“The People of the Book” Community Learning Resources

The Rabbi Sacks Global Day of Learning is an annual way to remember Rabbi Sacks through Torah study, learning in his memory during his yahrzeit, and in this way unite with Jewish communities, groups, students and individuals around the world.

This year’s theme, 'The People of the Book', reflects a concept that Rabbi Sacks cherished – a commitment to learning, dialogue and the power of ideas. This theme is particularly meaningful as Rabbi Sacks’ personal archive arrived at the National Library of Israel this year. His landmark speech, The Home of the Book for the People of the Book, was delivered at the foundation stone laying of the new National Library building, excerpts of which can be found on this page.

Together, let's explore the theme, and examine quotes, sources, and guided questions to further investigate the theme, designed for chavruta study, small groups, or frontal teaching.

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Optional Opening Activity

If the statistics are right, the Jews constitute but one percent of the human race. It suggests a nebulous, dim puff of stardust lost in the blaze of the Milky Way. Properly the Jew ought hardly to be heard of; but he is heard of, has always been heard of. He is as prominent on the planet as any other people, and his commercial importance is extravagantly out of proportion to the smallness of his bulk. His contributions to the world’s greatest names in literature, science, art, music, finance, medicine and abstruse learning are also way out of proportion to the smallness of his numbers.

He has made a marvellous fight in this world, in all the ages; and has done it with his hands tied behind him. The Egyptian, the Babylonian, and the Persian rose, filled the planet with sound and splendour, then faded to dream-stuff and passed away; the Greek and the Roman followed, and made a vast noise, and they are gone; other peoples have sprung up and held their torch high for a time, but it burned out, and they sit in twilight now, or have vanished. The Jew saw them all, beat them all, and is now what he always was, exhibiting no decadence, no infirmities of age, no weakening of his parts, no slowing of his energies, no dulling of his alert and aggressive mind. All things are mortal but the Jew; all other forces pass, but he remains.

What is the secret of his immortality?

Concerning the Jews, Mark Twain

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—PART I—

Introduction: The People of the Book

Source 1: The Home of the Book for the People of the Book

This source can be viewed as a video clip from the speech The Home of the Book for the People of the Book (YouTube timestamp 14:48-16:50) delivered by Rabbi Sacks at the National Library of Israel in 2014.

Books, and the acts of reading and writing, studying and teaching, interpreting and expounding, are all things absolutely fundamental to Judaism. For instance, a few years ago, I was asked by the British Secretary of State for Education whether it felt strange beginning a new year – Rosh Hashanah – at a different time from everyone else. I replied that when you celebrate the New Year depends on what is really important in your life.

What is the most important thing for Jews? It’s schools. It’s learning, so the Jewish New Year in our part of the world always begins at the same time as the academic year.

The Secretary of State asked: “Chief Rabbi, do you have something to help us, a saying, a sentence, to help us encourage a year of literacy?”

I said, “What do Jews do at this time of year? We say כּתבנּו בספר החיים - ‘Katveinu b’Sefer haChayim' - Write us in the Book of Life.

When Jews think of life, they think of a book. That is what we’re about.”

Therefore, when the Koran calls us 'the People of the Book', that is one of the understatements of all time. We are a people only because of the book.

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The Secret to Jewish Continuity

Source 2: Talmud Bavli, Shabbat, 30a-b

— אָמַר דָּוִד לִפְנֵי הַקָּדוֹשׁ בָּרוּךְ הוּא: רִבּוֹנוֹ שֶׁל עוֹלָם, הוֹדִיעֵנִי ה׳ קִצִּי. אָמַר לוֹ: גְּזֵרָה הִיא מִלְּפָנַי שֶׁאֵין מוֹדִיעִין קִצּוֹ שֶׁל בָּשָׂר וָדָם. ״וּמִדַּת יָמַי מַה הִיא״ — גְּזֵרָה הִיא מִלְּפָנַי שֶׁאֵין מוֹדִיעִין מִדַּת יָמָיו שֶׁל אָדָם. ״וְאֵדְעָה מֶה חָדֵל אָנִי״ — אָמַר לוֹ: בְּשַׁבָּת תָּמוּת. אָמוּת בְּאֶחָד בְּשַׁבָּת? אָמַר לוֹ: כְּבָר הִגִּיעָה מַלְכוּת שְׁלֹמֹה בִּנְךָ, וְאֵין מַלְכוּת נוֹגַעַת בַּחֲבֶרְתָּהּ אֲפִילּוּ כִּמְלֹא נִימָא. אָמוּת בְּעֶרֶב שַׁבָּת? אָמַר לוֹ: ״כִּי טוֹב יוֹם בַּחֲצֵרֶיךָ מֵאָלֶף״ — טוֹב לִי יוֹם אֶחָד שֶׁאַתָּה יוֹשֵׁב וְעוֹסֵק בַּתּוֹרָה מֵאֶלֶף עוֹלוֹת שֶׁעָתִיד שְׁלֹמֹה בִּנְךָ לְהַקְרִיב לְפָנַי עַל גַּבֵּי הַמִּזְבֵּחַ.

