L’Chayim Interview with JBS

Voiceover: Jewish Education and Media is pleased to present a programme that highlights the people, issues, and events of importance to the Jewish Community. Now here is your, host Rabbi Mark Golub!

Rabbi Golub: I'm Mark Golub, and every now and then (though rarely) but every now and then I have the great honour of introducing you to a Jewish superstar. You know, there are many wonderful creative dynamic individuals in the Jewish World making major contributions to Jewish life in myriad ways: Rabbis, educators, Israeli leaders, leaders of American Jewry and of world jewry... and if you watch on a regular basis you'll know I love many of them and have a profound appreciation for their passion and their commitment to Jewish life,

And then there are the superstars whose breadth of learning and strength of character and their unique vision for what Jewish life can be needs to be and their indefatigable energy and will to serve the Jewish people enables them to inspire us in unique ways to become better people and better more engaged more involved Jews.

On this edition of L'Chayim I have the privilege of sitting with a Rabbi superstar who has for more than 25 years been an eloquent voice of Jewish conscience and of an all-encompassing embrace of Torah. It is my pleasure to welcome here, on JBS, Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, the former Orthodox Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom and one of the brilliant rabbinic lights on the world you are seeing today and in orthodox circles.

Across the board Jonathan Sacks is considered to be a rabbi's rabbi. Jonathan Sacks, what a tremendous pleasure it is to have you at this table, thank you very very much, it's great to be with you.

Let me tell you just a little bit about Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, who has a most impressive resume. As much as I can tell you in a brief moment, there's so much more that can be added (if you google Jonathan Sacks you'll see what I mean) but here are some of what I believe to be the most important of Rabbi Sacks' achievements, accomplishments, and recognitions.

From 1991 to 2013 Jonathan Sacks was Great Britain's Chief Rabbi while also leading the largest synagogue in the UK, the United Synagogue. In 2005 Rabbi Sacks was knighted by the Queen of England for his service to the community and to interfaith relations. He's the recipient of 16 honorary degrees including a Doctorate of Divinity conferred upon him by the Archbishop of Canterbury and he won the prestigious Jerusalem prize for his contribution to Diaspora Jewish Life, currently Jonathan Sacks serves as the Ingeborg and Ira Rennet Global distinguished professor of judaic thought at NYU (New York University) and as the Kressel and arrat family university professor of Jewish thought at Yeshiva University, as if that's not enough, Jonathan Sacks is the author of 25 books which have won him many notable Awards including two national Jewish book awards - one for A Letter in the Scroll and one for a Covenant & Conversation. A personal favourite of mine is his book entitled Future Tense. I recommend it to everyone. All his books to everyone, and his most recent book, is a most relevant and timely one entitled Not in God's Name: Confronting Religious Violence published by Schocken Books). A superbly written critique of the blasphemous ways in which religion is distorted to justify the wanton murder of others.

Once again, Jonathan Sacks, it is so wonderful to have you sitting at this table. I've had the privilege of speaking to you once before on camera, and also to be in your presence many times, and you are doing an enormous service to the Jewish Community the Jewish World, shkoyach to you and thank you for joining me.

Rabbi Sacks: Well, thank you. Really. 

Rabbi Golub: So I want to talk about many things. Before we talk about the book and some of your thoughts about Jewish life in general, can I ask you a little bit about your own journey and where it begins and where you're born and the kind of home you're raised in and the parents you have? Where does the journey start for you, Jonathan? 

Rabbi Sacks: Well, my mother's family came really from Lithuania via Israel. My great-grandfather, who was a Lithuanian rabbi and a very orthodox scholarly person, became mobilised, I think, by the pogroms in Russia in 1881 and decided that aliyah was now a collective imperative for the Jewish people. And he went and became a pioneer.

I mean, he stayed a rabbi, but he built the first house in Petach Tikva. Wow. I have to explain a little.

Rabbi Golub: What was his name? 

His name was Arieh Leib Frumkin. And I have to explain here, Petach Tikva was founded in 1878. So it was the first of the new yishuvim.

But all the original settlers caught malaria. So they left and they lived some miles away. And that's why Rishon Lezion claims to be the first yishuv, because it was the first continuously inhabited yishuv.

In 1882, my grandfather led the return to Petach Tikva, built a house, built a school, ran the school, and it became an agricultural settlement. Yes. In 1894, having turned this hitherto unfarmable land into quite a prosperous region, the local Arabs attacked him. He felt it was not safe to bring up children there, so he came to London. 

So that is the sort of rabbinic history in my background. I never met my great-grandfather, but I was aware that there were rabbis in the past.

But my story really is more to do with my late father, who came over as a young man, as a refugee from Berlin. Had to leave school at the age of 14. There was only enough money in the family for one of the children to have an education, and it wasn't him.

Rabbi Golub: His name? 

His name was Louis Sacks. And so he helped run the family business, selling schmattes in Commercial Road in London's East End, which is like New York's Lower East Side. Now, you know, he was an intelligent man and a cultured man who never had a chance.

And one thing stayed with me over the years. He would take me to shul when I was five years old, and I would ask him, ‘Dad, why did we do this? Why do we do that?’ And he would turn to me and say, ‘Jonathan, I didn't have an education, so I can't answer your questions. But one day, you will have the education that I didn't have. And when that happens, you will teach me the answers to those questions.’

Rabbi Golub: Oh, how lovely. 

Rabbi Sacks: So, you know, for your father to make you his teacher, I mean, what greater gift can any child have than that? So it kind of spurred me. I was the first member of my family to go to university. 

Rabbi Golub: Did you have siblings? 

Rabbi Sacks: I am the oldest of four boys, all of whom did better than me at school and universities. I'm the kind of dumbo of the family.

