In conversation with David Brooks at New York University
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As part of his engagement with New York University as the Ira and Ingeborg Rennert Global Distinguished Professor of Jewish Thought, Rabbi Sacks was interviewed by prominent New York Times columnist David Brooks on 25 February 2015 as part of NYU’s Speaker on the Square programme.
Rabbi Sarna:
My name is Rabbi Yehuda Sarna, and I proudly serve as the executive director of the Bronfman Center for Jewish Student Life here at NYU, as well as the University Chaplain here at New York University. On behalf of the NYU Alumni Association and the Bronfman Center, it is my great pleasure to welcome you to this very special programme, and for those of you here for the first time, to NYU.
Dorothy Tanenbaum:
Good evening. I'm Dorothy Tanenbaum. Tonight, the NYU Alumni Association Speakers on the Square Programme is delighted to partner with the Bronfman Center to feature Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks and David Brooks. We celebrate over eight years of extraordinary lectures, all made possible through the generosity of dedicated alumni and friends.
It is my pleasure to welcome an esteemed NYU alumni this evening, Dr. Richard Born. Richard is an alumnus of NYU's Washington Square College and School of Medicine. Richard's knowledge of the downtown area extends far beyond his time at NYU. Together with his partner, Ira Drukier, Richard develops hotels in Manhattan. Among them, the Mercer, Jane, Greenwich, and Walton Hotels.
Rabbi Sarna:
I just wanted to give a special congratulations, Mazel Tov, to Richard and Debbie. Just Saturday night, they became grandparents once again, and so we thank them.
[Audience applause]
We thank them for being here tonight to celebrate with us. Richard.
Richard Drucker:
Thank you, Rabbi Sarna. It is an honour to be here this evening. NYU is my alma mater for both my undergraduate and graduate education. Both my daughter Jennifer, and my son Max, attended NYU, making NYU a family affair. We continue to marvel at the forward-thinking and seemingly endless opportunity that NYU provides its students, faculty, alumni, and friends. I'm proud to serve on the advisory board of the Bronfman Center, a home for Jewish students, and a Jewish centre for the whole University.
It is an honour to welcome back to NYU, Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, the Ingeborg and Ira Rennert Global Distinguished Professor of Judaic Thought, and to greet distinguished New York Time columnist, David Brooks, who has received an honorary doctorate from NYU. In fact, his father taught English Literature here.
Rabbi Sacks served as Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth between September 1991 and September 2003. A visiting professor at several universities in Britain, the United States, and Israel, Rabbi Sacks holds 16 honorary degrees, including a doctorate of divinity confirmed to mark his first 10 years in office as Chief Rabbi, by the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Carey.
David Brooks became an op-ed columnist for the New York Times in September of 2003. His column appears every Tuesday and Friday, so look out for it tomorrow. He is currently a commentator on PBS NewsHour, on NPR's All Things Considered, and NBC's Meet the Press. Mr. Brooks also teaches at Yale University and is a member of the American Academy of the Arts and Science. Please join me in welcoming Rabbi Sacks and David Brooks.
[Audience applause]
David Brooks:
Welcome, Lord Rabbi. I haven't been here since I was five years old. My father didn't get tenure, so we're still bitter.
[Audience applause]
That's not true. I'm just kidding. So the obvious first question is, you're Lord Rabbi Sacks, which is higher, Lord or Rabbi?
Rabbi Sacks:
First of all, obviously, David, I just want to say thank you for agreeing to do this, because I can't tell you what this does for my 'street cred' with my children. I'm the guy who got to sit next to David Brooks! So thank you, David. Thank you for all you've done to lift the conscience and the eyes of [so many]. You've been terrific.
[Audience applause]
And of course, Mazel Tovalso to Richard and Debbie on their new granddaughter, Ayelet, and I hereby agree to arrange a match with one of my grandchildren immediately, should terms be agreed to. And may we all see nachas from our grandchildren. Now, you were asking -
David Brooks:
I didn't know we'd get so Jewish so fast.
[Audience Laughter]
Rabbi Sacks:
So I'll tell you the good news about being a rabbi, you know, is that you're a servant of the Lord, but the trouble with the House of Lords - and people ask me what it's like, "What's the difference between going to a synagogue and going to the House of Lords?"
And I say: "If given the choice, always go to the house of the Lord instead of the House of Lords, because in the house of the Lord, only the rabbi gives a sermon; in the House of Lords, everyone does.”
And what's worse, nobody listens to them either, well, that's probably the same in a synagogue, likewise.
[Audience laughter]
Now I mean, this concept of rabbi and the concept of lord, tell us really what's at stake here. Rabbi means ‘my teacher’. We are not a religion that gets impressed by titles, by hierarchy. We believe that every Jewish man, woman, every Jewish child, is an aristocrat. We're part of a royal family that's been around for a very long time. So we don't take this ‘lords and ladies’ thing terribly seriously. And so for me, being in the House of Lords is just a chance to make sure there's a Jewish voice in the national conversation, and I think that's not unimportant.
David Brooks:
And I once met a guy in Britain who said, "I was having a nightmare." He was a Lord, and he said, "I was having a nightmareI was giving this incredibly boring speech in the House of Lords. And then I woke up, and I found out I was giving an incredibly boring speech."
[Audience Laughter]
Rabbi Sacks:
I know the feeling well.
[Audience Laughter]
David Brooks:
Now let's go to this teacher thing, the public intellectual. You're a Jewish public intellectual. Back in the 1950s we had Abraham Joshua Heschel, Martin Buber, Joseph Soloveitchik. We also had Christian public intellectuals: Reinhold Niebuhr. They don't seem to exist anymore, with the possible exception of you and maybe one or two others. Do you agree with that? And what happened?
