Desert Island Texts

Opening remarks

Moderator, Rabbi Dr. Rafi Zarum: I thought we'd try something different. Chief Rabbi, you've been our Chief Rabbi for 21 years and had many and varied experiences. And next year at your retirement, I want you to imagine - and you'll have to imagine - that the United Synagogue decides to give you and Elaine an all-expenses-paid world cruise for six months. Clearly an imaginative idea. 

Rabbi Sacks: Two Jews on a cruise. 

Rafi: Absolutely.

Unfortunately, while you're standing in the back one day, a wind comes along and you're swept away and you land by yourself,with just your clothes, on a desert island. And you reflect about your time as Chief Rabbi and you think about the verses in Tanach, which is our theme for today, that have meant something to you. And this is what I asked you to think about.

And you've come up with some very interesting texts. And we're going to go through and hear these things and I'll ask a few questions, and we'll end with a little surprise as well.

So you're on a desert island. There's no one there. And you think... 

So we go to our first source.

Rabbi Sacks: Well, let's be precise. There are two people there. Because if there are two Jews on a desert island, first of all, there's a Chabadnik to put tefillin on them. And number two, there's a reporter, because somehow it will get into the press. So but other than that, on our own. 

Rafi: Yes, absolutely.

So look at our first source:

“And God said, ‘Let us make Man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.'”

Bereishit 1:26

“Let us make Man in our image.” Chief Rabbi.

Rabbi Sacks: Yeah, well, everything that happens to you should be an incentive to look more deeply into the biblical text or into Torah SheBeal Peh. So this morning, I've already been provoked into a new insight, which never occurred to me before, because trying to sit on this stool, I suddenly understand what it means “HaYoshev al kisei ram veNisa.” And just how uncomfortable it is to sit on a high and exalted seat.

Rafi: It's more comfortable than a rock. 

Rabbi Sacks: It's more comfortable than a rock. And that text led me to understanding “Yosheiv Tehilot Yisrael,” one of the most paradoxical phrases in our whole liturgy.

“God sits enthroned in the praises of Israel,” because God exists regardless of us. But God exists regardless of us beyond the universe. God exists through us in the universe. And whenever we sing His praises or study His words, God lives among us. And that's what I'm really hoping for today. 

So it's obvious that we have to start with this depth charge, this explosive thing buried in the very first chapter of Tanach. “Na’aseh adam beTzalmeinu kidmuteinu.”

I mean, you could go on forever about this one verse, but the first thing I want to say is here is the entire political/ ethical / moral programme of Judaism already there in its DNA, in its most basic nuclear state. The idea that somebody might be in the image and likeness of God was not strange to the ancient world, because that was what a Pharaoh was. That is what a king of a Mesopotamian city-state or an empire was.

They were the image of God, or one of the gods, or the child of God, or the chief intermediary of God. In Egypt, the rulers tend to be seen as the child of God, Rameses, as the child of Ra, the sun-god. In the Mesopotamian city-states, the king was more like the high priest, the chief intermediary.

And here comes Tanach and says ‘No.’ Every single human being, regardless of class or culture or creed or colour; every single individual is in the image of God. And hence, already there in the first chapter is the challenge to which the whole of the rest of Tanach, and for that matter, the whole of Jewish history, and for that matter, the whole of human history, insofar as it's been inspired by Judaic ideals, has been a commentary.

Can we create a society that honours the integrity of the other as the image and likeness of God? 

It is an immense challenge. 

And the abolition of slavery, which, after all, didn't take place until the 19th century, is already implicit in that, et cetera, et cetera. So this is the single most transformative verse in the whole of Western civilisation.

Forget Judaism, it's the whole of Western civilisation. However, in Tanach, especially in Torah, and Torah very specifically, Bereishit even more so, you will find always hidden depths. There's a surface reading of the text, and there's an embedded reading beneath the text, which you have to know a lot and think a lot in order to see.

And what is the buried meaning here is this. That we tend to focus on this man-like-God thing. But what's really remarkable is, “Let us make God in our image, after our likeness.” And it hits us, maybe after 20 years, maybe after 60 years. Hang on, God has no image and no likeness. Tzelem appears only in negative contexts in the rest of Tanach. That is to say, you know, as a meaning of an idol, “Don't make an image.”

