Confronting the Future: Jewish Identity in the 21st Century
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In March 2002, Jewish Book Week hosted a conversation between Jonathan Sacks and George Steiner, chaired by Joshua Rozenberg. The full transcript of this conversation is available below.
Introduction: Marion Cohen, Chairman of the Jewish Book Council
Chief Rabbi, Professor Steiner, ladies and gentlemen: we are delighted to welcome you all to what is evidently Britain’s oldest literary festival. Those of you who were here last year when the Chief Rabbi was speaking at the Freud session will, no doubt, be extremely relieved that we have kept a stricter control of the ticket selling this year.
For those of us involved in the organisation of Jewish Book Week, each year is special. This year, however, seems to us to be particularly so. In the past, we have succeeded in attracting eminent writers and academics from the United States, from Israel and, of course, from the United Kingdom. Europe, however, has hardly figured in our programme planning. Now this could be a reflection of wider British insularity – or the simple fact that there is so much published in English that we don’t need to bother with translated authors.
As Jews, however, this lack of interest isn’t just sad, it is almost tragic. So much of our cultural heritage is based in Europe and it seems to us vitally important to know what is happening to the literary tradition there. How is it being developed since the last war? How far has its identity been shaped by that war? How far can we perceive any cultural unity within the geographic diversity?
With generous help from London Arts, we have been able this year to concentrate mainly on three countries: Czechoslovakia, France and Germany. I should like to pay tribute here to my vice chairman, Anne Webber, who has brilliantly put together the majority of the European part of the programme, and to express our very deep gratitude to the Czech Cultural Centre, the Goethe Institute and the Institut Français, not just for their practical help but for the massive enthusiasm with which they have joined this project. And do please, if you have a moment, admire the panels which are hanging either side of the room. They were generously brought by the Czech Embassy specially for Jewish Book Week and they actually illustrate a thousand years of Jewish writing in Bohemia.
The focus on Europe is an idea which we intend to pursue in subsequent years. Already Holland and Hungary are keen to promote their Jewish writers next year and we are keen to have our horizons broadened. This year’s programme, of course, is more than just the European Jewish voice. We have comedy, controversy, history, philosophy, literature; and Ann Widdecombe, whose views on the Old Testament will, I am sure, be trenchant and fascinating.
And I should like to thank here Natasha Lehrer whose contributions to the programme planning are always exciting and imaginative and of immense value; and Risa Domb, who organises every year the Israeli literature evening so wonderfully.
Because of the way that we have grown, Book Week has now become too big for a group of part-time volunteers and we now have a proper administrator. Pam Lewis has arrived like an angel from heaven and made our lives manageable once again. I am not sure what the consequences have been to the manageability of her own life, of course, but for us it has been wonderful.
Book Week would be only half as interesting and half as popular without the stunning Book Fair. As usual, our thanks go to Joshua Kuperad and to Martin Kaye for the rich and comprehensive displays this year and for all their hard work and flair.
Our relationship with the Jewish Chronicle, happily for us, continues to prosper and they are the most generous of sponsors.
Finally amongst all these ‘thank yous’ I should like to mention our PR director Jack Gilbert and to acknowledge the contribution of all the members of the Jewish Book Council. Someone told me recently that this was the first committee they had ever come across where everybody was working for the end product, and nobody was interested in being a macher.
Tonight, ladies and gentlemen, is the opening public event of the Conference on Jewish Identity organised by the Friends of the Hebrew University and the UJIA. The Conference itself, under the generous sponsorship of Clive Marks, will take place in central London over the next three days. There is a most impressive programme of events and many wonderful speakers, many of whom I know are here tonight.
Jewish Book Week is proud and delighted to be hosting this session which has been devised and put together by Michael Gee and Anthony Spitz. We are in fact deeply honoured by the calibre of the speakers on the platform tonight and I have great pleasure now in handing over to Joshua Rozenberg who will introduce the speakers and explain the format of the evening. Thank you very much.
Joshua Rozenberg:
Well, Marion, thank you very much indeed for that introduction. I am equally delighted to be here tonight. I knew this was going to be a sell-out event and I knew that if I accepted the invitation to chair this event, then at least I would get a seat — and I hope that those of you who are standing at the back won’t be too uncomfortable — but I think it is going to be worth it.
I suppose I should begin with a word from our sponsors. This is an article which the Chief Rabbi wrote in yesterday’s Jewish Chronicle. He said that he is looking forward to his conversation with George Steiner and that the last time they debated was in the Cambridge Union in the spring of 1967. Chief Rabbi Dr Sacks was a first-year undergraduate. Opposing him were Dr Steiner and an Australian research student called Clive James. The motion was: “This House would rather have written Gray’s Elegy than taken Quebec.” And those of you who haven’t read the article may ask the speakers at the end of the evening possibly what the result of the vote was — and what it should have been!
