To capture the breadth and depth of Rabbi Jonathan Sacks’ intellectual legacy in a few hundred words is impossible. But if I were to try to identify one idea that echoes through his writings across the decades it would be the claim made in his 2000 book Radical Then, Radical Now that Judaism “is not a way of understanding or accepting or being reconciled to the world. To the contrary, it is a protest against the world that is, in the name of the world that ought to be.”
In the modern era in particular, Jewish philosophy has been characterised by what the rabbi and thinker Steven Schwarzschild termed “the Jewish twist,” a phrase he used to emphasise the Jewish focus on practical reason over abstract theological concerns. While one could call his description into question with reference to much of medieval Jewish philosophy, Rabbi Sacks’ thought was always focused on practical reason, revolving around a moral axis.
Even in his early inward-looking works such as One People, a book that met with some opposition at the time, he was driven by a concern with inter-denominational strife within our community. One did not have to agree with the solutions he presented there in order to understand the basic moral concern that motivated him.
As he turned his attention to more global matters, and found a voice that would be heard nationally and internationally, Rabbi Sacks modelled for us all how that moral concern could emerge from what the world increasingly saw as the most unlikely of places — the unapologetic commitment to a particular religion.
Rabbi Sacks believed to his very core that particularistic Judaism could speak to the most important moral and social questions of the day.
As he would write in The Politics of Hope, “a free society cannot be created by political or economic structures alone. It requires virtues.”
Virtues, however, cannot be taught in the abstract. We gain them from families, communities, and traditions. And those value-laden institutions are not born of contracts, but of the biblical idea of covenant. For Rabbi Sacks, covenant is an idea that we ignore at our peril. It is through covenant that we “give shape to our individuality and moral substance to our sociability,” and our covenant is the Jewish one. It is a Judaism that Rabbi Sacks, deeply ensconced in its particular rituals and texts, nonetheless made relevant to the world at large.
In an era when difference is celebrated, religion as the orphan child, is still often denigrated. For Rabbi Sacks, Judaism modelled how we can — and even should — cultivate our differences in a manner that allows us to deliver a universal message.
The Dignity of Difference remains for me the most powerful statement of this credo, whereby “God, the creator of humanity, having made a covenant with all humanity, then turns to one people and commands it to be different, teaching humanity to make space for difference.” One need not, argued Rabbi Sacks, reduce religion to its lowest common denominator in order to identify the things we have in common. His was a voice that showed us that Orthodox Judaism does not need to be rationalised in order to be rational.
Ironically that was also the book, wilfully misunderstood at the time, that almost had Rabbi Sacks “cancelled” avant la lettre. In a world where difference is increasingly used to drive divisions between nations, political parties, and sadly even friends, it appears to have been prescient. In honour of his legacy, and for the good of Judaism and the wider world, we could do a lot worse than heed his message.
Daniel Rynhold is Professor of Philosophy and Dean at the Bernard Revel Graduate School of Jewish Studies, Yeshiva University