And “d’mut.” Obviously, “Ein lo d’mut haGuf,” you know, God has no image. And it is not until the opening of Shemot that we really get it between the eyes. Because when Moshe Rabbeinu asked God, ‘Who are you?’ He says “Ehiyeh asher ehiyeh”… I won't bore you, because I've written, it's at least in two of my books, the last two, “The Great Partnership” and “Future Tense,” how every single non-Jewish translation of those three words is wrong.

And only when they remembered to read the mefarshim, the Jewish understanding, they get it right. “Ehiyeh asher ehiyeh” does not mean ‘I am that I am.’ It means ‘I will be what I will be.’ Or to put it, paraphrase it, ‘I will be what I choose to be.’

And it was the French existentialist philosopher and novelist, Jean-Paul Sartre, who gave the simplest technical definition of that, although he saw this as a humanism, as a secular humanism. He said, “For humanity, our existence precedes our essence.”

For everything else, the essence precedes the existence. But for humanity, our existence precedes our essence. That is, we are what we choose to be. We cannot be pinned down in an image or a likeness. 

So it is only after reading the rest of Tanach and coming back to this pasuk that we understand “Let us make Man in our image, after our likeness” means I will bestow on human beings the greatest gift I can bestow on them, the gift of free will. We can choose what we will become.

And I don't want to waste too much time here on how revolutionary that idea is. But it is an idea that is challenged in every single generation. I heard it challenged by two years ago.

I did some conversations on BBC television with some atheists. Inevitably, three of the four were Jewish. But the one who wasn't Jewish, Colin Blakemore, said something which I think no Jew or Jewish atheist or what have you - well, no, it's not quite true - but very few Jews would say.

Colin Blakemore is, in fact, a hard determinist, who really believes we have no free will. Everything that we think we choose is determined by our genetic heritage. Now, that is clearly false and scientifically proven false by the new neuroscience.

But here is a thing that has been challenged in every generation, which is of the very heart of Judaism, that the greatest gift God gives us is the freedom to choose. 

And so here's a verse which has this political ramification - a society of equal dignity. But it also has this huge psychological ramification. We are free to choose. 

Rafi: Thank you. You learn a lot from that one verse. And we move on straight away to Shemot, with a response to a king. 

“And you shall say to Pharaoh, ‘Thus said God, ‘Israel is my son, my firstborn’.”

Shemot 4:22: 

Why did you choose that verse? 

Rabbi Sacks: Judaism has a unique structure, and I think still to this day, we don't understand the depth and uniqueness of that structure. Judaism is about both universality and particularity.

The Greeks and the thinkers of the European Enlightenment focused on universality, the things that are true for everyone at all times. And Christianity and Islam are universal monotheisms. They believe that they are the sole truth for all humanity, which is bound to set them in opposition to every other religion there is, because you've either got to convert the world or you've got to conquer the world.

And then you have the opposite - particularity, which is what we call the tribal instinct in human beings, which goes back to the hunter-gatherer stage of humanity and its more recent incarnations as European nationalism, the nationalism of the 19th century, which led to two world wars in the 20th century, and the kind of tribalism going on throughout the Middle East in turmoil today, which is mainly tribal. It's not ideological, it's not religious. It's mainly tribal. 

So you have these two great forces, what Henri Bergson called the two sources of morality. He wrote a whole book about this. And Judaism insists on both. It is the only civilisation I know that equally emphasises, number one, we're part of the human project, and number two, nonetheless, we have a particular identity, which is not shared and need not be shared by all of humankind.

And the Torah does with this wonderful few, this counterpoint between, on the one hand, pure universalism - “na’aseh adam b’ztalmeinu kidmuteinu” - which applies to every human being, and then the particularity of, “My child, my firstborn, Israel.” So we have a particular relationship with HaKadosh Baruch Hu, but all humanity has a universal relationship with HaKadosh Baruch Hu. And the most important thing that God is saying here is, ‘This is the way I love.’

Are you with me? In other words, Christianity borrowed from Greece, a strange opposition between agape and eros, two forms of love. Eros is love as sexual desire, and it's very particular. Read Shir HaShirim, and you'll understand that the poet or poetic voices in Shir HaShirim never tire of describing the particularity of the beloved.

