Genius and the Story of the Jews

Opening comments

Moderator, David Gregory: I'm going to start with both of you on a single question and I'll ask for the purpose of brevity and getting the conversation going for just a sentence or two in reply, Rabbi Sacks, why have Jews survived? 

Rabbi Sacks: I think we are the people who were called after Jacob's wrestling match with the angel. He was given the name Israel, “He who wrestles with God and man and survives.” And to my mind the most significant sentence in that encounter is when the angel as dawn is about to break says, “Let me go.” And Jacob says, “I will not let you go until you bless me.”

And somehow we have wrestled with some of the worst persecution and suffering any people has ever known and we have said to every tragedy, “I will not let you go until you bless me.” So we are not only the people who survived, but the people who took out of every crisis some new generativity, some new creation. And out of every bad thing that happened to us, we were determined to bring a blessing out of the curse. 

David: Simon? 

Simon Schama: Well, that's very poetically beautiful and I didn't say that sceptically at all, but inevitably, Jonathan and I were saying actually we come at these mighty and taxing questions from slightly different point of view and the more prosaically historical view is that whether through a blessing or whether through necessity Jews really had a code of ethics as the core of their collective existence rather than the markers of what were commonly taken to be the way to survive, power, armies, monuments, force, which is not to say that we were not in the force and monuments business through the biblical period.

We certainly were, but it was you know for me if I had to take one moment out of the Bible, it would be a much less poetically profound one than Jonathan's. It would be the possibility of Uriah reproaching King David for iniquity. The possibility of a dialogue between morality and power is so central to Jewish existence.

So when, as inevitably all those markers which were assumed to be a source of strength - the list I've just mentioned - were ripped away from us, the way to survive was with everything else, was with reflection, spirituality and ethics. 

And you know, on and on through generation and generation, right to this moment in Israel and in the Galut, in the Diaspora now, that same argument between power and not power, power - and I'm not saying that it's a zero-sum game, that still goes on I believe. 

Rabbi Sacks: If I can just add to Simon, I think, Simon, my favourite antisemite is Nietzsche. Because he was, that rarest of things, an original antisemite. Everyone else hated Jews because they rejected Christianity. Nietzsche hated Jews because they created Christianity.

Simon: Voltaire too. 

Rabbi Sacks: And to my mind Nietzsche framed the choice which Simon has rightly laid before us because Nietzsche's philosophy was based on the idea of power and the Jewish choice was always the power of ideas. And that makes us central I think to the human condition.

David: You write in “A letter in the Scroll” the following: “Moses realised that a people achieves immortality not by building temples and mausoleums but by engraving their values on the hearts of their children and they on theirs and so on until the end of time.” Is that a, is that ethics-based? Is that a spiritual blueprint? Is that different than a people who go through oppression and savagery and massacre, and hold together, somehow hold together. What's specific about that prescription? 

Rabbi Sacks: Well, I think, you know, Jews came up with this sentence in the first book of the Bible, that every human being regardless of class, colour, culture or creed is in the image and likeness of God.

So Judaism created this idea of a society of equal dignity. Now that's been a human search for a very long time and most people - to echo Simon - have looked at it in terms of either wealth or power. You can be a communist and say we achieve equal dignity by equal wealth, or you can be in favour of participative democracy. We have equal power. 

Jews knew that neither of those works. Some will always get more power than others, more wealth than others, and therefore they came up with I think the most radical and workable idea of an equal society, equal access to knowledge.

Because with knowledge, the more you share the more you have. Whereas with power or wealth, the more you share the less you have. So I think we became the people whose citadels were schools, whose heroes were teachers and whose passion was study and the life of the mind. 

Simon: Yeah, again, I think I'm going to spend the whole evening really just footnoting Jonathan.

Which is a good thing to be able to do. I couldn't agree more. But I said my little footnote here is that the Jewish enquiry is an enquiry which again, you know, the classical world does produce too. Especially the classical world as rediscovered by the Renaissance, where it looks in a mirror and says ‘What is it to be human?’ What is it to be human? And you know, in much of the classical world, actually outside Greece, I'm thinking of Mesopotamia and Egypt and and so on, the image that is looked at is the image of the King God, the emperor with all his battalions.

Jews were asked to consider the nature of humanity in terms of words, in terms of language. We now know through, you know, extraordinary kind of linguistic scholarship into the early origins of the Bible, that actually vernacular Hebrew it sort of precedes the writing of the Bible. Even if you push the Bible - which I rather do - I'm just a student of amazing scholars to about the 8th century, approximately the reign of Hezekiah as a continuous set of redactable scripts, that there are so-called ABCD, there are alphabetic exercises that have been discovered in the northern Negev going back to the 11th and 12th century BC, which is extraordinary early variant on West Semitic Canaanite 22-letter.

And if you think about that, it absolutely speaks to what Jonathan's just said. It is very hard to master hieroglyphic language or to master cuneiform, if you're not in a very small educated elite. 22 letters written down in alphabet is for everyone and a lot of those scholars - at least they persuaded me when I was researching volume one of “The Story of the Jews” - that part of the genius of the many generations of Bible writers was to actually take the sacred text and actually sieve it through this pre-existent earthy language.

So in Judaism, it's not just a matter of, kind of the sacred penumbra of mystical illumination and subservience before the God-King. If you all speak and if you're all encouraged to read out loud, there's that wonderful moment, isn't there, in Ezra, when Ezra reads out loud the Torah and, you know, Kriyat HaTorah is a vocal thing which presupposes... 

It's why Jews never shut up, you know. And in fact, it's a tradition, of course, as Jonathan knows, all the way through, I remember Samuel Pepys goes into that first synagogue in the predecessor of Bevis Marks and he, like so many people, is shocked by how noisy it is. People are constantly going into the great synagogue.

Rabbi Sacks: Here's a footnote, Simon. When Prince Charles came to synagogue for a synagogue service for the first time, in our shul in St. John's Wood, he sat in the warden's box during the evening service. It was the 50th anniversary of the State of Israel and the first time a royal of that seniority has been to a service in a synagogue.

And I asked him afterwards, did he enjoy it? And he said, “You do talk a lot, don't you?” So I said, “Your Royal Highness, exactly so. People say the art of conversation is dead. I say it's alive and well and happens in the synagogue when you're supposed to be praying.”

Simon: The thing about, but it's in the Talmud, Jews, non-Jews - and there'll be a lot here, I hope - Jews essentially communicate by agreed mutual interruption. As we have already discovered. 

David: All right. Before I get into some contemporary matters, I want to come back to the spiritual question that we started in the Green Room. I'd like, Simon, let me start with you. Can you describe a physical journey that you have taken as part of your Jewish life and what you learned from it? 

