Our Faith and Our Future

Introductory comments

Rabbi Dr Tzvi Sinensky: Rabbi Sacks, I wanted to open this evening. You mentioned the opportunity to hear you speak already a few times, in particular to our students, and the topic of faith. The topic of Emunah belief, which is obviously so crucial.

I'd like to open it up in the following way. First of all, I think it's occasioned by your title, which I think raises perhaps some naughty theological questions, I think, in terms of monotheism and so on and so forth, Rabbi Lord Sacks. But that perhaps will leave for another occasion.

But more than that, obviously in a serious vein, there are challenges to faith. There are challenges to Emunah, not just that are universal, but I think that are particular to this generation. On the one hand, we have from outside our community a virulent strain of the new atheists. Individuals such as Dawkins, with whom you've had conversations, Hawking, that entire school of thought, raising fundamental questions, but in a very aggressive sort of way, chipping away at the basics of our faith, of our Emunah. 

Even within our community, there are individuals starting to ask questions, questions from within the Orthodox community about the historicity of events such as the Exodus, such as the revelation of Sinai. Even within our own Orthodox community, within the Jewish community of believers, there are questions that are being raised about these core issues of Emunah.

So we have both from without the community, within the community, these questions that are being raised. 

And then at the same time, we have an opposite trend, perhaps even some would say equal, and opposite trend of those who are moving toward a greater fundamentalism. Fundamentalism with regard to not just religious violence and extremism, but even with regard to matters of interpretation of Scripture, how it is that we are to understand evolution, the age of the universe, and so on and so forth.

So sometimes it almost feels that we're caught in between. On the one hand, we have those chipping away and undermining, raising difficult questions about faith. On the other hand, those who take faith to extremes that perhaps we're uncomfortable with.

How do we find that middle path? What is that place of moderate but authentic faith that we can really use to get us through it? 

Rabbi Sacks: Oh, well, that's easy enough. 

This is really, really impressive. Thank you.

The Almighty used one of these at Sinai, and everyone... Az bekol ra’ash gadol. Could we kind of tone this down a little bit? 

Rabbi Sinensky: It's the trick mic we use for our favourite guests. 

Rabbi Sacks: This is really good. I like it. Should I do some more God imitations while I'm at it? 

First of all, let me say what a privilege it is to be in this extraordinary, extraordinary school. This is a school of great teachers, great Rabbis, but of outstanding young people who are going to bring pride and credit to the Jewish people.

So I just want to hear a round of applause from the parents for the incredible children and for the wonderful education they're getting. It's great. 

We're going to be reading the Haggadah in three weeks' time.

And we're going to ask the question of the Rasha. I don't want to call any Jewish child wicked. Let's call him challenging.

And his question is, “Ma haAvoda zot lachem?” - What does this service mean to you? Now, the Ba’al Haggadah understood that the critical word there was “lachem.” What does this mean to you? And he doesn't say, what's it mean to me? But if you look in the Talmud Yerushalmi, according to the Talmud Yerushalmi, his key word is avodah. The Talmud says, the Rasha says, “Ma haTircha haZot sheAtem matrichim et atzmechem?” Why all this hard work? You know that in the 1960s was the first generation of American women who went to college. And in the 70s, when they got married and they had kids, somebody had the bright idea of doing an apron, which read, “For this, we went to college?” So I had a special apron made for Elaine for Pesach, which read, “For this, we left Egypt?”

So what the Rasha is asking is, Why such hard work? Because the truth is, Avoda, which is the Hebrew word for serving God, is hard work. And there are two groups of people today who don't want that hard work. Some of them are secular, and they don't want somebody to lift their eyes beyond the material, beyond the things we can experiment and quantify and demonstrate mathematical or scientific proofs for.

Now, most of the important things in life, from art to beauty to music to virtue, are not susceptible of scientific proof, but they don't want the hard work of the stuff that needs you to grow up. Humanly. So they don't want the hard work of faith.

They want an easy life, in which everything that matters is reduced to a scientific equation. On the other hand, a completely different group of people, very holy people, don't want the hard work of making their Judaism applicable to the real world. They say, let the real world do its own thing. We will go off and we'll have our own real world. 

But without the real world out there, that world in there couldn't exist. Are you with me? If there weren't people out there building factories and economies and developing medicines and saving lives and all the rest of it, there couldn't be a group of people who sit and only learn Torah for the whole of their lives.

But they don't want the hard work of engaging with the world, and the atheists don't want the hard work of engaging with faith. 

Now, I say, “Ma haAvoda haZot lachem?” Faith just is hard work. And the harder we work, the bigger we become.

So I'm not bothered by the scientific atheists. I love them dearly. Richard Dawkins has become a great friend. I said to Richard, the BBC wanted me to do a series of conversations with Richard. So I said, I'll do it if... I'll... I'll do it if I find he's a likeable guy. So we invited him round for dinner.

We had dinner with Richard Dawkins, had a lot of our friends come along. I don't think he'd ever met such high-powered intellectual people who were deeply believing Jews. And he was a bit shaken by that.

And I said, “Richard, you believe that religion makes you stupid, right?” 

He said, “Yes, exactly.” 

And I said, “Richard, you follow the evidence wherever it leads. Isn't that right?” 

He said, “Yes, that's what makes me a scientist.”

So I said, “Richard, what do you do with this evidence, that we are less than one-fifth of 1% of the population of the world and Jews have won 26% of Nobel Prizes in physics, 27% of Nobel Prizes in medicine, 41% of Nobel Prizes in economics, 49% of world chess masters…?” 

