Torah in Motion 10th Anniversary

[Introductory remarks...]

Moderator, Dr. Elliott Malamet: … Chief Rabbi, a central theme of “Future Tense” is one you've pursued throughout your career. The Jews are not alone in the world. Despite the fact of numerous external challenges to the Jewish people In Israel and the Diaspora, you argue that, quote, “Today, Jews are not victims, not powerless, And do not stand alone.” Unquote. And you add that to think in such terms is counterproductive and dysfunctional.

Now, the devil's advocate argument, of course, which I'm sure you know, would be to assert that, given the rise of antisemitism in many quarters, and the demonisation and delegitimisation of Israel inside the U.N. and without, that Jews have every reason to feel that they're fighting a lonely battle in the modern world. Could you please explain to our audience why Jews should, in your words, take a stand not motivated by fear, not driven by paranoia or a sense of victimhood, but a positive stand on the basis of Jewish values? 

Rabbi Sacks: Ah, right, sorry. Elliott, I wonder if you would forgive me if I just briefly respond because, you know, I must say some personal thanks to all of you, to Julia, to Irwin. Sorry about your mobile phone. I once thought that we might resolve some of the difficulties in understanding Torah on the theory that God gave the Torah by mobile phone. Or maybe your reception is better in Toronto than it is in London.

But I thank Julia and Erwin for your words. And as a former American Ambassador to Britain, Ray Seitz, once said, “Compliments are fine, so long as you don't inhale.” So can I begin by saying that in Julia Koschitzky and in Professor Irwin Cotler, you have two of the real heroes of today's Jewish world. And in a community like Toronto, that has many heroes. And we salute you and we say to Hashem, may He continue to bless you, and may you continue to bless us.

I want to say a personal thank you to everyone here at Shaarei Shamayim for being our host this evening and to wish your new rabbi, Rabbi Chaim Strauchler, bracha v’hatzlacha in all he does. You're very lucky to have him and we wish him and the community continued growth.

Torah in Motion is a brilliant programme and I too salute Rabbi Joe Kelman and Elliott and everyone involved in this programme. And you are absolutely right. Torah is, of its essence, in motion. We are between Noach and Lech Lecha. And that is the real difference between last week and this week. Noach means to rest, rest content, menucha. You’re static. Whereas the words we always associate with Avraham are "lech lecha”. Always moving, always growing, always challenging. And then when both Julia and Irwin mention page 58 of “A Letter in the Scroll,” I have to say I only write the books, I never read them. I got terribly worried since 58 is gematria “Noach” whereas “Lech Lecha” is gematria 100, so I better be careful to write some good stuff on page 100 of the next book I write.

And finally, may I say what a privilege it is to be in this great community of Toronto - or everyone said “Trono” so I'm not sure… It's a community that I so admire. One of the great Jewish communities of the world. You are passionate for Israel. You are passionate for Jewish day school education. You had the seichel to put every Jewish institution in Bathurst Street… If that ain't a sign of incipient Jewish unity - I wouldn't accuse you of having achieved it yet - but at least incipient, you're all on the same road. You're all in the same… so kol hakavod to all of you and it's a privilege to be here. And now Elliott, would you remind me what the question was.

Okay. The answer is very simple. Okay, so some people don't like this very much. Now, 90% - forgive me, that's their problem. Bad things happen, so some of it is our problem. But the question is how do we respond? And let me be very blunt with you, Elliott. There is a horrendous thing that happened. None of us should pass judgement on European Jewry in the 19th century. But European Jewry in the 19th century made a horrendous mistake, which all of us would have made I think, in the same circumstances. 

They said this: non-Jews don't like this very much. You know, the 19th century was a horrific moment for European Jewry because on the one hand, all the rhetoric was enlightenment, emancipation, Jews are going to have equal rights, you're the same as us. But that same century of emancipation was the century that saw the birth of racial antisemitism. And, already by 1862 Moses Hess could see this and Jews internalised this antisemitism. And they said, ‘Why do gentiles hate us? Must be because we're different. So therefore, let's stop being different, and they won't hate us anymore.’

And so, they don't like us because we don't eat in their homes, we'll give up kashrut. They don't like us because we pray in a strange language, we'll pray in English, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And they took every move to divest themselves of everything that made Jews different.

Did that reduce antisemitism by one millimetre? Not by one. 

And I don't know if you've read - has it come out here in Canada? - a very moving book by somebody called Edmund de Waal called “The Hare with Amber Eyes.” Has it come out? And it tells the story of a remarkable Jewish family that I didn't know about, the Ephrussi family. About Charles Ephrussi, this great esthete, a Jewish banking family almost, second only to the Rothschilds in the 19th century. About Charles Ephrussi in Paris, about Victor Ephrussi in Vienna. These were people at the very peak of society, and yet like that, in 1938, the Anschluss. Everything… And before that, in Paris, when Edouard Drumont Drouin wrote that book “La France Juive,” you know, which was a virulently antisemitic book in the 1880s that became a bestseller in France and remained a bestseller. There were 200 editions of that book produced between the 1880s and 1945. 