Rabbi Golub: Is that true? 

Rabbi Sacks: Is it true? Yeah, absolutely true. Two of them today live in Israel.

And, you know, I just sensed I was making up for a lost life that my father never had, but would love to have had. 

Rabbi Golub: You grew up in an Orthodox environment, an Orthodox home, an Orthodox community? 

Rabbi Sacks: It was a traditional family, but neither of my parents knew very much. So I was really going where they hadn't been.

But for any parents watching, I have to say very simply, my parents may not have known very much and they didn't keep all that much. But one thing they communicated to me and to my brothers was they were ashrei yoshvei veitecha. They were proud of being Jews, happy to be in shul. My parents both worked very hard for the shul, you know, and my father became the President of the shul, my mother ran the Ladies Guild. And I think if you can communicate to your children your love for Judaism, that counts more than anything else. 

Rabbi Golub: And that's what they did for you? 

Rabbi Sacks: Absolutely.

Rabbi Golub: Did they also have a love for Israel? Because this is roughly what period of time? 

Rabbi Sacks: This is, well, I was born at the same time as the state of Israel. 

Rabbi Golub: Okay. So it's an infant state of Israel. As you're growing up and you're now, you know, you become Bar Mitzvah age and then you're a young teenager. Was Israel a reality in your life? 

Rabbi Sacks: Yeah. It was while I was in my first year at university. My father, who couldn't afford this kind of thing, so we'd never been to Israel. And my father said to me in around April, May 1967, he said, ‘Let's go to Israel.’ It was the only bonding trip we ever did, but it was eye-opening.

And this was just about a month before the Six-Day War. We were there for one of the earliest incidents. My father, who was then 60 years old, became a different person in Israel.

Rabbi Golub: Wow. 

Rabbi Sacks: The years melted away. He was a young man again. He loved everything about Israel. He became, you know, just jubilant. I remember an episode that was just, you couldn't script a piece of fiction like this, but it's true.

He wanted to take me to a concert in Tel Aviv. And they were playing one of his favourites, which was Gustav Mahler's “Das Lied von der Erde.” And we were on a bus talking in English. And he was saying to me, “Mahler's ‘Das Lied von der Erde,’ this was the finest music he ever wrote.” And the bus driver turned around and said, “No, the Ninth Symphony is better.” My father was in ecstasy.

In Israel, a bus driver is a music critic. I mean, you know, where in the world will you find something like this? So he really communicated his love for Israel. In the last years of his life, when he was too old to travel, he used to ask my mother to drive him up and down Golders Green Road.

This is like, I don't know, you would say Williamsburg. He said, ‘That's the next big thing to being in Israel.’ And he imagined he was there in Israel. Israel was to him, everything. 

Rabbi Golub: I don't know how long he lived. Did he live long enough to see the success you had as a rabbi? 

Rabbi Sacks: In his 80s, he went through a series of very difficult operations on his hips. And for me, the thing that made my whole life worthwhile is on the 1st of September, 1991, he was able, walking on crutches, to climb the steps to the ark in the St. John's Wood Synagogue and do p'ticha, open the Ark, at my induction as Chief Rabbi. 

Rabbi Golub: I got chills, Jonathan. 

Rabbi Sacks: You know, it was very, very special for me and I think for him. And he died five years later. But again, the other great moment in my life was my mother, who was such a fan of the Queen, you know. 

Rabbi Golub: Her name? 

Rabbi Sacks: Well, she was Louisa, but everyone called her Libby. And to come to Buckingham Palace as the guest of the Queen, to see me knighted in 2005. And that was, you know, I think to be a Jew is to try and give nachas to your parents. And I just thank Hashem that I was able to do that for them.

Rabbi Golub: Those are beautiful stories. 

Jonathan, at what point do you decide you want to be a rabbi? 

Rabbi Sacks: Quite late in life. I already had another career, other careers. But a year after that visit to Israel, I said, I must learn more about Judaism. And I came to America during my summer holiday in ‘68. I met many rabbis and through sheer chutzpah and dogged persistence, I got to meet two very, very special rabbis. Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik of Yeshiva University and Lubavitcher Rabbi, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson. 

Rabbi Golub: You met two of the greatest rabbinic lights in the history of the Jewish people. How do you get close to them? How did that happen? 

Rabbi Sacks: Oh, my goodness. I went to 770, walked in and said, ‘I've just come 3,000 miles to meet the Lubavitcher Rabbi. Could I have an appointment, please?’

Rabbi Golub: Off the street you do this? 

Rabbi Sacks: Yeah, yeah. The Chassidim fell about laughing.

They said, ‘Do you know how many thousands of people are waiting to see the Lubavitcher Rabbi? Come back next year. Come back in 10 years. Forget it.’

But I gave them my name and I said, ‘Look, I don't know where I'm going to be,’ because I was hitchhiking and bussing around America on a Greyhound bus. But I said, ‘I do know that I will be at some time with my aunt in Los Angeles.’ That was the far point of my visit. ‘So here's her phone number. And if by any chance the Rebbe can see me, please give me a call there.’ 

Rabbi Golub: How old are you? 

Rabbi Sacks: Pardon? 

Rabbi Golub: How old are you here? 

Rabbi Sacks: 20. 

Rabbi Golub: 20. 

Rabbi Sacks: And I think it was Sunday night, or maybe it was Motzei Shabbat, the phone call comes through, ‘The Rebbe can see you on Thursday night.’ 

Now, I had no money. So the only way I could get from Los Angeles to New York was by sitting on a Greyhound bus, which I don't recommend. I really don't. It's a long way to go on a bus.

But I sat with him and it was a life-changing encounter. 

Rabbi Golub: How? 