Rabbi Sacks:
I don't know. I didn't use the phrase, but it's a phrase that's better known in America than it is in Britain. I just felt that as a rabbi, as a teacher, I wanted the Jewish voice to be heard in the national arena. So I ran around, I was Chief Rabbi of many, many congregations. For the first few years, I ran around all of them, around Britain, around the Commonwealth. By about three or four years, I think I met everyone who comes to shul. And I sat down with Elaine, my wife, and I said, "How do I reach the people who never come to shul?" And that's when I realised that we do have this thing called the public square, which in Britain means things like the BBC, like the Times of London.
And so I began to do a fair amount of broadcasting and writing. And to my amazement, I mean real amazement, I remember back in 1993, this is quite a while back, we had a very serious crime in Britain. Two 10-year-old kids murdered a four-year-old child. I wrote an op-ed in the Times. The next day, I got a call from 10 Downing Street from the Prime Minister. He'd read the article: ”Could I come round and discuss it with him?"
I remember the first time I sat face to face with the Prime Minister. John Major turned to me and said, "Jonathan, what do I do about crime?"
I said, "Be against it, Prime Minister."
And from then on, I kind of found myself in the public square, but it wasn't a conscious decision. I just felt I want to reach Jews that I can't reach any other way. And in the course of doing that, I discovered that I was touching on a religious message, and I think Reinhold Niebuhr found this, that he reached way beyond the Christian community. I think A.J. Heschel found he reached way beyond the Jewish community.
When we enter the public square and develop a reason - use John Rawls' language of public reasons so that people understand what you're saying without knowing the proof texts - then you do add to the texture and richness of public debate. And we call stuff "the news." I specialise in "the olds," because you do need a sense of perspective. As Richard Weaver once said: "The trouble with humanity is it forgets to read the minutes of the last meeting." And if we forget the past, we can repeat its mistakes.
David Brooks:
I recently saw a graph of the experts who were cited actually in my newspaper by profession. And the economists over the decades had gone from here up to here, and everyone else had gone down to here.
Rabbi Sacks:
And the only trouble being, as they say, if you were to lay all the economists in the world end to end, they still wouldn't reach a conclusion.
David Brooks:
So, there is an economics department here at NYU.
[Audience Laughter]
Rabbi Sacks:
Sorry. I speak as a lapsed economist.
[Audience Laughter]
David Brooks:
Economics has become the gateway between public knowledge and policy. And it seems to me what's cast out of that conversation is the language of morality. And this hit home to me once. We have a show here called ‘Charlie Rose’, which is broadcast on PBS for 14 people on the Upper West Side.
[Audience Laughter]
Just a joke. I joke.
Rabbi Sacks:
You'll have to explain that one to me.
David Brooks:
I should not say these things that just come to me. And I once was talking about a book I was working on and I was using the word “sin.” And I got a call the next day from a prominent publisher, not mine, and he said: "I loved your description of your book. I wouldn't use the word sin. It's so off-putting. Use the word insensitive." But I think that's a sign that, especially for a religious figure, if you're talking about morality in the public sphere, there's certain words that are uncomfortable or unknown, and certain concepts, namely God. And do you find you talk about morality, you talk about public affairs, but you don't talk as much about God or use some of that language?
Rabbi Sacks:
I want to bring together here two very remarkable insights. Number one, a Talmudic insight. The Talmud says: "When you get to Heaven, the first question we will be asked is, 'Did you behave honestly in business?' The second question is, 'Did you learn Torah?'" That will show you a sense of rabbinic priorities. There are no value-free zones, including the market economy.
The second thing is a remarkable thing, and I'm sure you know this, that one of the great minds of the 20th century, John von Neumann, who was the son of a banker, and who in his spare time while he wasn't doing nuclear physics, invented something called Games Theory.
Games Theory has a famous thing called the Prisoner's Dilemma, which tells you that you can construct situations in which two people, each acting in their own best interests, achieve an outcome that is bad for both of them. Now, the Prisoner's Dilemma was regarded as a mathematical curiosity, but it was nothing of the kind, because it refuted the principle on which the whole of market economics is based: Adam Smith's principle that it's not the altruism of the butler and baker, but the pursuit of their own interests. In other words, he said, "If everyone pursues their own interests, then the economy," and he used an almost religious phrase, "by the invisible hand, will produce general good."
What the Prisoner's Dilemma showed is it isn't true. And the prisoner's dilemma was solved by something called the ‘Iterative Prisoner's Dilemma’. In other words, if two people get to know one another, then they realise that each pursuing their own interest is bad for both of them and they learn to trust one another. What this showed, mathematically, is that you cannot run a market economy without trust. And the banking system collapsed in 2008 because bankers lost the trust of the public and they lost trust in one another. So there's a very moral thing, and yet a whole western economy fell to pieces because of it. A free market depends on virtues that are not created by the market. Take sin and virtue out of economics and the economic system will collapse.
David Brooks:
What's the Jewish definition of sin?
Rabbi Sacks:
A Jewish one? The Jewish definition of sin is what you did, and I apologise for, on Yom Kippur.
[Audience Laughter]
David Brooks:
There's really no subjects on which he doesn't have a quip. It's impressive. It's impressive. No, I agree. A friend of mine who you must know, David Wolfe, Rabbi Wolfe from Los Angeles said, "The economists think we shoot for happiness, but we don't shoot for happiness; we shoot for holiness. And if we shooted for happiness, we'd never embrace anything that involves struggle. And we have a spiritual urge that makes us want to accept some loss of happiness for struggle.”
Rabbi Sacks:
Yeah. Look. Emory University down in Atlanta invited me four years ago to do a seminar on happiness with the Dalai Lama. And I thought to myself, well, first of all, the Dalai Lama is somebody I love anyway. But I thought to myself, "Happiness? I'm a rabbi, I'm Jewish, and they haven't asked me to speak about misery, existential angst, out-marriage, identity crisis. Happiness? What a non-Jewish thing to talk about! It's gevaldig. It's beautiful."
