Emerging from Crisis, Stronger | StandwithUs

Host, Michael Dickson: [Preamble… ]

… Thank you again for joining us from wherever you are. Our guest today is an inspirational faith leader. He's the former British Chief Rabbi, an inspiring figure for Jews and so many others. He's a moral voice in our world. He's the author of over 30 books. He's been awarded 18 honorary doctorates and has won many accolades, including the Jerusalem Prize, the Templeton Prize, and the StandWithUs Beacon of Light Award. Joining us live from London, I'm honoured to welcome Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks. Thank you for being with us. 

Rabbi Sacks: Well, Michael, it's great to be with you. Let me first of all thank every single one of the people who are connected with Stand With Us for their incredible work throughout the years. Important, vital work and every one of you is a hero. Thank you, Michael, and all your team,who are connecting us with one another across the world.

I think the Almighty sent social media down just for something like this. And Jews know how to connect. So it's wonderful to be with you and to wish all of you, every one of you tuning in, a good Pesach, maybe not a super happy one, but at least a memorable one, one we will talk about for the rest of our lives.

Michael: Absolutely, and we speak at a time when so many people around the globe are in different forms of pain. It's a phenomenon that's touching everybody. So as we all face this crisis, what brings you comfort and solace? 

Rabbi Sacks: Well, first of all the obvious negatives. I mean, this is the biggest thing that has happened since World War II. And at least it isn't a war. And many of us have been fearing a war at various times, whether it was the Cuban Missile Crisis or it was stuff in the Middle East or was stuff following the trauma of 9/11. Elaine and I and our kids who were then really quite young were in Jerusalem for the whole of the first Gulf War. And you know, it was not unlike this. We all had our gas masks and there were 39 Scud missiles raining down and we did not know whether the next one would contain chemical or biological weapons. So those were really, really fearful. 

Now, this is fearful at every level -, economic, physical, psychological, social. But at least it's not war and at least humanity isn't divided into our lot and the enemy. On this, we are a single humanity facing the same challenge.

So I think, terrible though it is, it could have been a whole lot worse.

Michael: There'll be many people who will be depressed by the situation, as you mentioned. Many will have suffered a bereavement of someone close. Surely no one is completely untouched by, as you said, this universal pandemic. How do you, as a rabbi, counsel people to see the light in what feels like a very dark situation indeed? 

Rabbi Sacks: Well, number one, bereavement is a kind of darkness whenever it happens. It's really, really tough. I mean it took me… it takes most people a year to get over a bereavement. That's what Jewish laws of mourning are about and you can't suddenly switch a light on and pretend It hasn't happened.

Bereavement is deep pain. The trouble is that bereavements are happening without the comfort of family and friends being with you at the funeral and being able to visit you at shiva. Obviously, all sorts of electronic devices, Zoom, you know, whoever heard of Zoom more than a month ago? Suddenly, funerals are being live streamed, shiva visits are being paid through Zoom and other things. So people who are bereaved still know that the community and their wider family is with them. But the truth is if there is one comfort, it's that everyone realises that they are not alone in being alone.

Michael: You've got a best-selling book right now in the UK. It's out in the United States in September. It's called “Morality.” How does it relate to the kind of situation we find ourselves in? 

Rabbi Sacks: Well, embarrassingly, it turns out to be the most topical book I could possibly have written and obviously I was not anticipating this. I've been arguing that increasingly over the last few decades, we've had too much ‘I’ and too little ‘We.’ Too much pursuit of self-interest, too little concern with the common good. And what's happened - and everyone has noticed this - is that we've had these two very distinct behaviours.

Crisis brings out the worst in people and the best in people. And the worst happens when people focus on the I, you know, they panic buy, they hoard, they stockpile, they flout social distancing rules or self-imposed isolation rules. And those things are terrible and they come from disregarding the common good.

On the other hand, we've had a rise in good neighbourliness, the like of which I've never seen before. Every street around here has its own WhatsApp group so that a guy who's going shopping can WhatsApp all his neighbours saying, “I'm going shopping. Does anyone need anything?” I can't tell you how many neighbours we have that we never knew we had who want to help.