Simon: Physical journey?.

Well, I was, it's an old Jewish story. It's a story of Orthodoxy, wandering away and kind of return, you know, to make myself sound like a kind of errant Old Testament figure. But that certainly would be true.

I grew up - is that what you want to know, David? I mean, I grew up in an Orthodox but not Chassidic or certainly not Charedi (the word was unknown) background, but we kept kashrut and I went to cheder. I was a cheder teacher, astoundingly. For a little bit. And so, you know, went through all that and then, oh, many things happened.

Adolescence happened, the nuclear disarmament movement happened, Marxism happened, Cambridge University happened. Happened to me in a different way from Jonathan. Jonathan had the fortitude to resist the 60s and its manifestation in Cambridge University.

But we were together at Thomson's Lane. Yes, so we were in the same shul in Cambridge, which I was there every Shabbat, but I became, I suppose, I became, insofar as I was still Jewish in that way - and this, I know, interests you very much, David - a Jew of comfortable social habit, I guess you would say. And that, I think, you know, you were egging me on earlier on to say, ‘Aah, but that's not enough,’ and it probably isn't enough, really.

And then, it was very - and stop me if this gets really very rambly, it probably already has. I did write a book of Jewish history called “Two Rothschilds and the Land of Israel,” about Edmond de Rothschild, the French Rothschild, and the Yishuv. In fact, the beginnings, really, the Hovavei Tzion, even pre-First Aliyah beginnings of the transplantation of Jews from Poland and Romania into Eretz Israel in the 1870s and 1880s, and I - there's a long story about that, which you don't want to hear - but I was the kind of historian, at that stage of my life, in Cambridge, in the late 60s and 70s, who felt that history was about writing the culture to which you did not belong. That part of history was really about a communion with people other than yourself, in a different time, in a different place. And there were also, when the book came out, it was, you know, no one needs dash out and buy it, but I have nothing to apologise for it, but my Auntie Esther never spoke to me again.

I thought, I don't want to be dealing with this, so I ran away, basically, to different kind of, to France, to Holland, and, but I had a little seminar in Cambridge, actually, which was just kind of post-biblical, with a friend of mine called Nicholas De Lange, you know, who was Amor Oz's translator and a great scholar of late antiquity Judaism, particularly of Philo, and we just had a kind of reading group, that's really -  you had a tortoise! - but it was, we had, it was just a wonderful thing. 

So it was my kind of philosophical secret, and it became more murky, and more cowardly, as I went on, until, you know, but it was, it was always there, it was read, I read Johnson, I read Leo, and I read, it was, it was a voice talking to me. And then when the BBC said, the BBC producer phoned me up and said, after I finished - I can't remember what it was, a series on American politics, I think it was, yeah - he said, I've got the obvious idea for you, and you're either going to run a million miles away, or you're going to have to do it, and he didn't have to tell me what it was, and that's why. 

David: That became “The Story of the Jews.” No, it does, it does. Rabbi Sacks, actually, Simon answered two questions in one, even though I only asked him the one, but, but that's what makes him brilliant. I'd like you to talk to us about your spiritual religious background, how you grew up, but also for you, was there a, an actual trip, an actual journey of sorts, that you learned something that was profound, Jewishly? 

Rabbi Sacks: Sure, sure. I went up to Cambridge in 1966, by which time, Simon was already a legend. He was the Ilui, the prodigy of Cambridge. He'd just been appointed the youngest ever fellow of a Cambridge college, and, and it was wondrous in our eyes. On the other hand, we didn't see Simon all that often, I have to say, in the synagogue, until, until that moment - this was a turning point, I think, in many lives - which is May, June, 67.

Simon: Yeah, that's true. 

Rabbi Sacks: Those very, very anxious three weeks leading up to the Six-Day War, when Israel seemed outnumbered, outgunned. Nasser had spoken about driving Israel into the sea. We, who had been born after the Holocaust, thought, God forbid, there's going to be a second Holocaust, and at that moment, a kind of frisson, a real sense of Jewish identity, touched an awful lot of people. And the fact that Simon used to come in every day to Thomson's Lane, to daven Mincha with us, told me, wow, if Simon's here, this is serious, and that, you know, when the sudden denouement, this extraordinary victory, the question then really stayed with me. 

Until then, I'd thought Judaism is what a small bourgeois group in Finchley kind of do with their spare time, I suddenly realised that there's history here, there's peoplehood here. All of us felt connected to people that we didn't know, 3,000 miles away in a country that I'd only just visited for the first time, and so that question stayed with me for a year. And I decided the next year, the summer of ‘68, that I was going to make a journey to discover a little more about my Judaism, and I kind of came here to the States, where I'd heard that there were a lot of great rabbis.

I bought a Greyhound bus ticket for a hundred dollars, went all the way around meeting every rabbi I could think of, and I met two rabbis who had a huge impact, who changed my life. 

One of them was the late Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, who had been, yeah, he was the leading Jewish thinker of the 20th century, but he'd written a doctorate on neo-Kantian metaphysics, epistemology, he knew, he'd read everything, and from him, I learned that you face the entire intellectual world of Europe, and not be afraid. That was number one.

But the really transformative impact came with my meeting Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the Lubavitcher Rebbe, and that was an extraordinary moment that changed my life. Because, you know, the first thing I did was, I, I, you know, I'm a total schlemiel, you know, I come along to America, not knowing where anyone is, and I asked, “Where do you find the Lubavitcher Rebbe?”

So they said, ‘Go to 770 Eastern Parkway.’ I took the subway there, I walked in, I said, ‘I've come 3,000 miles to meet the Lubavitcher Rebbe.’ They all collapsed laughing. They said, ‘There are thousands of people, come back next year.’ So, you know, I didn't know what to say, I had a chutzpah, that's, you know, that's number one survival mechanism, so I said, ‘Look, I don't know where I'm going to be, I'm wandering around the States, but I do know that I'll be with my aunt in Los Angeles, so if he finds, and spare me a couple of minutes, please phone through to this number.’

One Sunday night, the call came through. “The Lubavitcher Rebbe can see you on Thursday.”

And I had no money. I just had this Greyhound bus ticket. It took three days non-stop on a Greyhound bus from Los Angeles to 770 Eastern Parkway, and I sat for a half an hour with this great man. And I thought to myself, ‘What does he need to waste time with a shlemiel like me, from nowhere, with nothing?’ 

But I found it very dramatic, because after he'd answered all my questions, he started interrogating me. ‘What are you doing for Jewish life in Cambridge?’