But I pointed out that we have a word for happiness: it's ashrei. And ashrei is the first word of the book of Psalms. It's the first word of our most famous prayer, but if you look in the Chumash, and if you look in the Mosaic Books, the Mosaic Books are not about happiness; they're about simcha. Simcha is joy.
And I don't believe there's an English word that you can translate simcha into, because any word in English like joy, pleasure, delight, exaltation are all things you can experience alone. Simcha, you can't experience alone. If you look throughout the whole of Tanach, you are always celebrating with someone. You get married, you samech et ishto, you rejoice with your wife for a year. You have a festival, v’shamachta b’chagecha, you should rejoice in your festivals: you, your servants, the stranger in the gate.
So I'm not even a fan of happiness. I'm a fan of joy, because happiness, it can be selfish, it can be narcissistic, it can be self-indulgent, but there's Jewish focus on celebrating together and making sure that no one is left out. Now, that I think is a value worth living for.
David Brooks:
I would like to pause over the sentence about the Dalai Lama. I love the guy.... First, of two thoughts: who doesn't? But secondly, you got a chance to meet him and know him. I've only had a chance to meet him once, but he is someone who radiates a deep joy.
Rabbi Sacks:
Well, there's a song, [Az der Rebbe lacht, Lachen ale chassidim] When the Rebbe laughs, all the Hasidim laugh. When we did this conversation together at Emory University, 7,000 people came. It was in the basketball stadium. Nobody could understand a word he was saying, but when he laughed, 7,000 people laughed.
David Brooks:
Yeah, that's true.
Rabbi Sacks:
This man has the most infectious laugh in the universe, and for cheering us all up, he deserved the Nobel Prize.
David Brooks:
Absolutely. The one time I met him, he laughed at the most unexpected moments and it made me feel so relaxed. He had a little Dalai Lama bag, a little canvas bag. So I said, "You got any candy in there?" He pulled it out and, basically everything you get in the first class cabin of an airplane he started pulling out: the little visors, the ear things. But then he had a big Toblerone bar, so he had the candy.
Let's go to a more serious subject that is the subject of your next book, which is the subject of religion and extremism. We've certainly seen it in Islam. Is it a problem for Judaism? Is it a problem for Christianity? Is it a universal problem? And what is the manifestation of this problem?
Rabbi Sacks:
Where religion turns to extremes, when it feels that the distance between itself and the world has become unbridgeable. The normal state of religion is to exist in creative tension with the world. But when the world becomes so secular that if you're religious, you feel every value that you hold sacred is held lightly by the world, then you have to say, well, either I opt for the world or I opt for the word. As a result, all religions have become more extreme in the past century.
There was a series of pamphlets in the 1920s called ‘The Fundamentals’ that led to the word fundamentalism, and that began with Protestant Christians in America. The second religion to go extreme was Judaism after the Holocaust. When the world of the Charedim, of the very, very orthodox, did this extraordinary thing.
Because although all Jewries lost in Europe in the Holocaust, none was more hit than the ultra-Orthodox in Eastern Europe that lost over 90% of their number. All that were left, were ude m’tzul m’aish, a brand plucked from the burning, and with total dedication and without weeping and building Holocaust memorials, they simply rebuilt their shattered worlds.
They had the faith to marry and have children and build families and build communities, and build schools and build yeshivot. This community that was almost completely destroyed in the Holocaust has rebuilt itself in every country, in Israel, in America, everywhere. It's extraordinary.
There's such a thing as going to the extreme in the sense of shunning or negating the world, and that is not problematic. It becomes problematic when extremism turns to violence. Extreme Christians like the Amish, like the Mennonites. Ultra-Orthodox Jews who are happy sitting and learning and davening, they are not a threat to the world. They are holy people and they are a spiritual elite, and sometimes we agree with them and sometimes we don't. It's the combination, the incendiary combination of religious extremism and violence, which is not that common. That is the scary thing in the world today.
David Brooks:
Now, it's an amazing sentence that: “All religions became extreme in the 20th century.” That's counterintuitive. We used to have this thing called the secularism thesis that religion was dying out, but obviously not. Was it more accurate to say maybe, and this is true here, polarising?
Rabbi Sacks:
Well, there's a principle in sociology called Hansen's Law that says the second generation strives to remember what the first generations strove to forget. I mean, our parents' generation wanted to be deeply integrated. All our Jewish schools in Britain, and we didn't have many of them, what did you learn in a Jewish school in Britain when my parents were growing up? How to be a proper Englishman or woman. How to hold your teacup the way Her Majesty does. That's what they learnt.
In the old days, you used to go to Oxford to forget Yiddish. Now you go to Oxford to learn Yiddish. They have a chair in Yiddish in Oxford. They probably tell a very superior form of Yiddish-Oxford joke, I wouldn't know.
[Audience laughter]
David Brooks:
Yeah.
Rabbi Sacks:
I'll tell you an Oxford-Yiddish joke. One Oxford Jewish academic about another: "On the surface, he's profound, but deep down, he's superficial."
[Audience laughter]
David Brooks:
Now, in this country, when we want to assimilate, we tried to be British. You may have heard the phrase, what is it, ‘act Yiddish, think British’? Or no, ‘act British, think Yiddish’. What they did a couple generations ago was they decided to take all the names that were extremely English and give them to Jewish boys so nobody would think they were Jewish. They gave them names like Irving and Milton and Norman, and within a generation, they were Jewish names. It didn't work.
[Audience laughter]
Rabbi Sacks:
That's right. Was it Ben-Gurion who said, or who was it who said, "Today, they call it Israel, but next year, they'll call it Irving."
