The Jewish Future (with Tal Kienan)

Opening remarks

Moderator, Mijal Bitton: And Rabbi, I'm sure that you get so many books that are sent to you to read, and because you're busy writing so many books, you probably don't have time to read so many of them or respond to them. What was different about Tal's work that really moved you to be in this conversation tonight? 

Rabbi Sacks: Tal, first of all, and please hear this. Tal has written a brilliant book. It is really, from the opening paragraph, it grips you. Tal's personal story as an American teenager who makes aliyah and becomes a fighter pilot in the Israeli Air Force.It's a thrilling story. And it's also the story, Tal, of your personal search. And that's, you are searching, and that's hugely important.

So Tal has written a book that has immense power in these two ways, his personal narrative, and as part of the journey that I suppose we're all on, where are we going? But he raises the big questions, and they are big questions.

So if I can just respond, Mijal, to your question about how the Jewish people in Mississippi or the Colorado [referenced in the opening remarks], I have to tell you this, that there's a rabbinic saying. “Kol makom shene’emar ‘vaYehi’ eino ela lashon tza’ar.” Wherever it says, “And it came to pass,” that's a prelude to tragedy. When God created the world, He said, “Yehi,” let there be. And God created human beings to be creative.

And in order to be creative, you have to feel the cognitive dissonance between the Mississippi and the Colorado. Jews are born and live in the cognitive dissonance between the world that is and the world that ought to be. And it is our task in life to take the world that is and make it more like the world that ought to be.

Mijal: And, Tal, the question that you said really drove you for a long time, should there be Jews? So what have you discovered or developed along your journey? 

Tal: Well, first of all, my answer is yes. 

Mijal: Okay, good. I'm glad we're all, I hope, okay, that's good.

All right. Thank you. 

Tal: No, truly, and I accept, I ask that question sincerely, and I think we should all have the courage to ask that question sincerely and be open to a range of outcomes from the discussion around that question.

In my gut, I do feel value in survival of this organism that I'm a part of, right? I think we can each conceive of ourselves as individuals, but also as cells in a much bigger organism. And I do both, and I flip back and forth, I think, in life. I think we all do between that.

I want this organism to continue living after I'm gone. I mean it. And to me, that is immortality, which I think we all, somewhere inside, wanna pursue. And I don't think we experience things after we go, but we continue influencing after we go. And this is the vessel in which I feel the greatest influence. 

For humanity, I think there's also value in having this tiny group that is special in its own way. It's not the only special group, but it is special in its own way.

I'm not sure the world looks better. I think it probably looks worse without this group's mark. 

Mijal: But I said, I wanna point to something that might be… 

Rabbi Sacks: Can I respond directly? It's an interesting question. So I thought, let's test it. Let's road test it. So for, even before I was Chief Rabbi, but certainly for those 22 years, and still today, I try and walk the talk.

I try and take a Jewish message to the general British public - through BBC, through the national press, through radio and television. I felt such hunger, I mean, including four prime ministers, wanting advice from Jewish wisdom as to how you deal with juvenile crime? What do you do with the new child poverty caused by the breakdown of marriage? How do you create an ethos for schools in deprived areas? How do you give people ambition with compassion, which is so much a Jewish thing? 

And so, I came to the conclusion that, I kind of asked, if God chose the Jewish people, why did He create Gentiles? And the answer I gave was, He wanted somebody to appreciate Judaism.

So I'll tell you the things that I think we live and teach and practise that the world needs in the 21st century. Number one, ours is a century where every, almost every country under the sun is being destabilised and riven, because the world is changing faster than people can bear. Most people leave life in a world that's pretty much like the world they were born into.

People can get used to anything if exposed to it long enough. Poverty, disease, hunger, war. They can't get used to constant, accelerating change. 

One people on earth have lived for almost 4,000 years without a single day of security.

Wherever Jews were, they didn't know in Israel which empire is going to attack us next. In Europe, which country is going to expel us next? We lived with uncertainty and we not only survived, but we thrived. 

