Episode 4: Future Tense (Part 2)

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. 

This episode is sponsored in the memory of Alvin and Anita Kaplan, (Avraham Aharon HaCohen ben Moshe Nissan HaCohen V’ Devora and Chana Perl bat Malka Zissel and David).

You're listening to episode four of Books & Beyond. In our last episode, we explored the context, themes, and agenda of Future Tense, the second book in our series, in conversation with Dr. Mijal Bitton. We've titled this book, The Narrative, as it delves into the Jewish story, how we frame it, why it matters, and how it shapes our calling and mission in the world. In a post 7.10 world, this question has become more urgent than ever. In today's episode, we'll tackle the pressing issue of antisemitism, its role in defining the Jewish story, the centrality of the State of Israel to our sense of peoplehood, and the question of whether Rabbi Sacks optimistic vision for Judaism still holds true, or whether it requires rethinking in light of contemporary realities.

Tanya [Narration]: One of the deepest human needs is the desire to belong. Belonging to something greater than ourselves gives us meaning and purpose. Stories define us, they shape who we are, and give us a sense of identity. They help us answer the most fundamental questions of existence. Who are we? Where do we come from? What do we live for?

Stories provide a way of imposing meaning on what might otherwise feel like an arbitrary existence. This is not only true for individuals, but also for nations. Judaism is a religion of storytelling. The Torah more than just a book of law or theology is a book of stories because storytelling is the most authentic expression of identity.

Rabbi Sacks zt"l: Nations need identity. Identity needs memory. And memory depends on the story we tell ourselves and our children as to who we are.

Tanya [Narration]: In his 2009 book Future Tense, Rabbi Sacks explores how we should tell our story as Jews in the modern world.

He frames the narrative that he believes should guide us. A few years ago, my mother treated us to a rare outing in Israel, tickets to the theatre, and we went to see the Israeli production of Fiddler on the Roof. To my horror, I realised on the way to the hall that I'd made a grave parenting mistake. I'd never shown my daughters the film.

As the musical came to the end and the curtain closed on Tevye and his family leaving Anatevka, the crowd obviously were clapping and applauding, and my 18-year-old daughter looked at me and said, is that the end? So I said, yes. She said, but it can't be, it's not a happy ending. I glanced at my husband and we smiled each other and we said, welcome to the story of the Jews in exile. But it was at that moment I had this sudden epiphany. I knew that my children's experience of growing up in Israel was different to mine, but I don't think I'd fully grasped how different their narrative was.

This was a child who from birth had watched the most advanced jets fly over the shores of Israel every Independence Day. She was a child for whom a sovereign, democratic, free nation that could defend itself was just a given. She was a child who lived in a world where every day being Jewish was the end of her story.

She couldn't understand the fear, the vulnerability, the fragility of life in exile. She knew, obviously, that there were people that hated us. But she also knew that we had the means to defend ourselves against those people. My husband and I were both born and raised in London, with Holocaust surviving grandparents. And we were always, I think, maybe subconsciously aware of the precariousness of Jewish life in the diaspora. There was always this kind of sense of readiness for the next wave of antisemitism. But my daughter's perception of the story was very different to ours.

There was another occasion where that epiphany was again confirmed. It actually happened to be two days before October 7th. My family and I on, Chol Hamoed Succot, during Succot, we camped at the foot of Masada and we woke at 4 a.m. to climb to the top of the mountain and watch the sunrise. And as we were trekking up, we were telling our kids the story of how the Roman army camped at the base of the mountain for two years, even though recently there have been articles questioning that fact, but we were telling them the story and how they were determined to destroy the Jews whose only crime was being Jewish. And my 14 year old asked me in amazement, wait hold on, so the biggest empire in the world wasted a platoon of soldiers camping at the foot of a mountain just to kill a few Jews. Yep, I replied, that's just about right. She couldn't understand it, but two days later, she didn't need to ask the question, she was living out the answer.

 Between Masada and Fiddler on the Roof, I learned a lot about the narrative my kids have absorbed in The Land of Milk and Honey.

I also understood why October the 7th was not just devastating in its immediate impact, but perhaps even more profoundly in its psychological effect, because it shattered the foundations of our perceived national identity, of our national narrative. In the words of Micha Goodman, October the 7th was "regards from history".

Israeli kids for whom Fiddler on the Roof and Masada are just legends of a time long past, one day in October for 24 hours, they witnessed a visceral reminder of what it means to be a people without a land, without an army, and without a government. So this question of what the Jewish narrative should or does look like is something we are all grappling with today.

But it's also the question Rabbi Sacks was grappling with over a decade ago when he wrote Future Tense. In the previous episode, we discussed "the call", the way in which Rabbi Sacks frames the Jewish mission as one of protest and action through "covenantal responsibility". This book, Future Tense, we are calling "The Narrative", because here Rabbi Sacks defines the contours and the aspirations of the Jewish story.

And the Jewish story, as much as it is about the past, is also very much about the future.

Rabbi Sacks zt"l: I've had this feeling that the Jewish people is marching boldly in the wrong direction. We have had a very negative view of Jewish life. We think about the Holocaust. We think about antisemitism. We think about the isolation of Israel. We think about the Jews who are marrying out. And the whole assimilation thing.

So whenever you hear something Jewish, it's negative. Now, that can very easily become a self fulfilling prophecy because people don't identify with negative. Now, how did we, the people who celebrate life, who see God down here in the pleasures and delights of this world, how did we ever get into this negative mindset?

So, my feeling was I had to write something to say, guys, this is the wrong way of understanding what it is to be a Jew, and if we understand that the wrong way, we will take our people in the wrong direction.

Tanya [Narration]: So for Rabbi Sacks, the Jewish should be less about the tragedies that have befallen us in the past and more about how we transform that adversity into agency for the future. In other words, who we become will be defined by how we perceive ourselves and our story. For Rabbi Sacks, this story should not be solely about antisemitism, but about so much more.