You know, they want to paint all the details, all the brushstrokes. And agape is this universal dispassionate love for all of humankind, which is the Christian understanding of love, or the dispassionate love for everything that exists, which is Buddhism. And those are very beautiful conceptions, but Judaism says they are not the only two possibilities.

There's a third possibility of love that is selfless, like agape, but is passionately focused on the particular, like eros. And what kind of love is that? The love of a parent for a child. And God therefore appears, often in the Torah as a father, although in late Isaiah, also as a mother.

“Like one of whom his mother comforts, so will I comfort you.” Once in a while, you know, can a mother forget her child? Even she may forget, but ‘I will never forget you,’ says God. So there's this paternal and maternal love of God for Israel.

And that is this new concept of love, to which Judaism gives unique metaphysical dignity. And so sources one and two are the sources of Jewish universalism and of Jewish particularism. 

Rafi: I understand that verse in terms of “beni, bechori,” firstborn. Firstborns don't get a good time in the book of Bereishit. So calling us firstborn in Shemot, is there any hint of a reaction to that? Or you see it as part of the universal? 

Rabbi Sacks: The whole of Bereishit is a kind of commentary on what is bechor? What does bechora actually mean? What is it to be firstborn? And the Torah is telling us that the ancient world that worshipped nature, worships the biological firstborn. The biological firstborn is what is called the alpha male.

And there's a book by a Harvard biologist - I've forgotten the name -, but the title is taken from Hamlet. Hamlet says about his uncle who has killed his dad and married his mum, “a little more than kin and less than kind.” Shakespeare's crossword clue.

And it's called “More than Kin, Less than Kind.” And you will find that this issue of sibling rivalry, which Judaism or Sefer Bereishit sees as the source of all conflict. You know, Freud thought it was, you know, Oedipal. It was between fathers and sons. But Bereishit says, no, the real rivalry is sibling rivalry. And Bereishit is telling us it is not just the biological firstborn that God cares for, because that's firstborn in nature.

God cares for the people who care for Him. 

And that is why Hevel, who is the younger, he finds God's favour. Likewise, Isaac, who is younger than Ishmael. Likewise, Yaakov, who's a little younger than Eisav. And that's why Yosef. And that's why Rachel as well.

So the phrase “beni bechori Yisrael” is a phrase that says, I know that Israel may be younger than Egypt. And historically, Israel was younger than Egypt as a civilisation. It was younger than Mesopotamia.

Avraham comes in when Mesopotamia is already at its height. Moses comes in when Egypt is already at its height. So Israel is conscious of being the younger.

And the Torah is saying, ‘Even though you may be the younger, don't think you're second best, because that's not how God works.’

Rafi: Thank you. It's a different way of looking at ‘first.’ That's a great answer. 

Let's move on to our third verse. We're now moving into Tehillim, in Ketuvim.

“I will speak of your testimony before kings and will not be ashamed.”

Psalms 119:46

Rabbi Sacks:  Yeah, look, I stuck this in just to tell you a story. It's a nice story about learning Tanach. It's, you know, there are certain moments that you get that you never thought you'd get. And this one was created by a tragic event on the 4th of November 1995, the assassination of Yitzchak Rabin z”l. And I went out on the 5th with the official British delegation.

It's a long story as to how it happened, because I was in the middle of doing an induction at the time. But I went out with John Major, Tony Blair, and Paddy Ashdown, and Malcolm Rifkin, who was Foreign Secretary. And on the way back, John Major had to go on to a Commonwealth conference somewhere in New Zealand, I think.

So we flew back. We hitched a lift with Prince Charles. And so I just want you to figure this royal flight from RAF Northolt.

First of all, if you're offered one, just be prepared for the fact that it takes twice as long as a standard flight. It takes eight hours for RAF Northolt on the Queen's flight to get to Israel. It's got to stop in the middle to take breath.

It stops at Brindisi to Refuel. It only flies at 290 miles an hour. But you've got this little compartment that holds six people, two facing two and one facing one.

And then there's another compartment for kol ma’aminim shehu. And so we're sitting there. And I was due to sit next to Tony Blair. I mean, this is two years before he became Prime Minister. I think most people knew he was going to win the election. But I said to Tony Blair, sit with Paddy, because I checked they'd never actually sat together before. And I thought, we weren't sure what the election result was going to be two years from then. And we thought there might have to be a coalition.

