Jonathan Sacks: Universalizing Particularity : Universalizing Particularity [1 ed.] 9789004249813, 9789004249806

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Jonathan Sacks

Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophers Editor-in-Chief

Hava Tirosh-Samuelson, Arizona State University Editor

Aaron W. Hughes, University of Rochester

Volume 2

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/lcjp

Jonathan Sacks Universalizing Particularity Edited by

Hava Tirosh-Samuelson and Aaron W. Hughes

Leiden • boston 2013

Cover illustration: Courtesy of the Office of the Chief Rabbi. The series Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophers was generously supported by the Baron Foundation. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Jonathan Sacks : universalizing particularity / edited by Hava Tirosh-Samuelson and Aaron W. Hughes.   pages cm. — (Library of contemporary Jewish philosophers, ISSN 2213-6010 ; Volume 2)  Includes bibliographical references.  ISBN 978-90-04-24980-6 (hardback : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-90-04-25721-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-90-04-24981-3 (e-book) 1. Sacks, Jonathan, 1948—Philosophy. 2. Jewish philosophy. I. Tirosh-Samuelson, Hava, 1950– II. Hughes, Aaron W., 1968–  B5800.J66 2013  181’.06—dc23 

2013022104

This publication has been typeset in the multilingual “Brill” typeface. With over 5,100 characters covering Latin, IPA, Greek, and Cyrillic, this typeface is especially suitable for use in the humanities. For more information, please see www.brill.com/brill-typeface. ISSN 2213-6010 ISBN 978-90-04-24980-6 (hardback) ISBN 978-90-04-24981-3 (e-book) This hardback is also published in paperback under 978-90-04-25721-4. Copyright 2013 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Global Oriental, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers and Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Contents Editors’ Introduction to Series .....................................................................

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Jonathan Sacks: An Intellectual Portrait ..................................................

1

Finding God .......................................................................................................

21

The Dignity of Difference: Exorcizing Plato’s Ghost .............................

39

An Agenda of Future Jewish Thought .......................................................

57

Future Tense: The Voice of Hope in the Conversation of Humankind ..............................................................................................

85

Interview with Chief Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks October 29, 2012 .......................................................................................... 105 Selected Bibliography Chief Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks .......................................................... 141

Editors’ Introduction to Series It is customary to begin studies devoted to the topic of Jewish philosophy defining what exactly this term, concept, or even discipline is. We tend not to speak of Jewish mathematics, Jewish physics, or Jewish sociology, so why refer to something as “Jewish philosophy”? Indeed, this is the great paradox of Jewish philosophy. On the one hand it presumably names something that has to do with thinking, on the other it implies some sort of national, ethnic, or religious identity of those who engage in such activity. Is not philosophy just philosophy, regardless of who philosophizes? Why the need to append various racial, national, or religious adjectives to it?1 Jewish philosophy is indeed rooted in a paradox since it refers to philosophical activity carried out by those who call themselves Jews. As philosophy, this activity makes claims of universal validity, but as an activity by a well-defined group of people it is inherently particularistic. The question “What is Jewish philosophy?” therefore is inescapable, although over the centuries Jewish philosophers have given very different answers to it. For some, Jewish philosophy represents the relentless quest for truth. Although this truth itself may not be particularized, for such individuals, the use of the adjective “Jewish”—as a way to get at this truth—most decidedly is.2 The Bible, the Mishnah, the Talmud, and related Jewish texts and genres are seen to provide particular insights into the more universal claims provided by the universal and totalizing gaze of philosophy. The problem is that these texts are not philosophical on the surface; they must, on the contrary, be interpreted to bring their philosophical insights to light. Within this context exegesis risks becoming eisegesis. Yet others 1 Alexander Altmann once remarked: It would be futile to attempt a presentation of Judaism as a philosophical system, or to speak of Jewish philosophy in the same sense as one speaks of American, English, French, or German philosophy. Judaism is a religion, and the truths it teaches are religious truths. They spring from the source of religious experience, not from pure reason. See Alexander Altmann, “Judaism and World Philosophy,” in The Jews: Their History, Culture, and Religion, ed. Louis Finkelstein (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1949), vol. 2, 954. 2 In this regard, see Norbert M. Samuelson, Jewish Faith and Modern Science: On the Death and Rebirth of Jewish Philosophy (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008), e.g., 10–12.

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eschew the term “philosophy” and instead envisage themselves as working in a decidedly Jewish key in order to articulate or clarify particular issues that have direct bearing on Jewish life and existence.3 Between these two perspectives or orientations, there exist several other related approaches to the topic of Jewish philosophy, which can and have included ethics,4 gender studies,5 multiculturalism,6 and postmodernism.7 Despite their differences in theory and method, what these approaches have in common is that they all represent the complex intersection of Judaism, variously defined, and a set of non-Jewish grids or lenses used to interpret this rich tradition. Framed somewhat differently, Jewish philosophy—whatever it is, however it is defined, or whether it is even possible—represents the collision of particularistic demands and universal concerns. The universal or that which is, in theory, open and accessible to all regardless of race, color, creed, or gender confronts the particular or that which represents the sole concern of a specific group that, by nature or definition, is insular and specific-minded. Because it is concerned with a particular people, the Jews, and how to frame their traditions in a universal and universalizing light that is believed to conform to the dictates of reason, Jewish philosophy can never be about pure thinking, if indeed there ever can be such a phenomenon. Rather Jewish philosophy—from antiquity to the present—always seems 3 See, e.g., Strauss’s claim about Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed, perhaps one of the most important and successful works of something called Jewish philosophy ever written. He claims that one “begins to understand the Guide once one sees that it is not a philosophic book—a book written by a philosopher for philosophers—but a Jewish book: a book written by a Jew for Jews.” See Leo Strauss, “How to Begin to Study The Guide of the Perplexed,” in The Guide of the Perplexed, trans. Shlomo Pines, 2 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), vol. 1, xiv. Modern iterations of this may be found, for example, in J. David Bleich, Bioethical Dilemmas: A Jewish Perspective, 2 vols. (vol. 1, New York: Ktav, 1998; vol. 2, New York: Targum Press, 2006). 4 See, e.g., David Novak, Natural Law in Judaism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Elliot Dorff, Love Your Neighbor and Yourself: A Jewish Approach to Modern Personal Ethics (New York: Jewish Publication Society of America, 2006). 5 E.g., the collection of essays in Women and Gender in Jewish Philosophy, ed. Hava Tirosh-Samuelson (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2004). 6 E.g., Jonathan Sacks, The Dignity of Difference: How to Avoid a Clash of Civilizations (London: Continuum, 2003); Jonathan Sacks, To Heal a Fractured World: The Ethics of Responsibility (New York: Schocken, 2007). 7 E.g., Elliot R. Wolfson, Language, Eros, Being: Kabbalistic Hermeneutics and Poetic Imagination (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004); Elliot R. Wolfson, Open Secret: Postmessianic Messianism and the Mystical Revision of Menahem Mendel Schneerson (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009); Elliot R. Wolfson, A Dream Interpreted within a Dream: Oneiropoiesis and the Prism of Imagination (New York: Zone Books, 2011).



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to have had and, for the most part continues to have, rather specific and perhaps even practical concerns in mind. This usually translates into the notion that Judaism—at least the Judaism that Jewish philosophy seeks to articulate—is comprehensible to non-Jews and, framed in our contemporary context, that Judaism has a seat at the table, as it were, when it comes to pressing concerns in the realms of ethics and bioethics. Jewish philosophy, as should already be apparent, is not a disinterested subject matter. It is, on the contrary, heavily invested in matters of Jewish peoplehood and in articulating its aims and objectives. Because of this interest in concrete issues (e.g., ethics, bioethics, medical ethics, feminism) Jewish philosophy—especially contemporary Jewish philosophy— is often constructive as opposed to being simply reflective. Because of this, it would seem to resemble what is customarily called “theology” more than it does philosophy. If philosophy represents the critical and systematic approach to ascertain the truth of a proposition based on rational argumentation, theology is the systematic and rational study of religion and the articulation of the nature of religious truths. The difference between theology and philosophy resides in their object of study. If the latter has “truth,” however we may define this term, as its primary object of focus, the former is concerned with ascertaining religious dogma and belief. They would seem to be, in other words, mutually exclusive endeavors. What we are accustomed to call “Jewish philosophy,” then, is a paradox since it does not—indeed, cannot—engage in truth independent of religious claims. As such, it is unwilling to undo the major claims of Judaism (e.g., covenant, chosenness, revelation), even if it may occasionally redefine such claims.8 So although medieval Jewish thinkers may well gravitate toward the systematic thought of Aristotle and his Arab interpreters and although modern Jewish thinkers may be attracted to the thought of Kant and Heidegger, the ideas of such non-Jewish thinkers are always applied to Jewish ideas and values. Indeed, if they were not, those who engaged in such activities would largely cease to be Jewish philosophers and would instead become just philosophers who just happened to be Jewish (e.g., Henri Bergson, Edmund Husserl, and Karl Popper). Whether in its medieval or modern guise, Jewish philosophy has a tendency to be less philosophical simply for the sake of rational analysis 8 A good example of what we have in mind here is the thought of Maimonides. Although he might well redefine the notion of prophecy, he never abnegates the concept. On Maimonides on prophecy, see Howard Kreisel, Prophecy: The History of an Idea in Medieval Jewish Philosophy (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2001), 148–56.

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and more constructive. Many of the volumes that appear in the Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophers will bear this out. The truths of Judaism are upheld, albeit in often new and original ways. Although Jewish philosophy may well use non-Jewish ideas to articulate its claims, it never produces a vision that ends in the wholesale abandonment of Judaism.9 Even though critics of Jewish philosophy may well argue that philosophy introduces “foreign” wisdom into the heart of Judaism, those we call Jewish philosophers do not perceive themselves to be tainting Judaism, but perfecting it or teasing out its originary meaning.10 The result is that Jewish philosophy is an attempt to produce a particular type of Judaism—one that is in tune with certain principles of rationalism. This rationalism, from the vantage point of the nineteenth century and up to the present, is believed to show Judaism in its best light, as the synthesis or nexus between a Greek-inflected universalism and the particularism of the Jewish tradition. What is the status of philosophy among Jews in the modern period? Since their emancipation in the nineteenth century, Jews have gradually integrated into Western society and culture, including the academy. Ever since the academic study of Judaism began in the 1820s in Germany, Jewish philosophy has grown to become a distinctive academic discourse practiced by philosophers who now often hold positions in non-Jewish institutions of higher learning. The professionalization of Jewish philosophy has not been unproblematic, and Jewish philosophy has had to (and still has to) justify its legitimacy and validity. And even when Jewish philosophy is taught in Jewish institutions (for example, rabbinic seminaries or universities in Israel), it has to defend itself against those Jews who regard philosophy as alien to Judaism, or minimally, as secondary in importance to the inherently Jewish disciplines such as jurisprudence or exegesis. Jewish philosophy, in other words, must still confront the charge that it is not authentically Jewish. The institutional setting for the practice of Jewish philosophy has shaped Jewish philosophy as an academic discourse. But regardless of the 9 This despite the claims of Yitzhak Baer who believed that philosophy had a negative influence on medieval Spanish Jews that made them more likely to convert to Christianity. See Israel Jacob Yuval, “Yitzhak Baer and the Search for Authentic Judaism,” in The Jewish Past Revisited: Reflections on Modern Jewish Historians, ed. David N. Myers and David B. Ruderman (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 77–87. 10 Indeed, Jewish philosophers in the medieval period did not even see themselves as introducing foreign ideas into Judaism. Instead they saw philosophical activity as a reclamation of their birthright since the Jews originally developed philosophy before the Greeks and others stole it from them.



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setting, Jewish philosophy as an academic discourse is quite distinct from Jewish philosophy as constructive theology, even though the two may often by produced by the same person. Despite the lack of unanimity about the scope and methodology of Jewish philosophy, the Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophers insists that Jewish philosophy has thrived in the past half century in ways that will probably seem surprising to most readers. When asked who are the Jewish philosophers of the twentieth century, most would certainly mention the obvious: Franz Rosenzweig (d. 1929), Martin Buber (d. 1965), and Emmanuel Levinas (d. 1995). Some would also be able to name Abraham Joshua Heschel (d. 1972), Mordecai Kaplan (d. 1983), Joseph Soloveitchik (d. 1993), and Hans Jonas (d. 1993). There is no doubt that these thinkers have either reshaped the discourse of Western thought for Jews and nonJews or have inspired profound rethinking of modern Judaism. However, it is misleading to identify contemporary Jewish philosophy solely with these names, all of whom are now deceased. In recent years it has been customary for Jews to think that Jewish philosophy has lost its creative edge or that Jewish philosophy is somehow profoundly irrelevant to Jewish life. Several reasons have given rise to this perception, not the least of which is, ironically enough, the very success of Jewish Studies as an academic discipline. Especially after 1967, Jewish Studies has blossomed in secular universities especially in the North American Diaspora, and Jewish philosophers have expressed their ideas in academic venues that have remained largely inaccessible to the public at large. Moreover, the fact that Jewish philosophers have used technical language and a certain way of argumentation has made their thought increasingly incomprehensible and therefore irrelevant to the public at large. At the same time that the Jewish public has had little interest in professional philosophy, the practitioners of philosophy (especially in Anglo-American departments of philosophy) have denied the philosophical merits of Jewish philosophy as too religious or too particularistic and excluded it entirely. The result is that Jewish philosophy is now largely generated by scholars who teach in departments/programs of Jewish Studies, in departments of Religious Studies, or in Jewish denominational seminaries.11

11 See the comments in Aaron W. Hughes and Elliot R. Wolfson, “Introduction: Charting an Alternative Course for the Study of Jewish Philosophy,” in New Directions in Jewish Philosophy, ed. Aaron W. Hughes and Elliot R. Wolfson (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2010), 1–16.

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The purpose of the Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophers is not only to dispel misperceptions about Jewish philosophy but also to help nudge the practice of Jewish philosophy out of the ethereal heights of academe to the more practical concerns of living Jewish communities. To the public at large this project documents the diversity, creativity, and richness of Jewish philosophical and intellectual activity during the second half of the twentieth century, showing how Jewish thinkers have engaged new topics, themes, and methodologies and raised new philosophical questions. Indeed, Jewish philosophers have been intimately engaged in trying to understand and interpret the momentous changes of the twentieth century for Jews. These have included the Holocaust, the renewal of Jewish political sovereignty, secularism, postmodernism, feminism, and environmentalism. As a result, the Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophy intentionally defines the scope of Jewish philosophy very broadly so as to engage and include theology, political theory, literary theory, intellectual history, ethics, and feminist theory, among other discourses. We believe that the overly stringent definition of “philosophy” has impoverished the practice of Jewish philosophy, obscuring the creativity and breadth of contemporary Jewish reflections. An accurate and forward looking view of Jewish philosophy must be inclusive. To practitioners of Jewish philosophy this project claims that Jewish philosophical activity cannot and should not remain limited to professional academic pursuits. Rather, Jewish philosophy must be engaged in life as lived in the present by both Jews and non-Jews. Jews are no longer a people apart, instead they are part of the world and they live in this world through conversation with other civilizations and cultures. Jewish philosophy speaks to Jews and to non-Jews, encouraging them to reflect on problems and take a stand on a myriad of issues of grave importance. Jewish philosophy, in other words, is not only alive and well today, it is also of the utmost relevance to Jews and non-Jews. The Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophers is simultaneously a documentary and an educational project. As a documentary project, it intends to shape the legacy of outstanding thinkers for posterity, identifying their major philosophical ideas and making available their seminal essays, many of which are not easily accessible. A crucial aspect of this is the interview with the philosophers that functions, in many ways, as an oral history. The interview provides very personal comments by each philosopher as he or she reflects about a range of issues that have engaged them over the years. In this regard the Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophers simultaneously records Jewish philosophical activity and



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demonstrates its creativity both as a constructive discourse as well as an academic field. As an educational project, the Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophers is intended to stimulate discussion, reflection, and debate about the meaning of Jewish existence at the dawn of the twenty-first century. The individual volumes and the entire set are intended to be used in a variety of educational settings: college-level courses, programs for adult Jewish learning, rabbinic training, and interreligious dialogues. By engaging or confronting the ideas of these philosophers, we hope that Jews and nonJews alike will be encouraged to ponder the past, present, and future of Jewish philosophy, reflect on the challenges to and complexities of Jewish existence, and articulate Jewish philosophical responses to these challenges. We hope that, taken as individual volumes and as a collection, the Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophers will inspire readers to ask philosophical, theological, ethical, and scientific questions that will enrich Jewish intellectual life for the remainder of the twenty-first century. All of the volumes in the Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophers have the same structure: an intellectual profile of the thinker written by the editors, four seminal essays by the featured philosopher, an interview with him or her, and a select bibliography of 120 items, listing books, articles, book chapters, book reviews, and public addresses. As editors of the series we hope that the structure will encourage the reader to engage the volume through reflection, discussion, debate, and dialogue. As the love of wisdom, philosophy is inherently Jewish. Philosophy invites questions, cherishes debate and controversy, and ponders the meaning of life, especially Jewish life. We hope that the Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophers will stimulate thinking and debate because it is our hope that the more Jews philosophize, the more they will make Judaism deeper, durable, and long-lasting. Finally, we invite readers to engage the thinkers featured in these volumes, to challenge and dispute them, so that Judaism will become ever stronger for future generations.

Jonathan Sacks: An Intellectual Portrait Chief Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks represents one of the most important voices in current discussions that concern the plight of Judaism—and, indeed, of religion more generally—in the modern world. While his vision emerges out of the sources of Judaism, Sacks’s inclusive and highly accessible approach ensures that his writings reach a large audience within the general reading public. Although his earliest work dealt specifically with the problems besetting Judaism and its confrontation with modernity beginning in the nineteenth century, his more recent writings examine the importance of cultivating a culture of civility based on the twin notions of the dignity of difference and the ethic of responsibility. Responding to all of these issues, Sacks writes, simultaneously, as a rabbi, a social philosopher, a proponent of interfaith dialogue, and a public intellectual. In so doing, his vision—informed as it is by the concerns of modern Orthodoxy—is paradoxically one of the most universalizing voices within contemporary Judaism. Sacks possesses a rare ability to hold in delicate balance the universal demands of the modern, multicultural world with the particularism associated with Judaism. It is certainly no coincidence that Maimonides, the twelfth-century philosopher and halakhist, and Samson Raphael Hirsch, the nineteenth century “founder” of modern Orthodoxy, both figure highly in his writings. Equally at home in the world of philosophy and the Jewish tradition, thinkers as diverse as Plato, Judah Halevi, Friedrich Nietzsche, Menachem Schneerson, and Alasdair MacIntyre inhabit his intellectual world. Such diverse figures effectively become his conversation partners as he confronts both the promises and fractures inherent to philosophy. While drawn to the rationalism of philosophy, Sacks—having grown up in post–World War II Britain—is also highly critical that its universalism threatens the very existence of the particular and the diversity that informs it. If universalism represents one such threat to potential coexistence, its handmaiden is the cult of the individual, wherein the rights of the latter trumps those of the collective. In response to such threats, he argues that only an ethic that demands mutual responsibility that is connected to the idea of giving and belonging can confront that which threatens contemporary society. Although critical of secularism, Sacks is equally critical of religious extremism or radicalism, which represents no less of a roadblock to human diversity.

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What role does Judaism play in all of this? An examination of Sacks’s diverse oeuvre quickly reveals that he conceives of Judaism as a response, both intellectually and religiously, to the universalizing tendencies inherent to the West. This universalism incorrectly assumes that everyone, all of humanity, is essentially the same. Judaism, perhaps more than any other tradition, has paid the price for this universalism over the centuries because it has consistently been perceived to undermine the West’s values. The result, as should be evident to even the most passive observer, is that Jews and Judaism have been made to conform, often violently, to the parameters that the West sets for itself in the name of universalism. As a Jew and as someone critical of the unchecked philosophical enterprise, Sacks resists such view. Although he will subsequently argue that, even though there may exist only one truth for all of humanity, the only way to access it is through the particularity of one’s own tradition. Whereas God exists for all of humanity, Sacks is fond of saying, only Judaism exists for Jews. Or, as he himself eloquently puts it, “The God of the Israelites is the God of all mankind, but the demands made of the Israelites are not asked of all mankind.”1 Far from offering an insular philosophy of the tradition, Sacks conceives of Judaism as the intersection of the universal and the particular. Although he speaks to Judaism in all of its particularity, he is still able to articulate how this tradition is nevertheless able to speak to humanity in all of its universality. His is a Judaism that does not exist alone, but becomes a partner with God and other religions in the never-ending struggle for human dignity and social justice. Biography Jonathan Sacks was born on March 8, 1948, to a traditional Orthodox family in London, England. Educated at Saint Mary’s Primary School and Christ’s College School in London, he then went to Cambridge where, at Gonville and Caius College, he read Philosophy. From a young age, then, Sacks has been firmly embedded in the customs and habits of post-WWII England. His education did not take place in isolation, solely the product of Jewish day schools and yeshivot, but occurred in a largely public and 1 Jonathan Sacks, “The Dignity of Difference: Exorcizing Plato’s Ghost,” in The Dignity of Difference: How to Avoid the Clash of Civilizations, 2nd ed. (New York and London: Continuum, 2003), 52. This essay is reprinted as the second chapter below.



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secular environment. As a young Jew growing up in the aftermath of the Holocaust, he was able to become, simultaneously, a religious Jew and a citizen of a multiethnic society. In a recent autobiographical essay, “Finding God” (reprinted as the first chapter below), Sacks writes eloquently of the demands this balance caused him, and the repercussion on his intellectual journey. Drawn to the universalism of philosophy on the one hand, he was also aware of the particularity of his own situatedness as a Jew. To reconcile philosophy and Judaism in the 1960s, the period associated with the rise of the analytical tradition, was no easy matter. At the time of his undergraduate education, he writes, “the words ‘religion’ and ‘philosophy’ went together like cricket and thunderstorms. You often found them together but the latter generally put an end to the former. Philosophers were atheists, or at least agnostics.”2 Rather than choose one—philosophy or Judaism—over the other, Sacks looked to the medieval Jewish philosophical tradition for inspiration. Therein he found numerous individuals, at the head of which stood the towering figure of Maimonides, who refused to acknowledge such a bifurcation. One could, using the paradigm set up by Maimonides and other medieval Jewish rationalists, ostensibly reconcile these otherwise diverse worldviews. Thus, the medieval Jewish philosophical tradition demonstrated to Sacks that the relationship between philosophy and religion need not be antagonistic to one another, so long as one understood the place, role, and purview of each. At Cambridge, Sacks studied with Bernard Williams (1929–2003), often described as among the most important British moral philosophers in the twentieth century. Sacks credits Williams, a committed atheist, with forcing him to articulate the rationality of his religious belief. Sacks says that Williams, although an atheist, was not critical of his religious beliefs, a healthy respect that he finds lacking in contemporary atheists, such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. If a religious belief cannot be stated coherently, Sacks informs us—under the influence of Williams— then there is no reason that we should believe in it. Sacks also credits Williams with getting him to clarify the nature of the relationship between God and history. If God is eternal and beyond history, how can he effectively be involved in it? Sacks answers this question by disentangling the God of Israel from the God of philosophy. He writes that

2 Jonathan Sacks, “Finding God,” in The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning (New York: Schocken Books, 2011), 78.

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jonathan sacks: an intellectual portrait what Williams saw as a contradiction within faith, I recognized as a contradiction between the Jewish and Greek conceptions of God. The changeless, unmoved mover was the God of Plato and Aristotle. The God of history was the God of Abraham.3

This is a distinction that goes back at least to the work of the medieval Judah Halevi. It is a distinction, moreover, that defines the raison d’être of the medieval Jewish philosophical tradition: how to reconcile the demands of the natural world with that of revelation. Whereas many are content to keep these two spheres apart, Sacks—as heir to the medieval Jewish philosophical world—seeks to show how they are ultimately compatible with another. This is especially the case in his recent writings on the compatibility of religion and science. Even though philosophy aims at universality—that its propositions and conclusions are true in all situations—meaning is ultimately expressed in particularity. Judaism, representing the particular par excellence, now becomes an important tradition to both reflect upon and articulate universal concerns. This focus on tradition and the particular, as we shall see shortly, would resonate with the thought of others, most notably Alasdair MacIntyre, who would, in turn, become an important influence on Sacks’s work. Around this time, the mid-1960s, Commentary magazine published a series of responses to the nature of Jewish belief and contemporary concerns by leading rabbis.4 Wrestling with many of the ideas that he had, even if inchoately, Sacks decided to travel to the United States and Canada to meet with as many of these individuals as he possible could. Two encounters seem to have left an indelible mark on the young Sacks— those with Joseph Soloveitchik, rosh yeshivah of the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary at Yeshiva University in New York, and Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the Lubavitcher Rebbe. Sacks describes how it was Soloveitchik who helped him to appreciate how law (halakha) was the true and only essence of Judaism and that the problem with previous Jewish philosophy was that it had conformed too closely with Western philosophy with the result that it had failed to express what was unique about Judaism. Of the encounter, Sacks writes, “for two hours he spoke with an intellectual passion and depth far beyond anything I had experienced at Cambridge.”5 Furthermore, Sacks credits Schneerson with inculcating in 3 Ibid., 83. 4 Eventually published in book form as The Condition of Jewish Belief: A Symposium (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1989). 5 Ibid., 90.



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him a responsibility for the fate of the Jewish people and of Judaism in the modern world. How can we succeed as individual Jews in our professions, so the gist of the conversation went, if the collective state of the Jewish people is in disarray? Of the two encounters, Sacks writes that they were “life-changing”: “Rabbi Soloveitchik had challenged me to think. Rabbi Schneerson had challenged me to lead.”6 Although he would eventually complete a PhD at the University of London in 1981, the force of these two encounters led him far beyond the academy. As a result, Sacks decided to devote his life to the serious study of Jewish sources and to ensuring the future continuity of Jewish engagement with the tradition. In 1976 he received rabbinic ordination (smicha) at both Yeshivat Etz Hayyim, an Orthodox yeshiva in the Golders Green neighborhood of London, and at Jews’ College, also in London. In 1978 he was appointed rabbi of Golders Green Synagogue, London, a position he held until 1983 whereupon he became rabbi of the Marble Arch Synagogue, a leading modern Orthodox congregation in London. In addition to his rabbinical duties, Sacks also served as Principal of Jews’ College, now known as the London School of Jewish Studies, where he taught Talmud, Jewish Law, and Bible Commentary. He had previously served as Lecturer in Jewish Thought and, in 1982, was appointed as the initial holder of the Chief Rabbi Lord Jakobovits’s Chair in Modern Jewish Thought. In September 1991 Jonathan Sacks succeeded Immanuel Jakobovits as Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth. This prestigious position grants him spiritual authority over all British and Commonwealth Orthodox synagogues. Since his appointment, Sacks has received numerous visiting professorships (e.g., at King’s College London, Oxford, Hebrew University of Jerusalem), in addition to fifteen honorary doctorates (e.g., Yeshiva University in New York, University of Glasgow, Bar Ilan University). In 2005, Sacks was knighted in the Queen’s Birthday Honors “for services to the Community and to Inter-faith Relations.” In July 2009, he was recommended for a life peerage with a seat in the House of Lords by the House of Lords Appointment Commission. To this day, Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks remains a highly influential voice not only within and for British Jewry, but also an important social theorist and public intellectual. He is read by people of all faiths; indeed, many non-Jews have responded to his work. Eight of his books, for example, have been serialized or excerpted in the British press. In addition, he 6 Ibid., 91.

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engages the general public through his writings in The Times and his broadcasts on the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). He has also advised three British Prime Ministers (John Major, Tony Blair, and Gordon Brown) on matters pertaining to religion and social responsibility. Finally, Sacks’s work has been the subject of a recent collection wherein major scholars (including Menachem Kellner and Charles Taylor) engage and comment upon it.7 This all attests to Sacks’s belief that when Jews enter the larger human conversation they make a difference not just to Jews but to the very conversation. Judaism It is important to be clear that Sacks writes from the position of modern Orthodoxy. He is an Orthodox rabbi and functions, as we have just seen, as the Chief Rabbi of modern Orthodox synagogues under his aegis in Britain and across the Commonwealth—but not Reform, Conservative, or ultra-Orthodox ones. Because of this, the figure of Samson Raphael Hirsch (1808–1888), the “founder” of modern Orthodoxy, looms large in the pages of Sacks’s oeuvre, especially in those works dealing with the dilemmas within modern Judaism. Hirsch is, among other things, best known for the concept of Torah im derekh eretz (Torah with the way of the land), that is, the intersection between traditional law and teaching on the one hand, and the land and customs in which Jews happen to find themselves on the other. This concept, more than anything else, was responsible for establishing an intimate relationship between traditionally observant Judaism and modernity. In many of his diverse writings, Hirsch sought to demonstrate that the combination of Torah and derekh eretz is not only possible, but necessary if Judaism and Jewish values are to influence the religious sphere of personal and communal life, in addition to the secular and mundane sphere. For Sacks, as indeed for Hirsch, the fulfillment of Torah requires worldly involvement and general participation in society, something that demands the modern Jew to acquire the requisite knowledge for such participation. This principle or active engagement with larger society, it should be noted, informs all of Sacks’s work. Of Hirsch, Sacks writes:

7 Michael J. Harris, Daniel Rynhold, and Tamra Wright, eds., Radical Responsibility: Celebrating the Thought of Chief Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks (Jerusalem: Maggid Books, 2012).



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Hirsch drew a clear distinction between matters of halakhah—the commanded and the forbidden—and the matters of custom, habit, folklore, and convention. Torah im derekh eretz meant that Torah could be combined with selective elements of any culture in which Jews were located, provided that it involves no breach of a command or prohibition. Just as Jews dressed differently in different times and places and spoke different languages, so they could now acquire European mores while leaving the essential core of Torah untouched.8

Such a passage situates Sacks intellectually. Although he will try to understand various denominations of Judaism, he is always quick to point out that Orthodoxy cannot recognize the legitimacy of interpretations of Judaism that abandon fundamental beliefs or halakhic authority. Judaism that departs from the truth and acceptance of the halakha is a departure from authentic Judaism and, he reasons, is tantamount to the accommodation of secularism. So, while Sacks will develop a highly inclusive account of the world’s religions, there were times when he was critical of the denominations within Judaism, though this figures less in his more recent writings. Several of Sacks’s early works are concerned precisely with this fragmentation within Judaism. Within this context, one of his most important books is One People?: Tradition, Modernity, and Jewish Unity (1993).9 Therein Sacks confronts—indeed, as every modern, thinking Jew must— the legacy of the nineteenth century, an era that witnessed the rise of revolutionary new interpretations of Jewish existence, from the rise of Reform Judaism to the existence of secular Zionism. These diverse interpretations, or understandings, of Judaism, while they have undoubtedly contributed to its survival over a rocky century and a half, have nevertheless created, what Sacks calls, three “primary fault-lines.” Unless attended to, he argues, they risk irreparably splitting the Jewish people apart. These fault lines are (1) that between secular and religious Judaism; (2) that between Orthodox and liberal Judaism; and, finally, (3) that between Israel and the Diaspora.10 Of most important concern to Sacks, at least in the aforementioned work, is the second, the division between Orthodoxy and more liberal denominations. Although, as mentioned, he writes from the perspective 8 Jonathan Sacks, One People?: Tradition, Modernity, and Jewish Unity (London: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1993), 58. 9 More popular versions of the work also appear in Arguments for the Sake of Heaven: Emerging Trends in Traditional Judaism (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1991). 10 Sacks, One People?, ix.

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of Orthodoxy, Sacks refreshingly does not engage in polemics. As he writes in the Preface to the work, “intellectual honesty is a precondition of the religious life.”11 Modernity and the social processes that followed in its wake, according to Sacks, were responsible for destroying the meaning of many of the key terms of Judaism. Following Alasdair MacIntyre, he argues that although traditional terms may well remain, their original contexts and traditional meanings have all but been lost or forgotten. For example, terms such as Torah, mitzvah (commandment), ge’ula (redemption), Am Yisrael (the People of Israel), and Eretz Yisrael (the Land of Israel) are often invoked by various denominations within Jewry; however, the dislocations— intellectual, social, religious—brought about by modernity ensures that such terms are now understood differently by each group or subgroup. Are such terms, for instance, to be understood culturally? Religiously? Metaphorically? Rather than form a unified semantic field, the new and revisionary sense of these terms risk tearing asunder traditional Jewish interpretations and, thus, their very meanings. The result of this diversity is that the language of contemporary Judaism risks collapse. To stop this endless deferral of meaning, Sacks argues that it is necessary to recreate a holistic and coherent tradition. Here, once again, we see the influence of non-Jewish social philosophers such as Alasdair MacIntyre. The key to this recreation, for Sacks, is inclusivism. By this he does not mean that anything goes or that any and every interpretation of Judaism is equally valid, but that all of Israel exists because of and within a binding covenant with God. To use his own words: “God and Israel have entered a binding covenant. The choice, once made, cannot be unmade. God has joined His destiny with all of Israel. All of Israel has pledged itself to God . . . Israel is henceforth to be one indivisible people, the collective firstborn child of the One God.”12 The covenant, in other words, is geared for the entire collectivity of Israel and not just its spiritual or religious elite. This inclusivism means that Judaism—based as it is on the central institutions of the family, the community, and learning—is somehow out of sync with what many perceive to be the values of modernity. This means that all Jews, whether or not they would acknowledge it is another matter, share a common destiny that provides an alternative to the cult

11  Ibid., vii. 12 Ibid., 203.



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of the individual associated with the secular nation state. The key, of course, is to get Jews to recognize this destiny so that Judaism can, as he will argue in his later writings, serve as a blueprint for others. In this, all Jews—regardless of so-called “denomination”—are “part of the covenant, participants in Judaism’s bonds of collective responsibility, to be related to with love, dignity, and respect.”13 Universalism vs. Particularism Thinking about Judaism, about the particular, has not surprisingly led Sacks to reflect upon the meaning of the universal. As we have already witnessed, Sacks is deeply interested in analyzing the problems inherent to the task of philosophy, especially its desire—at least since the time of Plato—to eradicate the particular. In his autobiographical chapter, reproduced as the first chapter below, Sacks correctly notes that the Holocaust did not occur just anywhere, but it did so in Europe, a continent at whose heart existed the philosophically inspired values of rationalism and liberalism. Although many of the philosophers associated with the Enlightenment believed that prejudice emerged from religion and not reason, the particular and not the universal, the events of the twentieth century clearly reveal that this was very far from the case. To reveal the limitations of philosophy is the goal of Sacks’s rationalism. Despite the appeal to universalism in the latter, Sacks argues that “languages and cultures are always particular.”14 The very act of thinking and reflecting on the big questions of life (Who am I? Why am I here? How shall I live?), thus, emerge out of specific contexts that are unique to various groups, nations, and peoples. In his The Dignity of Difference, he argues that, when properly understood, the particular leads us to an appreciation of difference, becoming that which leads “us to recognize the integrity of the search for God by those outside our faith.”15 Because universalism always seeks to elide or flatten difference, it fails to appreciate the vast ecosystem of religions and cultures in its midst. According to Sacks, Any attempt to impose on them an artificial uniformity in the name of a single culture or faith, represents a tragic misunderstanding of what it takes 13 Ibid., 216. 14 Sacks, “Finding God,” in The Great Partnership, 88. 15 Sacks, The Dignity of Difference, 9.