Every shul has become a kind of social centre for doing this kind of thing, doing the Pesach shopping for everyone. And the thing that really hit me because it was so unexpected is that my little eight-year-old granddaughter, of her own accord, two weeks ago, following the rules of distance social distancing, went to every house in her street knocking on the door and saying, “We live at number 12. If you need anything, just knock on our door.” And nobody told her to. It was just great. So, you know people have discovered the ‘We’ and how good it is. And the ‘I’ and how bad it is. And I do hope that what will come out of all of this, in the long run, will be a stronger sense of social connectedness, a stronger sense of altruism, a stronger sense of neighbourliness, which is really what I wrote my book in order to try and achieve.

Michael: We're coming up to Passover, to Pesach, the festival of freedom. We're approaching Seder Night, when families and friends come together in normal times. Now in normal times, Jewish life is the opposite of social distancing. So, with so much of Jewish life focused on coming together, how should we approach Passover this year? When we can't be with our family or with our community? 

Rabbi Sacks: Well, I'm sure you do it with a sense of humour. I'm sure you've seen the thing that was going the rounds today. You know, the Sages in Bnei Brak sitting around discussing the Pesach and the police come in and say “Forbidden!” Poor old Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Tarfon. They weren't keeping the social distance stuff. 

Michael: They couldn't stay for the Shema. 

Rabbi Sacks: They couldn't stay for the Shema. They broke it up long before the Shema. But it seems to me that some creative things are being done. I mean, first of all, I'm sure you know Rabbi Benny Lau Is doing an online Seder with singer Ehud Banai, which is going to be broadcast on television. On a television channel that won't be broadcasting anything else, so you can leave it on all the way through and all you'll do is get the Seder, so we can't do that in Chutz L'Aretz, but Benny Lau is doing that. 

There is a fabulous project I'm sure you're aware of in Israel, especially in Yerushalayim, called Am Echad BeShulchan Echad [One People at One Table]. At 8:30 on Wednesday evening, everyone is going out on their balconies so that the elderly people who are alone can hear the five-year-old and four-year-old kids sing Ma Nishtana. So the whole of Yerushalayim is becoming one family and this is something that never happened before. So I think it's really really good.

Elaine and I will be on our own, but then a few years ago, you know, our kids bought us one of those little electronic picture frames, you know the kind. And so now, every Friday night when we're making kiddush, we stand by the picture frame. And we see all our grandchildren. It's beautiful. So you can do all this stuff and if you're really, really in in the depths of despair, then you have to watch Natan Sharansky's little video of how he survived nine years in the KGB prison, and four and a half of them in solitary confinement. And he really managed to put together the mental disciplines to do it and he's got a lovely YouTube video.

But the truth is that maybe we're being reminded of something we've forgotten about, you know. Pesach used to be, we're in Egypt, we're slaves and this is terrible and we're eating the bread of affliction and the bitter herbs of slavery. I asked a rabbi in Los Angeles who was conducting a seder in Hawaii, and I said, “In Hawaii, where is the affliction?” He said, “That comes when they give you the bill.”

But you know, I mean here we are in the middle of affliction and Pesach is telling us that there is a journey from the matzah and the maror to the four cups of wine of freedom. We can move from darkness to light, from confinement to liberation. So Pesach is a journey of hope.

And this particular Pesach, although it may be a little lonely, will be very vivid and I think, you know, give us an experience that we're not going to forget.

Michael: Absolutely. I'll remind our viewers that you can send in your questions. We'll be happy to put them to Rabbi Sacks as much as we can, given our time.

Rabbi Sacks, this week marked what could be a turning point in the UK as Jeremy Corbyn ended his term as British Labour leader. Now, during that time antisemitic attack after attack was uncovered in the party that he led. What are your reflections on this and on modern antisemitism? 

Rabbi Sacks: Well, I'll tell you something. It's very interesting. There was a Labour leader called Harold Wilson, who won four general elections. There was a Labour leader called Tony Blair, who won three general elections. There was a Labour leader called Gordon Brown, who was the last Labour Prime Minister. All three of those were true friends of the Jewish people and true friends of the State of Israel. And they're the only people who won an election. So I hope that Labour has finally worked out that if you want to win an election, try however hard it is to be friendly to Jews and respectful of the Jewish State. Because otherwise you're going to be in complete exile forever.