I began one of the… I was terribly English in those days - it's rubbed off since - so I began this English sentence, “In the situation in which I find myself…” and he cut through. I mean he was not rude like us. He cut through in the middle of the sentence and said, “Nobody finds themselves in a situation. They put themselves in a situation, so if you put yourself in that situation, you can put yourself in another situation.”

And so, he challenged me to go to Cambridge and lead. 

There used to be, he used to have something called a Fabrengen, where thousands of Chassidim… he would speak for hours, and every 20 minutes they'd pause and they'd sing songs. And if you were about to leave - I was about to leave for the next day - and during the songs you came up with a bottle of vodka, and you poured a little in a thimble, and the Rebbe would say “L'Chaim!” And that would be the Rebbe's vodka that you took with you into the world.

So I go up to the Rebbe and find the thousands and thousands of Chassidim, and instead of doing what he normally did, it was say “L'Chaim!” he turned to me and said, “You're going already?” 

I said, “Yes.”

He said, “Why?”

I said, “Because I have to get back to university.”

He said, “The Cambridge term doesn't begin until the middle of October. I think you should stay.” 

Now how he knew, I don't know, but I stayed. I said I can't stay because it's a charter flight, and I can't, so the next morning they kind of kidnapped me, they locked me in a room. I said “How am I going to get back?” 

They said, “We'll tell the airline you're ill.”

I said, “What? How am I ill?”

They said,”Tomorrow we'll take you to the Rebbe's doctor, he'll find what's wrong with you.”

And so I got to spend Rosh Hashanah with the Lubavitcher Rebbe, heard him blow shofar, I mean it was a transformative experience. 

Why? Because this, in Cambridge I met very, very brilliant human beings. In the Lubavitcher Rebbe, for the first time I met a holy human being, and that to me was very powerful.

David: Why is it so hard for Jews to talk about God and spiritual life? Simon? 

Simon: About personal relationship with God? Well you can, you can hear your own, you know, your own wonder about that, amplified by my massive silence as you, pushing like that. I, we're not a confessional, at least I, I've never felt Judaism to be confessional. I think Jews argue about God, and they argue with God in, in the Bible famously. And there's some, but the sense actually - well at least I never had a very strong mystical sense - I mean of course there is Kabbalah, you know, and there, there are, there is a certain kind of Chassidic mysticism, and all that's very important, but I don't know, I mean I belonged and grew up in a kind of more discursive, argumentative, you know, verbally interrogatory kind of Judaism. And a huge amount of Judaism, you know, we read the Mishnah, and the larger Talmud really, it's about life on earth, really. 

David: And understand my question is more about my own spiritual longing. It's certainly not a judgement, I mean because for you, and for so many others, there's great satisfaction in that, I mean it's just, it's, it's a question for me, because I do think that so much of our, you find it in the scripture, you find it in our liturgical life, there is a, a very personal conversation with God, but I think in modern Jewish life, in my life, growing up as I have, and in my community, I find that it's, it's more absent.

Simon: Well let me try a slightly different tag, I think actually, you know, we've really broached this a bit actually, and that's to say, first of all God does not have a face in Judaism, as he does in Christianity, the notion of God as somebody, something that can be really embodied, as in the Christian tradition, is, is, I was going to say abhorrent, that's too extreme, but it's certainly alien to the Jewish tradition. So the manifestation of God is in a set of teachings, and the teachings are overwhelmingly about how to comport oneself in, in this world, I think that's, that's part of it, I think actually. 

David: Rabbi?

Rabbi Sacks: I, I think Jews seek God's face, 

David: We seek God's face in our tradition.

Rabbi Sacks: We seek God's face, Psalm 27 says so. I think Jews were, until relatively recently, the God-intoxicated people. I don't think there are any more profound conversations with God than in the Book of Psalms. I don't think there are any more passionate love songs about God than the Song of Songs. I mean, it's extraordinary that anyone put that book in a canon of sacred scriptures. And that this is, I mean, Eros is part of what it means to love God in Judaism. This is a passionate longing, and I have this feeling that something happened around 17th, 18th century, somehow exile had gone on too long. We say in our prayers, “Because of our sins, we were exiled from our Land.” We said, God says through Moses, you know, “Return to me, and I will return to you.”

For 16 centuries, Jews were the most pious people, you know, they were not the people of the biblical age, constantly tempted into idolatry. Yet wherever they went, they raised up scholars, they built yeshivot, they, you know, they were fastidious in keeping the commands, and somehow redemption never came. 

There was a tidal wave of messianic longing around the time of Shabbatai Tzvi in the 17th century, and that was disappointed, and then, you know, this huge, this gift by the Europe of enlightenment and emancipation, which is, you know, play down your Jewish identity and become one of us. And I think Jews made the terrible mistake, I have to say, of opting for that bargain rather than keeping their faith.

Because number one, all that enlightenment and emancipation led really to the worst antisemitism we have ever known, and to the worst human catastrophe we've ever known. And it also became something very problematic, because antisemitism in the 19th and early 20th century became something not only out there, but something also in here. Because, for centuries, millennia, Jews had seen their reflection in the eyes of God, and they had defined themselves as a people loved by God. 

When they lost faith, and they first encountered antisemitism, they stopped defining themselves as the people loved by God, and came to the conclusion that they were the people hated by the Gentiles. 

And out of that, there was no way out, and, and it was a terrible moment.

So, I happen to believe that you keep your faith whatever happens. Because somehow or other, when you're drowning, you reach your hand up to Heaven, and sometimes God grabs hold of that hand and lifts you, and that's my personal experience. 

Simon: Well, this is a very shocking thing to say about the Enlightenment, actually. Here we're going to disagree.

I think it's terrible to blame antisemitism on the naivety of someone like Moses Mendelssohn. I'm putting words into your mouth a bit, but let's say he's a classic example of a maskil. And what is so deeply moving about “Jerusalem,” Moses Mendelssohn's great work, is that he presupposes - and I know what happened to his family and generations on, it's true - but he presupposes with the greatest blessed optimism that Jews can live out in the world without sacrificing their Judaism, and we're here in America, Jonathan, which is the product of Enlightenment optimism. 

Rabbi Sacks: I'm not critical of the Enlightenment, Simon. I'm saying the Enlightenment was a flight from particularity, and what we saw is the 18th century, the age of reason. In the 19th century, the return of the repressed, romanticism, nationalism, and so on. So, I'm not at all critical of the Enlightenment, and we would never, the Enlightenment was one of the great blessings of European culture, and I'm not negative about it one little bit.