I don't know what it's like celebrating Sukkot in New York. I'll tell you what it's like celebrating Sukkot in London. For a week, you live in this sukkah exposed to the wind, the rain, and the cold. And what do you call it? Z’man Simchateinu, the festival of our joy. We are the people who can celebrate a festival of insecurity and in the midst of it, find joy. 

If we can teach that to the world, this is going to be a better world. 

Secondly, we are the only Abrahamic monotheism that believes that you don't have to be like us to win a place in Heaven.

“Chasidei umot olam yesh lahem chelek l’olam haba.” We never sought to conquer or convert the world. Now, that is a message the world needs in an age of clash of civilisations.

We need to make space for what I called in one of my books, “the dignity of difference.” You don't have to impose truth by force. You don't have to impose a single truth on a plural universe.

That is an important message. 

And finally, we are the people, somehow Jews who have known every kind of tragedy and oppression, but we never let go of it until somehow we had extracted a blessing from it. So Israel, on the day that it's born, on Yom HaAtzmaut HaRishon, is attacked by five armies.

So Jews suddenly become the best soldiers in the universe. Tell people in Plotz in the 18th century, Jews become the best soldiers in the universe. When the recruiting officer comes from the Tsar, Jews run away.

Somehow they gave everyone else the oil, they gave us the desert, okay, so we'll show that you can make the desert bloom. They throw missiles at Israel. Israel invents “Iron Dome.” Saudi Arabia comes along and says, could we have Iron Dome, please, proving that the Almighty has a sense of humour.

Every single thing that Israel does, it becomes the world expert in rapid response, in post-trauma stress disorders. 

Jews take curses and turn them into blessings. 

And if we can teach that to humanity, we really will change the world.

Humanity needs us to live our values. And to be a Jew is quite simple, and it's been like this since the days of Abraham and Sarah. Be true to your faith and a blessing to others, regardless of their faith, and I believe the world still needs us to live that truth.

Mijal: So. So. So I'm noticing already that you are each using a different language when you're speaking. Tal, you, not just, yeah. Tal, you were speaking about should there be Jews? You were talking about survival, demographic continuity, and Rabbi, you spoke, used the language of Judaism.

You spoke about a message - really a covenant - and I think that actually shows different understandings of what you see as success. And Tal, I want you to comment on this last thing that the Rabbi said, which is that to be a Jew is to be true to one's Jewish faith, and to model that for the world. 

You write this book, I think, from a secular point of view, without advocating that each Jew needs to have this sort of faith. So what would you say is the, what should Jews do to represent the sort of message that you hope to bring to humanity? 

Tal: Sure. So I think, I'm hearing the same language, actually, and I think the distinction I would make, and it's - I think we all come at this a little bit differently - but Judaism has, is where the value is. Jews are the medium.

There is no Judaism without the Jews. So we do need to survive. We need the numbers.

We are constantly evolving. I don't think there's any generation of Jews who bequeathed the same Judaism to their children as the Judaism they inherited from their parents. We have constantly changed, and we need to continue doing that today.

The message of tolerating dissent, or even embracing dissent, that we hope to shine on the rest of the world, is one that I think we need to remember how to shine on each other, okay? Because I think we have lost that to a large extent in the last few generations. It has everything to do with this geographic shift. If you will, for a second, I've kind of been framing it as, so this is a people that's constantly evolved, but it's had at least two episodes where it was challenged to fundamentally reinvent itself, not just evolve, reinvent itself. The Exodus and the expulsion from Israel under the Roman Empire. Not the Babylonian expulsion, the Roman expulsion, where we went from one governance structure that kept us together, one operating system, so to speak, to a radically different operating system. 

You know, I'll just briefly on the second one, just for the sake of time, but we were people living in our own land, ruled by our own law that was administered by our own sovereign. And within two generations, we're passed out to hundreds of geographic nodes around the world, scattered, leaderless.

We had to come up with a new governance structure, and we did. And I argue that Mishna is the anchor of that governance structure. What's happening today is what I call the end of Diaspora.