Dara: It's a famously literary culture. I'm basically saying like, you know, why do we care how much, how all these, about all these details of how these people died, if we really ostentatiously don't care how these people lived. This was always really important to me to focus on this angle. I've spent decades as a Jewish writer and scholar of Yiddish and Hebrew literature. And it was always really important to me to not make this about, like, what the world did to the Jews. I mean, I used to do, when I would give talks for my book, first, you know, my five novels, all of which are, deal very deeply with Jewish culture.

You know, I would, I used to ask people in the audience in my book talks, like, you know, how many people here can name four concentration camps? And, know, most people in a bookstore can do that. I would then ask the same people, how many people here can name four Yiddish writers? Not as many people can do that, except that the problem is, you know, 80 percent of the people who were murdered in the Shoah were Yiddish speakers.

Rabbi Sacks is doing something similar to what Saul Barone does, the, 20th century historian when he talks about the lachrymose view of Jewish history, right? This is lachrymose meaning full of tears, right? This idea that you know, Jewish history is just sort of this litany of catastrophe.

And of course, Barone and Rabbi Sacks are both pushing back against this idea and making this argument for the vitality of Jewish life. I was an adherent of this view for many, many years, for really my entire career. And always avoided writing about antisemitism, always avoided focusing on it in my work and in my writing and with my scholarship,

Tanya [Narration]: that was Dara Horn. She's an award winning novelist whose early works delved into historical fiction and the rich Yiddish cultural heritage of Judaism. But she really became a household name in 2021 with the release of her book People Love Dead Jews. I remember reading it when it first came out.

It was absorbing and gripping and frankly quite unsettling. The book reveals incredible, often obscure, stories of antisemitism. But at its core, Dara puts forward a challenging thesis, that there's a strange, almost obsessive reverence for dead Jews, as if memorialising them lets the world off the hook from confronting the deeper question, which is why, time and again, do we have these endless stories of tortured, brutalised and murdered Jews.

So instead of facing the root causes of antisemitism, the world is content with building museums and teaching holocaust lessons as if that alone is enough.Reading Dara's book when i did, brought me back to Rabbi Sacks' argument in Future Tense, where he too grapples with the idea of antisemitism. But rather than documenting it, as Dara does, he offers a diagnosis and more important, perhaps, a remedy. And that remedy is aimed less at the non Jewish world, interestingly enough, and more at the Jewish community itself. Rabbi Sacks argues that Judaism cannot just be formed from a response to the external hatred. Actually, it has to be much more than that, if it's going to have a future. So I wanted to ask Dara, after years of writing about Judaism's cultural heritage, why she made this pivot to exploring it through the lens of antisemitism, kind of from a positive Judaism to a negative Judaism.

And I wondered, was there anything in Rabbi Sacks' narrative of Future Tense that spoke to her along the way?

Dara: Okay, so look, I avoided writing or talking or thinking about antisemitism for the first 20 years of my career. And the only reason I pivoted to this was because I was exploring a perversity in what I discovered my non Jewish editors wanted. What I noticed was that this was around 2018 when I started thinking about this differently was, I just was started getting bombarded by requests from editors at non Jewish publications to write about dead Jews. And this was often in response to, I mean, this was when there was a, there was a massacre at this, uh, synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in the United States.

Um, you know, there were some of these like high profile antisemitic violence in the United States. You know, a few incidents, and there were some other things like that where I kept being asked to write about this. And so this book was my response to sort of, why am I so uncomfortable fulfilling these requests from my editors at non Jewish publications? Why is this the only thing they care about? So I wrote this book as an intellectual exploration of an idea, to me this was like, I'm just going to step away from my novels for one project and then go back to writing novels. What happened after this book was published was that I discovered that I had no idea how much this affects people's lives because I was inundated with responses from readers.

 And it was like, it was like a template. It was like every reader had the same response. All my Jewish readers are either writing to me, accosting me in person at events, however they're contacting me. All of my Jewish readers, all walks of life, religious people, secular people, old people, young people, different countries, all, it's like they're, it's like a template.

They all say exactly the same thing. They say, I felt uncomfortable my whole life. I never understood why your book articulated this for me. Thank you. And then they say, I never told anyone this before, but, and then they tell me some horror story of their own personal experience with antisemitism. And then they say, thanks for writing your book.

Tanya [Narration]: Discussing Dara's book and its reception within the Jewish community brings us back to a fundamental question that we addressed at the beginning. One that I think resonates throughout Future Tense, and that's the question of how do we define our story? Is our Jewish identity shaped primarily by the experiences of antisemitism?

Or should our sense of self go beyond reacting to external threats and emerge rather from a deeper, perhaps more internal orientation? Another question of what the role antisemitism plays in this process. I asked Dara about this.

Dara: In my book, what I am arguing for is not a return to the lacrimose view of Jewish history, but an awareness that you really can't understand Jewish life without engaging with this aspect of Jewish history, which frankly does not have to do with Jews, it has to do with the way that other civilisations surrounding Jewish civilisation chose to respond to Jewish civilisation. This is sort of like, you know, it's a problem within other civilisations and quite frankly has to do with empire and conquest. The civilisations we are living in are one way or another empires and Jewish civilisation is a sense of resistance to empire.

And this is whether it's a political empire like ancient ones, like, you know, Egyptians, Babylonians, you know, Persians, Greeks, Rome. And then you think about empires like Christianity and Islam, these were both traditions that were engaged in conquest in one way or another.

Obviously we have, there's modern civilisations where there's this assumption of conformity. And Jewish civilisation has been a resistance to that kind of conformity. And so to me, I don't think that there's this binary where you're deciding between a lacrimose view of Jewish history or to just focus on the vitality of Jewish life.

I think that a lot of the vitality of Jewish life has to do with this amazing creativity and resilience, which has come from this Jewish engagement with empires that have tried to conquer it. And I think that's just the reality that we're living in.