The way we are going to handle questions is a little bit of an innovation. You will find pieces of paper on your seats. You’ll have to beg, borrow or steal a pencil or pen. I would like you to put your questions in writing. I’ve already had one or two questions, which is pretty impressive since we haven’t actually heard from the speakers yet! What I suggest you do is that you listen to our two speakers and, at the end of the opening remarks by each of our speakers, you hand in the written questions to somebody or bring them up and put them on the table here. I will select the questions. I will read out the questions. In that way I will try to get some sort of shape and structure to the evening.
The way it will work is that Chief Rabbi Dr Sacks will speak first. Dr Steiner will speak second. Each will speak for about 15 minutes. I then may invite each of them to respond — or I may bring in the questions depending on how we develop. But the idea is to have a debate and a discussion that is going to be accessible to all of you — which means that if I don’t understand it I’m going to have to ask you to explain some of the philosophical terms that I fear you will both be using.
The two speakers tonight need very little introduction. I think, perhaps, what some of us who know the Chief Rabbi from his more public appearances in the last decade perhaps have forgotten is that he studied philosophy at university. He was a lecturer in philosophy at Middlesex Polytechnic. He was a lecturer in philosophy and Jewish philosophy at London University and he has always had a lifelong interest in this area. I have a huge CV from Who’s Who? which I won’t read out. Professor Steiner also — a huge CV which again I won’t read out.
But what I will tell you about is the subject which is on the programme for tonight, which is really what our speakers are going to address. It goes as follows:
- What future lies in store for the Jewish people in the 21st century?
- What balance should be struck between secular principles and Jewish beliefs?
- What roles should national and European citizenship, God and Torah, the Diaspora and Israel play in our identities and in the culture and values we transmit to future generations?
- What balance should be struck between the secular principles and Jewish beliefs?
Chief Rabbi Dr Jonathan Sacks:
Joshua, thank you very much for those introductory words. I want, if I may, to begin by thanking on your behalf Marion Cohen and all those involved in Jewish Book Week. This is one of the great, great events of Anglo-Jewry. It gets better every year and I think they deserve our applause.
I also, if I may, want to thank on your behalf — because this is not only an event of Jewish Book Week but, as Marion reminded us, the beginning of a three-day Conference organised by Friends of Hebrew University, continuing a conference that we held a year and a half ago in Jerusalem — again, I want to thank on your behalf Clive Marks and the Ashdown Trust who have made this whole thing possible: Michael Gee and Anthony Spitz and the British Friends of the Hebrew University and UJIA who have helped to sponsor it. Could we have some applause for them as well.
Friends, forgive me. Elaine and I are suffering from terrible colds this evening. Elaine has completely lost her voice so I said, “Let’s go as one of George’s books. I’ll go as Language and you can go as Silence.” However, I want to express, very simply, my sense of the value of this dialogue and the importance of dialogue.
We read this morning in the sedra of Ki Tissa about the two tablets, the first tablets of stone engraved and written by God which Moses shattered when he saw the golden calf: the holiest objects really ever. Then the second set of tablets, carved by Moses himself after God had forgiven the people, and they remained intact.
According to Rav Soloveitchik of blessed memory, those two tablets represent the dual aspect of revelation, of Jewish imagination. The first tablets represent the Written Torah, Torah shebichtav, God’s word to man. The second tablets represent the Oral Torah, our humanity’s attempt to interpret and respond to the word of God. And interpretation, translation have, of course, been a major theme of George Steiner’s writings.
God may have stopped talking to us but we never stopped talking to Him and to one another. For me, the Oral Law, the second tablets, represent in their widest possible sense the unbroken conversation between the Jewish people and God, and itself — that continuity of dialogue, in which it is so important that we all, every one of us, have a voice. That is why I felt so privileged that George felt able to engage in this dialogue because he has been a remarkable voice of a particular interpretation of our tradition.
George, I have learned an enormous amount from your work. From your first book, I think The Death of Tragedy, that crucial insight, that tragedy is not a Jewish genre — whatever the tragedies of our history. From Language and Silence I learned of the failure of civilisation to civilise, to prevent the Holocaust. I learned much about translation from many of your books, especially After Babel; about the religious pre-supposition of art; about the connection between God and art in your book Real Presences; and about the eclipse of the Messianic dimension in your latest book Grammars of Creation. I am hugely looking forward to your next book — the book of your Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard University (and what an honour that was for you, George — and, vicariously, for us) — on one of the great Jewish themes: talmid and rav, disciple and master. Perhaps you could just hint this evening a little of what you will be writing in that book.
