Episode 7: Morality (Part 1)

Tanya: I'm Dr. Tanya White and this is Books & Beyond: The Rabbi Sacks Podcast, a series dedicated to exploring four of Rabbi Jonathan Sacks most powerful ideas from four of his most influential books. Each episode features distinguished leaders and prominent voices from the Jewish world in dialogue with his teachings. Whether you're a devoted admirer or new to his work, this podcast offers inspiration and insight for these challenging times. 

You're listening to episode seven of Books & Beyond, where we delve into the fourth book in our series, Morality. We've titled this book, ‘The Application’. In previous episodes of Books & Beyond, we've explored the themes and messages in Rabbi Sacks' books, A Letter in the Scroll, Future Tense, and To Heal a Fractured World.

We called A Letter in the Scroll, ‘The Call’, because it invites us to consider God's calling to us as humans in the world and as Jews in our covenantal role. Future Tense, which we labelled ‘The Narrative’, challenges us to adopt a forward looking national story, embracing our identity as agents of destiny rather than victims of fate.

Then, with To Heal a Fractured World, we turn to ‘The Mission’. The book calls on us to address the world's brokenness, not just through social activism, but by nurturing our uniquely Jewish identity, observing its particular laws, and fostering character and virtue. Now, in this episode's book, Morality, Rabbi Sacks turns outward.

The book aims at both Jewish and non Jewish audiences as a profound social commentary on the state of Western society. Drawing on the Bible and Jewish tradition as a springboard, Rabbi Sacks applies his lifetime of thought to address the pressing challenges facing humanity today.

In this first of two episodes exploring Morality, I'm joined by Professor Samuel Lebens.

As a philosopher, Sam is perhaps the best person to help me unpack the ideas underpinning this extraordinary book. Professor Sam Lebens, or Sam as I shall call him, was a long time student of Rabbi Sacks and very close with him. Professor Samuel Lebens is the Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Haifa, and he works in a wide range of philosophical fields, from the history of early analytical philosophy to the philosophy of fiction.

But his main focus has been the philosophy of religion, with a particular focus on Jewish philosophy, and I can personally recommend many of his books. His recent books include A Guide for the Jewish Undecided and, with Tatiana von Solodkoff, Thinking About Stories: an introduction to philosophy of fiction. Sam is also a rabbi and a Jewish educator who educates beyond the ivory tower. And I can say, having heard Sam many times, that I highly recommend listening to him, all of his teachings, which really do extend far beyond the ivory tower of philosophy. Welcome Sam. This is going to be an exciting conversation, I think

Sam Lebens: Oh, it's all exciting Tanya.

Tanya White: It's all exciting, specifically talking about where the book speaks to us, I think also on a personal level and how maybe it impacted us personally.

So let's begin with the context, we're going to listen to a quote from Rabbi Sacks that he begins the book with, where he speaks about this idea of human freedom.

Rabbi Sacks zt"l: Love your neighbour, love the stranger, hear the cry of the otherwise unheard, liberate the poor from their poverty, care for the dignity of all. Let those who have more than they need share their blessings with those who have less. Feed the hungry, house the homeless, and heal the sick in body and mind. Fight injustice, whoever it's done by, and whoever it's done against. And do these things because being human, we are bound by a covenant of human solidarity. Whatever our color or culture, class or creed. These are moral principles, not economic or political ones. They have to do with conscience. Not wealth or power, but without them freedom will not survive.

The free market and liberal democratic state together will not save liberty, because liberty can never be built by self interest alone. I based societies all eventually die  

Tanya White: Sam, well, we just heard from Rabbi Sacks. I think in many senses, that is the premise of the book. What do you think? He talks very much about this idea of I based society and the end of liberal democracies, which I think for him was a great fear.

Sam Lebens: It's insightful of you, Tanya, I think to hone in on this quote, and particularly from the vantage point of freedom. He mentions freedom and liberty at the end, but actually it might surprise some readers to hear him talk about liberty and freedom in that context, because I'm not sure all of our listeners will know Isaiah Berlin made this distinction between positive and negative liberty, two types of freedom. For those who don't know what that means exactly, the basic idea, and like you said, you could call it freedom from and freedom to. Negative liberty is the freedom from external constraints. So if you're in, prison or you're handcuffed or you're held back, by external forces, so you're not able to do the things you want to do because others are holding you back. Then you suffer from a deficit of negative freedom. Positive freedom is to my mum always forced me to practice piano and I, you know, I felt that was a terrible assault on my negative liberty. But what I found out many years later was that she actually cultivated in me a freedom to be able to play piano.

I now have the freedom to play piano and that's a positive liberty and that I wouldn't have had that were it not for my mum's attacking, so to speak my negative liberty as a child.

So if that helps people understand the difference. And I think, and this is just from my experience about, teaching philosophy to undergraduates More people seem familiar with negative liberty than they do with the idea of positive liberty. I don't know if that's been your experience, too.

Tanya White: Definitely. And I think this was Rabbi Sacks great worry and actually at the end of the book on page 283, for those that want to look it up, he brings actually in David Brooks and he speaks about the idea of "freedom from" and "freedom to", which is an Isaiah Berlin concept. And he speaks about this idea of, freedom to, is the right to constrain myself, autonomously constrain myself, put constraints upon myself.

And he says, I think Rabbi Sacks, and again, we're talking about the context of the book. Rabbi Sacks was very worried that society was a society of freedom from, but had no idea how to nurture a culture of freedom to. And I think that to me is one of his main concerns, perhaps one of the reasons he felt the need to write the book.

Sam Lebens: Precisely. Historically, so Isaiah Berlin comes from Eastern Europe and comes to, he was born in Latvia and then he moved to Britain obviously and became an important philosopher at Oxford. His concern, Isaiah Berlin's concern was looking at the Soviet Union and the lack of liberty they had there. And he makes this distinction between positive and negative liberty. Now, Isaiah Berlin, when he looks at the Soviet Union, he's like, Oh my goodness, with the gulags and all that, we really have to protect negative liberty if we have to prioritize one over the other prioritize negative liberty was Berlin's concern because actually Stalin's champions would say, Oh, I know we've taken away their negative liberty, but we're actually helping them to blossom as, fully Soviet Communist citizens. It's in their best interest. We are cultivating their positive liberty.