[Audience laughter]
David Brooks:
Is it in the nature of religion, in the nature of human nature, in the nature of some virulent philosophy that has infected religion that we see? Especially in Islam religion, we see extremism and violence.
Rabbi Sacks:
No, no. What we're seeing now is something highly specific, and that is religion as the cloak of sanctity, hiding the naked pursuit of power. Now that's not religion. That is politics masquerading as religion and those are two very different things.
Now, I don't think Jews or Christians should feel in any sense superior here because where Islam is now, we have been, and they have been. Don't forget that what is happening in Islam now was happening in Israel in the first century. You had these three major rebellions against Rome, all of which were devastating because they went hand in hand with internecine civil war within the Jewish people itself.
Josephus, who is an eyewitness to the destruction of Jerusalem, writes in his book ‘The Jewish Wars’, that the Jews inside Jerusalem were more intent on killing one another than fighting the Romans outside. What is happening today in Syria and Iraq was, in a small way, happening in Jerusalem 2,000 years ago. The end result of that was a catastrophe from which it took us 2,000 years to recover. Jews learnt, do not confuse religion with the pursuit of power.
The same thing happened in Christianity in the 16th and 17th century after the Reformation when Protestants and Catholics were murdering each other across Europe, and which only ended in 1648 with the Treaty of Westphalia. Then you had these major thinkers, the greatest of them being Hobbes, Spinoza and Locke, who developed the basic principles of social contract, human rights, doctrine of toleration, which became in the 18th century or more later, the separation of church and state in two versions, the American version and the French version.
Islam is going through what Judaism went through 2,000 years ago, what Christianity went through four centuries ago. The end result is always the same. People realise you must never confuse religion and power, or to put it bluntly, you cannot impose truth by force.
David Brooks:
Are you saying that the violence stems from a political vision that just has a cloak of sanctification? Because it seems to me a lot of the people, the Jihadists, they are seeking sanctification. They believe they're serving God. They don't particularly have a political agenda quite as much. They believe there has been disrespect toward their God, and it is a purely religious war.
Rabbi Sacks:
David, Isis is an attempt to re-establish the Caliphate. It's a quite explicitly political organisation, which is run on a theology, which is negated by every single authoritative voice in Islam. Islam does not allow you to murder innocent women and children. Islam does not allow you to commit suicide. Islam does not allow you to be a suicide bomber or a terrorist. All the imams of any authority have clearly declared Al-Qaeda, Isis, Boko Haram, are in contravention of Islamic law.
What is absolutely clear and lucid is the restoration of the caliphate after the al-nakba, if you like, of 1922 when the last imperial bastion of Islamic power, the Ottoman Empire, was dismembered, and that is what they're trying to restore. What is clear about them is their political agenda. What is thoroughly murky is their religious justification, which is so tenuous as to be tissue thin.
David Brooks:
Let's talk about Europe, what happened in France and the atmosphere in Great Britain. The first question I guess is if Jean-Jacques Jew comes to you, lives in Paris and says, "For the long-term health of my family, I think I should leave France and go to Israel." What would you say?
Rabbi Sacks:
David, I had a chance in May 2007 to sit, not much more distant than I am from you now, to address the three leaders of Europe at the time. Angela Merkel, who was chairing the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso, chairman of the EU, and Hans-Gert Pottering, President of the European Parliament in Strasbourg. I said to them, "Jews in Europe go back a long way. That experience added many words to the human vocabulary. Words like: inquisition, expulsion, forced conversion, auto-da-fé, ghetto, and pogrom." I said, "All that is the past and we will live with the past. But today the Jews of Europe are asking, ‘Is there a future for the Jews of Europe?’, and that should concern you, the leaders of Europe."
I spoke about this seven and a half years ago to the European leaders, and I have to say that I'm not sure that any of them knows how to deal with this. It's a very, very difficult issue. Therefore, Jews have been leaving France now, although it's only come to public notice, but I know that Jews have been leaving France since around April 2002. Because that's when I first heard from French Jews that they felt it was not safe to bring up children in France.
I don't think it's only France. I think it's happening in Norway, in Sweden, in Holland, in Belgium. That is serious. To think, we've just commemorated the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. To think within living memory of the Holocaust, you have a Europe where it's unsafe to be a Jew in the street. I don't know whether Europe will ever recover from that stain on its character, so I think this is a very, very serious issue.
David Brooks:
Do you think the problem is some radical extremists within the Muslim community? Or do you think there is a pervasive anti-Semitism within society?
Rabbi Sacks:
Anti-Semitism is like a virus. We have a protection against viruses called the immune system. After the Holocaust, the greatest attempt in the history of humanity was undertaken to create an immune system so strong that it would be proof against any virus of anti-Semitism. That was a commitment of “never again.” Fifty years of anti-racist legislation. Fifty years of interfaith dialogue. Fifty years of Holocaust education.
The trouble is, although Europe was cured of that virus, certain countries in the Middle East had been infected. Some in the 19th century by the spread of the blood libel into Egypt and Syria. You remember the Damascus blood libel of 1840, and then of course brought by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem who was working for Hitler in Berlin during the war, he brought ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ in Arabic translation into the Middle East, and both of those have infected the Middle East, and from there, quite wide swaths of Islam. This is not only the Islamists, and they have brought it back to Europe. That is what's happened. I mean it's tragic.
David Brooks:
If your family or members, or your friends or congregants, are at a dinner party in London in the course of normal life, does this come up? Do they feel it? Is there a ‘dining while Jewish’ phenomenon?
Rabbi Sacks:
I think we've been talking about nothing else for the last 10 years, actually. Britain remains a profoundly tolerant country. The first time I spoke about anti-Semitism in the EU, I spoke in the EU Centre in Brussels in 2003, and I said, "Jews cannot fight anti-Semitism alone. The victim cannot cure the crime. The hated cannot cure the hate."
