[Introductory remarks...]
Rabbi Sacks:
Friends, it is such a privilege to stand here and pay tribute to one of the great organisations of the Jewish world.
The work of the AJC in defending the rights of Jews everywhere, in supporting Israel's right to be, in standing for the rights of minorities everywhere, in the name of justice, human dignity, and religious freedom, has not only been outstanding but in several remarkable cases it has changed history. This is a truly great organisation. Please join me in saluting AJC and its extraordinary Executive Director, David Harris.
I say to all of you, may God bless you and may you continue to bless us. Friends, the story of the Jewish people in our time can be simply told. In 1945, the Jewish people stood in the valley of the shadow of death. The Jews of Europe had been reduced in the prophet Ezekiel's haunting phrase, to a valley of dry bones. And in less than 70 years, in one of the most remarkable transformations in the history of humanity, it reached one of the highest points Jews have ever reached. We've been around a long time.
Judaism has been around twice as long as Christianity, three times as long as Islam, but never before did we simultaneously have what we have now, both independence and sovereignty in the State of Israel, and freedom and equality in the Diaspora. And then it happened.
Let me say what happened by way of a story.
It's one of those stories. The story is told that facing the world's energy crisis, a very religious Jewish scientist addressed that energy crisis by inventing a car that ran on faith.
To get it to go, you had to say, “Baruch Hashem, thank God.” To get it to stop, you said, “Amen.”
It worked perfectly.
Tried it out many times. “Baruch Hashem,” it went. “Amen,” it stopped.
After a series of successful trials, he decided to give it a real trial. And he drove the car up a mountain road, and it worked perfectly. Then he turned it around to come down. But the car got faster and faster around these twisting mountain roads. And he's saying, “Amen" and nothing happens. He says, “Amen” again. Nothing happens. It's getting faster and faster and faster. By now, the car is almost out of control.
It reaches a hairpin bend. Its front wheels go out into space. And he summons himself with one final burst of energy and says, “Amen!”
And the car stops. And he sinks back in relief into his seat and says, “Baruch Hashem.”
Right now, the Jewish people is that car on that mountain. Because three things have happened in our time.
Number one, unbelievably, within living memory of the Shoah, antisemitism has returned to Europe. It is threatening the future of Jewish communities in France, in Sweden, in Norway, in Denmark, in Holland, in Hungary, in Latvia, in Ukraine. Let me make it clear that I am not one of those people who sees antisemitism anywhere.
My late father, alav haShalom, who came from Poland, had a different kind of makeup. Every time the traffic lights went red, he said, “Antisemitic traffic lights!” I never saw the world that way for the first 50 years of my life. I never experienced one single incident of antisemitism anywhere.
But that has now changed.
And so bad has it become that already in May 2007, when I had the opportunity of addressing simultaneously the three leaders of Europe - Jose Manuel Barroso, President of the European Commission, Hans-Gert Pettering, President of the European Parliament, and Angela Merkel, then President of the European Council, I said to them, these words: “Jews and Europe go back a long way. And that history added many words to the human vocabulary. Words like expulsion, disputation, forced conversion, inquisition, auto da fé, ghetto, and pogrom, not to mention the word Holocaust.” I said, “That is the past. And we can live with that past. But today, the Jews of Europe are asking, ’Is there a future for Jews in Europe?’ And that should concern you, the leaders of Europe.”
That is still the case, and that is the first thing that happened.
The second, no less serious, is the sustained, relentless, ruthless international campaign to delegitimize the State of Israel. It began, of course, in the United Nations in 1975.
But the current attempt started actually much more recently in the now notorious United Nations Conference against Racism in Durban in 2001, mere days before 9/11. That was when Israel was accused, especially by the NGOs, of the five cardinal sins against human rights: racism, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, attempted genocide, and crimes against humanity.
That battle is still being fought on university campuses throughout the world, in unions and professional bodies, among academics, among human rights NGOs, and even, sad to say, some churches throughout the world. This is not an innocent campaign. Let me define it precisely.
In 1948, 1967, and 1973, Israel's enemies tried to put it in a military crisis, and they failed. In 1973, after the Yom Kippur War, with the boycott, it tried to put Israel in an economic crisis, and it failed. In 1975, with the notorious United Nations resolution equating Zionism with racism, they tried to put Israel in a political crisis, and they failed.
Today, Israel's enemies try to put it in a moral crisis, and they may succeed. Because not only have they turned world opinion against Israel, they've even succeeded in dividing Jewish opinion on Israel. And this is, to paraphrase von Clausewitz, a continuation of war by other means.
It is the face of the new antisemitism in our time. Of course. I am not saying that all criticism of Israel is antisemitism. I am not saying, for one moment, Jews must support Israel uncritically. Truth is, we never supported anything uncritically. We say, “The Lord is my shepherd,” but no Jew was ever a sheep.