George, as you know, is a total polymath — somebody who knows everything about everything. Although I don’t know of a good George Steiner anecdote, I hope you’ll forgive me, George, if I think the one most appropriate is the one they used to tell about the late Maurice Bowra who was, of course, warden of Wadham College, Oxford, later vice-chancellor of Oxford University. Maurice used to really irritate his fellow dons every night at High Table because, whatever the conversation was about, he always knew more about it than everyone else and totally dominated the conversation.
So one day the dons decided to take their revenge on Maurice Bowra. They decided they would choose some suitably obscure topic — Ming dynasty vases and Chinese ceramics — would read up and commit to memory the Encyclopaedia Britannica article on it and have a conversation so erudite and arcane that Maurice would be totally outclassed. Well, the evening came, the conversation began and, indeed, it worked. Bowra sat, for once in his life, silent during the whole evening as this extraordinary conversation went on about Ming dynasty vases. At the end of the evening, he got up and took his leave of the company and, turning round at the door, said, “Gentlemen, I’m so glad you’ve read my Encyclopaedia Britannica article.”
Friends, there are many things we could talk about but let me identify just three.
George, first, I hope we could talk a little about your sense — your conception — of Jewish identity. Much that you have written I find very inspirational, particularly your reworking of a famous phrase of Heinrich Heine, the subject of one of your articles in Salmagundi, that lovely phrase you wrote, “Our homeland, the text,” and that equally beautiful definition of the Jewish community as, in your words, “a concentric tradition of reading” — Jewish people like a page of Mikraot Gedolot, like a set of commentaries around a central text. That is a lovely image.
Where I think I would challenge you is on your understanding of Jewish identity in terms of the Jew as the perennial outsider, the disturber of the peace, the person who lives, as it were, without a home in language — like Heine, Kafka — the Jew as a symbol of homelessness.
I don’t believe that is true of Jews and Judaism. It is true of a particular, brief and ultimately tragic moment in Jewish history — for a whole generation, or several generations of Jews, who tried to assimilate into European culture and found themselves rejected, and thus found themselves neither at home in the new European culture that they were trying to enter, nor in the old Jewish identity that they had abandoned. That was a glorious, creative moment but ultimately tragic — and it was you yourself, George, who told us that tragedy is not a Jewish genre.
For myself, I believe that Jews made a terrible mistake when they stopped defining themselves as a people loved by God and started defining themselves as a people hated by the gentiles. That was a bad move and could lead only to that prolonged ambivalence, even self-hatred, about which, for instance, I quoted a few in The Guardian last week, but one I didn’t quote — Frederick Raphael, who said:
“I feel myself alien from everyone. That is my Jewish identity.”
Or, as Amos Oz said when I had a dialogue with him last year in Israel, he said:
“I’m not sure if I’m going to agree with you, Chief Rabbi, but then again I don’t usually agree with myself.”
So I think Jewish identity is less homeless and less conflicted than that.
Secondly, clearly about Israel, George, you and I will have much to say — especially at this tragic moment when this evening we have just had really tragic news of yet another suicide bomb claiming Jewish lives, this time in Meah Shearim.
Your view, George, which you have expressed with great clarity, is that Jews are at home not in space but in time. Trees have roots; human beings have legs. However, I believe that — though I understand and respect that view — after the Holocaust it was no longer tenable.
You wrote in an early essay of yours entitled A Kind of Survivor that the Jews are always the valuable irritants in a culture and, as a result, they are hated. You wrote these words:
“The chauvinist will snarl at his heels but it is in the nature of a chase that those who are hunted are in advance of the pack.”
Now, George, that wasn’t true. And even, to use Isaiah Berlin’s phrase, “If Jews are not hedgehogs but foxes, the fox sometimes gets caught.”
Not everyone was in advance of the pack and six million Jews did get caught. Therefore, I believe that after the Holocaust Jews needed, and still need, defensible space: home in the sense defined by the American poet Robert Frost as, “the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”
Therefore, I cannot agree with you on Israel — but I hope that we can disagree with courtesy and respect.
Finally, God Himself and the way of God — which, in Judaism, is intimately related to the ethical. You remember that God says about Abraham that “I have chosen him so that he will instruct his household, his descendants afterwards” — veshamru derech Hashem la’asot tzedakah umishpat — “so that they will keep the way of God, doing righteousness and justice.”
Those key words: mishpat — retributive justice, the rule of law; tzedakah — distributive justice, care for the poor and, today, the world’s poor — and those other two words, chessed and rachamim — key to the Jewish experience. Chessed — covenantal love. Rachamim — compassion or mercy. Judaism is an ethical system and it is rooted in reverence of God.
Now you, George — if I read you correctly (and correct me if I’m wrong) — have placed an enormous faith in art, in literature, and even in those modes of human expression like mathematics and music that reach beyond words. You, therefore, have placed your faith in culture.