And he paused for a moment. And he said, “You know what? Jews must be different.”

Which was quite nice, really. To get a bracha from Richard Dawkins is something special. But it doesn't happen every day.

And I believe that if the world that has moved to the right fully understood just how much cosmology and neuroscience and so many other scientific discoveries that are emerging day after day right now make so much more scientific sense, so much more lucid sense of our Jewish beliefs. And they really are. We're going to see a big paradigm shift within the next 50 years, because scientific discoveries are becoming more and more poetic as we go on into the 21st century.

Discoveries of the plasticity of the brain and many other things. Discovery of epigenetics. People thought everything was determined by the genes. It turns out that epigenetics is at least as powerful as genetics. All of these things are very beautiful. So I think I don't worry that people don't want the hard work.

But for us as Jews, Judaism is hard work. The harder you work, the greater you become. And that's why Judaism is such hard work and why it has produced such great people.

Rabbi Sinensky: Just to follow up with regards to the question of faith, so many of our students ask the question, how do we prove and what can we prove and let's try to prove the existence of God. And of course, during the mediaeval period, we know that many of the Rishonim, the Rambam, among so many others, expended a tremendous amount of energy. In the Rambam's case, he weaves it not only into his philosophical works, the Moreh Nevuchim, the Guide for the Perplexed, but even within his halachic work, the very framework, the introduction to his Mishneh Torah, he begins with fundamentals of faith, Yesod haYesodot, and so on and so forth, and he continues with essentially an Aristotelian proof for the existence of God.

Do we believe, or ought we believe that without the ability to fully prove the existence of God, we cannot have faith? Is that a sine qua non for the believing Jew or do we believe that one can indeed have faith without an absolute proof? 

Rabbi Sacks: It was Rabbi Tzadok HaKohen of Lublin who said that every day we have to be mechadesh chidushim, we have to deliver new insights into Torah because God is haMechadesh b'tuvo bechol yom tamid ma'aseh Bereishit, because God makes the universe anew every day. And because Torah is a commentary on the universe, so Torah has to become new every single day. And there's no doubt whatsoever that were Maimonides to come back to life today, he would certainly rewrite his metaphysics although he wouldn't rewrite his psychology. I mean, the Rambam's psychology holds up extraordinarily for a work over eight centuries old. It's absolutely extraordinary.

But he had a little too much faith in the Greeks actually because, you know, what Darwin, you know, Darwin, when he came up with his theory of natural selection lost his faith as a Christian, but as I try and show in my book, “The Great Partnership,” what Darwin refuted was not religion. What he refuted was the Aristotelian science on which the Christianity of his day was based. Aristotle thought that teleology, purpose, is part of nature. He called it “the teleological cause” and Darwin showed that nature doesn't have teleology. It doesn't think ahead. Nature doesn't think ahead. God thinks ahead but nature doesn't think ahead. 

So, in fact, all he disproved was Aristotelian metaphysics and that means that it wasn't the Rambam who was disproved, but I think today he would write the first four chapters of Hilchot Yesodei HaTorah slightly differently. 

Rabbi Sinensky: Can we substitute Rambam's proofs with other proofs? Do we need proofs? 

Rabbi Sacks: It was part of Aristotle's theory that you could prove purposes in nature, yeah? And I think it turns out that faith is more like art than science.

Are you with me? I mean, try and prove to me that Shakespeare's King Lear is better than whatever is running on Broadway today. Give me a knockdown proof. But if you don't know that Shakespeare's King Lear is greater than whatever is about to close on Broadway, then you don't understand literature.

Prove to me - as I was saying to the kids before when they asked me this question - that it's better to have a life of love than a life of hate or it's better to have a life with music than without music. Prove to me that it's better to be an optimist than a pessimist. You cannot prove any of these things with what would be knockdown scientific proofs.

But even the idea that you can prove a scientific proof scientifically has been well and truly refuted because we now know, and this is both Sir Karl Popper's conjectures and refutations and Thomas Kuhn's, the logic of the structure of scientific revolutions. Both of them were Jewish, don't forget. Karl Popper came from that line of Rabbis that we say in every ta’anit, every siyum - Rafram Bar Popper, Socha Bar Popper, Sir Karl Bar Popper… he was one of us, so was Thomas Kuhn. And what they showed was that, in fact, science does not rest on the ability to prove something, it rests on the ability to refute something. Because you can never prove that because the sun rose a million times it's going to rise the million and first time.

That is Hume's refutation of scientific proof. So even scientific proof isn't really proof. If you want really strong proof, you've got to go for a single malt whisky because that's the only really unbreakable kind you can go for.

If you read my “Great Partnership,” you will hear, listen to Einstein, you will listen to Freud, you will listen to the architects of quantum physics, all saying, categorically, science rests on faith. And I list all those quotes in the book. 

So it's Richard Dawkins, I think, who mischaracterises science and gives us a view of science that has not been tenable since David Hume in the 18th century, since Charles Darwin in the 19th century, or since Einstein in the 20th.

Rabbi Sinensky: Now that we've exhausted all matters relevant to faith, I want to turn to something a little bit different. We actually entitled this evening “Our Faith and Our Future,” which might have been plagiarised from you, but don't tell. And one of the things that we offered everyone the opportunity to do is to submit questions.

And it was fascinating. We received about 50 questions or so from those who are here this evening, from the audience. They were wonderful questions.