כּל יוֹמָא דְשַׁבְּתָא הֲוָה יָתֵיב וְגָרֵיס כּוּלֵּי יוֹמָא. הַהוּא יוֹמָא דְּבָעֵי לְמֵינַח נַפְשֵׁיהּ, קָם מַלְאַךְ הַמָּוֶת קַמֵּיהּ וְלָא יְכִיל לֵיהּ, דְּלָא הֲוָה פָּסֵק פּוּמֵּיהּ מִגִּירְסָא. אֲמַר: מַאי אַעֲבֵיד לֵיהּ? הֲוָה לֵיהּ בּוּסְתָּנָא אֲחוֹרֵי בֵּיתֵיהּ, אֲתָא מַלְאַךְ הַמָּוֶת סָלֵיק וּבָחֵישׁ בְּאִילָנֵי. נְפַק לְמִיחְזֵי. הֲוָה סָלֵיק בְּדַרְגָּא, אִיפְּחִית דַּרְגָּא מִתּוּתֵיהּ, אִישְׁתִּיק וְנָח נַפְשֵׁיהּ.

David said before the Holy One, Blessed be He: Master of the Universe, Lord, make me to know my end; in how long will I die? God said to him: It is decreed before Me that I do not reveal the end of the life of flesh and blood. He asked further: And the measure of my days; on what day of the year will I die? He said to him: It is decreed before Me not to reveal the measure of a person’s days. Again he requested: Let me know how short-lived I am; on what day of the week will I die? He said to him: You will die on Shabbat. David requested of God: Let me die on the first day of the week so that the honour of Shabbat will not be tarnished by the pain of death. He said to him: On that day the time of the kingdom of your son Solomon has already arrived, and one kingdom does not overlap with another and subtract from the time allotted to another even a hairbreadth. He said to him: I will cede a day of my life and die on Shabbat eve. God said to him: “For a day in your courts is better than a thousand” (Psalms 84:11); a single day in which you sit and engage in Torah is preferable to Me than the thousand burnt-offerings that your son Solomon will offer before Me on the altar (see I Kings 3:4).

What did David do? Every Shabbat he would sit and learn all day long to protect himself from the Angel of Death. On that day on which the Angel of Death was supposed to put his soul to rest, the day on which David was supposed to die, the Angel of Death stood before him and was unable to overcome him because his mouth did not pause from study. The Angel of Death said: What shall I do to him? David had a garden [bustana] behind his house; the Angel of Death came, climbed, and shook the trees. David went out to see. As he climbed the stair, it broke beneath him. He was startled and was silent. This interrupted his studies for a moment, and he died.

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Source 3: Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, Will We Have Jewish Grandchildren? pp. 38-39

It is a subtle story. On the surface it is a simple example of midrash aggadah, one of those legends by which the sages fleshed out the bare bones of biblical narrative and made them come vividly alive. It is, however, much more than that. The sages, with their unique combination of simplicity and depth, were talking not just about King David but about themselves and the fate of the Jewish people. They had lived through two military uprisings against Rome: the great rebellion of 66 CE, and the Bar Kokhba rebellion of 132–135 CE. Both ended in disaster. As a result of the first, the Temple was destroyed. As a result of the second, the whole of Judea lay in ruins… The twin defeats of the first and second centuries were catastrophic and devastating. For as long as anyone could foresee, Jews would not be able to survive by military strength or defend themselves by conventional weapons. How then would they endure? The sages gave a remarkable answer. The military arena was not the only, or even the most important, battlefield. Of far greater significance from the point of view of Jewish continuity was the arena of culture, civilisation and faith.