So Berlin was like ‘no, let's prioritize negative liberty over positive liberty.’ But I think Rabbi Sacks in a very different context, just as you point out Tanya, is looking at Western society where we have a great deal of negative liberty, and that's great. He doesn't want to take that away from us. But we are suffering from a lack of positive liberty. We're not somehow flourishing. We're not being the best that we can be. We're capable of so much more than we're achieving. And I think the unique contribution that Rabbi Sacks is making here that I don't see in Berlin is that negative freedom is something that an individual can have on their own to a degree. But positive liberty, you can't flourish as a human being without being part of some community or other.

Tanya White: Between a matrix of relationships.

Sam Lebens: Absolutely. So the more we become intoxicated by a culture of what Rabbi Sacks calls unfettered individualism.

We might see tremendous advances in in our negative freedom, but we will suffer from a deficit of positive freedom.

Tanya White: And perhaps what Isaiah Berlin or, as you said, the communist Russia is, I think back to Abraham Maslow's chart that without the basic rights, without our most fundamental human needs, which is obviously a sense of negative freedom. We can't actually get to the top of the triangle, which is positive freedom.

And I think Rabbi Sacks was very aware of this, which is why, and what we've seen over the last, few podcasts that we've been doing, the notion of freedom for Rabbi Sacks was one of the most central, fundamental principles for him, both as a religious orthodox Jew, which was almost sometimes for some people, perhaps an anomaly, something that, we wouldn't necessarily expect because as an orthodox Jew, you are constrained by certain rituals and laws and, but also I think, he was a, let's not forget, he came from, Cambridge enlightenment philosophy, Cambridge graduate and someone for whom freedom and also someone who saw in his own life, how important freedom was being brought up in the UK and liberal democracy.

And again, he wrote this in, or he published it in 2020, right? we're now four years ahead and we can already see very clearly what he was predicting, what he was pointing out and showing is something that's, the trajectory has taken us to an even worse place. And

Sam Lebens: of fragmentation,

in particular.

Tanya White: of, and in terms of radical individualism, in terms of this idea of, where is freedom?

What we're seeing now in America, what we're seeing with antisemitism, the threatening of people's freedom for the sake of so called a greater cause. What, where does that take us? So these are all things that Rabbi Sacks was very concerned about the notion of freedom and this, and liberal democracy and what that meant.

Sam Lebens: That balance between negative and positive liberty, I think when you look at the biblical narrative, it's crucial to note that God first has to break the fetters of Egyptian bondage, which he has to set us free in the negative sense first. And then he gives us a Torah which, constrains us in various ways but accentuates our positive liberty. And Rabbi Sacks, championed a type of religion that, that was not coercive and a religion that kind of eschewed institutional power and in these senses he remains, despite being a critic of unfettered individualism and kind of liberalism gone

Tanya: Libertarianism,

Sam Lebens: inter libertarianism perhaps even. He remains a liberal in the classical sense

Tanya White: a hundred percent. He's a hundred percent I liberal. And I think that's what we have to come back to. And what we've hinted at and definitely spoken about in the last few podcasts is this idea of Rabbi Sack's communitarianism, which is very much it's almost born out of his liberalism, but recognizes the importance of previous commitments of being born into certain conditional obligations and responsibilities and being able to take responsibility for those things that already exist and moving them forward. And one of those things, and I, and this is the second part of the context that I want to talk about, one of those things is the idea of the we. If we're going to define Rabbi Sacks' book, Morality, in one sentence, I think we would define it by saying that Rabbi Sacks in the book is drawing an image of the movement from I to we. Rabbi Sacks speaks about the history of humanity as being we to I. And then he's saying we've radicalized in some senses the ideology of the I, of the self, of the selfies, he always speaks about selfies. But it's time for us now to again, engage with the importance of the we.

He's engaging with many voices like David Brooks, like Robert Putnam, Alistair McIntyre, all of these people are speaking about the idea of the we, of a common language of social bonds. One of the main messages here is that morality is not necessarily founded only from the self, almost in Kantian terms for those philosophers, right? From that the self is the be all and the ends all of morality, but that morality is born in the social ties of the we, of the common people of the common language of the common grounding.

Sam Lebens: Two things I'd add to that, I agree with everything you say there, Tanya. When thinking about this move from I to we first of all, note as we've done that this is connected to the passage we heard Rabbi Sacks read there about positive liberty because he thinks that you don't really flourish as a human individual, and therefore you don't really reach your full potential in terms of your positive liberty if you're not part of a group, because we are essentially social animals. The second thing I'd like to say is that, and again, it's really underlining things I've already spoken of he's trying to strike a delicate balance because it's a move from the I to the we, but it's based upon this communitarian notion that actually you find your most true self, so to speak, only in the context of a we. So it's not to obliterate the self by canceling oneself out into some greater community. It's, you find yourself by locating your space in a collective. In the story of Babel, as Rabbi Sacks reads it, inspired by Rabbi Hirsch and the Netziv and other more modern commentaries on Babel. Rabbi Sacks sees that story as a condemnation of a kind of synthetic, imposed, and forced collectivism. The type of collectivism you maybe saw in the Soviet Union, the sort of thing that Isaiah Berlin was scared of. That's a type of collectivism that doesn't leave room for the individual to flourish. It tries to obliterate the individual in the name of the collective. And that's definitely to confuse communism with communitarianism.

Rabbi Sacks was a long way away from communism. He was a communitarian.

Obviously, your readers will know that Rabbi Sacks wasn't a communist, but to understand that the intellectual distinction between Communism and Communitarianism, where communism is one form of ideology, I suppose, in a sense fascism, certain forms of fascism do this too, that place the collective above the individual.

And that's not what Rabbi Sacks is saying. Rabbi Sacks is saying that there's a sense in which the collective is prior to the individual that you discover who you are because of the context of of a community.

Tanya: I think he also speaks about in the book, when you give and when you become part of the community and when you are able to give of yourself to a community, the self is transformed. The self is transformed in the ties, in the relationships with other people. He begins the book and he speaks again about his relationship with Elaine and how when he met her, he saw in her someone totally different to the person that he was. And through that relationship, he was transformed. And I think it's very important to note that Rabbi Sacks is somebody who understands and constantly throughout his life, he speaks about the idea that, an I, an individual cannot be transformed and cannot grow outside of relationships. Relationships are what transform us. And I think what this book does is it brings almost these autobiographical elements of his own experience in his life into his moral philosophy, right?

Sam Lebens: Yes. Because the I is empty and unless it finds itself in relationship.