And then Vienna and the Anschluss… all of that attempt to be like everyone else… Jews cannot cure antisemitism. The victim cannot cure the crime. The hated cannot cure the hate. Who are the only people who can cure antisemitism? The people who lead the cultures that give rise to antisemitism. And therefore we need friends and allies. And that is why the work of the people in London in organising that conference and the wonderful work that Irwin does here in Canada, England and Canada became the first two countries where the fight against antisemitism was led by non-Jews. And we owe those non-Jews a tremendous debt.

And what happens when you go out to make friends? You know, I was very touched by your reference to the book “A Letter in the Scroll.” You know that book is not called “A Letter in the Scroll.” In England, it's called “Radical Then, Radical Now.” It was then translated into Ivrit. I have two brothers who made aliyah… and it's called “Radikaliut Az…” And my brother is a big mischief,... and you know him, I think. He said, ‘You know Jonathan, your book has just come out in Israel. It's called Ridiculous Then. Ridiculous Now.”

In England, it was called “Radical Then, Radical Now” because in England my books are read by non-Jews. And I want you to understand this. That book was serialised in the Times. Now this is a book about Jewish pride. And I said to the Editor, the Deputy Editor of the Times, you know, Jews are less than one half of one percent of the population. The readership of the Times is 99.5% non-Jews. I said to the Deputy Editor of the Times, Michael Gove, ‘Why are you publishing this? This is about Jewish identity.’ He said - this non-Jew - “Because you're our Chief Rabbi.”

Now go figure this. This is 2000. Today, 11 years later, Michael Gove is no longer the Deputy Editor of the Times. He entered Parliament and is today Secretary of State for Education and will get up in any gathering, Jewish or non-Jewish, and tell a non-Jewish public, number one, ‘You want something to admire? Jewish day schools.’ And then he will go on and say, ‘You want something else to admire? The State of Israel.’ 

Now here is a non-Jew who has become the biggest single defender of the State of Israel in the current government and the biggest single supporter of Jewish education. In 2002, May 2002, you remember what May 2002 was? We had the suicide bombing at its height, that horrendous bombing at the Park Hotel in Netanya, Erev Pesach. Then Jenin, the reply. It was a horrifically tense moment between Jews and Muslims in Britain.

May 2002, the Queen, Her Majesty - I should stand when I say that, but you take the point - gave a little reception for kol ma’aminim shehu, of all faiths in Britain, in Buckingham Palace. Towards the end, I am approached by a very Haredi Muslim who comes up to me and says, “Chief Rabbi, you are the Chief Rabbi, aren't you?” 

I said, “Yes.”

He said, “My wife wants a word with you.”

And she comes towards me with a big hijab and I’m dreading what she is going to say. And she comes up to me and says, “Chief Rabbi, I just want to thank you for “Radical Then, Radical Now,” for “A Letter in the Scroll.”

Go figure. You stand up for your faith. Other people respect you for that. You see yourself as a victim, other people will see you as a victim. You have to do the opposite thing. 

One month earlier, in April 2002, the Union of Jewish Students came to me saying, you know, there is a lot of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish sentiment on campus. And I sat down with the Union of Jewish Students and I said, ‘You are going to do the unexpected thing.’ They call this in psychotherapy, paradoxical intervention. ‘Your response to antisemitism on campus is that you are going to lead the fight against Islamophobia.’

Out of that initiative came an organisation which is very prominent today in Britain called the Coexistence Trust, Jews and Muslims fighting antisemitism and Islamophobia together. And that is now a group that has tremendous presence in the Houses of Parliament and in British political life and is a model for all other communities. 

You want to fight antisemitism? The simplest account I can give when anyone asks me is the profound words of one of the greatest Jewish mystics of all time, Nachman of Bratslav, which is so simple that we teach them as a song to our five-year-old children, kol ha’olam kulo gesher tzar me’od. Life isn't easy. It's full of dangers. V’haIkar shelo lefached klal. The main thing is never to be afraid. If you walk tall, if you have absolute confidence, you go out to make friends, you win those friends.

And with friends like those, we will fight antisemitism and we will win. 

Elliott: Since everyone has been talking about “Radical Then, Radical Now,” we'll mention it. I remember when I read the book the first time and I was very struck by the opening, especially. If you haven't read the book, in the opening of the book there's a group of students who came to Rabbi Sacks and asked him about their college project. So he told them to send out a survey to Jews of diverse backgrounds, asking what being a Jew meant to them. Very few of them answered the survey, but those that did, there was actually a resounding negativity about their Jewishness. In fact, it was perhaps, to my mind, best encapsulated by one man who quoted an Israeli boy who viewed Judaism as a “hereditary illness.” That's what the boy said. It's a hereditary illness.

So when the man asked him, ‘Why do you consider it a hereditary illness?’ He said, ‘Because you get it from your parents and you pass it down to your children and not a small number of people have died from it.’ So that's a pretty chilling thing to say about being Jewish.

