Inaugural Norman Lamm Prize Lecture

Opening remarks and speeches

[From minute 18:17]

Rabbi Sacks: President Joel, Kvod HaRav, Rabbi Norman Lamm shlita, distinguished rabbanim, friends. Thank you for this honour. 

President Joel, you did really well. I think you're even better than Her Majesty… in case you're looking for a promotion. And I am deeply touched and deeply moved by your words. And I had to remind myself of what a great American, Adlai Stevenson, said when he said, “Compliments are fine so long as you don't inhale.”

But friends, I want to say what a privilege it is to stand in this great hall, in this great institution, Yeshiva University, which is for me, and I say this carefully, the single most important educational institution in Chutz La'aretz. 

And to do so in the presence of your outstanding President, Richard Joel. I want to say, Richard, what a fine job you have done. The yeshiva is lucky to have you. And I wish you and Esther continued success in all you do. 

But tonight, friends, isn't about me. It isn't about President Joel. It isn't about Yeshiva University. It is about the man who has won the affection and admiration of everyone in this room tonight and thousands more. The real person we are here to honour is Rabbi Norman Lamm. 

Friends, I want to tell you a very simple story.

It is set back 42 years ago in 1968. A young philosophy student from England came to America in search of Jewish thinkers to strengthen his faith and alleviate his doubts. One of those thinkers, already famous, was Rabbi Norman Lamm. In those days, a congregational rabbi, not yet President, but already a teacher at Yeshiva University.

The student, being a little farblunget [yiddish for ‘a state of aimless wandering’], had not managed to arrange a meeting in advance. Instead, relying on a combination of serendipity and chutzpah, he phoned up and asked for an immediate meeting. Now, I have to tell you, there is no conceivable reason why this rabbi should even see this student from 3,000 miles away with whom he has no connection. Let alone spend time with him. But that is what Rabbi Lamm did. 

He took this young student, a total stranger, into his office in the shul and spoke with him for more than an hour about Torah and Mada, about synthesis, about Rav Kook, and about Yeshiva University, where he said Torah was strong and Mada was strong, but where, back in 1968, he wasn't sure that the synthesis between them had fully happened. 

That was, of course, before Rabbi Lamm became President of Yeshiva University, before he wrote his own most important books, before he launched institutions like the Orthodox Forum and the Library of Jewish Ethics. 

And, of course, the student was me. It explains why tonight is so personally meaningful for me as a way of saying thank you for that act of generosity of spirit 42 years ago, which left an indelible impression on me.

Friends, you don't need me to tell you about the public Norman Lamm, the President who saved Yeshiva University from financial crisis, who built it into the mighty university it is today. You don't need me to tell you about Rabbi Lamm, the superlative writer, speaker, teacher and ben Torah; the man who unflinchingly carried the banner of Torah and Mada sometimes in the face of attacks from left and from right. As I said, if you remember when you conferred an honorary doctorate on me and I gave the commemoration address, I said to the graduating students, ‘If you are faithful to the principles you have learned in this institution, you will be attacked by the right and by the left and when that happens, that will be your honorary doctorate.’

Friends, you know that Rabbi Lamm. I just want you to know of the private Rabbi Lamm whose kindness all those years ago to one young student helped change his life. 

Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in standing and showing our appreciation of one of the gedolei zmanenu, Rabbi Norman Lamm. [standing ovation]

Friends, now to tonight's lecture. In 1756, the self-proclaimed defender of freedom and the hero of the enlightenment, Voltaire, published a virulently antisemitic essay about the Jews. They had, he said, contributed nothing original to civilisation. No art, no science, no philosophy, even their religion they had borrowed from others. That was in 1756. Within the next 200 years, the Jewish people whom he condemned for adding nothing new to human thought had produced an explosion of brilliance and originality the like of which it is hard to find parallel in the entire intellectual history of humankind.

In physics, Einstein. In sociology, Durkheim. In anthropology, Levi-Strauss. In philosophy, Bergson, Wittgenstein. In music, Mahler and Schoenberg. In literature, everyone from Proust and Kafka to Isaac Bashevis Singer and Shai Agnon. In psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, absolutely everyone except for the token gentile, Jung. 39% of Nobel Prize winners in economics, 28% in medicine, 26% in physics, 47% of world chess champions. Everyone, in short, from Irving Berlin to Isaiah Berlin.