And by the way, both of those fundamental restructurings also had to do with the geographic relocation. We went from Egypt to Israel, we went from Israel out to the world. We've now gone from out in the world, and forgive me, Rabbi, for if I've come off as dismissive of European Jewry, but we're already 90% Israeli and American.

We've never had this level of concentration in the last 2,000 years. It is a totally different ballgame for the Jews today. And I think our struggle now comes to really a fundamental reinvention of what this is.

And I think key to that reinvention is the ability to accommodate diversity and dissent, right? And it's good that we're speaking in different voices. And the Rabbi's first letter to me - which I mentioned to some of us earlier - started with, “We don't agree on all of your answers, but we agree on all of your questions, and the questions are much more important than the answers.” Embracing that ethic is, I think, going to be key to a successful reinvention of Judaism.

Mijal: So since we're speaking about disagreement, one of the most significant topics that the organised Jewish community in America is always talking about is really the question of intermarriage. And Tal, in your book, you write about intermarriage. You explain that on an individual level, you have no problems with it, but that collectively it might challenge the demographic future of the Jewish people.

And I want to actually turn the question to Rabbi Sacks, and not ask about intermarriage, but ask about in-marriage. And my question is the following. In America today, we would react with horror at anybody who tried to prevent interracial or inter-ethnic marriage. We would think of that as bigoted. 

So can we create in America, can we make the moral and ethical, not the halachic Jewish legal, but the moral and ethical case for Jewish in-marriage? 

Rabbi Sacks: I'll put the question even sharper because to my mind, central to Judaism, central to our texts, “Ata vechartanu mikol haAmin,” can you use the phrase “Chosen People” anymore without sounding racist? And that is a fundamental question of what it is that we're talking about. What it is to be a Jew in the contemporary world.

So I wrestled with this. And in the end, I came up with a phrase, which I think I probably already mentioned. And that phrase is “the dignity of difference.”

That is to say, if you read the Bible in Genesis 1 to 11 - Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah and the flood, Babel and its builders, the focus is on humanity as a whole. And this insistence that every human being - regardless of class, culture, or colour, or creed - is in the image and likeness of God. It's universal. And in the 12th chapter, Parashat Lech Lecha, suddenly the focus narrows on Abraham and Sarah. One family.

And the question is, why does it move from the universal to the particular? And I think the answer lies in the story of the Tower of Babel. The story of the Tower of Babel is about the world's first empire. In Mesopotamia, the first Assyrian empire.

And imperialism is this attempt to impose a single truth on a plural world. 

Genesis 11, the story of Babel, begins with the line, “The whole world was of one language and the same speech.” Whereas Genesis 10, the previous chapter, has already said that humanity divided into 70 nations with 70 languages.

So the one language of Babel is the language of imperialism. If you go to South America, for instance, they either speak Spanish, or in Brazil, Portuguese, because the Spanish and Portuguese imposed their language on the native population. 

And God is saying, I created diversity.

Everyone is in My image, but everyone is different, as the Mishna in Sanhedrin says. 

Therefore, Jews are commanded to be different, to teach humanity the dignity of difference. 

Now, I road tested this on each year, because I worried that British students would turn out to be anti-Israel. And so Elaine and I, each year, invited the heads of the National Union of Students to our home. We got to know them, we befriended them, we did a reception. And I road-tested this idea of “the dignity of difference” with these student leaders who are Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, atheists, not a Jew among them.

And I gave them the shiur on “the dignity of difference” to see if it worked for them. And I could see them walking out of the room half an inch taller, and you could write the words in the think bubble above their head. And the words read, ‘We always knew we were different, but we thought that was a bad thing. And now the Chief Rabbi is telling us it's a good thing.’

So, I had to develop a different way of thinking about this in order to make Jewish particularity work. Now, the Torah itself, or Tanach itself, tells us something about out-marriage.

It tells us that without Ruth, who was not only not Jewish, but I mean, ethnically a Moabite, that is, Israel's biggest enemy at the time. And without a Ruth entering the family and faith of our people, there would never have been a King David. And we read this on Shavuot, when we're thinking, ‘We're great. God gave the Torah to us, not to anyone else.’

