The Future of the Jewish People (with Tal Kienan)

Introductory comments 

Baroness Altmann, Moderator, more introductory comments

…And Tal has written this critically acclaimed book that we're here to discuss tonight, “God is in the Crowd,” which is a bold proposal for discovering the relevance of Judaism in the 21st century. And it has received enormous praise across the globe, not least from Rabbi Lord Sacks, who has actually said about it that “it is enthralling, searching, profound, an extraordinarily powerful work on Jewish identity in the 21st century.” And I certainly would recommend all of you to read it, and I hope that you will enjoy the discussion.

We are going to have about 40 minutes or so of bilateral discussions between our two distinguished guests, and then we will have time for questions from the audience. 

So if I may start, Tal, your book will certainly resonate with so many Jews today, I think, who are asking how does Judaism fit with modern-day realities, and why should people in future keep making the choice that they want to be Jewish? It's about Jewish survival and continuity, which I assume everybody in this room is interested in, concerned about, or has their own views of. And I assume, but correct me if I'm wrong, but your search for Jewish understanding and a sense of responsibility and commitment to Jewish survival are the reasons that drove you to write “God is in the Crowd.”

And I wonder what you would like to see as the main takeaways that people should gain from it. 

Tal Keinan: Right, well first thank you, thank you both for having me here and for appearing with me, and thank you for JW3 and Ilia Salita, it's wonderful. Global Jewish Conversations is a fantastic title for what we're doing, because I don't think there is enough of a global Jewish conversation today, and that's really part of my answer to that question.

I wrote this book, despite my frankly meagre qualifications, to have written a book on Judaism, because that is a question that I lived much of my life with the wrong answer to. It occurred to me relatively early in life that Judaism is optional. Certainly in the United States, and I assume we're going to speak a little bit about Great Britain, but certainly in the United States Judaism is optional, and that hasn't been the case for such a large swath of the Jewish world in 2,000 years.

And we're not opting in, we are opting out, the vast majority of us, at a rate that within two generations there will not be a Jewish people in the United States, assuming trends remain linear. So the first question is, should there be Jews? Should we care about that? And I answered that question in the wrong way, what I today consider to be the wrong way, and it ended in maybe the most momentous decision of my life. 

But I was moved by the picture of the boy in the Warsaw Ghetto, which if you've read the book I described the moment where I saw that picture for the first time, the boy with his hands up in surrender to Nazi troops, and was caught looking at the left side of the picture where you see his family and his neighbours, wondering what they were thinking.

How had they allowed themselves to get to this situation where they had no contingency plan? And as far as we know they were all marched off to their deaths, that was the 1943, the final liquidation of the ghetto. And I began asking whether I'm something more than just an American, because I grew up like in a typical American Jewish family, typical in that my three older brothers married non-Jewish women who I love, and I love my nieces and nephews, they're wonderful, they're just not Jewish. That is the trend in the United States. We didn't really have Judaism growing up.

And for the first time I was forced to ask, did these people consider themselves Poles? Did they not realise that this is part of the cycle of Jewish history? This is the rule, it's not the exception. 

And not having an answer to that question, I found myself in Israel, and my Zionism was really born from that. And it took me many years and commitments that I really couldn't take back, flying in the Israeli Air Force, to ask why exactly am I doing this? Because increasingly it does seem like a choice.

And even if it's not, if I'm only Jewish because of anti-Semitism, is that really enough of a reason? 

And I think that the question I hope people would go home with, or come away from the book with, is that question, should there be Jews? And I ask it in sincerity, meaning I'm open to a negative answer, but I think we should be asking ourselves that, because we're on a trend right now where our future, I think, is questionable. 

Baroness Altmann: What are your thoughts on that? 

Rabbi Sacks: Well, first of all, like you both, I want to say thank you to Raymond and to JW3 for hosting this wonderful occasion, and the Genesis Philanthropy Group for sponsoring these Global Jewish Conversations. And what a wonderful idea this is.