So the book focuses in large part on Judaism as a revolution, as a revolution, as a radical wholesale change in not only the prevalent outlooks of the ancient world, but in the history of humankind. Now my question to you is that many Jews today view Judaism as a kind of ancient, somewhat antiquated system. So I'm wondering if you can articulate why you see Judaism as revolutionary and also why it's not perceived by more Jews that way as a radical faith.

Rabbi Sacks: Because, you know, we practise Judaism without thinking about it. And that is bad news because, you know, Jews - and even Sigmund Freud saw this in his last work, “Moses and Monotheism” - were thinkers. We always preferred the intellectual to the physical. And somehow or other something went wrong. 

You know, 1756, Voltaire wrote a virulently antisemitic article about Jews and Judaism in which he said Jews contributed nothing new to civilisation. Not in the arts, not in the sciences, not in philosophy, not even in religion. 1756. Over the next 200 years, we produced geniuses in every single field. In physics, Einstein. In sociology, Durkheim. In Levi-Strauss. In anthropology, Levi-Strauss. In philosophy, Birx and Wittgenstein. Everyone from Irving Berlin to Isaiah Berlin, you name it, they were Jewish. In psychoanalysis, they had to have Jung there as the token gentile. I mean, everyone else was Jewish. Mind you, who else needs psychoanalysis? 

Then it came to apikorsim. You know, of the four great apikorsim of the modern age, three of them were Jewish: Spinoza, Marx, Freud. The only one who wasn't Jewish was Charles Darwin. Why Charles Darwin wasn't Jewish, I'm not sure yet. Long beard, total apikoros, he had every qualification. I had to come to the conclusion that Darwin was a random genetic mutation.

But every one of those intellectuals was estranged from Judaism. So we had this unbelievably profound people asking challenging and profound questions, coming up with radically new ways of seeing the world. And at the same time, they were turning their backs on Judaism, and Judaism retreated and retreated until it became afraid to ask the deep questions.

And that is really, really bad news. But Judaism remains radical. For instance, let me give you a for instance, which to me was really rather strange. About two years ago, when was the conference on climate change in Copenhagen? You remember that one? All the world's governments came. So it's interesting, you know, that the government came to the faith leaders in Britain before they sent the minister to Copenhagen. They wanted to know what we had to say. So we had all the faiths there, so I told them, you know, what do you need to solve the world's climate, global warming and climate change?

Well, what about Shabbat? One day in seven, no driving, no planes, no this, that and the other. You would solve the world's energy crisis and climate crisis at a stroke.

They're sitting there with their mouths open. An imam comes up to me and says, you know, ‘Chief Rabbi, I never thought of that before. I'm going to tell all our imams to tell people not to drive to the mosque on Friday.’

I wish I could get some rabbis to say that. 

So climate change, the Bible, the Torah, contains in parshat Behar and in Sefer Devarim, the world's first environmental legislation. When the big issue of international debt came up towards the millennium in the late 1990s, it was the Vatican, it was the United Nations, sorry, and the World Bank or the IMF or what have you, that came up with this campaign for international debt relief called Jubilee 2000.

And it was based on Vayikra Chapter 25 and Shemitat Kesafim. This was the great idea and it's 3,300 years ago. What astonished me, because we've been out of Britain now, we've been in motion, I've got to tell you, we've been running around from Chicago to Boston to New York to Washington to here and I'm asking my staff to phone me up every day just to tell me where I am.

And so, I just picked up on my emails yesterday and today. Yesterday in the Daily Telegraph and today in the Evening Standard, two non-Jewish journalists, because there's a, do you have here an “Occupy Wall Street” movement here? And in New York, certainly, we really saw it there. And some people in America have been worried about some antisemitic tendencies among the protesters. Have you seen that? Okay, so on Thursday, somebody called Christina Odone in the Telegraph and today somebody called Matthew d’Ancona in the Evening Standard, have said, in effect, ‘Chief Rabbi, could you come home? We need you.’

Because they are camped outside St. Paul's Cathedral and the church is not sure whether to be for or against or what have you. And both of them said that ‘The Chief Rabbi has been the one voice that has defended on the one hand the market economy and on the other hand, the need for ethics in economics.’ Because the first thing, almost the first thing I set up, when I became Chief Rabbi was the Jewish Association of Business Ethics.

So here, our defence of market economics on the one hand, but our insistence on tzedaka and chesed, distributive justice and the alleviation of poverty on the other, turns out to be absolutely as new as today's and yesterday's newspapers. So I think Judaism, everywhere you look, continues to be radical and I'm just sorry that we don't see it. I’m sorry.

Elliott: So why the disconnect then? In other words, why doesn't the message get through? We're not manifesting it properly, we're not communicating it properly, we're not disseminating it properly? If the message is good, but the people don't hear it, where's the impasse, where's the block?

Rabbi Sacks: I don't know. I try and read a lot of books. I must mention one of the great influences on my life, my Rav, who came to London from Toronto, from Clanton Park Shul, Rabbi Nachum Rabinovitch shlita, one of the great, great rabbanim and thinkers of our time, with whom I learned daily for 12 years, and to whom I owe everything.

