Restoring Our Moral Culture: A Conversation with Abe Socher

Rabbi Sacks, I always say, needs very little introduction. As I remarked in a follow-up email to subscribers, he has one of the most distinguished and astonishingly productive CVs in the Western world. It really makes the rest of us feel, perhaps, shamed, perhaps a little guilty. We’ll get to the difference between shame and guilt when we talk. Nonetheless, it is entirely appropriate to say a few words.

From 1991 to 2013, he was the Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth, and in 2009, he was named to the House of Lords. He is the winner of many prizes, including, most recently, the Templeton Prize. Among his many books, depending on how you count, somewhere between two and three dozen, I’d point to Tradition in an Untraditional Age, The Dignity of Difference, and The Great Partnership which is on religion and science.

Although most of his books have been named in an audience of both Jews and non-Jews, his new book, Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times, is perhaps his most ecumenical yet. It is a diagnosis of the dysfunctional common culture, or lack thereof, of Western democracies, that is, our common culture, along with a bracing prescription to, as he says, restore the common good. As such, it is really addressed to us all, as Americans, Europeans, and so on. Although, not surprisingly, it draws a great deal on classical Jewish texts and thinkers, some of whom I hope we’ll discuss.

Before we begin just a word to the audience. Rabbi Sacks and I will speak for about 35 minutes, after which we’ll have a brief question-and-answer period. To ask a question, and you can do this at any point, just go to the bottom of your Zoom screen and hit the button that says Questions & Answers, or Q&A, and we’ll get to as many as we can by the end of the period.

For those of you among the Zoom cognoscenti, do not click the button that says Raise Your Hand, just ask the question. There are just too many of you to go through the calling on people who, as it were, raise their hand. Finally, as the great Alex Trebek says, please do make sure it is in the form of a question.

Okay, Rabbi Sacks.

Rabbi Sacks:

Hi there.

Abe Socher:

Welcome to the Jewish Review of Books.

Rabbi Sacks:

I consider it a great privilege. You’re a terrific magazine, really.

 Abe Socher:

Well, thank you very much and I very much enjoyed reading your book.

So, here in America, we’re in the midst of the kind of divisive tribal election campaign whose rhetoric, not to speak of actual violence in the streets, is a major symptom of the problems you’re addressing. Yet you’ve argued that mixing politics and religion makes for bad politics and bad religion, I believe you said. How do you respond to those on the right and the left, and I have questions here from both sides, who would argue that it’s precisely here that somebody who believes in the necessity of religion returning as a bolster, at least, for public morality, if not more, must take a stand on one political side or the other?

Rabbi Sacks:

By all means do so, but don’t do so in a synagogue and don’t do so in the name of a religion. You do so in the name of a synagogue, you desecrate sacred space by using it for secular purposes. You do so in the name of religion, you show the world that you have not understood the first thing about religion.

Can you imagine, for instance, Jeremiah getting up in the centre of Jerusalem and saying, “Vote Biden”? Can you imagine Malachi saying, “No, vote Trump! He’s good for Israel”? My goodness, how tone-deaf, how insensitive are you, that you can confuse the essentially moral message of the prophets with the essentially political message of a presidential candidate?

I’m not saying Jews shouldn’t enter politics. By all means enter politics, but don’t do so in the name of religion, don’t do so in the synagogue, and if at all possible, do something else altogether. That something else altogether is described at the very heart of Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America.

Here he is, this young aristocrat, 1832. He’s come from France, and he knows in France, religion has a great deal of power but zero influence. He comes to America and sees that it has no power at all because of separation of church and state, so he assumes it has zero influence. To his amazement, he finds exactly the opposite. It has no power but enormous influence, so much so that he calls it the first of America’s political institutions.

He wants to understand how it happened, and he goes to lots and lots of ministers and he asks them. They explain to him, it happens because they don’t talk politics in church. He asks them why, and they answer, “Because politics is divisive. If we spoke politics in the church, the church would be divisive as well. We would rather remain a unifying factor in American life and let us renounce the politics. Leave it to the politicians.”

I have been profoundly moved by that statement of Alexis de Tocqueville. Here I am, a member of the British Parliament, I sit in the House of Lords. You say to me, “Rabbi Sacks, how come you keep out of politics?”