So I thought it would be good to get them talking. I'm an inveterate shadchan - I suppose every Jew is. So I said to Tony Blair and Paddy Ashdown, ’You sit together.’

And I'll sit, Prince Charles sitting across the aisle. And Tony Blair said, ‘What do you do, Jonathan?’ I said, ‘Don't worry. I've got a book.’

So I took out my book, which was the Mikraot Gedolot. And I was learning Parashat HaShavua. And Tony Blair, who read and probably still reads Tanach every night, was fascinated because he's looking across the table at me. I'm facing him. And there is no English book that looks like a Mikraot Gedolot. You know, text surrounded by all these different commentaries.

And even Shakespeare, mit al haMefarshim, you know, still it's like the Hertz Chumash. They're all grouped in one body of text, you know. So this idea of this big text in the middle surrounded by everything just fascinated him.

He'd never seen a booklet look like that. So he said, ‘Explain it to us.’ And so I explained, ‘Here's the text, and here's Rashi, and who is Rashi, and here's Rambam, who's Rashi's grandson, who argues with his zayda,’ and this, that, and the other. And we explain, and we explain Ibn Ezra, and we explain Ramban. Now Ramban comes along and differs with dignity from Ibn Ezra. You know, I disagree with him on everything, but I still love him, and all the rest of it.

And Rashi, lo mishpat haBechora, he always felt that Rashi was the firstborn and had to be treated with respect and so on. And I'm explaining all these mefarshim, and he is fascinated, because Tony Blair loved and loves Tanach. So after I'd explained this, Tony Blair said, ‘Would you teach us some?’ So I did.

And so I taught Parshat HaShavua with all the mefarshim. And Prince Charles, who was overhearing this, came and stood in the aisle because he wanted to listen in. And so for an hour, I taught Parshat HaShavua with all the mefarshim to our future King and our future Prime Minister.

And I thought to myself, ‘You know, when did a Jew have a moment like that?’ And this verse flooded into my brain from Psalm 119, a verse that always fascinated me. And I thanked HaKadosh Baruch Hu that I had been able to live to fulfil it. “V'adabra b'eidotecha neged malachim v'lo evosh,” “I will speak of your statutes before kings and not be ashamed.”

And with that, we take a little musical break. So we can all pause for a moment. I've just put in a couple of minutes of music.

And here is one of my favourites. You probably know it because we stuck it on one of our CDs. But it is the most beautiful example of what happens amongst Jews, when Jews of different ethnicities and traditions come together.

And of course, they come together in Medinat Yisrael, which is why I find the idea of Israel as an apartheid state so multiply offensive. So here are some black Jewish kids from Ethiopia, meeting up with a secular Israeli called, what's his name? What's his name? Shlomo Gronich. And combining the music of Africa and the music of Israel and religious and secular and black and white.

And it is the Sheba Choir with Shlomo Gronich, singing a song called “Chasida,” which means the stork. And the story it tells is that these Ethiopian children, while they were still in Ethiopia, looked up and they saw the storks migrating and Israel is on their flight path. So they asked the storks, ‘You know, how are things in Israel?’ And they dream that one day, like storks, they will fly to Israel.

[song] 

Rafi: Even though you're a Chief Rabbi, you're very much in control. 

Rabbi Sacks: I'm one of those control freaks, you know, but I ought to learn a lesson from HaKadosh Baruch Hu, which is give people freedom. But at any rate…

Rafi: Let's move on to the fourth source. 

Rabbi Sacks: All I want to say is, you know, we don't just read Tanach. We don't just discuss Tanach or learn it. We live Tanach. And here was an image, as you know, a number of the olim from African or Arab countries understood literally. “VaEsa etchem al kanfei nesharim” - They saw themselves carried to Israel on eagle's wings. And there's an echo of that in that song. And it actually happened. If you live Tanach, you become part of its story.

Rafi: That's my Teimani background. And Yemenite siddurim all have at the beginning, the picture of kanfei nesharim in the siddur to remind. 

Source 4 from Jeremiah:

“Go and cry in the ears of Jerusalem, saying, ‘Thus said the God; I remember you, the devotion of your youth, your love like a bride, when you went after Me in the wilderness, in a land that was not sown.”