And I said to him, ‘I suffer from insomnia,’ and he said, ‘Could you tell me the technique?’ So I read a lot, I surf Amazon.com a lot, I buy a lot of books, and I read in every kind of discipline. And I'm constantly arguing now, asking, where does that connect with Torah?

And I think, and I call this in “Future Tense,” in my new book, Torah v'Chochma. So I think you need to sort of place yourself in these disciplines, whether it's neuroscience or evolutionary psychology, or it's cosmology, or it's economic theory or games theory. And you constantly, if your mind is open, and you look at the wisdom of the world, you actually will see new things in Torah.

And the person who said this was Rav Tzadok HaKohen MiLublin, who said, since we say that HaKadosh Baruch Hu is “yistakel b’oraita uvorei alma,” since the Torah is the blueprint of the world, and since we say “HaMechadesh b’tuvo beChol yom tamid ma’aseh bereishit,” that God renews the world every day, then we should take the renewal of the world, and it will allow us to see new faces in Torah. So that's the way I do it. 

Elliott: I mean, sometimes students come to me with this sort of thorny problem that I know you've wrestled with, which is that many students today are universalists. So when you're trying to teach Judaism to them, their attitude is, ‘There's good stuff everywhere,’ and they don't understand Jewish particularism. So if Judaism is true, then why were Jews not commanded to go out and convert everyone to the one true faith? And if all people are made in God's image, and are indeed God's children, then how can any religion be singled out as true above and beyond others?

For many years in education, this is what I've heard. Along the same lines, how can a certain people be called ‘chosen’? What does that mean? And so on. So how would you respond to the dilemma that moderns have with the idea of trumpeting or championing one faith, one idea, one people above others? 

Rabbi Sacks: Well, you know, I tell this story about the late Rav Shlomo Carlebach, of blessed memory, who spent a lifetime going around campuses, and then towards the end of his life he said, ‘I go to see students, and I ask them what they are, and if somebody says, I'm a Protestant, I know that's a Protestant. And if somebody says, I'm a Catholic, I know that's a Catholic. And if somebody says, I'm just a human being, I know that's a Jew.’

Where did we ever get this crazy idea? One of the most radical Jewish ideas ever. And it is the idea most necessary for the world in the 21st century. Is that, tzadikei - or chasidei - umot haOlam, yesh lahem chelek l’olam haba. That the righteous, the nations of all the world, have a share in the World to Come.

That meant that Judaism never held ecclesiam non est salus, that outside our faith, there's no way to heaven. We never said that. Now in a plural world, we need the Jewish teaching.

When I, in the summer of 2000, addressed the United Nations, we had the modestly entitled Millennium Peace Summit. You can tell how effective we were this week. All the religious leaders of the world came together in the summer of 2000, declared world peace, and just a year later we got 9-11, so we weren't that great.

But there was an Indian guru, who said to me, ‘Rabbi Sacks, I would like you to be a keynote speaker in our counter conference.’ And I said, ‘What's your counter conference?’ He said, ‘The World Conference of Non-Evangelising Faiths.’ And I began to realise that that is what speaks to so many people about Jews. Jews serve God, but they don't force it on anyone else. They don't try and conquer or convert the world.

It's our most radical thing. And therefore, I had to bring about a way of expressing this very complex idea in a simple way. And I meditated on it for several years, and eventually I came up with the phrase, “the dignity of difference.”

Abraham was told, leave behind all the things that make people the same, their land, their birthplace, their culture, their father's house. Go and be different. Why?To teach the world the dignity of difference. 

And I road-tested this. Every year, Elaine and I give a reception in June, just after the close of the academic year, for the leadership of the National Union of Students. Not the Jewish students, the non-Jewish students. We feel, because Israel is coming under attack, we need to have the students as a whole on our side. And they really are. They've been heroic. 

And I tested. Each year, I give them a shiur before the reception, and I road-tested on these non-Jewish students “the dignity of difference” concept. And I saw these guys - Hindus, Sikhs, guys from the Caribbean - leaving the room, walking an inch taller. And I suddenly realised it works for them. We always knew we were different, but we always thought that was bad news. Now the Chief Rabbi is telling us it's good news. 

And because it worked on them, I realised it worked, full stop. Now you may feel that London University is very antisemitic or anti-Israel, but if you walk along Gower Street, you will come to ULU, the University of London Union. Look to one side as you come through the front door. On the wall, outside, is a plaque. And it is a quote from “Dignity of Difference.” You know, with author, Chief Rabbi Sacks. And it says the following, “Because we are all different, we each have something unique to contribute.” And the students, the non-Jewish students, took that as their message.

So we are the people who believe in a particular faith and a universal God. The miracle of monotheism, we say, is not one God, one truth, one way for all humankind. The miracle of monotheism is that unity up there creates diversity down here.

And I had to do it that way so that we would not see particularism as a reason for disengaging with the world or considering ourselves superior to the world. 

Elliott: And yet it seems sometimes that that message gets lost in the sort of attacks on religion that are so much a part of contemporary life. I have many students who quote a lot more from Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens than they do from the Torah and the Talmud. And that's a trend that is growing. What the nation called the New Atheists is in vogue. And they attack religion with flourish as the province of irrationality and even fanaticism.