And it was fascinating to see how many questions were less about faith and more about our future. And in particular, the question of our future in Europe and the anti-Semitism that has been rising like a tidal wave each and every day, really, it feels like sometimes. The question of whether or not there is a Jewish future in Europe, what that looks like. If you could speak to that, I think that would be great. 

Rabbi Sacks: I grew up among non-Jews. I went to a non-Jewish university, so I was exposed to the world.

And for at least the first 50 years of my life, more than that, I never experienced a single episode of anti-Semitism. The first time I encountered anti-Semitism was around 2001, when our youngest daughter, who was at that time a student at the London School of Economics, who had gone to an anti-globalisation rally, which quickly turned into a tirade against America and against Israel and then against Jews. And she came back with tears in her eyes. And she said, “Daddy, they hate us.” 

That anti-Semitism could appear in Britain in the 21st century, something I never anticipated. Then Rebecca West, the novelist, said that having been through what they've been through, Jews have an unsurprisable soul.

That was when I discovered that I have a surprisable soul. And I began to do the research. This is 2001, 2002.

And from, I remember the date very clearly, 28th of February, 2002, when I addressed British parliamentarians on the subject and I wrote a piece in the national press the same day on the subject, I sounded the warning for three or four years, on the BBC, in the national press. I said, this is coming. We have to be prepared.

Many members of my community were critical of this. They thought I was exaggerating. I knew I was understating because I'd done the research and I could see what was coming.

And, you know, it's been quite serious. Serious to the point in which in May 2007, I had the opportunity of addressing together, they were sitting together, and not much further than we are sitting now, the three leaders of Europe - Angela Merkel of Germany, who was chairing the European Union, and José Manuel Barroso, the head of the European Union, and Hans-Gert Pottinger, the head of the European Parliament in Strasbourg. 

And I said, Jews in Europe go back a long way. And that experience added certain words to the human vocabulary. Words like expulsion, forced conversion, disputation, inquisition, auto da fe, ghetto, and pogrom, and worst of all, Holocaust. I said, all of that is in the past.

We will live with that past. But today the Jews of Europe are asking, is there a future for Jews in Europe? And that should concern you, the leaders of Europe. Well, that hit them between the eyes. I don't think anyone had been that blunt with them and that was just under eight years ago. So they have known this for a long time. The British Parliament has known it for a longer time.

And it's very challenging and it's very disturbing. Because let me make this absolutely clear. 

The hate that begins with Jews never ends with Jews.

And therefore, if it isn't safe to be a Jew in Europe, it will not be safe to be a human being in Europe.

If the forces at work promoting this anti-Semitism come to power, then European freedom, the dream of the whole of Europe, will go up in flames. And if it becomes the case that it is no longer safe for Jews to live in Europe, within living memory of the Holocaust, there will be a stain on Europe's soul, on its moral reputation, that will never be cleansed as long as human beings walk this earth.

Now, I doubt that there's a serious political leader in Europe who's not aware of this. And therefore, I have to salute the British Prime Ministers who have led the fight against anti-Semitism. Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, David Cameron.

Every one of them has got up in public and said - at my request, I have to add here, but they're completely on board on this - that Jews will never have to fight anti-Semitism alone. Because this is my constant cry. I said this in the European Union headquarters in 2003.

Jews cannot fight anti-Semitism alone. The victim cannot cure the crime. The hated cannot cure the hate.

And therefore, the fight against anti-Semitism must be led by the political leadership of Europe. And right now, it's the moral credibility of Europe that's on the line. Therefore, we have to win this battle. There's no choice. There's no choice for us, there's no choice for Europe. But I think we will see in retrospect that what happened this year, earlier this year in Paris and in Copenhagen, will be a turning point.

Because there were attacks on Jews before. But this time, people clearly saw that the people attacking freedom of speech in Paris and in Copenhagen are the people who want to kill Jews, Rachmana litzlan, in Paris and Copenhagen. So, not only is the Jewish future at stake, the freedom of Europe is at stake.

And it is the case, sadly, that even in the 21st century, we have some enemies. But we also have friends. And some good and loyal friends.

And we must make sure that we stand together with those friends to fight anti-Semitism, to defeat anti-Semitism, for the sake of the Jewish future and for the sake of the future of Europe. 

Rabbi Sinensky: We're here in North America, and it's certainly... we're very fortunate in that we certainly don't encounter anything of the scale that you're struggling with and that the European Jewish community is seeing there. And yet sometimes, for me and for some others that I speak to, there's almost a sense that, for that reason, there's little that we can do.

I'm wondering if you think that's the case. What can we do sitting here in order... You mentioned in terms of fighting anti-Semitism together with allies. Do we need to be working more with other faith communities, with other parts of the global community? 

Rabbi Sacks:  Do you know how many of us there are? Not many, and I was thinking most of them are in the room right now.

I mean, we're a tiny little people. Maybe 12, 13 million Jews, keyn yirbu in the world.

But all we have to do, I decided, I did my arithmetic about 13 years ago, and I worked out all Jews have to do is make three friends in their next generation. 

Number one, India, which feels very much as threatened by radical Islam as we do. They're living next together, living next door to a nuclear-armed Pakistan.

China. The reason I mention India and China is that there are over a billion Indians, and there are over a billion Chinese. That's a lot of Chinese.

I have to say, when I first became Chief Rabbi, somebody realised I was going to be travelling the world, and they gave me a world directory of Jewish communities. And in 1990, the day this book was published, they listed the populations of each of these countries, and then the Jewish populations of each of these countries. So although it would be completely different today, in 1990, the entry for China read “Population one billion, Jewish population five.”