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jonathan sacks: an intellectual portrait for a system to flourish. Because we are different, we each have something unique to contribute, and every contribution counts.16

In terms of Judaism, this means—as we have already witnessed—that although God has made a binding covenant with the Jewish people, He nonetheless remains the God of all of humanity. Understanding this delicate balance between particularism and universalism, Sacks believes, enables us all to avoid the clash of civilizations, one of the major threats to the global order and the ability of all of us to coexist within it. At the center of this ability to appreciate the other for whom he or she is resides the biblical narrative of Abraham, the prototype for the notion that human dignity is ultimately based on the fact that all of us are different from one another. What is the role of Judaism in contemporary society? In his Future Tense, Sacks argues that the tendency in Judaism, especially since the nineteenth century, has been either to engage with the world with the result that Jewish identity is lost or to preserve such identity at the cost of disengagement from the world.17 Once again, returning to the paradigm supplied by individuals as diverse as Maimonides and Hirsch, Sacks seeks the middle ground: how to remain halakhically Jewish while still engaging with and in the world. Sacks argues that we “are in danger of forgetting who Jews are and why, why there is such a thing as the Jewish people, and what its place is within the global project of humankind.”18 The question of who Jews are, and why they are, is a huge one with potentially many different and competing answers. For Sacks, the answer lies in the contexts of ultimate ideals. Jews, he argues, are not destined to live alone nor be the perennial target of hate. On the contrary, Judaism provides faith and hope—the faith that God has summoned us to become partners in the creation of a just society in which the divine presence can find a home. Such a faith is not unique to the Jews, argues Sacks, but has also inspired “Christians and Muslims, whose religion grew in Jewish soil, as well as others who respected the Jewish love of family, community, education, tradition, the pursuit of justice, the passion for argument and the Jewish sense of humour that can laugh even in the face of tragedy.”19

16 Ibid., 22. 17 Jonathan Sacks, Future Tense: Jews, Judaism, and Israel in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Schocken Books, 2009), 2. 18 Ibid., 4. 19 Ibid., 7.



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Judaism must not become an insular tradition, on his reading, but must play an intimate role within the human conversation. This conversation is one in which others listen to the wisdom of Judaism just as Jews themselves must listen to the wisdom of other traditions. The strength of both Judaism and other faith traditions here once again returns us to the idea that the universal concerns of human existence reside in the historical experiences of the particular. The challenges that face Jews, in other words, are not unique to them, but are in effect those of all humanity. Hatred, economic collapse, environmental degradation, and terrorist attacks now effect everyone and not just Jews. Sacks asks us all to return to the story of Abraham, a story in which all the families of the world are and will be blessed through this nomadic patriarch. Because of the interconnection between all peoples and all faiths, one understood using the complex metaphor of the universal and the particular, Jews must not turn inward and reject the world. On the contrary, Jews must embrace the world in which they inhabit with others, just as they must stand unified with like-minded individuals in other religions in defense of human freedom and dignity. In the same volume, Sacks puts it eloquently in the following terms: Now is not the time to retreat into a ghetto of the mind. It is the time to renew that most ancient of biblical institutions, the covenant of human solidarity made in the days of Noah and after the Flood. Without compromising one iota of Jewish faith or identity, Jews must stand alongside their friends, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, Sikh or secular humanist, in defense of freedom against the enemies of freedom, in affirmation of life against those who worship death and desecrate life.20

As Social Philosopher Social philosophy represents the reflection upon questions of social behavior, from the meaning of community to the social contract. We have already seen how in The Dignity of Difference, Sacks made the bold claim that, to face the pressing challenges of our time, we need not only the great religious traditions, but a way to bring their wisdom into dialogue with one another. Each tradition needs to find—not simply tolerate—the positive value in the diversity of the others. Again, we see the movement away from the idea that if religions simply adjusted and assimilated to the universal culture of secularism all troubles and internecine conflict would 20 Ibid., 10.

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cease. Such a universal vision, as Sacks has shown in his other works, quite simply cannot be inclusive precisely because it refuses to tolerate difference and especially that which resists—intellectually, socially, culturally, religious—the so-called status quo. Universalism, and this is a leitmotif that runs through Sacks’s diverse writings, ignores the particulars of God’s created universe. Juxtaposed against this, he calls for dignity of difference, something that is based on the radical transcendence of God from the created universe, with its astonishing diversity of life forms—all of which, as we now know though genetic research, derive from a single source—and from the multiple languages, and cultures though which we, as meaning-seeking beings, have attempted to understand the totality of existence.21

Sacks builds on these observations in his more recent The Home We Build Together (2007). Therein, he contends that a large part of the problem facing both contemporary society and the refusal to acknowledge the dignity of difference resides at the foot of multiculturalism. Rather than lead to integration, he argues, multiculturalism (as official governmental policy in places such as Britain and Canada) has actually succeeded in creating further segregation. Instead of providing incentive to live together, multiculturalism has paradoxically provided the incentive to stay apart, something that has led to the concomitant refusal to get to know one’s neighbors. Rather than diminish tensions between various religious and ethnic groups, Sacks argues that multiculturalism has actually succeeded in exacerbating them. By questioning multiculturalism as state policy, Sacks’s analysis forces us to ask: What is a society? What purpose does it serve? Is there such a thing as society? To begin to answer such questions, he argues that the modern nation state, in part influenced by a postmodern version of liberalism, increasingly denies the existence of a shared moral code. The result is the emergence of the cult of the individual (e.g., individual needs, individual rights) that ignores the key concept of social commitment and belonging. Juxtaposed against individual rights, Sacks calls for a return to concept of the common good. Society, he writes: is where we come together to achieve collectively what none of us can do alone. It is our common property. We inhabit it, make it, breathe it. It is the

21 Sacks, The Dignity of Difference, 201.



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realm in which all of us is more important that any of us. It is our shared project, and it exists to the extent that we work for it and contribute to it.22

Rather than blame minorities for their refusal to conform to the larger culture in which they dwell (e.g., Britain, Canada, America), Sacks—himself the product of a minority culture within Britain—argues that we need to rethink the very idea of society and the myriad of interpersonal networks that comprise it. Unless this is done, he reasons, internecine conflicts in, say, the Middle East, risk becoming internecine conflicts that play out amongst neighbors in London, New York, or Montreal. The world, made smaller by technology, must be put together again with an ethic that appreciates and draws power from the diversity in its midst. At the heart of this renewal, for Sacks, is the unique vision of Judaism, which—to reiterate—is simultaneously particular and universal. Although the God of Israel is the God of all humanity, the religion of Israel is not the religion of all humanity. One does not have to be a Jew to exist in the image of God or to be blessed by God. One does not, in other words, have to be Jewish to pray to God and be answered by God. Judaism acknowledges a diversity of faiths and rejects the principle that extra ecclesium non est salus (outside of the church there exists no salvation). To use Sacks’s words once again: Only the combination of a particular faith and a universal God can yield this conclusion. If God is everywhere, and has set his image on everyone, then God exists outside the Abrahamic covenant as well as within. That is the only form of theology that can yield the God-given integrity of otherness, the dignity of the stranger. The alternatives are tribalism—many nations, many gods—or universalism—one God, one faith, and only one gate to salvation.23

Hate is that which prevents us from accepting the other on his or her own terms. Just as God has made a space in his creation for humans, Jews must make space for the other and all of humanity must, in turn, make sense for one another. Because Judaism is not a religion of conversion, it has the potential—if understood properly—to become a model of coexistence for the rest of the world. Geographical coexistence is contingent upon theological coexistence.

22 Jonathan Sacks, The Home We Build Together: Recreating Society (London and New York: Continuum, 2007), 5. 23 Ibid., 83 (his italics).

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Yet, and this is crucial for Sacks’s argument, Judaism—like every other tradition—risks misinterpretation with the result that it, too, can be mired in the clouds of obscurantism. At the beginning of One People?, Sacks remarks that “I do not believe that Jewish faith is the acceptance of myth. It is the constant battle against myth in the name of religiously conceived possibility.”24 Faith ought not to take us away from the world, but force us to make it a better place. Torah and wisdom (hokhmah) form a double helix that comprises Judaism’s core. Observation, experience, and insight become the counterpart to the Torah’s divine word and revelation. One without the other produces either dehumanized scientism or religious fundamentalism. This is connected to another major theme found within Sacks’s writings, that of the ethics of responsibility and the related role that Jews have in tikkun ha-olam (the repair/restoration or the world). In his To Heal a Fractured World, he argues, following the rabbis, that humans are active partners with God in the work of creation. Life, therefore, should not be spent in the accumulation of material and sensual pleasures, but recognized as “God’s call to responsibility.”25 Juxtaposed against both the secular consumerization of society and religious fundamentalism, he seeks to promote the religious imperative of responsibility to others, to society, and to humanity. This imperative is found not just in Judaism, but is widely distributed in different traditions. Following the lead of the great medieval philosophers, most notably Maimonides, Sacks contends that one cannot apply the Torah to the world unless one first understands the world: To apply the Torah to the human mind, one must understand psychology and psychiatry. To apply it to society, we must understand sociology and anthropology. To cure poverty, we must understand economics. To avoid environmental catastrophe, we need to understand botany, biology, climatology, and much else besides. All these things come under the general heading of “wisdom”, which I defined as the knowledge that helps us see the universe as God’s work and the human person as God’s image—in other words the sciences and the humanities broadly conceived.26

In order to address the world, and not hide from it, Judaism must reunite Torah and wisdom, the two interconnected strands of its existence. Only 24 Sacks, One People?, vii. 25 Jonathan Sacks, To Heal a Fractured World: The Ethics of Responsibility (New York: Schocken, 2005), 3. 26 Sacks, Future Tense, 226–27.



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when these two features are reunited can Jews make the world a better place and, thereby, take up their place as a light unto the nations. In one of his least “Jewish” books, The Politics of Hope, Sacks further explores the importance of community and the social contract. Therein he juxtaposes liberalism with libertarianism. The latter has created the cult of the individual and, in the process, eroded a sense of the common good; instead, it has created a severe mistrust of social order and an erosion in institutions (e.g., the family, the faith community, the government) that have traditionally sustained this order.27 The former, on the contrary, envisages a civil society based on “the realm of the public good within which we discover our identity and allegiances, our loyalties and common strivings, our sense of liberty and equal regard.”28 Sacks contends that it is only as husbands and wives, parents, friends, and citizens—not consumers—that we can make a positive difference to those around us, thereby creating a common good regardless of religion, ethnicity, or other matters that divide us. Science and Judaism This focus on Torah and wisdom has led Sacks in recent years to look at the intersection of religion and science, a debate with massive ramifications that grows more loudly by the year. In his The Great Partnership, Sacks addresses all those individuals who argue that to believe in God or to practice religious faith is an error. He refers to these individuals—he has in mind people like Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens—as the “new atheists,” those who misunderstand both the true nature of science and of religion. Rather than argue that religion and science represent two mutually exclusive ways of viewing the world, Sacks argues that they are compatible with one another, but only when they are both understood properly. Religion and science, on his reading, “are the two essential perspectives that allow us to see the universe in its three-dimensional depth.”29 Whereas science is interested in taking the world apart in order to investigate how it works, the goal of religion is to put things together and see what they mean. The first is an activity that is associated with the left hemisphere 27 Jonathan Sacks, The Politics of Hope (London: Jonathan Cape, 1997), 13–14. 28 Ibid., 208. 29 Sacks, The Great Partnership, 2.

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of the brain, whereas the second is the domain of the right hemisphere. Unless the two spheres are held in equilibrium, the results will be catastrophic. Science without religion produces a society that dehumanizes; religion without science produces myth. Once again, Sacks’s interest in the religion-science debate is motivated by his role as a social philosopher. A society based solely on atheistic principles is one that stresses the individual and one that produces a view of the world that cannot imagine alternatives. Religion, on the contrary, is that which gives us both the faith and the courage to transform the world. Although writing out of the sources of Judaism, Sacks’s argument—as it should now be clear—is one that appeals to all the monotheistic traditions, especially those trajectories within each that are not afraid to engage the wider culture and to confront the intellectual challenges that face all of humanity. The uniqueness of monotheism is that it endows life with meaning. Whereas science represents the search for explanation, it is only religion that provides the quest for meaning. For it is religion, not science, that asks—and provides the answers to—the big questions: Who am I? What is the meaning of life? For what purposes are we here? Since science and religion represent two distinct activities of the mind, one cannot take precedence over the other. On the contrary, both, taken together, “constitute a full expression of our humanity.”30 The fact that they exist in potential friction, according to Sacks, resides in the peculiar development of Christianity. Because this religion drew its science and its cosmology from Greece and its religious impulse from ancient Israel, it had to translate each into the semantics of the other. The result was a “hairline fracture that would not become a structural weakness until the seventeenth century.”31 The translation of religious conceptions into the scientific language of Greek, in other words, produced a tension that would emerge as a full-blown rupture with the scientific revolution. Sacks calls for a renewed examination of the domains of science and religion. Rather than see them as antagonistic, he argues, we must see them as potentially compatible. Unless the twin hemispheres of our bicameral brain exist in conversation with one another, we risk descent into either religious obscurantism or the cold dehumanization afforded by science. He concludes The Great Partnership with the following words:

30 Ibid., 39. 31  Ibid., 61.



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Religion and science, the heritages respectively of Jerusalem and Athens, products of the twin hemispheres of the human brain, must now join together to protect the world that has been entrusted to our safekeeping, honoring the covenant with nature and nature’s God—the God who is the music beneath the noise; the Being at the heart of being, whose still small voice we can still hear if we learn to create a silence in the soul; the God who, whether or not we have faith in him, never loses faith in us.32

The Chapters That Follow The following four chapters show these many diverse and overlapping trajectories at work in Sacks’s writings. The first chapter, “Finding God,” which originally appeared in The Great Partnership, provides a compelling autobiographical account of how Sacks went from being a young student majoring in Philosophy to the Chief Rabbi of Britain and the Commonwealth. Of particular relevance is Sacks’s relationship to his doctoral advisor, the intellectually formidable Bernard Williams, a committed atheist, who first encouraged Sacks to think coherently through his positions. It goes on to relate how it was two encounters in particular—the one with the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, and the other with the doyen of modern Orthodoxy, Joseph Soloveitchik—that altered the course of his life. It was these encounters that led Sacks to give up a solely academic career in favor of a rabbinic life devoted to the spiritual and intellectual care of Jews. These autobiographical details all take place against the larger rubric of a book that, as we have seen, reflects on the integrative relationship between religion and science. Sacks provides this account of his encounters with the atheist Bernard Williams and the religiously devout Schneerson and Soloveitchik to demonstrate that the stark choice that the new atheists offer us—science or religion—need not be the only one. On the contrary, religion offers us that which science cannot: meaning. Sacks’s faith is not a naïve faith, one in which we pray for our personal salvation or invoke formulae to provide us with luck or miracles on a small scale. Religion, for Sacks, is about love, trust, family, community, giving, study, atonement, and prayer. Rather than envisage these as counterproductive to the scientific enterprise, Sacks argues that they function as its partner as we make sense of our world.

32 Ibid., 291.

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Another important feature that emerges from this chapter, one that we have seen time and again above, is Sacks’s inclusivism. Judaism holds no stranglehold on religious truth, for Sacks, but takes its place along the other great religious traditions. Since all humans are created in the image of God, Sacks believes that we must see the beauty and wisdom in faiths that are not our own. For only when we acknowledge the diversity of the world’s religious traditions can we, as Jews, take our place alongside others in the quest to change the world for the better. The second chapter, “The Dignity of Difference: Exorcizing Plato’s Ghost,” originally appeared in The Dignity of Difference. The latter deals, as we have seen, with the importance of diversity in the world. We see and appreciate diversity in the world’s flora and fauna, so Sacks argues why should we not appreciate it in people and their religious beliefs? Rather than envisage a uniform culture that some argue would solve all our problems because it would get rid of tribalism and put an end to difference, Sacks argues that such a view actually succeeds in exacerbating tension because it assumes—incorrectly and against the evidence supplied by the historical record—that all are essentially the same. Our dignity, rather, is rooted in the notion that none of us is exactly like any other. The concept of universalism, the “Plato’s Ghost” of this chapter’s title, holds that there is but one truth about the essentials of the human condition and that it holds for all peoples at all times. This is not just a philosophical proposition—I am right, you are wrong—but a worldview that has been responsible for some of the greatest crimes of history (e.g., the Inquisition, the Holocaust). The desire for uniformity, however, is not confined to philosophy. Recent years have seen the rise of totalitarianism, consumerism, imperialism, and fundamentalism—all of which are just as pernicious to human existence because they demand similar uniformity. Juxtaposed against Plato and his modern epigones, Sacks turns to the Bible, a work that—in the aftermath of the Tower of Babel—celebrates the dignity of difference. The ramifications of Sacks’s assessment are significant. It is what enables Jews to be particular and universal, the same and different as all others. The monotheism that emerges from the Bible teaches that, while there is one God, there is no single gateway to His presence. The unity of God, on the contrary, emerges from the diversity of creation. The third chapter, “An Agenda of Future Jewish Thought,” was originally published in his Tradition in an Untraditional Age. In the Introduction to the book, Sacks remarks, “In theory, Jewish philosophy should have become a central discipline of Jewish life. But at this juncture, the



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terms that comprise it have lost their lucidity. For what is Judaism in the modern age? And what is philosophy? And what is the conceivable relationship between them?”33 As we have seen already above, Sacks laments that the central terms of Judaism—the terms with which Jewish philosophy has always dealt—no longer hold. Reform Jews, secular Zionists, and Orthodox can no longer agree on their meaning. The goal of a renewed Jewish philosophy must be to wrestle with these terms, with contemporary culture, with the Diaspora, with the Jewish State, and with the Jewish people as a whole if it is be successful. In this chapter in particular, Sacks examines the conflict between Jewish tradition and secular modernity. Surveying the extreme options from assimilation to and withdrawal from the world, Sacks argues for an engagement with the world that, simultaneously, does not take away from the intricacies of Jewish life. Rather than claim that there is one size that fits all, he argues that the task for Jewish thought is to articulate which types of Jewish life can function for models of emulation. Within this context, Sacks defines the task for Orthodoxy not to retreat within the walls of its own constituency, but to provide religious leadership without relinquishing the ideal standard of halakha, an ideal to which all Jews ought to aspire. Once again, we see the universalist streak in his discussion of the particular. Although Judaism, writes Sacks—and here he invokes the thought of Soloveitchik and Hirsch—may well be the religion of a particular people, the Jews, it carries a much larger responsibility. The future of Judaism is not just about survival, but about the cognizance of a people whose fidelity has the potential to lead the entire world to God. The goal of the Jewish people, framed in this manner, is to serve as an inspiration and model to the rest of humanity. Just as the particular needs the universal to remove its blinders, so, too, does the universal need the particular to prevent it from its dogmatist dangers. The fourth chapter, “Future Tense: The Voice of Hope in the Conversation of Humankind,” originally appeared in his Future Tense. In this chapter, Sacks tells us what he finds special about Judaism. For this tradition, according to him, is uniquely able to exist in the future tense. By the latter he means that Judaism is, as he calls it, “supremely the religion of the notyet.” God, in other words, is not confined simply to the realm of science or

33 Jonathan Sacks, Tradition in an Untraditional Age: Essays on Modern Jewish Thought (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 1990), xiii–xiv.

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deducible from the past. Rather, on Sacks’s understanding, Judaism—like God himself—is open-ended. The result is that Jews, and those who learn from them, live with the possibility of redemption. Another way of saying this is that God awaits us in the unknown and unknowable future. The genius of Judaism, for Sacks, is that God is now found in time, in history, as opposed to nature. Sacks proceeds to numerate several features that he believes to be distinctive to Judaism’s ability to be open to the future. These include an acknowledgment of the future (seen, for example, in the very name that God gives to Moses: “I will be what I will be”), a sense of time (something that does not endlessly repeat itself ), the introduction of messianism, and a sense of narrative (that is not about closure). Once again, however, Sacks is quick to show that the genius of Judaism is not meant for Jews alone. On the contrary, Judaism functions as a blueprint for repairing an imperfect world, and this is something that has the potential to resonate with all peoples of the globe, regardless of their faith. The faith of Judaism—with its ability to endow every human with dignity as being created in the image of God, its endowment of freedom and human responsibility, and its insistence on the sanctity of life—functions as a model for one and all. In the conclusion of this chapter, Sacks sums up his life’s work. It is a passage worth quoting in its entirety: I have argued for a Judaism that has the courage to engage with the world and its challenges. Faith begets confidence, which creates courage. That is how Jews lived in the past and should live in the future. For they are the people of the journey to a distant destination, begun by Abraham, continued by a hundred generations of ancestors, and it still beckons. Judaism is a faith in the future tense. Jews were and are still called on to be the voice of hope in the conversation of humankind.34

34 Sacks, Future Tense, 252.

Finding God* God lives where we let Him in. Rabbi Menahem Mendel of Kotzk It was as though a more complex interlocutor had spoken. Jorge Luis Borges, ‘The Approach to Al-Mu’tasim’ But the Lord God called to the man, ‘Where are you?’ Genesis 3:9

‘Thank God for atheists!’ was my first response to philosophy. I was the first member of my family to go to university, and it hit me like a cold shower. Those were the days—Oxford and Cambridge in the 1960s—when the words ‘religion’ and ‘philosophy’ went together like cricket and thunderstorms. You often found them together but the latter generally put an end to the former. Philosophers were atheists, or at least agnostics. That, then, was the default option, and at the time I did not know of any exceptions. The first thing we did, a kind of nursery-slope exercise, was to refute all the classic proofs for the existence of God. Kant had disproved the ontological argument. Hume had shown that for any supposed miracle, the evidence that it had not happened was always greater than the evidence that it had. Darwin had shown the error in the ‘argument from design’. For me, far from being a threat, this was like an immersion in a mikveh, a ritual bath. I felt purified. All these arguments, by then deemed to be fallacious, were in any case wholly alien to the religion I knew and loved. They were Greek, not Hebraic. They carried with them the scent of Athens, not Jerusalem. They were beautiful but misconceived. As Judah Halevi put it in the eleventh century, they were about the God of Aristotle, not the God of Abraham. Now, every thinking Jew—none more than Maimonides—loves Aristotle, and every feeling Jew loves Socrates, who comes across the pages of history exactly like a rabbi, always asking unsettling questions. Socrates is that most Jewish of figures, an irrepressible iconoclast. But Greece is Greece, Jerusalem is Jerusalem, and the two are not the same. * Originally published in Jonathan Sacks, The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning (New York: Schocken Books, 2011), 78–98.

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The ontological argument struck me as philosophical legerdemain of the lowest kind. It states, roughly, that if we can conceive of the greatest possible being, then it must exist, because if it did not exist, it would not be the greatest possible being. It immediately occurred to me that by the same token you could prove that the cruellest possible being exists, because if it does not exist, how cruel could it really be? At best, it qualified as a not-very-good Woody Allen-type joke. The idea that you can pass from concept to existence in that kind of way is actually a kind of magical thinking: the belief that saying, or thinking, makes it so. That is what Wittgenstein set himself against when he called philosophy ‘the battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language’.1 As for the argument from design—the world looks as if it was designed, therefore it had a Designer—it was wobbly to begin with. Had John Stuart Mill not put the contrary case with immense passion and power? Nature impales men, breaks them as if on the wheel, casts them to be devoured like wild beasts, burns them to death . . . starves them with hunger, freezes them with cold, poisons them by the quick or slow venom of her exhalations, and has hundreds of other hideous deaths in reserve . . . If there are any marks at all of special design in creation, one of the things most evidently designed is that a large proportion of all animals should pass their existence in tormenting and devouring other animals . . . [I]f Nature and Man are both the works of a Being of perfect goodness, that Being intended Nature as a scheme to be amended, not imitated, by man.2

But is that not precisely what the rabbis meant when they said that Abraham encountered God in the vision of ‘a palace in flames’, meaning, yes, there was order, but there was also disorder, violence, chaos, injustice?3 God told Abraham to leave home and travel ‘to the land I will show you’, but no sooner had he arrived than there was a famine in the land and he had to leave. Design there may be, but it is not obvious, not on the surface, certainly not self-evident. As for Mill’s conclusion—‘If Nature and Man are both the works of a Being of perfect goodness, that Being intended Nature as a scheme to be amended, not imitated, by man’—that is precisely what the rabbis had in mind when they spoke of people becoming ‘God’s partner in the work 1  Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, New York, Macmillan, 1953, para. 109. 2 John Stuart Mill, Nature, London, Kessinger Publishing, 2010, pp. 28–30. 3 Genesis Rabbah 39:1. See Jonathan Sacks, A Letter in the Scroll: Understanding Our Jewish Identity and Exploring the Legacy of the World’s Oldest Religion, New York, Free Press, 2000, pp. 51–60.



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of creation’. They believed that God left the world incomplete to be completed by humanity. That, in Judaism, is not heresy but mainstream belief. As for miracles, David Hume would surely have enjoyed the approach of Moses Maimonides, who argued that miracles are not a proof of anything, since there is always the possibility that they have been performed by magic, optical illusion or the like. The Israelites did not believe in Moses because of the miracles he performed, he says in his code of Jewish law.4 Why then did Moses perform them? Because they answered a physical, not a metaphysical need. Why did he divide the Red Sea? Because the Israelites needed to get to the other side. Why did he produce manna from heaven and water from a rock? Because the people were hungry and thirsty. Believe in miracles, said Maimonides, and there is a danger you will believe in false prophets. Lest it be thought that Maimonides was a lone voice, consider the Bible itself. Two prophets, Elijah and Elisha, both raise the dead to life (1 Kings 17:17–24; 2 Kings 4:8–37). Yet neither the biblical text nor later Jewish tradition made any great fuss over this. The real miracle in both cases—as it is in the stories of the patriarchs and matriarchs in Genesis, and of Hannah in the book of Samuel—is that infertile women were able to have children in the first place. In that sense, modern fertility treatments, including in vitro fertilisation, are our miracles. We should not need supernatural intervention to see children as the gift of God. The Babylonian Talmud displays a fascinating attitude towards the miraculous. It tells the story of a man whose wife died giving birth. The man was so poor he was unable to pay for a wet-nurse. A miracle happened, says the Talmud, and his own breasts sprouted milk (male lactation is, in fact, a natural though rare occurrence). What is fascinating is what the Talmud says next: ‘Rav Joseph said: Come and see how great is this man that such a miracle was performed for him. Abbaye said to him: To the contrary, come and see how lowly was this man, that he needed the natural order to be changed for him.’5 Abbaye believed, with many of the sages, that we should not need miracles, nor should we rely on them. Judaism is a religion that celebrates law: the natural law that governs the physical universe, and the moral law that governs the human universe. God is found in order, not in the miraculous suspension of that order. If you read closely the book of Exodus, the book that contains the most and greatest miracles, you will see that none 4 Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot Yesodei ha-Torah 8:1. 5 Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 53b.

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induced lasting faithfulness on the part of the Israelites. Within three days of the division of the Red Sea they were complaining about the water (Exodus 15:22–24). Forty-one days after the revelation at Mount Sinai, they were making a golden calf (Exodus 32). Faith is about seeing the miraculous in the everyday, not about waiting every day for the miraculous. So my induction into godless philosophy did wonders for my faith. It cleared the garden of religion from the covering of weeds that was disfiguring the lawn and hiding the flowers. Nor did I expect otherwise. If God created the world, then his existence must be compatible with the world. If he created human intelligence, his existence must not be an insult to the intelligence. If the greatest gift he gave humanity was freedom, then religion could not establish itself by coercion. If he created law-governed order, then he could not have asked us to depend on events incompatible with that order. Oddly enough, it was the atheist Bernard Williams, who later became my doctoral supervisor, who really clarified the issue for me. In what must have been one of his first published articles, ‘Tertullian’s Paradox’, he delivered a devastating onslaught against irrationalism in the religious life.6 His target was the famous statement made by Tertullian in the third century: Certum est, quia impossibile, ‘It is certain because it is impossible.’ Faith transcends understanding. Williams rightly argued that, once you start down this road, there is no way of distinguishing between holy nonsense and unholy nonsense. If a belief cannot be stated coherently, then what is it to believe in it? Faith would then become ‘whistling in the dark without even the knowledge that what one is whistling is a tune’. Maimonides had made almost exactly the same point eight centuries earlier. In The Guide for the Perplexed he referred to people who objected to giving reasons for the divine commandments, on the grounds that if their logic could be understood by mere mortals, then there was no reason for believing they were divine. Maimonides dismissed such views as unworthy of consideration, because they resulted in making God lower than mere mortals. Shall we really say that human beings do things for a reason while God does not?7

6 Bernard Williams, ‘Tertullian’s Paradox’, in Anthony Flew and Alasdair MacIntyre (eds), New Essays in Philosophical Theology, London, SCM Press, 1955, pp. 187–211. 7 Maimonides, Guide for the Perplexed, Book III, 31.



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Williams’s second point, though, was deeper. Religious believers were called on to believe two things that cannot both be true. On the one hand God is eternal, unchangeable and beyond time. On the other, God is involved in history. Williams spoke about the central events of Christianity, but the same is true in Judaism. God speaks to Abraham, gives him a child, is with Joseph in Egypt, summons Moses at the burning bush, and rescues the Israelites from slavery. Williams, with great elegance and subtlety, in effect said: you cannot have it both ways. Either God is within history or he is beyond history, but not both. Given that this was the only theological statement of Williams I know of, written when he was relatively young—twenty-five—it may have been that this was one of the reasons he decided to abandon his faith, though this is mere speculation on my part. To me, however, it suggested exactly the opposite, the first intimation of the argument I have set out in the previous three chapters. What Williams saw as a contradiction within faith, I recognised as a contradiction between the Jewish and Greek conceptions of God. The changeless, unmoved mover was the God of Plato and Aristotle. The God of history was the God of Abraham. They simply did not belong together. Williams the atheist helped me clarify, and thereby strengthen, my faith. He did more—but of that anon. What led me to examine my faith in depth was not the success of philosophy in refuting proofs for the existence of God. It was its failure to say anything positive of consequence about the big questions of life: Who am I? Why am I here? To what story do I belong? How then shall I live? I loved philosophy and still do. I read it, teach it and cherish it. At Cambridge, and later at Oxford, I was taught by people of awesome brilliance, especially by my undergraduate tutor Roger Scruton, for whom I have a deep affection and admiration. But philosophy in the late 1960s and early 1970s had reached a dead end. Under the influence of the Vienna Circle and Logical Positivism, it had given up on the big questions. Instead philosophers spent their time focusing on the meaning of words. Instead of asking what is right and wrong, it asked, ‘What do we mean when we say this is right, that is wrong?’ It seemed less like the search for wisdom than a kind of high-minded lexicography, as if the great arguments that had divided serious minds for twenty-five centuries could be resolved, or dissolved, by mere reflection on what words mean. Besides which, it often seemed to turn out that they did not mean anything at all. ‘Right’ and ‘wrong’, it was argued, were nothing more than an expression of emotion or perhaps not even that. The combination of

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technical virtuosity and naiveté was sometimes staggering. G. E. Moore had argued that morality was a matter of intuition, as if it was not patently obvious that people in different cultures and ages had different moral intuitions. A. J. Ayer, in a mere twenty pages of Language, Truth and Logic, consigned the entire worlds of aesthetic and moral judgement, metaphysics and religion to the wastepaper basket on the grounds that they consisted of statements that could not be conclusively verified and were therefore meaningless. Either this was a joke whose point I could not see, or it was philistinism on a stunning scale. Slowly it began to dawn on me that I would have to turn to religion, not philosophy, to find the wisdom I sought. I was beginning to see why. Philosophy aimed at universality—at propositions that were true in all places, at all times. But meaning is expressed in particularity. There is no universal meaning. There are universal rules. ‘Treat others as you would wish to be treated’—the so-called Golden Rule—is one. ‘Do not cause suffering where it can be avoided’ is another. But they are too few, thin and abstract to constitute a way of life. There was a witty philosophy professor at Columbia University, Sidney Morganbesser, who is said to have taught this point to his students by taking them to a restaurant, summoning a waiter, and ordering soup. ‘And which soup would you like?’ asked the waiter. ‘We have chicken soup, fish soup, leek soup, lentil soup and a very fine borsht.’ ‘I don’t want any of those,’ said Morganbesser, ‘I just want soup.’ Whether or not the waiter got the joke, the students eventually did. There may be a Platonic essence of soup—soup in general, the universal form of soup—but it belongs strictly to a Platonic heaven. Down here, if you want to drink soup, it has to be of a particular kind. The same, I realised, applies to meaning. Science may be universal, but meaning is not. The great error of the Enlightenment was to confuse the two. One of the great joys of my life was to discover, some years later, that some great thinkers had reached the same conclusion: Alasdair MacIntyre in After Virtue, Michael Walzer in Spheres of Justice, Stuart Hampshire in Morality and Conflict, Michael Sandel in Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, all of them appearing in the early 1980s. Together they gave back to philosophy its history and substantive particularity. Something else happened in 1967 that led to a real crisis of faith: not faith in God but faith in human beings. It is hard for anyone who did not live through them to describe the mood that prevailed among Jews in the tense weeks before the Six Day War. Arab armies were massing on Israel’s borders. Egypt’s President Gamal Abdel Nasser had closed the Straits of



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Tiran and was threatening to drive Israel into the sea. It seemed, not just to us but to Jews throughout the world, that there was a real danger that Israel would be totally annihilated. The little synagogue in Thompson’s Lane was full day after day. Jews we had never seen there before were praying daily for Israel’s safety. As it happened, Israel won a swift victory. But it was a transformative moment for my generation. We who had been born after the Holocaust had just lived through the fear of a second Holocaust, and nothing would be the same again. At about the same time I encountered the English don George Steiner. We debated one another at the Cambridge Union. He had just published a book of essays, Language and Silence, and this too made a great impression on me. What he wrote about the Holocaust was about the failure, in Germany, of the humanities to humanise. ‘We know now,’ he wrote, ‘that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day’s work at Auschwitz in the morning.’ This was new to me, and the more I have read in the intervening years, the more disturbing it becomes.8 The Holocaust did not take place long ago and far away. It happened in the heart of rationalist, post-Enlightenment, liberal Europe: the Europe of Kant and Hegel, Goethe and Schiller, Beethoven and Brahms. Some of the epicentres of antisemitism were places of cosmopolitan, avant-garde culture like Berlin and Vienna. The Nazis were aided by doctors, lawyers, scientists, judges and academics. More than half of the participants at the Wannsee Conference in January 1942, who planned the ‘final solution to the Jewish question’, the murder of all Europe’s Jews, carried the title ‘doctor’. They either had doctorates or were medical practitioners.9 This was devastating to me. I have known people who lost their faith in God during the Holocaust, and others who kept it. But that anyone can have faith in humanity after Auschwitz to me defies belief. Much has been written about the history of hate that Hitler exploited. There have been libraries of books about Christian, racial and (sadly and more recently) Islamist antisemitism. Far too little, however, has been written about a fourth kind, which played its own part in the centuries leading up to the Holocaust, namely philosophical antisemitism. It can be found in virtually all of the great continental philosophers of the Enlightenment and beyond. Voltaire called the Jews ‘an ignorant and

8 George Steiner, Language and Silence, London, Faber & Faber, 1967. 9 Mark Roseman, The Villa, the Lake, the Meeting: Wannsee and the Final Solution, London, Allen Lane/Penguin, 2002.