But, at the same time, you, more than anyone else, have reminded us that civilisation at crucial moments failed to civilise. There were string quartets, as you remind us, playing in Auschwitz, Birkenau, as a million and a quarter Jews went to their death. Most of the people present at the Wannsee Conference who planned the Final Solution had PhDs. Civilisation does not civilise — or, as you wrote in Bluebeard’s Castle, it was only a very brief move in time and in thought from Nietzsche’s statement of the death of God to the death, or attempted death, of the people of God.
Therefore, one of the great questions I have to ask you, George, is where you will find the source of ethics in the 21st century — when we are faced with fateful choices of the kind that mankind has never faced before: when we have, through terror or warfare or environmental devastation or, who knows, even genetic manipulation, the capacity to destroy life on earth.
I believe that morality must be founded in a sense of the sacred, of the sanctity of life in the image of God. Without the sacred, can we have an ultimate and sure foundation for morality?
Those are the questions I’d love to ask you, George, and I hand over to you.
Professor George Steiner:
I am more honoured and moved than I can say by Jonathan’s reading; by the generosity of his questions. Really, is there anything to add? Think of these as very tentative footnotes of thanks.
Why have we survived? The Greeks founded almost every major thought in science by which we still live. The Romans were formidable: they told us of law, of the State, of the arts of war and of peace. Many other peoples one could name. We are still here and, with the fascinating exception of the Chinese (perhaps we can come back to that), we are the only ones. So the question is: Why are we still here?
For a practising, believing Jew — not a difficult question. The promise to Abraham, the covenant with God. If we cannot, or not readily, avail ourselves of that reinsurance, perhaps there is another approach? I believe we are here because we have an enormous task — which is to teach human beings to be each other’s guests.
The greatest of all modern philosophers used a very powerful German word, Geworfenheit — “thrownness.” We are thrown into life. Neither you nor I have the slightest clue why one is born blind, another with genius; one in the terrible poverty of a Somali slum, another in wealth and privilege. Not a clue. We are thrown into life. We are guests of life. We are guests, and the task of a guest is to leave the dwelling-place of his host, if he can, even a little better than he found it. To be guests of life, to be guests of each other. If we don’t learn to live as guests and help others, it is very possible that this human race could destroy itself.
To be a guest is a very difficult condition. I have no illusions about that. Hosts get tired of their guests. They chafe at having let them in at all. It is an agonisingly difficult condition. It means, as my father taught me — to have your luggage packed, always. It saved us. “Have your luggage packed.” Above all, don’t howl if you have to leave. It is endlessly interesting and exciting. Endlessly. If I’ve been, on the whole, excluded probably from more great universities than most, it’s been marvellous. You have to learn new languages. You have to learn new civilisations, new skills. It is an immensely privileged condition because no city is not worth leaving when it turns unjust, cruel. No city is not worth leaving. You walk out! Because there are things you must not accept or be implicated in — under any circumstance.
I can handle a human being if I know that there is in him or her an absolute, a non-negotiable. It need not be rational. It need not be demonstrable. We do not know, I think, the deep sources of our convictions. They are immensely complex — but I hope each of you has, at two in the morning, somewhere, the absolute non-negotiable line. And if you know what it is — nothing can happen to you. Nothing important.
For me, it has always been that to torture another human being is the non-negotiable. The absolute non-negotiable. You walk out! And if a State says that we have to torture in order to survive — I am not a political scientist, I am not a military intelligence expert — who am I to object? But I have the right to say: The survival of that State is not worth it. To torture another human being is to violate what vestige there may be left in this wretched human race of a God presence. No political gain is worth that. So everyone has in him different non-negotiables. As long as he knows which they are, I repeat, morally you have ballast. You can be safe. Not from persecution. Not from secular ruin. But from something infinitely more important: safe from not knowing who you are.
The Diaspora has been in a terribly dangerous, unwelcome or welcome condition as guests. When Jonathan speaks of being in a nation or community — oh, let him beware! There is no such thing. Overnight — he is too young to know that or to remember it — overnight, those of us who have been brought up in France, the nation of the Dreyfus Affair which had gone to the brink of self-destruction to clear Dreyfus in that immense moment of Voltairean outrage and justice for a Jew, that nation announced that no Jew had citizenship any more. Overnight.
That was before the Nazis made any move. That came from Vichy, from Monsieur Xavier Vallat. And this included the crippled and people with three Croix de Guerre from Verdun and people from families who had been crucial in the French Revolution and even before. Overnight. You are nothing. You have no protection in the law, no protection anywhere. Don’t imagine that you are a national of a nation. Although it may seem to you utterly insane, it can happen anywhere. It can happen anywhere. We are guests.