That is not because the whole world is philosemitic, but it is because anyone who can't be trusted to rid his party of antisemitism cannot be trusted with the destinies of our nation. And I think Sir Keir Starmer has made this absolutely clear, straight away. Almost the first thing he said is we have to rid the party of the taint of antisemitism. We have to remove it, he said, by its roots. He sent a lovely message to the Jewish community comforting them for some of the casualties of the pandemic. He's indicated that he's going to take a completely different direction. And that's going to be very good news for us, for the Labour Party and for Britain.

Michael: Speaking about antisemitism, I remember at our Stand With Us UK gala in London a couple of years ago, you powerfully said - and this is relevant as we come up to Passover - “To be free is to let go of hate.” To be free is to let go of hate. How should both we and our enemies internalise that message? 

Rabbi Sacks: I was saying this because Moshe Rabbeinu, at the end of his life in Devarim chapter 23, says, “Don't despise an Egyptian because you were a stranger in his land,” I mean that's an incredible thing to say.

I mean we were a stranger in his land. They did not put us up in the Cairo Hilton. They persecuted us, they enslaved us, they killed our male children. And yet Moshe Rabbeinu says don't hate them, because if you do, you'll still be slaves. Not physically, but psychologically. You will not have let go of the past and the past will not have let go of you. And Jews are not good haters 

You know, the only people we really hate are the Amalekites and we haven't got a clue who they are. Actually, the only Amalekite we can really think of is Haman and Purim and all we do is make a loud noise. There's nothing nasty about it. So somehow or other, we've stayed - relatively speaking - very free of hate. 

And the result is that we are not held captive by the bad things that have happened in our past. When the fact that a mere three years after the liberation of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, Jewish people could get up in the form of David Ben-Gurion and proclaim the State of Israel meant that Jews were looking forward.

They weren't looking back. Hate always involves looking back. And the end result is you are held captive by the past and you would never be free.

Michael: Rabbi Sacks, I want to let you know we have some greetings from Sultan Mashakba who's saying “Shalom” from Jordan, Priya Raio is in Mumbai, India, watching us. Heinz Adam is saying “Shalom” from Santiago in Chile, Camino de Molina is in Colombia, Singer David is in Budapest, Mandy Sher in South Africa, Angela Brown in Brussels… just sending their greetings from around the world. 

Rabbi Sacks: Yeah, greetings to them. I've just travelled further in one minute than I have in the rest of my life! 

Michael: You and all of us. One of the recurrent themes in modern antisemitic attacks are that Israel and uniquely - we're talking about the nations of the world right now - uniquely among the world's 193 nations, Israel alone is seen as illegitimate. So is anti-Zionism in your view the new antisemitism? 

Rabbi Sacks: Yeah, I mean the reason we have a coronavirus pandemic is because viruses mutate. The body has this incredible sophisticated mechanism called the immune system. And it recognises viruses and it sets up the defences against them. And the only way a virus can survive really and succeed is to mutate. So that the immune system no longer recognises that virus because it never saw that virus before. 

And the same is true of hatred, especially of antisemitism.

So, in the Middle Ages, Jews were hated for their religion. In the 19th, late 19th and early 20th century, they were hated for their race. Today, they're hated for their nation state, the State of Israel. Each one of those mutations because you couldn't in the 19th century hate Jews because of their religion. The 19th century was an age of scientific rationality. Religion just didn't have any street cred anymore as a reason to hate somebody. But race was regarded as something that could be studied scientifically.

After the Holocaust, you can't hate somebody because of their race. So we got hated for our nation state. What is common to all three? Religion, race and nation state is that they are the collective embodiment of the Jewish people. So, in the Middle Ages, we were a religious community. In the late 19th century, early 20th century, lots and lots of Jews were quite secular, in Vienna, in Berlin, in Paris. So they were no longer really a religious community. They were an ethnic community. Today, the collective embodiment of the Jewish people is the State of Israel. All the rest of us are scattered minorities.

