I Believe — A Weekly Reading of the Weekly Bible
Jonathan Sacks
Maggid/OU Press, £22.99

When Ezra gathered the exiles from Babylon who had returned to Israel, he organised a public reading of the Torah to remind them of the teachings they had forgotten. But he didn’t just rely on his recitation: according to the Book of Nehemiah, the Levites went about the assembly, explaining the words in detail so that the people could understand.

From the earliest days, we have needed a helping hand to make sense of our sacred texts. And there has been no more gifted expositor of the Torah in our times than Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks.

I Believe, published posthumously, is the tenth volume in the Covenant and Conversations collection, which began life as a series of weekly emails on the weekly Torah portion.

I Believe cover image, jpeg

This final set was composed in the last year of his life in 2020, as the occasional allusions to lockdown testify. “When we feel alone, we are not alone, because the great heroes of the human spirit felt this way at times — Moses, David, Elijah and Jonah.”

Each of the essays in I Believe ends with a sentence or two highlighted in bold summarising the key values he elucidates from the sidrah. Combined, they act as his ethical will to the community.

Some focus on a close reading of a particular passage — the spies in Numbers were not asked to “spy” on the land as such but latur, a word which rather meant to seek out and report the good. Others range more broadly across the world of ideas.

But everywhere is his seemingly effortless ability to match observations from political science, philosophy and other disciplines to insights from biblical tradition.

His references range from Rousseau and Nietzsche to Apple founder Steve Jobs and the Tom Hanks film A Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood — as well as, of course, to other rabbinic commentators. One of his most creative interpretations links the story of the “heavying” of Pharaoh’s heart with the Egyptian Book of the Dead.

In ancient Egyptian lore, the deceased would have to undergo a ceremony whereby their heart was weighed in the scales against the feather of ma’at (cosmic order). If the heart was too heavy, through misdeeds, then the person could not proceed to the afterlife.

Examining Jacob’s name change to Israel, he says that Jacob represented the man who wanted to be like his brother, Esau — taking his brother’s blessing— rather than be himself, while Israel had the “courage to stand upright and walk tall”. It is a choice that challenges Jews today in their relations with the world around them.

“Jews have overachieved,” he remarks. “Judaism however, with some notable exceptions, has underachieved.”

Joseph’s rise to viceroy in Egypt demonstrates the “sheer ambiguity of power”.

In his famine preparation plans, Joseph ends up concentrating more power in the hands of Pharaoh — which will have fateful consequences for the Israelites when a new ruler takes the throne.

Jonathan Sacks photo MichaelDonald

Rabbi Sacks (Photo: Michael Donald)

From the episode of Nadab and Abihu, the sons of Aaron consumed after bringing strange fire to the Tabernacle, he reflects on the need to observe limits and for ecological responsibility.

In his introduction, Rabbi Sacks states that “the values that underlie the Torah are strikingly relevant to contemporary society and to our individual lives in the 21st century secular time”.

Everything that follows in the volume is an eloquent demonstration of that.

One of his predecessors, Chief Rabbi Hertz, in the edition of the Chumash that was to become a standard in the United Synagogue for more than half a century, could refer to the early Israelite society as “a theocracy”.

It is not a description you will find in I Believe. It was the gift of Lord Sacks that the Torah he expounded could speak to a liberal democracy.