I say again: to be a guest is really enormously important and privileged because human beings are going to have to learn to be each other’s guests or they will perish. It is not I, for God’s sake — it is Weizmann who made the key statement. It is not a polite statement. Don’t be angry. I am quoting him: “We Jews are dung. Scatter us and we shall fertilise the earth into life. Put us in a heap and we stink.”
It was a bleakly prophetic insight. A terribly prophetic insight.
To be someone who causes the world not to go to sleep — the prophets tell of “watching in the night” — insomnia is a very unpleasant condition but it leads to a lot of thinking. We are not loved for it. In France at the moment, where they think very hard on these things, a very dangerous word has been launched: Judaïphobe. Not anti-Semitism. Careful. Judaïphobe, meaning two things — superb ambiguity. The fear the Jew has of the other, and the other’s fear of the Jew — in a dialectical relationship. La Judaïphobe.
It is not only that we disturb. It is that many liberal, scholarly, decent, humane beings — I find them in the common rooms around me, to give a trivial example — cannot but feel that were it not for the Jew, and particularly the Middle Eastern tragedy, the world would come to rest, or partial rest, or have a bit of breathing space. There might not have been September 11th. And that is said by decent human beings, caring human beings — but very worried ones.
It’s a very dangerous thing to be a Jew — and an immensely privileged one. I believe we are a chosen people — but in a quite different sense. We are “chosen” to try and make others begin to see that they must live as each other’s guests.
This entails some very small, almost embarrassingly small, practicalities. To come down to earth with a hard thump.
Teach your children languages. At a time when this country, in some ways now a third world country without sunshine, is about to abolish what remains of language teaching — let no Jew play that game. The more languages you know, the more you understand the infinite wealth of the human presence, of its cultures, of its possibilities — but, above all, you might be able to earn your living somewhere else. And that helps a great deal. And it’s a marvellous thing: the Jews were very great linguists — among the most gifted of linguists. They have been for a long time. Now that is fading.
Secondly, once in a while — oh not every day! but once in a while — suggest to your children that making money is probably the most boring and sterile of human activities. That almost anything else is more interesting, more creative. And we are the only culture (I’ve asked my Chinese friends about this) — we are the only one which has a blessing, a liturgical blessing, for the family whose child is a scholar. Now that’s what I call a lekach! I wouldn’t trade that for anything. For a child is a scholar: you thank God for that. I found no blessing for bankers or insurance clerks.
Teach your children that there is no exile on this earth except from decency. Yes, one can be exiled from decency, from honesty, from the attempt to pursue truth. That is a terrible ostracism. Otherwise, there are no exiles. And if, tomorrow, we had to be — Jonathan and I — in Indonesia, first of all we would learn Indonesian. It would do us a hell of a lot of good! I’ve got very lazy about my languages. Secondly, the first job would not be very good. The second would already be better. And the last thing I would do is howl to the Lord God saying, “How could You do this to me?!”
I think He would answer, “That’s what you’re here for.”
So there are small practicalities for one’s children. Let me put this as gravely and seriously as I can: to be a Jew is to try — failing, I know — but to try to diminish the weight of hatred in this world. That hatred has never been blazing more intensely than today. And it is no use — forgive me, Jonathan — to invoke God.
The Hindu — as he burns alive the children of the Muslim, tonight, tomorrow, it’s every day now; they are burning children alive, pouring petrol over them, throwing them into the fire — invokes his God, and invokes him passionately and sincerely and with prayers of great ancientness and, perhaps, formal duty.
I was with colleagues in Belfast where a university professor of one persuasion said to me, “You won’t understand me but I would die happily if I could take ten of the bastards with me!” A university professor.
So let’s have no illusions about invoking God as a guarantor of even minimal decency. And until Hindu and Islam, north and south Belfast, Basque and Spain — forgive me, the list is so long now it is unbearable — stop seeing in hatred their only fulfilment: it’s a career; it’s a profession to have a Kalashnikov and to hate — we don’t have a chance. None of us.
And it may be the very perilous, very perilous, ever-to-be re-begun task — the day task and the night task — of the Jew, to try — I repeat: try, try, not to succeed but to try — to diminish, be it by an iota, the weight of loathing which now blazes in this world (and which, of course, as Jonathan in a powerful address three days ago said he feels now also in this country) and rising all around us.
It is by opposing hatred, wherever and whenever; it is by saying “I would like to come and live among you.” And what the Greeks regard as the holiest of all acts — to welcome a stranger into your house: xeinos polisetinen oikeya [phonetic] — where the word “stranger” becomes the word “friend,” xeinos.
It’s by trying to do something like that — I know how difficult it is — that we, I think, may come to understand why we have survived. Thank you.
Chair:
I am going to call upon the Chief Rabbi to respond in a moment but, as I say, in terms of questions, you are now free to start filling in your sheets to be handed in.