I remember people used to say the art of conversation is dead. And I also always used to reply, no, the art of conversation is alive and well and exists in shul when you're supposed to be davening.  Or as Lefkowitz, the atheist, who went to shul every day and when asked why he went to shul every day, he said, ‘Well, you know, I go with Goldberg. Goldberg goes to talk to God, and I go to talk to Goldberg.’ So I love this idea of conversation. It is the Jewish form.

Although, to be honest, other people have conversations, Jews have arguments, but at least the idea that we can argue constructively together excites me. And it excited me that a secular figure like Tal could write a book in which the first word on the cover is God. I mean, this was really exciting because it said to me, here is a person who is open, here is a person who cares, here is a person who wants to engage with others, who believes things that maybe Tal you don't, who have different kinds of experiences.

And the proposition that ‘God is in the crowd’ is really important because I think Judaism is unique in this. You know, you have countries like Britain that have a lot of different religions, and you have religions that are spread across many countries. But Judaism is both a religion and a nation, and it is the only one that combines the two.

And the end result is, if Judaism were only a religion, there would only be space within it for believers. So the concept of a secular Christian is unintelligible, but the concept of a secular Jew is thoroughly intelligible because we're a nation, not just a religion. And that means that we are bound together the way a family is bound together in all its diversity and all its variety.

So Jews, who are maybe one of the very smallest nations on earth, one-fifth of one percent of the world population, and not just now. Moshe Rabbeinu, Moses, said in chapter 7 verse 7 of Sefer Devarim, of the book of Deuteronomy, “Not because you were many did God choose you and love you. You are the tiniest of all peoples.” This tiny little people makes an enormous amount of noise. 

Why? Because we are so diverse. Because we're held together as a nation, or to put it more simply, we are held together as a family.

And that is why we can converse and why we can argue. Because if you have an argument with a friend, tomorrow he may not be your friend. But if you have an argument with a member of your family, tomorrow they are still a member of your family.

So you can, because of that strength of bond between us, we can argue, we can disagree, we can differ. And I think how we cope with diversity is important not only to us, it's important to the world. 

The world looks at Jews. Damn it all - sorry, excuse my language -The world looks at Jews.

We've been around, we inspired a little thing called Christianity 2,000 years ago. Now 2.4 billion people. 16 centuries ago we inspired, oh sorry, 14 centuries ago we inspired something called Islam. 1.6 billion people throughout the world. 

In the 17th and 18th centuries, people like John Milton, John Locke, and in the States Thomas Jefferson, read the Hebrew Bible and out of it developed the very concepts that created the free societies, the liberal democracies of the West. 

We have had a decisive influence on history on at least three separate occasions. The world is interested in Jews. 

Sometimes they like us, sometimes, what can you say? I have a problem with one or two politicians right now in the United Kingdom. And sometimes we have American politicians who like us who we rather feel it's like, you know, sometimes you're embarrassed by your enemies and sometimes by your friends. But one way or another, people are interested with us. 

And I think they want to know, what does this global age have to learn from the world's first global people? We've been a global people for 2,000 years. 2,000 years ago there were Jews in Israel, there were Jews in Babylon, there were Jews in Alexandria, there were Jews in Rome. We've been a global people for 2,000 years. What lessons do we have to share with humanity? 

And one of them is how do we cope with difference? 

Baroness Altmann: Given that particular train of thought, maybe I could ask you, Tal, whether you are confident that your prediction of a linear trend, which has ultimately produced your diagnosis that there won't be any Jews left might be open to the challenge that we've always been through difficult times and there have always been times when it seemed like it was the end of the Jews. But somehow it hasn't happened and it's sort of on the lines that Rabbi Lord Sacks has just described.

Tal: Sure. So I don't want to come off as too much of a, I'm not trying to be a prophet. I don't know what's going to happen.

And what I can say is the trend will definitely not be linear for sure. I read on the way over here that 5% of pregnancies end on the predicted due date, 5%. One day before and one day after is 4 point something percent, right? So 95% of births do not happen on the due date.