Tanya White: It's amazing. And also, I just want to mention that he published an article while Rav Soloveitchik was still alive, let's note, critiquing Rav Soloveitchik's very famous book Lonely Man of Faith. And we're not gonna, unpack the essay, but what was super important about the essay, and even though of course we all know that Rav Soloveitchik was deeply impactful and influential on Rabbi Sacks life in many ways. What we've discussed in the past on this podcast is how Rabbi Soloveitchik's essay, Kol Dodi Dofek, Fate and Destiny. We see both overtly and covertly in all of Rabbi Sacks' books. I really find it -

Sam Lebens: of Rabbi Sacks' thinking.

Tanya White: So much of his thinking. But his essay or his book the look began as an essay, The Lonely Man of Faith. Rabbi Sacks was deeply critical of Rav Soloveitchik's philosophy in that book, because Rabbi Sacks did not believe that the ideal or the goal or the existence of the individual was a lonely or should be a lonely existence.

Sam Lebens: As you've said, it's an ontological issue, right? Ontology is the study of existence, the philosophy of existence. I think Rabbi Sacks sees in Rabbi Soloveitchik's Lonely Man of Faith a doctrine according to which the I, the first person, somehow comes first and it, and therefore it can be completely alone and discreet and, and it discovers God and it discovers others, it discovers to be fair to Rabbi Soloveitchik, that's more true of Adam 1 than it is of Adam 2, right?

This, in the Lonely Man of Faith, Rabbi Soloveitchik distinguishes between two kind of archetypes of the human condition found in the Bible. But certainly, Rabbi Sacks is concerned that Rabbi Soloveitchik has this kind of ontology of the self that floats free from relationship.

Tanya White: Right. And for Rav Soloveitchik, we know he talks in the second with Adam, when he talks about Adam two, he talks about the covenantal community in some senses being the Panacea for Adam two, right? For the problem of loneliness.

Sam Lebens: Whereas for Rabbi Sacks, you only really find yourself as an individual because you find yourself as part of a covenant

Tanya White: I would also say though, that one of his concerns in this book is the notion of very much so, uh, that he sees in Western society that we have become an anxious generation, a lonely generation.

Sam Lebens: Yes.

Think of it this way, in contrast, Rabbi Soloveitchik sees loneliness as one of the formative aspects of the human condition. Rabbi Soloveitchik was an existentialist, and this is, that's probably part of of what influences him to think in that way. Whereas Rabbi Sacks thinks that loneliness is a malady that can be overcome.

It's not an essential part of Rabbi Soloveitchik would ask us to look at, chapter one of Genesis and see that Adam was made alone out of the mud Rabbi sacks, I think would ask us to point out that even in that chapter Adam is only called an ish a person when he names his wife an Ishah So somehow yes, a homo sapien the animal that we are can exist alone, but a person isn't a person without relationship.

The self is defined through the other, and to that extent, if the 20th century finds, or the 21st century, finds itself confronted with a pandemic of loneliness, we shouldn't shrug and say that's the lot of humankind. No, we need to move from the I to the we, and like you said, that's what arguing for in this book.

Tanya White: We've spoken about the context. We've spoken about the idea that for Rabbi Sacks, he saw a very great danger in the society and liberal democracies. And we've spoken about the idea of obviously freedom, the danger of only looking for negative freedom rather than positive freedom. We've spoken about the idea of the move from the I to the we the critique of Rav Soloveitchik's ontology. Beginning his career, and in some senses coming full circle back to the same question of the I and the we, and the definition of self at the end, very end of his life and with the book Morality. And, we've now want to look at the idea of the aim or the agenda of the book. And I think in some senses, actually, we've already discussed most of the aims of the agenda that he really is arguing for the continued significance of community. Religion is the bedrock of morality and we'll talk about that as we go on. Shared values and really a common language, a common good, a way in which we can speak about morality that isn't just subjective that isn't just from the perspective of the individual, because for Rabbi Sacks, that is what is going to sustain society.

You can have plenty of good individuals but the question is whether those individuals are able to sustain society as a whole and for Rabbi Sacks, the moral society, the moral fabric of society cannot be sustained without some bedrock and for Rabbi Sacks, the bedrock, I think his religion and family and all those, all those goods that religion bought to the fore is what he speaks about in the book.

Sam Lebens: Yes, it's not only religion, but it's communal associations which are smaller than the state and that are not fixated on the market, right? So in, in his political philosophy, this again is a mainstay of communitarian political philosophy, you recognize that we have these two massive institutions, the state and the market unlike some political ideologies who, who want to do away with the state, perhaps a kind of anarchist or libertarian, or unlike some ideologies who want to get rid of the market or the free market, perhaps kind of communism, the communitarian recognizes, no, the state's good for some stuff and the market's good for some stuff.

But there, there need to be other social organizations groupings that are smaller than the state. That's what we call community, right? That are not motivated by market forces either. So it's neither the state nor the market. Talking about the agenda of the book, I'd say noting that this is one of these books, and there are many of them and I think in a conversation with you before this podcast, Tanya, we've noted how some of his later books are addressed to a much wider audience than some of his earlier writings, right?

And, the most extreme kind of example of that is to compare that paper from the 1970s in tradition, critiquing Rabbi Soloveitchik, which was very much an in house Jewish philosophy, theology, and ontology contribution. It wouldn't be all that interesting to people outside of Jewish philosophy or theology. And then this book, Morality, which is addressed to as wide an audience as possible. Basically, anybody interested in protecting the liberal democracies of the West from atrophy. And that's a much, much bigger audience. And I think that it's important to recognize how he's able to make that move. Partly, it's because he doesn't think that any one human being is a member of just one we. We're born into a family, that's a particular community in a sense. A community of kin, kith and kin that you don't choose, you're just born into. And then there are faith communities, which are larger than that, or your local community. There's the, it seems trivial, Rabbi Sacks was an Arsenal fan. So you've got the

community of Arsenal fans, he was alumnus of Oxford and Cambridge and Kings, and those are also communities. And he, was an English man and he was proud to be British and English, and he knew those things shaped him. He was a member of the West. All of these things you can think of them as concentric circles of communal belonging, the family being the smallest and they ripple outwards. And Rabbi Sacks thought that it was really important that we don't just occupy the widest one of those, which is just there's the individual in the state and there's nothing in between.

Yeah. That He thinks that wouldn't help human flourishing. No, each person needs to be situated in their family, in their linguistic community, in their local community, but it does ripple outwards. And as you mentioned in that section, right from the preface that we heard him read, he talks about a type of human solidarity that is rooted in our shared humanity, which I suppose is the widest circle that the human is born into.