And Ruth is telling us that Judaism is not an ethnicity. If you have to be of the Jewish race to be Jewish, then there's no defending it in today's world. But if we say Judaism is a faith which you are either born into, or you embrace, or you live it in your home so that your children can embrace it, then Judaism ceases to be an ethnic group and becomes the faith community that it is and should be.

And I'm afraid this is the only way we can think of it today. We have to embrace all the people who want to join us. The people who don't want to join us, we have to say, ‘Please, give at least your children the chance to experience it.’

And people do want to experience it. 

Mijal: And I know Tal has some thoughts on conversion that I want you to share. But before that, I just want to push a little bit more, Rabbi.

I work a lot with young Jews and with interfaith families. And there's many of them that will believe in the dignity of difference. But their understanding of the dignity of difference means that you can build a family that has the dignity of difference within it And that you don't have to lose your Judaism because you marry somebody of a different faith. 

Now, the two main answers that I have seen given to couples that are considering intermarrying, and somebody is trying to speak with them about it, is either, oh, ‘Remember your grandparents, the Holocaust, Jews are assimilating, we can't lose anymore.’ Or like a demographic argument, or even a Kantinian argument, ‘If everybody would do it, then we wouldn't have a Jewish people.’

For me, all of these arguments don't necessarily have a moral or ethical basis. And I really want to challenge us to think, can we make the moral case for in-marriage in today's American society? 

Rabbi Sacks: Well, when I say to a couple, do me a favour, create a Jewish home, I'm not using emotional blackmail. I'm not saying the Jewish people stands or falls by how many Jews there are.

The truth is, Moshe Rabbeinu already said, “Lo merubchem, chashak Hashem baChem vaYivchar baChem, ki atem haMe’at miKol haAmim.” Not because you are many, did God choose you, for you are the smallest of all peoples. We have never relied on demography and numbers. We have relied on our contribution to civilisation.

What I say to a couple is, you will not find a faith in the universe that values marriage more, that values family more, that sets aside sacred time to bond between husband and wife, parent and child. You will not find a faith more passionate about educating its children, giving them moral values. That is why you should bring your Judaism into the home.

Don't give your kids mixed messages because kids can handle everything except ambivalence. 

And if their parents give them ambivalence, the kids react by walking away. And I don't want to see relationships between parents and children break down.

If you have a shared faith, that bonds parents and children. 

Mijal: I want to bring this question to you, Tal, because I actually think you take a very… it's a little bit of a challenging position to say on an individual case that it is something that I have no problem with, I embrace, but hey, collectively, it's an issue. So I just wonder, how has this played out in the way that people have responded to your book? And do you see, what message do you have about this? 

Tal: Well, so I think it goes back to the point about we're all individuals and we're also cells in a larger organism.

And that tension between the individual and the collective I think has guided Judaism from the beginning. And if you kind of think of our foundational story where we become the Am Yisrael that almost every Jewish holiday acknowledges, it's the Exodus. The Exodus is the gift. We receive the gift of Torah and of the Promised Land. It is, I think, our most celebrated occasion. 

However, for 602,000 Jewish men leaving Egypt, it was nothing but an individual tragedy, right? All of these men.

Mijal: Plus the women.  

Tal: Plus the women, right, but we counted the men at the time. 

Mijal: Right.

Tal: These people went off into the desert following Moses, immediately turned on him and said it was better in Egypt. And I wasn't there, so I'm going to take their word for it. It was better in Egypt under slavery than it was in the desert.

And then died. All of them died except for two people, right? Of the 602,000 men who left Egypt, only two people, two men set foot in the Promised Land. Not even Moses did that.

And yet this is the gift, the founding gift of Judaism. It's a gift that can only be received in community. And the juxtaposition, the fact that it was a collection of individual tragedies, I think marks that tension, which we've struggled with forever.

And I struggled with, I think we all do. And I think that's okay. And the intermarriage question goes right to that.