However, I have to tell you that in his letters and his diary, Moses Mendelssohn was one of the first, already in the 1780s, to pick up Jew hatred, because he was roughed up in the street, 

Simon: In the park. 

Rabbi Sacks: Yes, and you know, 

Simon: It’s true.

Rabbi Sacks: he was one of the very first who had that intuition. 

The second thing is, in the closing two pages of ”Jerusalem” in 1783, he defines Judaism as a burden. “Bear this double burden as best you can,” and no, I mean, look, you know, Simon, I mean, what am I going to say? This is one of the ironies of history.

No one, no one ever wrote more beautiful music at the age of 16 than his einikel, Felix, incidental music to A Midsummer Night's Dream. I mean, you know, we gave some of the world's most beautiful music to the world, but let us see the Enlightenment as a great blessing, but let us be Jewish enough to know that every great blessing comes with a dark side as well. 

Simon: But, you know, the venom of antisemitism - since we've raised music - is the Wagnerian moment, is das judentum in der musik.

Rabbi Sacks: 1851. 

Simon: Absolutely. So it's the overthrow. It's what happens… Jews from Manasseh Ben Israel, earlier from Simone Luzzatto, from Leone Modena, through to, you know, from the Venice Ghetto - we're commemorating 500 years of that next year - through, you know, the age of the Maskil, was an intense struggle to find how Jews can live in the world where there are not only Jews. 

It's great to live surrounded, if you're Lubavitcher Rebbe, by your followers and in a community of completely shared beliefs, but the majority of the people here, maybe not a majority, you know, are living out in the world along with non-Jews. The comradeship between Moses Mendelssohn and Lessing, yeah, was a great moment in the history of Jewish life.

Rabbi Sacks: I think that Lessing's “Nathan the Wise,” which was his tribute to Mendelssohn, is one of the high points, one of the greatest contributions in the Enlightenment. It is an extraordinary statement of religious tolerance, way ahead of its time, still relevant today. 

And all I'm saying is this, Simon, I believe Jews must go out into the world. I've written books about this. I believe it. I've done it myself. I believe that to remain confined within the ghetto is a betrayal of what we're here for. In the first words of God to Abraham, he says, “Through you shall all the families of the earth be blessed.” I think we've got to go out there.

We've got to be engaged with the intellectual currents of our time, with the social issues of our time. I think we've got to be there. 

The only thing on which I disagree with the assumptions of the Enlightenment is that the Enlightenment was universalism. We're all the same, which meant the Jews had in effect to be secular Muranos.

Simon: But Mendelssohn doesn't say that, does he? No, no. He actually, what is special about “Jerusalem” is that he says, well, should we let him say something? I guess it's really, go on. He's the token American.

David: Oh my gosh, I'm so flustered, I'm spilling. It's all right. It's all right. I just wanted to steal the show. Let me do this. I apologise for that. I'll clean it up in just a few minutes. 

You've raised antisemitism and I know a great many in the audience will want to hear about where we are in this crisis moment today. How do you see the crisis of antisemitism today? Is it different from this period that you've studied, the post-Enlightenment period of the lie of assimilation in Europe and the antisemitism that occurred then? What are we seeing today? How would you describe it? Is it a crisis, is it something less? 

Simon: Well, it's a horrible marriage between the kind of, you know, the poisonous venom which will not go away of classic post-Enlightenment antisemitism, that instead of Jews being accused of the blood libel, although they do go on being accused of committing the blood libel - Damascus 1840, the Bailiff's Trial in the early 20th century - the vampirism of which Jews were supposed to be guilty was capitalist vampirism, wasn't it? That was, you know, Edouard Drumont, those terrible things. So if you read the - if you can bring yourself - to read the obscenely vile charter of Hamas, you're redeemed only by its comic lunacy when it says be on your guard against Jews because they dominate Lions Clubs and Rotarians. Not any Rotary Club I've ever been to, you know, so there are the kind of inadvertently idiotic things, but you know, then swallowing the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, hook, line and sinker, probably more people through the web now believe in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion than at any other time since the forgery was made. But I said it's a marriage between that and ferocious anti-Zionism, ferocious anti-Zionism. 

So I do think that kind of a lot of the, you know, what Benjamin Netanyahu said, ‘Everybody should go to Israel, leave Europe, it's the end of the road,’ that I could not disagree with more. Part of actually what Jews are, I don't know, what I think Jews should be doing is actually bringing the long history of Jewish experience, the high points as well as the low points.

For instance, give you one thing, example. Zionism is grotesquely caricatured as an entirely alien colonial incursion into a Muslim Arab indigenous world, as though there was from the Bible to the 20th century no Jewish history with any roots, with any living presence in Eretz Israel, no one's heard of Tzfat, they don't know about Lurianic Kabbalah, you know, any of that long history. You tell people there was a Jewish majority in Jerusalem at the turn of the 20th century, they think you're kidding or lying, or both. 

So there is, you know, one of the things that sort of has to be done in addressing non-Jewish audiences - and this is an enlightenment ideal - is essentially educational. And I would say that there's so many difficult aspects because actually part of the murderous virulence which starts with anti-Zionism and then morphs into the kind of idiocy seen in the Hamas Charter is a result of the blowback of the death of empire.

So we have large Muslim populations of disaffected and often disadvantaged young people all over Europe who buy into the crude equation. 

David: And Rabbi Sacks, you wrote in the Wall Street Journal a couple of years ago, the notion that Israel's foreign policy or national security policy is hatched in a kosher supermarket in Paris is lunacy, that's antisemitism. 

How are these two forces though linked in a way that makes this a unique threat? 

Rabbi Sacks: Well look, first of all let's just, you know, let's, the first thing is the Jewish way of never being too intimidated is to make a joke out of it. So my favourite story is these two Jews in Vienna in a coffee house in 1933. One is reading the local Jewish newspaper, the other is reading the notoriously antisemitic rag called Der Sturmer.

The first one says, “How can you read that? That's full of antisemitic vile poison.” And the second one with a big smile says, “When you read your newspaper what does it say? The Jews are arguing, they're divided, they're assimilating, they're disappearing. When I read mine, what do I discover? Jews control the banks, they control the media, they control the world.” He says, “No, if you want the good news about the Jewish people, always read the antisemites. 

The real question is this, and it's an interesting question, antisemitism is a virus. Europe, after the Holocaust, created, it's the most sophisticated and complete attempt ever to strengthen the European immune system so that it could never be exposed to the virus of antisemitism again. 50 years of anti-racist legislation, 50 years of interfaith dialogue, 50 years of Holocaust education. And somehow or other what a virus does to defeat any immune system is to mutate. So, in the Middle Ages, Jews were hated for their religion. In the 19th and early 20th century, they were hated for their race.