I realised that the great failure in the 19th century, and even the early 20th century, is Jews were left alone. The one thing we did in Britain almost immediately, that's in 2003, is we went to the Prime Minister, we went to the politicians, the parliamentarians. We said, "You have to lead the fight against anti-Semitism." Britain became the first country where the fight against anti-Semitism is led by non-Jews, and that is incredibly important.
The most important thing that has now happened, and tragic that it should have happened, but it is incredibly important, is that what happened in Charlie Hebdo in Paris has finally persuaded Europeans of something every one of us has known for a very long time. The hate that begins with Jews never ends with Jews. You may call this anti-Semitism, but in the end it's going to affect every single European. If a Jew isn't safe to live in Europe, then no one is safe to live in Europe.
David Brooks:
Is it your perception the Charlie Hebdo thing has proven to be a pivot point, or will prove to be a pivot point?
Rabbi Sacks:
I hope so. We can't fight this one alone. I mean, Christians have to realise that right now, Christians are being wiped out of the Middle East. I mean, it's a horrendous story and it's a largely untold story. I mean, more than a million Christians have been forced to leave Iraq. Afghanistan, there are no Christians, they burnt down the last church in 2010. 450,000 Christians fled Syria. Five million Copts in Egypt are living in fear. So unless Jews and Christians can stand together then... We have to stand together, there is no alternative.
David Brooks:
Are you generally optimistic or pessimistic about the future of Judaism? Do you have worries about intermarriage, worries about other things that you think will either drain, or are there trends that just make you think we're just going great guns here?
Rabbi Sacks:
Should I give you a Jewish definition of optimism?
[Audience laughter]
David Brooks:
I thought you might.
[Audience laughter]
Rabbi Sacks:
This is the worst possible world in which there is still hope.
[Audience laughter]
David Brooks:
I'm digesting that. I'm really asking what makes you worry and what makes you hopeful?
Rabbi Sacks:
Listen, I was discussing, there's a professor of English literature, your father taught English literature. We have one in Cambridge called George Steiner.
David Brooks:
I know.
Rabbi Sacks:
George Steiner was in a sense a survivor of the Holocaust. He was a child in France when it happened. And we were having a conversation like this 12 years ago. And the subject turned to anti-Semitism. And he turned to me and he said, "They will hunt you out like a dog."
And I said, "George, I am not a guest in this country. I stand and I fight." And that is still my belief. We don't just take this lying down, we stand and we fight because Jews were hated because they were different. But difference is what makes us human. It's the fact that each of us is unique, means that none of us can be substituted or replaced by any other. It is that that that makes life holy. And therefore a country or a culture that has no room for Jews, has no room for humanity. And therefore we stay, we stand, and we fight. And we fight with good friends, with Christians, with secular humanists, with Hindus, with Sikhs and above all with moderate Muslims who feel as threatened as we do. And we stand and we fight and we win. And believe you me, we will win, end of sermon.
[Audience applause]
David Brooks:
But say you're a 20-year-old student on an American college campus, what does that mean? What do you do? Is it the wearing of the kippah? Is it the being out there and Jewish? Is it building bridges? What do you do?
Rabbi Sacks:
I come back to that word simcha. If I were a Jewish student on campus, I would do what we do in our local synagogue, get in the best whiskey, do the best kiddush, have the most wonderful Shabbat you can possibly imagine, and invite the local leading Christians and Muslims to come and make Shabbat with us. And I would teach them some Shlomo Carlebach songs. And I would say, I am going to share a little of my Jewish joy with you because I think you need cheering up. I'll tell you something, David, this surprised me. There was an Italian film director, I've forgotten his name now, Bernini, who did a film called Life is Beautiful, which was a comedy about the Holocaust. And I wrote in a book I wrote, I said, I understood his point that humour keeps you sane. But in Auschwitz, humour didn't keep you alive.
And this book of mine, which was a cheerful sort of book, it was called Celebrating Life, I wrote it to cheer myself up after my father alav ha’shalom died. It became the Holocaust survivor's favourite book. But they came to me and they said, “There's one sentence in your book that we don't agree with, where you say you can't agree with Bernini’s Life is beautiful”. And an Auschwitz survivor said to me, "When I was in Auschwitz, I realised that unless something kept my spirits going, I would die. I was a young man. I found another young man of my age, and we agreed that every day we would try and find an episode where we were out in our labour camps that would make the other one laugh. And we would come back at the end of the day, exhausted, dead, and we would tell each other a funny story. And we both laughed. Humour kept me alive."
David, we are the people who didn't even lose our sense of humour in Auschwitz. And frankly, that sense of humour has saved our humanity. And we have to share that with the world because right now our humanity is on the line. So I wouldn't invite the lunatics to my kiddish, but anyone who is willing to have me as a friend, I would say a l’chaim, I would give them cholent, which either kills or cures one way or another. And I would say, let us stop being embarrassed about being Jewish. You know what? We are embarrassed, they're not embarrassed. You remember Jackie Mason? He was doing his shows and he was saying, “They laugh at my jokes, and then they say, too Jewish.”
We're embarrassed about being too Jewish. You know that? There was this wonderful man, Shlomo Carlebach, who went around campuses teaching people to love, to sing. And after a lifetime, he summed up his experiences because he went out to non-Jews as well as Jews. And he said, "When I come to a group of students, I ask them, what are you? And if a student gets up and says, I'm a Catholic, I know that's a Catholic. And if a student gets up and says, I'm a Protestant, I know that's a Protestant. And if a student gets up and says, I'm just a human being, I know that's a Jew." Let us stop being just human beings and be proud to be Jews. And do you know what? The non-Jews will enjoy it because they want us to be what we are.