I like the fact that you're framing it in ethical terms. And I like the Rabbi's notion that this is, we can't guilt people into doing, quote unquote, ‘the right thing.’ And to your point, because you have a responsibility for future generations to perpetuate this notion. We have to appeal both to the collective and to the individual. And we don't have the antisemites to do it for us anymore. 

In Israel, the government is trying to club it into us. And I think that is failing and is potentially the most dangerous thing happening in Judaism today. In the United States, we're falling victim to ambivalence. 

What we need to do is create a definition of Judaism that we can endow to our children that will be of enough value. And family is a key tenet or a key piece of that value. That it's something that enough of us will embrace by choice. 

Mijal: So I really hear the demand here to make the values case for Judaism and living a Jewish life. Let me ask you a follow-up question to that, Tal. You just spoke about creating a definition for Judaism. And it reminds me of a lot of your recommendations in your work in which you recommend different centralised structures that will together curate the collective and diverse wisdom of the Jewish people. You speak about a collective endowment fund. You speak about having a centralised authority in Israel who would rule on questions of personal Jewish status. 

So my question to you is the following. From where I'm sitting and looking at American Jews, survey after survey is telling me that American Jews are more polarised than ever. They're never going to agree - in the state they're in right now - to a sort of centralised authority that could really speak to all of them. I also know that people in my generation, millennials, are really allergic to centralised establishment authorities.

So as a very results-oriented businessman, I want you to speak a little bit about what some might perceive as a gap between your vision and your recommendations for what we can do, and the current reality on the ground. And I know I'm speaking about America right now. 

Tal: What I think can be that line, and I think it's going to be very useful for us, and this is not about centralising power, it's about clear lines and definitions, is eligibility for full citizenship in Israel under the Law of Return because it's an objective and universal standard set by the self-proclaimed nation-state of the Jews.

And I think that's a very valuable concept to have. The way it's administered today by two men whose rulings on conversion are quite fickle - and we're seeing today exactly how broken that process is - that's not the right process. But the definition is an extremely useful definition.

And if we're going to define what Judaism is, I think it's important that we define how you get in and also what you're walking away from, if you go out. And we don't really have a clear notion of that or a consensus. We're going to have a lot of different views on it, and I think that's part of Judaism, it's okay.

This is about finding or defining a lowest common denominator, right? It's not everybody has to agree with everybody, but let's try to find the lowest common denominator that most of us - and in the book I use 80% as a magic number for statistical reasons - that we can accept ‘This is Jewish. This is what Jewish means.’ 

Mijal: So let me take this question and turn it to Rabbi Sacks. We're speaking right now about a definition of Judaism that we can agree with.

So I want to ask you, Rabbi, to please speak a little bit about interdenominational pluralism. Let me explain what I mean. I think a lot of your work has to do with people from other faith or people who are secular. But when we talk about trying to create a centralised definition of Judaism, and a lowest common denominator, in my mind, some of the most urgent questions that are going to come up are between different denominations, who have not only ideological questions about Judaism, but also questions about practise. 

In my own minyan, in downtown? minyan, we can be diverse and pluralistic in theory as much as we want, but at the end of the day, before we have services, we have to sit down, we have to discuss what does this look like, what the mechitza, the partition looks like, and we have to make difficult decisions. So can you speak a little bit as an Orthodox Rabbi, do you believe that despite the differences or denominational differences, we can actually come up with something deep, something deep that can unite us, that can unite Orthodox Jews and Reformers? 

Rabbi Sacks: There's an innate tension in the idea of a Chief Rabbi. Chief Rabbi of Britain, the same is true throughout Europe. Chief Rabbi of France, Chief Rabbi of Rome, and so on. That's an Orthodox role. But something like 30% of Jews in Britain are affiliated to non-Orthodox synagogues. So obviously, they never looked to me as their authority, but the fact was that often when I spoke on behalf of the Jewish community, the non-Jewish public was taking my voice to represent all Jews, and therefore there's an innate tension. 