Rabbi Sacks: Well, because what I had done with all the other rabbis was ask them my questions about faith. And I asked all these questions to the Rebbe and he answered them very quickly, very rapidly. And then he did a role reversal, started asking me questions. How many Jews are there at Cambridge University? How many of them come to the Jewish Society? Of course, how many Jews were there at Cambridge University? We estimated at the time about a thousand.

How many came to the Jewish Society? Maximum 100. So we were losing 90% of our kids. So he started asking, ‘What are you doing about it? What are you doing about it?’ And I said, being very English in those days, ‘In the position in which I find myself…’

And the Rebbe interrupted me in the middle of the sentence and said, ‘You don't find yourself in a position. You put yourself in a position. And if you put yourself in a position, you can put yourself in a different position.’

He was challenging me to become a leader. Now, the last thing in the world I ever dreamt of was becoming a leader, let alone a rabbi. I mean, absolutely not on my horizon at all. But he was clearly saying, you know, you're there. You've got to do something about it. And many, many years later, I reflected on that.

And I said, people got the Rebbe all wrong. They thought, here is a leader with thousands of followers. I said, it's true. But it's the least interesting fact about him. A good leader creates followers. A great leader creates leaders.

And that's exactly what the Rebbe did for me. 

Rabbi Golub: Okay. You're 20 when this happens. You don't leave his office and become a rabbi. 

Rabbi Sacks: No. 

Rabbi Golub: Okay. Tell me about meeting Rav Soloveichik. 

Rabbi Sacks: Rabbi Soloveichik really challenged me to think. 

Rabbi Golub: Is this the same trip? 

Rabbi Sacks: Same trip, yeah.

Rabbi Golub: What was it like to meet him? 

Rabbi Sacks: He normally sat in his class while his talmidim were preparing for his shiur. And because he'd agreed to meet me, he sat outside the class, in the corridor, in Yeshiva University. And eventually, we went into a room. And he sat with me for an hour and told me all the things, amazing things. He told me his famous thing that “The philosophy of Judaism has to be excavated from Halacha.” This was a really, really important moment for me.

I'd never seen that possibility. That was his great chidush. That's what made him the great thinker he was.

Rabbi Golub: Can you explain to those who are watching all over America right now? What did he mean by “excavate Halacha”? 

Rabbi Sacks: You know, people think, here's a book, Shulchan Aruch. It's got Jewish laws in it. Or let's mention the one by Maimonides, the Mishneh Torah. It's full of laws. You want to know what to do? Open that book.

Here's another book, completely different. It's a book of Jewish philosophy. Let's call it The Guide for the Perplexed. I know it's been done before. Okay, so here's one book. Here's another book. And there's no connection. This is what Jews do. This is what Jews think and believe.

And that is how everyone saw it. Until Soloveitchik came along and said, ‘If you want to understand Jewish philosophy, you've got to open that book, the book of laws, and then meditate on those laws deeply enough. Go beneath ground level.’

Really… now, what made the rabbis think of these laws? What made God give us these laws? And you will begin to understand what Jewish thought is all about. So, for instance, we have lots of laws about teshuvah. That's why we have Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.

Rabbi Golub: Repentance. 

Rabbi Sacks: Repentance. Now, if you think deeply enough about repentance, it only actually makes sense if we have free will. Because if everything is determined by our genes, then we couldn't really have done anything about it. So it's silly to repent and have remorse. And it's ridiculous to think you can change because we are what we are because of our genetic endowment.

But the fact that Judaism has laws of repentance tells us we have free will. So dig down deep enough into what lies beneath the laws. You will eventually come up with a Jewish philosophy.

Now, that was very, very exciting. I was studying philosophy at the time and nobody at Cambridge University ever told me anything remotely as interesting as that. And he told me many other things. But… he told me about his friendship when he was a fellow student with the Lubavitcher Rebbe. Very, very interesting. Told me about his personal debts to Lubavitch because his first teacher as a child was a Chabadnik.

So, you know, people have now, now that a lot of his stuff has been published that wasn't published in his lifetime, people are more aware of this. But actually, he knew the Lubavitcher Rebbe and he had strong kinship ties. 

Rabbi Golub: Okay. Jonathan, I am fascinated by who you were at 20. Once again, you were doing… you were not meeting the Lubavitcher Rebbe nor were you meeting Rav Soloveitchik because you wanted to be a rabbi. 

Rabbi Sacks: Correct. I wanted it... 

Rabbi Golub: So what was the drive? What was it about, what was it in you that you went looking for these two people? 

Rabbi Sacks: Because we had lived through, a year before, the Six-Day War. Now what people forget about the Six-Day War is what it looked like before the war began. Before the war began, Egypt, Syria, Jordan were massing troops. Nasser had ordered the United Nations peacekeeping force out of the Sinai Desert. He closed the Gulf of Aqaba.

It looked as if Israel were about to suffer the most momentous onslaught. And for a generation, of my contemporaries born after the Holocaust, it looked as if we were about to live through a second Holocaust, God forbid. And the most non-religious Jews were coming to shul in Cambridge and davening every day. We were all caught up with this incredible fear and trauma. And then, you know, miraculously, six days, it was over. 

But I was left with this afterthought. It's true I'd been to Israel just a few weeks earlier. But what made all of us feel so connected with a nation thousands of miles away, most of whose population we'd never met? 

This was not a religion in an ordinary sense. This was not Judaism like Christianity or Islam or whatever it was that I grew up with, you know, the kind of thing you do in a house of worship and at home.

All of a sudden, this was about peoplehood, about connection, about history, about hate, about goodness knows what. I mean, we had been there in one of the most extraordinary moments of Jewish history. 

