Rachel Goldberg-Polin and Jon Polin: ‘We pray for rampant, unreasonable, unwieldy hope’

Rachel Goldberg-Polin and Jon Polin at the Sacks conversation, which also marked the publication of the new Sacks Koren Humash (Meron Persey Photography)[Missing Credit]

Rachel said that if she could ask Rabbi Sacks a question, “I would ask Rabbi Sacks if he has found Hersh there, and if he would teach him some of what he has taught me.”

Jon, who has read Rabbi Sacks’ writings on the entire Torah cycle, said he would ask him to teach world leaders how to balance compassion with toughness. Too many leaders they had met, he said, were “kind, but ineffective”, or effective but without compassion.

Taub asked the parents of three about their Jewish upbringing in Chicago. Jon explained that he was “comfortable in all circles” of Jewish life, and “grew up with Judaism at my core”, attending a religious school, where he later met his wife. Rachel said her childhood was less observant than her husband’s, but “we were very proud of Israel; that was how we lived Jewishly.”

“I always felt embraced and appreciative of the diversity within the Jewish community,” Rachel said. “And so, in this arduous odyssey that we found ourselves in these past two years, something that's been so supportive and scaffolding to us has been the vibrancy of communities that have reached out to us,” she went on.

Lord Sacks, speaking in 2016 (BEN STANSALL/AFP via Getty Images)AFP via Getty Images

Exemplifying the embrace she has felt from the whole Jewish community, Rachel recounted being invited to meet a strictly Orthodox rabbi in Bnei Brak who normally “did not meet with women”.

The encounter required “a sort of choreography”: the rabbi would look at Jon, ask him a question, and Rachel would reply while he continued looking at her husband. It was, she said, “really beautiful… an embrace”.

“The word ‘united’ is so overused, but the fact that we were getting embraced from this wide swathe also speaks to the symbiotic relationship we both have as children of the diverse Jewish community,” Rachel said.

The evening opened with a recording of Rabbi Sacks reflecting on the role of Midrash in bringing Torah into the present day. Taub asked the couple whether a verse or theme from the Humash had taken on new resonance.

For Jon, Rabbi Sacks had long encouraged him to “go deeper into the reading”, particularly around leadership. One figure stood out: Nachshon ben Aminadav, who stepped into the sea before it split. “He didn’t ask for permission,” Jon said. “He just did.”

Rachel said she had come to see the biblical patriarchs and matriarchs not primarily as heroes but as flawed humans.

“Starting from the very beginning, it's crisis after crisis, it's pandemonium, it's puzzlement, it's befuddling, it's confusing. Starting with Adam saying, ‘It was her’ — Eve being framed, by the way — Eve saying, ‘No, it was him.’”

Realising the flawed nature of everyone was “very validating,” she went on.

Rachel and Jon with Daniel Taub at St John's Wood Synagogue on Monday evening[Missing Credit]

Rachel also said the passage in Devarim, commanding the choice of life had acquired new personal meaning: “We could live, or we could really choose this layered, textured life… I choose life differently now.”

“We were in Washington last week, and I was speaking to a crowd of non-Jewish people, and I said: ‘I can live, and I'm going to choose to live, and I am not going to be ugly. I'm not going let what happen turn me ugly, and that's choosing life,” she went on.

Taub asked whether any parts of the religious tradition troubled them, referencing Rabbi Sacks’s book Not in God’s Name. Jon cited “an eye for an eye”.

“It makes sense for a system of justice. But something that I've learned along this path is how personal [and] unique justice is,” he said.

He described receiving a call from the Israel Defence Force, Shin Bet and FBI, informing them that the terrorist who oversaw the attack in the bomb shelter where Hersh was taken hostage had been killed. Their reaction was “non-reactive”, he said, unlike others who felt relief. “I’m not critiquing. I totally understand.”

Meanwhile, Rachel said when she read the Humash, she wondered how people could be so “dismissive” of holiness, “which was raining down”.

“The entire journey in the desert, I find fascinating for so many different reasons. They had Starbucks falling on them three times a day from the sky, and it was hot, and they were still kvetching.

“And the truth is, throughout all of Humash, there's this phenomenon… a lack of acknowledgement of holiness in life. And we struggle with this today.”

Before October 7, as a teacher, Rachel recalled speaking to students who said they would believe in God only if proven. “That's not how it works,” she told them.

“There is beauty in not having the proof, and that is what belief is – it is this leap.”

“Hashem is standing right in front of you. Your face is turning red because Hashem is right there, and you're still doubting. And those are the texts that are the most juicy.”

On the role of their shul, the Hakhel congregation in south Jerusalem, the pair said it had been an invaluable support system. “The entire community seemed to always predict what we needed,” Jon said. Rachel said she believed all 36 righteous ones or Tzadikim Nistarim “are in our shul”.