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barbarous people, who have long united the most sordid avarice with the most detestable superstition’. Fichte (1762–1814) wrote that the only way of making Jews civilised was to amputate their Jewish heads. Immanuel Kant spoke privately of Jews as ‘the vampires of society’ and argued for the ‘euthanasia’ of Judaism. Hegel took Judaism as his model of a ‘slave morality’. Nietzsche accused Jews of giving the world an ethic of kindness and compassion which he saw as the ‘falsification’ of natural morality, namely the will to power. The most virulent of the philosopher antisemites, whose work was regularly cited by the Nazis, was Schopenhauer. He spoke of Jews as ‘no better than cattle’ and ‘scum of the earth’ and said they should be expelled from Germany. The logician Gottlob Frege wrote in 1924 (he was in his midseventies at the time) that it was a ‘misfortune that there are so many Jews in Germany and that in future they will have full political equality with German citizens’.10 Martin Heidegger, the greatest German philosopher of the twentieth century, joined the Nazi Party in 1933. Shortly after joining the party he became rector of the University of Freiburg. Among his first declarations was the statement that ‘The Führer alone is the present and future German reality and its law.’ After the war Heidegger made no attempt to apologise for his involvement with the Nazis, his admiration for Hitler, or his betrayal of Jewish colleagues. Jonathan Glover summarises his response as a ‘mixture of silence and grandiose evasion’.11 This cries out for explanation. The philosophers of the Enlightenment believed that prejudice belonged to religious sentiment and that it could be cured by an age of reason, in which, in the words of the revolutionary French National Assembly, ‘All men are born, and remain, free and equal in rights.’ Why did this dream fail so consistently and so profoundly? The Enlightenment was a ‘dream of reason’. Reason is universal. It applies at all places, in all times. Prejudice, so Voltaire and others argued, comes from the particular: the local, the church, the neighbourhood, the community, even the family, the things that make us different, attached

10 See Léon Poliakov, From Voltaire to Wagner, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975; Nathan Rotenstreich, Jews and German Philosophy: The Polemics of Emancipation, New York, Schocken, 1984; Paul Lawrence Rose, Revolutionary Antisemitism in Germany from Kant to Wagner, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1990. 11  Jonathan Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century, London, Jonathan Cape, 1999.



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to this, not that. Tolerance would therefore come only when men and women learned to worship the universal, ‘humanity’. That is a dream destined to fail because it is universal. Its immense power, evident in science, is that it leads us to seek universal patterns, chains of cause and effect, in the phenomena of nature from the cosmos to the genome. But the human person is not entirely a phenomenon of nature. Yes, we are bodies, the ‘quintessence of dust’. But we also have minds, and whether or not the mind is coextensive with the brain, it allows human beings to do something no other life form known to us does: to become self-conscious, to feel lonely not just alone, to question, think, plan, choose, and ask ‘Why?’ To think, we must use language and everything that goes with language: communities, cultures, conventions and codes, the things that make us different. Languages and cultures are always particular. Between Babel and the end of days, there is no universal language. To universalise, to apply modes of thought that work for science to human beings, is to dehumanise human beings. Hence philosophy in the Platonic-CartesianKantian mode is no defence against genocide. Allied to hate, it makes it possible. So my encounter with philosophy, which I still love and cherish, taught me the limits of philosophy. I needed something more. The question was, where to find it? Where do you find God? There is a short story by the Argentinian poet Jorge Luis Borges called ‘The Approach to Al-Mu’tasim’.12 In it Borges imagines a young man who finds himself in a poor neighbourhood of Bombay. He is a fugitive—from what, we never learn. He takes refuge among ‘people of the vilest class’ and gradually adjusts to them ‘in a kind of contest of infamy’. He hides himself in their midst and becomes like them. One day he is in the middle of a conversation when he senses in one of the people with whom he is talking a discrepant note—a tone of voice, an inflection, that does not belong: All at once—with the miraculous consternation of Robinson Crusoe faced with the human footprint in the sand—he perceives some mitigation in this infamy: a tenderness, an exaltation, a silence in one of the abhorrent men. ‘It was as if a more complex interlocutor had joined the dialogue.’

12 Jorge Luis Borges and Andrew Hurley, Jorge Luis Borges: Collected Fictions, New York, Viking, 1998, pp. 82–7.

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He knows that the man with whom he is conversing is incapable of ‘this momentous decorum’. He infers that he has been influenced by someone else. He is ‘the reflection of a friend, or of the friend of the friend’. He senses a trace, perhaps many times removed, of a remarkable presence. ‘Rethinking the problem he arrives at a mysterious conviction: some place in the world there is a man from whom this clarity emanates; some place in the world there is a man who is this clarity.’ He resolves to dedicate his life to finding this man. That is how I have sought God, not through philosophical proofs, scientific demonstrations or theological arguments; not through miracles or mysteries or inner voices or sudden epiphanies; not by ceasing to question or challenge or doubt; not by blind faith or existential leap; certainly not by an abandonment of reason and an embrace of the irrational. These things have brought many people to God. But they have also brought many people to worship things that are not God, like power, or ideology, or race. Instead I have sought God in people—people who in themselves seemed to point to something or someone beyond themselves. In 1931, in his notebook, Wittgenstein wrote the following sentence: ‘Amongst Jews “genius” is found only in the holy man.’13 In the summer of 1968 I set off in search of holy men. I went to America. That might seem a strange choice, but I was looking for Jewish thinkers unafraid to confront the challenges of philosophy. The mid-1960s had witnessed, in both Britain and the United States, a ‘death of God’ controversy, in both cases started not by atheists but by theologians. An American-Jewish magazine, Commentary, had published a series of Jewish responses from leading rabbis,14 and I decided to meet as many of them as I could. So I bought a Greyhound bus ticket and spent the whole of that summer travelling from city to city in Canada and the United States, meeting rabbis and asking them the big questions. Wherever I went, two names kept coming up in conversation. One was Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, the leading thinker of American Orthodoxy. Heir to one of the leading dynasties of East European talmudic scholarship, he had ventured out into Western philosophy and written a doctorate on post-Kantian epistemology. Coming to the United States with the 13 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1980, p. 18e. 14 This was later published as a book: The Condition of Jewish Belief: A Symposium, Northvale, J. Aronson, 1989.



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rise of Nazism, he had taught several generations of modern Orthodox rabbis. Of all contemporary Jews literate in the two worlds of Talmud and philosophy, he was the greatest. The other was the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneersohn. Already a legend, he had done what no previous Jewish leader had ever tried to do. He had sent emissaries throughout the world, seeking out lost and disaffiliated Jews and, wherever possible, bringing them back to faith. Eventually other individuals and organisations followed his lead, but he was the first, and the people I met spoke about him with awe. Not only were these two—one in the arena of thought, the other in leadership—the greatest rabbis alive, they were also living remnants of the world Jewry had lost, the talmudic academies and Hassidic courts of Eastern Europe, more than 90 per cent of which were destroyed in the Holocaust. I was determined, whatever the practical difficulties, to meet them, and eventually I did. In both cases, it did not take long to realise that I was in the presence of greatness. Rabbi Soloveitchik, formidably erudite in every branch of philosophy, spoke about the need to create a new kind of Jewish thought, based not on philosophical categories but on halakhah, Jewish law. Law was the lifeblood, the DNA, of Judaism, and it was more than mere regulation of conduct. It was a way of being in the world. Jewish philosophy in the past had based itself on its Western counterpart, and in so doing had failed to express what was unique about Judaism, its focus on the holy deed. For two hours he spoke with an intellectual passion and depth far beyond anything I had experienced in Cambridge. My encounter with Rabbi Schneersohn was unlike any other. The first half of our conversation proceeded conventionally. I asked the questions, he gave answers. Then, unexpectedly, he reversed the roles and started asking me questions. How many Jewish students were there at Cambridge? How many were actively identified with Jewish life? What was I doing to engage them? This was something for which I was not prepared. I was on a private intellectual quest, with no larger intention. I was interested in my Jewish identity, not that of others. I began my reply with a typical English evasion: ‘In the situation in which I find myself . . .’ The Rebbe allowed the sentence to go no further. ‘You do not find yourself in a situation,’ he said. ‘You place yourself in a situation; and if you placed yourself in one, you can place yourself in another.’ We were losing Jews, he said, and each of us had a responsibility to do something about it. Years later, I summed up that moment by saying how wrong people were to think of him as a leader with thousands

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of followers. A good leader, I said, creates followers. A great leader creates leaders. The Rebbe created leaders on a scale unprecedented in Jewish history. These were life-changing encounters. Rabbi Soloveitchik had challenged me to think. Rabbi Schneersohn had challenged me to lead. In both—though neither spoke of it—I sensed the extent of what Jewish life had lost in the Holocaust. In both too I felt the scale of the challenge in the present, as Jews were losing interest in Judaism, nowhere more so than on campus in their college years. Both conveyed the gravitas and depth of the Jewish soul. There was something in them that was more than them, as if an entire tradition spoke through their lips. This was not ‘charisma’. It was a kind of humility. In their presence you could feel the divine presence. At university I had found intellectual agility, subtlety, wit, the rapier thrust of trained, honed, razor-sharp minds. But these were holy people. Somehow you felt larger because of them. I went back to Cambridge, finished my degree, began a doctorate under Bernard Williams, then went to Oxford where I studied briefly with the Catholic philosopher Philippa Foot, who did much to bring virtue ethics back into moral thought, and then, for two years, I taught philosophy. But the memory of those two meetings stayed with me, challenging me to learn more about Judaism. So in 1973 I said goodbye to everything I had dreamed of doing as an academic, and began serious Judaic study. Five years later I became a rabbi. Thirteen years after that I became Chief Rabbi. God kept calling and I kept following, hoping that at least some of the time I was going in the right direction. I have sought God in the meanings that have inspired people to live in such a way that their lives seem to point to something larger than themselves, what Matthew Arnold called ‘the power not ourselves that makes for righteousness’, and what the rabbis meant when they said ‘the divine presence spoke through them’. It can be a gentleness, a tenderness, a generous embrace. It can be an affirmation, someone who gives you the confidence to be yourself. It can be a forgiveness, a way of saying, yes, you know and I know that it was wrong, but that was yesterday, and you have work to do today, and perhaps tomorrow will bring the chance to heal what you harmed. It is hard to define what it is that makes you feel, as did Borges’ young man, that you are seeing the trace of another, greater presence, but you do, at least if you have accustomed yourself to search for it.



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People within the Abrahamic monotheisms have always known that for most of us, most of the time, God, more infinite than the universe, older and younger than time, cannot be known directly. He is known mainly through his effects, and of these the most important is his effect on human lives. That is what I sensed on meeting the Lubavitcher Rebbe and Rabbi Soloveitchik. In them it was obvious. It is why they commanded so much respect within the American Jewish community. But over the years I have learned to find it so much more widely, in communities that care, in the kindness of strangers, in people who touch our lives, perhaps only momentarily, doing the deed or saying the word that carries us to safety across the abyss of loneliness or self-doubt. It is where I find God in Jewish history. There is a grandeur, a nobility, a heroic passion about Jews that does not seem to come naturally to this fractious, quarrelsome, stiff-necked people. We catch traces of it in a Hebrew fugitive tending his father-in-law’s sheep in the desert in Midian, in a village herdsman from Tekoah, a water-drawer from Babylon, a wine-seller in eleventh-century France, in a hundred eighteenth-century villages in Russia—in short, in Moses, Amos, Hillel, Rashi, the followers of the Baal Shem Tov, and others in every generation. Time and again, often in circumstances of back-breaking poverty, the Jewish spirit has caught fire and produced words and deeds of incandescent beauty. Their kingdom bounded by a nutshell, Jews counted themselves kings of infinite space. I find no way of accounting for this in terms of what Jews were, or where they lived, or what happened to them. Somehow they were touched by a sense of destiny, a vision of God and the world, that transfigured them— even at times against their will—into a people that defied the normal rules of the decline and fall of civilisations. Their very existence seemed to testify to something vast and unfathomable that knowingly or otherwise they carried in their midst. They became what Isaiah called ‘God’s witnesses’. Their history, their survival against the odds, their intellectual flights and utopian endeavours, became a signal of transcendence. But you have to be very narrow indeed not to see beauty and wisdom in faiths other than your own. I have been inspired by seeing Sikhs offering hospitality to the poor in Amritsar, Christians building homes for the homeless throughout the world, Hindus practising sewa, compassion to the distressed, by the majestic wisdom of the great Chinese Confucian and Taoist traditions, and the courage of the many Muslims I know who fight the extremists in their own communities. The statement that every human being is in God’s image precedes both the universal covenant with

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Noah in Genesis 9 and the particular covenant with Abraham in Genesis 17, to tell us that our humanity precedes our religious identity, whatever that identity may be. Why is it that we say we see something distinctive in these lives and not, say, in a politician hoping for our vote, or a lawyer doing her job, or even a soldier risking his life for the sake of his country? Because the scientists and philosophers are to this extent right, that people generally act on the basis of rational self-interest. Consciously or otherwise, we seek to hand on our genes to the next generation. Individually and as groups, tribes, nations and civilisations, we are engaged in a Darwinian struggle to survive. All this we know, and though the terminology may change from age to age, people have known it for a very long time indeed. But here and there we see acts, personalities, lives, that seem to come from somewhere else, that breathe a larger air. They chime with the story we read in chapter 1, about a God who creates in love, who has faith in us, who summons us to greatness and forgives us when, as from time to time we must, we fall, the God whose creativity consists in self-effacement, in making space for the otherness that is us. This has nothing whatsoever to do with the physical laws, Darwinian or otherwise, governing biology, and everything to do with the making of meaning out of the communion of souls linked in loyalty and love. Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin see such flowerings of the spirit as ‘spandrels’, decorative motifs that have nothing to do with the weight-bearing architecture of life.15 Like most people, I see them as the redemption of life from mere existence to the fellowship of the divine. As Isaiah Berlin said, there are people tone deaf to the spirit. There is no reason to expect everyone to believe in God or the soul or the music of the universe as it sings the improbability of its existence. God is the distant voice we hear and seek to amplify in our systems of meaning, each particular to a culture, a civilisation, a faith. God is the One within the many; the unity at the core of our diversity; the call that leads us to journey beyond the self and its strivings, to enter into otherness and be enlarged by it, to seek to be a vehicle through which blessing flows outwards to the world, to give thanks for the miracle of being and

15 Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin, ‘The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme’, Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, B, 205, 1979.



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the radiance that shines wherever two lives touch in affirmation, forgiveness and love. How then are we to understand the rationality or otherwise of religious faith? Ironically, again it was Bernard Williams who led me to the answer. In one of his most famous essays, ‘Moral Luck’, he wrote about the painter Paul Gauguin. At the age of thirty-seven, in the midst of a successful career as a stockbroker, Gauguin left his wife and five children to work full time as a painter, first in Paris, then in Aries, and finally in Polynesia where he died. Williams asked the question: What would have had to have been the case for Gauguin’s decision to be justified? He became one of the greatest artists of his time, and that leads us to think he was right to do what he did. But he might not have become a great artist. He might simply have lacked the ability, the gift. But Gauguin could not know this in advance. None of us can. We do not know what we could become until we try to become it. It was luck that justified Gauguin’s decision. So there is a place for luck in the moral life.16 That seems to me a faulty analysis. Whether or not Gauguin became a great artist has no bearing whatsoever on the moral question of whether he was justified in leaving his wife and family. We might well say that as an artist he was admirable, but as a human being less so. History is littered with such examples. Yeats put it best: The intellect of man is forced to choose perfection of the life, or of the work, And if it take the second must refuse A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.17

So I could not see that the Gauguin case introduced luck into morality. But there was another conclusion to be drawn altogether. The Gauguin case showed that there can be key decisions, life-changing, ‘existential’ as we used to call them, that cannot be rational because not all the facts on which a rational decision depends are knowable in advance. Gauguin may have suspected that he had artistic genius, but he could not know until he had taken the risk of dedicating himself totally to art.

16 Bernard Williams, Moral Luck, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1981, pp. 20–39. Needless to say, this is a crude summary of an exquisitely subtle argument. 17 W. B. Yeats, ‘The Choice’, in The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, Contemporary Publishing Company, 1994, p. 209.

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I may know who and what I am. I cannot know in advance who or what I could become. There are certain risks you have to take, such that only in retrospect can you know whether you were right to take them, and perhaps not even then. Neither Gauguin nor Van Gogh lived to see their genius recognised. This is not a minor fact about humanity. It lies at the heart of all creative endeavour. Crick and Watson could not know in advance that they would discover DNA when they began to search for it. Columbus could not have known he would discover America before he set sail for it. As Karl Popper said in The Poverty of Historicism, the future cannot be predicted, because how it will happen depends on discoveries that cannot be predicted, because if they could be predicted they would already have been discovered. That is why every attempt to foretell ‘the shape of things to come’ is at best guesswork, and usually bad guesswork. What Gauguin had was faith: faith in himself, in his art, in his vocation. Externally, his fate may seem like luck: so Williams argued. But to Gauguin himself, luck was the last thing he had in mind. Does anyone engaged in scientific research, or writing a novel, or starting a new business, or getting married, believe in luck? Hardly. If luck were what governed the universe, we would all be Stoics or Epicureans, guarding ourselves against outrageous fortune by avoiding worst-case scenarios and minimising risks. Luck is precisely the wrong concept to invoke if we seek to understand those who take great risks in a cause to which they feel themselves called. What they have is faith: faith that effort is rewarded, that dedication is worthwhile, that there is no creativity without risk and no risk without occasional failure. Faith is not a spurious knowledge of things we might be able to demonstrate through scientific means. Nor is it belief in the irrefutable, always insulated against the possibility of being proved wrong. Faith is the human response to the phenomenon that defines the human condition: the constitutive uncertainty of our lives as we walk towards the undiscovered country called the future. We know much, but there is one thing we can never know: what tomorrow may bring. Faith is what allows us to face the future without fear: ‘Though I walk through the shadow of death I will fear no evil for you are with me.’ That was the faith that moved Abraham and Sarah to leave their land, their birthplace and their father’s house, to travel to an unknown destination in response to a divine call. It moved Moses to abandon life as an Egyptian prince or a Midianite shepherd, to lead his people to freedom.



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Faith is what moves people to great achievement that defies probability and predictability. Faith is not certainty. It is the courage to live with uncertainty. Faith is never easy. The great heroes of the moral life, like the great artists and scientists and thinkers, like anyone who has undertaken to live a life of high ideals, know failure after failure, disappointment after disappointment. What made them great is that they refused to despair. Like Jacob wrestling with the angel, they said to fate, ‘I will not let you go until you bless me’ (Genesis 32:26). Judaism is built on that faith. Jews refused to let go of God, and God refused to let go of them. They wrestle still. So do all who have faith. Science is about explanation. Religion is about meaning. To find meaning in life, as Viktor Frankl discovered in Auschwitz, is to hear a call. ‘In the last resort, man should not ask, “What is the meaning of my life?” but should realise that he himself is being questioned.’18 God is calling each of us to a task—asking each of us as he asked the first humans, ‘Where are you?’—but to hear the call we have to learn to listen. We can never be sure that we heard correctly. We can never know that it really was the voice of God, which is why humility not arrogance, and risk not certainty, are the deepest marks of faith. Nor can we be sure in advance that the journey we take will lead to the destination we seek. That—the Gauguin problem—is why we need faith. I owe that discovery to my teacher, Bernard Williams, perhaps the greatest atheist of our time. Everything I have learned about faith in a lifetime tells me that the science of creation—cosmology—wondrous though it is, takes second place to the sheer wonder that God could take this risk of creating a creature with the freedom to disobey him and wreck his world. There is no faith humans can have in God equal to the faith God must have had in humankind to place us here as guardians of the vastness and splendour of the universe. We exist because of God’s faith in us. That is why I see in the faces of those I meet a trace of God’s love that lifts me to try and love a little as God loves. I know of nothing with greater power to lift us beyond ourselves and to perform acts that carry within them a signal of transcendence. God lives wherever we open our eyes to his radiance, our hearts to his transforming love.

18 Viktor Frankl, The Doctor and the Soul: From Psychotherapy to Logotherapy, New York, Vintage, 1986, p. 13.

The Dignity of Difference: Exorcizing Plato’s Ghost* Politicians at international forums may reiterate a thousand times that the basis of the new world order must be universal respect for human rights, but it will mean nothing as long as this imperative does not derive from respect for the miracle of Being . . . It must be rooted in self-transcendence: transcendence as a hand reaching out to those close to us, to foreigners, to the human community, to all living creatures, to nature, to the universe; transcendence as a deeply and joyously experienced need to be in harmony even with what we ourselves are not, with what we do not understand, with what seems distant from us in time and space, but with which we are mysteriously linked because, together with us, all this constitutes a single world; transcendence as the only real alternative to extinction. (Václav Havel, The Art of the Impossible)

One belief, more than any other (to quote a phrase of Isaiah Berlin’s)1 is responsible for the slaughter of individuals on the altars of the great historical ideals. It is the belief that those who do not share my faith—or my race or my ideology—do not share my humanity. At best they are second-class citizens. At worst they forfeit the sanctity of life itself. They are the unsaved, the unbelievers, the infidel, the unredeemed; they stand outside the circle of salvation. If faith is what makes us human, then those who do not share my faith are less than fully human. From this equation flowed the Crusades, the Inquisitions, the jihads, the pogroms, the blood of human sacrifice through the ages. From it—substituting race for faith—ultimately came the Holocaust. I used to think that the Holocaust had cured us of this idea; that it was impossible not to hear from the ghosts of Auschwitz the cry, ‘Never again’. Now I am not so sure. I have come increasingly to the view that if we do not, like Jacob, wrestle with the dark angel of our nature and beliefs, there will be other tragedies. In Rwanda, Cambodia and the Balkans there * Originally published in Jonathan Sacks, The Dignity of Difference: How to Avoid the Clash of Civilizations, 2nd ed. (New York and London: Continuum, 2003), 45–66. 1  Berlin, Isaiah (2002), Liberty. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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already have been, and there will be more. This is the greatest religious challenge of all, and much will depend on whether we are equal to it. It is a challenge posed in the Bible’s opening chapters. The first recorded act of religious worship leads directly to the first murder, the first fratricide. Two people bring an offering to God. The name of one is Abel; the other was Cain. I read this as a clear and fateful warning, at the very beginning of the book of books, that just as there is a road from faith to redemption, so there is a direct path from religion to violence. What is it that leads people to shed blood in the name of God? There is one answer with which we are familiar. Religion is about identity, and identity excludes. For every ‘We’ there is a ‘Them’, the people not like us. There are kin and non-kin, friends and strangers, brothers and others, and without these boundaries it is questionable whether we would have an identity at all. The sense of belonging goes back to prehistory, to the hunter-gatherer stage in the evolution of mankind, when homo sapiens first emerged. Being part of the group was essential to life itself. Outside it, surrounded by predators, the individual could not survive. Some of our deepest, genetically encoded instincts, go back to that time and explain our tendency to form networks, attachments and loyalties. To this day, we call these predispositions tribal. They lie behind some of the earliest religious expressions of mankind. In the pantheon of antiquity there were gods who represented a people or a nation. They watched over its destinies, fought its battles, had their home in a local shrine or sacred mountain, and had, as it were, local jurisdiction. So, for example, the Moabites could see their conflict with the Israelites in terms of a battle between their god, Chemosh, and the God of the Israelites. So primordial is this sense that it never altogether died. It revived in secular terms in the romantic nationalism of nineteenth-century Europe in ideas such as the Volksgeist, the ‘spirit of the race’ conceived in terms no less mystical than its pagan predecessors. It survives today in football grounds and sporting contests throughout the world. Tribalism has immense power, as anyone who has ever been caught up in the emotions of a crowd can testify. To surrender the lonely self to something larger, more powerful and elemental, is one of the deepest instincts of mankind. A tribal world is agonistic: a place of conflict where the strongest wins and honour and glory lie in fighting, even dying, in a noble cause. That was the mood among many young men as they set off in 1914 to fight for king and country in the First World War.2 It took millions 2 Barzun, Jacques (2000), From Dawn to Decadence. New York: HarperCollins.



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of deaths, a further world war, and the awesome power of atomic and nuclear weapons, before the West reached the collective conclusion that the price of war was too high. Today we are inclined to see resurgent tribalism as the great danger of our fragmenting world. It is, but it is not the only danger. The paradox is that the very thing we take to be the antithesis of tribalism—universalism— can also be deeply threatening, and may be equally inadequate as an account of the human situation. A global culture is a universal culture, and universal cultures, though they have brought about great good, have also done immense harm. They see as the basis of our humanity the fact that we are all ultimately the same. We are vulnerable. We are embodied creatures. We feel hunger, thirst, fear, pain. We reason, hope, dream, aspire. These things are all true and important. But we are also different. Each landscape, language, culture, community is unique. Our very dignity as persons is rooted in the fact that none of us—not even genetically identical twins—is exactly like any other. Therefore none of us is replaceable, substitutable, a mere instance of a type. That is what makes us persons, not merely organisms or machines. If our commonalities are all that ultimately matter, then our differences are distractions to be overcome. This view, I will argue, is profoundly mistaken. It is a mistake that has been made several times in the history of the West, and we are in the process of making it again in the form of globalization. Nothing else I have to say in this book will be more radical or harder to understand, because it challenges an assumption that for at least two millennia has been at the heart of Western civilization. Yet that is the case I will make: that we need nothing less than a paradigm shift in our understanding of our commonalities and differences. It may seem bizarre to suggest a connection between the tragedy of September 11 and a Greek philosopher who lived almost 2,500 years ago, but that is what I am going to suggest. I call it Plato’s ghost, and it has haunted the Western imagination ever since. * * * In the Stanza della Segnatura in the Vatican hangs one of the supreme artistic achievements of the Renaissance: Raphael’s vast canvas, the School at Athens. Framing the scene and dominating the upper half of the painting are the magnificent columns, statues and arches of the academy through one of which, in the far distance, can be seen a blue and lightly clouded sky. Occupying the centre and foreground are the members of the academy in small groups, speaking, listening, arguing, gesticulating and disputing. In the front, one solitary thinker sits on the steps wrapped in thought, head on hand like Rodin’s Penseur. Our eyes are drawn, however,

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to the two figures in the middle, the two giants of Greek thought. On the left is Plato, his hair and beard white with age, and next to him a younger man, Aristotle, who will become his most famous disciple and whose influence will at times outshine that of the master himself. Aristotle’s left hand is turned downward, but Plato’s right hand is raised in an upwardpointing gesture. We need no caption to tell us what Plato is saying: If you seek truth, Aristotle, do not look down to this world that surrounds us, empirical reality with all its messy and chaotic particulars. Look up to heaven and the world of forms, for it is there that you will find the true essence and nature of things. There, in place of particularity and conflict, you will find unity and harmony.

In the world of ideas, difference is resolved into sameness. Particulars give way to universals. The world we see, in which we move and live, he argued in The Republic in the famous parable of the cave, is a mere play of shadows.3 The true essence of things is not matter but form, ideas, not their concrete embodiment in the world of the senses. That is where trees become Treeness, where men become Man and apparent truths coalesce into Truth. It is a wondrous dream, that of Plato, and one that has never ceased to appeal to his philosophical and religious heirs: the dream of reason, a world of order set against the chaos of life, an eternity beyond the here and now. Its single most powerful idea is that truth—reality, the essence of things—is universal. How could it be otherwise? What is true is true for everyone at all times, and so the more universal a culture is, the closer to truth it comes. Is that not, after all, how we grow to maturity as individuals? We begin, in childhood, by being attached to our immediate family. Then, as our exposure to the world widens, we come successively to embrace friends, neighbours, the community, society and eventually all mankind. So it is with civilization itself. The history of homo sapiens is precisely the move from small, roving bands to tribes, city-states, nations and ultimately, if not yet, global governance. Particularity—the world of the senses and the passions—is the source of conflict, prejudice, error and war. Universality is the realm of truth, harmony and peace. The move from primitive to sophisticated, parochial to cosmopolitan, local to global, is the journey from particular attachments to universal reason.

3 Plato (1955), The Republic (trans. H. D. P. Lee). Harmondsworth: Penguin.



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Seen through this set of values, Judaism cannot but be seen as a revolution that reached half-way. It stands between two eras: that of the tribal cultures and local deities of the ancient world on the one hand, and on the other the universalistic cultures such as those of Greece and Rome, and their religious successors, Christianity and Islam. Judaism was, as it were, born in media res. It was able to conceive of a universal God, but not yet of a universal faith. Here and there in its sacred texts there appeared shafts of light in the form of the universalistic visions of Amos and Isaiah, but Judaism remained a particularistic and therefore tribal faith. It was trapped into the parochialism of antiquity. This view is a travesty, but were it no more than that I would not trouble to argue the case here. My argument is far more fundamental, namely that universalism is an inadequate response to tribalism, and no less dangerous. It leads to the belief—superficially compelling but quite false— that there is only one truth about the essentials of the human condition, and it holds true for all people at all times. If I am right, you are wrong. If what I believe is the truth, then your belief, which differs from mine, must be an error from which you must be converted, cured and saved. From this flowed some of the great crimes of history, some under religious auspices, others—the French and Russian revolutions, for example—under the banner of secular philosophies, but both under the enchantment of Plato’s ghost.4 * * * The Hebrew Bible is a book whose strangeness is little understood. It tells the story of God who makes a covenant with an individual, Abraham, whose children become a family, then a tribe, then a collection of tribes, then a nation. It is the narrative of a particular people. Yet the Bible does not begin with this people. Instead it starts by telling a story about humanity as a whole. Its first eleven chapters are about Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah and the Flood, Babel and its tower—archetypes of humanity as a whole. This is not simply an etiological myth, a tale of origins. It is quite clearly intended to be more than that. The Bible is doing here what it does elsewhere, namely conveying a set of truths through narrative. But by any conventional standard, the order of these stories is precisely wrong. They begin with universal humanity and only then

4 Gunton, Colin (1993), The One, The Three and The Many. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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proceed to the particular: one man, Abraham, one woman, Sarah, and one people, their descendants. By reversing the normal order, and charting, instead, a journey from the universal to the particular, the Bible represents the great anti-Platonic narrative in Western civilization. Against Plato and his followers, the Bible argues that universalism is the first, not the last, phase in the growth of the moral imagination. The world of the first eleven chapters of Genesis is global, a monoculture (‘the whole world had one language and a common speech’). It is to this world that God first speaks. He gives Adam a command, Cain a warning, Noah His grace. Yet, one by one these experiments fail. Adam disobeys. Cain becomes a murderer. Noah inhabits a world filled with violence. A poignant verse speaks of God’s disappointment: ‘The Lord regretted that He had made man on earth and His heart was filled with pain’ (6:6). After the Flood, God makes a covenant with all mankind, the first universal moral code. But that is not the end of the story. There then follows a brief passage that deserves to become a parable of our time: Now the whole world had one language and a common speech. As men moved eastwards, they found a plain in Shinar and settled there. They said to each other, ‘Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly.’ They used brick instead of stone, and tar instead of mortar. Then they said, ‘Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves and not be scattered over the face of the whole earth.’ But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower that the men were building. The Lord said, ‘If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so that they will not understand each other.’ So the Lord scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. That is why it was called Babel—because there the Lord confused the language of the whole world. From there the Lord scattered them over the face of the whole earth. (Genesis 11:1–9)

The men on the plain at Shinar make a technological discovery. They learn how to make bricks by drying clay—the first processed (as opposed to entirely natural) building material in history. As after so many other technological advances, they immediately conclude that they now have the power of gods. They are no longer subject to nature. They have become its masters. They will storm the heavens. Their man-made environment—the city with its ziggurat or artificial mountain—will replicate the structure of the cosmos, but here they will rule, not God. It is a supreme act of hubris, committed time and again in history—from the Sumerian city-states, to



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Plato’s Republic, to empires, ancient and modern, to the Soviet Union. It is the attempt to impose a man-made unity on divinely created diversity. That is what is wrong with universalism. Babel—the first global project—is the turning point in the biblical narrative. From then on, God will not attempt a universal order again until the end of days. Babel ends with the division of mankind into a multiplicity of languages, cultures, nations and civilizations. God’s covenant with humanity as a whole has not ceased. But from here on he will focus on one family, and eventually one people, to be his witnesses and bearers of his covenant—a people in whose history his presence will be peculiarly transparent. He will ask of them that they be willing to give up home, birthplace and land, all the familiar certainties, and undertake a journey with God as their only protection. Theirs will be a singular and exemplary fate. They will be a people who are different. Indeed the word kadosh, ‘holy’, in the Bible means just that—being different, set apart, distinctive. The question is, Why? * * * Judaism has a structural peculiarity so perplexing and profound that though its two daughter monotheisms, Christianity and Islam, took much else from it, they did not adopt this: Judaism is a particularist monotheism. It believes in one God but not in one religion, one culture, one truth. The God of Abraham is the God of all mankind, but the faith of Abraham is not the faith of all mankind. There is no equivalent in Judaism to the doctrine that extra ecclesiam non est salus, ‘outside the Church there is no salvation’. On the contrary, Judaism’s ancient sages maintained that ‘the pious of the nations have a share in the world to come’.5 Indeed, the Bible takes it for granted that the God of Israel is not only the God of Israel. He is also the God of Abraham’s contemporary, Melchizedek, king of Salem, not a member of the covenantal family but still a ‘priest of the Most High God’. He is acknowledged by Jethro, Moses’ father-in-law and a Midianite priest, who gives Israel its first lesson in government—the appointment of heads of thousands, hundreds, fifties and tens. Two of the Bible’s heroic women, Tamar and Ruth, are not Israelites. The first is a Canaanite, the second a Moabite, yet each has a place of honour in Israel’s history and both are ancestors of its greatest king, David. How does such an idea arise and what does it imply? 5 Tosefta, Sanhedrin, Chapter 13; Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Teshuvah, 3:5.