Tanya White: So I think it's very important what you're saying here, because I think if we follow the trajectory of Rabbi Sacks' books, we see very clearly that the earlier books are far more parochial, they're far more focused and on Jewish questions, on issues of peoplehood issues of Halachah, issues of what's the future, Jewish continuity.

As his role enlarges within the Jewish community, and then even, becoming a Lord in the house of Lords and within the UK, the Chief Rabbi, and then even more globally, we see that his writing also begins to expand and his audience begins to expand. And therefore the agenda of the book. becomes more expansive, which is why it's no surprise that his last book is called Morality. Just the name itself is Morality, right? It's a global, universal title.

Sam Lebens: Yeah.

Tanya White: And I think, if you look at his earlier books, One People?, Crisis and Covenant, these are much more parochial, maybe parochials are much more particular.

And this movement of the universal and the particular, and we've discussed it, but it's, it really is, I think, one of Rabbi Sacks major contributions, both to the Jewish and the non Jewish world. The idea that we can actually situate ourselves both as universal people and mankind with universal needs and goals and contributions. But at the same time, or maybe I should say the other way we are particular and from our particularity is born our universality and not the other way around. And I think that was Rabbi Sacks greatest contributions to modern Jewish philosophy, I think in particular but generally also just to the global community, how we don't just have to be out there, trying to further big, global, massive ideologies, but we can actually also just be transformed from the very small acts, very small rituals of our religious communities that can transform us as individuals.

Sam Lebens: I'd go so far as to say, Rabbi Sacks thought this was potentially the key distinctive message of Judaism. This kind of interesting, peculiar balance between the universal and the particular. There are places where he says the reason God chose the Jewish people. Yeah. So the whole raison d'etre of the election and of the covenant with Israel was to demonstrate to the entire world the dignity of difference, to use a title of a different, of his books.

Tanya White: Yeah, which, which we haven't done, but very important book.

Sam Lebens: Because he saw Judaism as a monotheism that says that there's one God for everybody. So we are all, by dint of our common creation, our common creator we share in that human solidarity. We're members of one community. But God wanted to showcase to the world that you really flourish as individuals by being parts of smaller communities within these concentric circles that ends with all of humanity. I think, as a member of the Western democracies that he cared about and that he was worried about their long term health, he would say look, we need to have a common language. And this is what you're talking about the agenda of the book. And peculiarly the common language that a society needs will have to be based on notions like trust, reciprocity, loyalty.

And yet, those notions can't be learnt at the level of a state. They're learnt in smaller associations. You learn in your family what trust is about, what loyalty is about. You learn that in your local community. But then when you become fluent, so to speak, in the language of loyalty, trust faith, these kind of thick virtues that you imbibe from your communal setting, you become fluent in those virtues, you'll actually find it easier as a citizen in the Western state to find common ground with other people, even if they come from different faith communities because they'll at least speak that language of loyalty, reciprocity, faith.

Tanya White: As we've spoken about one of the major contributions of Rabbi Sacks, I think generally to Jewish philosophy, philosophy at all, is the idea of this almost this double commitment to our particular situational environment and our universal mankind, universal principles. And Rabbi Sacks brings, he draws that matrix into the book Morality very clearly, where he speaks about the idea of thick and thin morality. Let's just hear what he says on page two of the book. 75 and 276 for those of you who want to follow with the book.

Rabbi Sacks zt"l: Applied to morality thin, applies to the moral concepts that we use to make judgments between and across cultures. They tend to be highly universal and lacking in specificity. Justice is a thin concept insofar as we can recognize injustice in cultures remote from our own. Thick relates to those features that make this culture different from others.

Morality always begins, [Michael] Walzer says, with thick concepts. We learn what it is to be moral within our own highly localized and specific culture. Morality does not begin with a high level of abstraction. We learn to do this, not that, because that's how things are done in our world. Only later on do we discover that other people do things differently.

Sam Lebens: That's a wonderful illustration of what I was trying to say less eloquently that a society would crumble, western liberal democracies would crumble if people don't buy in to those very thin notions of morality, that's enough to hold a liberal state together and anymore it would stop being liberal. So notions like justice, freedom, but you're not going to be able to really understand what those mean that like you said, they're very abstract. Unless you come from your own background with a thicker sense of justice, thicker moral notions. Two things that, I think influence him here. One is Francis Fukuyama and the other is the Lubavitcher Rebbi.

Tanya White: Very different people.

Sam Lebens: Yeah, very few thinkers who were, who would be influenced by those two

Tanya White: inputs.

Give us a bit of a background on them both.

Sam Lebens: Fukuyama wrote a book called Trust, in which he tried to argue, he's an economist, and he tried to argue that kind of Western free market economies they crumble without certain quite thick virtues the market can't teach and the state can't teach either. Like trust, faith, fidelity, and he tries to sketch that if you don't have them that the market itself is going to be in trouble. The Lubavitcher Rebbe tells this story Rabbi Sacks quotes it in the Dignity of Difference, about a person lugging around a bag of stones, that's his job all day. And another person who handles gems, gemstones. And if you give the person who lugs around rocks all day, you give him some delicate rubies to look after, he won't know how to handle them, he won't know how to do them, he'll treat them like rocks because that's all he's ever known. But if you give the rubies to a person whose job is to protect gemstones in general, then they'll know. And the Lubavitcher Rebbe said to Rabbi Sacks that if your own culture, your own heritage is a burden to you like a sack of rocks, then the heritage, the culture of other people, their rubies, their gemstones will also equally, you won't know how to value them. But if you truly value your own, then you'll be able to recognize the value of others.

And I think part of the wisdom there, and part of what moved Rabbi Sacks is this idea. Look, the particular things that make your life what it is could be very different from the particular things that make my life, what it is. But if I at least recognize the value that those particularities have in shaping me. And even if I don't understand your language, and I don't understand the things that make you, I can recognize, gosh, they must be valuable to you. And that the person who carries gemstones rubies, and the person who carries diamonds, they might not be able to understand everything about one another, but they will have a common language, however thin. But the person who carries rocks, he's not going to be able to join that conversation.

Part of liberalism's brilliance is it allows diversity to flourish in its midst, the dignity of difference. But if the people who make up that society don't value their own specific, particular communal backgrounds

Tanya White: Or, or even not value if they don't understand the importance of of your own particular setting and your own particular set of morals, laws, rituals, whatever you want to call it. And I would even say your own particular conditions that you're born into, right? Your family, the value of the family, even if you love your family for, everyone has issues with family, but you recognize the importance of being part of those communal bonds, however you want to call it. And what that gives you the positivity of being a self within that. And if, as you said, if the West has given up on that I would say on the significance of that definition of self.