You name it, they did it. Even when it comes to apikorsim [heretics], let's face it, we did well. Jews produced three of the four greatest apikorsim in the modern world: Spinoza, Marx and Freud. The only one who wasn't Jewish was Darwin. Why Darwin wasn't Jewish, I have no idea. Every qualification - long beard, big head, total apikoros, should have been Jewish. It must have been a random genetic mutation. 

But, but, and this is the but. The relationship between those thinkers and Judaism was at best total indifference; at worst, active hostility.

Most abandoned Judaism. In some cases - Marx, Wittgenstein - their parents had already abandoned Judaism. Many, like Marx and Freud, were intensely opposed to religion as such and that is the unspoken tragedy of the modern Jewish world.

The Catholic historian, Paul Johnson, once called rabbinic Judaism “an ancient and highly efficient social machine for the production of intellectuals.” And yet for the past 250 years, Judaism has lost its intellectuals. 

And we can put the problem very sharply.

Today, there are more Jews studying at university than ever before. Today, there are more Jews studying at yeshiva than ever before. More than in the great days of Mir and Ponevezh and Volozhin, more than in the days of Sura and Pumbedita, and yet the connection between them is less than ever before.

There is a form of cerebral lesion in which the right and left hemispheres of the brain are both intact, but the connection between them is broken and the result is dysfunction of the personality. Today, the Jewish people as a whole is suffering from a collective cerebral lesion. 

To see how wrong this situation is, how at odds with the fundamentals of Jewish values, I want you, just briefly, to accompany me this evening on an intellectual journey to trace the basic structures of the Jewish mind.

Structure shared by neither of the other Abrahamic monotheisms, Christianity and Islam. Quite different. And a structure shared neither with any figures in the mainstream of Western philosophical thought, from Plato to Descartes to Kant and beyond. 

And let us begin at the beginning.

Bereishit bara Elokim, as soon as we step back and look at the structure of the first 12 chapters of Bereishit, we see something very odd indeed. The theme of Chumash, the theme of Tanach as a whole, is clear. Rashi says so in his comment to the very first word of Torah, “Bereishit,” “Bishvil Torah, haNikra reishit, bishvil Yisrael, haNikra reishit.”

The Torah is about the Jewish people, a particular people, and Am Segula, a unique people. But the Torah does not begin with the Jewish people. It begins instead with a series of archetypes of humanity as a whole.

Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noach and the Flood, Babel and its builders. And not until those four failures does the narrative focus to the particularity of one man, Avraham, one woman, Sarah, who become a tribe, who become a collection of tribes, who become one people. The Torah begins with the universal, and only then does it move to the particular.

And you will find that that is the basic structure of Jewish thought. You will find it replicated wherever you look. Birkat HaMazon begins with the universal, HaZan Et HaKol. Only then does it narrow its focus to the particular, Al Ha’aretz V'HaMazon, and then even more to Yerushalayim. The brachot before Kriyat Shema begin with the universal, with the universe, Yotzer HaMe'orot, and only then do they move to the particularity of God's love for Israel, HaBocher B’amo Yisrael B’ahavah. And what makes this unusual is that it is precisely opposite to the mainstream tradition in Western philosophical thought.

Alfred North Whitehead called the whole of Western philosophy a series of footnotes to Plato. And for Plato, knowledge begins with particularities, the things we see with our senses, but it culminates in the universal, and only the universal is ultimately real and true. In other words, as I put it in one of my books, the Torah is the West's supreme example, the only great example, of a counter-platonic narrative.

Now let's move on. We've seen the dual focus of the narrative. Then come again, something that you won't find in Christianity and Islam, the structure of Bereishit built around two different covenants.

Number one, with Noach, and through him all humanity. Number two, with Avraham, and through him, the covenantal family. So the narrative movement moves universal to particular - the first covenant with Noach, universal, the second with Avraham, particular.

Now, we add to this the third element. Notoriously, famously, the Torah functions on the basis of two primary names of God - Elokim and Hashem. We know how Chazal interpreted those names, Elokim = Midat HaDin, Hashem = Midat HaRachamim.

However, much more fundamental is the analysis given by Yehuda Halevi in Book Four of the Kuzari, where he points out that Elokim and Hashem are words of different logical type. Elokim, he says, means, is a collective noun, meaning the totality of all forces operative in the universe. The ancients personified natural forces as gods; they called each one an eil, and therefore Judaism groups them all together - Elokim, and says God is the totality of all those forces.