Jeremiah 2:2

Rabbi Sacks: This is the verse that solves the puzzle, which must have been bothering us all the way through Tanach, certainly all the way through from Shemot to Devarim, which is that the Bnei Yisrael don't get a terribly good press. And that is the extraordinary thing about Tanach.

Every ancient civilisation recorded its triumphs. It did not dwell on its defeats, its faults, its inadequacies and its tragedies. It just didn't dwell on them.

Whereas Sefer Shemot, and Sefer Bamidbar in particular, dwell on the failings of Israel. You know, they're constantly criticising. They're constantly challenging. They're disobeying. They break the law. They want to go back to Egypt. They want another leader. The whole works. And you read Shemot and Bamidbar and you think ‘How odd of God to choose the Jews.’

And you wonder why. You know, OK, we know that God who loved Avraham and loved the Avot. But you know, I mean, what is this? And it is not until we get to Jeremiah many, many centuries later that we finally get the one verse that solves the mystery.

“I remember the love of your youth and the passion of your betrothal.” And in what was this expressed? That you were willing to follow me through an unknown, unsown land. God loves the Jewish people because they have the courage to travel.

To travel, as they say nowadays, outside their comfort zone. To travel to an unknown destination. 

Judaism begins in two journeys. From opposite starting points in opposite directions. Avraham and Sarah's journey from Ur Kasdim, from Mesopotamia. Moses and Israel's journey from Egypt.

And these are counter-cultural journeys. You know, you're trying to drive into London in the rush hour. There's all the traffic. You try to drive out of London. You get a pretty reasonably clear road. So if you ask what is the direction of travel throughout human history? It is always from low civilisations to high civilisations. From poor countries to rich countries. 

Now the highest of high civilisations in the days of Avraham was Mesopotamia. And yet Avraham is travelling not to Mesopotamia but away from it.

The highest apex of civilisation in the days of Moshe Rabbeinu was Egypt. The Egypt of Rameses II. And again, the Israelites travelling not to Egypt but away from Egypt.

And in both cases, they have to go through what the anthropologists Victor Turner and Arnold von Gennep call liminal space. You know, something that is just neither here nor there. It's no-man's land.

And that in particular is the case with Moshe Rabbeinu in Israel at 40 years in the wilderness. And it is that Jewish courage to follow the call of God without knowing where exactly it is going to take us. That is the definition of what it is to be a Jew and why God chose the Jews. It was not that odd. 

And Jews somehow or other have always had that faith, the faith to be chalutzim, the faith to be pioneers. Whether it's intellectual, whether it's physical and geographical, whether it's social, we've been the pioneers of history. We have upset the established order. We have challenged the idols of the age. And that is all there in this one verse in Jeremiah.

Without that one verse, the whole of Judaism would be a mystery to us. And that is why this is an absolutely key verse. You know, when Richard Dawkins and the others rail against faith, they are talking about faith in a very strange way to us as Jews.

You know, faith in, you know, the ultimate explanation of cosmology, why there's a universe, why science is science, why the world, you know. That's not what faith is about in Judaism. Faith is what a parent has to have in order to bring a child into the world. What a business person has to have in order to start a new enterprise. What a scientist has to have in order to begin a line of investigation that may take 10 or 20 years of their lives. And in the end, you discover nothing.

You've got to take that risk. It is the risk of bringing something new into the world. It is the risk described metaphorically, I mean literally but metaphorically, by this concept of a journey into an unknown future.

And it is the fact that Bereishit 1 is telling us that human beings have free will, that tells us that the human future is constitutively unknown. It's not only unknowable, unknown, it is also unknowable because it's made by us. So it's that faith in the future that allows Jews to embark on the journey.

And that, in this one majestic verse from Jeremiah, is why God loves the Jewish people. 

Rafi: Thank you. Thank you.

Your fifth choice:

“You shall not loathe an Edomite, for he is your brother. You shall not loathe an Egyptian, because you are a stranger in his land.”

Devarim 23:8

Why did you choose that verse? 

Rabbi Sacks: Well, because it completely goes against human nature.