Sam Lebens: Many people in the West are trained to kind of hate themselves, hate their history, hate their, you know, and there's a lot to be ashamed of in Western history. There's no doubt about it, right? Colonialism and all sorts of evils. There's no doubt about it. But if all we have, when we look at our own history, our own culture is shame then ultimately, we we won't really have the basis to value what make other people different. Not really not in that most profound way. so Rabbi Sacks is saying, and this is how he's able to write a book like Morality, that's addressed to people outside of the synagogue, so to speak much outside of Judaism. He says, look, it doesn't matter which particular faith which particular smaller than state community you're a member of, but it's important to be members of them to allow them to flourish because if, if they don't, then we will lose the thin notions of justice and liberty and democracy that hold the West together.

Tanya White: And are a channel, for us to communicate with other people to a degree, on the moral fabric, on the social fabric of the society in which we live in. So that's really where the loss is and that's what Rabbi Sacks main concern, I think, and main agenda of the book is almost to win back thin morality, actually through nurturing and encouraging a sense of thick morality.

Sam Lebens: A plurality of thick moralities.

Tanya: We've got the context, we've got the agenda, and now I want to just talk for a minute or two about the outline of the book. So to me, what I find fascinating about his later books, as opposed to his earlier books, is the format of the books. The earlier books are more essay type chapters, and then he kind of pulls all the ideas together.

Whereas his later books are almost written a thesis he sets about creating these kind of tightly formed arguments towards an end, towards kind of a goal, a thesis that he is putting forward. And in this book in particular, the way that I like to teach it and imagine the structure is to actually imagine it in medical terms.

Because if you think for a second, he's grappling with a particular type of malady that's affecting society, which he calls cultural climate change. So obviously like environmental climate change, it affects all of us, but we also are the ones who've caused it. We've caused this change to the ecosystem. So we're the ones that are also responsible for its remedy. So the way that I see it is that the book is divided into five parts. He calls part one, the solitary self. And there he describes if we're, again, if we're using the analogy of, of a malady that needs healing.

He describes the symptoms of the disease. So the symptoms of the disease for him is, and these are all the chapter titles, loneliness, unsocial media, meaning social media, fragile family. Those are the symptoms. That's what we're seeing in society where, where we've gone wrong. That's the symptoms of the disease.

Then in part two, he diagnoses the root causes of the disease. So we've seen the symptoms. Now we need to diagnose its cause. So how have we got to this place? So he talks about markets without morals, democracy in danger, identity politics. Again, these are the causes that have caused the symptoms.

Part three is this journey to healing. It's the first step in the treatment plan. So we're going to ask the questions, is this medicine going to work? You know, will this treatment remedy the symptoms as well as treating the root cause of the disease? And the titles, for example, are, can we reason together, post truth, safe space, two ways of arguing, victimhood, public shaming, basically asking us to look at the symptoms, to look at the causes and find the medicinal remedy that's going to help nurse society back to full health. So that's part three.

Then in part four, which he calls being human, he sets out the principles on which the remedy is based. Now, if we're using our analogy of, you know, medicine, I would say this is, and again, I'm, I'm definitely not, it's definitely not my, area, but I would probably call this pharmacology. This is what are the medicinal properties, right? Rabbi Sacks is looking for a remedy for cultural climate change. And he begins with looking at the human being and asking what makes us human? What drives us? What do we need to have in our lives in order to lead a meaningful, happy life? And for Rabbi Sacks, that's human dignity and freedom, that's meaning, that's morality, that's religion. And these are all the titles of the fourth part. This is the pharmacology. What lies at the root of the medicine that's going to help the causes and the, and the symptoms.

And then finally in part five, which he calls the way forward. We have the final stage of how I see it, the treatment plan, right? What's the end goal? What does full health look like and how are we going to get to that point? And he leaves us on, as Rabbi Sacks always does, he leaves us on a note of hope that there is a way back, that we can return to full health and that society and cultural climate change is not a pervasive disease or condition, but one that we can actually, turn back from.

Sam Lebens: That notion of hope at the end, I mean, it's, it was so key to, to Rabbi Sacks you know, he tells his funny story about, a GPS, a satellite navigation system being his tutor in the notion of hope because however far wrong you go when you've got your satellite navigation system, you know, you're using Waze or Google Maps or whatever it may be, however many wrong turns you may get, you may take, it, it, it always just says recalculating route, which to him was a lived metaphor for faith because faith is the belief for him, or at least in part, faith is the belief that however far bad or however far wrong things have gone, there is a route back . And it was very clear that in his last major public engagements in his life, he was still a prophet of hope because he was saying, too many people are writing obituaries for the West as if there's no way back. And that might be true. The West might be about to crumble and die. I mean, Look around us and look what's happening in America and the state of civil discourse. And yeah, you know, it could be the end of the American century and the West is dead and China's gone. Who knows? He wasn't a prophet of optimism, which is just the blind belief that things will get better on their own. No, he wasn't. He took these prognoses seriously. the West could die, but he was a prophet of hope, which is to say that there is a way back, until it happens until the West is dead, we shouldn't give up on the possibility Until we've gone over the cliff, we can keep resetting the course.

Tanya White: Yeah. He actually says it beautifully. I'll let him say it himself on right in the very beginning, actually in the preface, not even in the introduction, he says as follows .

Rabbi Sacks zt"l: He ended the book with a warning of The Coming Ages of Barbarism and Darkness. That book, despite its pessimism, brought me back to moral philosophy. MacIntyre has been one of the great influences on my life, though there is this obvious difference between us. Being Jewish, I am disinclined to pessimism. I prefer hope.

Tanya White: No one can say it better than Rabbi Sacks.

Sam Lebens: No, it's amazing that we can still hear his voice, Tanya. Isn't that a wonderful?

Tanya White: Unbelievable. Really a legacy lives on. So now I want to jump into kind of the main part of what we're talking about. And that is the main themes and topics, which obviously we've already chatted about quite a bit. But I do want to speak here specifically, to the challenge of the solitary self. I think we should begin with that because I think for him, that the solitary self and the outsourcing of morality to the market and the state, and all of those dangers that we see really unfolding today in society, are a danger to our reasoning together. You know, Rabbi Sacks spoke about this idea of how do we reason together? How do we connect to each other? Because when we can reason together, when we can listen to each other, that prevents polarization.