Rabbi Sacks at work in his study[Missing Credit]

“If we could just replace all 120 members of the Knesset with 120 members of our community, we'd be a much better country and a much better world,” Jon added.

Rachel praised the “real mensches” of the community, including “two quiet women” who conduct acts of solidarity, for example, standing silently on a roadside with yellow flags. They reminded Rachel of A J Muste, the schoolteacher who stood outside the White House for years during the Vietnam War with a sign reading “Stop this war”. When asked whether he thought it would change anything, he replied: “Oh, no, I hold the sign so the world doesn’t change me.”

“That’s what that minyan is doing,” Rachel said.

The conversation turned to younger Jews who have distanced themselves from Israel during the war. Rachel believes some hold Israel to an impossible standard. “In an aspiring democracy, you don't always choose who is currently living in the White House, and you can still be proud of who you are and what your country stands for in theory.

“It’s a strange double standard that we think somehow every single thing whoever’s running the show is doing is in the name of everybody.” She urged young people “to expand their thinking and be more gracious to Israel”.

Jon shared an incident from a rare week’s holiday on the Oregon coast – the couple’s first week of anonymity in two years.

In a coffee shop, they were met by a barista wearing a Free Palestine badge. Rachel introduced herself, showed the server a picture of Hersh and explained that he had been advocate for peace – and told the man what had happened to him in Gaza. After a pause, the barista responded by launching into an accusation: “Well, if you guys didn’t commit genocide…”

Jon said the interaction was educational. Criticism of Israel was legitimate, he said, but “when you… fail to take a moment to just say, ‘I’m sorry for your loss,’… there’s really nothing to talk about”. Many young people, he said, encountered the same dynamic on campus. Quoting Rabbi Sacks, he recommended: “When people look down on us, our only response is to hold our heads up even higher.”

Taub agreed, noting a diplomatic saying: “You can change my opinions, but you can't change my instructions."

“If you find yourself dealing with somebody who is effectively acting in accordance with a set of instructions… I think you have to keep your dignity intact and invest your energies elsewhere,” Taub said.

In her closing remarks, Rachel alluded to challenges facing British Jews.

“My heart is with you, your heart was with us, your heart stays with us. We feel it, we appreciate it, we know it… This symbiotic situation has woven itself around the Jewish people around the world, and I pray and I think that it's not going to unbraid anytime soon.

“The thing that I really pray for us is that we are showered with the most rampant, unreasonable, unwieldy hope, that we have irrational, outrageous, luscious hope, because that is so intrinsically Jewish,” she went on. “We have to wrap ourselves in that jacket of hope and keep going.

“And so my prayer for you and for us… is that we have this radical, powerful hope that just like tefillin, stays around us and keeps us… courageous.”

Gila Sacks, Rabbi Sacks’ youngest daughter and a trustee of the UK board of the Rabbi Sacks Legacy, closed the evening. She thanked guests, including the Chief Rabbi Sir Ephraim Mirvis and David Morris, the son of philanthropist and businessman Conrad Morris, in whose memory the new Sacks Humash has been dedicated.

Gila said the publication of her father’s prayer book — which he had been working on at the time of his death in 2020 — is the thing which had moved her most since his death.

“That it's just there… on people's laps during davening, not just for those with the time or inclination to pick up a book of essays or download a lecture, but that it is there for everyone, as part of their Shabbat; that my father has become part of the furniture of our Jewish life. That is a blessing beyond words.”

A Humash, with the text and the commentary, Gila went on, “is the most basic way we have of reminding ourselves that there must be multiple ways to get to the truth. Commentary is the systemisation of argument.”

The commentator, she went on, was “a questioner, throwing doubt or light or shade on the text, and role-modelling the task to all of us, because if they can bring their own voice to the text, so can I, the reader”.

“Rabbi Sacks once said: ‘How do we explain that Judaism is a religion of argument, and argument is for us something holy?’”

[Missing Credit]The Koren Sacks Humash

As the world “forgets how to argue well”, with narratives fracturing, Gila asked if the approach of the Humash could allow for people to “make space for the possibility that someone else might have a valid perspective, even if I disagree with it”.

“Accepting they might have their own truths doesn't require me to doubt or diminish my own...A commentary is one small way of saying: ‘I have a voice and you have a voice. I might disagree with you with all of my being, but come, let's sit, let's have a conversation.”

The room heard that Rabbi Sacks’ work was being translated into Hebrew; tens of thousands of students have already studied it, and a booklet for soldiers has been produced for the IDF. Lady Sacks said the work being done in Israel was particularly moving.

The new Koren Sacks Humash, Conrad Morris Edition, features the late Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks' translation and commentary. Published by Koren Publishers in partnership with The Rabbi Sacks Legacy, many copies have been donated to shuls in memory of Jewish philanthropist and businessman Conrad Morris.