Israel is the only place where Jews are a majority, where Jews have the ability to create their own society and their own culture. It's the only place that they speak the Jewish language. So the collective embodiment of Jews has changed. Antisemitism has changed. But today, anti-Zionism is antisemitism and the reason is that of all countries whose legitimacy cannot be doubted, it's the State of Israel. It was brought into being by a two-thirds vote of the United Nations on the 29th of November 1947.

I mean, you couldn't have a more obvious form of legitimacy than that which had been preceded by the Balfour Declaration, which had been endorsed by the League of Nations in 1922.

So you have to rewrite history to delegitimize the State of Israel.

Michael: Rabbi Sacks, in a few weeks we will celebrate the 72nd Independence Day. And I hope I'm not giving anything away to our audience here, I know that you also recently celebrated the same birthday. 72 years since the Jewish State was reborn. You've called Israel, “the home of hope.” Why so?

Rabbi Sacks: Because of two very moving moments many centuries apart. There is a prophecy in the 37th chapter of the book of Ezekiel where the prophet sees Israel as a valley of dry bones. And I find that the most haunting Holocaust literature I know, despite the fact that it was written 26 centuries before the Holocaust. But that's what the British saw when they liberated Bergen-Belsen on the 15th of April 1945. A valley of dry bones. And God says to the prophet, the people say, ‘Our hope is lost.’ And God says, ’But it isn't lost. I will lift you out of your graves and take you to the Land of Israel.’

And I thought, what an image of what actually happened in the 20th century! And then of course, there's this man called Naftali Hertz Imber, who in 1877 - two years before the word “antisemitism” is coined - writes the poem that became Israel's national anthem. And for some reason, he went back to that 37th chapter of Ezekiel and took that phrase of avda tikvateinu, [our hope has been lost] and added the words od lo [not yet]. “Od lo avda tikvateinu.”

And that to me is what Israel is about. It's about the proof that we should never give up hope. Now, you know what happened when they liberated Bergen-Belsen, because it's on a recording that you can find on YouTube. The BBC sent a reporter and the survivors sing a song in Bergen-Belsen. And you know what they sing? Od lo avdah tikvateinu.

So for me, Israel is the power of hope to transform the world. The Jewish people kept hope alive and hope kept the Jewish people alive.

Michael: Nowadays, in terms of the strategic threats Israel faces, there is a group that calls themselves BDS, the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions activists who campaign against Israel. Would you share your views on them? 

Rabbi Sacks: Human rights are universal. So, if you're going to defend human rights, or if you're going to protest an abuse of human rights, you have to do so universally. BDS singles out Israel and protests abuses of human rights, where it refuses to protest anyone else's abuses of human rights. That therefore is not human rights. That is a classic example of human wrong. I find BDS really really lacking in any integrity. It is fundamentally aimed at the dismantlement of the State of Israel. It’s deeply shocking and because I care so much, I and my wonderful team of Joanna and Dan, put together some three little whiteboard animations. I don't know if you've seen them. One is on…

Michael: I've seen them and we've shared them and we will share them again perhaps after this broadcast on our Facebook.

Rabbi Sacks: Yes, so, you know, I've done one on BDS, one on antisemitism and one on anti-Zionism. I think these are absolutely outrageous. 

Michael: Rabbi Sacks, Israel - and particularly Israelis - are almost uniquely perhaps resilient. It's a nation that has had to hang tough like no other. Now, particularly in this time when we could all do with some resilience, what lessons can we learn from Israel? 

Rabbi Sacks: Number one, as soon as all this is over, let's all go and remind ourselves what a great country Israel actually is.

Number two, just look at what Israel has always been. It's an affirmation of life in the face of death. It was born after the Holocaust. It has survived 72 years of being surrounded by enemies, and every time there is a threat to Israel's security, somehow or other Israel has found the ingenuity to turn that curse into a blessing, or at least neutralise the curse. You know, when they were lobbing missiles against hospitals in the north of Israel, they simply built underground hospitals that could be taken underground in 24 hours.