We have, therefore, the battle-lines set. Professor Sacks talks of Israel: Jews need a defensible space. Professor Steiner says: No, no. Stay here, we should live among strangers. We are each other’s guests.
Professor Sacks says: Where do you find the source of ethics? Professor Steiner says that it is no use to invoke God — that God is not going to be able to save us from the perils.
I thought possibly that Professor Steiner’s response about the dangers of Judaïphobe, of all the dangers that the Jews were in in France, and that Professor Sacks has been speaking about in his lecture this week — I thought perhaps there was this meeting of minds: that perhaps there was the agreement that antisemitism is such a serious threat to us all that perhaps the answer is that we should take advantage of Israel and the defensible space that Professor Sacks speaks about. Anyway, over to you, Chief Rabbi.
Jonathan Sacks:
Well, George, thank you for those very, very thought-provoking words and, of course, you began by saying that there is only perhaps one civilisation as old as ours, namely: China. As part of my responsibilities, I still seem to be Chief Rabbi of Hong Kong. That makes me kind of de facto Chief Rabbi of China.
[Interjection from George Steiner: “I’d love the job if you’d recommend me!”]
George, shall I tell you this wonderful story? When I became Chief Rabbi in 1991, somebody gave me a book, a directory of world Jewish communities. It had a little paragraph on each country in the world and its Jewish community. In 1991, the entry for China read as follows: “China: population 1 billion. Jewish population: 5.”
And I remember saying to Elaine, “I promise you this: that if there are five Jews in China, I guarantee you two things: number one, there are six shuls. And number two, someone, somewhere is saying: The Jews are running the country.”
However, the fact is that I do love China because, of all the great civilisations, it is perhaps the only one which did not have an indigenous tradition of antisemitism.
When we were in Hong Kong last October for the centenary of the old synagogue there, Ohel Leah, that lovely man Mr Tung Chee-hwa (Chris Patten’s replacement in Hong Kong) said to me, “Chief Rabbi, we Chinese have a very ancient civilisation and you Jews have a very ancient civilisation.” (This is a south-east Asia joke, George, so I’m sure you’ll follow this!) He said, “We’ve been around for 5,000 years; you Jews have been around for 6,000 years. What I want to ask you is: What did you do for the first thousand years when you had no Chinese takeaways?”
I said, “Mr Tung, you want to know what we did for those first thousand years? We complained about the food.”
However, George, I am now going to disagree with you and I hope, please — I want to communicate that I do so respectfully because I do mean that yours is a voice that we must hear. It’s an important voice in the conversation. The fact that I disagree with that voice should not, I hope, imply any lack of respect.
When I did this conversation with Amos Oz in Israel last May at Bar Ilan University, I saw on the programme that it was held under the auspices of the “Such-and-such Chair in Judaism and Civility.” The fascinating thing is that when they came to translate that into Hebrew, they found that after 4,000 years the Hebrew language has no word that means “civility.”
However, I hope, George, that I’ll behave with derech eretz.
One, to correct you — or just some factual points. Judaïphobe is not a modern word invented in France. It was invented by a Russian writer, Judah Leib Pinsker, in his 1882 pamphlet Auto-Emancipation.
Two, we have a blessing not only on Jewish scholars, on children who are scholars, but much more generously, George, the rabbis 2,000 years ago coined (and this is something special) a blessing for non-Jewish scholars: asher natan mei-chokhmato le-vasar va-dam. So we never took a narrowly chauvinistic view of the Jewish passion for scholarship because we recognised that others — Greeks, Romans, etc. — had their own distinguished scholarly traditions.
Three, you quoted a very moving remark in Greek about loving the stranger and welcoming him into your home. George, we said that a long time earlier. I would have wished you to have said it in Hebrew: gedolah hachnasat orchim mikabalat penei ha-Shechinah — Greater is welcoming in strangers than even welcoming the Divine Presence. Even the Greeks didn’t say it as beautifully as that, and I will return to that remark in a few moments.
George, I agree with you: we are guests. We are guests. That is a fundamental axiom of the biblical imagination. In the 25th chapter of the book of Vayikra (Leviticus) there is a stunning statement, George, which I hope you will hear in its full depth because it is so close to what you were saying. God says to the Israelites: veha’aretz lo timacher letzmitut — the land, the earth, shall never be sold in perpetuity — ki li kol ha’aretz — for all the land is Mine (there is no ultimate human ownership in land) — ki gerim ve-toshavim atem imadi — which more or less means “you are My guests, you are My temporary residents.”
We even have a festival of homelessness. It is called Sukkot, when we move from our home to a shack, open to the elements — the wind and the rain — and this “third world country without sun,” which is a particularly poignant sort of thing to do. And do you know what we call this “festival of homelessness”? Just listen to this. We call that festival z’man simchateinu — the time of our rejoicing. We can be homeless, and yet rejoice.