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To this I suggest a radical answer. God, the creator of humanity, having made a covenant with all humanity, then turns to one people and commands it to be different in order to teach humanity the dignity of difference. Biblical monotheism is not the idea that there is one God and therefore one truth, one faith, one way of life. On the contrary, it is the idea that unity creates diversity. That is the non-Platonic miracle of creation. What is real, remarkable and the proper object of our wonder is not the quintessential leaf but the 250,000 different kinds there actually are; not the idea of a bird but the 9,000 species that exist today; not the metalanguage that embraces all others, but the 6,000 languages still spoken throughout the world. Thanks to our new-found knowledge of DNA we now know that all life in its astonishing complexity had a single origin. Matt Ridley puts it breathlessly but well: .

The three-letter words of the genetic code are the same in every creature. CGA means arginine and GCG means alanine—in bats, in beetles, in bacteria. They even mean the same in the misleadingly named archaebacteria living at boiling temperatures in sulphurous springs thousands of feet beneath the surface of the Atlantic ocean or in those microscopic capsules of deviousness called viruses. Wherever you go in the world, whatever animal, plant, bug or blob you look at, if it is alive, it will use the same dictionary and know the same code. All life is one. The genetic code, bar a few tiny local aberrations, mostly for unexplained reasons in the ciliate protozoa, is the same in every creature. We all use exactly the same language. This means—and religious people might find this a useful argument—that there was only one creation, one single event when life was born.6

Judaism is about the miracle of unity that creates diversity. The essential message of the Book of Genesis is that universality—the covenant with Noah—is only the context of and prelude to the irreducible multiplicity of cultures, those systems of meaning by which human beings have sought to understand their relationship to one another, the world and the source of being. Plato’s assertion of the universality of truth is valid when applied to science and the description of what is. It is invalid when applied to ethics, spirituality and our sense of what ought to be. There is a difference between physis and nomos, description and prescription, nature and culture, or—to put it in biblical terms—between creation and revelation. Cultures are like languages. The world they describe is the same but the ways they do so are almost infinitely varied. English is 6 Ridley, Matt (1999), Genome. London: Fourth Estate.



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not French. Italian is not German. Urdu is not Ugaritic. Each language is the product of a specific community and its history, its shared experiences and sensibilities. There is no universal language. There is no way we can speak, communicate or even think without placing ourselves within the constraints of a particular language whose contours were shaped by hundreds of generations of speakers, storytellers, artists and visionaries who came before us, whose legacy we inherit and of whose story we become a part. Within any language we can say something new. No language is fixed, unalterable, complete. What we cannot do is place ourselves outside the particularities of language to arrive at a truth, a way of understanding and responding to the world that applies to everyone at all times. That is not the essence of humanity but an attempt to escape from humanity. The same applies to religion. The radical transcendence of God in the Hebrew Bible means nothing more or less than that there is a difference between God and religion. God is universal, religions are particular. Religion is the translation of God into a particular language and thus into the life of a group, a nation, a community of faith. In the course of history, God has spoken to mankind in many languages: through Judaism to Jews, Christianity to Christians, Islam to Muslims. Only such a God is truly transcendental—greater not only than the natural universe but also than the spiritual universe articulated in any single faith, any specific language of human sensibility. How could a sacred text convey such an idea? It would declare that God is God of all humanity, but no single faith is or should be the faith of all humanity. Only such a narrative would lead us to see the presence of God in people of other faiths. Only such a worldview could reconcile the particularity of cultures with the universality of the human condition. This means that religious truth is not universal. What it does not mean is that it is relative. There is a difference, all too often ignored, between absoluteness and universality. I have an absolute obligation to my child, but it is not a universal one. Indeed it is precisely this non-universality, this particularity, that constitutes parenthood—the ability to feel a bond with this child, not to all children indiscriminately. That is what makes love, love: not a generalized affection for persons of such-and-such a type, but a particular attachment to this person in his or her uniqueness. This ability to form an absolute bond of loyalty and obligation to someone in particular as opposed to persons-in-general goes to the very core of what we mean by being human. It is the theme explored by Steven Spielberg in his film AI. In it, a couple whose son is in a coma acquire a child-robot that

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has been programmed to love. The question is whether they can return that love, knowing that he/it is one of a type taken from a production line of dozens of identical products. The answer given by the film is that they cannot, which is almost certainly true and a reason why we should never go down the road of reproductive cloning or anything else that threatens to reduce persons to types. The essential irreplaceability of persons is what gives love its vulnerability, its openness to loss and grief, its fragility and pathos. It is what separates science (the search for universals) from poetry (the love of particulars). It is also what distinguishes the God of the philosophers from the God of the Hebrew Bible. God as we encounter Him in the Bible is not a philosophical or scientific concept: the first cause, the prime mover, initiator of the Big Bang. He is a parent, sometimes male (‘Have we not all one father?’), sometimes female (‘Like one whom his mother comforts, so will I comfort you’), but always bearing the love that a parent feels for a child he/she has brought into being. The God of the Hebrew Bible is not a Platonist, loving the abstract form of humanity. He is a particularist, loving each of his children for what they are: Isaac and Ishmael, Jacob and Esau, Israel and the nations, choosing one for a particular destiny, to be sure, but blessing the others, each in their own way.7 The God of Abraham teaches humanity a more complex truth than simple oppositions—particular/universal, individual/ state, tribe/humanity—would allow. We are particular and universal, the same and different, human beings as such, but also members of this family, that community, this history, that heritage. Our particularity is our window on to universality, just as our languages is the only way we have of understanding the world we share with speakers of other languages. God no more wants all faiths and cultures to be the same than a loving parent wants his or her children to be the same. That is the conceptual link between love, creation and difference. We serve God, author of diversity, by respecting diversity. * * * This gives biblical ethics a different character from philosophical ethics. Philosophical ethics, true to its Platonic origins, focuses on what we have in common: rationality (Kant), emotion (Hume), or our desire for pleasure and aversion to pain (Bentham). Duty, obligation, sympathy, solidarity—

7 On Ishmael’s blessing, see Genesis 17:20; on Esau, see Genesis 27:39–40 and Deuteronomy 2:5; on other nations, see Amos 9:3, Jonah et al.



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these are the things we share in virtue of our universality. They belong to Man, not men; Humanity, not individual human beings; the unity of the moral world, not its diversity. Even when philosophy focuses on the individual it tends to do so in abstract terms: the ‘unsituated self ’ divorced from constitutive attachments to family, friends, community and history.8 That is what gives philosophical morality its ‘thin’ or context-free character. Biblical morality, by contrast, is far more complex. It emphasizes the dual nature of our moral situation. On the one hand, we are members of the universal human family and thus of the (Noahide) covenant with all mankind. There are indeed moral universals—the sanctity of life, the dignity of the human person, the right to be free, to be no man’s slave or the object of someone else’s violence. The three vignettes of Moses’ life before he becomes leader of the Israelites perfectly illustrate this. He intervenes, first to rescue an Israelite from an Egyptian; then an Israelite from a fellow Israelite; then the (non-Israelite) daughters of Jethro from (non-Israelite) shepherds who are preventing them from watering their flock. Moses recognizes the universal character of injustice and fights against it, regardless of who is perpetrating it and who is its victim. On the other hand, we are also members of a particular family with its specific history and memory. We are part of a ‘thick’ or context-bound morality (represented, in Judaism, by the Abrahamic and Mosaic covenants) which confers on us loyalties and obligations to the members of our community that go beyond mere justice. We have duties to our parents and children, friends and neighbours, and the members of society considered as an extended family (‘When your brother becomes poor . . .’). The generic word for such duties is chessed, usually translated as ‘kindness’, but meaning the loving obligations we owe to those with whom we are linked in a covenantal bond. It is precisely these moral intimacies that give life to the families and communities in which we learn the grammar and syntax of reciprocity and altruism. Michael Walzer explains why it is that ‘thick’ or context-laden moralities are more fundamental than ‘thin’ or universal ones: Societies are necessarily particular because they have members and memories, members with memories not only of their own but also of their common life. Humanity, by contrast, has members but no memory, and so it has

8 Sandel, Michael (1982), Liberalism and the Limits of Justice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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the dignity of difference no history and no culture, no customary practices, no familiar life-ways, no festivals, no shared understanding of social goods. It is human to have such things, but there is no singular human way of having them. At the same time, the members of all the different societies, because they are human, can acknowledge each other’s different ways, respond to each other’s cries for help, learn from each other, and march (sometimes) in each other’s parades.9

The universality of moral concern is not something we learn by being universal but by being particular. Because we know what it is to be a parent, loving our children, not children in general, we understand what it is for someone else, somewhere else, to be a parent, loving his or her children, not ours. There is no road to human solidarity that does not begin with moral particularity—by coming to know what it means to be a child, a parent, a neighbour, a friend. We learn to love humanity by loving specific human beings. There is no short-cut.10 * * * Nowhere is the singularity of biblical ethics more evident than in its treatment of the issue that has proved to be the most difficult in the history of human interaction, namely the problem of the stranger, the one who is not like us. Most societies at most times have been suspicious of, and aggressive toward, strangers. That is understandable, even natural. Strangers are non-kin. They come from beyond the tribe. They stand outside the network of reciprocity that creates and sustains communities. That is what makes the Mosaic books unusual in the history of moral thought. As the rabbis noted, the Hebrew Bible in one verse commands, ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself ’, but in no fewer than 36 places commands us to ‘love the stranger’. Time and again it returns to this theme: You shall not oppress a stranger, for you know the heart of the stranger— you yourselves were strangers in the land of Egypt.11 When a stranger lives with you in your land, do not ill-treat him. The stranger who lives with you shall be treated like the native-born. Love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt. I am the Lord your God.12

9 Walzer, Michael (1994), Thick and Thin. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. 10 Sacks, Jonathan (2000), The Politics of Hope, 2nd edn. London: Vintage. 11  Exodus 23:9. 12 Leviticus 19:33–4.



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It does not assume that this is easy or instinctive. It does not derive it from reason or emotion alone, knowing that under stress, these have rarely been sufficient to counter the human tendency to dislike the unlike and exclude people not like us from our radius of moral concern. Instead it speaks of history: ‘You know what it is like to be different, because there was a time when you, too, were persecuted for being different.’ Indeed, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that this is precisely the reason why the Israelites have to undergo exile and slavery prior to their birth as a nation. They have to learn from the inside and never lose the memory of what it feels like to be an outsider, an alien, a stranger. It is their formative experience, re-enacted every year in the drama of Passover—as if to say that only those who know what it is to be slaves, understand at the core of their being why it is wrong to enslave others. Only those who have felt the loneliness of being a stranger find it natural to identify with strangers. Even Moses, who grew up as an Egyptian prince, suffers his own exile in Midian and calls his first son Gershom (‘there I was a stranger’), saying, ‘I have been a stranger in a strange land.’ We encounter God in the face of a stranger. That, I believe, is the Hebrew Bible’s single greatest and most counterintuitive contribution to ethics. God creates difference; therefore it is in one-who-is-different that we meet God. Abraham encounters God when he invites three strangers into his tent. Jacob meets God when he wrestles with an unnamed adversary alone at night. The Book of Ruth, which tells the prehistory of David, Israel’s greatest king, reaches its climax when Ruth says to Boaz (her ‘redeemer’), ‘Why have I found favour in your eyes such that you recognize me, though I am a stranger’ (2:10). The human other is a trace of the Divine Other. As an ancient Jewish teaching puts it: ‘When a human being makes many coins in the same mint, they all come out the same. God makes every person in the same image—His image—and each is different.’13 The supreme religious challenge is to see God’s image in one who is not in our image. That is the converse of tribalism. But it is also something other than universalism. It takes difference seriously. It recognizes the integrity of other cultures, other civilizations, other paths to the presence of God. The prophet Malachi says to the Israelites, ‘From furthest east to furthest west my name is great among the nations, says the Lord of Hosts, but you profane it . . .’ (1:10). The God of Israel is larger than the faith of Israel. Traces of his presence can be found throughout the world. We do not 13 Mishnah, Sanhedrin, Chapter 4, para. 5.

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have to share a creed or code to be partners in the covenant of mankind. The prophets of Israel wrestle with an idea still counterintuitive to the Platonic mind: that moral and spiritual dignity extend far beyond the boundaries of any one civilization. They belong to the other, the outsider, the stranger, the one who does not fit our system, race or creed. * * * We can now state what Judaism represents in the history of Western thought. The story of the covenantal people begins with two journeys: Abraham and Sarah’s from Mesopotamia, and Moses and the Israelites’ from Egypt. Mesopotamia in the days of Abraham and Egypt in the age of Moses were the supreme economic and political powers of their time. Judaism was born as a protest against empires, because imperialism and its latter-day successors, totalitarianism and fundamentalism, are attempts to impose a single truth on a plural world, to reduce men to Man, cultures to a single culture, to eliminate diversity in the name of a single sociopolitical order. The faith of Israel declares the oneness of God and the plurality of man. It moves beyond both tribalism and its antithesis, universalism. Tribalism and its modern counterpart, nationalism, assumes there is one god (or ‘spirit’ or ‘race’ or ‘character’) for each nation. Universalism contends that there is one God—and therefore one truth, one way, one creed—for all humanity. Neither does justice to the human other, the stranger who is not in my image but is nevertheless in God’s image. Tribalism denies rights to the outsider. Universalism grants rights if and only if the outsider converts, conforms, assimilates, and thus ceases to be an outsider. Tribalism turns the concept of a chosen people into that of a master-race. Universalism turns the truth of a single culture into the measure of humanity. The results are often tragic and always an affront to human dignity. Not all empires are universalist. The Ottoman Empire, for example, preserved a significant measure of local autonomy for the various cultures and faith groups under its aegis. There have been five universalist cultures in the history of the West: the Alexandrian Empire, ancient Rome, medieval Christianity and Islam, and the Enlightenment. Jews suffered under all five. What is particularly significant is that three—Greece, Rome and the Enlightenment—prided themselves on their tolerance. Like certain forms of tolerance today (‘political correctness’ comes to mind), it turned out to be highly circumscribed. Antiochus IV banned the public practice of Judaism. The Romans destroyed the Temple. The Enlightenment failed



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to prevent the Holocaust. What turned out to be the source of intolerance was not religion as such—three of the five civilizations were, after all, not religious. Rather, it was universalism or what I have called ‘Plato’s ghost’. The critical test of any order is: does it make space for otherness? Does it acknowledge the dignity of difference? That has now become a, perhaps the, central question of the global age. Difference has now become part of the texture of daily life. At work, in the street and on the television screen, we are regularly confronted with people whose faith, culture, accent, race, skin colour and customs are unlike ours. That can be an enriching experience or a threatening one. As Benjamin Barber pointed out, there are centripetal and centrifugal forces at work—on the one hand McWorld, a largely American culture conveyed by multinational corporations, branded goods, media stars, cable and satellite television and the Internet, and on the other a resurgent tribalism that rejects Western ‘decadence’ and reasserts primordial identities, some religious, some ethnic, often a combination of both. When the two meet and collide, as they did on September 11, the world trembles. To hold the two in balance, to recognize and give due weight to our commonalities and differences, the universal and the particular, is one of the hardest of all cultural and spiritual challenges but it is the only way to avoid a clash of civilizations—and what is at risk in that clash grows yearly. After 1945, the world placed its faith—as did the French Revolution— in a universal code of human rights. That is our contemporary equivalent of the biblical covenant with Noah. There is much to be said for this, but it is only half of what is needed for the coexistence of diverse cultures. No universal code as such tells us what we would lose were the multiplicity of civilizations to be reduced; were one culture to dominate all others; were distinctive voices to be lost from the conversation of mankind. The abstract language of rights fails to enter into the depth of what Hinduism means to a Hindu, or Confucianism to its devotees. It suggests that the particularities of a culture are mere accretions to our essential and indivisible humanity, instead of being the very substance of how most people learn what it is to be human. In particular, it understates the difficulty and necessity of making space for strangers—the very thing that has been the source of racism and exclusion in almost every society known to history. If we are to live in close proximity to difference, as in a global age we do, we will need more than a code of rights, more even than mere tolerance. We will need to understand that just as the natural environment depends on biodiversity, so the human environment depends on cultural

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diversity, because no one creed has a monopoly on spiritual truth; no one civilization encompasses all the spiritual, ethical and artistic expressions of mankind. * * * In 1981 Isaiah Berlin wrote some notes for a friend who was about to deliver a lecture and turned to him for help. Berlin was due to go abroad the next day and wrote the following hurried notes, which convey, as well as anything he wrote, his lifelong opposition to intolerance and what he believed to be its source: Few things have done more harm than the belief on the part of individuals and groups (or tribes or states or nations or churches) that he or she or they are in sole possession of the truth . . . It is a terrible and dangerous arrogance to believe that you alone are right: have a magical eye which sees the truth: and that others cannot be right if they disagree. This makes one certain that there is one goal and only one for one’s nation or church or the whole of humanity, and that it is worth any amount of suffering (particularly on the part of other people) if only the goal is attained—‘through an ocean of blood to the Kingdom of Love’ (or something like this) said Robespierre: and Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, and I daresay leaders in the religious wars of Christian v. Muslim or Catholics v. Protestants sincerely believed this: the belief that there is one and only one true answer to the central questions which have agonized mankind and that one has it oneself—or one’s Leader has it—was responsible for the oceans of blood: But no Kingdom of Love sprang from it—or could . . .14

Shortly before he died, in 1997, he asked that I should officiate at his funeral. In the tribute I paid to him, I quoted one of the most haunting of the sayings of the Jewish sages—a story they told about the creation of mankind. Although at least fifteen hundred years old, it seemed to me to say what he had spent much of his life teaching: Rabbi Shimon said: When God was about to create Adam, the ministering angels split into contending groups. Some said, ‘Let him be created.’ Others said, ‘Let him not be created.’ That is why it is written: ‘Mercy and truth collided, righteousness and peace clashed’ (Psalm 85:11). Mercy said, ‘Let him be created, because he will do merciful deeds.’ Truth said, ‘Let him not be created, for he will be full of falsehood.’ Righteousness said, ‘Let him be created, for he will do righteous deeds.’ Peace said, ‘Let him not be created, for he will never cease quarrelling.’

14 Berlin 2002, p. 345.



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What did the Holy One, blessed be He, do? He took truth and threw it to the ground. The angels said, ‘Sovereign of the universe, why do You do thus to Your own seal, truth? Let truth arise from the ground.’ Thus it is written, ‘Let truth spring up from the earth’ (Psalm 85:12).15

This is an audacious theological interpretation. God, it suggests, was in two minds before creating mankind. Yes, humanity is capable of great acts of altruism and self-sacrifice, but it is also constantly at war. Human beings tell lies and are full of strife. God takes truth and throws it to the ground, meaning: for life to be livable, truth on earth cannot be what it is in heaven. Truth in heaven may be platonic—eternal, harmonious, radiant. But man cannot aspire to such truth, and if he does, he will create conflict not peace. Men kill because they believe they possess the truth while their opponents are in error. In that case, says God, throwing truth to the ground, let human beings live by a different standard of truth, one that is human and thus conscious of its limitations. Truth on the ground is multiple, partial. Fragments of it lie everywhere. Each person, culture and language has part of it; none has it all. Truth on earth is not, nor can it aspire to be, the whole truth. It is limited, not comprehensive; particular, not universal. When two propositions conflict it is not necessarily because one is true the other false. It may be, and often is, that each represents a different perspective on reality, an alternative way of structuring order, no more and no less commensurable than a Shakespeare sonnet, a Michelangelo painting or a Schubert sonata. In heaven there is truth; on earth there are truths. Therefore, each culture has something to contribute. Each person knows something no one else does. The sages said: ‘Who is wise? One who learns from all men.’16 The wisest is not one who knows himself wiser than others: he is one who knows all men have some share of the truth, and is willing to learn from them, for none of us knows all the truth and each of us knows some of it. Nothing has proved harder in the history of civilization than to see God, or good, or human dignity in those whose language is not mine, whose skin is a different colour, whose faith is not my faith and whose truth is not my truth. There are, surely, many ways of arriving at this generosity of spirit, and each faith must find its own. The way I have discovered, having

15 Genesis Rabbah 8:5. 16 Mishnah, Avot, 4: 1.

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listened to Judaism’s sacred texts in the context of the tragedies of the twentieth century and the insecurities of the twenty-first, is that the truth at the beating heart of monotheism is that God is greater than religion; that He is only partially comprehended by any faith. He is my God, but also your God. He is on my side, but also on your side. He exists not only in my faith, but also in yours. That is not to say that there are many gods. That is polytheism. Nor is it to say that God endorses every act done in His name. On the contrary: a God of your side as well as mine must be a God of justice who stands above us both, teaching us to make space for one another, to hear each other’s claims and to resolve them equitably. Only such a God would be truly transcendent—greater not only than the natural universe but also than the spiritual universe capable of being comprehended in any one language, any single faith. Only such a God could teach mankind to make peace other than by conquest and conversion, and as something nobler than practical necessity. What would faith be like? It would be like being secure in one’s home, yet moved by the beauty of foreign places, knowing that they are someone else’s home, not mine, but still part of the glory of the world that is ours. It would be like being fluent in English, yet thrilled by the rhythms and resonances of an Italian sonnet one only partially understands. It would be to know that I am a sentence in the story of my people and its faith, but that there are other stories, each written by God out of the letters of lives bound together in community, each bearing the unmistakable trace of his handwriting. Those who are confident in their faith are not threatened but enlarged by the different faith of others. In the midst of our multiple insecurities, we need that confidence now.

An Agenda of Future Jewish Thought* The last chapter suggested a pessimistic conclusion: that Orthodoxy and modernity are fundamentally incompatible. Orthodoxy is predicated on revelation and tradition: on the power of the past to command. By contrast, writes Edward Shils, ‘The time through which we have just lived has been one in which what was inherited from the past was thought of as an irksome burden to be escaped from as soon as possible.’1 The whole thrust of post-Enlightenment thought has been hostile to religious belief in general, classic Jewish values in particular.2 Few of the concepts in which the Jewish tradition is constituted can be translated into the terminology of contemporary culture. Halakhah—the idea of right conduct as expressed in law—cannot be transposed into the language of autonomy—the idea of right conduct as expressed in personal choice. The idea that there are significant roles into which we are born— differentiating between Jew and non-Jew, for example, or between men and women—runs contrary to the modern idea that the only significant roles are those which we choose. The very concept of covenant, and with it the idea of the singular destiny of a chosen people, runs counter to the Kantian idea that ethics is essentially universal, a matter of rules that, if they apply at all, apply to all. So the conflicts of consciousness between Jewish tradition and secular modernity are many and deep. The conclusion seems inevitable. There is and can be no synthesis between Judaism and modernity. There is instead an either/or choice. Either Judaism or modernity but not both. Therefore the project of modern Orthodoxy is destined to failure. The analysis is true, but the conclusion is false. The programmes of Samson Raphael Hirsch, Rav Kook, Rav Soloveitchik and others are as imperative as ever, perhaps more so. Let us summarise those programmes. Essentially they were four-fold. First there was the critical dialogue between Judaism and contemporary secular culture, as expressed in Hirschʼs maxim of Torah im Derekh Eretz or Yeshiva Universityʼs Torah u-Mada, ‘Torah and science’. Second was the reconstruction of Judaism * Originally published in Jonathan Sacks, Tradition in an Untraditional Age: Essays on Modern Jewish Thought (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 1990), 107–36. 1  Edward Shils, Tradition, London: Faber and Faber, 1981, 2. 2 See, for example, Leo Strauss, Philosophy and Law, Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1987.

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as the ethic of a nation in its own land, the project of religious Zionism. Third was the affirmation of knesset Yisrael, the congregation of Israel, as an indivisible entity. This led figures like R. Seligmann Baer Bamberger and R. Marcus Horowitz to oppose Orthodox secession from the general Jewish community in Frankfurt and R. Isaac Reines, founder of Mizrachi, to oppose a similar secession from the secular Zionist movement. Implicit here was the assumption that an ongoing dialogue must be maintained between Orthodox Jews and others for the sake of the Jewish people as a whole. Fourth was the Hirschian emphasis on what was traditionally known as kiddush ha-Shem, the idea of the universal Jewish ethical example. Judaism might be the religion of a particular people, but it carries a wider responsibility. The Jewish people is to serve as an inspiration and model to humanity as a whole. These values are currently in eclipse. This fact tells us about the mood of the contemporary Jewish world. But it tells us little about whether that mood is justified. Contemporary Challenges It is not. Consider the four programmes in turn. The first was the dialogue between Judaism and secular culture. Recent figures suggest that as many as ninety per cent of young American Jews attend college. Throughout the Jewish world the present generation of Jews is arguably the most secularly educated of all time. The confrontation between Judaism and the contemporary intellectual environment might have been, in Saadia Gaonʼs and Maimonides’ time, imperative for those few only who had ventured into the foreign fields of philosophy and had become disorientated and lost. Today it is applicable to the overwhelming majority of Jews, whose exposure to secular culture is a daily phenomenon, through the media, literature and the arts, and whose knowledge of the classic texts of the Jewish tradition is, by contrast, meagre and sporadic. Torah im Derekh Eretz in the late twentieth century may be a more critical undertaking than it was a hundred and fifty years ago when Hirsch first proposed it. There may be fewer points of contact and less likelihood of synthesis. In the process Judaism may have less to learn, and by implication, more to teach. But the imperative is all the more urgent, to engage the taken-for-granted assumptions of contemporary scholarship, politics and ethics in critical conversation with the values of Torah. To abandon this undertaking is to imply that Judaism does indeed have nothing of



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consequence to say about the ways in which contemporary society understands and organises its world. This is not so much pessimism as a lack of faith in the power and relevance of Torah to all environments and cultures. The second programme was religious Zionism. The state of Israel has been through difficult times since the Yom Kippur War. The continuing hostility of the Arab states, the internal problem of the Palestinians, the intifada, and Israelʼs international isolation have shaken two of the deepest held assumptions of secular Zionism: that the existence of Israel would end anti-semitism—which it saw as a phenomenon of the diaspora—and would lead to the ‘normalisation’ of ‘the Jewish condition’. What is more, socialism, the secular religion of Israelʼs early statehood, has been a less than convincing ideology in the last decade. Shelilat hagolah, ‘negation of the diaspora’, another premiss on which secular Zionism was built, has also become increasingly untenable. For the diaspora has persisted and has proved to be the source of Israelʼs most unconditional support. There has, in short, been a vacuum in secular Zionist thought as to the distinctive character of a Jewish state and its relationship with the diaspora specifically and international opinion generally. This calls out for a fresh statement of religious Zionism. That religious groups can flourish in Israeli society as a sub-section of the population has been established. That religious thought can yield a society-wide vision of justice, righteousness and compassion on the model of the Book of Deuteronomy has not yet been established. To abandon the project of religious Zionism as the attempt, albeit tentatively, to shape a messianic order would be a dereliction of Jewish destiny in the face of a merely temporary demoralisation. The third concern of modern Orthodoxy was the idea of Jewish peoplehood as something that ultimately transcended ideological schisms. Internally, in the twentieth century, Jews have been deeply divided, between Orthodoxy and Reform, religious and secular, and between those who chose to live in Israel and those who chose to remain in the golah. Externally, though, Jews have been tragically conscious that hostility makes no such distinctions. The Final Solution took no account of the religious, political or cultural affiliations of Jews. More recently, anti-Zionism has proved as undiscriminating as anti-semitism. The Jewish fate, recent history has suggested, is indivisible. Jews have sensed the immense power of what R. Soloveitchik called the brit goral, the covenant of shared history. The inner and outer realities of Jewish peoplehood have been sharply discrepant, out of step with one another.

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Inwardly, ideological and spiritual divisions have deepened. Only external crisis has had the power, momentarily, to unite Jews into a community of shared feeling and purpose. Jewish unity has perhaps never before seemed simultaneously so desirable and so inaccessible. Recovering the substantive reality of knesset Yisrael, the covenantal congregation, is another transcending imperative of the present. The fourth element of the programme, Samson Raphael Hirschʼs idea of Judaism as a universal ethical example, is no less relevant to the present. Hirsch was surely correct in his understanding of the role of Judaism in an open secular society. The Jewish destiny, he argued, is neither particularist nor universalist but a complex interaction of both. To be a Jew in a predominantly non-Jewish environment is to be partially integrated and partially segregated. It means living by a set of values, some of which are common to humanity as a whole, some of which are specific to Jews. This is not a comfortable or easily negotiated stance. It is not surprising that it has been described by its critics as ‘ambivalent’ or ‘schizophrenic’. It is, in fact, neither of these things but the classic challenge of Jewish existence. On the one hand Judaism speaks of the Torah as a private covenant with the Jewish people: ‘He has revealed His word to Jacob, His laws and decrees to Israel. He has done this for no other nation.’3 On the other hand, it projects the values of Torah against the backdrop of mankind. ‘Observe them carefully’, says Moses about the commandments, ‘for this is your wisdom and understanding in the eyes of the nations. They will hear all these rules and say: This great nation is surely a wise and understanding people.’4 A Jewish perspective is both inward and outward, concerned to maintain a critical distance from other cultures while at the same time engaging their attention and ultimately admiration. To be a Jew is to be a witness to the world of the presence of God. It is a difficult challenge, and there are two quite different ways of abdicating from it. One is assimilation: the way of total integration. The other is withdrawal from society: the way of total segregation. These are opposite but not equal alternatives. Assimilation leads to Jewish extinction. Withdrawal may be a mode of Jewish survival. But the fact that segregation is infinitely preferable to assimilation does not thereby entail that it is an ideal. It is not. For Jews are summoned to something altogether more vast than mere survival. They are called to play a specific part in 3 Psalm 147:19–20. 4 Deuteronomy 4:6.



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the development of human civilisation as a whole. That universal vision was never wholly absent from the Jewish imagination, though there were some ages in which it was less relevant than others. It is extraordinarily relevant today. Western societies generally have moved from monolithic to pluralist cultures. The Jewish voice on ethical issues is sought and given an attentive hearing. The state of Israel is looked to as a model of democracy and civil liberties in the Middle East. That it is sometimes judged by friends and critics alike by a different standard from that applied to its neighbours is a phenomenon that should be seen for what it is: an implicit ethical compliment. Jews today are faced with possibilities for kiddush ha-Shem of which Hirsch, a century and a half ago, could only dream. That this ideal should be treated with scepticism, above all in Orthodox circles, is not only religiously tragic. It is in the long term unwise. For if Judaism, either in Israel or the diaspora, fails to win the admiration of observers, it will fail ultimately to win the emulation of Jews themselves. Jewish survival, that miraculous succession of defiances of probability, depends on more than the pursuit of survival as an end in itself. It depended, classically, on the pursuit of a vision of a holy people whose fidelity would one day lead the world to God. However difficult that vision is to sustain in a post-Holocaust world, it must be attempted, for it is essential to Jewish self-definition. Adjectives and Ideology So the mood of pessimism which has settled over Orthodoxy in the last two decades is, from any wider perspective, untenable. The essential hopes of Samson Raphael Hirsch and Rav Kook have been realised. It has proved possible to engage in advanced secular study, participate in the shaping of a plural society and achieve civic prominence while remaining faithful to Jewish teachings. The state of Israel exists. The general secular environment is more self-questioning, less abrasive, more open to tradition than at any time since the birth of Enlightenment. Jews today stand at the threshold of religious possibilities that were, a century ago, improbable. The time is opportune, therefore, for a re-engagement of Orthodoxy with the problems of modernity. But on what basis is it to proceed? Along the lines of Hirsch or R. Kook or R. Soloveitchik? Or along some new intellectual-spiritual axis altogether?

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We would argue that these are the wrong answers and the wrong way of understanding the question. The burden of our case in this chapter is that Jewish thought generally, Orthodox thought specifically, has been limited and distorted by being allocated into adjectives and ideologies. A certain kind of thought has been labelled ‘modern’ Orthodoxy. Recently the preferred term has been ‘centrist’ Orthodoxy.5 Evidently these terms answer to a perception, or they would not have been coined. But they mislead. Adjectives of ideology have no place in the ongoing life of Torah. The labels ‘centrist’ and ‘modern’, along with their counterparts, ‘rightwing’, ‘left-wing’ and ‘traditionalist’ Orthodoxy, misconceive halakhah and aggadah, Jewish law and thought, and their application to changing circumstance. They make it all too easy for certain positions to be delegitimated. A sociologist may identify different groupings within Orthodoxy and may label and categorise them into movements, denominations and tendencies. But there is a vast difference between the detached observation of the sociologist and the internal reasoning that takes place within Judaism itself. And here these labels have no place. Traditionally Judaism knew of sharp differences of style, custom and intellectual orientation. There were Ashkenazim and Sefardim, Chassidim and Mitnagdim, mystics and rationalists. There were fierce arguments within Volozhyn yeshivah in the nineteenth century, for example, over whether pilpul or peshat, intellectual ingenuity or fathoming the plain sense, was the proper method with which to approach the talmudic text. There were equally fierce arguments within the Lithuanian yeshivot as to whether Mussar, the discipline of ethics, was a proper part of the curriculum. A living tradition contains such divergences and arguments.6 What tradition did not know was the projection of these arguments into ideologies and movements with separate organisational bases and no strong lines of communication between them. Instead the question that confronted the Jew was: what does Torah require of me in this time and place? The question was answerable by reference to the texts and interpretations of tradition. The answer might be influenced by a particular orientation, or shittah. But it was not to be determined in advance by an ideological position. The importation of adjectives and ideologies into 5 Norman Lamm, ‘Some Comments on Centrist Orthodoxy’, Tradition 22:3 (Fall 1986), 1–12. 6 See the fascinating remarks by Alasdair MacIntyre on the relationship between tradition and argument in his After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, London: Duckworth, 1981, 206–207.