The great Jewish embodiment of military prowess was King David. But there was another David, author of the book of Psalms. Reflecting on their fate, the sages realised that it was this other David who was the enduring symbol of Jewish life, not waging war but engaged in what was to become the very pulse of Jewish life after the destruction of the second Temple: study. The talmudic story of King David and the Angel of Death is nothing less than a metaphor of the people of Israel and its fate. David stood for Israel, the warrior turned scholar. So long as he carried a book, not a sword, he would be immune. The sages, in a story calculated to appeal to children, propounded a sophisticated hypothesis: that so long as their mouths did not desist from study, the Angel of Death would have no power over the Jewish people. The Jews might have lost the battles with Rome but they would win the war against mortality. Individual Jews would live and die but the Jewish people would be eternal. With the hindsight of history, we now know that they were right.

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Testing the Hypothesis

Source 4: Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, Will We Have Jewish Grandchildren? pp. 41-47

The Jewish people has survived. But at significant moments that survival lay in doubt. Catastrophe struck and there was no obvious route to a secure future. The prophets had declared that Israel would be an eternal people. But there were times when this seemed desperately unlikely. There were moments when it might have been otherwise. These critical junctures repay close attention. What saved the people and faith of Israel from the might-have-been of oblivion? Consider three such turning points.

The first came in the fifth century BCE. Several centuries earlier, the northern kingdom of Israel had been destroyed by the Assyrians. Its population was dispersed and rapidly assimilated into the neighbouring cultures. Ten of the twelve Israelite tribes disappeared from history. In 586 BCE the southern kingdom of Judah, comprising the two remaining tribes, was also overcome, this time by the Babylonians. The Temple was destroyed and the elite of the people taken into captivity. There they might also have disintegrated as a group, were it not for the insistent message of the prophets that hope was not lost.

Under Cyrus, king of Persia, a new and more benign regime took shape and some of the exiles were allowed to return. Eventually, under the leadership of Nehemiah, the statesman-governor, and Ezra, the priestly scribe, a Jewish renaissance began. It faced formidable difficulties. On their arrival in Israel, the two leaders found chaos. Those Jews who had remained had lost their identity. They had intermarried. The Sabbath was publicly desecrated. Religious laws had fallen into disuse.

The book of Nehemiah describes the event which was to prove the turning point. The people gathered in Jerusalem where Ezra, standing on a wooden platform, read to the assembled crowd from the Torah. A group of Levites acted as instructors to the people, “reading from the Book of the Law of God, making it clear and giving the meaning so that people could understand what was being read.” The population entered into a binding agreement to keep the Torah. The covenant, which had been in danger of being forgotten, was renewed. A new era of Jewish history began… Ezra represented a new kind of Jew, one who was to shape the character of the Jewish people from that time to this. Not a lawgiver or a prophet, a king or a judge, neither a political nor a military leader, Ezra was the prototype of the teacher as hero. Under his influence, the ancient ideal of the people of the Torah became institutionalised. Public readings and explanations of the sacred texts became more widespread. By the second century BCE a system of community-funded schools had developed. Mass education, the first of its kind in the world, had begun…

In the first century CE a second crisis struck with devastating force. An ill-advised rebellion against Rome brought savage retaliation. The Roman forces led by Vespasian descended on the centres of Jewish resistance. In 70 CE Vespasian’s son Titus brought the campaign to its climax with the siege of Jerusalem. The city was captured. The second Temple was destroyed. It was a fateful moment, though few of those who lived through it could have known for how long Jews would suffer its consequences. It was the beginning of the longest exile Israel had ever known… The bases of Jewish life lay in ruins. The Temple, symbol and centre of the nation, was gone. There were to be no more kings or prophets, serving priests or sacrifices within the foreseeable future…

Jewish tradition has rightly identified one moment as a symbol of the turning point. The Talmud relates how the sage Johanan ben Zakkai stood out against the Jews of his day. During the siege of Jerusalem, leaders within the city believed that they could prevail against Rome. Johanan knew that they were mistaken and argued unsuccessfully for surrender… Johanan, according to the Talmud, had himself smuggled out of Jerusalem and was taken to Vespasian. He made a simple request: “Give me [the academy at] Yavneh and its sages.” Johanan predicated Jewish survival not on military victory or on the messianic age but on a house of study and a group of teachers.