And they capture spots on bestseller lists. And for believers, it's actually perturbing to read some of the arguments because the methodology is often to portray the very worst elements of religion, or particular historical incidents in religion, and to convey them as a typical representation of the faith. Now, I'm wondering why you think that this has become so popular now, to deride religion as negative, as simple-minded, as destructive.

Is it because those people who are condemning religion are only viewing its worst aspects and can't be bothered really to portray a more nuanced picture? Or are they actually picking up on real problems within religious communities that sort of fail to create and to communicate a more sophisticated, a more nurturing message of the best that religion has to offer? Why is this so in vogue?

Rabbi Sacks: Well, Elliott, as you know, that's my next book. It's come out in Britain already. It's coming out here in the States and Canada next year. It's called “The Great Partnership - God, Science and the Search for Meaning.” And it's my response to Richard Dawkins. 

Just 10 days ago, I met Richard for the first time. We did a 45-minute conversation together on BBC. And I actually liked him. I'm terribly embarrassed to say this. And he liked me. I think we're actually going to get on because I said, “‘You know, if we invited you for dinner, would you come?” He didn't say “Only if it's treif.” I mean, actually said, “I'd love that.” So if we can convince Richard Dawkins that in Judaism we value an apikores more highly than an am ha’aretz, then maybe he'll become a Jewish atheist.

But that book is a serious attempt to move the argument on. I mean, enough already. You know, this new atheism is not new. It is a rather simplified and simplistic repeat of arguments that came from Hume and Kant and were said a lot better by Bertrand Russell. And so it's absolutely ridiculous. 

Why has it happened? It has happened because of that phenomenon most memorably described, almost a cliche now, by W.B. Yeats. You know, “Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. The best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

When a civilisation is at its prime, science and religion walk hand in hand. The society and religion walk hand in hand.

And that's how, you know, America and Britain were between roughly 1850 and 1950, something like that. But when that balance is disturbed, then you get movements towards the extremes. The secularists become more aggressive. The religious turn inward because they say the world doesn't understand us, it hates us. And then they turn inward and they move from, in secular terminology, from being a church to being a sect. And both are hostile towards one another.

And once there's that dynamic of hostility, it's extremely hard to do anything at all because the vociferous voices, the radical atheists and the religious fundamentalists, shout louder than anyone else. And frankly, somebody's got to step in and say, you know, there is common ground here. 

We're not going to convert the radical atheists and we're not going to convert the radical fundamentalists. But we have to be strong and firm in our conviction that science and religion do belong together. And I am proud to be a member of a religion that 2,000 years ago coined a bracha on seeing an eminent scientist, Jewish or non-Jewish, religious or secular. So Judaism has always valued science and seen it as having religious dignity. And that takes a lot of the sting out of Richard Dawkins. 

Elliott: I mean, this equation of faith with fundamentalism, do you see that as a kind of passing thing? Is that just sort of exacerbated by 9-11 anxiety and this ubiquitous discussion of Islamic terrorism? Or is there something actually more permanent? What I'm getting at is that are we in the final stages of something that the Enlightenment wrought that you talk about in “One People,” that MacIntyre talks about in “After Virtue,” which is the loss of shared moral meanings, that we don't seem to have a unified moral discourse that people share. So we use the same words - good, bad, right, wrong, evil - but it means so many different things to so many different people that you really don't have a cohesive public anymore that's really talking the same moral language.

And is this reversible? 

Rabbi Sacks: Look, religious extremism is on the increase in every religion I know. And the groups in the middle, you know, the more tolerant, the more embracing, are in decline everywhere I know. And this is a very difficult phenomenon and it bodes not well for any of us. And it's not a passing phenomenon. And even if it were a passing phenomenon, it would be incredibly dangerous.

And therefore, I think we have to take a stand and say, not to oppose either extreme, but to show there is a compelling alternative, that this idea that we don't share any values is absolutely ridiculous. 

We all share values. We all value honesty, integrity, decency, menschlichkeit, call it what you will.

The idea that human beings do not share moral values is ridiculous. And, you know, it's absurd. And that is actually why I reach out to a lot of faiths. Elaine and I have as our guests. We do receptions for the leaders of all the faiths in Britain, all the Christian denominations. You think we're divided, they're more divided. 

Somebody said there are 20,000 different varieties of Christianity. We've only got about 16 of Judaism, you know. We're not the world's most fractious religion.

And we bring the Muslims, the Sikhs, the Hindus, the Buddhists, the Jains, the Zoroastrians, not to forget the Baha'i. And we're friendly with all of them. And we come together, we pull them together whenever there's a moment of tension or crisis.

We bring all the leaders together and we show there is a compelling model of enlightened tolerance. 

Elliott: How can, from an educational standpoint, in your term as Chief Rabbi, Jewish education in the UK really exploded, right? There was a tremendous increase. It grew… 

Rabbi Sacks: I think ‘exploded’ is probably the wrong word here.