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Orthodoxy is a symptom of the breakdown, socially, of the structures of community and intellectually, of the tradition of argument which is the dialogue between Torah and its application to a given age. Is Orthodoxy Modern? Consider the two adjectives in turn. In what sense can there be a ‘modern’ Orthodoxy? First, Orthodoxy can be responsive to its time. A modern Orthodoxy in this sense would be one which bore the signs of its specific place in history. But in this sense all varieties of contemporary Orthodoxy, from the most avowedly modernist to the most uncompromisingly ‘traditional’, are modern. We have argued that R. Soferʼs rejection of modern social processes was as much a considered response to modernity as Samson Raphael Hirschʼs acceptance of them. Descriptively, all Orthodoxies are modern. Evaluatively they are not. For quite clearly, as we have seen, there were thinkers like Hirsch and R. Kook who were enthusiastic about the possibilities of modernity while R. Sofer saw it as a threat to tradition. In this second sense Hirsch and Kook were ‘modernists’. But neither of them was ideologically so. Hirsch was clear about the dangers as well as the challenges of emancipation. R. Kook believed that the upheavals through which he lived were part of the messianic process. But he had specific expectations about the return of secularists to tradition; and those expectations are open to refutation. In short, neither embraced modernity a priori and unconditionally. Modernism, for them, was not an ideology and in this sense they were not exponents of a ‘modern’ Orthodoxy. There is a third sense of the word. For more recently there have been thinkers who have deliberately sought to integrate ‘modern consciousness’ within the tradition in a more radical way than any of the figures we have thus far studied.7 They have argued that at least some values embedded in contemporary secular society—liberalism, personal autonomy, democracy, role equality between the sexes and pluralism—can be accommodated within halakhic Judaism. They have sought a larger role for the individual as against the community, for halakhic change as against stasis, and for the dignity of the self as against structures of authority. 7 See Charles Liebman, ‘Religion and the Chaos of Modernity’, in Take Judaism, for Example, edited by Jacob Neusner, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983, 147–164; David Singer, ‘The New Orthodox Theology’, Modern Judaism (forthcoming).

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Emanuel Rackman (b. 1910), for example, has called for a ‘teleological’ approach to halakhah which would allow for development within Jewish law according to a broad sense of its underlying purposes rather than a narrow sense of precedent.8 Eliezer Berkovits (b. 1908), similarly, has argued the case for recovering the flexibility of Jewish law understood as ‘the Word intended for this hour, for this generation’.9 More radically, David Hartman (b. 1931) has sketched a complete philosophy of Judaism ‘in terms of a covenantal anthropology that encourages human initiative and freedom and that is predicated on belief in human adequacy’.10 More radically still, Irving Greenberg (b. 1933) has outlined a post-Holocaust Judaism in which the very terms of the covenant have been rendered ‘voluntary’. Greenberg speaks of a ‘third era’ in Jewish history, marked by religious pluralism and ‘holy secularity’.11 These thinkers are modern in a thoroughgoing sense. For they believe that Judaism is itself transformed in its encounter with modernity. To be sure, they seek to stay within the rabbinic tradition. But they believe that the tradition itself contains resources for change, and that it has in fact changed with each confrontation with a new social and intellectual order. But it is precisely here that the question arises: can Orthodoxy be modern in this sense and still be Orthodoxy? For each of these philosophies stresses one side of the rabbinic tradition at the expense of another. There are tensions in Judaism between legal precedent and underlying purpose, halakhah and personal autonomy, religious authority and individual freedom. Indeed some positions— like Greenbergʼs denominational pluralism—almost certainly lie outside tradition altogether. Admittedly, Rackman, Berkovits and Hartman are aware of contrary tendencies in Judaism. Hartman explicitly describes his approach to rabbinic texts as ‘selective’. His concern, he writes, is ‘to locate specific tendencies or possibilities within the rabbinic tradition that could be supportive of a covenantal religious anthropology capable of participating adequately in the challenges of modernity’.12 But is a selective reading of tradition still tradition? Is it not precisely an attempt to

8 Emanuel Rackman, One Manʼs Judaism, Tel Aviv: Greenfield (undated). 9 See Eliezer Berkovits, Crisis and Faith, New York: Sanhedrin Press, 1976; Not in Heaven, New York: Ktav, 1983. 10 David Hartman, A Living Covenant, New York: Free Press, 1985. 11  Irving Greenbergʼs analysis is contained in three papers published by the National Jewish Resource Center: On the Third Era in Jewish History (1980), The Third Great Cycle in Jewish History (1981) and Voluntary Covenant (1982). 12 A Living Covenant, 13.



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tailor tradition to a set of a priori ideological assumptions, rather than to let it speak with its own authoritative voice? Is Orthodoxy Centrist? So ‘modern’ as an adjective describing Orthodoxy is redundant in the first sense, misleading in the second and contestable in the third. The same doubts apply to the adjective ‘centrist’. What is any kind of Orthodoxy to be centrist between? Between Orthodoxy and heterodoxy or halakhic and non-halakhic Judaisms there is no middle ground within tradition. Centrism, like the words right- and left-wing, is a term transferred to Judaism from the vocabulary of politics. Roger Scruton neatly defines the view espoused by centrists as ‘the supposed political position somewhere between the left and right, where political views are either sufficiently indeterminate, or sufficiently imbued with the spirit of compromise, to be thought acceptable to as large a body of citizens as would be capable of accepting anything’.13 The use of such an adjective in a Jewish context is a significant symptom of the politicisation of religious life: a phenomenon which affects all sectors of contemporary Judaism and which deserves serious consideration in its own right. But even if its legitimacy is granted the same problems apply to religious as to political centrism: confrontational politics tend to favour clear alternatives over the vague attempt to ‘capture the middle ground’. There is, to be sure, something more substantive to the idea of ‘centrism’ within Orthodoxy. Maimonides spoke of the ‘middle way’ between extremes as the ideal conduct of the chakham or sage.14 He was speaking of ethical character rather than communal policy, but there are suggestions in his work that the same applies here too: a balance must be struck whenever there is a conflict between two or more Jewish values. Many of the issues that have created controversy in Orthodoxy in the last two centuries have been of this kind. How was one to choose between social integration and segregation, or Torah and secular study, or concern for the position of women as against concern for the stability of traditional roles and institutions? If both sides of the equation are values within Judaism, as we would argue that they are, then a concern for the tradition as a whole dictates a careful balance between them. 13 Roger Scruton, A Dictionary of Political Thought, London: Pan, 1983, 57. 14 Maimonides, Eight Chapters, ch. 4; M.T. Deot 1.

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But that balance cannot be specified in advance. Consider one example: the strange fate of Hirschʼs idea of Torah im Derekh Eretz. Samson Raphael Hirsch and R. Moses Sofer, as we saw, held diametrically opposed views on the relationship between Torah and secular culture. Yet within a generation the gap between Frankfurt and Pressburg was dramatically reduced. Hirschʼs son-in-law and successor, R. Solomon Breuer (1850– 1926), had been a student of R. Moses Soferʼs son and successor, Abraham. Breuer, though he had himself studied at German universities, was a fierce traditionalist. He founded the Association of Orthodox Rabbis in Germany which excluded all rabbis who maintained contact with Reformdominated communal organisations. He was a prime mover of Agudat Yisrael, which brought together East and West European Orthodoxy in opposition to the Zionist movement and which likewise sought to exclude non-secessionist rabbis. The principle of Torah im Derekh Eretz could not long survive. If Orthodox integrity demanded a principled withdrawal from the general Jewish community, the same argument applied with no less force to involvement in secular culture. In 1890, two years after succeeding Hirsch as the rabbi of Frankfurt, Breuer founded a yeshivah on the East European model. A major revision of Hirsch’s programme was under way. Hirschʼs daughter, Mrs Solomon Breuer, wrote to R. Moses Soferʼs grandson, Shimon, that Hirsch had never intended Torah im Derekh Eretz as a universal norm.15 It was specifically limited to his own community and to the circumstances prevailing at the time. Thus began a process of re-interpretation which has continued ever since. Openness to secular culture was, on this view, a horaʼat shaʼah, a temporary concession not a universal rule. It had been intended to combat the inroads of the Reform movement, or to comply with pressure from the state that all children receive a general education, or as a means to a professional or business career. Exponents of Hirsch, among them Joseph, Isaac and Mordechai Breuer, R. Yechiel Weinberg, Dayan Grunfeld and Lord Jakobovits,16 have pointed out that Hirsch unquestionably believed otherwise. As Hirsch himself wrote, ‘We maintain that a familiarity with all those elements which lie at the root of present-day civilisation, and a study of all the subjects required for such an acquaintance, is of the highest necessity for the Jewish youth 15 See Samuel Heilman, ‘The Many Faces of Orthodoxy’, Modern Judaism 2:1 (February 1982), 23–52. 16 See, for example, I. Grunfeld, Three Generations, London: Jewish Post, 1958; Immanuel Jakobovits, ‘Torah im Derekh Eretz Today’ L’Eylah 20 (Autumn 1985), 36–41.



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of our day as it was in fact at all times, and should be looked on as a religious duty’.17 For Hirsch, Torah im Derekh Eretz was permanent, not temporary; an obligation, not a concession. Nonetheless, the revisionists were essentially correct. The Hirschian synthesis was a horaʼat shaʼah. It was a product of its time. What does not follow, however, is that Torah without derekh eretz is a permanent ideal. The reverse is the case. This too is a horaʼat shaʼah, a response to the times. The argument over whether Torah study is an exclusive pursuit has been waged at every significant point of rabbinic history. It has taken different forms at different times, and the phrase derekh eretz has shifted its meaning accordingly. Was a father obligated to teach his child Torah only, or prepare him, in addition, for an occupation? Was the ideal life one which combined Torah with a worldly occupation or one devoted wholly to study? Was the study of secular disciplines forbidden, or necessary only in an emergency—to refute the heretic and guide the perplexed—or part of the religious duty of knowledge of God and His works? The argument can be traced from the mishnaic period to the middle ages. Each side, at each point, had its adherents. The questions had no single authoritative resolution. This brings us to a fundamental point. There are areas of Jewish law where rabbinic tradition allows a wide latitude of application. The standard rubric in such cases is ‘everything depends on the assessment of the halakhic authority’ or ‘the ruling depends on the place and time’. There are areas of Jewish law where these statements are made explicitly, others where we recognise the implicit operation of such judgements. Restrictive or open policies on conversion, interactions between Jews and nonJews, the place of women within the religious life and decisions on how to relate to those who break the Jewish law, all come within this category, as does the cluster of issues embraced by the phrase Torah im Derekh Eretz. In all these cases we can trace differences of policy between different Jewish communities at different times. This is not to say that halakhic rulings are subjective or historically conditioned or the result of sociological causes. They are not. The halakhic process is judicial, the application of precedent to specific circumstance. There are areas of halakhah, however, which require for their application a careful evaluation of the present, one which may involve historical and sociological judgement. In the case of Torah and secular culture, the 17 Quoted in Grunfeld, 116.

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questions to be answered are: Will a given educational policy enhance or endanger Jewish spirituality? Will it resolve or increase the perplexities of a generation? Will it lead to greater or diminished Jewish commitment? Though the sources on which a ruling must be based remain the same, the answers to these questions will differ systematically from place to place and from one culture to another. These are exceptional but important spheres in which every ruling is implicitly a horaʼat shaʼah, local as to its application. An important conclusion follows. There is no meaningful ideological sense that can be attached to phrases like right-wing, left-wing or centrist, modern or traditional Orthodoxy. For there is no unitary, permanent ideological or institutional expression of the relationship between Judaism and its contemporary environment. There are instead as many modes as there are communities and generations. Orthodoxy developed in one way in nineteenth century Frankfurt, in another in Pressburg, and in yet other ways in England, France, Italy and Eastern Europe. Policies that were effective in one context were destructive in another. R. Azriel Hildesheimer (1820–1899), a commanding figure of both rabbinic and secular scholarship, was bitterly criticised as rabbi of Halberstadt in Hungary for his plans to create a modern rabbinic seminary. The same project was outstandingly successful in his subsequent home of Berlin. R. Yechiel Weinberg reports a telling episode. R. Israel Salanter, leader of the Mussar movement, visited Germany where he found R. Hildesheimer conducting a class in Tenakh and Shulchan Arukh for girls. He remarked: If a rabbi in Lithuania were to do likewise in his community he would certainly be removed from his position. And certainly, such is the law. But nonetheless I hope I can share R. Hildesheimerʼs place in Gan Eden, paradise.18 Conflicts and Contexts The point is crucial, for it allows us to recover perspectives that have been obscured in recent times. Their loss has handicapped Orthodox thought and has plagued Orthodoxy itself with fierce internal conflicts that have disfigured the image it presents to the world. Since the image of Orthodoxy is itself a matter of religious concern—at stake are kiddush ha-Shem and chillul ha-Shem, the sanctification or desecration of God’s name—the

18 Responsa Seridei Esh, 2:8.



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issue is not a light one. What, then, are the consequences of the idea that there are important areas of Jewish law where rulings depend on the time and place? First, apparent conflicts may not be real. Let us imagine hypothetically a single halakhic authority in two different situations, first as rabbi of a ‘nominally Orthodox’ congregation, subsequently as the head of a yeshivah. Some of the rulings he would give—precisely on controversial topics such as the permissibility of secular study, or mixed youth groups, or the place of women in the community—would vary systematically between the two contexts. To be sure, his rulings on other issues—the permissibility of certain kinds of medical operation, for example—would not. Nor does it follow that his halakhic principles will have changed. It may simply be that as a congregational rabbi he was constrained by such principles as ‘Just as it is a mitzvah to say that which will be heeded, so it is a mitzvah not to say that which will not be heeded’,19 or ‘Better that they sin unwittingly than knowingly’.20 But there are areas in which a halakhic ruling is specific to a given time, place and circumstance. Many of the apparent conflicts between ‘left-wing’, ‘right-wing’ and ‘centrist’ Orthodoxy have been of just this kind. For they have different constituencies. The natural constituency of ‘centrism’ is the synagogue. That of ‘right-wing’ Orthodoxy is the yeshivah or Chassidic community. The context of ‘left-wing’ Orthodoxy is usually academic or intellectual: the university or college campus. The challenges of these three kinds of environment are quite different from one another, and what is an appropriate response to one may be inappropriate to the other. Genuine conflict arises when rulings are divorced from their context and asserted as universal norms. The talmudic literature guarded against this by preserving conflicting judgements within the same tradition, as if to say that there are circumstances in which one judgement is germane and others in which another is more apposite. There are times when the Talmud is explicit; this ruling applies to us, that to them;21 this to Israel, that to Babylon; this to the ‘early generations’, that to the ʻlater generationsʼ; this to the ‘pious’, that to the average person. There is, then, no ʻleft-wing’, ‘right-wing’ or ‘centrist’ Orthodoxy. These phrases, that is to say, are misconceived if they are taken as ideological

19  B. T. Yevamot 65b. 20 B. T. Betzah 30a, Shabbat 148b. 21  B. T. Berakhot 44a and generally.

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alternatives to universal questions stated without regard to context. There is instead a single Torah applied to a specific time, place and person. Judgement as to what is appropriate to a given context is part of halakhic ‘wisdom’ or what is sometimes called da’at Torah. The same applies to communities. The parameters of Orthodoxy will vary as between Israel, where it is called on to address issues in the public domain, America, where Orthodoxy is in a minority, and Anglo-Jewry where it represents the affiliation of the majority. This was the basis of R. Yechiel Weinberg’s halakhic critique of Eastern European rabbis who sought to apply their conventions to French and German Jewry. Their rulings, he insisted, were not wrong; they were right; but they originated and had their salience somewhere else. Much conflict and confusion has followed failure to observe this fact. The vast geographical dislocations of Jewry following the Russian pogroms of the 1880s and in the years surrounding the Second World War led to clashes of custom and perception between indigenous rabbis and those newly arrived from Eastern Europe. Many of the tensions in contemporary Orthodoxy flow from the competing claims to authority of the yeshivah head and the congregational rabbi. Both phenomena arose from the transfer of rules which governed one context into another. Perhaps the process was unavoidable. Certainly the resulting clashes enlivened Jewish life and forced each side to sharpen its self-definition. But they would have been less acrimonious and more creative had they been accompanied by a proper mutual respect for the context-specific nature of certain halakhic traditions. There are other consequences. For example, it is sometimes lamented that ‘modern Orthodox’ or ‘religious Zionist’ yeshivot and yeshivah high schools have moved away from their original ideologies toward a more traditionalist disdain for secular education and ‘narrow, particularistic, authoritarian’ values.22 But this is inevitable. The natural environment of traditionalism—its Sitz-im-Leben—is the enclosed, segregated community. The one leads to the other. ‘Modern’ Orthodoxy will always have difficulties in creating its own yeshivot, for its place and role lie elsewhere, namely, in congregational life. The real crisis of ‘modern’ Orthodoxy has been the sharp split between yeshivot and congregations. Few figures today combine—as was once the norm—the roles of yeshivah head

22 Lawrence Kaplan, ‘Education and Ideology in Religious Zionism Today,’ Forum (Fall/ Winter 1979), 25–34.



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and communal rabbi. This leads to a concentration of poskim, halakhic authorities, in yeshivot. Relatively few have had experience of congregations. What follows is an inevitable distance between halakhic rulings and the realities and traditions of congregational life. This leads to the ‘crisis of legitimacy’ experienced by many congregational rabbis. The Challenge of the New There is another consequence. The closer Orthodoxy comes to the social processes at work in congregations (ʻcentrism’) or to the intellectual currents of the academic world (ʻleft-wing’ or modern Orthodoxy proper) the more its environment is subject to change. The segregated community of the yeshivah or Chassidic group may aspire to something approximating stasis. Not so Jews who inhabit the secular world. There, values and intellectual fashions change. It follows that those who attempt to speak to such Jews must reckon with a constantly changing context. In a phrase, ‘modern’ Orthodoxy must continually re-invent itself. This brings us back to the idea of Torah im Derekh Eretz. It is sometimes supposed that the phrase means that there is a definitive synthesis, whether of the kind envisaged by Hirsch or along the lines set out by R. Kook, between Judaism and secular culture. There is, we suggest, no such thing, for there is no stable entity that can be designated as secular culture. Culture is a process, not a state. It is fluid and constantly in motion. It follows that Torah im Derekh Eretz is itself a process rather than an achievement. Dayan Grunfeld, himself a follower and translator of Hirsch, defined Torah im Derekh Eretz as ‘the relationship between Torah and the civilisation of a given epoch’23 or ‘the proclamation of the sovereignty of the Torah within any given civilisation’.24 This is a far more general idea than that espoused by Hirsch, and leaves open the possibility that there may, at any given moment, be no synthesis available. We believe that this is a more accurate way of describing the relationship between Torah and the ethos of the age. Torah im Derekh Eretz is the ongoing critical dialogue that must always occur at the interface between Judaism and its environing culture. It is essentially incomplete, ongoing and open-ended. The resolutions of one generation are inadequate to the next. Secular culture has meanwhile 23 Three Generations, 8. 24 Ibid., 12.

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moved on. Its positions have shifted. Its contours have subtly changed. A major error of ‘modern’ Orthodoxy has been its canonisation of Hirsch, R. Kook or R. Soloveitchik as if their work yielded a definitive philosophy of Judaism in modernity. New challenges may yield different inspirations. It may be that other, hitherto neglected figures of the last two centuries, may come into new prominence: R. Chaim Hirschensohn, for example, or R. Isaac Reines or, from the ranks of German Jewry, Rabbis Hildesheimer, Ettlinger, Bamberger and Hoffman. There are times in which the philosophical orientation of Judah Halevi is more compelling than that of Maimonides. There are ages in which the relationship between Judaism and general culture is one of congruence, at others a sustained critique. There are periods in which a universalist mood answers to Jewish experience; others at which particularism is more appropriate. Ultimately there is no escape from a continual re-engagement with the sources, biblical, talmudic, midrashic and halakhic and the identification, through their categories, of the dangers and possibilities of the new. Torah im Derekh Eretz is not an ideological position but a process, and one whose outcome is impossible to predict in advance. Tradition renews itself through its encounter with the new. It atrophies whenever it declines that encounter through either systematic rejection or systematic accommodation. Chadash muttar min ha-Torah, ‘the new is permitted’, is as far removed from a living tradition as chadash assur min ha-Torah, ‘the new is forbidden’. Ironically it has been the most traditionalist communities that have been the most innovative in recent decades and the most quick to respond to changing public moods. It was the yeshivah and Chassidic communities that first noted the trend, in the 1960s, toward tradition, ethnicity and the search for ‘roots’. They developed outreach networks, sought baalei teshuvah, religious returnees, and created for them new styles of yeshivot. They pioneered new modes of informal education: the lunchtime learning session for businessmen, the ‘student encounter’ and the residential retreat. They were the first to exploit the educational potential of the telephone (Dial-a-Daf Yomi) and cable television. ArtScroll, a traditionalist publishing house, applied modern typographical techniques to traditional texts. To be sure, these are instrumental rather than principled uses of modernity. But they demonstrate that traditionalists, no less than Hirsch in his day, are quick to perceive value-neutral possibilities in the contemporary cultural and technological climate. There are no static traditions, least of all the tradition of modernity. Those who sought to create a liberal tradition out of the work of Hirsch,



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R. Kook and R. Soloveitchik quickly discovered that all three could be cited on the opposite side of the argument. The Hirsch who wrote the Nineteen Letters was also the Hirsch who advocated Orthodox secession and segregation from the general community. As Samuel Heilman has noted, Hirsch became ‘a hero of a traditional Orthodoxy no less than he had earlier become the ideal of those drawn to modernity’.25 The R. Kook who wrote of the inner harmony pulsating through creation became, after the Six Day War, the inspiration of the ultra-nationalist Gush Emunim, and in the 1980s of the machteret, the religiously motivated ‘underground’ group that perpetrated acts of terrorism against Arab targets.26 The R. Soloveitchik who valued human creativity at the beginning of ʻThe Lonely Man of Faith’ was also the R. Soloveitchik who delivered a crushing assault on secularism at its end. Every deeply considered Orthodox response to modernity has strands within it that can be taken in both liberal and conservative directions. Those who wish to do in their generation what Hirsch, R. Kook and R. Soloveitchik did in theirs have no option but to begin again at the beginning, in the meeting between contemporary culture and the biblical and rabbinic texts. Neither the dynamic of the new nor the stasis of the old are achieved without constant re-interpretation. The Renewal of Torah im Derekh Eretz We have argued, then, against a conception of Orthodoxy that sees it as a set of conflicting ideologies. The parcelling of Orthodoxy into right, left and centrist positions, or into an antinomy of modernism against traditionalism, is a symptom of the collapse of overarching structures of community and the fragmentation of Orthodox life into non-communicating organisational enclaves. The cause is social, the effect intellectual, and the loss spiritual. What is lost is the ongoing critical dialogue between Torah in its full authority and a particular context in its full specificity. Instead Torah is allowed to speak only in those accents ideology has determined in advance. And local context is mistaken for a universal situation. Tradition then speaks in a series of strident voices, each of which denies the legitimacy of others, instead of in its classic mode: as an open-ended 25 ‘The Many Faces of Orthodoxy’, 50. 26 On the issues involved, see the collection of articles in Morasha 1:2 (Winter 1985) and 2:1 (Fall/Winter 1985).

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argument between different perspectives. This delegitimation of alternatives within the same tradition is what is sometimes called fundamentalism, and it is important to note that there can be a fundamentalism of the left and centre, no less than of the right. In its place we have argued for the recovery of a non-ideological approach to Jewish thought, one that sees its role as the application of a single Torah to a specific time, place and constituency. Such thought will recognise the presence of conflicting voices within the biblical and rabbinic tradition, as well as the existence of other contexts and constituencies that may evoke different judgements. This is not relativism or pluralism. It is what is involved in the application of Torah to changing circumstance. What, then, are the issues that shape the agenda of future Orthodox thought? They are what they have been since the threshold of Jewish modernity. For we have argued that the four great projects that have engaged the imagination of the great Jewish thinkers of the last two centuries must be addressed anew in every generation. They give rise to processes, not definitive resolutions. No synthesis or antithesis between Torah and its surrounding culture is final. It is at best provisional. The great questions must be taken up again in every age. Let us restate them. The first is Torah im Derekh Eretz, the meeting between Torah and contemporary culture. But here we must divest ourselves of a priori expectations as to what that meeting will yield. Hirsch and before him Saadia Gaon believed it would yield a kind of static synthesis, convergence on a single truth from different starting points. R. Kook— as to some extent did Maimonides—anticipated that it would produce a more enveloping synthesis, a unity of the disciplines. R. Soloveitchik— not unlike Judah Halevi—foresaw conflict. There is, for them, no ultimate meeting point between the universalism of secular thought and the particularism of revelation and covenant. The comparisons between these modern thinkers and their medieval predecessors are tentative and analogies could be drawn in different ways. What they have in common, though, is what Quentin Skinner calls a predilection for the ‘Grand Theory’,27 a framework of prior expectation, in this case as to the outcome of the encounter between Torah and secular civilisation. We have argued for a more modest, case by case approach. The strength of Torah im Derekh Eretz lies in its detailed application, not its general

27 The Return of Grand Theory in the Human Sciences, edited by Quentin Skinner, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.



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philosophical stance. We have had, in recent years, impressive beginnings. There have been useful works on Jewish economic and medical ethics and some initial thoughts on the relationship between Judaism and psychiatry, psychology and psychotherapy. But these are only beginnings. There is a tendency to suppose that a book on one of these subjects sets forth the Jewish view on the questions under review, and that therefore no more work needs to be done. But it is in fact rare to find a contemporary issue about which one can aspire to present the Jewish view. At most one can argue a Jewish view. The Jewish view emerges, if it does at all, only after alternative views have been presented and argued and a consensus develops. Torah im Derekh Eretz is a process, not a set of conclusions. Consider a small, or perhaps not so small, example. Sol Roth, in his recent book Halakhah and Politics: The Jewish Idea of a State,28 argues that within limits Judaism is compatible with democracy, individualism and human rights. At the same time Gershon Weiler’s Jewish Theocracy appeared in English.29 Weiler, an Israeli secularist, argues that rabbinic Judaism is radically incompatible with politics and a liberal, democratic state. Weiler is opposed to Judaism, but the same point has been made in the name of Judaism by Neturei Karta, opponents of the state of Israel on religious grounds, and by religious nationalists like Meir Kahane who has argued that ‘there is a potential confrontation between the Zionist Jewish state . . . and modern ideas of democracy and citizenship’.30 At stake is one of the deepest issues facing religious Zionism. And a question like this cannot be resolved by polemics on the one hand, apologetics on the other. It requires sustained, close and critical study informed by halakhah and aggadah on the one hand, political theory and history on the other. It requires, too, an extended and reasoned debate between opposing positions. And it requires that the debate be accessible to a wider audience than academics and scholars if it is to become part of public argument within a Jewish state. That argument is part of what Torah is in the public domain. One of the most serious contemporary threats to Judaism as a living tradition is the divorce of Torah from derekh eretz. When Jewish political theorists, for example, are insufficiently grounded in Torah, and exponents of Torah insufficiently knowledgeable in political theory, a question like 28 Sol Roth, Halakhah and Politics: The Jewish Idea of a State, New York: Ktav, 1988. 29 Gershon Weiler, Jewish Theocracy, Leiden: Brill, 1988. 30 Quoted in Yehoshafat Harkabi, Israel’s Fateful Decisions, London: I. B. Tauris, 1988, 188.

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the ideal form of a Jewish state is secularised on both sides into an issue that can only be settled by political confrontation and a war of cultures. Torah im Derekh Eretz is a religious imperative not only—as Maimonides and Hirsch saw it—as a means to the perfection of the self, but more basically as a precondition of a mature halakhic response to the many pressing ethical, social and political questions of our time. Tikkun Olam and Religious Zionism Arising immediately out of this is what Maimonides listed as one of the aims of the halakhic system, tikkun olam, ‘the perfection of the world’, or as we might more modestly translate it, ‘the establishment of society’.31 In both biblical and rabbinic thought, Judaism is actively concerned with society as well as self. This is implicit in the very concepts of mitzvah and halakhah—of religious truth as expressed not only or even primarily in terms of personal experience, but also in terms of law. Law governs communities. It creates societies. And it is this fact that has become intensely problematic in the modern world. For secularisation, as we now know, does not result in the eclipse of religion. Instead it transfers it from the public to the private domain. There, it is experienced not as societal norm but as personal commitment: not as law but as choice.32 This affects all modes of religious behaviour, from the most liberal to the most conservative. For liberal Judaisms, such as Reform, it results in the substitution of choice for law altogether, so that personal autonomy is seen as the central value of Judaism.33 Some Reform thinkers still use the word ‘halakhah’, but the word has been robbed of its traditional sense. The impact on traditionalist Orthodoxy is quite different but no less profound. Orthodoxy comes to be identified with voluntary communities, above all the yeshivah, instead of with the Jewish people as a whole. Instead of being seen as the law of a people, halakhah is experienced as the code of those who volunteer to be bound by it, a choosing elite. In either case religious thought has effectively abandoned the public domain. But it is precisely this that lies at the heart of two of the great

31  M. T. Mamrim 1:2. 32 Peter Berger, The Sacred Canopy, New York: Doubleday, 1967. 33 See Eugene Borowitz, ‘The Autonomous Jewish Self ’, Modern Judaism 4:1 (February 1984), 39–56.



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projects of Orthodoxy in modernity: religious Zionism and the role of Judaism in a secular diaspora. Consider first religious Zionism. One of the great questions confronting it has always been: what impels rabbinic Judaism, embodying as it does a tradition of political quietism and the belief that exile would be ended only by Divine intervention, to seek to reconstitute itself as a state in the land of Israel? There were two classic answers to this question, one given by R. Kook, the other by R. Reines. The first was mystical, the second pragmatic. For R. Kook, the ingathering of Jews to Israel was the start of a messianic process. For R. Reines it was a simple matter of saving lives from persecution. Though both answers remain relevant and profound, neither speaks lucidly to the situation of Israel in the late twentieth century. On the one hand it is beset by too many conflicts, internal and external, to be obviously messianic. On the other, Israel is too exposed to danger, and some diaspora communities are too well-established, for Israel to be the only obvious safe haven for Jewish existence. The classic answers may remain ultimately true but they are not immediately self-evident. Hence the current crisis of religious Zionism. But there was a third strand of religious Zionist thought which remains tantalisingly germane. Until emancipation, in a series of enclosed and semiautonomous Jewish communities, Jews lived Judaism as part of the public domain. Education, arbitration, civil disputes and community ordinances were informed by Torah. One could speak coherently of a Jewish culture, enriched by a bricolage of borrowings, but integrated nonetheless. It was emancipation and the collapse of the self-governing kehillah that drove Judaism inward and secularised the public domain. And it was this that led a number of traditional Jewish thinkers, among them R. Moses Sofer, to seek Jewish revival away from Europe in a settlement of the land of Israel. Indeed until the 1880s the majority of Jewish settlers of the land was intensely and traditionally religious. Israel is the one place Jews can today seek to construct a Jewish and Judaic public culture. It ‘expands the possible range of halakhic involvement’ as David Hartman puts it, to include ‘the moral quality of the army, social and economic disparities and deprivations, the exercise of power moderated by moral sensitivities, attitudes toward minorities and the stranger, tolerance and freedom of conscience’.34 It is the sole remaining

34 David Hartman, ʻThe Challenge of Modern Israel to Traditional Judaism’, Modern Judaism 7:3 (October 1987), 229–252.

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Judaic context in which society can become the vehicle for—in Aharon Lichtenstein’s striking phrase—‘collective beatitude’.35 But this presupposes that Judaism, not just Jews, reenters the public domain. What would it be for a modern macro-economic system to embody halakhic values? Or a contemporary welfare state? Does Judaism indeed favour a welfare state, or does it prefer a minimalist state which leaves major educational and charitable decisions in private hands? What kind of inequalities of wealth and income are compatible with Jewish values? What generally is the place of halakhah in a secular state? Should it be made law by a secular legislature? Should it remain a voluntary and self-imposed code? What are the possible and desirable interactions between Judaism, culture and society? Yet again these questions have no immediate and definitive answer, for between the authoritative texts and their contemporary application lies the process of interpretation and argument. Torah is constituted more by the conversation than by its conclusion, which in any event is provisional. But again we are struck by the relative poverty of the detailed workingout of responses to these and related questions. Here too there is a predominance of Grand Theory over detailed analysis. But if Jewish thought does not assume this responsibility, the result will almost certainly be its confinement within the ‘four cubits’ of home, school and synagogue. In which case a Jewish life can be lived as cogently in Boro Park as in Bayit VeGan, in Harvard no less than in Haifa. Tikkun Olam and Judaism in the Diaspora A similar though more complex set of concerns arises out of the place of Judaism in a pluralist diaspora. Here we face an issue whose existential impact is recent even if it arose theoretically more than a century ago. Emancipating societies were in theory secular; in practice their public cultures remained residually Christian. Jews saw their interests best advanced by a more universalistic order. They became passionate advocates of liberalism, socialism and secularism. Many—devotees, observers and critics alike—came to see these causes as in some way essentially ʻJewish’ without any clear sense of why or how this was so, other than that

35 Aharon Lichtenstein, ‘Religion and State: The Case for Interaction’ in Arguments and Doctrines, edited by Arthur A. Cohen, New York: Harper and Row, 1970, 423.



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they were promoted by Jews and were sometimes buttressed by vague references to ‘the prophetic tradition’. These identifications are no longer adequate. Politically Jews, whether in Israel, America or England, are no longer overwhelmingly associated with the left. They have become aware, in the last two decades, of some of the political problems of socialism and the cultural problems of liberalism. They have been reminded, too, that there is a religious politics of the right. As mature members of diaspora societies, they are more conscious also that there is a potential conflict between a Judaic voice on ethical and social questions, and the more narrow concerns of Jewish sectional self-interest. In the modern state, composed as it is of a vast variety of ethnic and religious groupings, there is an unprecedented place for a Jewish contribution to the question, as Mary Warnock puts it, ‘What kind of society can we praise and admire?ʼ Warnockʼs remark arose in the context of the Committee of Inquiry she chaired, at the invitation of the British Government, into human fertilisation and embryology (1982–1984). It raised important issues of medical ethics, but it raised them against the backdrop of a morally diverse society. Her opening observations are significant: ‘In our pluralistic society it is not to be expected that any one set of principles can be enunciated to be completely accepted by everyone. This is not to say . . . that there is no shared morality whatever. The law . . . sets out a broad framework for what is morally acceptable within society . . . Within the broad limits of legislation there is room for different, and perhaps much more stringent, moral rules.’36 This distinction between a public legal code and a more demanding moral community comes close to the classic Jewish distinction between the sheva mitzvot bnei noach, the Noachide commands binding on humanity as such,37 and the more rigorous demands—613 commandments— binding specifically on Jews as the people of the covenant. A Jewish ethic that responded to a pluralist society would therefore have to make a rigorous distinction between ʻJewish’ and ‘Noachide’ halakhah. It is just this that the rabbinic tradition is unusually, perhaps uniquely, well poised to do. But here too the quality of Jewish responses has been low, sometimes failing even to make this elementary distinction between the rules that 36 Mary Warnock, A Question of Life, Oxford: Blackwell, 1985, 2–3. 37 One of the few recent studies of the issue is David Novak, The Image of the Non-Jew in Judaism: An Historical and Constructive Study of the Noahide Laws, New York: The Edward Mellen Press, 1983.