But it's a good baseline. And I think it's good. I think this is true in investing and I think it's true in life.

It's good to have the base case, an upside case, a downside case, but it's good to identify a base case. And linearity is a good base case. This could be cyclical. I agree. And certainly history would suggest we've had many ups and many downs. We tend to, the downs tend to be followed by ups.

It could be worse though. It could be worse. If you want there to be Jews in the world, it could be exponential.

If you just look at the math, the probability of a Jewish male of marrying age meeting a Jewish female of marrying age in Denver, Colorado in 2019 is significantly lower than it was in 2009. That's not quite the case in New York today, but the number of cities were, which would argue for exponentially. For exponentiality.

So I don't know what the end game is. What I try to suggest in the book is it doesn't matter so much. Here we have a threat and we have an opportunity before us.

And I think luckily the prescription for addressing each is the same. And to me, I hope the book ends on an optimistic note. There is what to do.

We have resources and we could do something quite beautiful I think with our family. 

Rabbi Sacks: There was an article - I must've read it 40 years ago - in the old, do you remember the old Jewish Encyclopaedia? You remember the very, very old one. And there's an article there called under the heading of ‘Jewish Superstition.’

And it tells the story of a certain Eastern European community where it was considered unlucky to be the first person buried in a new cemetery. When I read this, I thought to myself, to be the second person buried is also nisht ametzia [not a bargain]. Anyway, they had this terrible superstition. Nobody wanted, this community had bought a plot for a cemetery and nobody wanted to be the first person to die. So they got together as a community. It's all there if you actually look it up. Jewish Superstition in the old Jewish Encyclopaedia. 

They actually hired a very, very elderly Jew to be the first person to die. And what happened? And again, this is taken from the encyclopaedia. Suddenly, dying gave him a new interest in life. You know, whenever he passed, everyone would say there goes Yossele, the town dier. And he lived another 10 years. So everyone else had to simply wait. So it turns out that dying gives Jews a new interest in life. 

Simon Ravidovitz, the great Jewish historian, once wrote an article about Jewish history, which was entitled “The Ever-Dying People.”

We're always just about to die. And when that happens, wonderful people, totally unexpected, like Tal, come along and say, we can't let the Jewish people die. And they give us new reasons to live.

And that's exactly what your book does and why it's so beautiful. 

Baroness Altmann: Do you see the same existential threats as Tull is describing in the book? And do you see the sense of urgency or feel the sense of urgency to modernise and reform how our religion works? 

Rabbi Sacks: I see it rather more darkly, actually, than Tal. And I'm going to ask you, because I only once ever saw a musical.

Our daughter, Dina, said, “Dad, you've got to see this.” Has anyone seen the musical “Hamilton”? You've seen this? So you will know this story. Alexander Hamilton, first Treasury Secretary, author of 51 of the 85 Federalist Papers, born in some obscure little Caribbean island to an unmarried mother and an absconding father, and somehow so gifted that the townspeople pay for him to go to King's College. It was called then Columbia University, as it's called now, etc etc.

And all the way through this, he sings a song, “I am not throwing away my shot.” He's got this wonderful moment, and he's not going to throw it away.

He sings this 11 times in the course of the musical. But what happens? He throws it away. Number one, by having an adulterous relationship, which almost kills his marriage, and certainly kills any chance he might have of being President of the United States. As Thomas Jefferson sings in the musical, ‘That's one less thing to worry about.’ 

And then, like a fool, knowing that he lost his son, Philippe, in a duel, he accepts a duel with Jefferson's Vice-President, Aaron Burr, and is killed in that duel. He throws away his shot.

I want you to think, we know everything Tal says, and it's all true, that Israel is deeply divided, that the world's largest diaspora community, the United States, is out-marrying at the rate of seven in ten outside the Orthodox community. Bad things are happening. But think about this.

We've been around a long time, 4,000 years. We have, Jews have lived in virtually every country under the sun, and yet never before in the whole of Jewish history have we had simultaneously independence and sovereignty in Israel, and freedom and equality in the diaspora. Everything my Bubba and Zeyda and their Bubbas and Zeydas ever prayed for, we have.

