Rabbi Sacks’ Interview at The University of Dallas on Judeo-Christian relationships

Dr Bainard Cowan:

Now in your book, The Dignity of Difference, you spoke of the cosmopolitan culture that rules in large part in the West and of its impersonal nature. And you contrasted that to the personal sense of the Creator in Judaism. Do you think that that still reigns today, that sense of the personal in modern Judaism?

Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks:

I think Judaism, along with Christianity, has always felt that the personal God is at the very heart of faith. And that’s what Judah Halevi in the 11th century within Judaism, and of course Pascal in his Pensées said is the difference between the God of Aristotle and the God of Abraham. The God of Aristotle is a concept, the God of Abraham is a person to whom we can say “Thou”. And I think speaking as a Jew I feel this very powerfully. And it comes across in very dramatic ways. You see, Jews are a very small people, one of fifth of 1% of the population of humankind. An American writer called Milton Himmelfarb once said: “Just think of it, the total population of world jury is smaller than the statistical error in the Chinese census.” So there’s so few of us that the relationship with God is very up close and personal. We all feel as if we count and we have an individual relationship with God.

Dr Bainard Cowan:

Well, you’ve also spoken of the presence of the Jews in the modern world as a stimulus against this self-complacency of modern culture. Am I right?

Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks:

I think in terms of the Jewish relation to the world, we all feel, in a sense, like Abraham that were cast in the role of iconoclasts, it’s our task to challenge the idols of the age, whatever the idols, whatever the age. And that means Jews, both religious and really sometimes secular, have been a very challenging thinkers. So many of the shapers of the modern mind have been Jewish, whether by background or conviction. You think of Spinoza you think of Freud you think of Einstein, you think of people in a whole series of disciplines because Jews are trained to ask questions and take nothing for granted. And I think that has remained the Jewish task in the modern world. We are the iconoclasts.

Dr Bainard Cowan:

Wonderful. Now, in the Erasmus lecture you gave for First Things last year, you spoke of a new meeting for Christians and Jews. And I wonder if you could elaborate on how you see what’s possible for that new meeting?

Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks:

One of the most interesting phenomena in civilisation, and it’s a privilege to be part of it, is this transformed relationship between Jews and Christians that emerged in the wake of the Holocaust and a very deep rethinking of Christian attitudes to Jews and Judaism. And so, whereas for almost 2000 years, Jews and Christians met in a sense of suspicion and sometimes hostility, today we meet as friends in deep mutual respect and speaking personally, my relationship when I was Chief Rabbi of Britain and the Commonwealth with successive Archbishops of Canterbury and Cardinal Archbishops, head of the Catholic Church in England and Scotland, was very close. It was a very deeply personal friendship. I also think that when you’re a public figure, that kind of personal friendship gets noticed by people, and the fact that people would be able to see the leading Catholic and the leading Anglican and the Chief Rabbi were close friends who shared interests and spoke about the same things in a similar kind of way, brought a great message of healing to Britain in an age when let’s face it religious and ethnic conflict is one of the great dangers facing humanity.

Dr Bainard Cowan:

Well, what then is the role for the university in this new meeting of Christians and Jews, and specifically for a Catholic university?

Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks:

The idea of a university owes so much, of course, to Cardinal Newman, the great Catholic thinker on the role of the university in human civilisation. And I think the university today is the great critical arena. A Catholic philosopher called Alasdair McIntyre once said of any institution, “Don’t ask what it does. Ask ‘of what conversations is it the arena?’”. Now you at the University of Dallas have set out as your task, “the pursuit of wisdom, truth, and virtue”, and those things are advanced by conversations between people who come together in the collaborative pursuit of truth. And when that begins to happen, let’s say between Catholics and Jews who didn’t have a conversation like that through most of the centuries, it becomes a very blessed presence. And I think truth is a conversation scored for many voices.

Dr Bainard Cowan:

It’s a very stimulating conception of the university as a place to encourage great conversations. Now, what about the challenges that you’ve spoken of for the Abrahamic faiths as a whole? How might the people of these faiths work together more to face the challenges that come in this century?

Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks:

It was two great figures Samuel Huntington and before him Bernard Lewis, who warned already in the 1990s that we might face a clash of civilisations. And there is no question that deep down that’s a codeword for conflicts between Jews, Christians, and Muslims. The Abrahamic monotheisms have not always been the most pacific of peoples, of cultures. And it does seem to me that when we can set against that the contrary example of Jews, Christians, and Muslims, including in that embrace many other faiths as well, when we come together to share our wisdoms, that becomes an antidote to the single greatest danger facing the west in the 21st Century. We have seen conflict destabilise large parts of the world today.

They are destabilising most of the countries in the Middle East, many countries in Asia, and many countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, and religion is not the cause of those conflicts, but it’s usually brought into those conflicts. And as I’ve said, when any political conflict becomes religionised, it becomes absolutised. Because what in peacemaking, in politics is a virtue, in religion is a vice, namely, compromise.

So when you have Jews, Christians and Muslims engaged in a conflict over power, then you have conflict turn very dramatically away from peace and towards the kind of permanent state of war. And that is why you have to address this by choosing the path of influence rather than power.

Power is a zero-sum game. The more I share power, the less power I have. Influence is a non-zero game. So when it comes to wisdom, or truth, or virtue, the more I share those things, the more I have. So if religion in the 21st Century pulls back from the pursuit of power and instead pursues the role of influence, then religion can become a force for peace instead of what it is now in so many parts of the world: an aggravation and intensification of conflict.

Dr Bainard Cowan:

As for Jews and Christians themselves. I’m thrilled that you believe that we have a new opening, a new beginning. What do you think is the best that we could aim for in this coming century with the relations?

Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks:

Just a few days ago, something happened in Rome called the Four Popes. Cardinal, the Pope Benedict XVI, and Pope Francis coming together to canonise John XXIII and John Paul II. Those four Popes have done more to transform relations between Jews and Christians than anyone else in history. It’s quite an extraordinary phenomenon, begun by John the 23rd leading to Vatican 2 and Nostra Aetate, taken forward by John Paul II, especially in his visit to the synagogue in Rome, where he spoke of Jews and Christians as elder and younger brothers. I had the privilege of knowing Benedict XVI a little because we shared intellectual interests, and Pope Francis has taken it further than any previous Pope.

In his open letter to the editor of La Repubblica, who challenged him on the Church’s approach to Jews over history. And he said something quite extraordinary. He said, “we owe the Jews a debt for their faithfulness to the covenant over the centuries. And we owe them a debt not just as human beings, but as Christians.”
For me, that little sentence was one of the most healing utterances I have heard in my lifetime. So it is clear that Pope Francis is a very, very special individual who is going to continue that process of healing and has already done so much to do so.

And he is as it were the culmination of a process started by no lesser saintly individual than John XXIII. So, I think from here on we have become friends, and now we have a great journey to undertake together: to defend the Judeo-Christian ethic in a highly secular age. And the importance of that is back to where we began. The idea of the personal, of God as “Thou”. At the end of the day, Judaism and Christianity are here to teach us about the sanctity of the human person and the bonds of love between us. And what the modern age has produced, whether it’s science, technology, liberal democracy or the market are very impersonal institutions. So our task as Jews and Christians, as Jews and Catholics, is to reinstate the sanctity of the personal, which happens whenever we relate to one another in love and trust.