And that principle, that ontology of homelessness, is at the very essence of Jewish ethics. I pointed out that there is one verse in the Bible — Leviticus 19:18 — which Christianity took from us and then claimed for its own as you will see in every Gideon Bible you see in your hotel room: ve’ahavta le-re’acha kamocha — you shall love your neighbour as yourself. And Christianity took that over.
There is a much more fundamental axiom, George, which appears not once but, according to our sages, 36 times in the Mosaic books. I did a computer search and it does appear 36 times: ve’ahavtem et ha-ger — you shall love the stranger — ki ger hayitem be’eretz Mitzrayim — because you know what it feels like to be a stranger.
To love the neighbour, George, is easy. The neighbour is somebody like you. To love the stranger is hard because the stranger is somebody not like you. And that is the very essence of Jewish ethics.
To love the stranger was the theme of my Rosh Hashanah television programme this year and it touched a chord with Sikhs, with Muslims, with Hindus in this country and they wrote to thank me for it. But, George, something happened. It happened ten years before I was born. The Evian Conference of 1938, when Jews were no longer welcome guests in Germany and other parts of Europe, when European leaders knew that a terrible thing was about to happen, and when the great nations of the world came together in Evian and everyone said, in so many words, “We have no room for you.”
When I fly in an aeroplane — we bumped into one another a little while back — and I look over those vast, empty expanses of virtually every country in the world and I think: That world had no room for Jews. George, at that point we couldn’t rely on being guests.
Here I want to make a fundamental point. You must not elide this distinction: there is a difference between being God’s guests on earth and being the guests of other human beings on earth. God doesn’t chuck us out. God doesn’t murder us when He doesn’t like us any more. God doesn’t ban us. God doesn’t exile us. We can be God’s guests. After Evian, we can’t rely on being human beings’ guests.
That is why the whole history of our “guest-hood” is so tragic. England threw us out in 1290. The first country to expel its Jews after the Romans. The English expulsion was followed by a whole series — hundreds of them — throughout Europe, culminating in that horrendous narrative of the Jews in Spain where they had once experienced their Golden Age. Spain’s Kristallnacht took place in 1391. For 101 years Jews were intermittently persecuted, forcibly converted, subject to the Inquisition, called — even if they converted — Marranos, which is the Spanish for “pigs,” until they were finally thrown out en masse in 1492.
George, we can’t live in a world like that. That is why after the Holocaust it became necessary for Jews not only to be guests everywhere, but to be hosts somewhere.
Israel had to be that place, where Jews could be at home. And yes, I agree with you, George — there is a risk: because when Jews have to learn not only how to be guests but how to be hosts, they face the ultimate challenge of Judaism.
Because, George, when the Jewish people are guests and oppressed and powerless, they can be as righteous as Isaiah and Jeremiah. But, George, if we cannot create a state and a society which respects the rights of strangers and minorities — in which, for instance, Christians and Muslims, Baha’is and Druze, can worship freely, can have their schools, can serve in the army, can have members of Parliament, and can be ministers in a government — if we cannot create that society, then we, the Jewish people, are guilty of the ultimate desecration of God’s name.
That is the challenge. That is what Israel is about. And it is the toughest moral challenge Jews have ever had to face.
George, I’m not saying that Israel is perfect. Of course not. You know the old Jewish joke — the optimist says, “This is the best of all possible worlds.” And the pessimist says, “You’re right.”
But I want to say this to you. You think we are surrounded by hatred now. Let me tell you: There was a time when we were surrounded by love. I’m talking about the years immediately after the Holocaust, when the whole world sympathised with the Jewish people. Jews were loved — or pitied — and Jewish identity was at its peak of acceptability.
Do you know what Jews said at that moment, George? In 1947, David Ben-Gurion, in the middle of that moment, said this:
“It is not what the world says but what the Jews do that will determine our fate.”
George, at the height of Jewish acceptability, we declared a Jewish state and — from that moment on — we were hated. And we’ve been hated every day since.
Now you might say that was a tragedy, that we should have stayed acceptable. But I want to say that we did it with open eyes. And it was not a tragic moment — it was the single most morally courageous act taken by a people in 2,000 years of exile.
You said, George, that no city is not worth leaving when it becomes unjust or cruel. I want to say something even deeper: There is no city not worth staying in and trying to make just and kind. And that is what Israel means to me.
Yes, I agree: Jews have to be God’s guests on earth. But somewhere, they also have to be hosts. Because only then can we apply to ourselves what we have demanded of others for all time.