And what are we doing? We're throwing away our shot. This is crazy. It's absolutely mad.

Why did Jews want the Land of Israel? Just as a refuge, just as a place where you don't have to watch anti-Semites on the television? They wanted the State of Israel because they wanted the chance to do what every other nation takes for granted and we could never do, which is build a society according to our own deepest values. Tzedek, Mishpat, Chesed, Rachamim, righteousness, justice, loving-kindness, and compassion.

That's what Israel should be. It should be the living embodiment of what Judaism is supposed to be in the public domain. You should see that in its schools. You should see that in its welfare facilities. You should see it. And you do, of course you really do, but the world never sees that Israel.

And secondly, out there in the diaspora, for heaven's sake, why did we not take a Jewish message to the world? Even if you have to do it when everyone's trying to eat a decent breakfast, you know, at least take a Jewish message. 

Baroness Altmann: You are doing that. 

Rabbi Sacks: Well, but I mean, you know, there are not enough people doing it.

Baroness Altmann: I agree. 

Rabbi Sacks: And it's really, really sad. So I'm not worried the way Tal is that we're going to disappear because Tal knows this is a self-refuting prophecy.

All you've got to do is tell Jews we're about to disappear, and suddenly we appear. I'm worried that we're throwing away our shot, that Hashem wants us to do something with all of this. 

Baroness Altmann: Is that perhaps part of the issue with being a Jew in Israel, where to some extent - Tal and I talked about this - the education system in Israel has chosen not to, what it would call, indoctrinate young children and explain the history of Judaism and the importance of Judaism.

American Jews, British Jews, if you have children at Jewish schools, they know about that immediately. And even if they choose not to keep it, they've got that foundation. But in Israel, one hears people saying, ‘I'm an Israeli. I'm not a Jew.’ And I wonder if that is an element in where you see the threats and how you would react to that. 

Tal: Yeah. So in smaller forums, I often start with that question that we started with at the first section of the book, should there be Jews? Only once have I had a negative answer in the United States. In Israel, it happens quite regularly. I wouldn't say it's a commonly held view, but in an audience the size of, three or four people will say, I'd be much better if we could organise for a benign extinction, right? No violence.

But if we could fade, for example, the notion of marrying ourselves into extinction in the United States is a very appealing one to many secular Israelis. And I think secularism in Israel largely defines itself in real enmity with religiosity, right? We've created, this is a political fight, and it has been, I think it's been exacerbated in the last 30 years or so, but it's really been from the beginning. So the notion of an Israeli identity, and I understand it and sympathise it, it's a heavy weight to be an Israeli. It's heavy. You have to perceive, I think we all kind of conceive ourselves both as individuals and as cells in a larger organism, and our lives are arranged in kind of a tension between the two. In Israel, it's almost impossible to get away from the second.

You are a cell in a larger organism. You have obligations to that organism. They're real. They're heavy. They're not taxes. They're putting yourself at physical risk, putting your children at physical risk.

I understand and sympathise with the craving for normalcy that many secular Israelis have. The bad news, I just don't think normalcy is on the menu. For Israel, it probably isn't for the Jews. We're not going to be regular. 

And my answer is, okay, so let's embrace what's special here. Let's celebrate it.

And yes, it comes with a cost for sure, but it's something worth preserving. That means we look at Israel as a means and not as an end. The Jewish people has to be the end. Israel would be the means. 

That's not a message that resonates so well with many Israeli audiences. I understand it, but I think it is a question we have to raise in Israel.

Baroness Altmann: Well, following on from many of the themes in your book, Rabbi Lord Sacks, one of the particular themes is this conflict between universalism and particularism, which are themes that you have featured so prominently in your own writings. Of course, the distinction between universalism and particularism isn't just a straight-line continuum. It's not black and white. They can fade into each other. But how would you define Judaism in this context? You've suggested Judaism as a faith. 