The short answer is this. Number one, in the House of Lords, I sit on the crossbenches. That is the place reserved for people of no party affiliation. Number two, when I speak, I do not speak on any issue that is party-divisive. You can see that if you look at my speeches on YouTube, many of them are there. Number three, I have been there for 11 years and I have not voted once, because I say I want a voice, not a vote. A voice is a matter of influence; a vote is a matter of power. I do not see why I, as a religious leader, should be given an extra bit of power. Religion is not about power, it’s about influence.

Abe Socher:

Yet your book makes a strong argument that the retreat of religion from public life has been deleterious to morality, to our civil culture, so how does that work exactly? What would a positive return of morality, not politicking from the pulpit, but something else, how would that work?

Rabbi Sacks:

Yeah. I’ll tell you exactly how it works. My argument in the book is any society needs, basically, three arenas. Two of them are competitive, the market and the state, the competition for wealth and the competition for power. Both are competitive, both are about I, both are about self-interest. That’s fine, no problem with that. But they have to be sustained by a third arena, the moral arena, which is about we, not I. It’s about collective responsibility for the common good.

Now, that common arena, the moral arena, was historically undertaken by the Church. It was undertaken by the Church one way in Britain, through the established Church, and another way in America, through this denominational religion which is unique to America. And they were very powerful agents of social change, very powerful. But of course, in Britain today you have an almost totally secular society. And in America, you have an increasingly secular society because the fastest growing religious affiliation in America is none, which applies to at least 30% of young Americans. So religion has kind of evacuated the public space. I mean, all you got to do is go back to somebody like Reinhold Niebuhr and The Irony of American History. Or even a lay figure, like the sociologist Robert Bellah, Beyond Belief, The Broken Covenant, these were even, what’s it called, Habits of the Heart, his book.

You had religion in the public domain. Today, it’s almost completely disappeared, and that answers your question, how come I wrote this book? For almost everyone in a very non-Jewish way, in which religion plays quite a small part in the book. Because I know by now, if you mention the R word, everyone switches off, nobody’s interested anymore. So I wrote this book to see if I could speak to people in terms that spoke to them without necessarily utilising religious language. Though, I think religion can do so much good if it so chooses.

Abe Socher:

One of the hopeful themes in your book, and I wonder if this is in some tension with what you were just saying is your hope for generation Z, those born after 1995, as perhaps more we-focused than I-focused than immediately previous generations. And yet that generation is I think, if I’m not mistaken, more secular than ever. And it’s also, of course, closest to the university campus where so much of what you decry, the identity politics, the focus on victimisation and so on, not to speak of even darker phenomena, antisemitism and so on, are alive. So how do you see that?

Rabbi Sacks:

Hmm, I don’t know to be honest with you, Abe, all I know is my most enthusiastic audience is young people, that’s all I can say. I did a five part series for BBC on morality, completely different from this book where I got the really, really big names there. You know, whether it’s Mike Sandel or Robert Putnam or Jordan Peterson or Steven Pinker or Jean Twenge, all these guys, and these were the megastars. But we decided to include on the programme 17 and 18 year olds from four schools in Britain interacting with those superstars, giving their opinion on the superstars’ opinion. And I found the 17, well, it wasn’t just me, everyone called the 17 and 18 year olds the stars of the series. They were serious. they were reflective, they were mature. And I loved working with them, I really did.

So, I found it really, really easy to work with them because when need be, I can keep the religion thing as a very low profile. Religion remains an important source of values to immigrant groups in Britain, the Sikhs, the Hindus, the Muslims, and so on. So with them we could be a bit more religious, otherwise, a bit less. What we are talking here is the politics of communication. I mean, I’ve written this book to try and make a difference. And so I try and enter people’s mindset and speak to them where they can hear what I’m saying. And I have not found a problem with the young guys. But once you get caught up with the woke stuff, and the virtue-signalling stuff and the no-platforming stuff and the cancel culture, that’s a kind of closed box, and it’s really hard to get people out of that box.

Abe Socher:

Have you been no-platformed?

Rabbi Sacks:

No, thank Heavens. I’m not important enough.

Abe Socher:

I’m not sure that’s the reason.