Sam Lebens: I see this beginning, maybe you'll think of an earlier place in his writings where this, comes up, but I see this in The Home We Build Together. Because in many ways, as you've been pointing out, Morality is the kind of summation of a career of, of thinking and writing. So it's unsurprising that themes from various, layers of his work reappear.

In The Home We Build Together, and then echoed and developed in Morality, is this great (and it's inspired by Alistair MacIntyre) it's this great fear that the West is losing its literacy and its eloquence when it comes to speaking about morality, because we're losing a shared language. And one way of thinking, we've spoken about these concentric circles, each network of associations you belong to your family, your community, or going outwards to the whole of humanity, each of them, so to speak, comes with its own language. And part of what we've been discussing Tanya so far is that, the smaller the network, perhaps the thicker, the moral notions and the wider the network, the thinner the moral notions. And that that's okay. But by being, a member of any given community, you learn a set of expectations, behaviours, customs, rituals, and these are like a language, and sometimes it literally is a language. Like in my family, we have words that you don't use outside because we've made them up, that just have evolved, you know. So it can literally literally be a language. Or to be a member of the English speaking community. That's one of the communities to which we belong for Rabbi Sacks. So imagine if we belonged to no communities at all, right. We just grew up as, atomistic individuals, we wouldn't develop thick languages, right? And Rabbi Sacks fear is that as society fractures and we get closer to that dystopia of completely atomistic individuals, we lose expressive power.

Tanya White: It's such an brilliant metaphor, Sam. I think Rabbi Sacks keeps coming back to the metaphor of language because for him, so much of our shared experience is through the mechanism of language. And therefore it's a metaphor that allows me to, on the one hand, Have a fidelity to my own sense of individual experience and at the same time to be able to transcend that and to express that to the outside world.

Sam Lebens: Language is a perfect metaphor for the things Rabbi Sacks is interested in here, because not only is language inherently communal because it's about communication between more than one person and as I said rich languages like English or Hebrew or French languages that have developed over thousands of years with millions of speakers are much more expressive than any individual could be if they tried to start from scratch. But what's particularly good about the metaphor is just like Rabbi Sacks thinks that the individual becomes who they are to a great degree because of the role they play in a community, even your own subjective experiences are richer because you speak a language. The less our languages flourish, they become less expressive, until you imagine this person born with no relations to any human beings at all, never developing anything like a sophisticated language.

Then, the diagnosis that this is the part that I see in The Home We Build Together, not what I just said, but what follows from it, is that, well, if we don't share common concepts with which we can reason together, then when we have a dispute, we can't fight it out at the level of intellectual debate. I try to convince you, you try to convince me. We have some rules about civility and how it's done nicely and, you know, whatever. And when you lose the ability to reason with others, you start to use tools are not to do with reason in order to win your your argument, you try and shout the loudest rather than to be the most convincing, or you try and shame other people rather than convince them, right? You try to show that you must be the winner of the debate because you are the greater victim or because you are the greater, well, those things aren't to do with truth. Right there to do with who has the most powerful narrative and who shouts it loudest, who has the most moving narrative, who is worthy of the most shame. These things aren't, about truth and reason.

Tanya White: And they are really symptomatic of a death of civility, which is what Rabbi Sacks is very concerned about.

I should note that he talks a lot in the book about shaming, about the dangers of victimhood mentality, and even kind of this group victimhood, which he was very concerned about.

Sam Lebens: It's not healthy to view yourself as a victim.

I heard the other day a conversation between David Brooks and Rabbi Sacks there was one moment where he spoke about his life in very personal terms. He spoke about Rabbi sacks receiving criticism, but not criticism about his ideas. You and I know that he encouraged that and enjoyed that he enjoyed intellectual debate. And if you disagreed with when I was 18 years old, I wrote him an email where I disagreed with something he said in one of the faith lectures, and he was just so encouraging of debate. Obviously I wrote it with a great deal of respect, I wrote it in a respectful way, but I told him I disagreed with him and he loved that.

Tanya White: I think in one of the last times he actually spoke, in person, he spoke to a group of journalists people can look it up online. Maybe we'll, we'll put the link in, the podcast, he spoke to a group of journalists and someone asked him, you know, you're such a brilliant orator. Why do you write, what's your imperative? And his answer was, you know, I realized from a very young age that I had. A gift that I was able to convince people, he said, but I didn't want to be able to just convince people. He said, I wanted to be able to give over an argument and to be open to criticism of that argument because that is civil discourse because that is where, and he spoke about the idea, that's where ideas grow.

Sam Lebens: Yeah, because in oratory, you can conjure such an air of authority and convincingness that you can bring people with you when they haven't really reasoned it through. And he felt that in the written word, you know, that can still happen, but to a lesser degree, we engage with writing in a more critical way

Tanya White: Exactly. So he definitely encouraged critical, I would say, critical dialogue of his ideas.

Sam Lebens: what he hated was. shaming, and personal vendettas. And, and he said in this conversation with David Brooks, that when things got really personal during some of the early days of his chief rabbinate, and people wrote horrible things, not about what he'd done or not about things he'd argued, but about him, that they made them personal. He said that every single atom in his body, he said, felt rejected and it hurts. He speaks in these very vivid terms of pain and rejection. But then he realized that actually what matters much more is if God has faith in him, right?

It doesn't matter if his detractors, he was able to find in his theism, a great deal of kind of, comfort in the face of, public shaming and, and whatever. But I think that, his experience as a public figure who had to weather the storm, not of intellectual critique or even political critique, which I think he would have welcomed, but of kind of shame and personal, venom, I think that must have, informed the things he's writing in Morality and earlier against a shame culture.

Tanya White: And I would say that even more so if we look even further back, I mentioned at the beginning and I've mentioned in the other podcast how impactful Rabbi Soloveitchik's essay, Fate and Destiny was for Rabbi Sacks. In the beginning of the essay, Rabbi Soloveitchik speaks about an existence of fate and an existence of destiny. And ultimately he says that an existence of fate is when I make myself into a victim. When I cannot move past the why question, why did this happen to me? This is terrible. Life is terrible. These things happen. I can't do anything about it. And that creates a victim type mentality whereby I believe that I deserve better, but I'm actually not going to do anything to make my conditions better.