But there is nonetheless a new antisemitism.
Unlike the old, it isn't hatred of Jews for being a religion. It isn't hatred of Jews as a race. It is hatred of Jews as a sovereign nation in their own land.
But it has taken and recycled all the old myths, from the blood libel to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Though I have to confess, as I said to the young leaders this morning, I have a very soft spot for antisemites, because they say the nicest things about Jews. I just love the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Because according to this, Jews control the banks, Jews control the media, Jews control the world. Little though they know, we can't even control a shul board meeting.
But the new antisemitism has the same aim as all its predecessors, to turn Jews worldwide into what Max Weber called “a pariah people.”
And it is beginning to succeed. And thirdly, behind it all, the third great problem is the shadow of Iran. Iran arming Hamas to Israel's south and Hezbollah to the north. Iran in full pursuit of nuclear weapons. Iran which since Ayatollah Rafsanjani in 2001, has been publicly declaring its intent to wipe Israel off the map. Put those three together - antisemitism, anti-Zionism and Iran, and we have our problem.
Jews alone, of all the nations of the world, are still, after the centuries of suffering, and still after the single greatest crime of man against man, still find called into question their very right to be.
What therefore must be our response? What should we do?
Number one, we need to make friends and allies. Jews must not be left. We must not be left to fight antisemitism on our own. It cannot be done. The hated cannot cure the hate. The victim cannot cure the crime. We need friends and allies.
And in order to win those friends and allies - and AJC has been in the front line of doing this so well and so effectively - but to win those friends and allies, we need to learn to speak about antisemitism in a new and more inclusive way.
What do I mean? What do I mean is the Jews throughout the ages were hated because they were different. Because they were the most significant non-Christian minority in Europe, and today the most significant non-Muslim minority in the Middle East.
Antisemitism is the paradigm case of dislike of the unlike. But the truth is, difference is what makes us human. Every person, every culture, every faith is unique, therefore irreplaceable.
And a Europe or a Middle East that has no room for Jews has no room for humanity.
We have to remind people that antisemitism is a crime not against Jews, but against humanity. Because antisemitism begins with Jews, but it never ends with Jews.
Jews alone were not the only ones to suffer under Hitler. Jews were not the only ones to suffer under Stalin. And Jews won't be the only ones to suffer under today's antisemites. In fact, let's be blunt. Number one, the overwhelming majority of victims of radical Islamism today in Syria, in Egypt, and Afghanistan, and Iraq are Muslims.
Let us be absolutely clear that the real victims of intimidation and terror and ethnic cleansing in the Middle East today are Christians, who have been reduced in one century from 20% of the population of the Middle East to a mere 4% today.
Therefore, let us say loudly, clearly, and categorically, we will fight for the right of Christians everywhere to live their faith without fear.
But we need you Christians to fight for the right of Jews to live their faith without fear.
We will lead... I've personally tried to lead... and we will lead collectively in the fight against Islamophobia.
But we need you Muslims to lead in the fight against Judeophobia because it is our shared humanity that is at stake. And that is the first thing we have to realise.
Yes, we have enemies, but we also have friends - good, true, and loyal friends. And that, in no small measure, is due to the work of AJC. Let us just continue that work.
Number two, no less important. We must learn to overcome our differences and our divisions as Jews and work together as a global people.
Friends, consider this extraordinary historical fact. Jews in history have been attacked by some of the greatest empires the world has ever known, empires that bestowed the narrow world like a colossus, that seemed invulnerable in their time. Egypt of the Pharaohs, Assyria, Babylonia, the Alexandrian Empire, the Roman Empire, the mediaeval empires of Christianity and Islam, all the way up to the Third Reich and the Soviet Union.
Each one of those, seemingly invulnerable, has been consigned to history while our tiny people can still stand and sing, “Am Yisrael Chai.” And yet, and yet, three times Jews went into exile.
Number one, in the days of Joseph and his brothers. Number two, in the days of the Babylonian conquest and the destruction of the First Temple. And number three, in the destruction of the Second Temple under the Romans, and each time for the same reason, because Jews could not live at peace with one another.
Joseph and his brothers couldn't speak peaceably together. In the First Temple period, within… after the mere three generations of kings, Israel split into two, a northern and a southern kingdom. In the Second Temple period, the sectarianism was rife. Only one people has ever been able to put at risk the future of the Jewish people, and that is the Jewish people.
Friends, let me say it loudly and clearly. How can we expect the world to love us if we can't bring ourselves to love one another? How can we expect the world to support us if we cannot support one another?
Now is the time to say clearly and categorically, even if we don't share a faith, we certainly share a fate. We are one family.