[Audience applause]
David Brooks:
Let me ask you about Shabbat meals. I have a stereotype or a generalisation that almost every Christian religious service is more spiritual than almost every synagogue service. But every Shabbat meal is more spiritual than every Christian religious service. I want to talk about the bottom side of that equation. Do Jews have a problem talking about faith and their experience of God?
Rabbi Sacks:
I think they do. And I'm not sure why. We used to be the God intoxicated people. And somewhere, somewhere around the 18th century, Jews lost faith. I think exile had gone on just too long. So you had these extraordinary minds from Spinoza onwards, you know all the statistics. 27% of Nobel prizes in medicine, 26% in physics, 41% in…, you know the statistics. But how many of those were believers? And it's a tragedy because somehow Judaism is, to my mind, one of the most mature adult extraordinary faiths I've ever come across. We do not, like the Red Queen in Alice, believe in six impossible things before breakfast. We are not a people who believe in the irrational. We are the people who invented the concept of argument for the sake of heaven. In fact, I think God only chose the Jewish people because he loves a good argument.
See, you have this tremendous intellectual, muscular, daring religion which puts in its canon of sacred texts, books that any other religion in the world would deem heretical, like Ecclesiastes, a subversive book, or Jobe, of Jobe hurling questions at the Almighty, and the Almighty finally turning up at the end and asking four chapters of questions of his own and never answering any one of Jobe's. It’s daring, it's a wonderful faith and somehow Jews lost it. I don't know. Because at a certain point, antisemitism stopped just being something out there and became something in here, and it's a great loss.
David Brooks:
But do you come to experience God through reason and through argument or through sensation and transcendent sensation?
Rabbi Sacks:
I think Judaism gives you many different ways of coming to God. That's the nature of Judaism. God isn't simple in Judaism. There's creation, there's revelation, there's redemption. So there's that sense of God in the orderliness of the universe that Albert Einstein had to a tremendous degree. I mean, he was a mystic guy. He didn't believe in a personal God, but he'd believed in, well as he said, "God doesn't play dice with the universe." Except he does. But Einstein didn't realise that and it stopped him understanding quantum physics as early as he might have done. And there is revelation. This idea that we encounter God through the word. Amos Oz and his daughter Fania, wrote a book recently about their Jewish identity and they called it Jews and Words. This idea of textual study, we find God through his world, we find God through his word. And then redemption, we find God through history beginning with Pesach.
And every other experience of exile and return slavery and freedom. So I think you encounter God in multiple ways. We have mystical traditions and so on. Judaism is a rich, diverse living tradition. It's not a simple set of creeds, you tick off the 39 articles or something and that's it. Judaism knows that because we are different, what works for some doesn't work for others. I encountered God through music. And I regret the fact that sadly, when the temple was destroyed, the rabbis decreed, let there be no more music. Let there be no proper music in synagogues. We lose a great deal.
Christians have these incredible choral traditions. They do the most extraordinary things in churches. They sing in the same key with the same words at the same time. I mean, it's unbelievable. It's so un-Jewish you wouldn't believe it. But I think the aesthetics of music, I find, I mean not only Jewish music incidentally, I mean personally, I can experience the transcendence through Beethoven's late quartets, which are among the most spiritual things ever. So I just think God is as broad as humanity. Every aspect of humanity is a way of encountering God.
David Brooks:
Now, Paul Tillich, who was one of those public theologians in the 1950s, wrote a great collection of essays or sermons called ‘Shattering the Foundations’. And one of them was on grace, on the unmerited love of God, a Christian concept. And he said, "When you're at the bottom of your life and you're at a moment of suffering, you just get the sensation that you're accepted and that you don't have to do anything, you don't have to become a Christian, you don't have to read the Bible, you don't have to do anything. You just have to accept the fact that you're accepted and that God loves you more than you deserve." Is that translatable into a Jewish concept?
Rabbi Sacks:
Is that... Where do you think he got it from?
[Audience laughter]
David Brooks:
A leading question.
Rabbi Sacks:
Psalm 27:10: “kiy avi v’imi azav’uni v’Hashem ya’asfeyni.” Even if my mother and father no longer had faith in me, God never loses faith in me. God has more faith in us than we have in ourselves. And I speak from deep personal experience here, David. I mean, it isn't always easy being a leader of Jews. I mean, there's good news and bad news about the Jewish people. The Jewish people are the greatest speakers in the world. The bad news is they're the worst listeners. So Jews have great leaders. The trouble is they have no followers. As I once said, "The Lord is my Shepherd, but no Jew was ever a sheep."
[Audience laughter]
I used to read Beha'alotecha (Numbers, chapter 11). Moses at the lowest in his life, to Elaine, my wife. This is what he says,"If this is how you're going to treat me," he says to God, "If you have any rachmanos on me whatsoever, kill me now.” That's what it says in the Bible. I said to Elaine, "If we haven't got there we're okay." But there were times when every molecule, every subatomic particle of self-confidence that I had was smashed to smithereens. And it was at that moment when I suddenly realised, it does not matter if you believe in yourself, God believes in you. That's what matters. And that gave me the strength to carry on. And that is what Paul Tillich is writing about. And that is common ground between Judaism and Christianity. We may lose faith in ourselves. God never loses faith in us. I regard that as an absolute axiom of Judaism.
David Brooks:
This is a personal question, but I'll ask it anyway. Have you had moments of doubt about God's existence?
Rabbi Sacks:
Moments of doubting God? David, I studied philosophy at Oxford and Cambridge. There wasn't a single religious believer in my teachers. I was up against the best minds in Europe. And I never for one second had a moment of crisis of faith in God. But I surely to goodness had moments of crisis of faith in humanity. And I still have them.