And it is, of all pesukim in Tanach, the one that most needs to be heard today, right now, with what is happening in Syria, what is happening in Libya, what is happening throughout the Middle East. Here, the pasuk takes the two cultures that Jews have most reason to fear and dislike. Eisav, you know, an oracle has told Rivka…. Here are these eternal adversaries, Jacob and Esau, whose other name is Edom.

And so, you know, many Jews think, they quote a gemara without really understanding the depth of this. “Halacha sheEisav soneh et Ya’akov.” You know, it's a kind of rule of nature that Esau hates Jacob. Well, it is not a rule of nature that Jacob need hate Esau.

And the second one is Egypt. The people who enslaved our people, who embarked on a planned systemic genocide, and the Torah is saying, ‘Don't hate either of them.’ Esau is, after all, your brother. And Egypt, after all, did provide you with a place to live. Otherwise, you would have died by starvation. Don't forget, in the days of Joseph, in the days of Jacob, there was no food in the land.

And remember, number one, that relationship of kin, distant relation, but still a relation. And number one, number two, that hakarat hatov, that yeah, Egypt may have done bad things to us, but they began by doing good things to us. And this is an assault on hate at its most basic, at its most elemental.

And I have tried to struggle with the question, why? Why is Moshe Rabbeinu telling us this? And the short answer is, if the Israelites continued to hate Egypt, Moshe Rabbeinu would have taken the Israelites out of Egypt, but he would not have taken Egypt out of the Israelites. And they would remain slaves, not physical slaves, but mental slaves. Slaves to the past that they couldn't get over resenting. Their whole life would be spent lamenting al-Nakba, the humiliation. 

Rafi: Do you see that in the word “tita'ev” as opposed to sina, as a more long-term, knowing that sina might be an emotional reaction at the time, but tita'ev is understanding you have to move on from this and not be a victim. 

Rabbi Sacks: Yeah, tita'ev is deep-rooted hatred. It goes deeper than sina, which can cover also dislike. And also, even liking less. God sees that Leah was hated by Jacob. Now, of course, Leah wasn't hated by Jacob. She was simply loved less than Rachel was. So sina is too broad.

But it is the real visceral hatred born out of stereotypes and born out of a sense of victimhood that the Torah is addressing here. And it is putting forward one single proposition. And I state it in simple words.

To be free, you have to let go of hate. 

And that is something that many nations in the world need to hear right now. And of all these, pesukim, it is the one most centrally relevant to the politics of our time.

Rafi: A real challenge, a real challenge. 

Source six with Job. Job's so-called friends:

“And it was after God spoke these words to Job, that God spoke to Eliphaz the Temanite, ‘My anger burns against you, and against your two friends; for you have not spoken of Me what is right, as my servant Job has.”

Job 42: 7-8

I've got an inkling of why you chose this, but tell us in your own words. 

Rabbi Sacks: Ah, you know, you use phrases like Kitvei Kodesh - sacred scripture, canonical text, holy books. The image we have in our mind is of, you know, straight-laced doctrinal orthodoxy. And that is why the decisions Am Yisrael made and Chazal made in canonising the books that they canonised, continues to amaze us. Because they not only included conventional literature, they included literature that is nothing less than subversive.

I mean, the most subversive book in the canon is Kohelet, the book of Ecclesiastes, which, you know, is so, so radical in many ways. And you have to wrestle with it. But you have to be open-mouthed in astonishment that anyone included Kohelet in Kitvei Kodesh. 

And we see this in this extraordinary, counterintuitive denouement of the Book of Job. Throughout much of the Book of Job, Job's three friends and comforters spend their time defending HaKadosh Baruch Hu. God is just, and therefore you complaining about the injustice of your punishment must be wrong. Either you committed a sin and somehow or other you're being punished, or, you know, the John Keats thing, “the world is a veil of soul-making,” God is making you suffer to lift you to spiritual heights. And Job will have none of it. He says, ‘I don't accept this. I didn't commit a sin, and I insist on my right to speak to God, and I want God to come and listen to me.’

And Job has challenged God throughout, and his friends have justified, vindicated, defended God throughout. And at the very end of the book, God says, ’Job is right, and you're wrong.’

Job, the challenger, is right, and you, the ultra-Orthodox defenders of God, you're wrong. Now, I mean, that's a curved ball, you know, and it is, I find, the most curved ball in all of Tanach. God says to Job's comforters, ‘You have spoken wrongly, unlike Job.’