Few decisions have had more lasting effects. For seventeen hundred years Jews became a people held together by study of Judaism’s holy texts. In place of the Temple came the synagogue, the yeshivah and the bet midrash. In place of sacrifices came prayer, learning and the performance of good deeds. The mantle of leadership passed from kings, priests and prophets to the sage, the teacher who “raised up many disciples.” Exiled, dispersed and deprived of power, a shattered nation was rebuilt through one instrumentality: education. Jews had lost their land, but they would not lose their identity. Physically scattered, they remained spiritually joined.

The third crisis brings us to the present [20th] century and to what, in human terms, is the greatest tragedy ever to have struck the people of the covenant: the Holocaust. At the beginning of the twentieth century, four out of every five Jews lived in Europe. By the end of the Second World War the vast heartlands of European Jewry had been destroyed. The great powerhouses of rabbinic learning – Vilna, Volozhyn, Ponevetz, Mir – were gone. The citadels of the Jewish spirit had been reduced to ashes. Jewry’s religious leaders and the communities

from which they came had been murdered. At most, the survivors were “a brand plucked from the burning.” Rarely has Judaism’s everlasting light come closer to being extinguished…

What happened next will one day be told as one of the great acts of reconstruction in the religious history of mankind. A handful of Holocaust survivors and refugees set about rebuilding on new soil the world they had seen go up in flames. Rabbis Menahem Mendel Schneersohn, Aaron Kotler, Jacob Kamenetzky, Shragai Mendlowitz, Joseph Soloveitchik and others like them refused to yield to despair. While others responded to the Holocaust by building memorials, endowing lectureships, convening conferences and writing books, they built schools and communities and yeshivot. They urged their followers to marry and have children. They said: “Our world has been shattered but not destroyed.” They said: “Hitler brought death into the world, therefore let us bring life.” Within a generation Mir and Ponevetz, Lubavitch and Belz lived again, no longer in Europe, but in Israel and America.

Within a half-century, traditional Jewry has risen from the ashes to become the fastest growing and most influential force in Jewish life. It has achieved what all observers had hitherto thought impossible. It has shown that Torah can flourish in a secular Israel and an open America. It has proved that Jews in today’s diaspora can experience demographic growth. It has brought about a revival in talmudic study that has no precedent since the great days of Babylonian Jewry. But it has done more. It has demonstrated in our time that the classic Jewish response to crisis remains the most powerful. Like Ezra, the yeshivot and Hasidic leaders concentrated on teaching. Like Yochanan ben Zakkai, they devoted themselves to raising up disciples…

These three moments are seminal to an understanding of Jewish history. At each of them, the Jewish people confronted its own mortality… In each case, however, the hypothesis of the sages was proved true. So long as “their mouths did not desist from study,” the Angel of Death had no power over the Jewish people. Those who set as their first priority the education of future generations were rewarded by Jewish continuity.

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—PART II—

Covenant and Conversation

Source 5: Devarim 5:19 and Rashi’s explanation

אֶֽת־הַדְּבָרִ֣ים הָאֵ֡לֶּה דִּבֶּר֩ ה' אֶל־כָּל־קְהַלְכֶ֜ם בָּהָ֗ר מִתּ֤וֹךְ הָאֵשׁ֙ הֶֽעָנָ֣ן וְהָֽעֲרָפֶ֔ל ק֥וֹל גָּד֖וֹל וְלֹ֣א יָסָ֑ף וַֽיִּכְתְּבֵ֗ם עַל־שְׁנֵי֙ לֻחֹ֣ת אֲבָנִ֔ים וַֽיִּתְּנֵ֖ם אֵלָֽי׃

“The Lord spoke these words with a loud Voice to your whole assembly at the mountain from amid the fire, cloud, and thick darkness, v’lo yassaf. And He wrote them on two stone tablets, and gave them to me.”

ולא יסף. מְתַרְגְּמִינָן "וְלָא פָּסִיק" (וּלְפִי שֶׁמִּדַּת בָּשָׂר וָדָם אֵינָן יָכוֹלִין לְדַבֵּר כָּל דְּבְרֵיהֶם בִּנְשִׁימָה אַחַת וּמִדַּת הַקָּבָּ"ה אֵינוֹ כֵן — לֹא הָיָה פוֹסֵק, וּמִשֶּׁלֹּא הָיָה פוֹסֵק לֹא הָיָה מוֹסִיף) כִּי קוֹלוֹ חָזָק וְקַיָּם לְעוֹלָם (סנהדרין י"ז); דָּ"אַ — ולא יסף לֹא הוֹסִיף לְהֵרָאוֹת בְּאוֹתוֹ פֻּמְבִּי:

ולא יסף — We render this in the Targum by ולא פסק and He did not cease”, — [Because it is characteristic of human beings that they are unable to utter all their words in one breath (but must make pauses) and it is characteristic of the Holy One, blessed be He, that this is not so, therefore He did not pause, and since He did not pause, He did not have to resume], — for His Voice is strong and goes on continuously (Sanhedrin 17a). Another explanation of ולא יסף: He did not again ever reveal Himself with such publicity.