I've never seen anything like it. We were impressed by the Chinese putting together a hospital in 10 days, but you know, China doesn't face the kind of dangers Israel does. Israel shows us you can be surrounded by enemies, you can be a tiny country surrounded by vast, vast nations and empires and stretches of land, and yet you can still affirm life. And you could see how clear, firm and decisive Israel's response was to the coronavirus pandemic.

It was very clear from the word go. Britain wasn't clear from the word go, the United States wasn't clear from the word go, but Israel was. And you look at how it's just taken 11 big cargo jets and flown them to China to bring back huge supplies. Somehow or other, when it's a matter of preserving and protecting and sanctifying life, Israel does these incredible things. 

But how do we learn this? Can I just give you a word of Torah, because you know, I am a rabbi. On the seventh day of Pesach, we have the division of the Red Sea. Just before then, Israel has a battle against the Egyptians with all their chariots, and Moses says to the Israelites [quotes the Hebrew], Just stand there and watch God do it. He'll do it, you just shut up and He'll do everything for you. After Kriyat Yam Suf [the division of the Red Sea], they have another battle, this time against the Amalekites. This time no miracles from God. Moses says to Joshua, Go and fight Amalek. There are no miracles whatsoever. The Israelites, inspired by Moses who lifts his arms up. They look up to the sky. They're inspired and they win. 

Kriyat Yam Suf is that dividing point in history, between the moment when God fights the Israelites’ battles for them and the moment when the Israelites fight the battle for God. 

And that is the big dividing point. Our Kriyat Yam Suf was the Holocaust. And Israel is the Jewish people saying, I'm not going to wait for God to fight my battles for me. I'm going to fight His battles for Him. And that is the source of Israeli resilience. We take our destiny into our own hands and we fight for Him. We don't wait for Him to fight for us.

Michael: I'd like to bring in some questions from our audience. This one comes from Ian. He's saying, “My wife and I have enjoyed reading your [Rabbi Sacks’] Haggadah, and are planning to host our first Seder. What advice do you have to engage our family who are more interested in their brisket dinner than Jewish texts and rituals? 

Rabbi Sacks: [chuckles] I don't know. Look, I mean first and foremost, you're going to get them all, please, to spill one extra drop of wine when it comes to the plagues because we've just discovered the 11th plague. Second thing is, you're going to discuss what it felt like to be in Egypt with all those plagues running around you. 

The Haggadah is always relevant because it's a pretty political sort of text and the best way to do it is just ask everyone, if you can, just to prepare, in advance, one little three-minute thing on something that interests them. I mean, just to ask them to do it without any forewarning is a little difficult. But just say now, you know, could you just give/share with us one little insight? And I think that will spark a conversation that’ll get terribly interesting actually.

Michael: Jaron Trea? is saying, quoting your words back to you, he is saying you once wrote in one of your books, “Faith is about seeing the miraculous in the every day.Not about waiting every day for the miraculous.” What is the miraculous that we can see in this specific situation? 

Rabbi Sacks: I cannot believe that history, destiny, the Almighty or something saw things so precisely as to provide us with all these social media that allow us to connect ourselves to one another. If this pandemic had happened 10 years ago, we would be living in complete and absolute isolation. We wouldn't know what to do. The whole society would close down! 

Whereas in fact - and this is a grassroots phenomenon - all sorts of people are doing all sorts of creative things. There's a guy who's a personal trainer who's got I don't know how many hundreds of thousands of Brits doing half an hour's exercise with him every day. Also, you've got a family who do a little bit of singing and apply Les Misérables to our present situation…

I, in my book, was a little bit critical about the social media, but here it is. They have come at just the right moment. I think, in many ways, this has happened at a moment where we should in any case have thought, are we going in the right direction as a society?

And this is forcing on us reflections that couldn't have happened otherwise. I see everything about this is really quite miraculous. Miracles are sometimes very painful. Please be aware of this, but I've rarely yet found a big event, in my life or in the life of society, that I couldn't extract some real meaning from. And if you want to know how to do this, at any stage in your life, say, ‘What has this thing that has just happened to me allowed me to do that I couldn't or wouldn't have done otherwise?’