Tanya [Narration]: So for Dara, it seems that Judaism's creative energy stems from its resistance to assimilate into the prevailing civilisations that it existed within. And In the aftermath of 7.10, we observed a recurring pattern in Jewish history, that when faced with external threats, we instinctively reconnect with what Erica Brown in a previous episode referred to as our “thin identity”, or what Rabbi Soloveitchik called in his essay, A "Covenant of Fate".

And it's that deep, almost inexplicable bond to my people where their pain resonates as my own. That's the thin identity that we saw instinctively come out and emerge after 7.10, but can this fragile connection truly sustain a people over time? I wanted to explore this question, so I turned to someone whose career has been dedicated to combating antisemitism on the front lines for a few decades.

Michal: At this pivotal moment, we have not just the ability, but the responsibility to be in many ways awakened to not just remember the past and understand what it is that we see now based on our memory of the past. We do have that responsibility. And also on knowing that ultimately we will be okay. Ultimately, it's true that it will be okay, but it's not sufficient. That's optimism, that's not hope.

In addition to remembering, we have to reclaim, reclaim our indigeneity, reclaim Zionism, reclaim our identity, reclaim international law principles, reclaim those liberal values, reclaim the meaning of the word progress that progressive spaces post 10.7 actually exposed themselves for being not progressive at all, and finally to renew.

Tanya [Narration]: You're hearing Michal Cotler-Wunsh. She's Israel's special envoy for combating antisemitism and a senior policy and strategy advisor. Michal also served as the first Knesset liaison to the issue of the International Criminal Court and co founded the Inter Parliamentary Task Force to Combat Online antisemitism.

Michal: To renew the covenant that the late Rabbi Sacks speaks of so much, and it is not just the covenant of fate, it is the covenant of destiny, to quote the late Rabbi Soloveitchik, that says the covenant, whether it is to our own Ten Commandments, whether it is to the foundational international principles that we understand created that international rules based order, or whether it is to the covenant of each of our democracies, Canada, the United States, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and so on, or the foundational principles of France, right? Egalité, fraternité, liberté. Where are those when we see what's happening in France today? The understanding that remember, and reclaim, and renew are really the antidote to the three Ds. The covenant of fate defined by the three Ds, the demonisation, the delegitimisation, and the double standards as the mechanism that in the past barred the individual Jew and now bars the Jewish nation state.

Well, the antidote to that is the covenant of destiny, at the moment of time in which we live, that looks forward to the next hundred years, as you said, that remembers our history, that reclaims our identity, that renews that covenant, and in our case, when I look to the hundred years ahead, we have the Declaration of Independence.

The vision, mission, values of what this state is, the nation state of the Jewish people, a prototypical indigenous people, returned to an ancestral homeland after thousands of years of exile and persecution, committed to equality. That is the word cut out for us as a people and as a nation state in the next, you know, decades to come.

Tanya [Narration]: Michal's perspective aligns closely with the ideas in Future Tense. And that really shouldn't come as any surprise because Michal doesn't only sit on the Rabbi Sacks Legacy Board, but she's also deeply familiar with many of his works. Fun fact for our listeners, Michal's father Irwin Cotler, who held many prestigious roles in Canadian politics, is actually mentioned by Rabbi Sacks in Future Tense, in the chapter entitled, A People That Dwells Alone.

Rabbi Sacks recalls a moment after the 2001 Durban Conference, which, instead of fighting racism turned into this hate filled attack on Israel. And at the time, Irwin Kotler, who was an advisor to Canada's Minister of Foreign Affairs, warned that Israel was underestimating the power of NGOs in shaping a dangerous narrative.

He quoted in the meeting that Rabbi Sacks was in, Balaam the non-Jewish prophet, who said, Henam levadad yishkon, it's a people that dwells alone. Rabbi Sacks describes that moment as an epiphany. And he asks Irwin Cotler, what makes you so sure that Balaam meant those words as a blessing? Could you have intended them perhaps as a curse?

Surely being a pariah people is not a good thing. This moment for Rabbi Sacks really shapes the core argument of Future Tense. It's not good for Israel or the Jewish people to live in isolation. We're a people whose mission can only be achieved through engagement with the world, not standing apart from the world, says Rabbi Sacks.

But here's the big question. How do we engage when even our supposed allies seem to bet . In Future Tense, Rabbi Sacks introduces one of his most well known ideas, the analogy of antisemitism as a virus that mutates over time. So, I asked Michal for her take on this, and whether, during the Durban conference, there was already a sense that we were witnessing the emergence of this new strain of the virus, as Rabbi Sacks suggests in his book.

This is what she had to say.

Michal: I want to say first of all, alongside many human rights organisations and champions that were in attendance at the 2001 Durban Conference Against Racism, that turned into an antisemitic hate fest. The recognition that it was their life's work, i. e. human rights, that was co opted and weaponised to enable this mutation of antisemitism that actually intersects with Rabbi Sacks' analysis of antisemitism and the way that it mutates by latching onto the guiding social construct of the time, religion, science, and in our case, I'll call it the secular religion of our times, that is human rights. All of those in attendance at the 2001 Durban Conference Against Racism and in the buildup towards it, recognised that it was actually their life's work, their life's commitment that was co opted and weaponised, i.e. human rights, and recognised the dangers of the co-opting and weaponisation of this international rules-based order, if you will, and the human rights, infrastructure that was created to uphold, promote, and protect that international rules based order post World War II, so that never again, they recognised the danger of collapsing that infrastructure. Not just to the nation state of the Jewish people that was intended to be the state of the Jews, but was turned with this systematic co-opting and weaponisation, demonising, delegitimising, and applying double standards to the Jew among the nations rather than the state of the Jewish nation.