It wasn't just me it changed. It changed all of the Soviet Jews, people like Natan and Avital Sharansky. All of them were suddenly, had something kindled. And you wanted to know, what is this thing? And that's why it took that summer to go to America and ask rabbis to try and explain it to me.

Rabbi Golub: You said that there were questions of faith you were asking rabbis. Can you share one of those questions with me? 

Rabbi Sacks: Well, the point about philosophy as I was doing it was that there was not a single philosopher, almost none in the whole of Britain who believed in God. They were all atheists or agnostics. In fact, the first thing you do when you're studying philosophy, or at least you did in those days, was to prove that all the proofs for God's existence don't work. They're untrue. They don't work.

I mean, this never really bothered me. I mean, deep down, I have to say, I was not torn and conflicted because, you know, at the end of the day, I had that love that my parents had given me for Yiddishkeit. So, you know, I mean, this was quite… this was not existentially threatening.

It was just curious. Whoever thought in the first place that you'd sit down and prove that God exists? I mean, it's just not a Jewish thing. You don't sit down and write some abstract proof that God exists. What you do is you remember your people's history. We were rescued from slavery to freedom. We survived while all the empires that tried to attack us disappeared from history. I mean, you don't sit down and construct something called the ontological argument, you know, and just play with words. So I was never threatened by it, but they were sort of conventional questions.

If God knows in advance what we're going to do, how do we have free will? Et cetera, et cetera. 

Rabbi Golub: I got it. 

Rabbi Sacks: The sophomore, the undergraduate questions.

Rabbi Golub: Good for you. Okay. So then you say to me, but becoming a rabbi is something that came to you later in life.

Rabbi Sacks: Yeah. 

Rabbi Golub: How did it come to you? Why did you become a rabbi, finally? 

Rabbi Sacks: Well, the Rebbe challenged me to lead, which I did. I went straight back and became head of the Jewish Society in Cambridge. And because of his pain at the loss of Jews from university, I actually became the sort of student chaplain - or what you'd call a Hillel chaplain or something - at Cambridge. We'd got married already, and I was doing a research, doctoral research. So in an amateurish sort of way, a lay sort of way, I'd done some leadership.

But, you know, as the years passed, I taught philosophy and I was about to qualify as a lawyer. But as the years passed, I realised that none of my contemporaries from university were going into the rabbinate.

Many of them had become religious because of that experience of the Six-Day War. It was a transformative moment for many of my contemporaries. A lot of them made aliyah, but none of them became rabbis.

And I thought, ‘For heaven's sake, if nobody else is going to do it, let's do it.’ And that was when I was 25 that I began to study for the rabbinate. 

Rabbi Golub: And you become a rabbi at what age? 

Rabbi Sacks: At 28.

Rabbi Golub: And when, at what age do you, and how do you end up Chief Rabbi of Great Britain? 

Rabbi Sacks: Well, I went back to the Rebbe. 10 years later, ‘78. After I got smicha. And he gave me a mission. 

Rabbi Golub: Were you… smicha in Great Britain? 

Rabbi Sacks: Yeah, yeah. Two different kinds of smicha in Britain. The traditional one and what you would call the Israeli Chief Rabbinate one. And the Rebbe told me I've got to go and train rabbis. So I became Head of Jews College, which was our rabbinical seminary.

And then, you know, there's… Lord Jakobovits retired. 

Rabbi Golub: Did you know him? 

Rabbi Sacks: Of course, sure. 

Rabbi Golub: A remarkable man, yes.

Rabbi Sacks: Yeah, yeah. Very remarkable. And they asked me to be his successor. So, you know…

Rabbi Golub:  Were you hesitant at all? Or were you thrilled with the opportunity? 

Rabbi Sacks: I was very hesitant. And so was my family.

Rabbi Golub: Because?

Rabbi Sacks: Because it's a very public role. You don't have a private life in a situation like that. You become a figure on the national stage.

It's a very weighty responsibility because how you are perceived affects how the Jewish community is perceived. And I didn't go anywhere for 22 years without a protection officer. So we were all very, very iffy about it.

I asked a couple of rabbinical leaders whom I admired most, and they told me to do it. 

So eventually, I said to Elaine and the kids… and they are so supportive. It was extraordinary.

Rabbi Golub: How many children? 

Rabbi Sacks: Three children. 

‘Would you mind if I asked the Rebbe?’ Because when you ask the Rebbe, you do what he says. I mean, that's the terms of the relationship. If he says do it, you do it. And if he says don't do it, you don't do it.

So they took a deep breath and said, ‘Dad, if you feel… OK.’ 

Rabbi Golub: So you went back to the Rebbe and asked him? 

Rabbi Sacks: So I went back to the Rebbe and asked him. And I wrote to him all the pros and cons, the reasons to, the reasons not to. And I wrote, should I accept the position if offered? 

And the Rebbe, who before he became Rebbe, ran the Chabad Publishing House, knew all the typographical symbols that proofreaders use. And when he could answer without using a word, and just use a typographical symbol, that's how he would do it. 

So he answered my question, that question, without a single word. He wrote, where I’d written ‘should I,’ he used the invert word order symbol. So ‘should I’ became ‘I should.’ And that was his answer.

Rabbi Golub: Marvellous. All right, one more question on this line. As you look back at your more than 20 years as a Chief Rabbi, not what was the most wonderful moment, but what was the challenge for you that you felt either most frustrated by or just how wonderful it was you were able to break through? But as you look at that arc of years - and you did remarkable work, Jonathan, as Chief Rabbi… And it's interesting, I don't know if you understand, you were Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom, but really for world Jewry, you became a major leader for all of us. And we were reading you and watching you. And when you spoke, you spoke in the name of many of us who had nothing to do with Great Britain.