Elliott: There was a huge increase in parents sending their kids to schools. But then you have this problem of how can Jewish schools and Jewish educators assist students in this very delicate task, right, of both accepting the Western values that they live with - that autonomy, that diversity - but also with the allegiances demanded by Judaism.

How can they, it feels sometimes for them a kind of cognitive split. How can they merge and be Western and Jewish at the same time? 

Rabbi Sacks: First of all, I mean just in arithmetic terms, 20 years ago we had around between 25% and 30% of our children at Jewish day schools. Today, nearly 70%. And that is a tremendous transformation. And those schools are our pride and joy, as your schools are rightly your pride and joy.

We have one advantage over you. The government pays for them. 

What on earth are we doing underestimating the intelligence of our kids? You think they can't handle a dilemma? Our kids are a lot brighter than we give them credit for. And what we've done as far as we can is what we call an integrated curriculum. If you're studying art, integrate that in your Jewish work, you know, integrate that into the way kids make their own Haggadot or families together make their own Haggadot.

You're doing economics or moral philosophy, integrate that with the chosen sugyas. We try and make sure that the same critical intelligence they're using in their secular studies, they're using in their Jewish studies, and they are weaving them together. Because don't forget, in Judaism we believe the God of Revelation is the God of Creation. 

So all the secular studies they're studying about God in Creation or the nature of Creation must dovetail with what they're studying in Torah SheBa’al Peh and SheBichtav. Assume that they're integrated. 

The one thing I would challenge, however, is your view that we have to embrace the values of modernity. I am critical of many of the values of modernity. 

Individualism in modernity has wrecked the single institution that Jews valued more than anything else, and that matters to society more than anything else, which is marriage. If we're all individualists, if it's all ‘I, I, I,’ what happened to the ‘We’?

You know what an ‘I’ generation this is? You know, the Torah was given in our time by the late Steve Jobs, of blessed memory, who came down from the mountain with the two tablets, iPad 1 and iPad 2. And what is it? iPad, iPhone, iTunes, everything's I, I, I. What about the ‘We’? 

Now, what is the result of that individualist culture?

I hope you don't have this in Canada. I profoundly hope you don't. Britain today has the largest percentage of teenage pregnancies, the largest percentage of single parent families, and the largest percentage of children born outside of marriage in the world.

In 2009, in Britain as a whole, 46% of children were born outside of marriage. Now, everyone, all the chattering classes, say marriage is only a piece of paper. It is not only a piece of paper.

The average length of cohabitation without marriage is less than two years. So, you have 46% of children growing up, many of whom never know what is a father. In the mid-80s, a Christian clergyman in Newcastle said to me, ‘Rabbi Sacks, I spent my whole life going around to the children, teaching them Christianity, God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Ghost. I can't do that anymore because there's a word they don't understand, and it isn't God. It's Father.’ 

And do you know the result of all that? In 2007, UNICEF, the United Nations Children's branch, published a league table of countries and came up with the discovery that Britain's children are the unhappiest in the world.

On the 13th of September 2011, just seven weeks ago, a UNICEF follow-up study showed that British parents are trying to buy the affections of their children. They buy them expensive clothes, they buy them the latest smartphone, and the one thing they don't give the children is the one thing the children want. It costs nothing, and it's called time.

So, it seems to me here that we have to be critical, we have to engage critically with our time, and therefore I don't use the word ‘Modern Orthodox,’ because ‘ModernOrthodox’ implies we accept modernity. We don't accept anything - then, now, or in the future. We critically engage with.

And that is one of the great Jewish contributions to civilisation. We were of our time, but we were also of eternity. And therefore we could be the critical prophetic voice in civilisation.

Elliott: I don't actually remember saying that we should embrace the values of modernity. What I said is that my students embrace the values of modernity. 

Rabbi Sacks: OK, next time invite me to talk, schmooze with your students. I mean, seriously, because, you know, the values of modernity, some of them are beautiful, and some of them are just a wrong turning. 

Elliott: I think that, you know, there's a duality, there's a paradox there, because the very things that we like about modernity, the individualism, the ability to express, the lack of constraint, can also morph into the narcissism and the dysfunctionality that you're talking about, and I think they find it hard to modulate what goes into what. 

Rabbi Sacks: I'll tell you, I'll tell you the answer. The answer is not to forbid. The answer is not to condemn. The answer is not to wag your finger.

The truth is kids don't like that, especially once they reach the teenage years, and in my humble view, we have to give our children challenges that give them the ability to give us pride. It is my view that children grow to fill the space we create for them. And if that space is small, they'll stay small, and if that space is big, they will grow. 

Today's society sees kids as mini-consumers. Salvation by shopping, which is the new religion. It's amazing, you know. You think Jewish continuity. What do you say to kids about Jewish continuity? There is an advertisement for a watch, I love. I hope I will not be taken to task for this. It is called a Patek Philippe, and it says, “You never really own a Patek Philippe. You merely hold it in trust for the generations.” 