I said to Elaine, if there are five Jews in China, I can guarantee you two things. Number one, there are six shuls. And number two, someone somewhere is saying the Jews are running the country.

So why do I say India and China? Because India and China, the two civilisations, they're the two world civilisations that are as old as Judaism. They're both over 4,000 years old, and neither has any history of anti-Semitism. So we're talking about two major potential allies.

The other major potential ally is the Catholic Church, which has done teshuva after the Holocaust, a process begun by Pope John XXIII, continued by Paul VI, and then John Paul II, and Benedict XVI. But the current Pope, Francis I, is the best of them all. He has said positive things about Jews and Judaism that no Pope in history has said.

And there are 1.2 billion Catholics in the world. Add 1.2 billion Catholics, 1.2 billion Indians, 1.1 billion Chinese, you make three friends, you've got one half of the world global population. So let's go out and make a few friends.

You know, invite them into the school, give them a nice meal, zoga l'chaim, and one way or another. But I think we have got to go out and make those friends. There are Jews I know who believe that it is our destiny to be “Am levadad yishkon,” the people that dwells alone.

For me, that is bedieved not lechatchila. That may have been our fate in the past, it is not our destiny in the future. So let us go out there and tell the people on UCLA and Berkeley campus and Cornell and Columbia, guys, if you see Jews intimidated today, you will see Christians intimidated tomorrow. So let's stand and fight the people who want to fight freedom.

Rabbi Sinensky: I wanted to follow up with regard to the anti-Semitism conversation with a question about Aliyah for European Jews in terms of fleeing. And I'm going to share a summary of a position that you took with regard to that matter, and I wanted to impress you a little bit about it, to ask about it. Here's the way that it was summarised in a recent interview right here from the Philadelphia Exponent, a local newspaper.

And it ran as follows. “Rabbi Sacks strongly rejected Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's appeal to European Jews, made repeatedly in the wake of the recent attacks, for them to come home. He concurred with the Chief Rabbis of France and Denmark whose rejection of that appeal, he said, was both dignified and correct.

Intimidating Jews into leaving Europe is precisely what the anti-Semites want, and that is why we will not give it to them.”

And I want to ask about this. It was so striking to read this and to hear this, and I felt so torn upon reading this passage.

On the one hand, the sense of the dignity of those communities not cowing to anti-Semitism, fighting exactly this fight, built on hope and optimism for what we could bring together with other partners for the future. And yet at the same time, as a religious Zionist Jew, the commitment to Aliyah, the belief in reishit tzmichat geulateinu, in the sense that it is indeed very much our destiny to be there. And so I'm wondering how we balance these two.

Rabbi Sacks: Israel has changed the world for every single Jew. That is the single most important thing that differentiates anti-Semitism now from anti-Semitism then. In 1938, the world knew that Hitler was planning a catastrophe for the Jews.

They knew it. He'd been absolutely upfront about it in his broadcast speeches, his public addresses. Everyone knew it.

And in 1938, the nations of the world, the nations of the free world, came together in the French spa town of Evian to decide what to do to save Jews from this catastrophe. Not one country in the world opened its doors to the Jews. And I say this shamefacedly as an Englishman and you as an American, neither England nor America, the great fighters for freedom, the people who won the Second World War, they themselves would not open the door to Jews.

And Jews knew that over the whole surface of this planet, of this wide earth, they did not have one square inch that they could call home, in the Robert Frost sense of the word as the place where you have to… when you have to go there, they have to let you in. 

Israel is home. It is the home for all of us.

It is the home of the Jewish heart. 

And therefore, because of Israel, life in Israel, but life in Chutz LaAretz is not what it was in 1938. But just because there is an Israel, we can stand up to anti-Semitism in Europe without fear because we do have a home.

Now, do I feel that we should all go and live in Israel? Let me make it absolutely clear. That when you live in Israel, you are living in a country where the very language, where the very landscape, where the very stones speak Jewish history. You cannot experience, even in Ir HaKodesh Philadelphia, I mean, you know, as near to heaven as you get outside of Israel, here is the home of American freedom, of the Jubilee Bell, and of all the wonderful, you know, the correct girsa of the declaration, American Declaration of Independence, and where Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin sat in the summer of 1776. It's great. 

But you go to Israel, that's where our people began, that was where our people was born, and where in our time our people has been reborn.

You go to Israel because that is where you live, the fullest Jewish life of anywhere on earth. Nowhere else.

In 4,000 years of history, we have been to every country on earth, we have lived under every fate known to nations. Nowhere did we have, exercise that one basic right of any nation to create a society according to our ideals. Nowhere could we do that in 40 centuries except in Israel. 

So I am a religious Zionist with all my heart, but I don't let Islamist extremists or the far right or the far left drive me out of Europe and drive me to Israel simply because I'm afraid of my life.

I am not afraid of the anti-Semites. I really am not afraid. So as far as they're concerned, I stay and fight.

As far as Israel is concerned, I will go there to live Torah, to breathe Torah, and to teach Torah. 

So there is nothing in what I said about European Jewry that in any way derogates from the fundamental beauty and imperative of Aliyah, but what a small group of radical extremists are trying to do is trying to drive the Jews out of Europe. 

And there's a good reason why they want to do that.

Because they know so long as Jews are in the country, the enemies of freedom have a fight on their hands. 

And I'm not going to give them that victory that fast. 

Rabbi Sinensky: I wanted to change gears a little bit and to raise something, to come a little bit closer to home for us as a community.