But as you look back on it, is there something that you say to yourself, you know, this was the greatest challenge I had. And I was successful to a certain extent. And to some extent, I really feel the challenge, you know, still exists.

Rabbi Sacks: I think there were two things. First of all, I knew, and this is a very British issue. I knew that we would not have a future unless we got Jewish kids to Jewish day schools.

You can live on inherited wealth for only so long. And you can live on inherited identity for only so long. My estimate was three generations.

So if you come from a family of inherited wealth, and you're a member of the fourth generation, if you want to be rich, you've got to make it yourself. And the same about identity. And I told our community, our kids are the fourth generation.

And I have to say, you know, the community was terrific. I mean, it was their doing, not my doing. I was just cheering from the sideline. But when I began, there were 25% of Jewish children at Jewish day schools. And when I left, there was 70%. So, you know, that was a community-wide achievement.

Rabbi Golub: But they heard your message. 

Rabbi Sacks: They heard. And, you know, it's just… doing these things is very humbling. That's the honest truth. They heard the message. They ran with it. They built the schools. They raised the money. And they became great schools and a source of pride, not only to us, but I think to the nation.

The other thing I felt very strongly is, you know, why is there antisemitism? I mean, it's a complex, complex issue. But at least one reason is people fear what they don't understand. And people didn't really know. The general public didn't really know. What do Jews believe? What do they do? What are they like at home? And we kind of kept a low profile. And I felt for all sorts of reasons that the time had come to take a high profile, to share our gifts with the British public at large.

So I did a lot of radio and television and writing for the national press. Some of my books were written for non-Jews, not just Jews. And I think the effect was to make the British public as a whole feel, you know what? We now understand Judaism a bit better. We like it. Because Jews don't try and convert us. I mean, it's a very important thing.

We're very unthreatening. And so I always, in my broadcasts, was tacitly saying, this is how we see things. If it works for you, great. And if it doesn't, that's okay. And people liked that. So I think the end result was Jews felt a little more comfortable in owning up to their Jewishness in public.

It's not a problem you have in America, but it's a problem we have in Europe. And I think we brought Judaism… I call it “bringing the voice of Judaism into the conversation of humankind.” 

And I think that those two things were really great.

But it was just a huge privilege. And Elaine and I thanked Hashem for every day, really. Because to be able to serve the Jewish community in that way, it's just, it's a great, great gift. And we enjoyed it. 

Rabbi Golub: Thank you for sharing that with me. And it leads me into now, some questions about how you view Jewish life today, as opposed to talking about your personal life. As you look at where Jewish life is in Europe, but beyond Europe, you have a real sense of what's going on here in American Jewish life. And there's also a question about what Jewish life will be like in the State of Israel as well. 

Jonathan Sacks, what gives you most pause? What concerns you most? What are the challenges? Your own Pew Report, in essence, what do you feel at the moment are the largest threats to the Jewish future? 

Rabbi Sacks: Well, there are two real issues, one external and one internal. The external one we know all about, antisemitism has returned. Unfortunately, what happened was, after the Holocaust, Europe created this remarkable immune system. 50 years of Holocaust education, interfaith dialogue, anti-racist legislation.

What they didn't really realise or appreciate is that over the past 100 years, Europe had infected the Middle East with antisemitism, which entered the bloodstream of Islam and became very dangerous. And that world now has brought it back to Europe. So that's worrying.

And it's worrying systemically because you see it on the one hand in the international isolation of Israel. And on the other hand, the real risk to European Jewish communities. But as I have said, and of course, as events in Europe have repeatedly borne out, if it's not safe to be a Jew in Europe, then it's not safe to be a European in Europe. So that's the external challenge. 

The internal challenge was probably put very well by President Rivlin of Israel when he said Israel, there's no longer an Israel majority and minorities. He said, ‘We have become a country of four minorities.’ There's the secular Israelis, the religious Israelis, the Haredis, the ultra-Orthodox Israelis, and there are the Arab Israelis. And they really are not cohering as a single nation. They don't share a narrative, a sense of identity, a sense of linked fortune.

So those internal divisions in Israel are dangerous. In world Jewry in chutz la’aretz, in the Diaspora, those divisions take a different form. But you could see here in America how Israel always used to unite Jews and it's begun to divide Jews.

And that's very worrying, because Jews are a very strong, resilient people. The only thing we are not good at surviving is division within our own ranks. And for heaven's sake, sitting here in America, can I forget Abraham Lincoln saying “A house divided against itself cannot stand”? So those are the two problems.

Rabbi Golub: Very often when people talk about you and they mention all the things that you have done to contribute to Jewish life, if they ever criticise or worry about where you've stood, the issues that I see discussed are, mentioned are, to what extent is Jonathan Sacks open to American streams of Jewish pluralism, meaning non-Orthodox expressions of Judaism? Can you explain how you view non-Orthodox, whether it's Reform, Conservative, Reconstructionist, anything that is not within a halachically-committed ideology? How do you view that? 

Rabbi Sacks: My views have changed very considerably. 

Rabbi Golub: Really? 

Rabbi Sacks: Yeah. I'm an Orthodox Jew and I kind of hope people will understand and accept that. But I used to see my fundamental task as a defender of the faith, you know, standing on the battlements, repelling the attackers and so on. But pretty soon I realised this was just not the right way of seeing the Jewish people. The Jewish people has been through a lot of trauma these last two centuries, as a result of which we've splintered and fragmented.

And frankly, I came to the conclusion that rather than, you know, standing there defending the battlements, I ought to go out there and embrace the crowd. And that became very important to me. 

Rabbi Golub: When did that happen for you? 

Rabbi Sacks: It happened about 10 or 15 years ago.