That’s why I believe in Israel — as a deeply moral and spiritual project, fraught with risk, scarred by war, surrounded by hate, and yet — still — a place where the Jewish spirit tries to build a society of tzedek and chessed, of justice and compassion, not only for itself, but as a model of what the prophetic imagination was always about.
Chair (Joshua Rozenberg):
Thank you both very much. I think we should move on to some of the audience questions.
First question: “You both seem to agree that Jews have a unique moral role to play in the world. But isn’t that idea of Jewish ‘chosenness’ problematic in a pluralistic, egalitarian age?”
Jonathan Sacks:
Great question. Let’s be clear: “chosen” does not mean “better.” The Torah never says Jews are better than others. What it does say is: we are chosen for a particular task — to bear witness to the presence of God in the world, and to live lives of justice, compassion, and holiness.
To be chosen is not a privilege; it’s a responsibility. It doesn’t confer status — it imposes obligations. That’s why Amos could say, “You alone have I known among all the nations of the earth — therefore I will punish you for all your sins.” That is not a badge of pride. That’s a warning.
And in our day, in a world that deeply values diversity, I think it’s entirely legitimate to say: every culture, every people, has something to contribute to the human conversation. Judaism has never said it has a monopoly on truth — only that it has a particular voice. And that voice, rooted in the experience of slavery, exile, and return, is one the world still needs to hear.
George Steiner:
Yes — but I would add this. The notion of being “chosen,” however defined, must be accompanied by a radical humility. Because the history of the 20th century — and indeed, most of human history — shows how easily we betray our own values.
As soon as we begin to see ourselves as morally privileged, we risk forgetting how fallible we are. One of the things I’ve always admired in the Jewish tradition is the role of the prophet: the internal critic. No other people preserved the words of those who rebuked them so fiercely. That’s remarkable.
So yes — if chosen means being held to account more rigorously, being asked to speak out, to act justly — then it is a very daunting task. But let’s never confuse it with superiority.
Chair:
Another question here: “Professor Steiner, you seem sceptical of statehood. But don’t people need a state to be safe?”
George Steiner:
Yes, of course. That is the overwhelming argument after the Shoah. After the inaction of the Evian Conference — after the death camps — it was impossible not to conclude that Jews needed a refuge, a state.
But that doesn’t remove the paradox. The Jewish people are strongest — intellectually, morally, spiritually — when they are outside power. That is when the voice of conscience is most acute. As soon as we are in power, we face the temptation to become what we once suffered under.
So my caution is not against statehood as such — it is against forgetting what our exile taught us: that power can corrupt, that the stranger must be protected, that the ultimate loyalty is not to the flag, but to the covenant.
Jonathan Sacks:
I agree — which is why Israel must always be more than a state. It must be a moral enterprise. And it must be constantly self-critical, as the prophets were.
But I would also say: We waited long enough. 2,000 years is long enough. Jews have dreamed of returning to Zion for longer than any other people has yearned for any other land.
And I say this to my friends: If we cannot recognise the right of Jews to their land, after all they’ve suffered — then we have created a world in which Jews are destined to be perpetual victims. And that is not a world I am willing to accept.
Chair (Joshua Rozenberg):
This has been an extraordinary evening. Before we close, I’d like to invite each of you to share one last thought. A takeaway for us, as we leave this room — perhaps even a note of hope?
George Steiner:
Hope?
I think of the Hebrew prophets — not because they promised an easy future, but because they never gave up the belief that the future could be redeemed. That’s very different from optimism. Optimism is a mood. Hope is a decision.
What I ask of Jews — and of all of us — is to insist that the flame of conscience not go out. That we remain awake. That we refuse to become indifferent to cruelty. That we teach our children the art of being strangers — and the deeper art of welcoming strangers into our midst.
If we can keep alive that sense of moral restlessness, that insistence on human dignity — then, yes, I allow myself a little hope.
Jonathan Sacks:
I agree with George. Judaism is not an easy faith, but it is a hopeful one. We don’t believe the world is perfect, but we believe it can be made better. And that it’s our job — yours and mine — to do just that.
Jews have never accepted the world as it is. We have always insisted on how it ought to be. I believe the 21st century will be the age when religions will either bring a message of peace, or they will bring conflict. There is no third option. And it is essential that the Jewish voice — a voice that has known exile and return, suffering and survival, alienation and homecoming — be heard in that conversation.
So I say: Let us teach our children to love — not hate. Let us be true to our faith, without being false to others. Let us bring light — even if it’s only a small one — to a world that sometimes seems all too dark. And if we do that — then, yes, there is hope. And yes, we have earned our place in the human story.
Chair:
Ladies and gentlemen, you’ve witnessed something special tonight — not just two brilliant minds, but two searching souls.
On behalf of all of us, thank you to Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks and Professor George Steiner.
Thank you — and good night.
Applause.
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