You know, this is crazy. Anyone who believes it. Can you imagine holding a Patek Philippe in trust for your grandson's bar mitzvah, and you say, ‘I've been holding this in trust for you,’ and he turns to a friend and says, ‘What a cheapskate, couldn't buy me this year's model?’ You know. 

So it is my view that the real way to teach kids is to really let them lead, and we do this by encouraging all our schools to have chesed programmes, and give those kids chesed awards, and let them do leadership stuff outside school.

And chevra, I'm going to tell you a story here, because, you know, if you're parents or grandparents, it's worth knowing this story. You know, Baruch Hashem, I and my brothers did okay academically, and my father, alav haShalom, who, you know, sold schmattes in Commercial Road (like New York's Lower East Side), never really succeeded in business, and the family was poor. They came over from Poland when he was young, and he had to leave school at the age of 14.

And they used to say, “Mr. Sacks, how come you had these four bright boys?” And he used to say, “It's their mother.” And I used to think, ‘Yeah, that's half right.’

But the truth is, I will tell you the answer. I remember this very vividly. When I was four or five years old, I would come back with my dad. We'd be walking back from shul, and I'd ask him, “Dad, why did they do this?” Or “What's the meaning of that?” And he always answered me the same way.

He used to say, “Jonathan, I did not have a Jewish education. So I can't answer your questions, but one day you will have the Jewish education I never had. And when that happens, you will teach me the answers to those questions.”

And if you want your kids to be good Jews, that's what you say to them. Let your children be your teachers. Don't say negative stuff about the culture. Give them the chance to give you Jewish pride. 

Elliott: Chief Rabbi, I'd like to conclude our discussion by returning to “Future Tense.” And there you write about the dangers of both, a certain kind of universalism and particularism, of assimilation on the one side and insularity on the other side, as responses to modernity. And it seems like a very difficult balance sometimes, because too much engagement can lead to a loss of rooted Jewish identity. Too much insularity, and Jews are no longer communicating with or in touch with the world at large. 

So I have two questions. One is, what do you feel Judaism can teach humanity as a whole?

And how can we interact with the world without losing ourselves? 

Rabbi Sacks: I can simply tell you what non-Jews want to learn from us. I was so concerned about the decline of the family in Britain that some years ago I made a television documentary on the state of the family for the BBC. It wasn't Jewish, it wasn't religious. And one of the things I did, just out of interest, out of curiosity, I invited Britain's leading childcare expert, a lady called Penelope Leach, who wasn't Jewish, and I didn't know her, but I thought, let's get a childcare expert who knows nothing about Judaism and come and see what we do in Jewish day schools. Just let us, you know, let's see. Something interesting may come out. 

So we took her to one of our primary schools on a Friday morning where the kids are doing their mock Shabbat thing. You know, the five-year-old mother and father blessing the five-year-old children, and they're the five-year-old bubba and zayda, etc.

And she's absolutely gobsmacked. She never saw anything like this before. And she's talking to these five-year-old kids, and she's saying, “What do you like about Shabbat? What don't you like about Shabbat?” And the kids were saying, “Well, Shabbat, can't watch television, it's terrible, it's terrible.” 

“And what do you like about Shabbat?” And this five-year-old boy said, “What do I like about Shabbat? It's the only day Daddy doesn't have to rush off.”

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

And you know, Elaine and I, because we care about good relations with other faiths, decided a couple of years ago to spend a week in Amritsar in North India - which is, Amritsar is the Jerusalem of the Sikhs, as the Golden Temple. And we spent a week there with Sikhs, with Hindus, and a week with the Dalai Lama. And you wouldn't believe this, lo yuman, we're in a Sikh university in Amritsar with 2,000 Sikhs.

The Dalai Lama spoke. I spoke. One of the world's leading Sikhs, Mahendra Singh, stands up in front of 2,000 Sikhs and says, “You know what we need? We need Shabbat.”

The Sikhs are very family-minded and very child-focused, the way we are. And he said, ‘You know, it's a day where you spend time with the children, you can't buy anything, isn't it? No distractions…’

I thought, ‘You know, next week I'm going to get him to give that drasha in shul.’

Wherever you look, we have a message for humanity. Because we've been around for an awfully long time, twice as long as Christianity, three times as long as Islam. Every great empire in antiquity all the way to the present tried to destroy us. Civilisations that seemed invulnerable in their time, that bestrode the narrow world like Colossus, whether it was Egypt of the pharaohs or Assyria or Babylon or the Alexandrian Empire or the Roman Empire or the mediaeval empires of Christianity and Islam, all the way to the Third Reich and the Soviet Union. Every one of those civilisations is today extinct.

And we, this tiny, fragile, vulnerable people of less than one-fifth of one percent of the population of the world, can still stand and sing Am Yisrael Chai. Therefore, I say in “Future Tense,” at the end, that “Judaism is the voice of hope in the conversation of humankind.” And I also believe, and although we're not going to stray into this territory, that if people would approach politics with an open mind, they would look at this tiny, fragile, vulnerable State of Israel, and see what it has done with a smaller population and a younger age than any country in the Middle East.