Not too long ago, we experienced a pretty significant, for lack of a better term, Rabbinic scandal. A Rabbinic scandal here with a prominent Rabbi, Modern Orthodox Rabbi living in Washington, D.C. A very difficult circumstance. And I wanted to express my sense as to what emerged from sort of the aftermath, not just about a particular event with a particular Rabbi, but really in terms of what it means for us as a community.

And what I experienced and what I saw after what had happened was, as a Rabbi and as a religious leader in the community, was really a sense that I got that at some point something had broken down. Or that not all was as well as perhaps we'd love it to be, we'd like it to be, in the relationship between the wider community and the religious leadership of our community. There was just a level of the conversation, the degree of concern about the need for transparency in Rabbinic leadership, which is, of course, extremely important.

But at the same time, in that conversation, I became afraid that somehow a chasm was being exposed, that somehow there was a lack of a full and healthy relationship, or as healthy as we'd like it, between our community, our religious leadership, perhaps not just a religious leadership, but our institutional leadership as well. 

What can we do in order to ensure healthy, proper relationships between our communities and our leadership at the same time? 

Rabbi Sacks: You have a lacuna here in American Jewry. It's a big problem.

Let me tell you what would happen in Britain, and I don't say that we're any better. It's just that we're different. In Britain, you have something called a Chief Rabbi.

And what this means is that you have a kind of court of appeal. Are you with me? So, if a congregation of lay leaders feel their Rabbi isn't listening to them, they would come to me. I would listen to them very carefully, and I'd find a way of making sure the Rabbi heard what they were saying.

We would normally put a Rabbi in to mentor the Rabbi or mediate for the Rabbi, and vice-versa, if the lay leaders were giving the Rabbi a very hard time. Again, the Rabbi concerned would phone me up. We'd listen, we'd make enquiries, and I would then go into the community and sit with his lay people and work it through.

There is nobody who is able to mediate between the Rabbi and the lay leadership of the synagogues in American synagogues. It's very curious. 

And this makes it very hard for the Rabbis because they're pretty much on their own. And it makes it pretty hard for the lay leaders because what can they do when they have problems and the Rabbi may not be listening? What can they do other than the drastic thing of not renewing his contract? 

So, a whole series of issues that have arisen in America have struck me very forcibly because every one of those issues we would have dealt with very fast indeed. Soon as the first inkling of a problem, we would deal with that very, very fast. We never put things off. We never hushed things up. And the result was we never had a case that came to the public press because everyone knew we dealt with these things. 

We demanded high ethical standards of our Rabbis. We demanded high ethical standards of our lay leaders. And we mediated the relationship whenever it was fracturing. And often it does fracture.

That's just life, and you need somebody to mediate it. Now how you build that into the structure of American orthodoxy, I don't know. But it's clear, and not from one case but from several cases, that you need such a mediation, such a court of appeal that stands outside the immediacy of that congregation and is able to mediate that.

Rabbi Sinensky: This is a suggestion that we appoint a Chief Rabbi of America and that solves all our issues?

Rabbi Sacks: I would not suggest such a thing, no. I think you've got enough problems on your own, and I have enough problems on my own. I think you have to live without it.

If you make an Archbishop of Canterbury, you probably better have a Chief Rabbi as well. But until you return to the English model, I think probably America remains America, and all the more beautiful for it. 

Rabbi Sinensky: Thank you.

Tomorrow is Election Day. Tomorrow is Election Day in Israel. I wanted to ask a question about Israel, but really to ask it in a broader sense about community.

It's sort of related also to our previous question in terms of building bridges and creating healthy relationships, but really here I'm asking more globally, really across our communities. 

Pretty much every time it seems that an Israeli election comes about - so let's say every year and a half or so - we experience, I think unfortunately, both a highlighting as well as sort of a reinforcing of the divisions of society. Every time it seems that there's an Israeli election coming up, the vitriol, just the negative energy in the air, people are really gasping for something more spiritual, something more meaningful because it really is so painful and it really is a very difficult time.

But I think it raises the question and offers an opportunity to think about how it is that we can go about creating a more unified community. First and foremost, in Medinat Yisrael, whether it be between the religious and the secular, between different political positions that may overlap with the religious-secular divide, but they also stand on their own to a certain degree, here in America and throughout the world. I think when we look at our communities, we look at the different denominations, certainly of American Judaism, I don't think that there's necessarily a tremendous amount of overlap.

I think that there are opportunities for us to come together and to speak and to do really important work around common causes. And at the same time, sometimes I wonder, are we doing enough? Are we too fractured a community? How do we address that both in Israel and here at home as well? 

Rabbi Sacks: Look, it's almost painfully easy in Israel. And it is to me the most extraordinarily astonishing fact that it isn't done.

If the religious public in Israel went out to the secular public in Israel in love, in total non-judgmentalism, and simply embraced them and respected them, the Kiddush Hashem would be beyond belief. Secular Israelis are ma'aminim bnei ma’aminim. They are believers, the children of believers.

But no Rav ever told them how great they were, you know? So, worried about the fractures in Israeli society and in world Jewry, I persuaded the Hebrew University in the summer of 2000 to mount a conference at the Hebrew U. I decided not to make it between Rabbis. I thought, you know, that's fahtig [finished] before I've even begun. You know, they won't even sit in the same room together.

So, I said, let's do it with academics. But we got academics from 16 different countries, from all the zeramim, from all the different shadings of Israel, from Harvard, from Princeton, from Yale, and Chutz LaAretz. And it was wonderful. It was terrific. We had this wonderful conference. 

