Addressing Greenwich Chabad on Jewish Pride

I was asked to say a few words this evening about Jewish pride. Somehow we're proud to be Jews, but at the same time, we're embarrassed to be Jews. There was a, you know, somehow we have this ambivalence about who we are.

And I want to tell you two little stories. My late father, alav haShalom, was one of the aristocrats of the Jewish world. He sold schmatters in Commercial Row. He came over to England as an immigrant, poor family, had to leave school at 14, never had an education, sold class in our equivalent of New York's Lower East Side, was never a success in business. But he walked tall as a Jew. Now, was there a time in Greenwich or not in New York? I know, but in England, you know, where England, they're very English in England. I don't know if you noticed this. And there was a time when I was growing up when nobody would even think of wearing a yarmulke in the street. It just wasn't done.

And I remember when I was a kid, I was walking back from shul with my father. I had my yarmulke on. And a very sweet man from the synagogue came up to my father. He only wanted to help. And he said, “Mr. Sacks, I think your son has forgotten to remove his yarmulke.” And my father turned to him and said, “No son of mine will ever be ashamed to be a Jew.”

That made a huge impact on a young child. And that lesson stayed with me from that day to this. And now move forward 30 years.

It's one of those moments, the many moments I had like this. 1994, November. I am flying back from Israel on a very sad occasion. The funeral of the late Yitzchak Rabin. I'm flying back in the royal flight with Prince Charles and Tony Blair. It's a very small plane.

If you're invited, you'll think twice because it takes twice as long. It has to stop in the middle, to take a deep breath and who knows what. Normal flight is four hours. The Queen's flight takes eight hours. So I'm sitting there in this tiny little cabin with Prince Charles and Tony Blair - just the three of us. And I'm thinking, what do I do?

They're reading the news. What do I do? And I thought to myself, what would Dad, alav haShalom, want me to do? So I got out my Chumash, my little Hebrew Bible with all the commentaries in Hebrew. And I start learning Parashat HaShavua, the passage we're going to read the coming Shabbat. Now, I don't know if you've ever seen a traditional Chumash with all the commentaries around. There's no book in English like it. There's no, even Shakespeare with all the commentaries doesn't look like this. And Tony Blair is looking at this and saying, “What is that, Jonathan?” So I explain what this is.

Here's the biblical verse. Here's Rashi from France in the 11th century. Here's Rashbam, his grandson, who always disagrees with his grandfather, which is a Jewish thing to do, et cetera, et cetera. I explain who Ibn Ezra is. And he's fascinated. And he says, “Jonathan, would you teach us some?” So I start teaching Tony Blair Parashat HaShavua.

And Prince Charles, who's sitting just across the aisle - it's a small plane - listens in. And he's fascinated. And he stands in the aisle. And for one hour, I give a shiur, a class, in this week's Bible portion, to the future King and future Prime Minister of England. 

I make a little bracha at the end. I quote to myself a line from Psalm 118. “V'adaber b'eidotecha neged melachim v'lo eivosh.” "I will speak of Your statutes in the presence of kings and not be ashamed." 

That was 20 years ago. And in both cases, it was the start of two extraordinary and very deep friendships, personal friendships, during which I had the privilege of advising both of them. But really, what they wanted to do was study Torah together. And from this, I learned a general rule.

Now, this may only be true in England. I don't know if it applies in America. But see if it makes sense.

After many such experiences, I realised that non-Jews respect Jews who respect Judaism. 

And non-Jews are embarrassed by Jews who are embarrassed by Judaism. 

And when our people get up and criticise the State of Israel, they get embarrassed, as do we.

So to have Jewish pride is something very, very special. And I can't begin to tell you how much we have to have pride in. 

Here we are, this tiny little people. You know, there was a wonderful French liberal writer called Voltaire. You heard of Voltaire? Voltaire loved everyone except Jews. In 1756, he published a thoroughly antisemitic piece in which he said Jews have contributed absolutely nothing new to human civilisation.

That was 1756. Between then and now, what turned up in physics, Einstein, in sociology, Durkheim, in philosophy, everyone from Spinoza to Wittgenstein, in anthropology, Levi Strauss, in psychoanalysis, every single psychoanalyst except Carl Jung, the token Gentile. Every other psychoanalyst was Jewish.

(Mind you, if you're not Jewish, who needs psychoanalysis?)