How can I speak for non-Orthodox Jews? And because we were faced with a problem that American Jewry is faced with - disaffiliation -, and we addressed that problem and we solved it in Britain. Perhaps we can talk about that another time. But we actually did something that changed the community and means that young Jews in Britain are more committed, more knowledgeable, than their parents or grandparents were. We did that.

But we had a lot of tensions. And in the end, I realised either you can be a very good politician or you can develop principles that have integrity. I'm sure the two are possible together. I'm not clever enough to do it. So being a third-rate politician, I decided let's do the principles that have integrity. 

And these were the principles, two of them.

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. 

That meant that half of what we did in Anglo-Jewry, we did across the board. Whether it was interfaith, fighting antisemitism, defending Israel, welfare facilities, all the rest of it, we did it across the board. I had reform rabbis. And I was Head of the Beit Din. And our Beit Din is more Charedi than the Chief Rabbinate of Israel's Beit Din. But I was the head of it. So I had the whole of this tension between the Eida Charedit, as it were, or at least a very traditional Orthodox Beit Din and a wide open public.

And my dayanim agreed with me on this. They never had a problem. They understood Jews work together on certain things. On other things - on synagogue life, on precise curricula for Jewish day schools, and obviously standards for conversion - we agreed to differ, but with respect. 

And that respect meant that we did not allow any of our rabbis to be critical of non-Orthodox movements from the pulpit, as etiquette. And we generated two principles that meant that on half the things we could work together, so every Orthodox Jew in Britain had friends who were Reform Jews, and every Reform Jew had friends who were Orthodox Jews, and it worked.

It wasn't a perfect solution because we still live in an imperfect world. So that was how we dealt with it practically, and it worked. 

The second thing was how do you deal with it, as it were, ideologically and intellectually? And I saw the problem as follows.

We had a problem. Could you sit together, Orthodox and non-Orthodox, on the same platform? And the consensus of my rabbis was you can't. So okay, what happens if you can't sit together? I said to my guys, what if we walk together? They said, that's okay.

So fine, so in my first year, I think or my second year as Chief Rabbi, I proposed the Chief Rabbi's Marathon, which being filtered through the filter of the Jewish community, changed over the course of about three meetings, from a run to a walk, and from 27 miles to round Hyde Park in Kensington Gardens, but we got the whole of Anglo-Jewry walking together. Now, and this was fabulous. We were raising funds for all the charities in Anglo-Jewry, and we walked together, and it was fun, and it was great.

But the week beforehand, we did a trial. See, can anything go wrong with a walk around Hyde Park? And we had the six organisers and the Mayor of Westminster on this little dress rehearsal, and within five minutes, the six of us had gone in six different directions. So we're thinking, what do we do when we have thousands and thousands of people next Sunday doing this walk? 

And I said, very simple. You see that bridge over the Serpentine in the distance? Have somebody with a megaphone on the bridge saying, “Kiddush this way.” 

Mijal: For Ashkenazi food or Sephardi food? 

Rabbi Sacks: A mix, okay. So what we have is we may choose our individual routes, but let's have a shared destination. 

Mijal: All right, thank you so much, Rabbi Sacks. Thank you so much, Tal. I'm now going to take questions from the audience… So can we have like true pluralism within different denominations when it comes to conversion? Let me take one more question.

So how can we have a more ethical business world? 

Tal: So I'm not sure we have the right, or frankly the means, to take responsibility for the ethical decisions of other people. If we can frame conventions and rules and norms around whatever it is we're doing. You asked about business, but it's not just in business.

I think that's obviously useful. I don't feel particular shame that Bernie Madoff was Jewish. That's just not something that figures for me. I don't know if that's what you're thinking of. But right, there are great examples of Jews on all sides. So that's not something that troubles me terribly.

Mijal: Thank you. Rabbi, can you address the question that we had earlier about that? 