After two days, I gave up in frustration.

I said to Elaine, I have listened to some of the world's finest speaking. The only trouble is, I've also listened to some of the world's worst listening. You know, Jews are the world's best speakers, but they're the world's worst listeners.

Everyone came and defended their fixed ideas, and nobody was really open to anyone else. So, I said, we're going to try a different approach. And I phoned up, and we arranged for me to go and see the Admor, the Rabbi of Israeli secularists.

Who is the Rabbi of Israeli secularists? The Israeli novelist, Amos Oz. And so, I said to Elaine, if you had a Gerer Rebbe there, a Satmar Rebbe, you'd certainly go and visit the Rebbe. We've got the secularists, the chiloni Rebbe, let's go and visit the Rebbe.

And my friend said to me, “What are you going to do? Are you going to convert him?”

I said, “No, I'm going to do something much better than that. I'm going to listen to him.” 

And so, we went out to Arad, into the desert, and we sat for two hours with Amos Oz, and we listened to him.

And he became a beloved friend. And I thought, you know, if only somebody had done that 20 years earlier, because you want to make somebody a Ba’al Teshuva, get there before they're 60. And so, the truth is, every year I take out a choir and three chazanim to Israel, and we do concerts for victims of terror. We go to hospitals. We go to the bereaved families. We go to the villages by the Lebanese border. We go to Sderot, and we just lift their spirits. We don't give them a hard time. We don't speak a drasha.

We just sing with them. And I tell you, those secular Israelis are more religious than my religious guys in Britain. Why? Because secular Israelis want from a Chief Rabbi what none of my congregations wanted from me in England.

You know what they want from a Chief Rabbi? A bracha. My guys never asked for a bracha. But secular Israelis want a bracha from a Rav.

May not help, but it wouldn't hurt. So, they want a bracha. So, I am convinced that if the religious public would just have enough self-confidence to go out to the chiloni world, and just zog a L'Chaim.

Let's drink together. Let's eat together. Let's sing together. Let's celebrate together. 

There's no bottom line here. I'm not trying to make you frum.

I just love you. I respect you. You're a fellow Jew.

You could turn the whole of Israel, barring a few extreme Meretz-infected cases, but other than that, you would turn the whole of Israel into a community that might not be religious, but respected religion, instead of feeling that terrible destructive tension that exists today. So, why people don't do it, I don't know. There are some wonderful Rabbis doing it.

You know, the... What do you call it? What? Tzohar Rabbis. And there are a lot of great guys there who do reach out to the chilonim. But Israel is so ready and ripe for it.

Because, really, these guys, Israeli secularists, have a Jewish neshama. And my own work, academically, in terms of leadership studies, I'm working specifically with secular Israelis. And I find they drink up the Torah. They love it. And so Israel could just be turned around. And I just hope the Rabbis will emerge in the coming generation and will do just that.

Rabbi Sinensky: What about outside of Israel? In terms of denominational relationships? Do we need to do more in that regard? What could that look like? 

Rabbi Sacks: Well, I'll tell you, we had a lot of turbulence in Britain on this. We had some “Fasten Your Safety Belt” kind of moments. And after those, I thought, hang on, this is very, very dysfunctional.

Jews arguing with Jews. Been there, done that. I don't need to do it all over again.

So I established two principles that I think have integrity, and they did solve every problem we faced. And that was, number one, principle one, on all matters that affect us as Jews, regardless of our religious differences, we will work together, regardless of our religious differences. 

Principle two, on all matters that touch on our religious differences, we will agree to differ but with respect.

Those two rules created the following scenario, that we could work together across the board, across denominations, on fighting anti-Semitism, on developing interfaith work, on supporting Israel, on welfare, and you name it. A huge number of activities where we could work hand in hand. There were areas where we couldn't work hand in hand. Shul services, educational curricula, where we couldn't. 

So Anglo-Jewry consisted of a number of vertical parallel lines of where we agreed to differ but with respect. But those horizontal lines, where we worked together on Israel, welfare, interfaith, and anti-Semitism, so that in England, every Orthodox Jew knew a Reform Jew, every Reform Jew knew an Orthodox Jew, and at least half of what we did, we were able to do together. 

So the warp and the weft created that lovely fabric in which we didn't diminish or make trivial the differences between us, but we did work together for the sake of the Jewish people. 

Rabbi Sinensky: Okay. Changing gears a little bit, the world we live in, pull out our phones and look at how many emails we've probably received since the time we started to talk until this point, it's just such a fast-paced, frenetic existence. It seems, and my experience has been over the last just five years, that it gets faster and faster each and every day. To add to that, for so many of us, living a committed religious lifestyle requires a tremendous amount of additional commitments, whether it be in terms of economic implications of living that kind of lifestyle, whether it be in terms of our commitment to family values.

There are so many demands upon our time that I find, certainly for so many people that I know, just the ability to come up and get a little bit of religious air is really quite difficult to do. I'm curious, in particular in your case, because I can imagine that you're very bored much of the time. This is your retirement, sitting in front of classrooms, in full stadiums, and speaking in such a public fashion.

What do you do personally to find your own renewal? 

Rabbi Sacks: What I do, I hope this isn't a shock to you, but I use the world's oldest time management tool, and it's also the world's greatest time management tool. It's called Shabbat. In the days of Moses, Shabbat was freedom from slavery to Egypt.