Rabbi Sacks:

Well, I’ll tell you something, you might find this interesting. You know that Jonathan Haidt, you obviously read the book. Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff wrote this book, The Coddling of the American Mind. When his English publisher was about to publish the book in Britain, they said to me, would I join Jonathan in launching the book? And I said, of course. So we did an evening, big, thousand people evening, centre of London, and it’s Jonathan and me on the one hand and a very, very radical feminist and a very angry black guy on the other side, a professor of Black Studies at a British university.

And his claim was, and he said it in these words again and again and again, “Britain is founded on racism, colonialism, and genocide.” And he kept saying this every three minutes. Now this did not endear him to the public. You do not pay 10 pounds or whatever it is to come and listen to a lecture to be told you’re a racist and a colonialist and a committer of genocide. So after about 30 minutes of this stuff, I thought this is just plain boring. I didn’t say this is just like America, but we were locked into our different boxes and nobody was moving anywhere. So I thought, okay, let’s give it a go, let’s give it a go.

And I turned to him and I said, “Look, you know when I was born, you know my circumstances. So you know the way I feel and why I feel that way. But I have to say that had I been born when you were born, under the circumstances in which you were born, I might have come to exactly the same attitudes that you have today. So now let us see whether side by side, we can find a better future together.” Now at that moment, I am told, a kind of wave when went through the audience. They were saying, thank heaven somebody’s broken through here and shown he’s willing to cross sides in order to have a serious conversation. And that did tell me that you can sometimes break through even these really closed environments, just by being willing to enter the mindset of somebody not like you.

Abe Socher:

And did that spark a later conversation, or was it just at the moment?

Rabbi Sacks:

It lightened up that evening to a much more engaged conversation. And my only concern at that point wasn’t to save the world, but to sell Jonathan Haidt’s books, I’ll be honest with you. But you know, it just showed you what you can do. Of course, to create society-wide change you need something a bit more rigorous than that. I mean, I recognise that.

Abe Socher:

Speaking of selling good books, before we get to questions, let’s get back to one moment in your book that I thought was particularly striking, and it can bring us back to Bernard Williams too. As you mentioned, one of his great books is Shame and Necessity. And this distinction between a shame culture and a guilt culture, these two kinds of moral cultures. This is a famous distinction which he deals with very sensitively.

Rabbi Sacks:

Yeah.

Abe Socher:

I suppose, archetypically, ancient Greece is a shame-honour culture and ancient Israel is a guilt-merit culture, let’s say.

Rabbi Sacks:

Yeah.

Abe Socher:

But he makes a very interesting distinction about hearing and seeing, in terms of these two cultures, which then, you turn into, despite this not being, as you say, a religious book, you then turn into a fascinating drasha [sermon, Torah talk]. And I wonder if, especially since we’re going to read Parshat Bereishit very soon, in a few weeks, you could explain that distinction and show how you read that parsha or-?

Rabbi Sacks:

Yeah.

Abe Socher:

Or that bit?

Rabbi Sacks:

Yeah. First of all, this is not in Bernard Williams, but it has to do with Yom Kippur. And that is that a guilt culture creates the possibility of atonement and forgiveness, because a guilt culture is predicated on a difference between the agent and the act. Hate the sin, love the sinner. And therefore, despite the fact that you did a bad act, nonetheless, you can remain a pure human being. The soul you gave me is pure, et cetera, et cetera. Hence, the possibility of atonement and forgiveness.

Shame culture is not like that, because there is no distinction between act and agent. And hence, an offence is an indelible stain on your character. Which is why, if you were shamed, you committed hari-kari, you became a Japanese war pilot. Or if you were British, you went off to Australia or South Africa, where nobody knew you, et cetera, et cetera, because there’s no way of cleansing shame. And that is why Yom Kippur is so essential in defining Judaism as not a shame culture.

The second thing is that we have now become a well and truly shame culture once again, another sign of our loss of the Judeo-Christian heritage. All this cancel culture stuff is essentially shame, not guilt.

Abe Socher:

Right.

Rabbi Sacks:

If it were guilt, you could apologise and be forgiven. But once they’ve cancelled you, there’s no forgiveness.

Abe Socher:

You’re banished.