And you go and ask Job to pray for forgiveness for you. And that is extraordinary. Now, there are many ways of looking at it. One way of looking at it is saying that Job's comforters spoke about God, whereas Job insisted on speaking to God. And that may be the key to this. 

Or it may be, as I've argued in my book, “Radical Then, Radical Now,” that Judaism is built on cognitive dissonance, the dissonance between the world that is and the world that ought to be.

And it is that dissonance that creates this extraordinary energy that is the Jewish people throughout history. No people have tried more assiduously to change the world for good. Why? Because Jews have never learned to accept the world as it is, with all its injustices and all its sufferings. Not to say, this is Ratzon Hashem. This is what God wants. So it is impious for us to challenge it.

And very often, Christians have not understood Jews, even criticised Jews, for trying to bring peace, justice, and compassion into this world. Because ultimately, it's only Olam HaBa where there is perfect justice. Nikolai Berdyaev, for instance, criticised Judaism for that.

So it is this dissonance at the end of the Book of Job that is that grit in the system that renders Judaism infinitely more complex than we think it is, and at the same time, infinitely more challenging. Because at the end of the day, you've got to put down the Book of Job and say, you know, ‘I've got to go and wrestle with the world. I cannot simply accept the world, because accepting the world is what Job's comforters do.’

Rafi: Can you say a word on the emotional side of it, of these people who are trying to justify God to him, and he won't hear that, that emotionally, is the text trying to teach us something about how to react when people try to apologise for something which cannot be explained, or which hurts you deeply? 

Rabbi Sacks: Obviously, there is an emotional issue here. Job is hurting. He's lost everything. He's lost his wealth. He's lost his health. And he has lost his children. And he is hurting. And they're coming along and, you know, doing Tziduk HaDin, Job, you know, this is God's will. And in a sense, you know, they are doing what we call nowadays blaming the victim. You must have done something to deserve this. 

And hence, not only are they failing to comfort him, they're actually, deep down, providing him with even more discomfort at a more judgemental level. And there is that emotional dimension as well.

Don't forget, the biblical text is always working on many levels. Don't think we have ever exhausted the meaning of the text by saying this is what the text means. It's working at many different levels.

Rafi: The stand against blame is very, very powerful. 

You have another musical break. 

Rabbi Sacks: Yeah, there's a little thing which, as I near the end of my Chief Rabbinate, I think of how it began.

And how it began was a brilliant piece of music composed for my induction. I'd never heard it before, that induction on the 1st of September 1991. And when I heard it, because my induction began with Mincha, which began with Ashrei.

And when I heard that Ashrei, and I was almost fainting, because September 1st, 1991, was a heatwave. It was an Indian summer. It was a heatwave. And I was wearing canonicals. I'd given up wearing canonicals a long time ago. So it was being televised. It was being filmed for television. And so we had all the television lights, and the heatwave, and my robes. And I was about to faint.

And I was listening to that magnificent music, composed by Lionel Rosenfeld and Stephen Glass, sung by the Shabbaton Choir. And I thought to myself, ‘Why don't you quit while you're ahead?’ And these were the first musical notes of my Chief Rabbinate. 

[song]

Last verse.

Rafi: Last verse, Chief Rabbi, from Isaiah. 

“‘The mountains shall depart, and the hills be removed; but My kindness shall not depart from you, nor shall the covenant of My peace be removed,’ says God, who has mercy on you.”

Isaiah 54:10

Rabbi Sacks: Mountains may be shaken, and hills be removed, but My love for you will never be removed. 

This passuk, in which God, through Isaiah, speaks of His love for Israel, is the key of keys to decode the whole of Judaism. 

In exactly the same way as Rabbi Akiva meant when he said, “All songs are holy, but the Song of Songs, [which is a pure love song,] is the holy of holies.”

Judaism, beginning, middle, and end, is a story. And it is not a story about us. It's a story about HaKadosh Baruch Hu.

And the story it tells is of God's love for humanity, and His particular love for the Jewish people. 

And all the anger, and the El kanah, the jealousy, and so on and so forth, is all a human inability to fully explain that what this is, is love. When God gets upset by the Jewish people, it's because He loves them so much.