Rabbi Sacks: Yeah. The Jewish approach to this, I think, is really unusual. It's hard for people to understand. And it is incredibly important.

And it can be stated very simply. We believe that the God of Israel is the God of all humanity. But we do not believe that the religion of Israel is the religion of all humanity.

And that is the tension between the universal and the particular in Judaism. And it is, to my mind, the most blessed idea I know of, full stop. 

Why? Because it means that God has made space for the people not like us.

Yes, we have the religion of Israel. But God is still there shining His light on the people who stand outside the religion of Israel, because all of them are made in His image. 

Let me ask you a question.

Who says Baruch Hashem in the Torah? Thanks God, right? Who says it? Number one, Noah. Number two, Abraham's servant, Eliezer, when he finds a wife for Isaac. And number three, Moses' father-in-law, Yitro, Jethro.

Three non-Jews. They're the ones who say Baruch Hashem. We do not have the belief that is definitive of Christianity, extra ecclesiam non est salus. Outside the Church, no one is saved. We say just the opposite. “The righteous of all nations have a share in the World to Come.”

The most perfect individuals in the whole of Tanach are Noah, “ish tzadik,” and Job, neither of whom is Jewish. The parasha in which we read the Ten Commandments and the Revelation at Sinai is called Yitro, the Midianite priest. We are the only religion I know, certainly the only monotheism I know, that has respect for the people not like us.

And I cannot believe that any message is more important in the 21st century. 

To have respect for the people not like you. 

That is the exact opposite of all the politics you see here in Britain, in America, and almost everywhere else in the world.

The whole of populism is about, ‘I'm right’ and the others, ‘I'm right, you're wrong, go to hell.’ That's basically a summary of political attitudes today. 

So when Jews come along and say, yes, there are universal elements which are that every human being is in the image of God and that after the flood God made with Noah a covenant of human solidarity. That's the global element. 

But yes, we, even we, this tiny little people, do feel ourselves especially close to God, loved by God. Judaism does justice to the universality of justice and the particularity of love.

Now I think those are terribly important and what has happened in today's Jewish world is that those two elements have split apart. So you find amongst lots of American Jews, only the universal counts, right? Tikkun Olam. Tikkun the olam and we'll all be fine. We're like everyone else, only more so. 

And so they're great on all the social action stuff but their Jewish particularism is small and diminishing. So they're going to disappear through assimilation.

And then you have the particularists, for whom Judaism is absolutely everything and nothing outside those walls counts for anything at all. And they are strong but their impact on the world is zero. 

And so we are seeing Jews split into the universalists and the particularists whereas Judaism is a matter of keeping those two things together.

And when you keep them together they become very powerful, very creative. 

Baroness Altmann: How do you balance the competing forces with Judaism as a faith and Israel as a State? 

Rabbi Sacks: Yeah

Baroness Altmann: How do you see that playing out? Do you think… 

Rabbi Sacks: Israel as a State is a political entity, right? And I'm not terribly, you know, I leave political entities to the politicians. I really do. They're better at it than rabbis are. Never let a rabbi have anything to do with politics. That's my principle. 

So Israel as a State is a political entity that has concerns with security and defence and the economy and everything else. Israel as a society, that's something different.

That's where the Jewish identity comes in. That's why we're teaching Israelis Tanach the way David Ben-Gurion would want them to know Tanach. It's their national literature.

You don't have to believe in God to find Tanach, a powerful library of works and so on. And I think there are secular Israelis now who have created Batei Midrash, learning programmes. Rabbi Benny Lau has created something called 929. Do you know about 929? You know the chapter of Tanach a day? And all kinds of Israelis join in and add their commentaries to it. So Israel as a State is one thing. Israel as a society is something else entirely.

Baroness Altmann: Tal, your book talks about the wisdom of the crowd and you believe it's vital to harness perhaps the power of technology to better Judaism and to improve our survival chances. But how do you think we could reach any kind of consensus when, as Rabbi Lord Sacks so often says, the canonical texts of Judaism are anthologies of arguments? 