Hashem, says Yehuda Halevi, is not a noun at all. It is a proper name. The way the President of Yeshiva University is Richard and the Chancellor is Norman, the proper name of the Creator of the universe is Hashem. Now, we only give proper names to persons, or sometimes by extension, things for which we have some affection - the car, a pet, whatever you have, but if you use a proper name, that implies personal relationship, friendship, even intimacy.

I feel terribly embarrassed reminding you of this in this great republic, but you can call the Queen, Your Majesty. Call her Elizabeth, and you'll still end up in the Tower of London. So, or at least you won't be invited back to Buckingham Palace a second time.

So we have, we have two names for God. Number one an abstract noun, number two a proper name. Number one implies distance, detachment, it's impersonal. Hashem, on the other hand, is personal. It is attached, not detached. What Yehuda Halevi called ‘Aristotle and the God of Abraham.’ So, we now then make the next discovery, which is very striking, that throughout Bereishit and generally throughout Torah, God appears not just to Jews, but to non-Jews likewise.

Avimelech, He appears, for instance, but as Elokim. If you look at all the non-Jews to whom Hashem reveals Himself in Bereshit, it is always to Elokim. And the Torah assumes that non-Jews will understand the concept of Elokim.

Joseph says to Potiphar's wife, how can I yield to you v'chatati l'Elokim? He takes it for granted that she will understand that when he uses the word Elokim, it is meaningful for her. The Torah assumes that non-Jews relate to Elokim. What they don't relate to is Hashem.

So, for instance, Pharaoh, of Joseph says, about Joseph, “HaNimtzah kazeh ish asher ruach Elokim bo”? Pharaoh finds it not problematic to say that Joseph has within him the spirit of God, but Moses, Pharaoh says, “Mi Hashem? Lo Yadati et Hashem.” Hashem does not appear to non-Jews, Elokim does. 

So we see that as with the two covenants, so with the two names of God. Elokim is universal, can be understood by anyone. But Hashem is particular to the Jewish people.

Let us now take this analysis one stage further. What is the primary arena in which we encounter Elokim? And the answer is obvious. Bereishit bara Elokim.

Elokim is God as manifest in Creation. To repeat, that is what Elokim means. The Force of forces, the Cause of causes, the Prime Mover, the Source of all being, God of Creation.

However, immediately in chapter 2, we begin to encounter Hashem Elokim, in chapter 4, just Hashem and when God enters into a personal relationship with somebody. With Adam, with Chava, with Cain, with Hevel. When He discloses Himself to them, when He speaks, when He listens, when He commands. Hashem is the God of Revelation. Elokim is the God of Creation. Hashem is the God of Revelation.

So we are beginning to see a picture building up. A duality between the universal and the particular. Noach and Avraham.

A covenant with all humanity, a covenant with one particular people. Elokim, Hashem, the God of Creation, the God of Revelation. God as He appears to Jew and non-Jew alike.

God as He appears specifically to zerah Avraham. No sooner do we say this, than we then see that this dual metaphysics of Judaism generates a dual epistemology. Two different forms of knowledge.

And they belong to this total worldview. And one of the most famous expressions of this is in the Midrash. “If they say to you there is wisdom among the nations, believe it. If they tell you there is Torah among the nations, do not believe it.” Chochma is a biblical category. There are three books of the Bible, of Tanach, in which the incidences of Chochma are overwhelmingly concentrated.

They are Mishlei, Kohelet, Iyov. Where the word appears far more than in any other books. It appears in Mishlei 103 times, in Kohelet 53 times, in Iyov 31 times.

And those three books are known generically as the wisdom literature. And if you look at all the occurrences of the word chochma in Tanach, you will see it is always a reference to something that is universal, just as the wisdom literature of Judaism is closest to the wisdom literatures of the period of ancient Egypt and so on. So for instance, in Bereishit, the concept of Chochma appears exclusively in connection with Egypt.

So for instance, Pharaoh says of Yosef, “Ein chacham veNavon kamocha.” There are chachmei Mitzrayim. In the beginning of Shemot, Pharaoh says, “Hava nitchachma lo,” so chochma is a universal. And if we ask in what context does the word chochma appear throughout Tanach, the answer, of course, is Creation.