Rabbi Sacks:

You’re dead, so that is that. Now, Bernard Williams quotes, I’ve forgotten their name, Janet somebody or other. It’s Ruth Benedict, of course, who created this distinction. And he’s says that the thing about shame is, it’s kind of visual. You imagine yourself being seen by other people. And hence, when you feel ashamed, the first thing you want to do is vanish underneath the floorboards. He says, in a guilt culture, that doesn’t help at all, because even if you vanish underneath the floorboards, the guilty voice inside of you is still there.

Abe Socher:

Right.

Rabbi Sacks:

So, shame is a visual phenomenon, and guilt is an aural one, it’s about what you hear. Now, bearing that in mind, I suddenly realised that if you look very carefully at the story of Adam and Eve and Eden and the serpent, you’ll see that almost all of it has to do with appearances. They’re naked and they’re ashamed. They hide from God, because they think if we’re hidden visually from God, he doesn’t see us,    he doesn’t, et cetera, et cetera.

And the serpent, the snake, the serpent says, “The day you eat from the fruit, your eyes will be open.” So this is a shame culture. And what Adam and Eve have done is they’ve opted for an ethic of the eyes, instead of an ethic of the ear, the ear that hears God’s command and the ear that responds to that command.

Now, I don’t know anyone’s analysed it that way, but if you look very, very carefully at the wording, you will see it kinds of works. It says that they’re intensely focused on seeing and being seen.

Abe Socher:

That’s marvellous. I have so many more questions, but I know your time is short. And I also know that there are so many people who want to ask questions, and we were a little stalled early on with the technology. Let me get to a particularly striking one, this is from a man named Ezra Waxman. He writes, “I am the survivor of a right wing, extremist attack, which targeted Jews and Muslims. Soon, I will be called upon to present my testimony in court and with an opportunity to speak directly to my perpetrator, if I so choose. Do you have any advice as to how one might utilise such a platform to lekadesh shem shamayim, to sanctify God’s name? As the attack took place last Yom Kippur, I’m wondering if there might be specific message coming from the Days of Awe, which could be important for our society to hear.”

Rabbi Sacks:

Oh, my goodness me, my goodness me. It’s terribly important, in my humble opinion, first and foremost, for you to speak from your heart. These extreme guys really lack a basic element of humanity, and it’s just terribly important that they hear from you exactly what happened, or how you felt, how it’s affected your life. That is extremely important.

But I think it is equally important if you feel able to say this, that this happened on the holiest day of the Jewish year. And very often, our enemies have chosen holy days on which to attack us. Certainly happened in Nazi Germany, and I have a strong suspicion it happened throughout the Middle Ages. And you have to stand up in court and say, “I will not be intimidated.” My people were around long before any of your people were, and we are still here. And the reason that we are still here is that we believe in the sanctity of life. And if you cannot recognise the sanctity of life, then society has no place for you.

Abe Socher:

It’s hard to know how to follow such a question, but there are many more talking. A follow-up question from Mario Flack, which is, “What book and in particular, what Jewish book, particularly influenced you when you were writing this book?”

Rabbi Sacks:

Now this is a book for, what do you call it? The left hand.

Abe Socher:

And yet still, Buber and Levinas and,

Rabbi Sacks:

Oh, right, oh sorry. Which Jewish book, in that sense?

Abe Socher:

Yes.

Rabbi Sacks:

Absolutely no question, the book of Jeremiah.

That’s the key one. There are a lot of passages in Devarim (Deuteronomy). There are a lot of passages in all the Prophets, especially Amos, but Jeremiah above all.

Jeremiah was politically intelligent, he had a far finer grasp of politics than any of his contemporaries. Jeremiah was a moral extremist, but he was a political moderate, he really was. He believed in making peace with the Babylonians, all the rest of it. He did not believe in fighting wars. He was not a zealot, the exact opposite. Politically, he was a moderate, which is why all the zealots wanted him killed, had him thrown into the pit, and so on and so forth. So he was politically wise and politically moderate.

But those are tangential to what Jeremiah’s all about. Jeremiah is telling us that unless a society is moral, it will fail. The test of a society being moral is that people feel this is a good place to live. In Jeremiah’s day, they didn’t feel this. They thought there was corruption, bribery, exploitation, the rich taking advantage of the poor, price-fixing, you name it. He was absolutely clear that a society that is not moral will not survive.