Argumentative? Definitely. Dysfunctional? Occasionally. But one family. Let there be between us a bond of indivisible, nonjudgmental, and unconditional love.
But thirdly and lastly, I will tell you the single most important thing we have to do. More important than all the others. We have to celebrate our Judaism. We have to have less 'oy' and more joy. Do you know why Judaism survived? I'll tell you, because we never defined ourselves as victims, because we never lost our sense of humour, because never in all the centuries did we internalise the disdain of the world.
Yes, our ancestors were sometimes hated by Gentiles, but they defined themselves as the people loved by God. There was a famous advertising campaign on the posters in the 1980s in New York, which read, “You have a friend in the Chase Manhattan Bank.” Underneath, in Israel, you had written, “Yeah, but in Bank Leumi, you have mishpacha.”
By us, God is more than a friend. He's mishpacha. We say "Avinu Malkeinu - our Father, our King" which means if our parent is a King, we are all, every one of us, members of a royal family.
Okay, we don't live in Buckingham Palace, but by us, every Jewish home is a palace. Every Jewish bride is a queen, every groom, a king. We were the people who took life in both hands and made a bracha over it. We were the people who said, “Ivdu et Hashem b’simcha,” - "serve God in joy". We don't just believe in God. We argue with God. We wrestle with God. In the Talmud, they outvoted God. God is family.
And in all those times, we never ceased to love Him with all our heart and all our soul and all our might. And we believed - and we still believe - that God must love us. Otherwise, why on earth did He choose us? Let's face this, when God made a covenant with the Jewish people, He was not opting for a quiet life.
Judaism is faith as celebration. Let me give you an example. I sit now - for my many sins - in the House of Lords. And the House of Lords, until very recently, was the home of Britain's Supreme Court. I once said to a fellow peer, imagine Britain's highest judges, all of whom sit here, the Lords, are so enthused by English Law that they decide one day they're going to dance around the House of Lords, each holding a copy of Halsbury's Statutes in their hands while singing loudly. Everyone would think they're totally mad.
Yet that is what we do in shul on Simchat Torah. I said, you want the majesty, the dignity, the impartiality of law, that you'll find in the House of Lords. You want to find the joy of the Law, for that you have to come to shul.
I tell you, we are the people who put love - love of God, love of the neighbour, and love of stranger, at the very heart of the moral life. We are the people who, despite all the tears and tragedies of our history, never ever lost hope.
And I tell you, that is how you defeat antisemitism and anti-Zionism, by refusing ever to be intimidated by it.
If we are strong, no power on earth was ever able to defeat us.
We are the people who never loved power. We are the people who instead loved life.
And that is why the world needs Jews and Judaism and the State of Israel, because each one of those things is a living symbol of what it is to celebrate life in tribute to the God of Life.
And that, therefore, is my final message. If we are strong and joyous in our Judaism, we will overcome every obstacle there is.
So let me just end with a story, a true story. It's slightly embarrassing. It happened to me long before I was Chief Rabbi. It happened 30 years ago. You know, England does weather. Now, you do weather in America. We just spent January in New York. It was a big mistake, guys. And you do cold, you do hot, but to do miserable, you've really got to be in England.
And one winter, 30 years ago, it was so miserable, I said to Elaine, “We've never done this before. Let's go to somewhere where there's sun in the winter. Let's go.”
We'd never been to Eilat before. We said, let's go to Eilat. We mentioned this to one or two of our friends, and they said, “Rabbi Sacks, please don't go to Eilat. The standard of dress there does not meet rabbinic criteria of modesty.”
Well, we didn't listen to them, but they were right. I spent the whole week with my glasses off, bumping into lamp posts and goodness knows what.
And we're trying to think of something vaguely rabbinic that you can do in Eilat. Now, this is 30 years ago. I don't know if they still have them, but in those days, they used to have glass-bottom boats. You could go out and see all the lovely coloured fish underneath. So we went out on this glass-bottom boat. We were the only passengers on the boat.
The captain heard us speaking in English, ran up to us very excited. He said, “You're from England?”
We said, “Yes, why do you ask?”
He said, “Ah, I've just been to England for a holiday.”
We said, “How did you like it?”
I don't know if you remember what Eilat was like 30 years ago before it was fully developed, bare brown hills everywhere, a little bit of a desert. And he said, you know, what did I think of England?
He said, “The buildings: so old! The grass: so green! The people: so polite!”
And then with a huge smile on his face, he opened his arms and looked around him at this landscape of desert hills. And with a huge smile, said, “But this is ours.”
Friends, there are many faiths, many religions in the world, and we admire them all. But this is ours. Let us be strong in our faith. Walk tall as Jews. Feel joy as Jews. And go forth from this gathering and bring pride to the Jewish people and blessings to the world.
Thank you.