Rabbi Sacks: I want to address both of them. First of all, the differential standards for conversion. Please understand that that is not a problem that generates insoluble human problems. That is to say, let's say somebody has a Reform conversion. That is valid currency within their Reform community. If they want to move to an Orthodox community, there is nothing about that Reform conversion that says you are considered by us completely invalid as a candidate for conversion. Please, you've come 10 miles to establish your Orthodox standing or that of your children. Can you do the one extra mile? I mean, mamzerut, for instance, the problems of illegitimacy in Jewish law really create insoluble human tragedies. Conversion doesn't. Any couple who want to move forward in their observance can do so. We are not going to solve the issue of ‘Who is a Jew?’ in terms of a pluralistic approach to conversion.

It's not on the table. It won't happen. Don't expect it to happen.

But it does not need to be the divisive issue that it has become in the relationship between Israel and the Diaspora. This is the fundamental difference between halachically valid conversion and eligibility for Israeli citizenship under the Law of Return. And those two things should be seen as different things.

I've given testimony to this on the various commissions of enquiry the Government of Israel has put forward. Somebody who says, ‘I see myself as a Jew, I want to align myself with the Jewish people and its fate in the Jewish land’ should be accepted under the Law of Return regardless of whether that was an Orthodox conversion or a Reform conversion. Full stop.

So let it not stand between us and Israel as if Israel is turning its back on sincere people who have made huge personal journeys. I think we have to say Israel embraces everyone who wants to be embraced by it. 

But here I'm going to disagree with you, Tal. I love you dearly, but I'm going to disagree with you on this second question. I cannot say that we have done our job on business ethics. I want to be very blunt with you on this.

To me, if a Jewish business person does something wrong, immoral, cause loss to innocent individuals, that is called Chilul Hashem. And we have to act so it doesn't happen. Now what I did, and it was virtually almost the first thing I did as Chief Rabbi was to establish in Britain the Jewish Association of Business Ethics.

It was the best business ethics organisation in the country bar none. All our top business people were members of it. All our top professionals were members of it. Our top financial journalists wrote scenarios. We enacted them. We took the programme to schools. We had the business successes themselves go to schools. We said it's payback time. These young people are looking up to you. They want to be like you. Tell them how you will resolve these ethical dilemmas.

It was an unbelievable success and we created out of it a “Money and Morals” curriculum from which we removed the Jewish content and gave it to Britain as an option for every single school in Britain. It was launched in the Houses of Parliament and it became a national curriculum. That lasted for 20 years and in those 20 years we did not have one single business scandal in Britain. Why? 

Because the mere fact of getting those business leaders together to talk about ethics, and to talk about it in the company of rivals and other alpha males - and yes, alpha females as well, gender equity on that one - actually created this ethical climate. And it was fantastic and I am appalled that there's no such business ethics centre here in American Jewry or in Israeli Jewry. 

And we, the rabbis, are responsible for the sin of omission because we did not do enough to tell people, ‘If you're Jewish, then the Talmud in Masechet Yoma says, ‘When you get to Heaven, the first question you will be asked is not, ‘Did you keep kosher? Did you learn Daf Yomi?’ But ‘Nasata veNatata b’emuna?’ Did you act honestly in business? And if we can't stand up for ethics in business, who can? 

Mijal: Well, Rabbi, you finished your work here at NYU. If you want to start that centre here in America, I know that we'd really love it. Thank you, I want to take two final questions and then I'll let Tal and the Rabbi give their closing remarks. 

…Okay, thank you. So if we have new systems of centralised leadership that can help new types of Jewish life, how are those leaders chosen? 

One more question, yes, over here. 

Questioner: So you both seem to support and embrace certain overarching principles or values that Judaism brings to the world, but do you think that this is enough to define Judaism in the 21st century to maintain our identity, or is it necessary for us to continue to follow certain halachic principles such as Shabbat, Kashrut, etc., to continue or maintain the foundation for those principles? 

Mijal: Thank you. 

Rabbi Sacks: In relation to the second question, do we need Halacha? Of course we need Halacha. Let me be very straightforward. 

Ancient Greece produced the world's first philosophers, the world's first scientists. They believed in ‘Truth Thought.’ We believe, as Jews, in ‘Truth Lived.’ 