Now, here is a man who lived quite a long life, who was simply not listened to, not heeded in his lifetime. Of course, in a famous chapter in Jeremiah, he says, “I said to myself, I’m not going to prophesy anymore because it’s brought me nothing but shame and humiliation the whole day long. But the word was within me like a burning fire, and I could not contain it.” So Jeremiah is the guy who tells us the fundamental truth. It’s very hard to say because when people are relatively affluent, they really don’t give much of a damn about morality. Jeremiah to me is the guy who said it all, saw it all, never lost hope. He was totally and absolutely the inspiration of this book.

Abe Socher:

Two more questions, but I’ll give them both to you and let you close on that. First, a reader who is anonymous, but who clearly read your book, says that he or she couldn’t help but notice and enjoy the use of humour and specifically Jewish jokes throughout Morality. “Given the prevalence of social media and its inherently dehumanising nature, what place do you feel Jewish humour, or other humour has, as we re-establish a feeling of connectedness and obligation to each other?” That’s the first question.

The second question, which comes from several people, so many that I won’t name names is, “aside from reading your book, what practically can we as Jews and as citizens do now to restore the kind of society at which you are aiming?”

Rabbi Sacks:

Yeah, number one, humour in Judaism, absolutely fundamental. Of course, Ruth Wisse has written a book on this. But actually the one I most enjoy was the sociologist, Peter Berger, who wrote a little book called Redeeming Laughter. It’s almost entirely about Jewish jokes.

I think we laugh because otherwise we’d cry. it’s that simple. I also found if you’re talking about humour, and we’re talking about university days, the funniest people I ever met were the most brilliant academics I ever met. Isaiah Berlin, for instance. I made Isaiah Berlin one of the judges in my Chief Rabbi’s Award scheme many years ago. I said, “Isaiah, you will decide who won the award four days before the award scheme. Whatever you do, don’t tell anyone who won!” We were at a dinner together, and I’m sitting through the second course, and Isaiah is telling everyone who won. So I went up to him, and I said, “Isaiah, we said it’s a secret!” He turned to me, and he said, “My dear boy, dear boy, I practise the Oxford way of keeping a secret, you only tell one person at a time.” That’s Isaiah Berlin. Bernard Williams had a wonderful sense of humour, et cetera, et cetera. The funniest of the lot was the Regius Professor of Roman Law at Oxford called David Daube. I don’t know if you ever came across David Daube, he’s the funniest guy ever. So these are brilliant, brilliant people.

Humour humanises. Humour tells me that I can take that one reality and see it a different way. It’s a kind of different way of doing cognitive behavioural therapy, but it tells me I am not a prisoner of circumstance. So I say humour is first cousin to hope and I thought I was dealing with such a heavy subject that I had to put a little bit of humour in the book. I wish I’d put a bit more in, but at any rate, a little bit. So thank you for noticing.

The second question, what can we do to make a difference? The truth is, you and I and every one of us can make a difference, because all we have to do is reach out to one other person in an act of kindness. As soon as it is safe to do so or at two metres’ distance if it isn’t safe to do so, wearing a mask, go out there and do, number one, visit the sick. Number two, as soon as it’s possible, open your house to hospitality. Number three, get in touch with the people who are isolated and who are feeling vulnerable and alone. Number four, volunteer. Number five, get engaged in some kind of local charity.

Now, I have to tell you, and I think I hint this in the book, that this will have a direct positive benefit on your health. We know now that doing good is actually good for you in it strengthens the immune system, for instance. It’s an extremely powerful medical phenomenon, and volunteering in particular.

The second you do this, you discover something we may have forgotten during the pandemic, which is that good things are contagious, not just bad things. That’s the only way we change the world, one life at a time, one day at a time, one act at a time, focusing on the people who are close to us or the opportunities that are close to us. Resolve that in the coming year, you will do one extra commitment by way of volunteering or helping others. As I say, it will be good for them, it will be good for you, and it will help begin to change the tone of society.

Abe Socher:

Well, it’s hard to know a better note on which to end. The book is Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times. Rabbi Sacks, I thank you for persevering through technological difficulties and for your eloquence. It’s been a pleasure, and I hope to continue at some later date.