And if you do that, you will find the Hand of Providence in your life. 

Michael: We have many Stand With Us students and high school leaders who are watching us now and they stand up for Israel on campuses all the time. What's your message for them? 

Rabbi Sacks: Oh look. Israel. There's so much wonderful about Israel, and I mentioned this thing about going out on the balconies and so on. It's so beautiful. But of course I don't live in Israel, so I don't see the miracles that are happening day by day by day.

Michael: I get to. I'm blessed too.

Rabbi Sacks: I get to see my miracles every day. One little example. There's a singer in Israel called Ishay Ribo who's just put on YouTube a new song that he's composed during the pandemic called Keter Melucha. Have you heard it? 

Michael: I have. I have.

Rabbi Sacks: And this is a beautiful, biblical kind of song, and yet relating precisely to what's happening in very elemental ways. He's talking about between Vayakhel and Pekudei, Vayikra and Tzav, and it's a very traditional thing. And then he's turning to Hashem and saying, “Ma Ata rotzeh shenilmad mizeh?” [What do You want us to learn from this?], “Eich lehitached betoch hapirud hazeh?” [How to come together as one amidst this separation?], etc., etc. 

So, you know, I think to myself, in what other country would I find a pop musician writing a deeply religious song in the middle of a thoroughly horrendous pandemic? And lifting everyone's spirits and getting their eyes to look a little upwards to heaven. I don't think that's happened in Britain. I don't think it's happened in the States, but it's happened in Israel.

Michael: Rabbi Sacks, Natasha is asking, “Antisemitism is a fight that we've always had to fight throughout my lifetime. Is this just something we will always have to battle?”

Rabbi Sacks: [sighs] It depends, this is a very deep subject. I wrote a book about it called “Not in God's Name.” It's not a very direct book because antisemitism as a direct phenomenon is actually a very deep phenomenon. I think a lot of it is deeply rooted in theology. I mean antisemitism was not born with Christianity. It was born really with a guy called Manetho who was an Egyptian priest in the third century BCE. You know that in Alexandria you had really the first deep, modern-type antisemitism, that then infected Greece, Rome and eventually Christianity, and Christianity was a major carrier of it.

The truth is, that has changed, and it changed because a very great leader, Pope John the 23rd, met a Jewish historian called Jules Isaac, a French historian, in 1960. Jules Isaac had written about the “Adversus Judaeos” literature in the early church fathers, the early antisemitic literature in the third, fourth and fifth centuries. And the Pope realised he had to change the church and he did. He didn't live to see it. He died in ‘63. It happened in ‘65. It was called the Vatican’s nostra aetate. Today, Jews and Catholics meet as friends, having lived for 1,800 years as at best strangers and at worst enemies. So, you know it can be done. It needs greatness on the part of religious leaders to take us there. But I don't see antisemitism as an absolute given. I don't think there was a major history of antisemitism in China, and I don't think there was a major history in India either. And that's because neither of them was a Muslim or Christian country.

We all have to wrestle - I mean you understand Michael - when I was saying to be free you have to let go of hate. We're all capable of hating. Jews are as capable as anyone else, and we just have to fight it. And I would hope that there will be Church and Muslim leaders who will fight it. I've certainly met people who do. So, I am hopeful that we can get rid of it, but Jeremy Corbyn did not help.

Michael: Absolutely. Well, let's hope we've both dodged a bullet for that one. Robert is a high school student in America. And he's saying, “How do I explain my connection as a Jew to non-Jewish friends, even though they are not religious?”

Rabbi Sacks: I think Judaism - and I know this for a fact - is really communicable, without any theology at all because of that whole prophetic tradition. I mean the story of Pesach is the Supreme Power intervenes in history to liberate the supremely powerless. You don't have to be religious to see this drama of freedom as a very powerful one. Amos, Hosea, Isaiah,Jeremiah are talking about social justice. They're talking about caring for the vulnerable in society. These things have inspired people whether they were religious or secular. 