Today, Shabbat is freedom from slavery to emails. It is so powerful that it is incredible, and sometimes you have to travel a long way. Elaine and I, wanting to make friends - I've said Israel needs friends, Jews need friends - and we decided that we wanted to make friends in India, among the leaders of the Hindu and Sikh community.

So we went and spent a week with the leaders of the Hindus and Sikhs in Amritsar, which is the Jerusalem of the Sikhs. It's in North India. It's where the Sikhs have their Golden Temple.

The Dalai Lama was there. And we're sitting in Amritsar, and I'm speaking, the Dalai Lama was speaking, and Mahinda Singh, number three in the world Sikh hierarchy, is speaking, and there are 2,000 Sikh students in the University of Amritsar. And to my amazement - because I had no idea this was coming -, Mahinda Singh got up, and he said to 2,000 Sikh students in North India, “You know, friends, what we Sikhs need is what the Jews have. It's called Shabbat.”

He said, “You wouldn't believe it. Jews spend one day every week telling the world to go away and just spending time with their family and just spending time with their friends.

We need Shabbat.” 

So I said, ‘Mahinda Singh, you're going to come and give that drasha in all of our shuls!’

In 2010, there was a world conference in Copenhagen on climate change.

And for some reason, the British government decided they would take to Copenhagen not just a political message, but a religious message. So the Archbishop of Canterbury and I gathered the religious leaders together, and we sent a little message for a Jewish, Christian, Hindu, Muslim, you know. So I said, you know, we, look, you know, I say, you know, Jews actually have a solution to the problem of climate change. It's called Shabbat. 

Imagine if no one in the world drove cars or flew planes one day in seven, we would reduce by one seventh at a stroke the world's carbon footprint. So just keep Shabbat, and you will arrest global warming.

The Muslims, the Imams came to me and said, you know, Chief Rabbi, we never thought of that before. We are going to tell all our congregation not to drive to the mosque on Friday. I said, you can come and give that drasha in shul on Shabbat.

I tell you, you know, Shabbat is the world's greatest time management tool. 

I, some years ago, did a documentary for the BBC. They asked me to do a documentary on the state of the family in Britain. Not the Jewish family, the family as an institution. And one of the things I did was I took what was then the leading child care specialist in Britain. She'd written all the books. Her name was Penelope Leach. And she was not Jewish, and she didn't know anything about Judaism. And I thought it'd be interesting television to take a non-Jew to a Jewish junior elementary school on a Friday morning, see what they'd do.

So, I take, with the BBC cameras, I take Penelope Leach, who'd never set foot inside a Jewish school before, and she comes Friday morning, and all the kids are doing the Mock Shabbat. So, you've got the five-year-old Mummy and Daddy, and the five-year-old Bubba and Zeida, and they’re all shepping nachas from the five-year-old children. And they're making kiddush, and they're making hamotzi.

And Penelope Leach, who's never seen anything like this before, starts talking to the kids, and she's talking to a five-year-old. And she says, “What do you like about Shabbat? What don't you like about Shabbat?” And this five-year-old boy said, “Well, what I don't like is you can't watch television. It's really terrible, you know.”

She said, “What do you like about Shabbat?” 

This five-year-old boy said, “You know what I like about Shabbat? It's the only day of the week when Daddy doesn't have to rush away.”

And as we were walking from the school, Penelope Leach turned to me and said, “Chief Rabbi, that Shabbat of yours is saving their parents' marriages.”

This idea, every one of you, as one of the 11, 12 million people who've bought Stephen Covey's book “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People,” will tell you that according to Stephen Covey, the basic principle of time management is the things that fall off the table when you're under pressure are the things that are important but not urgent.

Shabbat is the day dedicated to the things that are important but not urgent. 

And without Shabbat, we would fail to keep those things. But because of Shabbat, we do those things.

We make space for our family. Space to be part of the community. Space for learning and exercising our minds. Space for standing in shul and thanking Hashem for all the brachot He's given us instead of worrying that we haven't got the latest Apple smartwatch that makes us feel inferior because we've been sitting for 60 minutes so it has to give us a puch im panim [punch in the face]. And all the rest of the... You know. 

Shabbat and Yom Tov are the world's great time management secrets.

And that is the way to master emails. Mind you, for 22 years I didn't receive emails because they were considered a security risk. When I left the Chief Rabbinate, in theory, I could have received emails.

But I said to my staff that I take the same view of emails as Augustine took about virtue. Augustine said, “Dear God, give me virtue. But not yet.”

And I say the same about emails.

Rabbi Sinensky: So I suspect I've received more in the last few minutes than the Chief. We also, on Shabbat, of course, we spend a lot of time in prayer. In tefilla. And, of course, tefilla, as much as it's a centrepiece of our Shabbat experience, certainly speaking to not just our students, but so many people in the wider community, the sense that somehow you walk into shul, just the talking you hear in - not in our shuls here, of course - but really throughout the religious community, just the sense of, I think, that we know that that's a symptom. It's a symptom that so often when we walk into a house of prayer, we're there perhaps for social reasons, perhaps to fulfil the basic halachic obligation.

No question about it. And that's critical. And yet, at the same time, that for so many of us, and I certainly include myself in this, that it's not easy. It's just very difficult to garner a real sense of immediacy, understanding before the Lord. What can we do to enhance kavana and tefilla? 

Rabbi Sacks: I feel very strongly about this, and because of that, I produced, together with Koren, or before then, with our own community in Britain, a new introduction and commentary and translation to the Siddur, which was our first step. 