I tell you honestly, David, since we've just had Holocaust Memorial Day, the more I study Germany in the 1930s, the less I understand. I've spent a lifetime studying it and I still don't understand. How did those great minds, Martin Heidegger, Carl Schmitt, Gerhard Kittel, Konrad Lorenz, these guys who were Nazis that were among the greatest intellectuals, how did they play string quartets in Auschwitz Birkenau while they were turning one and a quarter million human beings into ash? I have an enormous crisis of faith in humanity. I never had a crisis of faith in God because I never believed that God is a strategic intervener. I never believed God is going to deliver us from all our problems. God is going to give us the courage and the wisdom that we can deliver ourselves. So I never had a crisis of faith, and I hope I never will. Because Judaism is not a faith that involves magical thinking.
It's not a naive faith. It's a very, very mature and sophisticated one. So no, I never had a crisis of faith.
David Brooks:
So let's talk about that material reality of Judaism. I'm Jewish, I don't keep kosher. Is that a mistake?
Rabbi Sacks:
Depends who the local kosher caterer is.
[Audience laughter]
David Brooks:
There are a lot of really good restaurants in this neighbourhood, by the way.
Rabbi Sacks:
It's terrific. Now, look, as far as I'm concerned, I used to be a slightly finger-wagging, judgmental kind of guy. And then I said to myself, "You know what? I'm going to leave that to God because, as Heinrich Heine said, his dying words, "Dieu me pardonnera c'est son metier." Heinrich Heine who'd converted out of Judaism, he said, "God will forgive me. It's what He does for a living." So, for decades now, I have ceased to judge anyone. I leave that to God because he's more forgiving than I am.
David Brooks:
Okay, I'll take a cheeseburger then. That's good.
[Audience laughter]
Rabbi Sacks:
It's bad for your indigestion, it really is...
[Audience laughter]
David Brooks:
There's a spiritual element to that question. But there's also at the moment a social element and a quality of life element. I mentioned backstage, I was driving to Bed-Stuy [Bedford–Stuyvesant] not long ago, a distant neighbourhood in Brooklyn. And it was a Saturday afternoon and basically I drove through Jewish Brooklyn. And there were Hasidic families with their kids, strollers, just kid after kid for mile after mile. And is that the future?
Rabbi Sacks:
David, I'm going to get a tiny little bit blunt here. I read the book of Job and I wonder, how did he carry on? I look at these families, children of Holocaust survivors, how did they, knowing that in the Shoah, a child could be sentenced to death, not because the child was Jewish, not even because his parents were Jewish, but because his grandparents were Jewish. How does somebody have the faith to have a child after Auschwitz? And when I look at these incredible families and all those young children, I see in every one of those faces, one of the million and a half children killed in the Shoah brought back to life again.
One day we will look back on what is happening in our lifetime. Historians will look back and say there were two miracles that happened after the Holocaust. One was the state of Israel that restored the Jewish nation, and the other were the Haredim who restored the Jewish people. And while others were drifting away, they had the courage and the self-sacrifice to have children. And I salute that. I am not charedi, but I do see that their children and their children's children are going to be the people who will sustain our people. And I just hope that they can be a little more generous and forgiving than some of their parents are.
David Brooks:
A couple of times this evening I've asked some questions on different subjects and you've come back to the Holocaust.
Rabbi Sacks:
Well, we have [inaudible].
David Brooks:
I mean it's not a little thing, I understand, but just describe the role it plays in your mental worldview. Is it a constant presence? Is it a commentary on human nature that haunts you?
Rabbi Sacks:
No, actually, I wrote a whole book called Future Tense, arguing against defining Jewish identity as was defined. There was a famous thinker called Emil Fackenheim. A great thinker who said, after the holocaust, a 614th command has been added to the Torah. "Thou shall not grant Hitler a posthumous victory." And I said, that is the most negative definition of Jewish identity given in all of history. It's so bad, Jean-Paul Sartre could have written it.
[Audience laughter]
That is not what we're about. We are about celebrating and sanctifying life, not about remembering death. It's just that. And I didn't think about the Holocaust at all. The first time I went to Auschwitz, I did so at the request of the BBC to make a television programme on the 50th [anniversary of its liberation], 20 years ago exactly. I was very reluctant to do it, but they persuaded me it was worth doing. And I said, "I'm going to tell the story of the Holocaust only if I'm allowed to tell it the Jewish way." And they said, "What is the Jewish way?" And I said, "A Jewish story must end with hope."
So I did this programme about the show. I filmed in Auschwitz. But the last five minutes were scenes of Jerusalem rebuilt and five-year-old children in Jewish schools. So, I have never been obsessed with the Holocaust. But what bothers me now, and it's as I've said, it's only in this last 10 or 12 years, is this real question, which is not really a question about antisemitism in Europe. It's a much deeper question. Does Europe, does the West have, the moral fibre, the moral courage to stand up against this? Or has Europe become so godless and so morally relativist that it actually has nothing to oppose to those who hate in the name of God? That's what's obsessing me.
David Brooks:
When you say morally relativist, do you mean that there's so much tolerance, there's not a core sense of identity and moral foundation?
Rabbi Sacks:
Look, here is the scene that I've seen so many times on television, I refuse to watch it anymore. A nice western journalist from the BBC or whatever it is sitting next to a member of Hizbut-Tahrir or some other radical Muslim group. And he says in a very polite voice, "Would you not agree that decapitating people for blasphemy is somewhat excessive?" And the Islamist extremist is sitting there with a very straight face saying, "Well, I can understand how you might see it that way. However, you do understand that different people have different pictures of the moral life and you understand that we have the right to see things and act as we see them." And the interviewer has no reply.