Rabbi Golub: Good for you. 

Rabbi Sacks: And I then formulated two principles, which I needed as Chief Rabbi. So the two principles go like this:

On all matters that affect us as Jews, regardless of our religious differences, we will work together, regardless of our religious differences. The second principle - on all issues that touch on our religious differences, we will agree to differ, but with respect. 

So that meant that I was able to work with Conservative, Reform, liberal and secular Jews. On a full half of the agenda of Anglo-Jewry. We work together on interfaith. We work together to defend Israel. We work together to fight antisemitism. We work together to do social action, to do welfare and all the rest. So all of these things, I was happy to work together and very publicly and conspicuously together. The issues that we couldn't work together are synagogue and at least some of the schools. And there we differed but with respect. 

And when I took those two principled stands, people really understood them. And we calmed what otherwise might have been - and what otherwise sometimes was - turbulent time.

Right now, we should be holding out the hand of love and warmth and welcome to every Jew. And we leave all the theological judgments to the Almighty. He's better at it than we are.

Rabbi Golub: I want you to explain from your perspective the difference between being a halachically-committed Jew, a Jew who is committed to Jewish law and Jewish tradition and a fundamentalist. Now, you've written this book, “Not in God's Name.” It is a beautifully, beautifully written book. And for people who might imagine, it's about confronting religious violence. And before I opened the book, I had a sense of what I thought Jonathan Sacks was going to do in the book. And then, every chapter takes the reader on a journey on another theme, very often of a rabbinic theme. Very often, you have all of these biblical chapters that you reference chapter by chapter in your book. And it's really a book of how do Jews embrace life. And why is it, you argue, that mainstream Jewish thought has never permitted itself to embrace violence? 

The book is so timely right now as we sit at this table. And by the way, Jonathan, there'll be hundreds of thousands of people watching on television, but then this programme goes online. It will be online forever. And there are tens of thousands of people who then one day will come across this. People who see this should know you and I are sitting in the shadow of this horrific event in Paris, where groups of jihadists ultimately killed no fewer than 129, 130 people. The number may grow because there are many right now who are in hospitals in very critical condition. The world has been stunned. It's been called Paris' 9-11.

And it is a question of, you know, how does the world confront Islamic jihadist terrorism? So your book has a power of particular moment. So I'm very glad we're sitting here at this time. But it's a book, and you and I talked off camera why you wrote this book, and it's been in process for a long time.

And it has a greater meaning than simply a moment that was very horrific for Paris. And what I find in your book is you're trying to address themes that are critical to Jewish life, to biblical life, and to religions as a whole. It's an extremely well-written, beautiful book.

Now, I want to read one little section to you, and it comes back to my question. I want to hear how you would separate commitment to Halacha from fundamentalism. This is what Jonathan Sacks wrote:

“Fundamentalism,” you write, “is so dangerous and so untraditional…”(Interesting choice of words.) “It is the tendency to read texts literally and apply them directly to go straight from revelation to application without interpretation. In many religions, including Judaism… (I believe you mean especially Judaism)... “this is heretical.” 

That's what you write about fundamentalism. You're very critical of fundamentalism. But I want you to explain how you understand the difference between a commitment to Halacha, which many people associate with fundamentalist Judaism, from the fundamentalism that you are critical of in “Not in God's name.” 

Rabbi Sacks: Something is absolutely fundamental to Judaism, and it is part of the famous story of the gentile who came to Hillel and wanted to convert and said, ‘How many Torahs do you believe in?’ And Hillel said, ‘Two, a Written Torah and an Oral Torah.’ And the convert says to him, “I'm willing to believe in the Written Torah. Forget the Oral Torah, but convert me.’

In other words, he's saying to Hillel, ‘Convert me on the condition that I can be a heretic.’ Well, Hillel has clearly been through the process that I went through in learning to love people with whom we don't agree on everything.

And so he accepts this man. And he starts teaching him the Aleph-Bet. So the first day, he teaches him Aleph-Bet-Gimmel. Good, fine. The guy goes away, comes back the next day for his lesson, and Hillel says, ‘Gimmel-Bet-Aleph.’ And the guy says, ‘Yesterday, you did it in the opposite order. Which is it?’ And Hillel says, ‘You see, you have to rely on me, the teacher, even to learn Aleph-Bet. How much more to learn what the Bible actually means?’

So that is the Jewish view. There's a Written Torah. There's an Oral Torah. And there's Revelation, there's interpretation. And those go hand in hand. And that's why fundamentalism is heretical in Judaism because it means written Torah without Oral Torah. 

Now, this is not an abstract thing. We know of the Samaritans in Second Temple Judaism. We know of the Karaites in the Middle Ages who were, in that sense, fundamentalists. So, for instance, why is it, do you think, that lighting Shabbat candles is such a sign of Jewish identity? The answer is that Karaites read in the Torah, “Lo tva’aru eish,” do not kindle a light in your house on the Sabbath day. And they interpreted that to mean there should be no light burning in the house. So if you came across somebody sitting on Friday night eating their dinner in darkness, you knew that was a Karaite. If you saw somebody sitting with candles, you knew that was a ‘Rabbinite.’

So, that's why Shabbat candles are a symbol of Jewish identity because the fundamentalists were the Karaites. And so, Judaism has this history of interpretation. 

But what I've tried to say in my book is so does Christianity, so does Islam. You cannot have a religion without authoritative traditions of interpretation. So, I wanted to show Muslims in particular don't lose that great tradition that once, between the 10th and 12th centuries in Spain, made Islam at the forefront of tolerance and intellectual openness. It's not as if Islam was never there. It was there, and earned the admiration of the world. 