Today, they are hated for their nation state. That is a major mutation. 

The other thing that happened is you can cure an epidemic within a given population, but you are seriously in trouble if it spreads to another population.

So, while Europe was curing itself of the virus of antisemitism, meanwhile the Arab and Muslim world was getting infected by an antisemitism that was strictly European, and Simon has alluded to both elements of it. Number one, the blood libel. I think as Brits, we have to admit the blood libel was created in Britain.

Simon: In England, yes. 

Rabbi Sacks: In Norwich in 1144. 

Simon: Lincoln…

Rabbi Sacks: Yes, and in 1983, the Syrian Defence Minister, Mustafa Tlass, wrote a book called “The Matzah of Zion,” explaining why Israelis kill Palestinian children to use their blood to make matzah. In 1991, the Syrian representative at the United Nations Commission of Human Rights asked every member of the UN Commission on Human Rights to read the book so they would understand what was the nature of Zionist racism. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, exposed as a forgery by the London Times in 1921, was taken into the Arab world by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who spent the war in Berlin, you know, working for the SS.

And it has been, you know, a major, it is a major text, and as Simon said, incorporated in the Hamas Charter. Egyptian television did a 40-part adaptation in 2002. Syrian television did a 40-part adaptation during Ramadan in 2003.

So the blood libel and the Protocols have infected a world that didn't know these particular libels.

David: Are you offended by the notion of what Netanyahu said, that Jews should leave Europe? 

Rabbi Sacks: I'll tell you the irony, and it's a very important one, that there is one huge difference between antisemitism now and antisemitism in the 1930s. Today, we have, thank God, a State of Israel. We have a home in the Robert Frost sense of the place where “when you have to go there, they have to let you in.” And therefore, it is not only Jews in Israel, but it is Jews in Europe who can say, I am not homeless, therefore I refuse to be intimidated. I am going to stand and fight.

And Israel has changed Jewish life for those inside and for those outside. 

David: Simon, there's a moment… 

Simon: It has had that mutually nourishing effect. I'm just concerned, really, that it's not seen as a zero-sum game. And we're two very English - even though I've lived half my life in the United States - you're hearing two very English voices here. Because people constantly ask me, I don't know, how do you make a distinction between the antisemitism, the anti-Israel or the antisemitism in the United Kingdom and so on? And you want to make a distinction, the most venomous anti-Zionism, anti-Israeli hostility, which exactly, as you beautifully put it, sort of mutates into a more traditionally odious antisemitism in Britain, in my view, is in the chattering classes, as we call them in Britain, is actually in the world - this doesn't make it less distressing, I have to say - in the world of intellectual comment.

Just two days ago, a hundred cultural personalities - if that's not an oxymoron, in this case I think it is - signed on to a cultural boycott of Israel, including some of my friends who bloody well should know, ex-friends who should know better.

The population at large in Britain, I mean - you're there more than I am in every way - does not strike me as Munich 1931, 1932, or at all, although probably that's what German Jews were saying in Munich in 1931. 

Rabbi Sacks: Recorded levels of antisemitism in Britain, and I'm referring to the latest surveys, are actually lower than they are in the United States. So you're talking about a general population that is not antisemitic in the slightest. But there is an additional factor, which I think is incredibly important, and I already said this 12 years ago in the EU headquarters in Brussels, when we had the first European conference on antisemitism with Romano Prodi. We've done so since with José Manuel Barroso and Angela Merkel. And I said, and I repeat this always, Jews cannot fight antisemitism alone. The victim cannot cure the crime. The hated cannot cure the hate. 

I will lead the fight, and I really have done this, for the right of Christians throughout the world to live their faith without fear. But I need you Christians to fight for that Jewish right. In Britain, we led the fight against Islamophobia, but I say to Muslims, you must help us lead the fight against Judeophobia. 

David: Let me ask, and I think we're close to taking your questions as well, and before I turn to those, Simon, there was this… just like that. Yes. Let there be questions. Thank you.

Simon, one of the really poignant moments of your series was you standing at the security barrier and kind of reckoning with what modern-day Israel represents to Jews, to Israelis, to the concept of Jews being a light unto other nations. 

And when you spoke to a settler - and your discomfort was evident in that interview - you wrote that the Bible is many things, but a blueprint for peace in the Holy Land, it is surely not. What do you make of Israel today? What gives you hope? What troubles you? 

Simon: Oh, the hope. Well, if we're talking about the internal character of Israel, the hope of, I'm always, you know, I'm always deeply moved and thrilled and astonished, actually, at that last chapter in Ari Shavit's wonderful book, I think, actually, not perfect, but none of us write perfect books except Jonathan. 

So I think it was very profound about that. So I think, first, you have to, as Jonathan very movingly put it, we have a home now. That is the big difference. It doesn't presuppose divided allegiance or make our home in the United States or Britain or France, wherever, compromised at all. But that is extremely important.

The one figure I, you know, I don't know why, I missed this out from when you asked me about my journey, was that when, I mean, three or four years before Jonathan was sitting with the Lubavitcher Rebbe, with Menachem Mendel Schneerson, I was meeting Ben-Gurion, actually. Not one-to-one, I have to say, not at all. And he was an extraordinary figure then. He'd retired.

He was living in Sde Boker. He came to talk to a bunch of kids in Jerusalem. And then there was also the message that the only place for young Jews or Jews of any kind was to go on Aliyah and to come to Israel.

But that was the kind of official speech. He was really wanting to know what Jewish life was actually like if you weren't going to do this, if you were going to put Aliyah on hold. And I was in Habonim. I was, you know, a baby Zionist. I was working on a Habonim kibbutz. I had that kind of sense.

But the sense I had of Israel then, and have always had, is of a kind of combination of a sort of commonwealth built on a sense of tzedakah, on justice, rather than pure power. I don't go all the way with Martin Buber. You know, those were times of impossible idealism. But I'm a two-state Zionist. I always have been. 

And, you know, Israel is not a monolithic place. Half of Israel's polity… we'll see what happens in the election. Half of Israelis also believe that there has to be some way in which the Palestinian population and Israeli population live side by side. And the settler was someone for whom biblical prophecy about territory, messianic redemption defined in kilometres of real estate, was the most important thing.

And that, I think, and still, thought and still think, is kind of profoundly misguided. But Israel is, apart from other great miracles, a true democracy in a region where democracy is not only absent but shrinking with every day that passes. 