Tal: So I'm not sure consensus should be the objective. It's reconciliation. And I think there's a distinction to be drawn here.

I call this era the post-Diaspora era in the book, not to be disparaging of English Jewry, so forgive me, but 90% of the world's Jews are concentrated in two jurisdictions, in Israel and the United States. And I see the trend heading toward the 100, not toward the 80.

That's the first time in 2,000 years we've had this sort of concentration. So using the term Diaspora as a model to describe the physical architecture of world Jewry, it's no longer useful, I think. Diaspora had certain features that lent themselves to the wisdom of crowds.

Our diffusion, the fact that we didn't have a Pope, there was nobody officiating over the evolution of world Jewry, and Judaism evolved dramatically over 2,000 years - in different places, in different ways, without real coordination between them. And it was through the mechanism, or at least I posit, of expulsions and migrations, that we were forced to reconcile our diverging interpretations of what this is, what is Judaism, without an authority to adjudicate globally. 

We were talking about conversion the other day. If a conversion took place in a town in Germany in the 19th century, no rabbi in Morocco was consulted about the validity of that conversion. He didn't get to weigh in. He probably had never heard of the rabbi who performed the conversion, might have never heard of the town in Germany, might never have heard of Germany.

We were living in really isolated worlds. By the way, the descendants of that convert are Jews. Within two or three generations, we've stopped counting who's who.

So as we were just talking earlier, how many people in the room are direct descendants of Abraham and Sarah? I think probably not a plurality of this room, that would be my guess. So we've accepted new members along the way, new ideas, but in a process of really crowd adjudication or crowd wisdom. No leader.

When I look at Israel today, for the first time in 2,000 years, we've re-established Jewish sovereignty. And yes, we are a State that gives the arms of government teeth. It's not just opinions now.

We're not sitting in a room in Amsterdam, you from Cordoba, me from Sevilla, and the rabbi from Toledo, and arguing about whether we should be eating legumes on Passover or not. Nobody can really definitively say this is the answer. 

Now we do have an authority that speaks for world Jewry. I don't think we gave much thought to what that actually means today. And so when we talk about Israel, and this is where the technology component, I think, comes in. To the rabbi's point, nation and society, I use different terms, but I think we're talking about the same thing.

Israel's really filling two different missions. One is very standard. It's like Switzerland. We're a country. We need fiscal policy. We need health care policy. We need the plumbing of any country. And we have a government that does that, for better or for worse. We're also the self-proclaimed nation-state of the Jewish people.

And that does not mean anything specific in Israel. Other than maybe the Law of Return, which basically makes us a physical refuge for Jews, we haven't really decided what that means. And to me, if we split the government, and again, this part of the prescription flies better in the diaspora than it does in Israel, but split the government into two.

One, just run a State. Defence policy, health care policy, that really should be run by the parliament of Israel. But the second piece is running the nation-state of the Jewish people, which really only has three, to me, three areas of jurisdiction that are important.

One is custody over the holy sites of Judaism. If we are the self-proclaimed custodian of those holy sites, why did we not set up in Argentina? Why did we set up in Israel? It's because of those sites. That is on behalf of all Jews, not just Israeli Jews.

The nation's obligations to Jews outside of Israel. Today, the State of Israel does take responsibility for the fate of Jews outside of Israel, but Jews outside of Israel have no say in exactly how that happens. 

And the third, and perhaps the most contentious, and my guess is both of you probably disagree with me on this, but I think it's the most important, is the definition of who is a Jew, which in this country, if somebody wants to convert to Judaism, I'm pretty sure I can find a rabbi who will agree to convert that person, no matter what their circumstances.

I'm pretty sure I can find a rabbi who will reject that conversion, no matter what the circumstances. But you don't care. You're going to affiliate with the community that embraced you, and you're going to ignore the community that rejects you.

In Israel, you have to care. You have to care. It really matters whether the State considers you a Jew or not.

Your rights are different. And the way we resolve that today is two men make a decision without much accountability. There are rabbis who make the cut today, might not make the cut tomorrow.

