The Dignity of Difference (video)

Rabbi Sacks: One of the things that emerged really from here, from the Mandel Institute, and from Jonathan Kestenbaum, and from all the issues that we were facing in Anglo Jewry, was what was called in America - and we then called in Britain - Jewish continuity. It has come to the fore again in American Jewry because you've probably read of the Pew Report which just came out, which talks about really rapid and massive assimilation. Outside of Orthodoxy, 71% of out- marriage in the States today. One half of American Jews can't read an aleph-beit. And we were faced with that kind of problem in Britain.

We had not yet reached that problem but we knew that if we were to exercise leadership - “Eizehu chacham? HaRoeh et haNolad” - you have to think ahead. And we were constantly driven by the question, ‘How will what we do today affect Am Yisrael 25 years from now?’ That was our standard frame of reference because we assumed you have to think long-term if you want to make systemic change. And we did create systemic change. 

It's a story for another day (unless you want to raise it when we're doing our question time), but we did manage to get Anglo Jewry to build Jewish day schools in a way that they'd never done before. So we moved from 25% of Jewish children in Jewish day schools in 1993 to 70% today. This was systemic change, because Anglo Jewry did not believe, in principle, in Jewish day schools. They believed in principle in social integration. We send our kids to state schools so that they should become good British citizens and we will teach them at cheder after school, whatever, what it is to be Jewish, and we had to change that. 

However, that was the easy change. Turning a community upside down was the easy bit.

The difficult bit was why? Why should somebody in the 21st century want to be Jewish when every other option is on the table? And I had to face the following problem, and it is a major problem. Why did a hundred generations of our ancestors want to stay Jewish and hand on that tradition to their children? And we know the answer.

It is there in every syllable of Jewish existence. “Ata vechartanu mikol haAmim, ahavta otanu v’ratzita banu.” Chosenness. God chose us and therefore for a hundred generations that worked.

He chose us. It's a great privilege. We want to confer that privilege on our children.

We are a royal family, if I can use the English phrase. We are the people who can say Avinu Malkeinu. Our Father is a King, so that makes us a royal family. The real problem - and this is the problem in the United States Jewry above all - is that you cannot use the concept “Chosen People” in contemporary society.

It doesn't play. It's racist. It's supremacist. It's all every ‘ist’ you can think of. And therefore - and in fact, the head of - what is it called? - the Jewish Theological Seminary, Arnold Eisen, wrote a book many years ago called “The Chosen People in America,” in which he shows you cannot use that phrase, “Chosen People,” in America. 

So the question was how do we get that concept into the language of contemporary society, into the language of liberal democracy? 

I now found a way of stating Jewish difference. God summoned us to be different in order to affirm everyone else's difference.

And you will say of course everyone is different. What makes Jewish difference different? And the answer is true. Everyone's different. It's just that throughout history, Jews were the only people to insist on the right to be different, the duty to be different, the dignity of difference.

They are the only people who over tvach aroch, in time, did not assimilate to the dominant culture or convert to the dominant faith. They were the ones who saw difference as a mitzvah rather than as a metziut, an uvda, a fact.

So now I had a paradigm shift, a way of talking about difference, which affirms Jewish difference but does not necessarily say to the world we're better than you are.

So I road-tested this idea.

Every year, Elaine and I used to give a reception for the leaders of the National Union of Students. Not the Jewish students, the National Union of Students, because you know there's a lot of anti-Israel stuff on campus.

So each year, at the end of the academic year, we would give a reception for the newly-elected leaders of the National Union of Students. It was nice, it was kavodik, it was in our garden, we had a reception. It was one of those few times in the year when you can sometimes expect the sun to shine, otherwise England is you know Hashem's aliyah campaign, the English weather.

And so you know, they felt a little bit special. 

And I sat, each year I would sit, and give a little shiur to them just like I'm doing to you. And so we had, you know, Christians, Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus. And for two years, I gave them a shiur on the dignity of difference, just to see how it played with non-Jews. And I could see - it's very sweet to say so - but I could see they were walking out of that room a little taller than when they came in and you could read the thought.

‘Oh, we always knew we were different but until now we thought that was a bad thing and here’s the Chief Rabbi saying it's a good thing.’ 

The second I saw that I knew we have found the way of talking about “Chosen People” in contemporary discourse. 

Jews were commanded to be different to teach the world the dignity of difference. 

And that is, to give it its technical name, universalising particularity.

It was, and so we were able to ask the question, why? Why be Jewish? Because we are here to defend everyone else's right to be different. 

And that played and so we were able to answer the question ‘Why?’ in the discourse of 21st century liberal democracy and pluralist societies.