I do have to say that alongside The 2001 Durban Conference Against Racism, basically, I was going to say, peddling or enabling the blood libel of Israel's an apartheid state on every single university campus across North America there has been an Israel Apartheid Week. We're talking now 23 years of Israel Apartheid Week since that 2001 Durban Conference Against Racism. And then, you know, if we mark that moment in time, 2001 and fast forward to 2023, another very alarming sort of, moment on that timeline, if you will, is actually, and to me, the most Orwellian inversion of fact and of law of that international rules based order is none other than in 2023, the state of Israel, the Jew among the nations, being accused of none other than the crime of Genocide, a term that we should shudder when we utter, as my father taught me, right?

A term coined by Raphael Lemkin, whose entire family was annihilated in Auschwitz, who dedicated his life not only to terming, to giving a word or, or being able to describe the atrocities of the Holocaust, too terrible to imagine, but not too terrible to have happened.

Genocide then dedicating his life to the Convention for the Prevention and the Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, of course, of which Israel was one of the first signatories, that convention being utilised in the International Court of Justice by none other than South Africa to accuse the state of Israel Jew among the nations of the crime of genocide, even as it defends itself from genocidal terror proxies of a genocidal Islamic regime in Iran. When you ask, did it help? It helped in the understanding, and this is sort of maybe leads us into a people that dwells alone or not. In order for the people not to dwell alone, first of all, we have to recognise that we are a people.

But the moment in time of 2001 at Durban is actually the first step in what needs to happen for a people not to dwell alone. And that is for us to recognise that we are a people, right?

That the targeting of the Jewish nation state is not just Israel, or the state to which some of us, 40-45% of us currently live in, but actually a targeting of that people

Tanya [Narration]: I was really curious to hear what Dara thought about this. Being based in America right now, with years of experience and research on antisemitism under her belt, did she agree with Rabbi Sacks' idea of antisemitism as a virus that mutates over time? Michal highlighted for us that that this virus has found ways to infiltrate certain existing cultures, like the human rights paradigm that she brings in.

I wondered whether Dara had a different take on this issue.

Dara: What's most striking to me is how damn familiar all this stuff is and how old it is.

And I'm looking at, all these protests on campus where, they're harassing Jewish students and screaming at them that, you know, anti Zionism is not antisemitism, for example. That slogan was created by the KGB in the 1960s, and it actually predates that, it goes back to 1918, in the Soviet Union is just forming, it's the, Bolsheviks have overthrown the Tsar, they're waging civil war in the former Russian Empire. They create what are called the Yevsekia, the Jewish sections of the Communist Party, to get the Jews of the former Russian Empire on their side in the civil war. And their whole philosophy of the Yevseksia these Jewish sections of the communist party was, we are not antisemitic, we are just anti Zionist. And this is in 1918. You know, it's 30 years before the creation of the state of Israel. Pretty sure it's not about Netanyahu. And, of course, in the process of not being antisemitic and only being anti Zionist Oh, and by the way, of course, they're Bolsheviks, so they're also anti religious, so of course they love Jews, it's just that, you know, you can't practice Judaism, you can't support Zionism, you can't study Hebrew, and in the process of, you know, not being antisemitic and only being anti-Zionist, they managed to, you know, persecute, imprison, torture, and murder tens of thousands of Jews.

And then it's later, at the, you know, decades later, when the KGB exports these slogans to the Soviet Union at that point has client states in the developing world and of course in the Arab world. They have inroads in progressive circles in other Western countries and so this is how they disseminate these slogans.

So when you say like, oh, what's new about this? I'm like, oh God, this is so damn old. That's what's amazing to me is like, Like, really? We're at this again? You know, like, what, Zionism is racism, Zionism is genocide, Zionism is apartheid, Zionism is colonialism. This is, like, right out of the KGB playbook.

I'm like, really? We're going there?

Tanya [Narration]: It seems that both Dara and Michal agree that antisemitism is real, obviously, and today it's as virulent as ever. They both share Rabbi Sacks' views that it's like a virus constantly evolving and attacking in different ways and in different forms throughout history.

So that's the diagnosis. But do they see eye to eye on how it affects the nation state at the broader narrative of the Jewish people? And do they see eye to eye in the prognosis and perhaps even in the way to treat the diagnosis? On the one hand, the narrative of victimhood seems to resonate, right? Dara's bestseller, People Love Dead Jews, shows that these stories capture attention. People like to hear about the Jews as victims, but it might also be a clever way to unite Jews under the fragile threads of this covenant of fate that we spoke about. So in an era where for the first time in 2000 years, Jews have a sovereign state, do we still need or even do we want to lean in to this dead Jew narrative, to this narrative of victimhood? And how does the relationship between Israel and the diaspora perhaps shape or form this kind of thinking? I was interested to hear firstly what Michal thought about these questions.

Michal: So if you needed the perfect storm that removed or ripped off brutally many, many masks in order to be able to identify what it is that we see, it's actually at this moment in time where Jews that found themselves in progressive spaces until 10.7 all of a sudden were kicked out of those progressive spaces with all kinds of assumptions, true or not, by the way, and the majority of Jews self defined as Zionists, they believe in Israel's right to exist, then kicked out of those spaces.

Or Reform rabbis who had spent their life on interfaith work realised that they had no interfaith colleagues that would reach out to them, assuming that what it was that happened in Israel impacts them in a very real way, whether because they have family or or it's because their people has been attacked.

And and so I think that people love dead Jews in retrospect, and I quote Golda very often in this perspective, in a continuum of Dara Horn's book. The understanding of what Golda said, and that is that the world hates a Jew that hits back. The world loves us when we're to be pitied. Well, Israel, after thousands of years, is the Jew that can hit back.

For thousands of years, Jews could not hit back. So not only does the world have to recognise that Jews, oh, they're actually equal, now they have a nation state, that it too, not only can defend itself, must defend itself, and defending itself includes having to take proactive measures so that those that vowed to commit 10.7, not once again, not three times again, but a million times again, will be prevented from doing so.