David: And Jonathan, when you look at surveys around the world that show that Israel is increasingly isolated, do you worry about its path? Do you worry about the role that Israel can play as a tie that binds Jews around the world? 

Rabbi Sacks: Look, I happen to think that Israel is an extraordinary human miracle. Israel has taken the Hebrew language, the language of the Bible, and made it speak again. It's taken a land that lay desolate for so many centuries and make it bloom again. But it has taken this scattered, shattered people and make it live again.

And I think Israel is the most extraordinary thing. In terms of democracy, I call Israel a hyper-democracy. Every taxi driver is a political pundit who does better than the op-eds. And so I think Israel is an extraordinary place of creativity, diversity. There's more diversity in this tiny country than you'll find in whole continents elsewhere. And I think it's incredibly, incredibly powerful.

At the same time, it's also, I say, you know, I say the Greeks gave the humanity the concept, and it's a very powerful concept of tragedy. And I say that, because there was never an Aeschylus or a Sophocles among the Jewish people. Instead, we had an Isaiah and a Jeremiah.

Simon: Jeremiah, yes.

Rabbi Sacks: And I said, Judaism is the principal defeat of tragedy in the name of hope. And what I see in the Middle East is one of those things I never expected. It is an unfolding Greek tragedy in a nation and a culture that always lived by the principle of hope.

So I've always said that no Jew, knowing what we know of history, can be an optimist. But no Jew worthy of the name ever gave up hope. And it is no accident that Israel is the country that called its national anthem, Hatikvah.

That is the song Israel sings for the world. 

And so I think a day will come as we see Syria, Iraq, now Libya, Yemen, and other places collapsing into chaos, into barbarisms and crimes against humanity of a kind we haven't seen since the Middle Ages. And there is Israel doing its little thing of showing that in a region of the world that never really knew democracy, you can be a successful democracy.

In a country that has no natural assets except its people, you can move from a third world to a cutting-edge first-world economy. At some stage, there must come a time when peace will come if only. Well, they said about one of my predecessors, the late Chief Rabbi J.H. Hertz, who was a fairly argumentative guy - I would never come into that category at all…

Simon: No. 

Rabbi Sacks: The Dictionary of National Biography says about Chief Rabbi Hertz that “He never despaired of a peaceful solution to a problem once every other alternative had been exhausted.”

So I think one day peace will come, if only from exhaustion. 

David: Let me get to some of our questions here and we'll try to get through as many of these as we can. So maybe we'll try to be a little bit briefer.

Rabbi Sacks: Now you are trying to provoke us. 

David: I'm sorry, I just thought I'd be ridiculous. What is your view of Israel's treatment of the Palestinians? 

Simon: It's a very unhappy situation. I mean, incredibly unhappy situation. You know, you can't but look, actually, at what Palestinians have to go through in order, you know, for example, to get to, from one bit of the West Bank into Israel to work, and not feel desolate about it. But it's, as I said, it's essential.

First of all, it's essential to make a distinction between Hamas-ruled Gaza and the West Bank. As we know from the negotiations between Olmert and Mahmoud Abbas, Abu Mazen, in 2008, it's possible to actually come to some sort of understanding with the Palestinian Authority, but it's incredibly difficult to do so with Hamas. But the argument, part of the argument that's gonna happen in the next election, will be do we have a partner to work with or not? The treatment of Palestinians will not get better until there is kind of active political engagement on that front.

I think, look, the alternative, the alternative to accepting that there will be a Palestinian state at some point, is annexation, in which case, Israel has a terrifying demographic problem. And it's difficult, you know, it's not kind of doves who came to this conclusion. It's Ariel Sharon who came to this conclusion, that if Israel needs to, if Israel can, you know, if Israel will remain a Jewish democracy, it can't be a Jewish democracy that annexes the West Bank. 

David: Rabbi, what, again, from our audience, what role do you think the concept of Teshuva and forgiveness have on Jewish survival? 

Rabbi Sacks: I think Teshuva and forgiveness are two of the most important concepts that Jews brought into the world.

If you, you know, one of the problems in philosophy for two and a half thousand years, human free will. Are we free, do we have a choice? You remember what Isaac Bashevis Singer said, “Vee have to be free, vee have no choice.” 

And if I want an empirical proof of free will, I'll say it's Teshuva, you know, we can change. And that is one of the most important contributions Jews made to the world, Carol Dweck at Stanford, “Mindset,” you know, this idea of the growth mindset. The Judah, the Yehuda, the brother of Joseph, that we meet in Genesis 37, the one who proposes selling Joseph into slavery, is the Judah who a few chapters later is the one who's prepared to stay as a slave rather than see his brother Benjamin made a slave. So when you look at the Bible, this idea that, you know, it was when I read “Emma” for the first time that I suddenly read a novel where the chief character is different at the end of the novel than she was at the beginning. And I think that's this very Jewish, insight. The other thing is forgiveness. 

Simon: Emuna.

Rabbi Sacks: Pardon? Emuna, really. Emma and Emuna, I never thought of that, you're quite right. 

And forgiveness, you know, the first recorded act of forgiveness in all of world literature is when Joseph forgives his brothers. As the philosopher - non-Jewish - I think, called David Konstan wrote a book in 2010 called “Before Forgiveness,” and he analyses the fact that the Greeks didn't have a concept of forgiveness, they had a concept of appeasement, which is different for forgiveness.

And again, you know, the trouble is we didn't emphasise this enough. We let Christianity say, Judaism is not a religion of forgiveness, and it's not a religion of love. Whereas when Jesus talks about love, he's quoting Torah, he's quoting, “v’ahavta l’rayacha kamocha,” love your neighbour as yourself, from Leviticus 19. And then he's quoting from Shema, “love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul.” Now I…

Simon: Plagiarising Hillel.

Rabbi Sacks: Plagiarising Hillel, plagiarising, yeah.

So, you know, when I read Hannah Arendt in “The Human Condition” saying Christianity invented forgiveness, I find it quite hard to forgive her. But I will tell you how we have lost touch with our own deepest ideas. There's a rabbi I know, an Orthodox rabbi who teaches at a Mennonite university and works in peace and reconciliation. And he goes around the country to places where there are very few Jews, and he talks about peace and reconciliation.

And he told me that he went to one town where there weren't that many Orthodox Jews, but an elderly Orthodox couple, hearing an Orthodox rabbi's coming to give a talk in the local university, sit in the front row, elderly. And he gives a lecture about love and forgiveness. And he tells me the man turned to his wife and says, “He talks like a Gentile.” You know, why did we give away our best ideas? 

And the finest idea we ever had was that God created the world in love and forgiveness, asking us to love and forgive one another.