Sam Lebens: In Radical Then Radical Now, you have a mission to do. So since there's a mission, and the mission is future oriented,

the mission isn't yet complete, we're on the way, you kind of aren't allowed to resign yourself to victimhood, right? God's calling you, so you've got to just get up and, you know, it doesn't matter if other people are saying they hate you or whatever, okay?

So that's one part which he doesn't speak about too much in the book, but the, the thing that I think comes in the book, which is more accessible, perhaps to non theists and, non Jews is that if we lose the ability to reason together, then we're left with very few tools to navigate conflict. And when you are left with very few tools, it's inevitable that they're going to be things to do with accumulating power, and shaming one another. We have a shame culture because we've run out of arguments. Or we've given up on trying to convince people. Or you don't have a shared language. Why would you give up on trying to convince people? Because you just don't have a language in which you can do that.

Tanya White: You cannot speak to the fundamentalist religion because the language is totally different. Or you perhaps maybe even cannot speak to, let's say, to the radical individualist or the radical liberalist because you no longer share a language in which you're both speaking from a shared communal platform.

I also want to draw in, we've already spoken about it, but I think it's such an important, theme in the book. And that is the idea of, again, the individual and collective moralities, the idea of particular communities. Now he brings in a brilliant idea, which I'll be honest, I didn't know about till I read the book when he published it, that the idea morality comes from the word, the Latin word mors. Mors is customs and conventions.

The word ethics comes from the Latin word for the character of a community. Ethos is the character of a community. And the roots of both of these words are begin in community. They begin in the particularity of a specific convention, specific customs, specific rituals, and then move outwards.

So what Rabbi Sacks seems to suggest in the book, when he's talking about this is we often think about morality as being something totally universal, that we can all tap into at any given moment. But Rabbi Sacks is saying to us that that morality that we imagine that all of us agree about even today in a post modern or I should say a radicalized post modern society. No, we don't have that morality. And the reason we don't have that anymore is because we have lost the particular communities with the thick morality and that is in some senses, fanning the fire, right? Of the breakdown of civil discourse, the breakdown of any common language and really the breakdown of society writ large.

Sam Lebens: I just want to know the kind of irony kind of irony is that you might expect a thinker who's worried about fragmentation and the loss of a common language you might expect such a thinker to move heavily in, in the direction of universal collectivism and say, give up your personal attachments and your personal thick communities and join with one humanity

Tanya White: John Lennon. Imagine all the people.

Sam Lebens: all the people, right? And we could have a common, then we'd have a common language. And Rabbi Sacks is saying, no, that, that's the myth of Babel. Actually, if you're going to get the right balance between positive and negative freedom and you're going to really have human flourishing, it has to be worked this way. You have to have real thick attachments at the level of, smaller communities and then somehow as they ripple outwards, you're going to find that you've got citizens in your states who are capable of communicating with one another because they come from the particular backgrounds they do like the person that carries the diamonds and the person that carries the gemstones. And because they do that they will at least have a thin language that they can really share. And that's all you really need for a liberal democracy to be held together. Because a liberal democracy, wants to be compatible with diversity. And doesn't want to impose a particular way of being on all of its citizens.

Tanya White: Beautiful. Sam, I want to segue now to our final part, my favourite part. And I want to open it up to you. We haven't really discussed yet so much your relationship with Rabbi Sacks, which I would love the listeners to get a little window into your own relationship and how he you Impacted you and maybe if you can to somehow tie it in also to parts about this book that spoke to you particularly, maybe something that you disagree with, maybe something you feel is lacking, or perhaps even something that was deeply impactful and change and transformed the way in which you thought about certain concepts and ideas.

Sam Lebens: I'll try and say something that wraps all of that together, if I can. Um, yeah, but I think I actually can in this instance. I love the book Morality. I think it's a great choice, especially for the kind of the culmination of the journey you've been on over the previous episodes. I get it. Of his oeuvre, it's not my personal favourite, and there's a few reasons for that.

One of the reasons is that sometimes I am in Rabbi Sacks' books with a kind of really large agenda, like this book. Political agenda, that's, way broader than, a merely Jewish interest. I'm so moved by his diagnoses, I feel that in The Dignity of Difference as well. I think, wow, he's, he's absolutely hit the nail on its head in terms of what's going wrong, in the West. Where I feel let down by the book is that I think he's given us the very merest sketch of kind of, well, what needs to happen in order to fix it? And I get that too. And I think what he says is right about what would need to be achieved in order to fix it. But what I don't see in the book is anything like a detailed plan of, okay, but how do we fix it? How do we achieve the fix that you have rightly said needs to occur and rightly described what it would look like? I see that to some extent in Future Tense as well. It's a criticism of that book and another book that I love. But there he talks about some of the things that Israel really needs. And I'm so on board that Israel needs that. But I feel like he didn't tell us at all, how to bring that about. And there's some massive challenges in order to do that. Yet, although Morality isn't my favorite book, this very criticism I have of it is related to some of the things I cherish most about Rabbi Sacks personally.

So, I tried to explain to people who are interested in my relationship to Rabbi Sacks that he was more like a Hasidic Rebbe to me than he was a rabbi. By the time I came of age, Rabbi Sacks was no longer teaching in any regular position. He was no longer teaching at Jews College. He no longer had a regular shiur. He was already a megastar, superstar. And it was actually quite hard get any time with him. But a chossid would go and see the Rebbe for Yechidus every now and again.

Just like Rabbi Sacks did to the Lubavitcher Rebbe. The Lubavitcher Rebbe had a huge influence on Rabbi Sacks, and yet Rabbi Sacks only met him, you know, a handful of times, but they were of tremendous importance to him. And so too with me, I reached out to Rabbi first when I was 18, and I'd been having a type of crisis in yeshiva. We don't need to go into the gory details here, although I've spoken about it elsewhere. And I wrote to him, it was in the middle of the storm over The Dignity of Difference in the Jewish community. So he was navigating his own very difficult times. And yet within a few months, I thought he'd forgotten about it. I wasn't really expecting a response. I received a very very heartfelt reply one that was counselling me about how to continue in yeshiva. One that showed me a great deal of care and affection, even though he didn't know who I was. And from that point on, you know, I emailed him a few more times and we continued to correspondence.

And then I came back to England to university, I was a bit of a Rabbi Sacks groupie. So I would go to him and he would always pick me out from the crowd, walk over to me, give me a hug, shake my hand because he knew I, I think Elaine in the early days said that's the boy that emailed you or whatever. But we, we became in that way, very close. He was a mentor to me. So when major things happened in my life, I would email him, or write a letter to him and he would respond when I was a postdoc in America and he'd come to America, we'd always find a time that I could just, meet him for a minutes. Because I developed a relationship with his office as well, which was helpful.