Not only does the world have to recognise that, but we have to recognise it as a people with 45 percent of us here, 45 percent of us in North America, 10 percent in the rest of the world, recognising that we are bound together, not as two sides of the same coin, but as the same side of the same coin. So that Israel's safety and security is bound together with the safety and security of Jews around the world.

And the safety and security of Jews around the world is bound together with the safety and security of their nation state, whether they live here or not. And I think that it takes the conversation one step further in many ways, after thousands of years in which people loving dead Jews, by the way, only in retrospect, right? And a little elucidation of that happened, as we saw, it took maybe, three days for the complete turnaround, the moment the Jew had to defend ourselves and wasn't just murdered, burned, raped, mutilated, abducted, the moment the Jew had to defend ourselves, the tide turned. And that is the critical moment, an existential moment, that I believe that we're at, not just for the state of Israel as the Jew among the nations, not just for Jews around the world that are attacked for the very fact that Israel exists in this new strain of antisemitism as Rabbi Sacks describes that mutation, this new mutation of anti Zionism that negates Israel's very right to exist. And as my father taught me, "never again" is a prospective commitment. We cannot prevent the past. We can only never again prevent the recurrence of atrocities in the future. We have to remember the past, but they're not going to, present in the exact same way. What we have to do is be able to identify the threats in the present in order to be able to prevent recurrence in the future.

Tanya [Narration]: So Michal clearly does not think telling stories of the past is enough to provide a preventative mechanism for the future.

Surely the ultimate safeguard against "never again" is the existence of a sovereign Jewish state that can defend itself by, as Michal puts it, recognising the threats of the present. Rabbi Sacks frames it this way too. You just need to look at how he positions the chapter on antisemitism right next to the one on Israel as a beacon of hope. He clearly sees the importance of juxtaposing the two. And this is what really struck me when I read Dara's book. It was this kind of glaring absence of Israel in the narrative. I asked myself when I read it, how could it be that a book in 2021 on antisemitism does not mention Israel, which is arguably the modern day solution to everything the book discusses.

I was determined to ask her about this, and so I did.

Dara: People have interpreted this as if this was some kind of statement on my part that I don't reference Israel in the book. When I tell you the reason you're going to be so embarrassed that this is so damn stupid. I was supposed to come to Israel, I had a ticket. I was going to do a reported piece and then COVID happened and I couldn't go. And I had a book contract and I'm handing in a book. And I didn't want to write just a piece that was just general here's all my feelings about the 9 million times I've been to Israel before and whatever. No, I wanted to like go and interview people and do a thing. And I couldn't go, and I had a book contract, and it was due.

 That's first thing, but the other thing I will say is that, like, I feel like, as an American Jew, It's not my job to write about Israel, because there's so many people who could do that so much better than I can.

Tanya [Narration]: Okay. So there was a pragmatic reason Israel wasn't mentioned. And while Dara is a Zionist and certainly believes in the centrality of Israel as part of the solution to antisemitism, I wondered whether in a post 7.10 world she thinks Israel is still the answer to that problem of antisemitism. Was something fractured on that day?

Dara: I was going to say, if anything, what, what October 7th validated my idea in a way that is horrifying to me, which is that actually Zionism isn't the answer.

You know, unfortunately what you see is this is a problem everywhere An awareness of the irrational, the irrational situation that Jews find themselves in no matter where they live.

There is an irrationality to this, right? There's an irrationality to this, like, you know, there's whole political movements that are organised against this group of people. That is an irrational reality of, you know, certain vulnerable minorities.

And if you're in that vulnerable minority, there's a lot of ways you can think about that. And obviously, the most, number one, most important one of, way to think about that is to think about self-defence. And, that is, the triumph of Zionism is the ability for physical self defence. And that, October 7th hasn't changed because if it had changed that, October 7th would be happening day after day. And that is not what's happening. October 7th happened on October 7th, and we're still dealing with the aftermath of it, and the hostages are still there, and I'm not saying that there's not, you know, that we're not still living with it, but this is not the Holocaust. The Holocaust is October 7th is happening every single day. And there's nothing you can That is not the same. But the fact that Jews in Israel and in the diaspora both are dealing with a situation where you're dealing with this sort of irrational mass movements. I Think that you can't realistically deal with the situation of being Jewish in this world without being thinking through this problem.

Let's put it that way. You need to at least think through this problem.

You know, you can pretend that it doesn't exist, and a lot of us were able to pretend it didn't exist until very recently. But our ancestors didn't have that opportunity and neither do we.

Tanya [Narration]: As I listened to both Dara and Michal each sharing their insights on antisemitism, shaped obviously by their distinct experiences and expertise, I found myself wondering, what is the path forward? I asked them both whether they thought Rabbi Sacks' message of engaging with the world is still realistic. Even in what feels like one of the darkest times for Jews in Israel since the Holocaust, is it possible to confront the reality of antisemitism whilst holding onto the hope that there are still those who genuinely want to be our allies? Does the optimism Rabbi Sacks expresses about friendship between Israel and the world and Jews and their non Jewish neighbours, does that really still stand today?

Can we maintain our unique identity without retreating behind literal and metaphorical walls, out of fear that Rabbi Sacks warns us not to do? Michal pointed out that what happened at Durban was deeply troubling, not just for Jews and Israelis, but also for those who championed human rights. But as time's gone on, our hopes in the world or in human rights advocates seems to be fading.

But she spoke that they too were very disappointed in what happened at Durban.

