if the blessings of the Rebbe and an opening to God always surrounded Rabbi Sacks. His mastery of history made him a defender of Western civilisation, a proud Zionist, but much like his philosophy tutor at Cambridge, the late Sir Roger Scruton, Rabbi Sacks recognised the Judeo-Christian West’s debt to Islam. Along with our East End roots, this Abrahamic commonality and love for the West bonded us.
Much like Moses, the rabbi was comfortable in royal palaces and homes of the poor. As with another Moses, the great medieval rabbi known to Muslims as Musa bin Maimun bin Abdullah al-Qurtubi al-Israili, or Maimonides (Rambam to many), Rabbi Sacks brought philosophy and theology together in a modern conversation on how to live as people of faith, with love for God, but also as loyal components of the modern world. The prophets came to teach us how to live in reality, not leave it.
In this pursuit, he was a pioneer and many Muslims in the West and, more recently in Morocco, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Jordan have turned to the rabbi’s books, online videos, recorded conference appearances and social media clips. For a long while, his books were contraband. Many imams and Muslim activists saw in Rabbi Sacks’ writings a deep divine wisdom, the critical spirit of Aristotelian philosophy. In a televised conversation with Professor Akbar Ahmad, he reminded us of what Muslims once were: the preservers of philosophy and theology that led to the eventual flourishing of freedom in Europe.
But his open and constant support for Israel stopped some Muslims from inviting him to public platforms. The anti-West, anti-Israeli radical Islamists from the Muslim Brotherhood and its affiliates were in the ascendant as “community gatekeepers”.
He liked to tell stories, continuing that ancient Jewish trait of conveying wisdom with narrative. He told a story about three men who spent their lives quarrying rocks. When asked what they were doing, one replied, “Breaking rocks”. The second said, “Earning a living”. The third said, “Building a cathedral”.
That cathedral of co-existence, through the dignity of difference and modernised traditions, is being built in the minds of many across today’s Middle East. Rabbi Sacks would have been pleased to know that invitations for him from the UAE, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and other nations were being issued. At the new synagogue, church and mosque in Abu Dhabi, the Abrahamic Family House, Rabbi Sacks would have recalled the ways of Maimonides, who lived among Muslims and wrote in Arabic. Today, not only Jewish peoples, but many Muslims mourn Rabbi Sacks too. He was our teacher, too.
Ed Husain is a doctoral researcher in philosophy and author of ‘The House of Islam: A Global History’.