One-fifth of a percent of the population of the world, 26% of Nobel Prizes in physics, 27% of Nobel Prizes in medicine, 41% of Nobel Prizes in economics, 10 Nobel Prizes for literature, 49% of chess masters. You name it, we did it. We even produced... [Applause from the audience] You want atheists and apikorsim and heretics? We did that as well.

Three of the four world's great heretics of the modern age were Jewish. Spinoza, Marx and Freud. The only one who wasn't Jewish was Charles Darwin. Why Charles Darwin wasn't Jewish, I don't know. Had a big beard, he was a total heretic, he should have been Jewish. It was obviously a random genetic mutation.

And do you know why? Let me tell you. What is your first memory? What is your first Jewish memory as a child? Can I give you a clue? I tell you, this actually happened. 2005, I had the privilege of being knighted by Her Majesty the Queen.

And you will not believe this, but at Buckingham - it's true - Buckingham Palace actually created a special little handrail for me, because when you are made a knight by the Queen, you kneel. But Jews don't kneel to anyone except the Almighty. So they had to make a special rail that I could lean forward a little bit on. It's a true story. And when this happens, the Queen is a bit bemused and turns to Prince Philip and says, ‘Why is this knight different from all other knights?’ 

But that is our first memory as Jews. What do we [learn to] do? The first thing we did was “Ma Nishtana.” The first thing a Jewish child learns is how to ask questions. You know what that does for the mind!? And that is why we produce so many great thinkers. Everyone else, you get taught something, you accept it. A Jew asks 'Why?'

And this is an [example]... Isidor Rabi, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist, said, ‘My mother made me a scientist, because everyone else came back from school, they [their mothers] said, "What did you learn in school today?" I came back from school, "Izzi, du fregn, the gutte kasha?" [she] said. ‘Did you ask a good question in school?’ This is the Jewish way. 

There was a parliamentary scandal in the 1990s in Britain called “Cash for Questions.” Members of Parliament were being bribed to ask questions in Prime Minister's Question Time.

I said, that is the difference between a Gentile and a Jew. A Gentile, you have to pay to ask questions. A Jew, you have to pay not to ask questions.

It's good for the mind. But I tell you, it's good for the soul. 

Is there any institution in the world as powerful as Shabbat? I have to tell you something.

You know, Israel and the Jewish people need friends, and we've been trying, Elaine and I, over the last 10, 20 years, to make some of those friends. And we realised that we have some serious friends in India - the Hindus, the Sikhs. There are a million plus, 1.2 billion Indians.

And so we spent a week with Hindu and Sikh leaders and the Dalai Lama in Amritsar in North India. And I tell you, I almost fell off my chair because I was lecturing to the university, the Sikh university, as was the Dalai Lama. And the third senior Sikh in the world, a gentleman called Mohinder Singh, gets up, and in front of 2,000 people, 2,000 Sikh students at the university, he gets up without any prompting.

I was not expecting this. He said, ‘You know what we need? What we Sikhs need? We need Shabbat.’ He says, ‘You cannot believe this. The Jews, one day every week, drop everything. They spend time with their family. They spend time with their friends. We need Shabbos.’

I said, ‘Mohinder, I'm taking you over. You can give that sermon in all our shuls.’

I tell you, we had an international conference on climate change in Copenhagen, 2010. For some reason, the government decided they wanted to send a religious message. And we got all the religious leaders there. True story, the environment secretary. So I gave a little five-minute dvar, and I said, ‘Guys, you know, serious problem, climate change, we have the answer. We call it Shabbat.’

Now just work out, if everyone in the world did not drive a car or fly a plane on Shabbat, we'd lower by one-seventh the world's carbon footprint. You know who loved this? The imams, they loved it. They said, ‘We're gonna tell everyone, don't drive to the mosque on Friday.’

I didn't get him to give that one in shul, for various reasons. They love Shabbos, and it is something beautiful. I'll tell you something.

20 years ago, I made a full-length documentary for the BBC, not a Jewish programme, about the state of the family in Britain, because, you know, we've got a lot of failed marriages, non-marriages. And I thought it'd be interesting to get a non-Jew to experience something Jewish and just film her reactions. I got a lady called Penelope Leach, who was Britain's leading expert in how to bring up children. Very famous lady. 