Michal: That's the first thing that happens post-Durban is the recognition of the human rights, organisations and champions around the world, that it's their life's work that has been co-opted and weaponised devastatingly. And the understanding that this is about much more than just Jews. And here is the next step of a people not dwelling alone. Meaning if this is a predictor of the collapse of a coal mine, then we have not only the ability, but the responsibility to transcend and reach across real or perceived difference of geography, of religion, of denomination, of politics, in order to be that sort of warning sign or siren that says, the coal mine will collapse and here is the sort of, mechanism that has enabled it. Meaning if the selective application of this infrastructure enables the targeting of Jew / Zionist / anyone who believes in the right of the State of Israel to exist as the single and only Jewish nation state, when there are tens of Muslim countries and tens of Christian majority countries, then we have a responsibility.

I'm going to say again, but after thousands of years where Jews weren't able to sound the alarm and say, not a people that dwells alone because we do have sovereignty because we do have that nation state to which we returned after millennia of exile and persecution, because we do have sort of at least presumably the status of being an equal member state and the family of nations and the ability to make this accessible to others that recognise that if one group, one identity, one country cannot be afforded the same protection as all others, then you can be sure that neither will others. If you can single out one individual, one community, one group, or in this case, one country from the rules that we're supposed to be upheld, promoted and protected by this international rules based order, you better be sure that it can be done or undone and that it no longer will be able to be upheld, promoted or protected for anybody. So to the detriment of all. If you actually are accusing the state of Israel of genocide, even as there is genocide happening as we speak in Sudan, who happened to have been hosted by none other than South Africa, weeks before the allegations against the State of Israel at the International Court of Justice, that is a problem for the world. It's not just a problem for Jews.

Tanya [Narration]: Dara's experience is somewhat more positive and optimistic perhaps than Michal's with regards to our engagement with the outside world.

Dara: I also get inundated with responses from non-Jewish readers and what all the non Jewish readers and these, again, people of many different backgrounds, people who are, Christians, Muslims, all different, racial groups, minority groups, all kinds of readers.

And what they're saying is, wow I had no idea. How can I help? I even got letters from people saying, I'm a recovering anti Semite since I read your book. I mean, obviously it's a self selecting group of people who are reading this book. What I discovered is this is an opportunity. Because what I really discovered, and this goes to, I think, the vision of, that Rabbi Sacks has when he talks about, you know, how we need to step back from this idea of a people who dwell alone and get out of this idea of, you know, the whole world is against us.

What I think, the point at which I absolutely agree with him, and this is very much my message in the project I'm working on now, Future Book, is there is so much more ignorance than malice. And this may be different in different countries and different settings, but certainly here in the United States, I speak around the United States all the time to many, many different types of audiences and often to many, you know, completely non Jewish audiences.

There is a lot of ignorance and there's an enormous amount of curiosity about who Jews are. What does it mean to be Jewish? Who are living Jews? And this is what no one is talking about, there's no public information. We have all this public Holocaust education, whether it's through the schools, through museums, through pop culture, TV, whatever it is. There's all this information out there that people are expected to be educated. The public, general public is expected to be educated about the Holocaust. There's zero expectation that anyone be educated about who are Jews. To the extent that last year, I was at a conference, a teacher conference at the Dallas Holocaust Museum in Dallas, Texas.

And one of the docents, I asked him, when the students come through the museum, what do they typically ask? And he says, you know what they ask? They ask, are there still Jews alive today? Because if you went to this museum, you wouldn't know. Right? And according to this museum, all the Jews are dead by 1945.

And what I find is this enormous curiosity on the part of broader non-Jewish public about Jewish culture. And, you know, I mean, a lot of them are curious because they're coming from, you know, a Christian or Muslim background, where it's part of their faith tradition, and they want to know more. But a lot of them, it's just because, you know, hey, I'm sort of interested and there's really no and what I'm trying to build now and in a lot of my other work is a ways for people to educate the broader public about living Jewish culture.

This is where I feel like I really coincide with Rabbi Sacks and his legacy in that this is really the message we need to be sending. And this is good news because what this there's so much more ignorance than now is what this reminds me of is the story in the Megillah in the book of Esther, right?

When Haman sets up this genocidal decree for the Jews of the Persian Empire. Queen Esther is, she's in the palace, but, you know, she doesn't know about this decree. She's hidden her Jewish identity. Her cousin Mordechai tells her, you know, he tells her about this decree.

He tells her, you need to go to the king. And she's afraid to go to the king. She's afraid to stand up for herself and for her people. She says, you know, like, if I go to the king uninvited, I could be killed. And he says, maybe this is the reason you became queen. Maybe this is why you're in this position of power and influence. And what's amazing to me is she goes to the king, and the king actually is on her side. You know, most people among our non Jewish neighbours, most people are not Haman. Most people are Achashverosh. it's like, oh, did I like that post? I must have been drunk, right? I mean, it's like that, right?

I mean, it's like, Achashverosh basically liked the post without really knowing much about it. You know, oh, everybody else clicked, you clicked repost, and so I did too. Right? I mean, he's basically that guy. I mean, the problem is that he's the emperor, right? But, like, he's that guy.

But the good news is, that guy can change his mind because he's not coming at this from this place of like, you know, Oh, I want to kill all the Jews. He's coming it's like total ignorance, total ignorance. That's an opportunity.

Tanya [Narration]: I found myself rethinking Dara and her thesis. Even through the screen, her vitality, passion, and her optimism are undeniable.

I had perhaps underestimated just how deeply she was engaged with Judaism. The books she wrote before her bestseller are rich with Jewish legacy that goes far beyond antisemitism. So while people love dead Jews might promote a type of Jewish identity tied to pain and the covenant of fate, her broader work and her personal vision of Judaism are far more nuanced and vibrant.

In the previous episode, Mijal Bitton and I explored many aspects of this. We discussed whether Rabbi Sacks got the diagnosis of antisemitism right, and in light of recent events, whether his optimism for engagement and reframing the Jewish narrative still holds up. Rabbi Sacks doesn't believe in an isolated philosophy of being.