If you look anywhere in Tanach, chochma is “Ma rabu ma’asecha Hashem, kulam beChochma asita” - “How great are Your works, O Lord, You have created them all in wisdom.” 

Torah is never spoken of as universal. It is, on the contrary, specific to the people of the covenant. It is “Morasha kehillat Ya’akov.” Moshe Rabbeinu says specifically, in VaEtchanan, “Umi goy gadol asher lo chukim uMishpatim tzadikim k’chol haTorah haZot asher anochi noten lifneichem haYom.” Torah was given to Jews, not to anyone else. “Magid dvarav leYa’akov…”

So we see now that this duality of two ways of knowing things is built in to the very structure of the universe, built into the structure of reality as Torah understands it, built into the duality of God and our experience of the world. 

So, we now have two modes of knowledge - Chochma and Torah. And they're completely different. Chochma is the truth we discover. Torah is the truth we inherit. “Morasha kehillat Ya’akov.” Chochma is the universal heritage of humankind. Torah is the specific heritage of Israel.

Chochma comes from being in the image of God, which we all are. Says Rashi to the phrase, “Na’aseh adam b’tzalmeinu kidmuteinu…leHavin uleHaskil” Every human being has the ability to acquire Chochma, but Torah has nothing to do with the image of God and everything to do with being the people of God. Chochma is acquired by seeing and reasoning. Torah is acquired by listening and responding. Chochma tells us what is. Torah tells us what ought to be. Chochma yields facts. Torah yields commands. Chochma yields descriptive scientific laws. Torah yields prescriptive behavioural laws. Chochma is about Creation. Torah is about Revelation.

And now we can understand what otherwise would seem a flat contradiction. The Rambam famously says, “kabel et haEmet mimi sheAmra” - “Accept the truth, whoever says it.” The Gemara says, “HaOmer davar b'Shem omro meivi geula l’olam.” The Gemara says no, it matters who said it.

So how can we reconcile what appeared to be a contradiction? And the answer is quite obvious. The Rambam was talking about Chochma. Chazal were talking about Torah.

When it comes to Chochma, if Einstein had not discovered relativity, someone else would have done it. What matters is not who discovered it, what matters is, is it true? But when it comes to Torah, the truth of Revelation, then we have to be sure of the chain of transmission, otherwise it cannot be validated. So we see they have two quite different logics.

So what we have, very quickly, seen is throughout a whole series of iterations, a duality at the heart of Judaism between the universal and the particular, as it's translated into biblical narrative, into the idea of covenant, into the names of God, and into the very structure of knowledge itself. Now, let us simply put the final piece in place. Let us locate this on the map of Jewish faith.

Rambam famously established the idea that there are 13 Principles of Jewish Faith. Along came the Tashbetz, Rabbi Shimon ben Tzemach Duran, and divided them all into three generic categories - Creation, Revelation, Redemption. 

Creation is the relationship between God and the world. Revelation is the relationship between God and us. And when you apply Revelation to Creation, the result is Redemption. 

And now, we come to the spiritual question of our time.

Redemption means applying Revelation to Creation, Torah to the world. How can we apply Torah to the world if we don't understand the world? 

Here is a moment. March 1991. Elaine and I and the family a year before - we said about the Chief Rabbinate what Augustian said about virtue - “Give it to me but not yet” - and so we went to Yerushalayim a year before taking up the Chief Rabbinate, to find peace. Just our luck, we found ourselves in the middle of the first Gulf War. Now, as you know, in 1991, Iraq launched 39 Scud missile attacks on Israel. By a series of miracles, there was only one casualty. 

But there was another casualty. And it turned out to be family stress.

Apparently, Israelis are not used to being in one small room with the rest of their family. And this was the biggest casualty of the Gulf War. So, towards the end of the war, we receive a phone call from the Mayor of Yerushalayim, who said he was setting up a working party on family stress, and would I please be the rabbi on this working party? I said, ‘You have no rabbis in Yerushalayim?’ And this was the reply: ‘We have plenty of rabbis in Yerushalayim, but none that understand family psychodynamics.’

And that was when I said to myself, ‘Ribbono shel Olam, if religious Jews, if believing Jews, if Bnei Torah don't understand psychology, or science, or economics, or literature, or political philosophy, then Torah munachat bekeren zavit, Torah is an irrelevance to the real-life problems of human beings in society. And when that happens, “kol yom vaYom bat kol yotzeit meiHar Horev uMachrezet v’omeret oy lahem labriyut meiElbona shel Torah.” Is there a single greater humiliation of Torah, than it becomes irrelevant to the problems of society, especially a Jewish society?