We don't know who is qualified to convert or declare somebody Jewish. That's something that we have to fix, and I think that's the sort of thing we can do through the crowd, not by generating a consensus, but by generating a reconciliation. Sorry for the long answer.

Baroness Altmann: Lord Rabbi Sacks, do you see this in the same way that there is a problem with the auspices, if you like, of the rabbinic judgments within Israel as they apply both within Israel and outside? 

Rabbi Sacks: Maimonides, in his law code, talks about times when Jewish identity had fuzzy boundaries. During the reign of David and Solomon and other times when a lot of people converted, not under official auspices. And he said that what happened was, we wait and see. Do they stay within the fold or don't they? Just wait and see. 

So I think we are in an age when Jewish identity has those fuzzy boundaries. And I think we have to live with it.

It's a very, very fraught and political issue, about which I can't say a great deal. But I do think the fact that there are those fuzzy boundaries in Israel itself, a group of rabbis, as you will know, including my own teacher, Rabbi Rabinovitch, set up a Beit Din to broaden the portals, the entrance to Judaism, because they felt that there is a danger in Israel that doesn't exist in the diaspora. The danger in Israel is, if you have a lot of Russians who have made aliyah, who are not Jewish and who are not converted, then you are importing to Israel the whole problem of intermarriage, which until then didn't really exist in Israel.

So they see the restrictive approach to conversion as carrying strictly religious costs for the future of Israeli Jewry. And since my own teacher is one of those who has lent his authority to this court, I listen to it very carefully, just as I listen as an ex-Chief Rabbi to the concerns of the Chief Rabbis of Israel, trying to bring some order to what otherwise would be chaos. So I think it is just one of those moments, both in Israel and in the diaspora, when there aren't sharp boundaries.

And the truth is we wait and see. 

But I've always felt that converts bring something very special to Judaism. And sometimes they see things in it that born Jews don't see.

And I feel this both from my own experience… The first time I went to yeshiva, immediately after university, I went to Kfar Chabad. That is a pretty heavy Russian Chabad Lubavitch yeshiva. My Rosh Yeshiva, who was the most Chabadnik Chabadnik you would ever meet, was a convert to Judaism, from Australia. I couldn't believe it. But you know, I mean, my goodness me, you know, I couldn't be his disciple and not say, wow, he brought something spiritual to this intensely spiritual place. And that was something beautiful. 

And go from there to six or nine months ago, when I was doing my programmes on morality for the BBC. And I'm sitting in the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, talking to the world's greatest sociologist, Robert Putnam, the Mr. “Bowling Alone” man.

And he's telling me, well, you know, I was born a Lutheran. But Lutheranism is all about the ‘I,’ about the individual. And Judaism is all about the ‘We,’ about community. That's why I decided to convert to Judaism. And it's there, I'm sure, on the BBC podcast. It's not, you can actually listen to this.

So from my Rosh Yeshiva of 50 years ago to my hero among sociologists at Harvard, I've always been uplifted and inspired by the incredible spiritual gifts that converts bring to Judaism. And I embrace them with love and with respect. 

Baroness Altmann: That's one of the idiosyncrasies among world religions about Judaism among the major world religions. We're not a proselytising religion, but we do welcome people who choose to want to join us.

Rabbi Sacks:  Yeah, of course, we assume they must be mad to want to in the first place. Once they pass the sanity test.

Baroness Altmann: Yeah. I think if I might ask both of you, Tal identifies the different sections of Israeli society. And I think you brilliantly explain the tensions that exist between all of the various groups. You've got the secularists. I think we discussed there's about 2 million within Israeli society, maybe? 

Tal: That's a guess. Yeah. Yeah. 

Baroness Altmann: And then you've got the territorialists. So the ones who want desperately to expand into Judea and Samaria and the sort of God-given lands, but that's a very small number, maybe a couple hundred thousand.

Tal: Yes. 