It's mate in one. He has lost before he's even opened his mouth. And the Islamist understands this. And in a world of moral relativism where there is no absolute truth and no absolute right and wrong, the only thing that talks is power. And in that sense, the Islamist is the true child of the 21st century. It's not because he is strong, it's because we are weak. And he sees and exploits that weakness. And I would find it very painful if Europe, having come through all that Europe has come through, lacks the moral strength to stand up to people who are shaming and desecrating both the image of humanity and the image of God.
David Brooks:
What's the answer? Explain why, we know it's wrong, but explain why it's wrong, decapitation.
Rabbi Sacks:
Why it's wrong, because in Genesis 1, the opening chapter of the Abrahamic faith's common ground to Jews, Christians, and Muslims, God delivers the single most important sentence ever uttered since homo sapiens first set foot on earth, Genesis 1:26, “Let us make man in our image after our likeness." That tells us that every single human being, regardless of class, culture, colour, or creed is holy. Life is sacred. God's image is implanted in every single one of us. And that's why murder is wrong and that's why terror is wrong. And that's why those who claim to be acting in the name of God are actually desecrating the name of God. Full stop.
[Audience applause]
David Brooks:
We've just got a few more minutes. So I'd like to ask you about the Super Bowl. No, I'm kidding. One of the questions from one of the students was, if you were not a rabbi, what would you be doing with your life?
Rabbi Sacks:
Well, just think, if I weren't a rabbi, I'd have to listen to them. So I'm rather pleased.
[Audience laughter]
When I was a student, I was undecided between being an economist, I went to study economics originally at university, or being an academic, a philosopher. I dream one day maybe I could be a fellow of my college in Cambridge or a professor, or a lawyer, a barrister. In January 1978, I came to New York. It was colder than it is this January. And visited a man who had been a great influence on my life, the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson. And I said, "I have these three ambitions and I'm not sure which to pursue. Which should I pursue?" He looked at my list and he said, no to the economist, no to the academic and no to the lawyer. He said, "You are going to train rabbis for the next generation, and you are going to become yourself a congregational rabbis so that your students will come and see you in action and learn how to do things."
He sent me back to be a congregational rabbi and a teacher of rabbis and sent me specifically back to the rabbinical training college called Jews' College. You have in Yeshiva University something called RIETS which is the equivalent in America. Which I did, I went back and became a congregational rabbi. I became the principal of Jews' College. I taught rabbis.
The odd thing was that having relinquished all three ambitions, I did have the privilege of giving Britain's top two economics lectures. I did become a fellow of my college. I did become a professor, even of NYU. I have this here to prove it. And they made me an honorary barrister, an honorary fellow of Inner Temple where I gave a lecture to 600 barristers on restorative justice, including the Lord Chief Justice and the Head of Chambers, Princess Anne. So, in the end, I think I'm just grateful that I had this chance of speaking to the Rebbe. And there are wise people who see where you fit into the big jigsaw puzzle. And in the end, I fulfilled all my ambitions precisely when I was walking in the opposite direction.
David Brooks:
What did you learn being a congregational rabbi? Did you learn things about human nature you didn't know before?
Rabbi Sacks:
Yeah. Number one, I learned that the art of conversation is not dead. It is alive and well and happens especially during the reading of the Torah.
[Audience laughter]
I also learned a certain robustness because once in a while I would give a sermon where I would speak my mind, and I was a rabbi of quite a congregation in Marble Arch, which had some fairly alpha males. And after my sermon, one or two of them would come over to me and deliver this wonderful compliment. "Next time speak about something you know something about."
But I will tell you this, I will tell you this. And it's an extraordinary thing. Elaine and I, we had this position as Chief Rabbi and Chief Rebbetzin for 22 years. We had as dinner guests round our table at our home, four prime ministers. I don't know how many government ministers. They all became friends. Lots of royals from Britain and even from the Middle East, from Morocco, from Jordan. And the odd thing is that every single time we had this guest of honour, they were outgunned intellectually by all the Jewish people around the table. And I suddenly realised that we may be a tiny people.
The late Milton Himmelfarb said, "Just think about it, the total number of Jews in the world is smaller than the statistical error in the Chinese census."
[Audience laughter]
We may be a tiny people, but we have an [ombarade derishes] of talent that is simply stunning. And we saw this every single time we gave a dinner. Ordinary people from our community. Somehow Judaism has this gift of raising the game for each of us, of letting us achieve more than we ever believed we could.
Now I'm no longer Chief Rabbi, I can occasionally sneak off to the cinema to see a film. And last motsei Shabbat I saw a film... Well, it's an American film, so you must have seen it: Whiplash. Have you seen this film? Now this is an incredible film. It's a totally unbelievable film, but it's about a real so-and-so who coaxes talent out of a young drummer and gets him to perform beyond his best by being the most obnoxious, objectionable human being you can imagine. Somehow Judaism coaxes that same 110% out of us without being obnoxious. The reason that we all hyper and overachieve is called having a Jewish mother.
And I'd rather have a Jewish mother than the guy in Whiplash. So one way or another, between our mothers' faith in us and God's faith in us, we may be a tiny people, but we do extraordinary things.
[Audience laughter]
David Brooks:
Backstage, the Rabbi was talking about The Lego Movie, which I will not go there.
Rabbi Sacks:
I love it. "Everything is awesome." This is such an un-British thing, let alone an non-Jewish thing. In Britain, everything's terrible. If everything's terrible, then everything's okay. Whereas in America, everything is awesome. Yeah, I commend that.
[Audience laughter]
David Brooks:
Yeah, that's true. Well, my somewhat unfair joke is that being a conservative columnist on the New York Times Op-Ed page is being the Chief Rabbi at Mecca: sometimes a little lonely. But it's been a great pleasure to be with the former Chief Rabbi of Great Britain, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks.
Rabbi Sacks:
That is great.
[Audience applause]