David: Another question here, does progressive Judaism have a future? And if so, where does it find its soul? And how best can it communicate that honest search? 

Simon: That's for you. 

David: You know, Rabbi, one of the, I'm gonna impute something into this that kind of, you know, I think part of this question about progressive Judaism is, to me, where the role of Zionism in Israel is in Jewish life among progressive Jews. Is there Jewishness defined by their Zionism? And if their Jewish identity and their love for Israel is perhaps a little bit more removed from the core than what makes up identity.

Simon: But what gives you that idea? When were you last in a reform synagogue? 

David: I belong in a reform synagogue. 

Simon: Oh, last Shabbat then. But why'd you have that idea? 

David: Because I believe that particularly, Simon, younger Jews who do not wake up in America fearful of the end of Israel or of antisemitism do not feel the same collective sense of identity revolving around Israel.

And I think there is a longing. I think that there is a quest to know God, to be inspired, to have spiritual life, to have a sense of meaning and purpose. And I don't believe that collective identity around even arguing over sacred texts - which few unaffiliated Jews do - or even a deep interest in Israel's present or future, is what motivates them and brings them together in community. That's my experience. 

Rabbi Sacks: I was with, I spoke just four days ago at the National Convention of BBYO, the B'nai B'rith Youth Organisation, which is, I think, majority reformed Jews in Atlanta. And I have to tell you, these kids know the joy of Judaism. They're soul sings. They were noisy.

I mean, but I think, I knew a guy called Avraham Infeld, who used to, for some years, run Hillel in America. And I remember him coming to me and saying, ‘I've just been to a Hillel convention. They had an Orthodox service, Conservative service, Reform minyan and a Reconstructionist minyan. And all four minyanim were Carlelbach!

And I think that's one very powerful discovery. We were terribly cognitive. But at the end of the day, when Jews talk, they argue. But when they sing, they sing together. “Az Yashir Moshe” at the Red Sea, they sang a song together.

So if you want to end the arguments, move from words to music. Because words are the language of the Jewish mind, but music is the language of the Jewish soul. And I think that's what Reform have rediscovered and it's gonna reconnect us all.

David: Do you think that's a real issue? What Simon and I were just going back and forth?

Rabbi Sacks:  I'll tell you, I think the problem Reform have with Israel is because of the way they've framed Israel. You know, we identify with Israel by being pro-Israel at a political level. I think that is completely the wrong way to look at it. I cannot begin to tell you how wrong it is. 

David: Do you think it's just a Reform at a denominational issue or do you think it's in part generational? Or do you think it's mostly that? Mostly a Reform and unaffiliated Jewish issue? 

Simon: Well, I'm not sure I accept the premise. That you're saying really essentially Reform identity is built so disproportionately around a kind of unexamined support for Israel, a kind of purely. Is that what you're saying? 

David: No, no, that's not what I'm saying. 

Simon: Oh, okay, well, I misunderstood you then. I misunderstood you then.

David: I'm just saying, I mean, I'm saying whether it's in my community, whether I think, rather I say there's more criticism of Israel politically, but I also mean generationally. I'm 44, and generationally I don't think that there is as much adherence to Israel and all it represents as the core of Jewish identity, as opposed to a kind of spiritual longing, which I think is accessible and is in our tradition. It's in our scripture, it's in our liturgy, it's in our songs, it's so rich.

Rabbi Sacks: David, I'd like to tell you that what I think is the way of framing this for the future of American young people. Jews have been almost everywhere in the world. One way or another. But if you read the Torah, what do you find? This is not a manual for the soul, individual souls sent to heaven. It's an instruction manual for the construction of a society built around justice, compassion, human dignity, freedom. 

Everywhere that Jews have been in the world in 40 centuries, there was only ever one spot on earth where Jews were able to construct a society in line with their deepest beliefs, and that's Israel.

The Tikkun Olam projects that happen in Israel, whether at an educational level, medicinal level, the guys out there in the Galil using medicine to reach out to Bedouin, Christian and Muslim populations. There are people out there using music to bring people together. 

And that is how they should relate to Israel. If you want to change the world, this is the one place where you can build a society along Jewish lines. 

So forget the political debates that you will run into on campus and focus on the humanitarianism of this incredible country, that's taking handicapped kids - the late Reuven Feuerstein was the world's greatest in dealing with severely handicapped and brain-damaged children. Or the incredible medicinal things. Or the economic, you know, raising up difficult families, all these things, Israel is absolutely outstanding. That's not the Israel we see. That's not the Israel they relate to. And that's the Israel every one of them could relate to. 

Simon: Well, there's so many things I want to say, unfortunately. First of all, I want to come back to your point, because I just want to clear this up. And there'll be a lot of people in Conservative congregations here, Reform congregations, I'm sure, who know actually that one of the joys, - because I, particularly West London Synagogue, where I'm a member, I belong to two shuls on two different sides of the Atlantic - but the pleasure in detailed discussion of the Torah, of the Mishnah, of the Talmud, is every bit as intense and preoccupied and elated in an intellectually complicated way in these communities, as I imagine it is in ultra-Orthodox communities. 

Secondly, I would say that division of opinion about Israeli policies is certainly - I don't know how one would actually measure it in the United States - but it seems to be something, actually, which does not divide along denominational lines.

You can go to Israel, as you know, and you'll find plenty of critics, actually, of Yisrael Beiteinu and the right-wing parties among the Orthodox. 

David: Simon, I disagree, but I think it's important to point out whether it's in Conservative or Reform, there are vast members of these congregations who do not know our history, who do not know the liturgy. Of course, there are those who are, and I'm sure you are in groups that do, as I am in groups that do, but there are a lot of Jews, and they are more in Reform and maybe even Conservative synagogues, who do not know of these debates, who do not know of our tradition. I do believe, I mean, that's… 

Rabbi Sacks: The best thing American Jewry has done in recent years is the Birthright Programme, which instead of talking about Israel, took it to Israel. 

David: Right, but I just wanted to take on that point, but I don't disagree with you that there is that robust dialogue across all communities, but I don't think it's- 

Simon: Well, I want to say one more thing, actually. Can I? 

David: Of course.

Simon: I guess that's the most disingenuous question I've pulled all night.

David: I already knocked over the water. I don't have any other dramatic- 

Simon: So, Jonathan's point, I also want to say there is work. Look, we're living in a world in which there are three horrible, horrible problems. 

One is the slow death of the planet, not so great. 

Secondly is the colossal distance between rich and poor worldwide.