Baroness Altmann: And then what you call the theocrats. I mean, these are the really religious groups who might be seen as religious leaders in Israel, which is about a million people, 

Tal: I'd say. Yeah. 

Baroness Altmann: Do you see the theocrats as being crucial to the future of the State of Israel? And how do you see their role in defining Israel and world Judaism? 

Tal: Yes, I do. And to be clear, a large chunk of the secularist population is religiously observant.

The distinction is how do we want to be governed? You know, again, most of the people that I've worked with over the years, maybe half the people I've worked with, are religiously observant. They would fall under, in the United States, they'd be called modern Orthodox, but are committed to democracy. If we vote as a nation that we're leaving Judea and Samaria, they're packing up and leaving. Some of them live there, but they will leave. That makes them secularism by my description. They don't want a halachically-ruled State either.

They are strict observers of halacha themselves. They don't want to tell me how to observe. That population, and maybe it's about a million, it's difficult to really say, and I think that the boundaries are a little fuzzy between the various groups. 

It's a dignity of diversity. At the end of the day, we need each other. We need each other. By the way, in the most prosaic form, they're the anchor that allows people like me to be adventurous, understanding that there is a home to come back to.

We shouldn't be dictating to each other exactly how to live. I think that's a problem. If we're able to reconcile that, they would no longer be theocrats, I suppose, but they would be the same people and I embrace them.

By the way, that's not a point that comes out strongly enough in the book, but it should. 

Baroness Altmann: Yeah. I think you were quite dismissive of them in some ways.

Tal: Yes. Yes

Baroness Altmann: Your description just now is much kinder. 

Tal: Thank you for the opportunity to fix that. 

Baroness Altmann: What about you, Rabbi Lord Sacks? How vital is the theocratic element to Israel? For me, it would seem impossible to imagine Israel without it.

Rabbi Sacks: I think two extraordinary things happened in the course of the 20th century, and happening now, that are really, really extraordinary and almost unprecedented. Number one, the rebirth of the State of Israel, which was the result of all sorts of people, but I think the Chilonim have a particular share in that vision and making it real. Secular Jews like Theodore Herzl who realised that you have to secularise in order to regain the power of political action.

You don't just daven and wait for Hashem to give you a State, you get on and do it. The rebirth of the State. 

But there has been a second miracle, the rebirth of the Jewish people. And that has come from the theocrats, from the Eida Charedit, because wherever you go in the world, certainly in Israel, but everywhere else, these are the fastest growing, the only really growing group in the Jewish population.

And they're doing things that I don't know there is any great precedent for. I mean, enormous families and a great sacrifice. These were the people, these were the communities that lost 90 to 95 percent of their members during the Holocaust.

And somehow this “Ud mutzal m’eish,” this brand plucked from the burning, has repopulated itself and translated itself from Mir and Ponovitch to rebuild Mir and Ponovitch in the Land of Israel, in the State of Israel. So they performed a miracle not less significant than the rebirth of the State. 

But as I was saying to Tal, the only thing they haven't noticed yet is nobody among that ultra-Orthodox world has sat down and said, ‘Hey guys, we won. We've done it. We've repopulated ourselves. We don't need to live behind ghetto walls anymore. Let's go out and share our Judaism with others, openly, non-judgementally.’

One person in that ultra-Orthodox world did that. His name was the Lubavitcher Rebbe.

One single person said, instead of turning inward, let's turn outward. And that one person changed the whole Jewish world. There's not a Jewish community anywhere in the world today that has not somehow or other been influenced by that kind of Chabad outreach.

Can you imagine what would happen if other figures today in the Eida Charedit did this? It would be extraordinary because as Tal has said, the word secular needs to be understood in terms of Israelis, because most Israelis really are traditional and open to it. What they don't like is being judged, and they don't like kfia datit, religious coercion. They don't like it being forced upon them by statute and law.

So I think the Eida Charedit has done great things, but it's time now to move on and realise that it has won its particular battle. It has developed strengths, and it doesn't have to be fearful of the outside world anymore. 

Baroness Altmann: Thank you.