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bind Jews, and those that, according to Jewish sources, bind society as such. There is room here for a renewal of a neglected, because not previously urgent, branch of Jewish thought. The issue is of more than academic concern. Jews in the diaspora are occupied in shaping and building societies. For the most part their involvements and interactions are with non-Jews in contexts governed by neutral rules and roles. The extant halakhic literature has relatively little to say about these interactions, beyond a general concern for kiddush ha-Shem, ‘sanctification of Godʼs name’, darkhei shalom, ‘the ways of peace’, and the avoidance of eivah, ‘animosity’. Unless there evolves a more nuanced and articulated set of rules or values for these situations, Jews will inevitably live out compartmentalised identities. For there will be no specific way for them to behave Jewishly in these contexts, nor even a detailed sense of what Judaism regards as acting ‘humanly’. They will be ‘secularists in the street’ however deeply religious they are in their private lives. Perhaps this is just what galut—exile—is in our time. But this judgement seems at the very least premature. Which takes us back to one of the key words of ‘modern’ Orthodoxy: synthesis. The word has standardly been applied to education and culture—to the idea that some fusion is possible of Judaism and secular disciplines. We have argued that synthesis in this sense may simply not be available. It depends on the state of secular culture. What is more religiously interesting is the idea of synthesis as applied to an individual life. Here it is a value long recognised in the rabbinic tradition under the rubric of ʻlet all your deeds be for the sake of Heaven’38 or, as Maimonides put it, ‘directing the powers of the soul toward a single goal’.39 That tradition recognises such a value makes it clear that compartmentalisation cannot be a religious ideal. The question then is: what is it to live oneʼs life in accordance with Jewish law and values as a doctor, lawyer, academic, businessman, industrialist, or any of the countless other occupations in which Jews are engaged, when the people with whom one deals are not Jews or if they are, are not bound by halakhah? Orthodox thought has been almost totally silent on this question. It has disattended it, as if to say that only within Jewish contexts can behaviour be coherently Jewish. But this is to withdraw from the

38 M. Avot 2:15; see also Avot de-Rabbi Nathan (2), 30; B. T. Betzah 16a. 39 The title of the fifth of the Eight Chapters, Maimonides’ introduction to his commentary to Mishnah, Avot.



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challenge of both religious Zionism and of post-emancipation diaspora life: of living in a non-religious society on the one hand and a non-Jewish one on the other. Can it be that the vast literature of Torah has no answer to this question, which today encompasses most dilemmas of most Jews most of the time? Against this we must reaffirm the faith of Ben Bag-Bag: ‘Study the Torah again and again, for everything is contained in it’.40 It was Franz Rosenzweig who was most perceptive about this impoverishment of Orthodoxy. He argued instead that ‘Exactly those things generally rendered permissible by Orthodoxy must be given a Jewish form’ and insisted that ‘the two worlds, the one of the Jewishly forbidden and the one of the “permissible” extra-Jewish, flow into one another’.41 Rosenzweigʼs ideal of the Jew was of a person who had ‘prepared himself quite simply to have everything that happens to him, inwardly and outwardly, happen to him in a Jewish way’.42 What that means, remains obscure. Once again, the Grand Theory exists; its detailed working out does not. Here then is the proper sphere of the search for synthesis. It will be created not in the house of study but in a series of existential models: the employer, perhaps, who creates new ways of acting humanely to employees, or the architect who enhances the urban environment, or the industrialist who reinvigorates an area of inner-city depression. There is no way of specifying in advance the way a life can be a model of kiddush ha-Shem or tikkun olam, of sanctifying Godʼs name or perfecting society. There are potentially as many ways as there are human lives. Something of this lies behind the stunning remark of the sages: ‘The Holy One, blessed be He, made every person in the stamp of the first human being, yet not one of them resembles his fellow. Therefore every person is obliged to say: The world was created for my sake.’43 Each life presents a unique set of possibilities for sanctification. Yet there is a task for Jewish thought—indeed for a Jewish literature—in identifying which lives are, and which are not, models for emulation. The range of such models has grown extraordinarily narrow in the last century, dominated by stories of yeshivah heads and Chassidic leaders. The Chassidic literature once celebrated the lives of ordinary Jews in

40 Avot 5:25. 41  Franz Rosenzweig, ʻThe Builders: Concerning Jewish Law’ in On Jewish Learning, edited by N. N. Glatzer, New York: Schocken, 1955, 83, 84. 42 Franz Rosenzweig, ʻTowards a Renaissance of Jewish Learning,’ in Glatzer, op. cit., 66. 43 M. Sanhedrin 4:5.

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ordinary situations—the ‘hidden righteous men’—but it is a tradition in eclipse. Recovering Faith The last and perhaps the most urgent task of Orthodoxy in modernity is to think a way forward to recovering the substantive reality of knesset Yisrael, the Jewish people as a single entity standing before God. On this, I have written extensively elsewhere,44 as has Michael Wyschogrod in his impressive theological study, The Body of Faith.45 Suffice it to say that there is a deep inner contradiction between an Orthodoxy which acts as if it were one denomination among others in the Jewish world, and which at the same time believes as a matter of deepest principle that there are no denominations within Judaism: that Judaism is either Orthodox or it is not Judaism. If Orthodoxy is to act responsibly toward the whole Jewish world and not simply toward its own immediate constituency, there are deep dilemmas to be faced about its relationship with secular and nonOrthodox Jews. It cannot consistently embrace pluralism, the view that a secular or non-halakhic reading of tradition is legitimate. But it cannot withdraw altogether into segregation without abdicating the responsibilities of religious leadership. There are problems here that have not been seriously confronted by religious thought, so insoluble do they seem. Once again though let us reiterate that the task of Torah is not necessarily to find solutions. In part it is to frame problems and point the way, if necessary an inch at a time, to making them less intractable. The second half of the final book of Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed is dedicated to the proposition that religious ideals cannot be legislated suddenly and immediately in the human situation. There is slow progress from less to more perfect states.46 Religious leadership for Maimonides—and in this respect it comes closest to imitatio Dei—is a matter of the governance of a total society.47 The challenge of Jewish leadership in the past two centuries has been to exercise that governance over a Jewish people many of whom have become alienated

44 In my forthcoming books, Traditional Alternatives and One People? Tradition, Modernity and Jewish Unity. 45 Michael Wyschogrod, The Body of Faith, Minneapolis: Seabury Press, 1983. 46 See especially Guide of the Perplexed 3, 32. 47 See Guide 1, 54; 2, 40; 3, 54.



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from Jewish law and faith, and in the absence of any coercive powers. That religious leadership has for the most part retreated into enclaves where its authority remains strong has perhaps been inevitable, but it is a measure of the challenge that still lies ahead. The perspective that emerges from this survey is paradoxical in the extreme. The great visions that drove Samson Raphael Hirsch and R. Avraham Kook have been substantively achieved. Jews have found it possible to be acculturated and integrated in the diaspora without abandoning halakhah or the fundamentals of Jewish faith. They have constructed a state and society in Israel in which religious Jews and Judaism, far from disappearing as secular Zionists believed, have grown in prominence and influence. And yet at precisely this juncture of success, the traditions of Jewish thought they initiated have lost their way. Torah im Derekh Eretz and religious Zionism have become suddenly problematic. The reasons for this, we have suggested, have been sociological rather than intellectual or spiritual. In the wake of the Holocaust, anti-Zionism, deepening secularisation and the intractable problems confronting Israel, Jewish thought has given way to a premature despair of the world and turned instead to a narrow survivalism. This is understandable, but it remains a failure of trust. The sages explained the phrase ‘God of faith’ to mean ‘God who had faith in the world He was about to create’.48 Something of that faith is needed in the domain of Jewish thought. There are times when faith in God comes easier than faith in the world He created. Yet both are integral to Jewish belief. Neither the biblical nor rabbinic tradition allows a prolonged retreat from the tense, unpredictable, ongoing dialogue with contemporary culture, with society in its Israeli or diaspora dimensions, and with the Jewish people as a whole. Renewing that holy argument is the future task of Jewish thought. For at stake is the fate of Torah whose living commentary is the Jewish people in dialogue with its covenantal calling.

48 Sifrei to Deuteronomy 32:4.

Future Tense: The Voice of Hope in the Conversation of Humankind* The future for Jews and Judaism, in Israel and the Diaspora, is fraught with risk. That is one reason why I called this book Future Tense. But there is another and more fundamental reason. We will not understand Judaism, or the Jewish people, or the trajectory of Jewish history, until we ask: ‘What made Jews different?’ Everyone is different. Each culture has its characteristic voice, each faith its distinctive vision. Lose it, and the culture begins to fade, the faith begins to falter. What, then, is Judaism? What are Jews called on to do? And why, in the twenty-first century, does it matter? The answer, I will argue, has to do with the future tense. Judaism is supremely the religion of the not-yet. In this chapter I want to explain what that means and why it is important. Judaism, I have argued, is not for Jews alone. If it were, it would make no sense. The God of Abraham is not a tribal God. He is the creator of heaven and earth. The God of Israel is not only the God of Israel. He made all human beings in his image. The God of the Hebrew Bible did not limit his blessings to one nation. After the Flood, he made a covenant with all humanity. Abraham and his descendants are not the only people in the Bible to encounter God. Abraham’s family are not the only moral heroes. So is Pharaoh’s daughter. So is Job. The Israelites are not the only people to whom God sends prophets. So were the people of Nineveh to whom God sent Jonah. ‘Through you,’ said God to Abraham, ‘all the families on earth will be blessed.’ How that will happen is not made clear in the Bible, yet the prophets were agreed that it would one day happen. Judaism is not for Jews alone. What then did God, through the Jewish people, its laws, life and history, seek to say to the world? The answer, I believe, lies in four strange, highly distinctive features of Judaism as a faith. The Great Mistranslation The first occurs at the formative moment in the life of Moses, when the prophet encounters God at the burning bush. God summons him to lead * Originally published in Jonathan Sacks, Future Tense: Jews, Judaism, and Israel in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Schocken Books, 2009), 231–52.

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the Israelites out of Egypt, but Moses is reluctant. ‘Who am I,’ he asks, ‘to be worthy of such a task?’ God reassures him, and then Moses asks, ‘Who are you? When the Israelites ask, who has sent you, what shall I say?’ God replies in a cryptic three-word phrase, Ehyeh asher ehyeh (Exod. 3:14). It is fascinating to see how Christian Bibles translate this clause. The King James Version reads it as ‘I am that I am.’ Recent translations are variants of the same idea. Here are some examples: I am who I am. I am what I am. I am—that is who I am.

These are all mistranslations, and the error is ancient. In Greek, Ehyeh asher ehyeh became ego eimi ho on, and in Latin, ego sum qui sum: ‘I am he who is.’ Augustine in the Confessions writes: ‘Because he is Is, that is to say, God is being itself, ipsum esse, in its most absolute and full sense.’ Centuries later, Aquinas explains that it means God is ‘true being, that is being that is eternal, immutable, simple, self-sufficient, and the cause and principle of every creature’. And so it continued in German philosophy. God became Hegel’s ‘concrete universal’, Schelling’s ‘transcendental ego’, Gilson’s ‘God-is-Being’ and Heidegger’s ‘onto-theology’.1 The mistake of all these translations is obvious to the merest beginner in Hebrew. The phrase means, ‘I will be what I will be.’ The verb does not use the present tense. Elsewhere, the Bible does. In the Ten Commandments, for example, the first verse reads, ‘I am the Lord your God who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery.’ Here the present tense (‘I am’) is used. But then, that verse does not speak of God’s name. It speaks of his deeds. Here, however, Moses asked God for his name. God might have replied, as did the angel who wrestled with Jacob, with a rhetorical question, ‘Why do you ask for my name?’, implying that the very question is out of order. There are things human beings cannot know, mysteries they cannot fathom, matters that transcend the reach of human understanding. But that is not what God says. He does answer Moses’ question, but enigmatically, in a phrase that needs decoding. God tells Moses to say to the Israelites, ‘ “I will be” sent me to you.’ It is as if God had said, ‘My name is the future tense. If you seek to understand me, first you will have to understand the nature and significance of the future tense.’ 1 See Richard Kearney, The God Who May Be: A Hermeneutics of Religion, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2001, pp. 20–38.



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‘I am that I am’ is a translation that owes everything to the philosophical tradition of ancient Greece and nothing to the thought of ancient Israel. The God of pure being, first cause, prime mover, necessary existence, is the god of the philosophers, not the God of the prophets. What, then, is the meaning of ‘I will be what I will be’? The name itself never recurs in the Hebrew Bible, but there is a later echo, in the great scene in which God appears to Moses on the mountain after the sin of the Golden Calf, in which he says, ‘I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion’ (Exod. 33:19). What this means is that God cannot be predicted or controlled. He cannot be confined to categories or known in advance. He is telling Moses, ‘You cannot know how I will appear until I appear; how I will act until I act. My mercy, my compassion, my strategic interventions into history, cannot be controlled or foretold. I will be what, when and how I choose to be. I am the God of the radically unknowable future, the God of surprises. You will know me when you see me, but not before.’ To be sure, in one sense, the future is connected to the past. God keeps his promises. That is an essential element of Jewish faith. But this very fact reveals the difference between predictability on the one hand and faithfulness on the other. Objects fall, gas expands, particles combine: these things are predictable. But people freely honour obligations they have undertaken because they are faithful. That is the difference God never fails to teach Moses and the prophets. God’s name tells us that he is not an entity knowable by philosophy or science, deducible from the past. God awaits us in the unknown and unknowable future. That is the first stage of the argument: the God of Israel is the God of the future tense. The Birth of History The second is the Jewish sense of time. A remarkable range of scholars— historians like J. H. Plumb and Yosef Yerushalmi, the philosopher Ernst Cassirer, Harold Fisch the literary scholar, and Thomas Cahill, the popular historian—have pointed out that in the Hebrew Bible, a new concept of time was born.2 Eric Voegelin, the historian of ideas, calls Israel ‘a new 2 J. H. Plumb, The Death of the Past, London, Macmillan, 1969. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory, New York, Schocken, 1982. Ernst Cassirer,

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genus of society’ because, unlike all other ancient civilisations, it ‘moved on the historical scene’.3 Anthropologist Mircea Eliade says that ‘the Hebrews were the first to discover the meaning of history as the epiphany of God’.4 This was a world-changing event. Time, for ancients, was cyclical, a matter of the slow revolving of the seasons and the generations, an endlessly repeated sequence of birth, growth, decline and death. Plato called time the ‘moving image of eternity’. Nietzsche developed the theory of eternal recurrences. Since the permutations of possibility are finite while time is infinite, what happened once will happen again. According to Eliade, in all mythological cultures, events become real by imitating an archetype. Rituals symbolically replay acts that happened at the beginning of time and gave the world the shape it has. In myth, time is abolished. The participants in ritual are transported back to the primordial moment and become one with eternity. Mythic time is not historical but anti-historical time: time in which nothing really changes. Change is threatening. Therefore myth and ritual reassure the believer that change is an illusion, unreal. Until Israel appeared on the scene, all cultures were like that. Some still are. Cyclical time is time as it appears in nature. All that lives, dies, but life itself lives on. Winds, storms, floods and drought wreak devastation, but nature recovers, homes are rebuilt, fields are replanted, and the cycle begins again. The dream of myth is order, and its perennial fear is chaos. Life is an ongoing struggle between these two opposites, which reflect the struggles of the gods, told in the endless stories of myth itself. The god of the sky fights the goddess of the sea. An inquisitive minor god steals one god’s secret or another god’s wife. The permutations are endless, but the basic plot is the same. First, there is order, then it is disturbed by a force of chaos: there is a battle and finally order is restored. So it was in ancient myth, and so it is today in its cinematic equivalents: Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings and the rest. The Hebrew Bible is a radical break with this way of seeing things. God is to be found in history, not just in nature. Things do change. Human The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, trans. Ralph Manheim, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1953–96. Harold Fisch, A Remembered Future: A Study in Literary Mythology, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1984. Thomas Cahill, The Gifts of the Jews: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels, New York, Nan A. Talese, 1998. 3 Eric Voegelin, Order and History, Volume 1, Israel and Revelation, Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press, 1956, p. 113. 4 Mircea Eliade, Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return, trans. Willard R. Trask, New York, Harper, 1959, p. 104.



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life is an arena of transformation. Abraham leaves the world of the Mesopotamian city-states to begin a new way of serving God. Moses and the Israelites leave Egypt to found a new social order. They are about to build a future unlike the past. That was the revolution. Without it, we would simply not have the key words we have come to accept as obvious, words like progress, development, advance, creativity, originality.5 Until Abraham and Moses, no one thought of time as a journey in which where you are tomorrow will not be where you were yesterday. The concept of change as progress would have been equally incomprehensible. For the ancients, change was a challenge to the established order. That too exists in some cultures and individuals today. To be sure, the prophets of Israel did not believe in ‘progress’ in the sense given by Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They did not believe all change is for the better. Some is for the worse. Nor did they believe that history is a story of continuous advance. Much of it is marked by regression. The proof is the story of the Israelites in the wilderness, a journey fraught with setbacks and delays. But time is nonetheless about transformation. The Moses who said, ‘I am not a man of words,’ is not the same as the man who forty years later delivered, in the book of Deuteronomy, some of the most gloriously eloquent speeches in history. The Israelites at the time of David are not the fractious group they were in the book of Numbers. The future is not a mere repetition of the past. Change, growth, development are all essential features of the human landscape. There are decisive moments that alter everything. God is not only present in eternity. He is also present in the here and now, in the process of change and transformation. The literature of ancient Israel was the birth of history, though it is not the same as the history written by Greek historians such as Herodotus or Thucydides. The Greek historians wrote about what happened. The prophets and scribes of Israel believed that history was more than a series of happenings. It had meaning. It constitutes a narrative. J. H. Plumb wrote: The concept that within the history of mankind itself a process was at work which would mould his future, and lead man to situations totally different from his past, seems to have found its first expression among the Jews . . . The uniqueness of this concept lay in the idea of development. The past was no

5 Thomas Cahill, The Gifts of the Jews, is particularly good on this.

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So the second point is that in Judaism a new concept was born, of a future substantively different from the past. The Story Without an Ending The third has to do with the nature of the Jewish narrative. Andrew Marr, we recall, said that Jews ‘have always had stories for the rest of us’. The Hebrew Bible is a book of stories, quintessentially so. Whereas science and philosophy represent truth as system, Judaism represents truth as story, a sequence of events that must play themselves out in and through time. Yet there is one aspect of the Hebrew Bible that has not had adequate attention. There are many types of story. Christopher Booker identifies seven basic plots: overcoming the Monster, rags to riches, the quest, the voyage and return, comedy, tragedy and rebirth.7 There are many genres: epic, lyric, romance, satire and so on. But essential to them all, indeed what makes a story, is what Frank Kermode calls ‘the sense of an ending’.8 A narrative needs closure. The separated lovers reunite, or the once-united lovers part. The hero wins, or the hero dies. The wicked witch meets her end, or the noble figure falls from grace. Different genres call for different kinds of ending, but without an ending there is no closure, no resolution, no frame, no story. Now consider the biblical narrative. David Clines, in his book The Theme of the Pentateuch, says that its theme is the promise of the land.9 The story begins with God’s call to Abraham to leave home and travel ‘to the land which I will show you’. Seven times, God promises Abraham the land. He promises it again, once to Isaac and three times to Jacob. The logic of the narrative is unmistakable. The end, heralded at the beginning, will be the land. It will become Abraham’s children’s home. It is a story about a journey with a destination, a divine promise and its fulfilment. Abraham

6 J. H. Plumb, The Death of the Past, pp. 56–7. 7 Christopher Booker, The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories, London, Continuum, 2004. 8 Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000. 9 David J. A. Clines, The Theme of the Pentateuch, Sheffield, University of Sheffield, 1978.



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leaves one home to find another. The story begins with a departure and ends with an arrival. Or so it should, but it doesn’t. No sooner does Abraham arrive than a famine forces him to leave. He travels to Egypt, a journey that because of the attractiveness of Sarah, puts his life in danger. He escapes the danger and returns, but again he has to leave, this time to rescue his nephew Lot. Again he returns, but a second time he has to leave because of famine, this time to Abimelech, king of Gerar. Again there is danger. Abraham survives and returns. But when Sarah dies he has nowhere to bury her, and he is forced to enter into lengthy negotiations with the Hittites to acquire even a burial plot for his wife. The story line is subverted time and again. And so it is with the life of Isaac, Jacob and Joseph. As Genesis draws to a close, the Israelites are in exile in Egypt, and the Promised Land is as distant as ever. With exodus, the tragedy deepens. The Israelites have become slaves. The place of refuge has become the place of servitude. Then light dawns. God speaks to Moses at the burning bush, telling him to take the people out from Egypt and bring them to the land. Even so, there are seemingly inexplicable delays. Moses prevaricates, until God finally loses patience. He returns to Egypt, tells the people they are about to go free, and then delivers God’s message to Pharaoh. But Pharaoh refuses. The Israelites think Moses has merely made matters worse. Moses, in turn, complains to God. Moses delivers signs, God sends plagues, and each time Pharaoh maintains his refusal. When he seems finally about to change his mind, God hardens Pharaoh’s heart. Eventually, after the tenth plague, Pharaoh says, ‘Leave’, but even then the way is not clear. God hardens Pharaoh’s heart again, and Pharaoh and his army pursue the Israelites. They come up against the sea. They despair. A miracle happens. The sea divides. The Israelites pass through. Now at last they are beyond the reach of Pharaoh. They have left Egypt. They are on their way to the land. All that lies ahead of them is a journey of a few days. But it turns out not to be so. At each difficulty, the Israelites want to give up and return to Egypt. Moses sends spies to get a glimpse of the land, but they come back with a devastating report. The land is good, but the people are giants, the cities well fortified, and an Israelite victory impossible. The people lose faith, and they are condemned to die in the desert. The arrival is delayed a further forty years. Even then, the disappointments are not at an end. Moses himself, the man who led the people to freedom and the brink of the Promised Land,

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is told that he may not enter. In the final glimpse we have of him, he is standing on a mountain-top, seeing the land from afar. We are no nearer at the end of the story than Abraham was at the beginning. Neither Genesis nor the Pentateuch as a whole, concludes with an ending. They are God’s unfinished symphony. We are left in medias res, in liminal space midway between departure and arrival, tantalisingly close yet unmistakably distant. We have travelled through several centuries and generations on a journey with a destination that no one has yet reached. So we expect that in the course of the other biblical books, we will find closure. By the end of the book of Joshua, the land has been conquered. Thirty-one battles have been fought. The nation has found a home. But as we read on, we discover that this is not a story in which people live happily ever after. Following Joshua, the rule of judges ends in anarchy: ‘In those days there was no king in Israel; everyone did what they saw fit.’ The people choose monarchy, but this proves only a temporary unification. After the death of Solomon the kingdom splits in two. The northern kingdom is taken captive and disappears. The southern kingdom falls to the Babylonians. The Book of Books ends, at 2 Chronicles 36, with Cyrus, king of Persia, who has conquered Babylon, giving permission to the exiles to return. So we find ourselves—after thirty-nine books and more than a thousand years of history—back almost where the story began, in Babylon, not far from Ur of the Chaldees from where Abraham’s family first set out. There is no other story quite like this. It breaks all the rules of narrative form. It leads us to expectations that are never met in the way we anticipated them. The Hebrew Bible is a story without an ending. Yet there must be an end, for we have heard it since the beginning. It has three elements: a land, the blessing of many children—as many as the stars of the sky, the dust of the earth, the sand on the seashore—and the promise that ‘Through you will all the families of the earth be blessed.’ Yet the land is never secure. As for many children, Moses says at the end of his life, ‘You are the smallest of all the peoples.’ As for being a blessing to all the families on earth, by the end of the Bible we are still not quite sure what this might mean. The Bible is one of the meta-narratives of Western civilisation, the Book of Books, the story of stories, yet Genesis and Deuteronomy and the Hebrew Bible all close with us, the readers’ still awaiting the promised, predestined end. It is always just over the horizon, receding like a mirage in the distance. The Bible leaves us, in Harold Fisch’s fine phrase, with



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‘the unappeased memory of a future yet to be fulfilled’.10 So we arrive at a third proposition: in Judaism we are always in the middle of a story whose ending lies in the future. The ‘Not Yet’ of History Which brings us to the fourth of Judaism’s unique ideas. It is the only civilisation whose golden age is in the future. Judaism invented the messianic idea. It is a protean idea, taking different forms at different ages and in different imaginations. But it is present in all the prophets, from Isaiah to Jeremiah to Malachi. It may refer to nothing more than the restoration of Israelite sovereignty. It may mean a utopian end of war and the reign of peace. It may be more still: the righting of the wrongs of history, the rule of justice after the day of judgement. It may even be the death of death. It might be natural or supernatural, an event within historical time or ‘the end of history’. Judaism knows all of these alternatives and more. Maimonides sensibly says that we will not know what it will be until it is. There is only one option mainstream Judaism does not entertain: the idea that the messiah has, in fact, come. This was, of course, the parting of the ways between Judaism and Christianity. Judaism has had many putative messiahs. There were several in the first century. In the second century, Rabbi Akiva and others regarded Bar Kochba as a potential messiah. Maimonides in one of his epistles, The Letter to Yemen, recounts three such messiahs in his father’s lifetime.11 The most widely followed messianic figure was Shabbetai Zvi in the sixteenth century. Even afterwards there were several others. Reform thinkers in Germany and America saw emancipation as the dawn of the messianic age. The baptised Karl Marx, whose grandfather was a rabbi, continued the tradition by formulating his own politicised, secularised version of the messianic idea. Many Jews believed that Theodor Herzl was a messiah—if not the ‘son of David’ then at least ‘the messiah son of Joseph’ who was his precursor. In our own time, some followers of the seventh Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, thought that 10 Harold Fisch, A Remembered Future, p. 19. 11  Epistles of Maimonides: Crisis and Leadership, trans. Abraham Halkin with discussions by David Hartman, Philadelphia, Jewish Publication Society, 1993.

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he was the messiah. Such is the pressure of messianic expectation among Jews. Yet in the final analysis, to be a Jew has always been to answer the question ‘Has the messiah come?’ with the reply ‘Not yet’. Not while there is war and terror, hunger and injustice, disease and poverty, corruption and inequality. Hence the fourth conclusion: in Judaism the golden age is always in the future. We have, then, in Judaism four remarkable, related ideas: a God whose name is in the future tense, a future-oriented concept of time, a literature whose stories always end in a future-not-yet-reached, and a golden age which belongs to the future. The Risk of Freedom The question is why. The answer lies in the radical Jewish belief in human freedom. We do what we choose to do. We are, within constraints, what we choose to be. Society is what we choose to make it. Judaism is supremely a religion of freedom. Free will might seem obvious, but it is not. The ancients believed that fate lay in the lap of the gods or the configuration of the stars. The Greeks believed in blind fate, ananke. Spinoza thought all events, including human behaviour, were determined by natural necessity. Marx saw history as determined by economic interests. Freud thought human behaviour was governed by irrational, unconscious drives. Some neo-Darwinians see it as the result of genetic determinism. On all these views, freedom is an illusion. Judaism argues otherwise, and it is important to understand why. If God is not within nature, but is himself the author of nature, then he is subject to no laws except those by which he chooses to bind himself. The very act of creation was a free divine choice. God is free to make or unmake, reward or punish, condemn or forgive. That explains the point with which we began. When God says to Moses, ‘I will be what I will be,’ and later, ‘I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy,’ he is saying that ‘I, God, am free. What I do, how I appear, how I intervene: none of these things can be predicted or controlled. I am what I choose.’ God is unknowable for the same reason that the future is unknowable: because of the nature of freedom. If God is free and he bestows his image on us, then we too, within the limits set by our bodily existence, are free. That is the point of the Bible from the beginning. God gives Adam and Eve a command that they are



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free to obey or disobey. He gives Cain the freedom to control his negative impulses and the freedom to capitulate to them. The story of the Hebrew Bible is of God’s gift of freedom to humankind. It is a fateful choice, and one that brings God great grief. For we can use our freedom well or badly. We can use it to create or destroy. We can use it to deprive others of their freedom. That is the risk, but it is the risk God chooses to take. Much of the Bible is about how to construct relationships, marriages, families, communities and a society which will honour the freedom of others, so that my freedom is not purchased at the cost of yours. Much of the rest of the Bible is about how such relationships failed: about war and tyranny and the betrayal of freedom, about the corruption of kings, the weakness of priests, the exploitation of the poor by the rich, and the passionate but often unavailing protests of the prophets. It is, as Emmanuel Levinas put it, a difficult freedom. In what does freedom consist? What makes Homo sapiens different? The answer lies in the fact that human beings have language. Other animals also have language. Primates do; so do dolphins; so even, by the dances they perform, do bees. Animals, especially the social animals that form groups, have ways of communicating. What makes human language unique is that it contains the future tense. We can speak of things that have not yet happened, and therein lies our freedom. Because we can speak of something that has not yet been, we can imagine it and therefore choose to act so as to bring it about. We are not held captive by the past. Events that are not free have causes, and they lie in the past. Let go of an apple, and it falls. Put chemicals together, and they react. A cause always precedes its effect. That is what sciences study: universal relationships between causes and effects. Free human action stands outside the causal nexus. Only humans are capable of acting not just because of something that happened in the past but in order to bring about an imagined future. We go to university to get a degree. We work to earn a salary. We enter politics to win power. These are free acts because they are directed to a future we seek to bring about. The keyword of the first chapter of Genesis is Yehi, ‘Let there be.’ Creation, human or divine, means actualising what has not yet been. We are free because we face an open future: open because it depends on us. We know the beginning of our story, but we do not yet know how it will end. That is the human condition, and it is why the Jewish story has a beginning but not an end. That is why God, about to lead his people from slavery to freedom, defines his name in terms of an open future: Ehyeh

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asher ehyeh, ‘I will be what I choose to be’. That is why Jewish time is not cyclical time in which the future is a mere repetition of the past. That is why in Judaism the golden age, the messianic destination, has not yet been. The language of freedom is the future tense. Judaism, the religion of freedom, is the religion of the future tense. The Concept of Tragedy A profound difference separates Judaism from the other great civilisation of the West, ancient Greece. The Greeks believed in a golden age that lay in the past. And they believed in fate, sometimes called moira, at others ananke, a future determined by the past. Therein lay the roots of one of Greece’s greatest contributions to civilisation, the concept of tragedy. The story of Oedipus, which Freud took as the emblematic human narrative, begins when the king and queen of Thebes, Laius and Jocasta, consult the Delphic oracle, Tiresias. He tells them that they will have a son who will kill Laius and marry Jocasta. To prevent this from happening, when the child is born, Laius has his feet bound together and pierced by a stake, and gives him to a herdsman whom he commands to kill him. The herdsman has pity on the child and gives him to a friend, who hands him over to Polybus, king of Corinth, who adopts him as his son and calls him Oedipus. When Oedipus grows up, he visits the Delphic oracle, who tells him that he is destined to kill his father and marry his mother. To avoid this, he escapes from the people he thinks are his parents and goes to Thebes. There, he encounters a stranger at a crossroads with whom he has an argument, and eventually kills him. The stranger is of course Laius, Oedipus’ unrecognised father. And so the story continues to its inevitable end. Everything Laius, Jocasta and Oedipus do to ensure that the oracle will not come true is a step towards bringing it about. That is an essential element of tragedy. Tragedy means something more than misfortune, catastrophe or disaster. All human groups know disasters, but tragedy is a cultural artefact. It comes from a view of the world in which we believe we control fate but in fact fate controls us. There is a force, or a set of forces, operative in human destiny as in all else, that brings suffering regardless of what we do. Tragedy is powerful—Aristotle called it cathartic—because in it we enter a world in which even the greatest heroes fail and fall, because in the end, neither they nor we are masters of our fate. We are dust blown



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by the wind. We are tiny figures in a vast constellation of forces that are indifferent to our existence and can crush us without knowing we are there. Our dream of freedom—our belief that we can say, ‘Let there be,’ and there will be—is an illusion destined to be shattered on the rocks of reality. Tragedy, a coherent, profound view of the human situation, is the gift of the Greeks to the world. Jews gave the world a different view, no less coherent and profound but deeply incompatible with a tragic view of life. It gave it the idea of hope. In a world of hope, we are not alone. We exist because someone, the One, created us in love. He knows we are here, hears our prayers, forgives our failures, lights our way through the wilderness of time, teaches us the paths of righteousness, speaks to us in the silence of the soul and takes our hand in the presence of fear, giving us the strength to resist despair. Hope is not mere longing, expectation, dream or desire, any more than tragedy is mere disaster. It is a culturally specific phenomenon, just as tragedy is, and the two cannot co-exist. If there is hope, there is no ultimate tragedy. If there is tragedy, there is no ultimate hope. The French playwright Jean Anouilh put the point forcefully in the words of the chorus at the beginning of his Antigone: Tragedy is clean, it is restful, it is flawless . . . In tragedy nothing is in doubt and everyone’s destiny is known . . . There is a sort of fellow-feeling among characters in a tragedy: he who kills is as innocent as he who gets killed: it’s all a matter of what part you are playing. Tragedy is restful; and the reason is that hope, that foul, deceitful thing, has no part in it.12

History without freedom equals tragedy. History plus freedom equals hope. With this we come finally to a definition of Judaism that explains not only what it has meant to Jews but what it has meant to the world. Judaism is the voice of hope in the conversation of humankind. Agents of Hope The prophets, even the most pessimistic, were all agents of hope. Jeremiah, one of the bleakest, bought a field in Jerusalem as a sign that he believed God would bring the people back from exile, which he did.