My second step, just because British Jewry is so different from American Jewry. Don't forget, in American Jewry, I don't know what percentage is Orthodox. What would you say, roughly? Say 10%, okay. In Britain, around 70%.

But the difference is, in Britain, the people who are members of Orthodox shuls are very often non-observant Orthodox. So they tend to come mainly Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. So they come on the days when the prayers are at their lengthiest. And sometimes their most incomprehensible. 

So I really went out on a limb to make the Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur Machzor. I realised I had a captive audience, actually.

Once you're stuck in shul on Yom Kippur, if you gave somebody a telephone directory, they would read it. Not much plot, but boy, what a cast. So I really worked at those two.

But I didn't manage to bring to America what I did at the time of my first Siddur, because I don't believe that just doing a new Siddur is enough. So I actually produced four CDs about tefilla. Words, music, words, music, for you to listen during the week on the car, stick it in the car, and what have you, just to convey some of the emotion.

Prayer is music. Prayer is poetry. And yet we recite it, we daven through it as if it were prose.

And somehow or other, you know, I've only just begun this journey. I haven't finished yet. I have to do a lot of YouTube stuff. I have to make the music of the prayers sing as part of these CDs. I mean, I work with the top, the man who was the top record producer in the 1980s of all the iconic pop music. We work with him to produce a number of new recordings of stuff, one of which is on YouTube if you haven't heard it yet, it was our Oseh Shalom that we did with some school kids to mark Israel's anniversary. So I believe that we have to try a multimedia approach to letting the poetry and the music of the prayers sing.

I've just begun this, but I hope you will do this as part of the school, and I hope you'll be in touch with our curriculum development department in Britain that is right now working on a curriculum to make prayer meaningful for some of the less religious. Not just the, you know, to make prayer a meaningful spiritual experience. So get in touch with our curriculum development team. They've done some great work, and I have no doubt that you will do great work, and if we can get those schools to share their good practise together, tefilla really is just beautiful, and it's magnificent, and we should allow it to sing to us.

Rabbi Sinensky: One final question, coming up on Pesach in just a few weeks, and so much of our time and energy at this time is really dedicated to the material preparations, to the point that we very often experience that sense of servitude and slavery going into the holiday. But of course it's about so much more. It's in particular the Night of the Seder, the central mitzvah, the VeHigadeta LeVincha, the mitzvah of transmitting not just the story, certainly of the exodus, but more globally, of course, transmitting the Jewish story, transmitting our heritage to that next generation.

And one of the echoes that I hear very often is the challenges that parents, certainly we as educators experience, how do we inspire that next generation with such a cacophony of voices out there, with the social media, and with the texting, and all the distractions, and all the exposure, how do we really filter out all of that noise and really connect with the next generation and pass on those messages? Any personal perspectives as a parent, any larger perspectives in terms of how to properly fulfil that mitzvah? 

Rabbi Sacks: My parents, aleihem haShalom, were of a generation of British Jews that for all sorts of reasons did not have much of a Jewish education. And I think they felt that lack of an education very deeply. But what they communicated to us, to myself and to my three brothers, beyond anything else, was their love of Yiddishkeit.

They may not have known as much as a generation does now, but they loved it, they lived it, they breathed it. They were ashrei yoshvei veitecha. They were happy to be in a shul. It was their home. 

And Wordsworth said in “The Prelude,” “What we love, others will love, and we will show them how.” 

And I think that is a very powerful statement.

It's a statement I quote in the name of the Alshich at the beginning of “The Letter in the Scroll.” Alshich, how can the Torah say, “veShinantem leVanecha,” you shall teach your children? What if your children don't want to learn? And his answer was, well, look two verses earlier, “VeAhavta et Hashem Elokecha,” you love the Lord your God. And if you love the Lord your God, your children will also.

So I think that is the klal gadol, the fundamental principle. But now I will let you into the secret. See, my dad, alav haShalom, who had to leave school at the age of 14 and never had this Jewish education. And he had four boys at four-year intervals. It was always a little painful come Pesach night. Arba banim, who is the chacham? Who is the rasha? And all the rest of it. Slightly painful experience…

But, you know, Baruch Hashem, we all went to university, we all went to Cambridge, we all got first class honours, all the rest of it, and we all stayed frum. So people used to say to my Dad, alav haShalom, “Mr. Sacks, how did you get four such great children?” So he said, ”It was their mother.”

Which was half true, actually. But the real truth was this. And I share it with all the parents here.

When I was five years old, every Shabbat I would walk back from shul with my father, alav haShalom, and I would ask him questions. And he always gave me the same answer. And this was his answer.

He used to say, “Jonathan, I never had a Jewish education. And therefore I cannot answer your questions. But one day, you will have the Jewish education I didn't have. And when that happens, you will teach me the answers to those questions.”

You want your children to become Chief Rabbis or Chief Rebbetzens? That's what you do. 

If we have the humility as parents to let our children do what God did to Abraham. You remember what he said? “Hithalech lefanai,” Go on ahead of me. I think when parents say to their kids, ‘Go on ahead of me. Know more than I know. Keep more than I keep. And then come and teach me.’ I tell you, you will have kids who will just amaze and astound you.

And that to me is the secret of being a Jewish parent. I learned it from my parents. And our children learned it from Elaine, thank goodness, who is so much better a parent than I am.

If you do that to your kids, you will have builders of the Jewish future like you cannot believe. You've got a great school. You have great parents. May you bring great blessings to the Jewish people in the coming years. Thank you indeed.