That's how I distinguish between Halacha and fundamentalism. Fundamentalism is abolishing the Oral Law. Halacha is accepting and applying the Oral Law. 

Rabbi Golub: Yes. It's interesting. You're pointing out that a halachic Jew embraces the notion of rabbinic interpretation. 

Rabbi Sacks: It's essential. 

Rabbi Golub: Yes, essential. 

Rabbi Sacks: Yeah. 

Rabbi Golub: And only because I have you at this table… You have studied the great philosophers throughout Jewish history. I'm curious to hear how you relate to an Abraham Joshua Heschel or a Martin Buber, both of whom are trying to articulate the existential religious essential moment, what it means to stand in God's presence. But each of them use their own metaphor. 

And Heschel talks about awe and the sense of standing in the presence of the awesome grandeur of God's universe. While Buber talks about the I-Thou experience. And the more one reads a Buber, a Heschel, all of them, one realises they're all talking about the same moment and same human experience, but they're talking about it in different imagery, in different language, that maybe at one point resonates with the reader. As you come across Heschel and Buber and any other of the major philosophers, how do you relate to them? Do you give them credit? Do they bother you? Do you embrace them, especially Heschel and Buber?

Rabbi Sacks: Heschel and Buber were two exceptionally great Jewish thinkers. Heschel, he is the great poet of Jewish theology. And his books are incredibly moving. I mean, all of them, they were really remarkable. And I think they remain very vivid and very, really magnificent. He was a hugely learned scholar and knew his sources in a most remarkable way. So Heschel is somebody with whom I relate very, very much.

Rabbi Golub: Yes.

Rabbi Sacks: Martin Buber, as you know, focused on one specific dimension of Judaism to the exclusion of some others. And he was very close, as you know, to a thinker called Franz Rosenzweig. And Rosenzweig himself was critical of the fact that Buber wrote a Judaism without Halacha.

Rabbi Golub: Without any observance at all. 

Rabbi Sacks: What both of them did, especially Martin Buber, is that they were spokespeople for… Yehudah HaLevi in our time. And I want to explain this in relation to Martin Buber.

Rabbi Golub: Please. 

Rabbi Sacks: Yehudah HaLevi talks about the difference between the God of the philosophers and the God of the prophets, the God of Aristotle and the God of Abraham. And to some extent, he attributes that to the difference in the two names of God, Elokim and Hashem.

Elokim is God in Creation. The shaper of forces. The kind of God of physics, if you like. The God of Einstein. 

And Hashem is the God who speaks to us. And to whom we speak. Hashem is a proper name. It's like, you know, He's a friend. I mean, He's a parent.

So HaLevi made that distinction. And that is precisely what Martin Buber was restating in his idea of the relationship between I, it. Between me and things, Elokim. And I-Thou, my relationship with Hashem as a person. Hashem. And clearly that's central.

I have translated and written commentaries to the Siddur and the Machzorim. And I'm convinced that the key word of prayer is “Ata.” 

Rabbi Golub: You.

Rabbi Sacks: “Baruch Atah Hashem…” You. This means we're not talking to a computer. We are not talking to a Higgs boson. The God particle. We're not talking to some random fluctuation in the quantum field. We are talking to Somebody who hears us, who speaks to us, who creates us in love.

And that, of course, sometimes… I mean, Heschel was a much more elaborate thinker than Martin Buber in many ways. Martin Buber's brilliance lay in the fact that he covered many disciplines. I mean, we tend to only remember him for one book, but he must have written close on a hundred of them.

Rabbi Golub: And he loved Hasidism, even though he was not an observant Jew. 

Rabbi Sacks: One of his great, one of his great things was making the tales of the Hasidim accessible. He wrote this two-volume anthology of “Tales of the Hasidim.”

One of his earliest works was translating the stories and aphorisms of Rav Nachman of Breslov. He, too, had a very distinguished grandfather. I'm sure you know this. His grandfather, Shlomo Buber, who was a businessman and banker, was actually a Jewish scholar of the highest possible standing, who came to Britain, went to the British Library, and was riffling through the Hebrew manuscripts and suddenly realises, ‘This is a Midrash we have been searching for for centuries!’ 

We know, because it figures in some anthologies that there was a midrash called Yelamdeinu, which is, you know, 2,000 years ago, very often, there would be an ‘Ask the Rabbi’ session in shul. Somebody would ask a question. The rabbi… and the rabbi would build a speech around the answer to that question. Rabbi Tanchum was known as the master of this genre. Shlomo Buber discovered this manuscript, published it for the first time, and it's known as “Buber's Tanchuma.”

Rabbi Golub: Yes.

Rabbi Sacks: And so both Heschel and Buber came from extraordinary grandparents. 

Rabbi Golub: Yes.

Rabbi Sacks: And they translated some very traditional and beautiful ideas about Judaism into some very vivid and poetic language.

Rabbi Golub: That's beautiful. So I want to hear what you have to say about the most serious problem confronting American Jewish social life, the issue of intermarriage. And you've seen how American life has evolved. And within the non-Orthodox world, there's also an attempt to be as embracing of all peoples as possible. And there have been major movements now which have embraced the notion of a gay couple also having a Jewish form of marriage. That's also something which I understand, it's something you have come out against.

But I wish you would talk for one moment about how you view American Jewish life coping with the issue of intermarriage. By the way, it's not like it doesn't also exist in Great Britain. But intermarriage is an expression of Jewish assimilation. 

Rabbi Sacks: Yeah.