And beginning, middle, and end, Tanach is the story of God's love. For beni bechori Yisrael, sometimes described as his child, sometimes described as his marriage partner - “V'Erastich…” And I think the quintessential expression of this is this verse from Isaiah. Isaiah, and Hosea, but Isaiah particularly, towards the end, speaks of God's love in these, but all the prophets do. 

And if we want to understand Tanach, it is not Man's book of God, it's God's book of Man. And it is this story of this unrequited love of God for a people who are often wayward, who often ignore Him completely. And this hurts Him to His very core - “VaYiyatzev al libo.” 

But nonetheless, that is the verse of verses. If we forget that Judaism is beginning, middle, and end, a religion of love, then we forget what Judaism is.

Judaism is the story of God's love for humanity and for us, and for our three loves: ‘To love the Lord our God with all our heart, all our soul, and all our might,’ ‘To love our neighbour as ourselves,’ and ‘To love the stranger.’

Judaism is the first and greatest civilisation built on the concept of love. As C.S. Lewis and all the sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists point out, every culture in the world has an elementary rule of justice. Do to others as you would wish them to do to you.

The golden rule - it's there in all cultures, and now we have good explanations in sociobiology, they call it reciprocal altruism, as to why that is true of all cultures. So all cultures have some basic feel for justice. Only Judaism built its entire morality on love, and that is why this is the verse of verses.

Rafi: Chief Rabbi, we've run out of time, but I'd like to thank you very much for your explanation of these verses. I just want to end on two things. 

[Rabbi Sacks to person playing the music: "Just begin and then fade up. Begin low and then fade up."] 

Chief Rabbi, I'm not going to allow you to have a book, because we've been doing verses of Tanach, and I think what you've shown as well, is that as soon as you quote one verse, other verses come in. So even though you only get eight verses, the whole of Tanach comes back with you.

But I want to end on two luxuries, Chief Rabbi. One I'm going to give you, and the other you have to think for yourself. I think it would be very hard for the Chief Rabbi to go to a desert island without a hat.

Rabbi Sacks: I shall wear it with pride. Thank you. Zeh matim o lo?

Rafi: Absolutely.

And what would your second luxury be, Chief Rabbi? 

Rabbi Sacks: My second... Elaine. 

Rafi: Thank you very much. 

Rabbi Sacks: Hang on, hang on. Just the last little thing you might want to know. What is... [to person playing the music: Low, low, low, if you don't mind.] What is the biggest spinoff of the biggest pleasure I ever got in the Chief Rabbinate, outside the specific duties, was a wonderful chance.

I don't know if I told you this story. 

You know, in 1998, ‘99, DreamWorks Studio did a little cartoon called “The Prince of Egypt”, all about Moses and the Exodus. And because DreamWorks Studios had to change the story a little bit here and there, so it could be watched equally by kids who were Jewish, Christian, Muslim, of no faith or of other faiths, they had to check whether they got it right, whether it was acceptable.

And so Jeffrey Katzenberg, the producer, showed myself (and I took our daughter Gila with to see) a private showing of this film when it was only one-third of the way through. Most of it was just sketches.

But the soundtrack had already been recorded. And there's some music on the soundtrack. And I immediately fell in love with one piece of music.

Which, why? Because it has Shirat HaYam. It has a biblical verse from Az Yashir, in the middle, in Hebrew, without translation or subtitles. I thought it was a brilliant piece of music. It went on to win the Oscar in 1999 for Best Music. It was then recorded by the late and lamented Whitney Houston. And it sold millions and billions and who knows what, 30 million hits on YouTube. But it's all kol isha...

So, 'If I get the chance,' I said, 'One day, I will do a version of “When You Believe”.’

The trouble is, this needs two choirs and a full symphony orchestra. Where do you find a full symphony orchestra? But I believed, as Avraham believed, God will provide. And eventually, I found somebody who had a symphony orchestra, one of the greatest musical producers in the last 40 or 50 years, Trevor Horn, who orchestrated this for us and paid for the orchestra himself, just for tzedakah, and gave it the best orchestration it's ever had.

It's a thing that sold millions and won an Oscar. But in no place was it orchestrated as beautifully as here. And here is the one place I know where Tanach actually appears in a piece of commercial music and - just fade up - and with this, we end.

[song]

Rafi: Thank you very much, Chief Rabbi.

Closing comments