And I took her into a Jewish primary school on a Friday morning. You know what they do in a Jewish primary school on a Friday morning? They do a mock Shabbat, but she is watching as these five-year-old mother and father and the five-year-old grandparents, then they're blessing the five-year-old children and they're making kiddush and haMotzi. Goodness knows what. And she's enthralled. And it was very beautiful television.

And she's asking these five-year-old children, ‘What do you like about Shabbat? What don't you like about Shabbat?’ This non-Jew who never went inside a Jewish school and never knew nothing about Judaism. And the kids are saying, ‘Well, what we don't like, you can't watch television on Shabbat. It's terrible.’

She said, ‘What do you like?’ And this five-year-old boy said, ‘You know what I like? It's the only night Daddy doesn't have to rush off.’ 

And as we were leaving the school, she turned to me and said, “You know, Chief Rabbi, that Sabbath of yours is saving their parents' marriages.” 

To hear that from a non-Jew, that is something special.

Friends, I could go on forever and probably will. I have to tell you, one of my problems coming from England to America is the discovery that not every word in American English means the same as in English English. One example is the word ‘momentarily,’ which in English means ‘briefly,’ but in American English means ‘soon.’

Now, it took me a while to work this out because people would get up and say, “And Rabbi Sacks will speak momentarily,” to which I explain, “No rabbi ever speaks momentarily.”

But I'm going to end with a very simple story, but it's a true story. It's one of the oddest stories ever, but I happen to be a tiny little part of it. You won't read it anywhere. It's fascinating. 

There was an English pig farmer in East Anglia with the unlikely name, it's a true story, called Ernest Onions. You can actually look this up on Google and you'll see at least part of this story. Ernest Onions was a farmer living out in the countryside and he had a hobby. He loved buying paintings.

So he would go around auctions locally and buy paintings. His kids thought that he was mad. He bought so many, they couldn't be put them on the walls. He kept some of them in his chicken shed. He was piling them up. As soon as he died, the children put all the paintings for sale.

They didn't want them. They put them for sale in a little auction house - I don't know if you've heard of it - called Sotheby's.

Sotheby's produced a little catalogue and on one page, there is a big oil painting of a lot of hooligans damaging a building and so on. They're doing a lot of destroying. And the Sotheby's catalogue says, “School of Pietra Testa, a 17th century painter, ‘The Sack of Carthage’,” you know, when Carthage was destroyed. Estimated price, £15,000. 

There was in England at the time, he was actually Irish, a very great art expert called Sir Dennis Mahon. Sir Dennis Mahon is looking through the Sotheby's catalogue and he's fascinated by this page, because - he says to himself - somebody is carrying off a seven-branched candelabra. What was the Menorah doing in Carthage? He suddenly realised this is not a painting of “The Sack of Carthage.” This is a painting of the destruction of the Second Temple.

If it wasn't “The Sack of Carthage,” then maybe it wasn't Pietra Testa. Being one of the world's great experts, he suddenly remembered that the French master, Poussin, painted two paintings of the destruction of the Second Temple, one of which is in the art museum in Vienna, the other of which disappeared in the 18th century. 

He had all the documentation, painted by Poussin in 1626 for Cardinal Barberini, and he realised this is the missing Poussin.

He went to the auction, bid for the painting. Obviously, if Sir Denis Mahon is bidding for something above the estimated price, other people begin to join in. Eventually, it went not for £15,000. 

He bought it for £155,000.

He then turned to Jacob Rothschild, Lord Rothschild, who bought it for 4 1⁄2 million. It today hangs in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. 

It's a very poetic story because that painting of the destruction of Jerusalem is now a testimony to the rebuilding of Jerusalem.

But what that story really told me is this family owned a treasure of almost inestimable value and they were prepared just to get rid of it. 

Because they didn't love it, they didn't know it was valuable. 

And so they lost a great deal of money but maybe something even more meaningful than that.

Let us understand the true value and beauty of what we have inherited, our Jewish faith and membership in the most remarkable people the world has ever known. 

That which we truly value, we will not give away. 

And what we hand on as the heritage to our children, they too will cherish.

May we have real pride because we are part of that great people that 4,000 years ago changed the world and which the world still needs today as much as it ever did before. 

Walk tall as Jews, walk proud as Jews and the world will admire us for being true to our heritage. That is Jewish pride.

Let us now walk the talk. Thank you very much indeed.