When Torah ceases to be the foundation of a society, and becomes instead the possession of a sect, or a series of sects, which have to defend themselves by erecting high walls against the world outside, then Torah is munachat bekeren zavit. Because religion has become one thing, and life has become another. And that is a fracture that Judaism cannot allow.

Judaism is a code of life. Torah and mitzvot are chayeinu v'orech yameinu. And chas v'shalom, that Torah should have nothing to say to us about the structure of an economy, or the ethics of business, or the breakdown of family, or the principles that govern politics.

When Jews appear to the world, how do they appear nowadays? Whether in Israel, or in America, or in Europe, they appear to the world as a series of religious sects who keep their distance on the one hand, and as a secular, deracinated majority on the other hand. HaYitachen? Is that the image we were supposed to present to the world? Whatever happened to “hu chochmatchem uVinatchem b’einei haGoyim,” says Moses, “This is your wisdom and understanding in the eyes of the nations.” 

Whatever happened to “v’raoo kol amei ha’aretz ki shem Hashem nikra eilecha”? Whatever happened to the idea that Jews in the world are such that people see them, and see the presence of God?

If they see Judaism, not as the God-intoxicated people, but as the highly secularised people the majority of the Jewish community ever had. Whatever happened to the religion that so valued Chochma, science, that it coined a blessing more than 2,000 years ago on haRoeh chachmei umot olam, somebody who sees a non-Jewish, a non-believer. There weren't any other monotheists when Chazal coined that bracha. To say a bracha on a non-Jewish sage distinguished for his or her scholarship, the bracha that I made on James Watson, co-discoverer of DNA, when he and I received an honorary doctorate together at Cambridge University.

Are we supposed to behave now towards science the way the Vatican did to Galileo or the way Bishop Wilberforce did to Charles Darwin. Us, the most intellectual religion in the whole history of the world, we are afraid of these challenges? Without Chochma, Torah loses its connection with the world. Revelation ceases to engage with Creation and we lose a sense of the supreme principle of faith, so supreme that we recite it seven times at the very climax of Neila: Hashem Hu HaElokim, the God of Revelation is the God of Creation. The God of the Word is also the God of the World.

Now I know that not all Chochma is permitted. The Sages were very clear in their distinction between Chochma as such and Chochma Yevanit, Greek culture. The culture of the Stoics and the Cynics and the Epicureans, and I have no doubt today that we have our own Chochma Yevanit.

Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett… what I call the intellectuals’ equivalent of road rage. And they would count as our Chochma Yevanit, which is not science but scientism, myth masquerading as science.

But without a compelling defence of faith, without a literate, informed articulation of faith, we will continue to lose our best minds for the next 250 years as we have done for the past 250 years. And we will fail in God's mandate to the Jewish people to be a transformative presence in the midst of humanity, by applying Revelation to Creation, thereby becoming agents of Redemption.

Friends, all we have to do without compromising one scintilla of halacha or one syllable of emunah, is to understand the world so that we can speak to the world. 

And then we will discover - as I have discovered - that when you speak Torah in the public domain, it speaks not just to Jews but to the world.

And I don't say that lightly. I’ve built my whole rabbinate around that and if this is what we discovered in Britain, kol shekein ben beno shel kol shekein, is it possible in America, where your Jewish community is 20 times as big as ours, and where your whole community is far more central to the life of the nation than is ours.

Friends, we know that not everyone will choose this route. It is hard, it is intellectually demanding, but let me assure you that there is not one challenge out there in the world today - moral, philosophical, political or societal - that we cannot face with total confidence that Moshe emet, v’Torato emet, with total confidence that our faith speaks with undiminished power to the formidable dilemmas of 20th-century secular time.

Friends, we have to mend that cerebral lesion, that dissociation of sensibilities, that splits Torah from Chochma, God's world from the world in which we live.

That is Tzav HaSha’a, the imperative of our time, and I say this to you knowing that you start with the greatest advantage anyone could have. Yeshiva University itself. Led and inspired for so many years by the man we honour tonight, Rabbi Norman Lamm, a man equally of Torah and Chochma. He led the way. Now let us continue the task. Thank you.