How it has enhanced the sciences and the arts and the humanities, the chein of their medical services. How it taught the world how to farm. How it taught the world the most advanced medical techniques. How it taught the world how, out of this resource-free zone, it focused on human capital, on human beings as infinitely valuable, and out of that created some of the world's leading technologies. 

Israel is the voice of hope for small, young nations. If Israel can do it, others can do it.

That is the message that we have to deliver again and again and again. It will be good for the world, and it will be good for us. 

Too often, Judaism is beset with klein-shtetl politics. Toronto is a total exception. 

But, Ribono shel Olam, min haMeitzar karati kah, anani b'merchav kah? Do we have to sit in this tiny little space arguing with one another?

Let us go out to the world and say, ‘Rabbotai, you know, we don't claim to have the monopoly over truth. We think, "bei mir bistu shein" [yiddish for “To me you’re beautiful”], you Sikhs and Hindus and Muslims and Christians and even Richard Dawkins, may Hashem preserve him, l'arichut yamim. You're beautiful.’

“Vayar Elokim ki tov.” If God could see the good in everything, so can we. And we can say to them, ‘Rabbotai, you have a problem. This is how we, over 4,000 years of reflection, address that problem. If it works for you, have it. And if it doesn't work for you, est nisht geferlach.’ [yiddish: not dangerous, ie, no problem.]

Judaism is the least threatening religion in the world. Unless you happen to be Jewish. 

But I mean… We have a message to say to the world, so let us say it out there. Let us, you know, I'm sure it's happening in Toronto, it's happening in London, all the hot-shot law firms put up a sukkah. For heaven's sake, you know, I don't know if you even saw this in New York, on the “Occupy Wall Street,” they put up a sukkah.

Did you see this? They put up a sukkah and this black cop - it's a true story - came in and he looked at the schach and they said, ‘What are you looking at?’ He said, ‘I just wanted to see if you could see the sky through the schach, I just wanted it to be kosher.’ You know, true story, it was in the news a couple of weeks ago. 

You know, wear our Judaism with pride and it'll be good for us, we will breathe a larger air. It'll be good for the world and we will all benefit. 

And is it difficult? Yes. 

Is it fraught with risk? Yes.

Should we be afraid? No. 

Because if we truly believe the words we say in davening every day or every year, then we know that faith must conquer fear.

And simply to sum up that message, if that's my last little thing before I go and sign the books and you get a bit of fresh air and stuff, I will tell you a little story and with this I will end, because we've just been through all the Chagim. 

And I don't know, is Canadian English more like English English or American English? 

Elliott: It's the usual Canadian confusion.

Rabbi Sacks: Anyway, in American English there's a wonderful word that we don't have in English English. The word ‘through,’ which means up to and including, right? 

We don't have that in English English. And this created enormous problems. I don't know if you know this. There's a machloket poskim, a machloket achronim, as to whether you say, how long do you say, “L'David Hashem Ori V’Yishi”?

We start on the first of Elul. Till when do you say it? Do you say it until Hoshana Rabba? Or do you say it up to Shemini Atzeret? Do you say it on Shemini Atzeret? And yesh poskim lekan veyesh poskim lechan, but here it's actually a geographical difference.

The East Europeans tend to say Shemini Atzeret, the West tend to say it only up to Hoshana Rabba. And for over a hundred years, the rubric of the Anglo-Jewish prayer book, which only changed when I did our new Siddur, said, it said, ‘till’ Shemini Atzeret. And the word ‘till’ in English English is ambiguous, between ‘up to and including,’ or ‘up to but not including.’

So the rubric was, you know, a tremendous help on this one. So ma’seh shehaya, this is a true story. It happened before we were born, but it happened in the 20th century, that on Shemini Atzeret, in an Orthodox shul in London, the chazzan got up and started saying “L'David Hashem Ori V’Yishi.”

The gabbai got up and said, “Shah!” The chazzan said, “But you say “L'David Hashem Ori V’Yishi” on Shemini Atzeret. And gabbai said, “You don't say “L'David Hashem” on Shemini Atzeret.”

The chazzan said, “But I'm the chazzan, and I'm going to say it.”

And the gabbai said, “But I'm the gabbai. You're fired.”

True story.

The chazzan brought a case against the gabbai for unfair dismissal. The case came to an English civil court, in front of a non-Jewish judge, who had to decide the entire basis of the case on whether you do or you don't say “L'David Hashem Ori V’Yishi.” 

You're a Gentile, what do you do on this? Certainly don't ask a Rav. The judge, chacham einav b’rosho, had the wisdom of Solomon. He had the psalm read out in court in English.

And he said, “You know, I think that psalm is so beautiful, I think you should say it every day.” The chazzan got his job back, and peace was restored. 

Tishma. “L'David Hashem ori v’yishi mimi ira Hashem maoz chayai mimi efchad.” “God is my light and my salvation. Of whom then shall I be afraid? God is the refuge of my life. Whom then shall I fear?”

Let us live our Judaism with faith in Hashem and fear of no one.

And we will be a blessing to the world, and a source of nachas to Hashem. Thank you. 

[Closing remarks]