12 Quoted in J. A. Cuddon. The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, London, Penguin, 1991, p. 985.

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The nearest the Hebrew Bible comes to tragedy is the book of Job. Job is a good man who loses everything: his wealth, his health, his children. He rails against the injustice of his fate. His companions, conventional believers all, tell him that he is wrong. He must have committed some sin. Or God is sending him suffering to refine his soul. God’s justice is inscrutable, therefore unchallengeable. Who are we to understand the infinite? But they are wrong. The book says so at the beginning and God says so at the end. Job has done nothing to deserve his fate. For forty-two chapters of blazing poetry and prose, the book walks along the edge of the abyss. Yet Job is not a tragedy. What redeems the story is not the ending in which Job gets back his property and reputation, has other children, and lives to a good old age. Nor is it what God says to him when he finally speaks from out of the whirlwind. God gives Job no answers, only four chapters of rhetorical questions. It is the fact that God speaks to Job, and vindicates his challenge. Two facts shine through the book: Job refuses to lose faith in God and God refuses to lose faith in Job. Job towards God is like Jacob wrestling with the angel, saying, ‘I will not let you go until you bless me’ (Gen. 32:26). At the end, God and man stand together in a momentous refusal to be parted. Job is not Lear or Hamlet or Othello, alone in an unfeeling world. The book of Job, paradoxically, is a love story, the love of a man for God and God for a man. Each is angry with the other, yet it is their meeting, not the answer to a question, that redeems fate from tragedy. By the end we begin to feel the full haunting significance of the phrase in Genesis 2: ‘It is not good for man to be alone.’ God is the redemption of our solitude. Those who live in the presence of God are not immune to suffering, but they are able to say, ‘Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil, for you are with me.’ Judaism is the principled defeat of tragedy in the name of hope. The Voice of the Not-Yet That hope forms the substance and structure of Jewish practice. The Jewish festivals are all stories of hope. Passover tells us that a people enslaved, powerless and without rights can win their freedom. Pentecost tells us that a people unloved by their contemporaries can become the covenantal



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partner of God himself. Tabernacles tells us that even a homeless nation, living in temporary dwellings, is still on a journey to the Promised Land. The New Year and Day of Atonement are festivals of a different kind of hope. The three pilgrimage festivals are about a nation and its history. The Days of Awe are about the individual and his or her destiny. They tell us that we are not prisoners of our past. We are not condemned forever to be haunted by the wrong we once did. We can repent and be forgiven; we can begin again. The liturgy on these holy days contains a line that in itself is the most explicit rejection of fate in the Greek sense. The Delphic oracle told of decrees that could not be averted, however hard people tried. On the high holy days Jews say to the contrary, ‘Penitence, prayer and charity avert the evil decree.’ In Judaism there is no such thing as a decree that cannot be averted. Therefore there is no future that is bereft of hope. The social legislation of Judaism is a minutely articulated set of instructions for building a society of hope. No one is to be allowed to be destitute. The produce of the field and the wealth of the town must be shared. No one is condemned to a lifetime of slavery. One day in seven, all are free. No one is to be indebted forever. Every seven years, all debts are cancelled. No one is forced to sell his or her ancestral inheritance in such a way as to rob their children or grandchildren of their heritage. In the jubilee year, land returns to its original owners. The entire legislative structure is aimed at creating a culture of hope. Even Judaism’s ritual laws are based on this principle. Tzitzit, the command to make fringes with a thread of blue on the corners of garments, appears in the Bible immediately after the episode of the spies in which the people lost hope of inheriting the land. The cord of blue was to remind Jews of heaven, and the knowledge that in fighting their battles they were not alone. Even the apparently inscrutable rite of the Red Heifer, which purified people after contact with death, showed that there is no defilement that is permanent, no stain that cannot be removed. Judaism’s ethic of medicine, with its overwhelming emphasis on saving life, tells us that what can be cured need not be endured. Illness is not a divine decree that must be accepted. Not all, perhaps, but most of the commandments are either about creating hope, individually or through networks of support, or about behaviourally inculcating habits of hope. So it is no accident that in the modern world many Jews became economists fighting poverty, or doctors combating disease, or lawyers contesting injustice, or teachers battling ignorance, or psychotherapists striving to defeat despair. The great Jewish thinkers, even those who had

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abandoned Judaism, were almost invariably utopians or revolutionaries, charting secular routes to hope. That is why Jews were so often hated by reactionaries, defenders of the past, its prejudices and privileges. Jews refused to worship the established order when it was manifestly unjust. They refused to see the randomness of fate as inescapable, the result of fate or original sin or pre-ordained hierarchy, the will of the gods or the decree of history. If God is ‘I will be what I will be’, then humans too share that freedom, albeit within constraints. Each of us is challenged to become what we could become, and to make society what it might be. Judaism is a sustained protest against the world that was and is, in the name of the world that could be, should be, but is not yet. Judaism is the voice of the Not-Yet in human civilisation. The Voice of Hope in the Conversation of Humankind This was perhaps the greatest contribution of Judaism—via the Judaic roots of Christianity—to the West. The idea that time is an arena of change, and that freedom and creativity are God’s gift to humanity, resulted in astonishing advances in science and our understanding of the world, technology and our ability to control the human environment, economics and our ability to lift people out of poverty and starvation, medicine and our ability to cure disease. It led to the abolition of slavery, the growth of a more egalitarian society, the enhanced position of women, and the emergence of democracy and liberalism. These were all consequences of ‘the birth of the modern’, set in motion by the Puritans, the Christians who came closest to the Hebrew Bible in their understanding of the world. Jews never accepted that war, violence, injustice, exploitation, the corruptions of power and the seductions of success are written into the structure of the universe. They do not believe that tragedy is inevitable, that human aspiration is hubris to be punished by nemesis, that a blind fate governs all things, that the universe or the gods are at best indifferent, at worst actively hostile, to humankind. They do not believe that genetic determinism means that all our efforts to change are fruitless and unworthwhile. If God defines himself as ‘I will be what I will be’, then he is telling us that, created in his image, we too can be what we will be. Within limits, to be sure. Judaism is not optimism. Jews do not believe in time as a story of unbroken progress. The tale of Adam and Eve is essentially about limits, about the things we can do but may not do. Jewish law is an assemblage of those limits. Without great care, the rich will exploit



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the poor, the strong will dominate and crush the weak. That was the burden of the prophetic message in ancient times. It should be so now. To be a Jew is to be an agent of hope. Every ritual, every command, every syllable of the Jewish story is a protest against escapism, resignation and the blind acceptance of fate. Judaism, the religion of the free God, is a religion of freedom. Jewish faith is written in the future tense. It is belief in a future that is not yet but could be, if we heed God’s call, obey his will and act together as a covenantal community. The name of the Jewish future is hope. Somehow, in a way I find mysterious and moving, the Jewish people wrote a story of hope that has the power to inspire all who dare to believe that injustice and brutality are not the final word about the human condition, that faith can be more powerful than empires, that love given is not given in vain, that ideals are not illusions to give us comfort but candles to light our way along a winding road in the dark night without giving way to fear or losing a sense of direction. The Jewish story is not for Jews alone. From the very beginning it was meant to be shared. When God said to Abraham, ‘Through you all the families of earth will be blessed’, when Moses said, ‘This is your wisdom and understanding in the eyes of the nation’, they were signalling that, improbably yet certainly, this journey across the wilderness of time in search of the Promised Land would be one from which all who believe in God, Jew and non-Jew alike, would draw courage. They too would walk it, each in their own way, towards their own field of dreams, their own destination of hope. Was there ever a less likely hero than Abraham, a man who performed no miracles, led no nation, delivered no great sermon to be inscribed on the hearts of future generations, a man who was promised so much yet saw so little fulfilled in his lifetime? Was there ever a less likely candidate for immortality, or witness to the power of faith, than the people whose name, Israel, means ‘One who wrestles with God and with men and yet survives’? For though Jews love humanity, they continue to wrestle with it, challenging the idols of the age, whichever the idols, whatever the age. And though Jews have loved God with an everlasting love, they have never stopped wrestling with him nor him with them. And still Jews survive. And still Jewish faith survives, a difficult, austere yet honest faith that refuses to make its peace with the evil men do; a faith that sees God as a teacher and humanity his disciples, that believes in freedom and human responsibility and that, when asked, ‘Has the Messiah come?’ has consistently answered, ‘Not yet.’

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No faith has endowed the human person with more dignity, seeing us all, whatever our faith or lack of it, as the image and likeness of God, holding all human life sacred, believing that we all have within us the power to defeat the evil that lives in each of us, and insisting on the most improbable of all religious beliefs: that more than we have faith in God, God has faith in us and will never lose that faith. Jews suffered for that faith, deeper, longer and in more lands than any other, yet they never lost their ability to challenge and argue and question, never sacrificed the critical edge of their intelligence. They did not define themselves as victims, nor did they lose hope or their sense of humour. And though many Jews, during and after the Holocaust, lost faith in God, they never lost their faith in life itself, here on earth with all its pain and loss. The state of Israel is testimony to that faith. Which other people, exiled for so long, would retain the faith that one day they would return? Which other people would fight so defiantly against those who believe that Jews have no right to their own land where they can defend themselves against those who, throughout history, have sought to destroy them, often in the name of the very God to whom Jews dedicated their lives, knowledge of whom they first introduced to the world? The world in the twenty-first century needs that faith. In an age of ecological devastation, it needs the Jewish reminder that we are placed on earth, as was Adam in the garden, to ‘serve and conserve’ it. In an age of economic inequalities, it needs the Jewish insistence on tzedakah, charityas-justice. In an age of terror, it needs the Jewish insistence on the sanctity of life. In an age of religious extremism, it needs to hear the Jewish denial that you can win your place in heaven by murdering the innocent on earth. Martyrdom is the willingness to die for your faith, not the willingness to kill for your faith. The world needs that difficult, often misunderstood and reviled, Jewish belief that though its religion is not the religion of all humanity, its God is the God of all humanity, so that the righteous of all faiths have a share in the world to come. For if we do not find a way for religions to live together peaceably and with mutual respect, we may yet betray God’s image and destroy God’s world. Jews have turned inwards; they need to turn outwards. They are conscious of being different, but so is every member of a minority, and in a global age every group is a minority. Our uniqueness is our universality, and it is precisely by sharing our uniquenesses that we enlarge the heri-



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tage of humankind. Jews are not the only people to seek God, live lives of faith, work for the betterment of humanity or count themselves blessed by God’s love. They are not alone. Jews have friends among many faiths, and among secular humanists, and they should cherish them all, making common cause with them in defence of freedom, human dignity and moral responsibility. They should not take every criticism as a form of antisemitism. They should rest secure in their unparalleled past and face the future with vigilance but without fear. I have argued for a Judaism that has the courage to engage with the world and its challenges. Faith begets confidence, which creates courage. That is how Jews lived in the past and should live in the future. For they are the people of the journey to a distant destination, begun by Abraham, continued by a hundred generations of ancestors, and it still beckons. Judaism is faith in the future tense. Jews were and are still called on to be the voice of hope in the conversation of humankind.

Interview with Chief Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks October 29, 2012 Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks, thank you for agreeing to participate in the Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophers. You are a remarkable, versatile person. As Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth you command the entire Jewish religious tradition and work within the traditional framework of the Jewish community, but you are also a public intellectual, a social theorist, a political commentator, a historian, a philosopher, an ethicist and, of course, a bestselling author. How did it all come about? What was your intellectual trajectory that allowed you to integrate these diverse activities? I began from a secular academic background. I studied philosophy at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, and then continued as a postgraduate at New College, Oxford. I had some wonderful tutors, among them in my undergraduate years, Roger Scruton in philosophy, who was certainly one of the great polymaths of our time, and my doctoral supervisor was the late Sir Bernard Williams, who was described as “the cleverest man in England” and was indeed a brilliant philosopher. So that was stage one, secular philosophy, and that was my first career. The events of the Six-Day War of 1967 and the weeks leading up to it, while I was just in my first year at university, had a huge impact on me. In 1968, I spent the summer in America traveling around on a Greyhound bus ticket, meeting every distinguished rabbinical thinker I could meet. I met all sorts of people on the way, among them, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, Rabbi Aaron Lichtenstein, Rabbi Norman Lamm, Rabbi Emmanuel Rackman, and many others. But there were two key encounters, two people that everyone was telling me to meet. One was Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson of Chabad-Lubavitch, and the other was Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, both of blessed memory. They really awoke in me a spiritual response and challenged me to think anew: Rabbi Schneerson posed the challenge of leadership and Rabbi Soloveitchik sent me the challenge of thinking Jewishly. I didn’t really address these challenges until 1973 when I’d already taught secular philosophy and I began my rabbinic studies. So that was stage two. Stage three was when I began my Jewish studies. I was extraordinarily blessed to have one of the greatest minds in the Jewish world that I have

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ever met, who was at that time head of Jews’ College, London, which is our rabbinical seminary. I refer to Rabbi Nachum Rabinovitch, with whom I lived and worked for ten years. I eventually became his successor. He was an extraordinary combination of talents and skills: he was a great halakhist, a great, in fact, one of the greatest commentators on the Rambam (Maimonides), and he was also a scientist, since he had a distinguished career at the University of Toronto as a professor of mathematics. Additionally, he had a very clear grasp of virtually every secular discipline, from philosophy, to astronomy, to medicine, and intellectually he had the highest conceivable standards. So he made me for the first time work hard as a scholar; he taught me how to produce scholarship. Stage four was when I was completing my doctorate. I started my studies with Bernard Williams with a focus on a secular theme, but I finished it on a religious theme on the concept of community and kol yisrael arivim zeh lazeh and hokheiakh tokhiakh. At that time, 1973, I basically had given up philosophy, because British philosophy had reached a dead end. It was linguistic, it was dry, it was an extremely esoteric branch of lexicography, which didn’t tell you anything about the substantive questions of human existence. All it told you was what words meant. And it was also tone deaf to the history of what words mean. In the course of doing the doctorate, I came across the book that reignited my interest in philosophy: it was Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue. He did it for me, and I think he did it for others as well; he gave philosophy back its history, and that was tremendously liberating. The return to history gave philosophy its credibility, its depth, and its substance. MacIntyre told us that philosophy is a series of traditions which allowed me instantly to see where this applied to Judaism as well. So, he showed me how philosophy could be done and that was stage four. Stage five was a matter of sheer necessity. We had had in 1993 an extraordinary crime that sent shockwaves through Britain, a four-yearold boy, called Jamie Bulger, was murdered by two ten-year-old boys. This crime led us all to ask what does this say about us, about British society? I wrote an op-ed in The Times and John Major, who was then Prime Minister, phoned up the next day, asking whether I could come and see him. I suddenly found in this extraordinary way having a relationship with senior politicians, including three consecutive prime ministers: John Major, Tony Blair, and Gordon Brown. I suddenly realized that the one thing one could do for them was to think things through. This is indeed the purpose of philosophy: to think things through. So that is how I began the public philosophy that I have been writing ever since.



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The first major work of that was The Politics of Hope, which took a debate about civil society and community from America to Britain, where it hadn’t really functioned. In that book I first began reengaging with philosophy in the new role as a religious leader and, hence, as a kind of public intellectual. The philosophers who shaped your outlook are all moral philosophers who advanced a particular strand of moral philosophy, namely virtue ethics. What is your view about the virtue ethics tradition within philosophy? The reason for this is that virtue ethics has, in the course of history, often been the common ground between religious and secular ethics. The classic example is the influence of Aristotle on the virtue ethic of Maimonides as set out in Hilkhot Deot (Laws of Ethical Character) in his law code as well as in several other of his writings. Something similar was occurring in British philosophy at this time. As an atheist, Bernard Williams was keen to put me in contact with a philosopher who was more sympathetic to religion than he was, and felt that the obvious figure was Philippa Foot, who was one of the leaders of the movement to bring back virtue ethics into moral philosophy. Virtue ethics is only one strand of moral philosophy, just as it is only one dimension of Jewish ethics. It just happened to be the most fruitful point of meeting between the two worlds. As you know, some analytic philosophers consider the virtue ethics tradition to be misguided or intellectually lightweight. Is this a serious critique? How do you see the place of internal debates within the discipline of philosophy? Certainly virtue ethics is only a small part of Jewish ethics, and were it not for Maimonides we might not think there was a Jewish virtue ethic at all. In Judaism, as in most other ethical systems, the primary question is: What should I do? How, in these circumstances, should I act? Virtue ethics is an attempt to answer the question: What kind of person should I be? So, for example, almost all the laws in the Torah are about action, not character. The narratives of the Torah are indeed about character, but even here there is no one template of the righteous or virtuous individual. Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are all different, as are Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel and Leah, Moses, Aaron, and Miriam. So virtue ethics is a valuable part of moral philosophy, but the really tough issues—between competing

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conceptions of justice, for example, or how to resolve conflicts between duty and consequences—are not resolved by it. The relevance of history to philosophy is a tricky question. On the one hand, you consult history, sociology, and anthropology in order to understand the context of human life, but in certain domains of your work, especially your discussion of the biblical text, history is actually missing. In other words, what history means and how it functions in human life can be interpreted in many ways. Yes, of course. The relevance of history is a particularly tricky question for Orthodox Jews. The truth is that there is more than one conception of history, and more than one way in which history functions within Judaism. To signal some of the key points: Judaism involves a massive shift from mythological or cosmological thinking that locates God in nature, to the prophetic faith that sees God in history. We meet God in history. We exercise human freedom in history. Redemption unfolds in history. All of this is different not only from the ancient world of myth, but from also the Greek view of history—“this is what happened”—and the characteristically modern idea that history is linear, a story of progress, or dialectical, as in Hegel and Marx. The Jewish view is different from all of these, in seeing history like a story with a beginning, middle, and end, or like a journey, with a starting point, a destination, and many digressions and false turnings between the two. Judaism is opposed to the ancient view that nothing really changes, the Greek view that history has incident but no overarching meaning, and the modern view of historical inevitability. For Jews, history is where human freedom interacts with divine freedom. It is therefore unpredictable, but also bounded by the framework of the covenant. We know how it will end, in some form of messianic denouement, but we do not know for sure how we will get from here to there, or when. As far as the biblical text is concerned, what is essential is the idea of the dual Torah, the Written Law (i.e., the Mosaic books) and the Oral Law, the ongoing work of commentary and application. There is the word of God for all time, and there is the word of God for this time. So as an Orthodox Jew I believe that the Torah is beyond history, but there is certainly



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a history of interpretation which can be traced from rabbinic midrash to the medieval commentators to now. How did you reconcile your Orthodox commitment with your academic training? Was there any tension or did they nicely complement each other? No. There was no tension between the two aspects of my life. In 1990, I gave a series of lectures on the BBC called the Reith Lectures. These were first delivered by Bertrand Russell in 1948. After giving the lectures somebody said to me, “I see you’ve really gained from your education in Cambridge. You always quote your opponents.” I said, “Yes, but I learned this not only from Cambridge; I also learned it from the rabbinic tradition itself, both the Mishnah and the Talmud. Why were the opinions of the House of Hillel accepted over those of the House of Shammai? Because Rabbi Hillel was kindly and compassionate, and also because he taught the views of his opponents as well as his own, and the views of his opponents before his own. So I think that a collaborative pursuit of truth is what links the university and the Beth Midrash. It’s a shared tradition. So they both share the same intellectual commitments, the pursuit of truth is inherently Jewish, which is an interesting and important point. The pursuit of truth creates intellectual communities. The university is indeed an intellectual community, but it is not collaborative as one would find in a Beth Midrash. In fact, the university is based on competition because we have absorbed the competitive values of our capitalistic culture. I have one advantage over academic philosophers, precisely because I am not functioning as an academic, although I do teach as much as I can. I’m not part of an academic institution and that allows me to cross disciplinary boundaries. I noticed this for instance, in a man like the late James Q. Wilson, who was a professor of criminology at Harvard and who wrote a wonderful book called The Moral Sense. Precisely because he wasn’t a moral philosopher, he was able to bring in neuroscience and a lot of other disciplines and literatures which gave enormous richness to his discourse. The same is true about Judaism. You know, there’s a lot of lateral thinking in rabbinic culture, but I also feel very strongly, as I stated in the first

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book I published, Arguments for the Sake of Heaven, that to be defeated by the truth is the only defeat that is a victory. This insight is pretty much common to the rabbinic mainstream and to the best kind of academic philosophy. In this regard your thought resonates with Menachem Fisch’s Rational Rabbis. Sure. Indeed, Menachem Fisch ends his book with a wonderful Talmudic passage about how the love of argument as the open-ended pursuit of truth is a supreme rabbinic value. It means that the intellectual options are never foreclosed. For this reason I think that philosophy has a place within Judaism. In turn, Judaism insists that the truth is bigger than us and that by challenging one another intellectually we gradually ascend. I fully agree with you, but I am concerned that in the Jewish community today in the United States and in Israel, there’s very little interest in philosophy. That is part of the injured contemporary Jewish condition. In what way? Could you elaborate? I tend to feel today that we are looking at Judaism through a microscope instead of through a telescope. And because we stand too close, we lose the big picture. It is like standing very close to an impressionist canvas and not being able to perceive the entire picture. We can see all the individual brush strokes, but we can’t see what it’s a picture of. I wrote my commentary to the Haggadah, which I made into a popular work, not an academic work, in order to encourage people to reflect about freedom, the history of freedom, the impact of Exodus on the concept of freedom. Why do we need that particular narrative to ground political freedom, which is itself a correlative of personal freedom, which is set up in the first chapters of Genesis? In other words, Torah embodies a philosophy, in this case a philosophical psychology of individual freedom and a political philosophy of collective freedom. How do other authorities within modern Orthodoxy regard your views about the philosophic nature of Torah? They have been really very encouraging. Philosophy does not speak to everyone, whether in the Jewish world or in the world outside. Jews have



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tended to philosophize when they came into serious contact with a culture different from their own, Greek in the case of Philo, Islamic in the case of Maimonides, modern European in the case of Soloveitchik. At other times, when the Jewish world was turned inward and the contact with other cultures was limited, Jews tended to write, not philosophy, but Torah commentaries or mystical and moralistic works. So today the Jews who engage deeply with today’s secular culture often read my philosophical works and those who don’t, don’t. No one has said: stop doing philosophy. What do you say to Orthodox Jews who maintain that Judaism is the truth and there is no truth outside of halakha. From this perspective, philosophers like Bernard Williams, Philippa Foot, or John Stuart Mill are not relevant to the interpretation of the Jewish revealed tradition. So, why should halakhic Jews bother with philosophy? Well, I had three great advantages here. Number one, I had a teacher, Rabbi Rabinovitch, who was not a professional philosopher, but who fully understood that you need chokhmah (i.e., wisdom) as well as Torah. That’s how I define my own position in Future Tense. Number two, Rav Joseph Soloveitchik served as my other example to emulate: he read everything, including philosophy and science, as did his two sons-in-law, the late Rabbi Isadore Twersky and Rabbi Aaron Lichtenstein. And Rav Soloveitchik, after all, was the great theoretician of halakha, as well as a poet and a philosopher of halakha. These are my living role models who showed me how to integrate Judaism and philosophy. Third was the greatest medieval role model, the Rambam. We need to remember that the Rambam’s earliest works were first, a treatise on logic and second, a work on astronomy. These scientific endeavors had an impact on his interpretation of halakha. The same is true in regard to his virtue ethics: the fact that the Rambam knew Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics allowed him to construct in the first two chapters of Hilkhot Deot as well as in the opening chapters of Eight Chapters, a virtue ethic in Judaism. Now it is true that there is a virtue ethic in rabbinic Judaism, but without the conceptual framework, provided by Aristotelian moral philosophy, the Rambam might not have been able to formulate it. In fact, no Jewish thinker formulated a Jewish systematic virtue ethic prior to the Rambam. It seems to me—as it seemed to many great Jewish thinkers in the past—that Torah is addressed to human understanding. Hugely significant

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here is the fact that, although the Torah contains 613 commands, biblical Hebrew has no word that means “to obey.” Modern Hebrew had to adopt a word, letzayet, from Aramaic. The Torah uses the word Shema, literally, “listen, hear, heed.” Now the verb Shema in the Torah means both “to obey” and “to understand.” Understanding the law is important for the kind of personal and societal transformation that the Torah seeks to work on us, so that we can create a society of justice and compassion, love and forgiveness. There are elements of that human understanding that the Torah calls chokhmah (wisdom), and, according to the Rambam, they include the natural sciences and the human sciences. I define “wisdom” religiously as anything that helps us understand the universe as God’s work, humanity as God’s image, and the Bible as God’s word. Those are things that wisdom brings to Torah, as Torah brings to wisdom. And I don’t think you can provide a philosophy of halakha without it. The great philosophers of halakha understood this point. The greatest, one of the very greatest although he wrote so cryptically that he is very hard to understand, was Rabbi Joseph Rosen of Dvinsk, known as the Rogatchover Gaon. He was the genius of geniuses and his analysis of halakha was deeply influenced by his reading of the medieval Jewish philosophers and hence by the people that they read, namely, Greek and Muslim philosophers. So, I don’t think halakhic positivism works at all. It doesn’t make sense to me. You can’t make legal decisions without some broad sense of what halakhic jurisprudence actually is. Do you think that contemporary halakhists need to study philosophy in order to make halakhic decisions? Rabbi J. David Bleich is one of my heroes and he is extremely well-read in philosophy, as you doubtlessly know, as much as he is a foremost halakhist who rules on numerous medical and ethical issues that arise out of the encounter with contemporary medicine, science, and technology. To be a really world-class posek [i.e., a “decider” of halakha where there is no previous ruling] today one has to know what kind of system are we dealing with here? Judges in the Sanhedrin, the Supreme Court in ancient times, had to be fluent in all the scientific disciplines of their time, and it seems to me that the same applies today. The great halakhists, whether or not they had formal academic training, always had that broad sense and sweep. They had to rule on questions of medical ethics, so they knew medicine. They had to rule on business ethics, so they had a broad



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understanding of economics and trade. Nowadays it is important to have a grasp of the natural sciences, a rough sense what the natural law theorists have to say, as well as what legal theorists such as Ronald Dworkin or Robert Cover have to say. Robert Cover is particularly relevant because he wrote about the interaction of law and narrative. It is absolutely clear that Torah, which does not quite mean nomos, is quintessentially structured within a narrative structure, slightly differently structured in the Book of Exodus and the Book of Numbers. But that combination of law and narrative is absolutely essential. Leviticus doesn’t have quite so much narrative to it, but that’s because it’s dealing with slightly different concepts, especially purity and holiness. I think most of the great halakhists had a sense of philosophy, whether or not they studied it formally. They made fine conceptual distinctions. They had rigorous and disciplined minds. They understood the large issues at stake in what may seem like very localized and detailed legal questions. Philosophy then is crucial because it offers us a conceptual vocabulary that enables us to unpack the meaning of divine revelation. However, most Jews today in the United States and in Israel don’t care about philosophy or they see it as unnecessary or even sometimes as a challenge to their Jewish identity or Jewish way of life. If you look at the history of Jewish philosophy, you will see that it comes to the surface only in specific times and places. There was Philo of Alexandria in the first century, then a long pause until Saadia Gaon in the tenth century, who was energized by the Karaites and then the Islamic philosophers began to influence Judaism as we see in the thought of Judah Halevi, the Rambam, and Joseph Albo. After the fifteenth century, however, Jewish philosophy tapers off again and doesn’t really remerge until the eighteenth century. The issue at stake is the relative status of philosophy within Judaism: is it marginal or central to Judaism? If philosophy thrived at certain times and places, for example, medieval Spain, Renaissance Italy, and modern Germany, why did philosophy not thrive in other Jewish subcultures at other times and places? Should we say, along with Neil Gillman, that philosophy arises only in periods of crisis of Jewish identity? Why does philosophy thrive only in certain times?

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We have to make several distinctions here. The first is between Jewish philosophy as an intellectual exercise, which can be done at any time in any place by anyone who thinks deeply about Judaism, and Jewish philosophy as a cultural phenomenon. In this latter sense it appears only under the following conditions: First, Jews find themselves situated in a larger cultural milieu. Second, they regard that milieu as relatively benign. They feel, within limits, tolerated and respected. They do not feel beleaguered, persecuted, and alone. Third, they sense the tensions between their own self-understanding as Jews and the concepts and categories of the larger culture in which they are situated. In that sense, yes, Jewish philosophy only arises at moments of crisis in Jewish identity. That is probably true not just of Jewish philosophy but of philosophy in general. The great ages of philosophy—the Athens of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle; the Europe of the seventeenth century between the Middle Ages and the “birth of the modern”; and again the Europe of nation states in the nineteenth century—were all periods of social and political transition. Old identities were breaking down, new ones were taking their place, and in this state of flux certain individuals stood back and sought to understand what is true and permanent in this world of transience and change. Not every age is an age of philosophy because not every age challenges the common sense understandings of who we are that we receive from our parents and the traditions we inherit. The second issue is whether philosophy in the classic sense—“a series of footnotes to Plato,” as Alfred North Whitehead called it—is genuinely compatible with Judaism at all. In my view, there is a real tension between Judaism and philosophy, and I’ve tried to analyze it in The Great Partnership. It turns out to be not unlike the tension between Judaism and Christianity. And for the same reason that I’ve diagnosed there, when I talked about the importance of the metaphor of right and left brain—drawing on the work of Robert Ornstein—as well as the different directions in which alphabets are written, depending on whether or not they contain letters for vowels, and so on. I pointed out the connection between the emergence of Greek philosophy in the sixth century BCE and the stabilization of the Greek alphabet as a system written from left to right. It is no coincidence that left-brain thinking of science and religion appeared in the West in the sixth century BCE. But Hebrew was and is written from right to left, and therefore Judaism as an intellectual system is quite different from Greek philosophy. My analysis of the difference between the two systems of thought is backed by many instances, including the research on autism of Simon



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Baron-Cohen. Other thinkers have also contributed to my understanding of Western philosophy, for example, the feminist philosopher Carol Gilligan, who paid attention to the difference between male and female moral reasoning, and Richard Nisbett, who explored the difference between Eastern and Western styles of thinking. In other words, the distinction between Judaic and Greek thinking is an instance of a larger structural difference between thinking about relationships and thinking about thingsin-themselves, between integrative and atomistic mindsets. To the extent that Western philosophy is Platonic, there will be that ongoing tension between Athens and Jerusalem. In one book I have written but haven’t yet published, I explore the motif of “Athens and Jerusalem,” which became a cultural trope in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, by looking at the difference between seeing and listening. Plato’s concept of knowledge is a form of seeing, whereas the Judaic understanding of knowledge is a form of hearing. Those kinds of things are very fundamental. So, for a Jew to enter the world of Greek philosophy requires one to make a cognitive leap. Conversely, Jewish religious concepts do not translate easily into Greek. And because all the early Christian texts were in Greek, the result is Western philosophy has had a tendency to think in Greek terms, which is inevitably also in Christian terms. A case in point is the name of God. In the Bible, God refers to Himself as “Eheyeh asher Eheyeh.” This was translated into Greek, Latin, and English as “I am that I am,” meaning, the Unmoved Mover, Necessary Being, or Ultimate Reality. That is the God of the philosophers, not the God of Abraham or the prophets. It is, of course, a complete and elementary mistranslation. The words mean, “I will be whatever I will be.” It is a statement about the future, about choice and freewill and the unknowability in advance of how God will appear and when. It means, “I am the future tense. I am the God of freedom, whose future can’t be predicted by humans.” In other words, I am that Being who will never be fully known, mapped, charted in terms of scientific laws or philosophical constructions. This is the God of history, not ontology; the God who is encountered, not proved by inductive or deductive reasoning. This is the God of freedom who has granted us freedom and thus made us something other and more than matter in space, a biological organism whose behavior is the result merely of physical, chemical, or genetic causes. There will always be some margin of mystery and some element of unpredictability.

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In other words, in this single mistranslation of a three-word phrase lies the whole chasm of difference and misunderstanding between Western philosophy and Judaic faith. Does that make sense? Yes, I fully understand your point, but what then, in your opinion, is Jewish philosophy? Does it possess a unique methodology? Does Judaism have a unique contribution to make to Western civilization? I think that there is something unique about the Jewish contribution to Western philosophy, though I have not yet set this out at length and in detail. That is a book I have not yet written. One way of putting it is to contrast what I call the logical imagination— Western philosophy in the Greek mode—with the dialogical and chronological imagination, which is the Judaic way of thinking. The Greek way of thinking is to see truth as a kind of two-dimensional frame, and we, the knowers, exist in a third dimension. We, the observers, are not part of what we observe. We merely look, see, discern, the way Zeus did from Mount Olympus, or the way visitors in an art gallery look at the paintings, or the way a scientist sees things through a microscope. We are the subjects. What we are looking at are objects. Philosophers are people with better eyesight than the rest of us. The word “idea” comes from the same Latin root as the word “video,” and knowledge for both Plato and Descartes was a form of vision, seeing the true essence of things. Judaism has no difficulty accepting this as a way of understanding objects, scientifically or philosophically. But God is not an object. Neither are we. We are free agents. We are the only beings thus far known to us who are capable of envisaging a future state of affairs that does not yet exist, and acting to bring it about. God, the Creator, by making us in His image, made us creative. Just as God cannot be fully known by human beings, so human beings cannot be fully known by other human beings. We can still surprise people who have known us for a lifetime. We can still, sometimes, surprise ourselves. So to think we can know and understand people the way we can know and understand objects is a category mistake, an intellectual error of the highest consequence. That is where Judaism parts company with Greek philosophy and everything that flowed from it. How then can we know God? How then can we know another human being? How does God know us? Not by detachment but by engagement. God does not sit like Zeus on his mountain, observing the ways of



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humankind. He gets involved. He fashions the first humans as if He were a parent. He speaks to them, tries to guide them, gets upset when they refuse to follow the guidance. They speak to Him. That is what I call the dialogical imagination. God speaks to us in revelation. We speak to God in prayer. We speak to one another in that ongoing “argument for the sake of Heaven” that constitutes, in the broadest sense, the oral Torah, the unbroken conversation of Jews with the terms of their destiny. What is more, that understanding of God, our fellow humans and ourselves, is never complete. We change over time. We grow. We fall. We regress. We pick ourselves up and start again—the process we call teshuvah (repentance or return). That is what I mean by the chronological imagination. Ehyeh asher Ehyeh is not just God’s name. In some extended metaphorical sense it is our name also. We are who we choose to be. Who was the real Moses? The tongue-tied stammerer at the burning bush or the eloquent, visionary teacher of the book of Deuteronomy? Judaism would agree with Sartre that “our existence precedes our essence.” Indeed we have no essence, all we have is an endless series of choices through which we become what we choose to become—the point made, perhaps under the influence of his Jewish teacher Rabbi Elijah del Medigo, by Pico della Mirandola in his Oration on the Dignity of Man at the beginning of the Italian Renaissance. In Judaism, then, the human world is not one of subjectivity versus objectivity, but of intersubjectivity, the world in which we relate to one another as free, dignified, choosing, and responsible agents. Words like “knowledge” and “truth” do not mean in Judaism what they mean for Plato and Aristotle. Da’at (knowledge) in biblical Hebrew does not mean detached, clear-sighted cognition. It means intimacy, physical and emotional. Emet (truth) does not mean a statement that corresponds to reality. It means being true to your word, keeping your promise, doing what you said you were going to do. This whole intellectual world is radically different from that of the Greeks in antiquity, and from science and secular philosophy today. I believe this to be important not just for Jews but for all of us, because it represents a radically humane way of thinking about our place in the universe and the kind of structures we should seek to build for our societal beatitude, our collective grace. There are, I believe, three fundamental concepts that are better understood by Judaism than by any secular philosophy with which I am familiar: human freedom, human dignity, and hope.