We've discussed that in the previous episodes. He also rejects a national existence that locks itself behind walls and cuts itself off from the world. And he certainly doesn't believe in this "parochial Judaism" that refuses to engage with the wisdom and the energy of the wider world. For him, it's always about balance, balance between the particular and the universal, the self and the other, realism and hope.

To achieve this, the Jews just cannot afford to get stuck in a victimhood mentality. And from our conversations, It was clear to me that both Michal and Dara agreed with this conclusion. And so perhaps the biggest question that remained was, does Rabbi Sacks' vision still resonate in a post 7.10 world?

Can we, despite the tragedies of the past year, still align ourselves with a narrative of engagement, carrying a particular message while acting as agents of hope and change? Or, should we indeed retreat inwards and focus solely on defending ourselves? What amazed me was that despite recording these conversations at different times, both women ended up referencing the same verse from the Tanach, from the Bible, when I asked my final question

Michal: We have the perspective of Jewish history, and that last time over 2, 500 years ago in ancient Persia, when there was an attempted genocide of the Jewish people, and this is what literally gets me up every single morning, we remember what it was that Mordechai said to Esther, right?

If you will be silent now, salvation will come to the Jewish people and you and your father's home will disappear. And who knows if it's not for this moment, you have arrived. What I'm trying to say is we have no choice but to try. And who am I after thousands of years of Jewish history when I just finished saying Jews could not fight back at this moment in time where 2024 is not 1944, and it's not 1904, and it's not any other time for thousands of years where we have a nation state to which we returned after millennia of exile and persecution, where we have an army, where we have sovereignty. And who am I at this moment to not at the very least try with the understanding that that is what defines us. That is our DNA as a people, the understanding that we are not a victimiser in this division of the world between victim and victimiser oppressed and oppressor.

We are certainly not victimiser. We are certainly not oppressor. But neither are we victim. Neither are we oppressed. Never have we been, not in Egypt. Were we those people that allowed ourselves to say, I am relinquishing my personal responsibility, abdicating responsibility, and I have no agency.

Not Natan Sharansky, when he was in an isolation cell for 12 years in the former Soviet Union, not for thousands of years, not Yosef, right? In prison do we abdicate our personal responsibility, and do we say I am a victim, and I will remain a victim, and forever I will be a victim. I am oppressed, and I am forever oppressed, and I will remain oppressed.

That is the moment of time that we're in. And the understanding, and I say this, quoting Rabbi Sacks often, antisemitism is not the problem of Jews. Antisemitism is the problem of antisemites. That understanding is ours, but the ability to make it understood to others, that's up to us. That is where agency and personal responsibility and national responsibility and communal responsibility of Jewish communities around the world, that is the place where we are not a people that dwell alone.

That is the place where we do have to identify actually, allies that exist today. And I've spoken in many, many, you know, sort of spaces where you identify allies, they may not be the allies you expect. The people of Iran, as opposed to the Islamic regime, that does the very same things that its proxies did here on 10.7, poisons and rapes and executes the people of Iran. Many of them understand precisely what it is that we're saying. The Uyghurs in China understand precisely what it is that we're saying. The people of Ukraine that have been attacked by the very same authoritarian regimes that understand that the international rules based order is collapsing. The signal may be us. And our responsibility is, of course, in democratic countries that are bound and are actually entrusted to uphold, promote and protect that international rules based order, whether it's legislators in the United States, whether it's mayors, whether it's police chiefs, whether it's university presidents, to understand that this is our shared responsibility.

So, it is a call to action. Absolutely. And it is a responsibility that Rabbi Sacks actually highlights in his, conversation, as he quotes with an Israeli diplomat and after this conversation with understanding what it was that happened in Durban, that it is a self fulfilling prophecy for us to accept that we are a people that dwells alone.

 Historically speaking, we are at a first in our history, we've never had it so good when we have it so bad, in the capability not just to defend ourselves and to hit back where necessary, but actually to come into our own, to have that agency as a state the nation state of a prototypical indigenous people returned after millennia of exile and persecution committed to equality. We have that in our mission vision values of the declaration of independence and standing up a little taller and owning that at 76 years young, and it's young for a country and understanding that after thousands of years, when we didn't exercise the sovereignty muscle, we now have the capability and the responsibility to exercise that sovereignty muscle, including understanding that we will not be able to fight antisemitism alone, because no subject of any hatred can combat, or any racism, or any form of bigotry can combat that hatred, racism, or form of bigotry alone. And that we have an added responsibility, having returned to this ancestral homeland, in reclaiming our identity.

Meaning, in many ways, the silver lining if you will, in this is the potential conversation that we should be having as a people, no matter where we live, 45 percent in Israel, 45 percent in North America, 10 percent in the rest of the world, the conversation as a people, 15. 7 million of us, that yes, we recognise people love dead Jews, and this is a new moment in our history where together we can combat, and we must combat, the multi layered wars that are raging as we speak, whether on all of Israel's borders or on the front lines of university campuses, the international institutions, if you will.

The Covenant of Destiny requires us to opt in to our identity, not to be defined by the hate from the outside, by antisemitism. The Covenant of Destiny actually says to us, for the first time in thousands of years, as this sovereign country develops, and it is still, as I said, 76 years young, that covenant of destiny says to us as a people, whether we live here or not, we opt in to this identity as a people.

Dara: We in the Jewish world, I think all of us have reached this Queen Esther moment where it's time to stand up. It's time to speak out and go to the king. And that to me, the fact that I can draw on that story, that is a story from the Jewish tradition. This idea that, oh, this is all imposed upon us from the outside. No! This whole dialogue with these other cultures is embedded within the tradition. What are our foundational stories in Jewish life, like Passover story? I mean it's like all of our stories are about, you know, Jews interacting with this non Jewish world.

When you think about the Hebrew prophets, they have all these prophecies of doom, but there's also prophecy of consolation. And that is the pattern of Jewish history. To me, it is unrealistic to pretend that you don't have these, situations where you have like the prophet of doom and the prophet of doom turns out to be right.