Because at the core of Judaism is a powerful morality. And that morality can be based on our humanity. You don't have to say this all came from heaven. All you have to do is say it comes from Earth. So long as we can see our fellow human beings as the image of God. In other words, Judaism isn't heavily theological. Does that make sense? 

Michael: It does make sense and in terms of his relationship to Israel, what would you advise somebody, a young Jew who's in a predominantly non-Jewish environment? How would you advise them to talk about their relationship to Israel? 

Rabbi Sacks: I think it's important for people to understand that Israel is where the Jewish people was born. That Judaism begins with two great journeys - Abraham and Sarah from one direction and then Moses and the Israelites from the other. It was there that they created a State, there that they created a language, there that the language, the landscape, the calendar… all of this is to us the place where our identity suddenly becomes coherent. It's no longer something locked up in my head. It's out there in the street. It's out there. I am in Jerusalem and “I lift my eyes to the hills whence my redeemer comes,” etc, etc. 

Everything about Israel is Judaism made real so… it would be hard to think of an example because if I were expecting a Greek to say, “Ah, the Parthenon in Athens. Go and see that. That's who I am,” but yes, that was 25 centuries ago, but Israel is just now as well as then. So Israel is where my people was born. Israel is where my people has been reborn.

Michael: Rabbi Sacks, I think we'll have to wrap up soon, but I wanted just to ask you, this situation we’re currently in will end. We don't know how soon but it will end. When it does, what lessons should we take from what we have all experienced collectively?

Rabbi Sacks: Number one is our vulnerability. This tiny little invisible thing has brought all humanity to its knees. We should take our vulnerability more seriously. The climate change people have been telling us this for years. Guys do not realise how vulnerable we are. I hope this will help us take more care of ourselves and our fellows and of nature.

Number two, it has done something really really important that Jews know all about. Because we believe kol yisrael areivim zeh bazeh [all Israel are responsible for one another]. You can be scattered all over the world but we know we're all tied to one another with bonds of mutual responsibility. This time, for the first time ever, all humanity face the same crisis, the same danger, the same anxieties. The whole of humanity. 

I hope out of it will come some sense of kol bnei adam areivim zeh bazeh, all of humanity, the covenant of global solidarity.

And finally, as I say in my book, I hope we will come out of this realising that if we really really want to create a good society; if we really simply want to live through something like this, we have to focus on the ‘We’ more than the ‘I.’ 

I think out of this will come a sense that we have been through something terrible together. And there will be a sense of social solidarity such as existed immediately after the Second World War, and great things can then happen because people feel for one another and they say, ‘Let us build something new together.’

Michael: And before we go, we, Stand With Us, we have a Haggadah and then you have a Haggadah as well. My brother has a tradition that he gets a new Haggadah every year, so there's plenty of space on the bookshelf for multiple Haggadahs. But our one is called “From Ancient Egypt to Modern Israel,” and with the artwork that we have within it and the quotes, it talks about that journey from Exodus, but not just that we left Egypt, but we came to Israel.

In this very special time - Passover leading up to Israeli Independence Day, preceded of course by Yom HaShoah and Yom HaZikaron, your reflections and final thoughts for our audience who are watching today?

Rabbi Sacks: We, on Pesach, drink four cups of wine, corresponding to the four expressions of redemption - ve’hotzeiti, ve’hitzalti, ve’ga’alti ve’lakachti - all in Exodus Chapter 6. The only thing is, if you actually open Exodus Chapter 6, you find that there are not four expressions of redemption. There are five. The fifth one is ve’heiveiti, I will bring you to the Land. Why did we not say that and why did we only have four cups of wine? Because we were in exile. In our lifetime we have seen the fifth expression of redemption. And I hope, Michael, in Jerusalem next year, we will drink the fifth cup of wine on next year's seder.

Michael: I very much look forward to it. Thank you very much Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks for your words of chizuk - of strength, of comfort, and of course of inspiration. I hope it's not long. Maybe we won't have to wait till next year. And before we do that in Yerushalayim next year in Jerusalem, thank you so much for your time and thank you for being with us.

Rabbi Sacks: Pleasure.

[Michael’s final remarks close the conversation... ]