It is through the way we live a certain life that we actually create those values. So you can't have Shabbat without the laws of Shabbat.

Judaism takes these abstract ideals and turns them into an intricate choreography of action which generates a life as a work of art, and that is the poetry of Halacha. 

Now, you and I know that if you ask people what's the state of the Jewish world? They'll tell you, ‘Oy, Israel is in shtuch,’ ‘Oy, Jews are assimilating and disappearing,’ ‘Oy, no Jew talks to one another,’ the “Oy Vay Theory” of Jewish identity, but I want to tell you that the historic truth is otherwise. 

We have waited 38 centuries since the first recorded syllables of Jewish time, when that journey began with Avraham and Sarah - “Lech lecha meArtzecha” - for something that none of our ancestors ever experienced.

Simultaneously, independence and sovereignty in the State of Israel, freedom and equality in the Diaspora. 

Maybe there were times when we had one, maybe there were times when we had the other. We never had them both simultaneously, and what are we doing with this moment that we waited 38 centuries for? We're throwing away our shot.

And that's why I love Tal's book, because he is telling us, loud and clear, we're throwing away our shot. Why did we want Israel? Why did we want freedom and equality in the Diaspora? I think we wanted Israel because, if you read Torah, the Torah is not a recipe for the salvation of the soul. It's a set of instructions, it's an algorithm, for building a society based on justice, compassion, the sanctity of life, and the non-negotiable dignity of the individual. That's what we had Israel for, to be a light to the world.

Why did we have freedom and equality in the Diaspora? So that we could do what Avraham was told to do in that first call from God, “V’nivr’oo becha, kol mishpachot haAdama,” through you shall all the families of the earth be blessed. And all of a sudden, people are asking, ‘Oh, why do we have Israel? Why do we have freedom and equality?’ We're throwing it away. 

I cannot begin to tell you the tears that I hear from Heaven right now.

Hashem is saying, ‘Look, I've given you everything you ever wanted. What are you doing with it? When you were persecuted for being Jews, you stayed being Jews. When you stop being persecuted from Jews, you walk away. When you had nothing to thank Me for, one Jew asks another, ‘How are you doing?’ And they reply, ‘Baruch Hashem, thank God.’ Now you have everything to thank Me for, you don't even speak to Me.’ 

The Almighty is a little bit like a Jewish parent - “You never call me these days.”

And Israel, okay, Israel is surrounded - Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran. But the fact is that Israel - and I really include secular Israelis here - I believe that Tal is a living proof of my proposition that secular Israelis are the only people who really believe that secular Israelis are secular.

I mean, here's a secular guy who writes, “God is in the Crowd.” The first word you write is the Ribono shel Olam. Secular Israelis are ma’aminim bnei ma’aminim, but they don't have rabbis who are willing to go out and say, ‘Tal, and all of you secular Israelis, we admire you, we respect you, because without secular Jews, we'd still be davening for a State of Israel. And because of secular Jews, we have a State of Israel.’ 

Mijal: Well. Thank you. Thank you. 

Rabbi Sacks: So, please, let us, all of us - Reform, Orthodox, religious, secular, work together, hear the call of 38 centuries, and let us go out and be true to our faith and a blessing to the world. Thank you.

Mijal: Tal. 

Tal: I'm gonna give a brief plea, which is also hopefully an answer to both of the questions that were asked here. Not just a system of ethics. I agree with that. Not a centralisation of power. And I encourage you, I encourage everyone to read the book to get exactly my thoughts on that.

But part of the exercise of Judaism - maybe the essential part of the exercise of Judaism - is being the medium through which Judaism is communicated and amended over the generations. 

It is our medium. We are not a succession of edicts issued from Above. We are the authors of our destiny. 

And what I would ask of everybody in the room - and as many Jews as we can get - is engage in this conversation. I'd love if you did it through the book, but you can do it through other ways as well. Engage in this conversation. Let's reclaim agency and direct ourselves to the future that we want collectively. Thanks.

Closing remarks