But it is also unrealistic to ignore the prophecies of consolation. And to me, the amazing aspect of Jewish history is not the litany of horror, but the amazing litany of resilience and creativity of the Jewish people. That's what's unique about Jewish history and Jewish civilisation, is not, like, the litany of horror, unfortunately, is not unique to Jews.

Sorry, it is unfortunately very common. What's unique, you know, and maybe not unique, but what is, you know, to me inspiring about Jewish civilisation is the creative reinvention of this civilisation in the face of all these challenges and the amazing resilience, not just resilience of like, oh yeah, we endure at all costs, but the creative reinvention, right?

The temple is destroyed, you know, the people are exiled, all of those, you know, that is the kind of destruction that. Happened in a lot of places in the Roman Empire. You know, it happens in a lot of places in a lot of empires, and the result of that is that those people don't exist anymore after that, they become assimilated into whatever the culture is.

What's unusual about Jewish life is that that didn't happen to the Jewish people, that instead there was this reinvention of Jewish civilisation. We have the whole rabbinic tradition that emerged out of that, right? So this is like the next idea, you know, I mean the, the idea of political Zionism is another example of that, right?

I mean this sort of reinvention of this culture is, that is the superpower within Jewish civilisation. And that is something that I, you know, to me, and that sort of the constancy of the divine covenant, which, you know, to me as a religious person is important, other people might not find that as resonant.

But you know, these are, to me, the, the sort of the power lines of Jewish civilisation. And that is, you know, that is this idea of creative resilience is where are we going from here? That's the interesting and exciting question about, you know, these horrifying moments is not let's talk about the horrifying moment, but what are we going next?

What's happening now? What's our plan for the future tense as Rabbi Sacks would put it? And to me, that's what's really interesting and an amazing and beautiful, hopeful opportunity here in the United States. As I said, I think that there's an enormous untapped opportunity in terms of the non Jewish culture in which we live. The vast majority of the people who are, there's ignorance rather than malice. And I see that as an enormous opportunity for future growth and for future education. I think that in Israel there are untapped opportunities for the future as well. People who live in Israel are going to be much more equipped to talk about those than I am. I'm not going to sit here and, solve the Arab Israeli conflict for you in this podcast. But I think that, there's going be some kind of aftermath after this war. There's going to be some kind of aftermath with whatever is happening in the region. One thing that we can be sure of is that things are always going to change. And the amazing thing about the Jewish people is the, the imagination that goes into being willing to change.

Tanya [Narration]: Queen Esther is the perfect example of someone who shifts from fate to destiny. She moves from a passive role to taking active responsibility for her people's future. Rabbi Sacks, who was deeply influenced, as we've mentioned before, by Rabbi Soloveitchik's essay Fate and Destiny, believed that it's not enough to be bound to our people by the thin strands of fate, those circumstances that pull us together.

To achieve our destiny, we must actively define who we are, what our story is, and how it shapes our future. We need to be the agents of our national and religious identity with a sense of hope and responsibility for the direction of our people. On October the 7th my daughter's image of Israel and the narrative they had grown up with here seemed shattered But as this tragedy unfolded we've also seen countless stories of unprecedented heroism and courage.

We've witnessed immeasurable kindness and unity. We have seen an unprecedented flurry of creative responses to the tragedy from song, to theology, to art. And even as we acknowledge the internal fractures within our people, the passion, love, and loyalty to our land and story are undeniable. Part of Rabbi Sacks' belief is that only by taking responsibility for our future can we fulfil our mission in the world. A mission that engages with the world, connects with our past and tradition, but always remains focused on the future

Rabbi Sacks zt"l: Wherever we look, we have problems, and therefore a tense future.

Now, I happen to be an enormous believer in hope, and this is a book of hope. It's saying do not be devastated by these things. But there is a much deeper reason why I call the book Future Tense. And it's fascinating. There is a simple three-word phrase that appears in the Bible, a key phrase, which if you look at English translations of the Bible, that is translations not done by Jews, you will find virtually every English translation mistranslates these three words.

And here it is. It is the moment where Moses meets God at the Burning Bush. And Moses says to God, Who are You? And God replies in three Hebrew words, Eheyeh Asher Eheyeh. Now look at all the English Bibles, and they translate it as follows. I am that I am. I am who I am. I am: that's who I am. You will find a dozen variants of that and they are all mistranslations and all obvious mistranslations.

Because the Hebrew in fact means, I will be what I will be. When Moses asks God, who are you? He replies, I am the future tense. Why so? Because, Judaism is a religion of freedom and responsibility. And it tells us the world that is, is not yet the world that ought to be. And therefore Judaism is the only civilisation in all of history whose golden age is in the future.

Every other civilisation has a golden age in the past. And of course, the fundamental difference between Judaism and Christianity is this, in answer to the question, has the Mashiach come? The Jewish answer is always, not yet. And Judaism is the not yet in the human imagination. It is the religion of the future tense, which is what God is calling us from. What God is calling us to make.

So Judaism is the supremely futur-oriented religion, the future that we make when we freely choose to act responsibly and to perfect a badly fractured world.

Tanya: I'm Dr. Tanya White, and you've been listening to Books and Beyond: The Rabbi Sacks Podcast. On our next episode, Dr. Raphael Zarum and myself explore the themes and impact of one of Rabbi Sacks, most popular books To Heal a Fractured World. Don't forget to check us out at rabbisacks. org and follow us on X and Facebook @RabbiSackspod and instagram @RabbiSackspodcast, where you will find all information and extra content relating to the episode.

If you enjoyed the episode, please be sure to rate us on Apple podcasts. Thank you to our series producer, Amir White and the team as well as to The Rabbi Sacks Legacy, with special gratitude to Jonny Lipczer. We cannot finish without holding in our hearts and minds that at the time of recording, a hundred 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.