The third is something which you and I think, I don't think, speaking of the Enlightenment, we thought would happen, the hideous return of tribal barbarism and the most brutal forms of religious intolerance. If there's one thing that Jews can do outside Israel, here, in the world, actually, and this is waving the flag of Manasseh Ben Israel and Moses Mendelssohn, is to talk, as you've been doing, this is your whole life's been about this, is actually the possibility of coexistence without the adulteration of your core beliefs. You're the most distinguished example of saying those very things, and that is work to be done in the Golah.

Rabbi Sacks: Let me just add a little footnote there, because you've been incredibly patient. And I say it takes us Brits a while to realise that American English… 

David: You notice how they use the term footnote, like it's just a little something.

Rabbi Sacks: It takes us a while to realise that not every word means the same in American English as English English. And one of the key examples is the word ‘momentarily,’ which in English English means briefly, but in American English means soon. And so people introduce me by saying, Rabbi Sacks will speak momentarily. 

David: Yeah, I know.

Rabbi Sacks: And I reply, ’Friends, rabbis never speak momentarily.’ 

Simon: The worst time that's happened, I remember American Airlines flighted in and said, ‘It's all right, folks, we'll be in the air momentarily.’ And I thought, well, I hope not.

Rabbi Sacks: What was the last point? What was it? I mean, what was the question? 

David: Well, we were talking about Reform and Conservative Jews. I don't know, it was spiritual longing. I don’t know, but you were talking about, something he was praising you about, the work you've done about the return to tribal hatred. 

Rabbi Sacks: My next book. 

David: Yes.

Rabbi Sacks: Out in the States in September is a protest against violence in the name of God. And it will be called “Not in God's Name.” That from Heaven, God is saying not in My name.

It'll be the strongest book I ever wrote. And I'm reaching out to Christians, to Muslims. And let me tell you, David, I have spent days with an ex-Hamasnik from the West Bank who has become a peace activist. So I don't give up. 

Simon: What? 

Rabbi Sacks: In Israel. Yeah, in Israel. So I don't give up on anything, but I think what we're seeing with ISIS, what we're seeing with Boko Haram and so on, is simply unacceptable. And we have to stand up as religious leaders and say not in God's name. 

David: Amen.

I want to, there's a final area that I'd like you both to weigh in on. And the question here invited something that I wanted to ask anyway, but I want to read the question because I thought it was well struck here. Where is the future of Jewish life? Zionists say Israel. Chassidim say Williamsburg. Lithuanians say yeshiva. Modern Orthodox say university. Where is the future? 

But I'm going to combine that with something that I was thinking about, that Rabbi, you've written about in a number of books, including “Future Tense,” which is if we celebrate Jewish survival, we must ask then to do what? So what is Jewish purpose in 2015? And I mean not just in the collective, and out of our sense of as a people, but I do return to something I care about, which is as individuals as well. What is our individual purpose? What is the point, the meaning of this survival that we as individuals take out as Jews into the world as those individuals, but also as part of something larger? 

Rabbi Sacks: I once asked Paul Johnson, a Catholic historian, who wrote a very fine history of the Jews. And I said to him, ‘Paul, you know, you're a Catholic. You must have spent years researching Jews and Judaism. What most impressed you?’

And he gave a very interesting answer.

He said there've been through histories and very famous individualistic cultures - Athens, Renaissance Italy, contemporary West. There've been some very collectivist cultures, you know, Chinese Communism. He said nobody managed to do both at the same time.

Jews have had that gift, an incredible sense of the importance of the individual, but at the same time, an equally powerful sense of collective responsibility. 

And I thought it was extraordinary that this Catholic had come, in effect, to the same conclusion as Hillel, who said “If I am not for myself, who will be? But if I am only for myself, who am I?” What am I? And I actually think that that is what the world needs right now. 

The West, having lapsed into various idolatries, most obviously the nation state or the race, is now worshipping the individual, you know, because you're worth it. I want it all. I want it now. The icon of our age is the selfie. So we're worshipping the self. So, you know, we can relate to that because Jews value the self. 

On the other hand, you've got these very collectivist cultures in the Middle East where, you know, everyone's, Jews are the only people who've managed to combine the best of both.

Every Jew is an individual. We say in Psalm 23, “The Lord is my shepherd,” but no Jew was ever a sheep. So we're a nation of individualists, but at the same time, we say, “Kol Yisrael areivim zeh bazeh.”

We are all linked to one another. As Shimon Bar Yochai put it in the late first century, “When one Jew anywhere is injured, all Jews feel the pain.” So I think that is a unique message.

No other religion has combined particularity and universality, the self and the greater good. And I think the world needs that message. And I think now is the time to engage with the world. Now is not the time to be fearful and stand alone. Let us reach out our hand in friendship to our brothers and sisters in the Abrahamic monotheisms, in Christianity, in Islam. Let us reach out beyond faith altogether and say that we're not the only truth, but we're a voice.

I call Judaism “The voice of hope in the conversation of humankind.”

David: You, Simon, the sense of the lesson of this evening and this conversation, what is Jewish purpose as you see it in 2015? 

Simon: Well, you know, we're coming back, I think, to where we began, which is, as Jonathan says, the preoccupation is obsessively with the maximisation of individuals, individual wealth, individual power. And also, I think, actually, partly because of the digital world we're all in, the short shelf life of memory.

Not too long from now, we're going to be sitting down at the Seder table. We're the only religion in our particular way in which we're required by the Torah, “Zachor,” to remember. And what we remember, we don't remember victory and triumph in imperial slaughter. We remember servitude and suffering and freedom and a redemption which included the blessing of a code of ethics, how to be a human being. 

And the purpose also is to uproot terrible prejudices. So Yitzchak and Moshe were passing a church one day, and a sign was up which said, “Converts needed. 50 pound bonus for signing.”

So Yitzchak says, ‘We can't do this…’ he says, ‘This is 50 pounds, time is hard.’ And how bad can it be? Our Muranos is constantly doing, he's coming back, Teshuva, there's no problem.’ So he comes out, and Moshe said, ‘So how was it?’ 

And Yitzchak said, ‘Well, it's all right.’

And Moshe says, ‘Well, can I have my share of the 50 pounds?’

And Yitzchak said, ‘That's all you Jews think about. Money, money, money.’

Just to uproot prejudice as well.

Over to you, Gregory. 

Rabbi Sacks: And my theory of how to fill an empty synagogue, put an enormous sign out front saying, “No Jews admitted.”

David: That'll get ‘em in.

I just have to conclude by saying, what an honour it's been to be on this stage with both of you. Thank you, everybody. I just, I'm privileged to learn from both of you. Before now and tonight, so thank you both, thank you all for your time tonight. Thank you.