Rabbi Golub: And the question is, how does the Jewish community strategize? How do we deal with this phenomenon which now there is almost no family on the American scene? And it even is in the edges of the Orthodox community. Very much, much, much of a different nature. But within non-Orthodox Judaism, there's almost no family that does not have somewhere in it the issue of intermarriage. How do you view? What is your suggestion? What is your prescription for how Jewish life should deal with the intermarried couple now? Should rabbis ever perform intermarriages? And what do you do with the issue of the gay marriage? 

Rabbi Sacks: Look, as far as I'm concerned, I always try to get to the bottom of things. You know, there are enough people who can deal with this stuff above ground level. I try and get to the root of things. And the most serious phrase I use is ‘Start with Why.’ 

Don't tell me ‘what.’ Don't tell me ‘how.’ Tell me ‘why.’ Why am I Jewish? 

And a whole generation, a whole series of generations, failed to answer that question. So the Jews who came to America had one answer to the question, ‘Why be Jewish?’ Why? Because my parents were Jewish. My Bubba and Zayda were Jewish. Their parents were Jewish. 

And you come to America, a new land, you don't do anything else just because your parents did so. So why should you stay Jewish? Just because your parents did so. 

One of the great contributions of Jews to the theatre was a play by Israel Zangwill called “The Melting Pot.” And you know, this plot of that… this was 1911. Theodore Roosevelt went to see it… A Jew and a Christian meet in America. They're both from Russia and they fall in love and they're about to get married. And then the Jew discovers that the father of the Christian girl was the Cossack who murdered his family in Kishinev. And all of a sudden, he realises he's marrying the enemy. And he says, ‘Yeah, this is America. In Russia, Christians kill Jews. In America, forget Jews, forget Christians. This is the melting pot, something new. We will both be American, not Jewish, not Christian. American. So that was a whole generation that failed to answer the question ‘why?’ 

Comes the generation that I grew up in and it is remembering the Holocaust. It's remembering the Six-Day War. Shoah u'Gvura. The Holocaust and the might of Israel. And the most famous formulation of that was by an American… Canadian Jewish thinker called Emil Fackenheim, who said that in our day, a 614th command has been added to the Torah. “Thou shalt not hand Hitler a posthumous victory.” And that became the ‘why’ of a new generation of American Jews.

That is the worst ‘why’ I have ever heard in my life. 

Rabbi Golub: Absolutely right.

Rabbi Sacks: Because if I'm only Jewish because of Hitler, then I know that Hitler murdered a million and a half Jewish children because they had Jewish grandparents. Do I want to inflict that risk on my grandchildren? If that's the reason to be Jewish, let me out of here as fast as possible.

So you can see the impact across a century of Jewish life, of failing to answer the question ‘Why?’ Both because my parents were and so as not to hand Hitler a posthumous victory, are bad, bad answers to the question. 

So unless you answer that question - Why should I be Jewish in the 21st century? - you are not going to achieve anything whatsoever.

I have spent my life trying to, in recent years, trying to answer ‘why?’ So, you know, let ’Yes, you know what? I'm going to build a Jewish home. I'm going to have Jewish children.’

Then we'll worry about the issues of conversion and status. To me, first answer the question ‘why?’ And then get people to see that giving your children a Jewish upbringing is the greatest gift we can give them.

I mean, at every level, it gives a child a sense of identity, a sense of history, a family narrative. Judaism teaches us to overachieve intellectually because for us, study is the highest value. Judaism teaches us… you know, there's an American psychologist called Walter Mischel, who created something called “The Marshmallow Test.”

Do you know this? You take four-year-old kids and you put a marshmallow in front of them and you say, ’You can eat it now or you can wait for 20 minutes and we'll give you two marshmallows.’ 

You can trace their performance age four on for 20, 40 years. And if they're able to wait for 20 minutes without eating the marshmallow, they are going to do better in life, in academic life. They're more likely to go to Harvard. They're more likely to be high flyers in any career. And it was all, ‘Can I avoid eating a marshmallow for 20 minutes in order to have two in 20 minutes time?’ 

Now, every detail of Judaism, laws of milk and meat, for instance, are rituals of learning to control the gratification of instinct.

So you give kids a training in what it is just to keep meat and milk, just to keep kosher. You're giving them a discipline that's going to have an impact on their SAT scores, on their chance of a happy marriage and the chance of being CEO of a major public corporation. Now, if I could give that to my kids - sense of identity, family, community, a sense of discipline, a sense of intellect, if I could do that for free, wouldn't I say that's the next best thing to allowing them to be part of a royal family? 

I mean, we are part of a royal family. We've been around twice as long as Christianity. Three times as long as Islam. We are one-hundredth of their size, and yet we have a huge impact on the world.

I think the greatest gift my parents ever gave me was Judaism. If I can persuade a few American Jews of that, you won't have a problem of Jewish continuity. 

Rabbi Golub: You're magnificent. Yotzei min haClal. The work you do is wonderful. May you go from strength to strength. 

Rabbi Sacks: Thank you.

Rabbi Golub: Kol tuv and hatzlacha in all you do. I love talking to you. You have to promise me this is a semicolon, not a period. You'll come back and sit here one other time. 

Rabbi Sacks: You got a deal. 

Rabbi Golub: Thank you.

Rabbi Sacks: Well done. 

Rabbi Golub: Thank you. The thoughts of Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks. Amazing!

Rabbi Golub’s closing comments.

Mabbi Golub: former Chief Orthodox Rabbi of Great Britain, the author of Not in God's Name: Confronting Religious Violence, published by Schocken books. It's about how one is a mensch in this world, it's a fabulous read, it should be part of your home library!

As always I invite you to be in touch with me, any thoughts or comments you may have to any of the ideas expressed by Jonathan Sacks, please email me, write me, post on our Facebook page, or tweet me. I look forward to hearing from many of you. Until the next time, I'm Mark Golub, my friends, to life!

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