The debate on the merits of the Chief Rabbinate has spread overseas following the announcement of Lord Sacks’s retirement in two and a half years.

Shmuley Boteach, writing in the Jerusalem Post, contended: “A chief rabbi is not principally an ambassador or a writer but a leader, and judged by this criteria Sacks, over the last two decades, failed to demonstrate the single most important component of leadership, moral courage.”

But the Chief Rabbi has a champion in Yitzchok Adlerstein, on the Orthodox blog Cross Currents: “I cannot think of another frum Jew who for years on end has broadcast the depth and profundity of Torah to tens of millions of people without respite! With whom would we associate the reaction of the non-Jewish world that the Torah (Devarim 4:6) writes about – “Surely a wise and discerning people is this great nation” – more than Jonathan Sacks?”