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Source 6: Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, The Home of the Book for the People of the Book

This source can be viewed as a video clip from the speech The Home of the Book for the People of the Book (timestamp 35:28 to 41:25).

At the heart of Judaism is this remarkable idea contained in the description of the great festival Shavuot, the Feast of Weeks. When Moses is at the end of his life recalling those events, in his final address to the Jewish people, the children of those that he brought out of Egypt, he reminds them of the great experience at Mount Sinai and uses a remarkable four-word phrase, remarkable only because it is so ambiguous. He says that what they heard was a “kol gadol v’lo yassaf”, “a great Voice and it went on no more” (Deuteronomy 5:19). As the commentator Rashi points out, this could mean one of two things. “V’lo yassaf” means the Voice sounded once and never again, or, as the Targum translates it, “passak v’lo”, a great Voice that sounded and never stopped. It is completely ambiguous.

Did the Voice happen once and never again, or did it sound once and ever again?

Of course, the reconciliation of that contradiction is that there were two modes of communication, the Torah Shebichtav, the Written Torah, and the Torah She’be’al Peh, the Oral Torah. The Written Torah was written once and never again, but the Oral Torah has never ceased.From the days of Moses to today, Jews have engaged in the mandate that God gave us to interpret His word afresh in every generation.

Judaism is, in short, an ongoing conversation between that once-and-once-only Divine Voice that sounded at Sinai, and the human interpretation of those words that has continued in every generation since. It is the great conversation that never ended. I call my commentary essays on the weekly Torah reading Covenant & Conversation, because “covenant” is mutual. God made it with Israel. Israel made it with God. But the whole of Judaism is that ongoing “conversation” between Israel and God as to how we understand God’s Word for all time to make it God’s Word for this time.

The end result of this was something quite extraordinary. We all know this, but we don’t often stop to remember it. What happened, having received the Torah from Moses, the Jewish people spent the next thousand years, from roughly the 13th century BCE to the third century BCE, writing commentaries to the Torah, which we call Nevi’im – Prophets and Ketuvim – Writings, the other books of Tanach, the Hebrew Bible. They then spent the next thousand years writing commentaries to the commentary in the form of Midrash, Mishnah, and Gemara. Then they spent another thousand years writing commentaries to the commentaries to the commentaries, from Biblical interpretation to Jewish law to poetry, to philosophy, and to mysticism.

For 3,000 years, virtually every word that Jews wrote from 1,300 BCE to around the 18th century, was a commentary to the Torah. It was only in the 19th century that Jews began developing the literature of the Jewish Enlightenment, which was not directly a commentary to the Torah. Jews became a textual civilisation.

That text becomes the defining feature of Judaism, which could be understood in two different ways. The mystics and the prophets before them saw that text as a kind of ketubah, a marriage contract between the loving God and His beloved people, or to understand it, as I prefer to do, as the written constitution of Israel as a nation under the sovereignty of God. For these two reasons, Jews became a people of the text: because of the invention of the alphabet and because only through words could we fully enter into a relationship with God.

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—Optional Concluding Video Activity—

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, Being Jewish

This video, animating an idea voiced by Rabbi Sacks in 2010, explores the powerful message on Jewish identity that Rabbi Sacks presents in Chapter Four of his book “A Letter in the Scroll”. He asks us to understand that every Jew is a letter in the scroll, a link in the chain of Jewish history and heritage, and he challenges us to consider what chapter we will write in the book of Jewish history.

This video can be considered an answer to the final Question to Consider (above). Watch the video and then consider as an individual, a family, and a community, what your chapter in the book will look like.

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To mark Rabbi Sacks’ fourth yahrzeit, we invite you to participate in the Rabbi Sacks Global Day of Learning celebrating his life, legacy and teachings.

May the soul of Rabbi Sacks be elevated in merit of the learning we will do in his memory.