I remember for a special birthday, Gaby managed to get me a one-hour meeting with Rabbi Sacks his home which was just a tremendous It was the best birthday present ever from my wife. But he was a Rebbe rather than a Rabbi. And one of the things that Rabbi Sacks said, the Rebbe did for him and and other rabbis in his life, he said, you need people in your life who have more faith in you than you have in yourself. And Rabbi Sacks, right from the beginning, even before he knew who I was, right? Just by reading my email, the response he gave to me it was manifest in his response that he had tremendous faith in me and my abilities to navigate the storms I was navigating and to this day, even since his passing, I draw a tremendous amount of encouragement and inner strength from the fact that I know that Rabbi Sacks, he loved me and he had faith in me and he wanted the best for me and believed in me. So when I, I'm struggling with my own kind of self esteem, know, he continues to be my Rebbe.

Now, how is this related to the criticism of the book? I think if I turned to Rabbi Sacks and said, look, Morality, I really agree with the diagnosis and I really think that you've said what the solution needs to look like, but you haven't haven't told me how to do it. I think he'd say to me, all right then Sam, so how do we do it? Which is to say, yes, it's a criticism of the book, but you shouldn't expect one person to have the answers to all questions. And Rabbi Sacks certainly didn't think he was a person with the answers to all questions. And at a certain point in his great humility, he turns out to us and says, Okay, here's what the destination looks like, here's what the problem is, you've got to find your own satellite navigation system to plot the way from here to there.

Tanya White: Beautiful.

And I I want to pull that in because we know that in his personal life, the Lubavitcher Rabbi did exactly that for him. He said in the situation in which I find myself and the Lubavitcher Rabbi says, you don't find yourself in a situation, you put yourself in a situation.

If I look at what we've done with these podcasts, we began with Radical Then Radical Now, (A Letter in the Scroll), and we called it ‘The Call’. And then we moved to Future Tense, and we called it ‘The Narrative’. And then we moved to To Heal a Fractured World and we called it ‘The Mission’. And we finally ended on Morality and we're calling it ‘The Application’.

And I think what Sam has done is said to us that in many ways for Rabbi Sacks, the application, even though at the end he outlines a few ideas and he tries to draw us back into this common language and he does it through the notion of covenant. We mentioned that one of the central themes of Rabbi Sacks thinking was freedom. A second -

Sam Lebens: Yes, he's not silent about how

Tanya White: he's not silent about to do it.

Sam Lebens: schematic

Tanya White: Very

schematic and almost like, you know, it's almost more of a theory than a practice.

But I think that is exactly what you said is that when we talk about the idea of when he ends and we're going to finish today with listening to the final words of the book from Rabbi Sacks himself, but he ends talking about the notion of covenant.

And for me, why is covenants such a central theme in every single one of his books, I would say it's really the pillar on which so much of his thinking stands, because covenant is exactly the mechanism that moves me out from the I towards the We. Covenant means that I see the other that I respect the other as they are Martin Buber's language. I see the other as a Thou rather than as an it. I see the other as a subject rather than as an object. And the other allows me to transcend the self. It allows me to transcend loneliness of the self. It allows me to transcend self interest and parochialism. Really only to kind of very nihilistic way of understanding the world. It really is the mechanism through covenant that I find meaning, that I find purpose, that I find agency and activism.

Covenant is the mechanism is the tool that we as humans can use to create a relationship with God and a relationship with the other. Does it mean those relationships are easy? Does it mean that they're not messy? No, on the contrary, relationships are messy and they're difficult and despairing and there's times where we want to just say, oh, just leave me alone. True. But we will not have a meaningful, happy, beautiful, transcendent life. If we do not engage with the other. And that is to me, what Rabbi Sacks is saying.

Sam Lebens: To bring it right back to the beginning of our discussion, it's in the midst of covenant, and only really in the midst of covenant, that one finds who one really is, and one finds one's positive liberty.

Tanya White: Exactly. One's positive liberty comes through the idea of covenant because covenant is also about the long road, it's not the short road.

Tanya White: And I think with that, we will leave Rabbi Sacks, his own voice to sum up everything we've been doing as he finishes the book and really calls upon us to take the mantle of leadership and agency and to make the world other than it is. Thank you once again, Sam.

Sam Lebens: Thanks, Tanya.

Rabbi Sacks zt"l: I have called the move from ‘We’ to ‘I’, cultural climate change. But there's a difference between this and environmental climate change. For us to make a significant difference to environmental climate change, billions of people must change the ways they act. That is because the environment is global. But culture is more local, especially when it concerns the tone and tenor of our relationships. To begin to make a difference, all we need to do is to change ourselves. To act morally, to be concerned with the welfare of others, to be someone people trust, to give, to volunteer, to listen, to smile, to be sensitive, generous, caring, to do any of these things is to make an immediate difference, not only to our own life, but to those whose lives we touch.

Morality is about us, each of us in our own sphere of interaction, taking responsibility. We don't have to wait for the world to change. For our lives to change.

Tanya: I'm Dr. Tanya White, and you have been listening to Books & Beyond: the Rabbi Sacks podcast. In our next episode, we'll continue our exploration of Morality with two exceptional guests. First we'll hear from Professor Jonathan Haidt, one of America's leading public intellectuals and sociologists, and the author of best selling books including The Coddling of the American Mind, The Righteous Mind, and The Anxious Generation.

A dear friend and admirer of Rabbi Sacks, Professor Haidt will offer his unique perspective on how the book's themes intersect with the pressing issues shaping today's public discourse. We'll also gain personal insights into the context and creation of Morality from Dan Sacker, who worked closely with Rabbi Sacks on this powerful work.

It's an episode of full of thought provoking ideas and behind the scenes reflections. You won't want to miss it.

If you would like to send me comments or feedback, please email [email protected]. Don't forget to check us out at rabbisacks.org and follow us on X and Facebook at (@RabbiSackspod) and instagram (@RabbiSackspodcast), where you will find all information and extra content relating to the episode.

Thank you to our series producer, Amir White and the team, as well as Rabbi Sacks Legacy with special gratitude to Jonny Lipczer. We cannot finish without holding in our minds and hearts that at the time of recording, 79 of our brothers and sisters continue to be held hostage by Hamas in Gaza. We pray for their safe return in both body and spirit, for the protection of our soldiers and for the return of all evacuees and a lasting peace.