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Returning to your point about the history of Jewish philosophy, the fact that it has flourished in some times and places, and not others, how does our past, our history, our situatedness shape who we are? Is it correct to say with the Zionist poet Shaul Tchernichowsky that “man reflects the landscape of his birth place?” Yes and No. There is no doctrine of eternal recurrences in Judaism and no environmental determinism. To be a Jew is to be on a journey. Your starting point is a given. Martin Heidegger, a philosopher I do not like very much, called this “thrownness” (Geworfenheit). We’re indeed thrown into the contingencies of time and space. But I believe that cherut (i.e., freedom) is definitive of the human as it is of God. We are constitutively free, hence, those fundamental concepts. You cannot get to grips with either the concept of atonement, repentance, or forgiveness without those basic concepts of freedom. As I understand from the work of David Konstan’s book Before Forgiveness, a concept of forgiveness does not exist in Greek thought. So, forgiveness appears for the first time in the Hebrew Bible and the first recorded instance of forgiveness is to be found in the story of Joseph and his brothers. In other words, Judaism describes a world of will and choice whereas ancient Greece understands the world in terms of character and fate. And those are very different worlds. Besides which, the first recorded syllables of Jewish time are God’s call to Abraham to leave his land, his birthplace, and his father’s house. To be a Jew is to be in but not of this time and place. Etre ailleurs (being elsewhere), said Charles Peguy, is la grande vocation de ce people (the great vocation of the Jewish people). The juxtaposition of Judaism and philosophy brings up another topic— Jewish secularism—since your understanding of Judaism is exclusively religious. In your written work you refer to Jewish secularism in the context of Zionism, but if I read you correctly, for you, Jewish secularism seems a contradiction in terms. Nonetheless today most Jews define themselves in secular rather than religious terms. Do you take Jewish secularism seriously? Well, yes, of course. But there are many kinds of Jewish secularists. There are the Jewish secularists, the Jews who may not believe in God or religion but feel positively about their identity the way Einstein did when he spoke of “the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, an almost fanatical love of



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justice and the desire for personal independence” as “the features of the Jewish tradition which make me thank my stars I belong to it.” Then there are the Jewish secularists whose work is deeply congruent with Jewish values and ways of thinking. I find this, for example, in the work of Viktor Frankl, the man who survived Auschwitz and founded a school of psychotherapy on the basis of what he called “man’s search for meaning.” I think that phrase is not a bad summary of what the Jewish religious search is. Then there are the figures like Isaac Deutscher who called himself, “a non-Jewish Jew.” Jewishness simply does not play an important part in their work or lives. There are people like Spinoza whose life and work was a way of liberating themselves from being Jewish. There are the conflicted, ambivalent, almost self-hating Jews. There is a trace of this in Karl Marx’s violent anti-Judaism. Even Wittgenstein was capable of anti-Semitic remarks before the rise of Hitler, at which point these cease completely. Then there are the really complex figures of whom Sigmund Freud was one. I personally believe that Freud would have created a very different kind of psychoanalysis had he worked on the basis of Jewish tradition rather than Greek myths. He would have given us a less tragic account of the human condition. It’s like the distinction Amos Oz makes between a Chekhov tragedy and a Shakespearean one. At the end of a Shakespearean tragedy, the stage is strewn with dead bodies. In a Chekhov tragedy, everyone’s miserable but they’re still alive. So, at the end of the Greek story of Oedipus, you’ve got a lot of dead bodies and a blinded, self-mutilated Oedipus. Whereas at the end of the Binding of Isaac, father and son, Abraham and Isaac, are still alive. I reflected on this briefly in my book To Heal a Fractured World. There I discussed Freudian psychoanalysis in comparison to the logotherapy of Viktor Frankl, the cognitive psychology of Aaron Beck, and the positive psychology of Martin Seligman. These are hopeful rather than tragic psychotherapies, based on the concept of meaning and based on the fact that we can choose the way we see the world. We can choose the way we think. And if we change the way we think, we will change the way we feel. So, there is a frame of freedom and hope in those psychotherapies that is not present in a Freudian psychoanalysis. In fact, an element of determinism is a consistent strand in Spinoza, Marx, and Freud. So, there are Jewish secularists to whom I can relate to very openly but there are others whose relationship to Jewishness is negative and whose negativity seems

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to color all they touch. They’re not Jewishly secular; rather, they are either estranged from or hostile to their Jewishness. Where do you see Zionism in the spectrum? Zionism to me is the great triumph and tells us why God created secularists. Because we Jews had left it to God for so long, we needed secularists to say, okay, maybe God is waiting for us. That has been the role of Zionism and we can see it in the writings of Zionist thinkers, such Moses Hess, Theodor Herzl, and Leon Pinsker. Hess was clearly a secularist, but his book Rome and Jerusalem really resonates with the world of religious Jewry. Hess believed that Zionism could only make headway in Eastern Europe, but not at all in Western Europe, because the Jews of Eastern Europe remained largely religious. So, Hess was a secularist to whom I can relate very strongly, even though he was an ex-Marxist. Hess is thinking in terms of his own Jewish identity when he says in the beginning of Rome and Jerusalem that the real struggle is the struggle of races not of classes. This clearly represents his break with Marxism, although Hess was a personal acquaintance of Karl Marx. Herzl was a less profound thinker—his greatness was as an activist— but in Herzl and Max Nordau, along with other Zionist speakers of the First Zionist Congress in 1897, one can sense this extraordinary moment of pathos of Jews who tried to escape from their Jewishness and failed. It is this tension, this paradox, that led these people to become Zionists so they could be like everyone else. But at the same time they aspired to create an ideal society in which actually there wasn’t anyone else but Jews. So, secular Zionism is full of paradoxes. I once said that I believed that secular Israelis are the only people who really believe that secular Israelis are secular. And what are they in truth? I think they’re ma’aminim b’nei ma’aminimim (believers, the children of believers). As a person who was born and raised in a kibbutz, I see the founders as secularized religious believers. Even though the kibbutz was a form of Jewish communism it was a secularized religious community with deep spirituality. Indeed, huge spirituality.



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Eliezer Schweid has written about it most insightfully. That’s why I love Schweid. He is a secular Jew but he’s, my goodness me, not a deracinated Jew. Rather, he is the carrier of the legacy of Bialik in our time. If Bialik and Ahad Ha-Am are indeed the cultural sources of Zionism then the presumed secular culture of Israel cannot be understood without the Jewish legacy. Yet, in your work the State of Israel and the conditions of its Jewish life does not receive a lot of attention. Why do you not talk more about this Jewish situation in Israel? Because I am very mindful of the point made by Michael Walzer in two very important books, one, a little work called Interpretation and the Social Criticism, and another, much bigger book called The Company of Critics. In these books Walzer says that the prophet is the one who speaks from within. The prophet cannot be an armchair philosopher or a critic from the sidelines. Since I do not live in the State of Israel, I’ve been profoundly reluctant to tell Israelis how Israel should be structured. I did all my political philosophy in a British context but everything I say is really translatable into Israel. I have been really mindful of the fact that it’s just not right to sit a long way from a society in which people are risking their lives day-in and dayout and to tell them what I think they should do. By the way, Michael Walzer is a secular Jew as well, but, my goodness me, a secular Jew for whom I have utmost admiration. Another example of a secular Jew who speaks like an ancient prophet to his contemporary Israelis is Amos Oz, the novelist. There is no doubt that the biggest lacuna in contemporary Jewish life is nevuah, that is, prophecy. To use the phrase of Emil Fackenheim, in the modern era we witnessed “the Jewish return to history.” The ancient prophets were people who saw God in history. So there’s no question as to why nevuah ended in about the third century BCE. It was then that Jews in Judea ceased to be autonomous or sovereign agents in the political arena. When Judea became part of the Alexandrian Empire, the history of the Jews was no longer Jewish history. But now with the founding of the State of Israel and the recovery of Jewish political sovereignty, the Jewish people have reentered history and therefore we should have had prophets.

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Of course, we did have prophets: one was religious, the other was secular. The religious one was Yeshayahu Leibowitz; the secular one was Amos Oz. They were both, in their way, prophetic voices. Both, needless to say, were controversial figures who often suffered for what they said. I think that Eliezer Schweid has functioned like a prophet in Israel. Quite possibly; although I read his books, I do not know him well enough. Certainly I hold him in the highest regard. I think that a navi today must be an Israeli. I have not written much about Israel as a deliberate selfrestraint. Not in any remote sense a belief on my part that Israel is anything other than utterly central both to Jewish existence and to Jewish philosophy. Let’s focus on your own social philosophy, which I think can be summarized by the title of one of your books: The Dignity of Difference. How should we think philosophically about difference? Well, I think the story of the genesis of the idea might be useful here. I actually had a practical problem and most of, almost all of, my philosophy flows from practical problems. I philosophize because I need to solve a problem. And there was a book I felt I had to write. I wrote a book called Will We Have Jewish Grandchildren?. It was a practical book about putting education at the top of our priorities. And then I realized that I had to do something else: I had to provide a compelling argument to answer the question, “Why should I be Jewish?” Very early on I realized that it almost can’t be done because you have to use the concept of chosenness. The answer to the question has to be given in the first person singular imperative. The answer had to speak to the reader directly as a divine calling: God has to be calling you personally. And that means you can’t get an important argument for why be Jewish that doesn’t use chosenness. On the other hand, chosenness is ruled out almost by contemporary discourse by the terms in which Enlightenment thought was framed. In my book The Politics of Hope, I have a chapter called “The Assault on the Particular.” Particularity was seen as primitive, tribal, atavistic. Everything worth saying or knowing was universal. Even today, the concept of a chosen people sounds racist. So, I could not make the case for being Jewish without the idea of chosenness, but I couldn’t use the idea of chosenness without sounding racist and supremacist.



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I reflected on this problem for several years and the result was a book called, in America, A Letter in the Scroll and in England, Radical Then, Radical Now. (The difference in the titles tells you something about the cultural differences between England and America, even though it is the same book. In America, my books are read by Jews, but in Britain, they’re read by Jews and non-Jews, and probably by more non-Jews than Jews. In fact, this book was serialized in the Times of London.) It suddenly dawned on me that you can solve the problem by universalizing particularity. This was a paradigm shift for me. I argued that God, having made a covenant with all humanity in the days of Noah after the flood, was disturbed by the emergence of empire and imperialism, symbolized in the Torah by the Tower of Babel. Empires are the attempt to impose a single truth on a plural world. So, immediately after the story of the Tower of Babel, we read of God’s call to Abraham to leave Mesopotamia, dissociate himself from an empire, and go to a land—Israel—whose geography and topography is such that you cannot use it as the foundation of an empire. That needs large stretches of flat land such as existed in the Tigris-Euphrates Valley and the Nile Delta. God told Abraham to be different in order to teach humanity the dignity of difference. That was my argument in A Letter in the Scroll. I road-tested the concept by giving lectures to diverse audiences. Each year, I invite the leadership of the National Union of Students (which is the national student body, not the Jewish body) along with the Union of Jewish Students to come to our home for a reception and I study with them. For two years in a row we tried out this idea of “dignity of difference” with students and I noticed how Sikh, Muslim, and Hindu students were walking an inch taller after these study sessions. I suddenly realized that something clicked with them because they said to themselves: we always knew we were different, but we always thought that was a bad thing. And now the chief rabbi is telling us it’s a good thing. I suddenly realized that the concept works. So I had the concept ready to hand before the events of 9/11. The idea for the book The Dignity of Difference was born when I stood with the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Chief Rabbi of Israel at the time, Rabbi Lau, and various Muslim, Hindus, and Sikh religious leaders at Ground Zero in New York and later at the World Economic Forum in January 2002. That was when I felt the full force of the danger represented by religious extremism and realized that Judaism contains a compelling message for humanity in the twenty-first century. As I stated it in my

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book, the God of Israel is the God of all humanity, but the religion of Israel is not the religion of all humanity; it is something unique to Jews. This combination of universalism and particularism is unique to Judaism. It does not exist in precisely this form in either Christianity or Islam, but I felt that it might speak to both of these faiths because its basis is the first twelve chapters of Genesis, which are common ground between all three Abrahamic monotheisms. God is universal but the covenant with the Jewish people is particular. To put it differently, the universalism of God and the particularity of the Jewish covenant are complementary. To elaborate, I realized that if God is the God of all humanity but Judaism is not the religion of all humanity, there is a margin. Let’s call it the margin of mystery of human beings who are in God’s image but not in our image. This is the counterpoint between universalism and particularism. It is what forces us to give religious dignity to the other. Or as I put it in the book, it forces us to hear the question: Can we see a trace of God in the face of a stranger? Could not a non-Jewish theorist of multiculturalism endorse that very last sentence? Well, I wrote a post-multicultural book called The Home We Build Together in which I show that multiculturalism brought about segregated diversity, whereas I am interested in integrated diversity. You explain this difference in the metaphor of the “hotel” versus “the home.” Multicultural society is like living in a hotel, where we occupy rooms next to each other but with no concern for each other or for the well-being of the hotel as whole, whereas in a society which functions as a home we live and work with each other and care for each other. Yes, exactly so. As I explain in the book, during the nineteenth century, the age of the country house, Jews were but guests. A guest is not fully at home, but we can no longer live with merely being guests in this world. This was followed in the 1970s by multiculturalism, which was undertaken with the best of motives but was poorly thought through. Since I published the book almost all major European leaders have admitted the failures of multiculturalism. Society is not, and cannot be sustained as, a hotel. There has to be a strong sense of the common good to which we all contribute, albeit each in our different ways.



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Is it fair to say that dignity of difference is a more sophisticated formulation of the logic of multiculturalism? No. The notion of dignity of difference was formulated as an expression of what I would suppose you would call religious pluralism. I am even ready to call this cultural pluralism; I have no problem with this phrase either. But within Judaism, pluralism has limits. I reflected on that at length in my book One People?. It was published in order to make a point against Jewish Orthodox pluralists such as David Hartman, and Yitz Greenberg, whose views I do not share. For me, Orthodox Pluralism is a contradiction in terms. One People? is my explanation of the forms and limits of pluralism within Judaism. I can accept halakhic pluralism or aggadic pluralism because they are within the parameters of Orthodox discourse, but Orthodoxy is incompatible with denominational pluralism. This means that to live together in a covenant of shared fate, Orthodox, non-Orthodox, and secular Jews have to work out a de facto modus vivendi. One People? is a serious and thoughtful book in which I took great care to work through the arguments philosophically and historically. The issue is so complex that it cannot be addressed in less than a book. The issue of pluralism within Judaism can be understood with an analogy to language: at what point does a linguistic practice cease to become a dialect and become different language? Judaism is a language that has many dialects within it. But at what point do we start breaking the rules of grammar and syntax? In addition to One People? I have reflected at length about pluralism in Crisis and Covenant. Both of these books, incidentally, were written before I became Chief Rabbi, though they were published shortly after I took office. So how do you apply the ideal of “dignity of difference” within Judaism? Clearly, not all Jews today share a faith, but they share a fate. So this binds us together, whether we are Orthodox, progressive, or secular. I have used many metaphors for the state of the Jewish world today. We are like the four children round the seder table. We each have different questions but we are sitting round the same table, telling the same story. Or we are voices in an extended conversation that began at Sinai and has never ceased. Rabbi Yechiel Michel Epstein, author of a halakhic work known as the Arukh Ha-Shulchan, says that Moses called the Torah a “song” because

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the most beautiful music is made out of complex harmonies. Judaism is a song scored for many voices. The truth is that it is hard, perhaps impossible, to construct a philosophy of Jewish unity in the current fractured state of the Jewish people. What we need are practical principles for gracious coexistence. I formulated two, and between them they have solved most of the problems we have faced within the community. They are: On all matters that affect us as Jews regardless of our religious differences, we will work together regardless of our religious differences. On matters that touch on our religious differences, we will agree to differ but with respect. That, I think, is the best we can do at this time. In terms of diversity within Judaism, the situation today, especially in Israel, is not good at all. The militancy of ultra-Orthodox Jews is very troubling. I respect what is called ultra-Orthodoxy, or in Israel the Edah Haredit, because it represents one of the miracles of modern Jewish history. The world of the yeshiva and the Hasidim was almost totally destroyed during the Holocaust. Only a tiny fragment remained, a “brand plucked from the burning.” After the Holocaust, they did not sit and weep. They married and had children and built homes and communities and schools and yeshivot, with a single-mindedness that is awe-inspiring, with the result that they have become the fastest growing group in the Jewish world. They are like Job after his trial. They had the faith to carry on living. They rebuilt what had been destroyed, no longer in Ponevez or Volozhyn or Ger or Satmar, but in Williamsburg and Bnei Brak. That was remarkable, and it will be seen as such from the perspective of history. But like every superhuman achievement brought about by relentless focus on a single objective, there is a price to be paid in terms of relationships with people who have a different set of values and way of life. Right now, this community stands at a crossroads. Will it continue as it has for the past two generations, segregated from the rest of Jewry, or will it now encourage its sons and daughters to enter mainstream society? There will be tensions either way. Historically, Jews have not handled diversity well. Read Josephus on the last days of the Second Temple and you will see that what we suffer now pales by comparison to what happened then. We are a people of strong individuals and fiercely held opinions—and that is true whether you are



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on the right wing or the left. I once pointed out that it is surely no accident that after four thousand years, the Hebrew language still does not have a word that means “tact.” That’s the tragedy of Israel today: secular Jews have become more entrenched in their alienation from the Jewish tradition because they mistakenly perceive Judaism to be violent, inhumane behavior. Don’t forget that in the early years of the State of Israel, Israeli secularists were often deeply intolerant toward religious Jews and imposed their values on them wherever they could. Sefardi Jews felt this in particular, and their sense of humiliation resulted in the rise of Shas as a political force in Israeli life. In general, I have always found secular Israelis extraordinarily open to Jewish spirituality whenever it is presented to them nonjudgmentally, with warmth and genuine friendship. So I do not think that the fissures in Israeli society today are beyond repair. To the contrary, were there to arise in Israel today a twenty-first-century equivalent of the Hasidic Movement, with an emphasis on serving God with joy, and on the religious dignity of every Jew regardless of their level of learning or observance, it would sweep the country. In the long run, I suspect Israel will rediscover the ancient Jewish truth that religion belongs to society rather than to the state, and to influence rather than power. The idea of the separation of powers, which in Western philosophy we ascribe to Montesquieu, in fact took place first in biblical Israel. I refer to the separation between the king, the high priest, and the prophet, which is fundamental and axiomatic to biblical Judaism. Simply put: a king cannot be a high priest; a high priest can’t be a king. The high priest has to stand outside anything that has to do with the allocation and distribution of power. In fact, I think the whole of Judaism is a sustained critique of power. So, when religion gets overly involved in politics, people begin to use phrases like “religious coercion” (kefiya datit) and the result is hostility between secular and religious Jews. But there is nothing inevitable or enduring about this. It could change. Another set of issues that challenge liberal societies today is the relationship between religion, science, and technology, which you address in your wonderful book The Great Partnership. Should science and

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technology make a difference in our interpretation of the Jewish tradition? How do you see the discourse of science and religion? Has this academic discourse made an impact on Judaism today? I think that until now the discourse of science and religion has been undertaken within a Christian frame of reference. The discourse of science and religion is a classic example of what I mean by “dignity of difference.” I recognize the independent integrity and dignity of science. Indeed the rabbis have had a blessing over great scientists that pertained to the non-Jewish scientists [chokhmei umot olam]; they must have been talking about Roman or Greek scholars who were the astronomers and the philosophers of their day. In other words, people with whom the rabbis totally disagreed on all matters relating to religion. So the fact that they were willing to coin a blessing over a scientist who may have been a polytheist or a deist or what have you, is to my mind very impressive and intellectually generous. I just think Judaism saw science as the universal heritage of humankind and it was not the particular Jewish task. Because the fact that Jews did not become scientists or philosophers in the ancient world except in Hellenized communities like Alexandria, is truly puzzling. The rabbis felt that science is for the world, whereas our Jewish specialty is Torah. Let somebody else discover how the world works. Thank goodness we know that in the realm of science Jews have made more than their mark in every conceivable science. Jews have entered science only after and perhaps even because they have left behind the Talmudic tradition. In the nineteenth century, Jews who sought social integration entered the universities, and in the twentieth century, academia is filled by Jewish scientists who have little interest in Judaism as a religious tradition. Isn’t the gap between Judaism and science more pronounced today when scientists who are Jews by birth care little about their Jewish heritage? Yes, and in Future Tense I referred to this bifurcation as a “cerebral lesion,” where the two hemispheres of the brain are in perfect working order but they’re just not connected. The result is dysfunction of personality. For this very reason I’ve tried to engage in conversations with many people from secular Jews such as Amos Oz to scientists who are born Jews such as Steven Pinker.



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So how can we bring all Jews, including traditional Jews to take science more seriously as Jews, and conversely, how can we convince scientists who are born Jewish to take Judaism more seriously as scientists? Yes, this is a very difficult challenge, even though it was not a difficult challenge in the case of Albert Einstein, for instance, who recognized what I would call Elokim if not Hashem, what he called Spinoza’s god. And Einstein was a very proud Jew and very committed to the Jewish people. What unites secular Jews and religious Jews is this covenant of fate; it binds us. Several years ago, for example, the winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics was a very Orthodox Jew by the name Robert Aumann. Yet Daniel Kahneman has also received the Nobel Prize in Economics, even though he is not a traditional Jew. The Nobel Prize winner for the discovery of penicillin, Ernest Boris Chain, is another Jew who was a first-rate scientist. In other words, there is a profound disjunction between Judaism and its best minds and its best scientific minds, which is a source of great pain for me. This is why I began a couple of years ago to try to bridge Judaism and science. The disjunction between Judaism and science is a massive problem, but is it quintessential? Is it treatable? I think it is. Today science is inseparable from technology, and you have written a little bit about technology. How do you see the impact of technology, most specifically communication technology, on contemporary life? We’re in the middle of lots of revolutions, sure. There’s a neuroscience revolution going on. Secondly, there is genetics, epigenetics, revolution going on. For example, just recently, it was discovered that the so-called 98 percent of “junk DNA” isn’t junk at all because it contains recipes for four million switches for switching on and off the twenty thousand genes that actually are functional. This means that epigenetics is going to displace genetics as the major understanding of the natural world. And of course, there is the worldwide communications technology revolution about which I have written extensively. I don’t need to add that every revolution in communications technology is systemic, rather than local, which means that we’re in huge areas of change which are going to overthrow twentieth-century paradigms.

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In your written work you express optimism about this current revolution. To some extent, the current revolution will be a victory of the right brain over the left brain as you have explained. Yes, we are in the midst of profound technological revolutions, whose impact is huge. We now know, for instance, that epigenetic factors are every bit as important as genetic factors. In terms of the “nature versus nurture” debate we are in the territory now which the Rambam sets out in Chapter 1 of Hilkhot Deot. That is to say, science tells us that we are born with certain characteristics and dispositions, precisely as the Rambam has recognized. He was ahead of his time in understanding the role of genetics as well as the limits of its extent. We are born with certain dispositions but humans have the freedom to change. Genetic determinism has, I think, been overthrown. I’m perhaps less sanguine about this point. There are people today who still hold a strict materialist position and who believe that change is driven by technology not human freedom. Are you talking about artificial intelligence here or genetic interventions? Not only. There is global movement today that speaks about the new phase in human evolution by virtue of converging technologies. These people define themselves as “transhumanists” and their goal is to use science and technology to bring about the post-human phase of the human species. This ideology challenges the dignity of human beings as you discuss in your political theory. What should be the Jewish response to this challenge? The classic narrative that is relevant to this contemporary situation is the Tower of Babel. That narrative too reflects one little technological innovation: making bricks by firing clay in a kiln. The technological intention was interpreted by some humans to mean that now we can build in a stairway to heaven. Contemporary transhumanism exemplifies a much older human inclination, the Promethean temptation, which has been pretty constant in human civilization. Judaism has extreme openness to technology. Genesis 1 articulates an imperative to conquer the world, to subdue it, to rule over it. Rabbi Soloveitchik called this posture toward the physical world “The Majestic Man.”



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Such posture, we should note, is very problematic from an environmental perspective. Indeed, it has huge problems with environmentalism, but this can be mitigated, if we remember, as John Passmore put it in the title of his book Man’s Responsibility for Nature. Passmore’s religious environmentalism actually nuances the Jewish notion of responsibility. Interestingly, Passmore’s environmental message was rooted in his religious commitment. He was a Presbyterian as were also other early environmentalists such as Rachel Carson and Lynn White Jr. Passmore’s book is a beautiful, great book. It showed how openness to technology must be combined with a sense of human limits that express humility in the face of the unknown, the unknown future consequences of actions, and so on. The rule of unintended consequences applies here no less than the nonnegotiable sense of human dignity. The story of human technology provides us with pretty copious tales of overreaching. These issues, and especially the notion of ontological humility, have not been dealt with by Jewish philosophers, with the exception of Hans Jonas in The Imperative of Responsibility. In regard to the technological challenge to human dignity, Hans Jonas was indeed a prophet. Even though Jonas correctly identified the relevant issues and warned against them, his warning was not heeded. I am quite pessimistic about the impact of technology on human society and culture. Well, I’m not an optimist, and I think we need to distinguish between optimism and hope, as I have in my book From Optimism to Hope. I have hope, but I’m not an optimist. There are other important Jewish philosophers who have understood the deep implications of contemporary technology. In addition to Jonas I am thinking about Leon Cass, who has been a very, very important defender of human dignity. Several Jewish ethicists, as you may know, have been rather troubled by his views and consider them unrepresentative of the Jewish openness toward technology. Oh, of course, because he’s writing within a broadly Jewish stroke humanist tradition, which seems to be “conservative” (a lower-case “c”). Jonas was

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undoubtedly the first Jewish critic of modern technology, but this topic actually transcends the specific boundaries of Judaism. I think that in terms of the implications of technology to humanity we could arrive at an overlapping consensus among members of diverse religious communities, be they between Christian, Hindu, and Sikh. A lot of people today hold the view that human dignity may not be sacrificed to technology. The principle of human dignity, however, has another side as well; it leads some people, especially in the Orthodox community, to take a very rigid position on end-of-life issues. Should we extend human life by putting people on respirators, which cause a lot of suffering, in the name of the human dignity principle? How should we negotiate those issues? Well, let me be very blunt on this point. I’m sixty-four years old, which means that I am about halfway through my life’s span. I have written less than half of the books that I feel I have to write, and to date I have not written on the big theological subjects; I haven’t done a systematic theology. But in particular, I have not written even one book on Jewish ethics, even though ethics and moral philosophy are my philosophical expertise, which I taught first in secular contexts and later in Jewish settings. So, it’s strange that I haven’t written a single book on the end-of-life issues and other ethical conundrums that arise from contemporary technology. These end-of-life issues I simply don’t wish to get into right now. They will call for very, very deep thought that I haven’t yet done. Obviously, I’ve issued halakhic rulings on issues of biotechnology and I’ve advised the government on some of these issues. But that is not what I would call a philosophical contribution. Yes, Judaism needs systematic philosophical reflection on technology, including biotechnology, that goes beyond ruling about the halakhic permissibility of this or that technology. The more reality creates phenomena for which there is no clear halakhic precedent, the more you need to do philosophical jurisprudence. This makes sure that one’s generalizations embody the point of the system as a whole.



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We should note that Rabbi Elliot Dorff has offered philosophical reflection on technology, biotechnology, bioethics, and medical ethics. Yes, but Rabbi Dorff is a Conservative Jew and even though I have read all his works, there are still differences, as you know, in terms of halakhic logic and meta-halakhic principles. So, within the Orthodox world we still need philosophical reflections, and I haven’t done the work and I know of very few other Orthodox thinkers who have written about these issues philosophically. I can think about Daniel Sinclair, a professor of Law at Fordham University whom I appointed as a Head of Jews’ College, Michael Broyde at Emory, and Abraham Steinberg, in Jerusalem. Technology is clearly one of the main challenges for human existence today. To go beyond the need to theorize a Jewish philosophy of technology, what do you consider the major challenges for Jews today in the beginning of the twenty-first century? How to live as a Jew in a world without walls. Here we have an unprecedented situation. We Jews have been around a long time and we have a lot of history and very little geography, to paraphrase Alexander Hertzen who said “The Slavs have a lot of geography and no history.” We now confront an unprecedented situation in all of our long history: Jews having independence and sovereignty in the State of Israel and freedom and equality in the Diaspora. Can we handle that? And to my mind, the most systemic risk, the greatest risk, is we define ourselves as a “people apart” and the world is against us. If you were to ask people out there, what are the biggest problems facing the Jewish world, they would tell you as follows: first, the international isolation of Israel; second, the very real existential threats to Israel from Iran, Hamas, and other militant Islamists; third, the return of antiSemitism to the world and especially to Europe; and fourth, assimilation, deracination, and out-marriage. The list could go on and on, and it reflects a perception of the outside world as very threatening to Jews. Those who wish our destruction are out there, and they hate us, they want to kill us, or they want to marry our sons and daughters and so on and so forth. But in truth, the question is, can we develop that that sense of selfconfidence that comes from faith? Even if we don’t believe in ourselves, at least God does. God has more faith in us than we have faith in us. Can we face the world without fear? That to me is the challenge for the Jewish existence in the twenty-first century.

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And can we face the world also without arrogance? Oh, God forbid, without arrogance, indeed! A hundred percent arrogance is insecurity. Arrogance is no more than a projection; arrogance is a kind of low self-image that says “in order for me to feel even remotely adequate, I have to look down on you as inadequate.” So, arrogance is an expression of fear and of existential insecurity; as is narcissism, by the way, or other forms of self-centeredness. That is why a conversation between Judaism and the world is really what Jewish philosophy is about, whether it’s speaking Judaism to the world or letting the world illuminate. It is that exchange between the particular and the universal. Wisdom (chokhmah) is universal and Torah is particular, which is the kind of litmus test here. Can we walk this very narrow bridge without fear? Because if we fear the world, we will be aggressive and arrogant and fearful all at the same time. And I just don’t see that as the right way of looking at things. I can illustrate my point by reference to the biblical story of the spies that were sent by Moses to report about the Promised Land while the Israelites were still in the wilderness. The spies reported that the Land of Canaan was filled with “giants” by comparison to which Israel is no more than “grasshoppers.” This perception and subjective self-assessment were totally completely wrong. So, seeing themselves as grasshoppers, they saw the inhabitants of Canaan as giants and were completely misled in their analysis of the situation. The spies saw what wasn’t there. And at the end of this Torah portion we are told about the commandment of wearing a fringed undergarment [tzitzit] in order to remember our commitment to God. There is a connection between these two motifs—the narrative of the spies and the commandment to wear the tzitzit—and the connection is found linguistically in the very connection between the verb leragel (to spy) and lehargil (to habituate). In other words, the commandment of tzitzit is the antidote to the reports of the spies. The spies saw what they feared was there, not actually what was there, whereas the commandment of tzitzit instills confidence. It is faith that allows the recipient of the commandment of tzitzit to see what’s there rather than what you fear is there, or you fear exists. Is it possible that religious faith can also distort what we see? Well, of course, that’s the standard way people think about faith. The point of my example is to teach a counterintuitive point. Normally, we think faith teaches us to see what we wish is there. Faith is a form of



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wish fulfillment, at least according to Freud. But my reading of the biblical narrative suggests that faith facilitates a more accurate perception of reality. So, that’s the first lesson I want to impart by reference to the biblical narrative. My second point is that to understand the mistake the spies made when they reported that the inhabitants of the land live in walled cities. The spies interpreted that reality to mean that “the cities are strong and, therefore, the people are strong.” But as Rashi already commented, if the inhabitants had to live behind high walls, they cannot be truly strong. Had they lived in open cities the inhabitants of the land were truly strong. So, my point is that we must not repeat the mistake of the spies and live behind the high walls of separation between us and the world, as if that will give us strength. Rather, we should be able to live without walls, relying on ourselves and the strength of our faith. The only issue is this: do we have faith in God’s faith in us? So, I am understandably a lonely voice here. Do I see anyone else going down the same line? Not particularly. Do I find enormous solace and instruction and enlightenment from almost the entire philosophical literature, yes. I love it. And I have learned so much from secular Jews, from secular philosophers who weren’t Jews. And there is a sort of community of those who care about tradition, about human dignity, about human freedom, and so on. And to understand that we are situated selves. Your comments on attitudes toward the other lead me to ask you about two important Jewish philosophers that we have not mentioned at all: Emmanuel Levinas and Franz Rosenzweig. How do their reflections about otherness and about the relationship between Jews and non-Jews help shed light on these challenges? Enormously. Levinas’s ideas about what I would call the “holiness of otherness” are absolutely fundamental. Rosenzweig is also incredibly suggestive, especially his essay on the “New Thinking” in that little volume of his philosophical writings, edited by Michael Morgan and Paul Franks. Reflecting on that text is yet another task I have not completed yet. I have a very high regard for both Levinas and Rosenzweig. I never had the chance to meet Levinas, but I have to say that when he writes on Jewish themes, he’s so much more intelligible than when he writes on general philosophical themes, although I must confess that it might be my Englishness that prevails in this assessment. As for Rosenzweig, he was clearly a mind of the most monumental proportions. Another philosopher

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who reflected on these issues is Emil Fackenheim whose book To Mend the World is an unusual book, indeed a philosophical gem. And we should also mention Michael Wyschogrod as an example of a contemporary Jewish philosopher and an Orthodox Jew, who has reflected deeply on the issues of the relations between Jews and others. His ideas were very, very influenced by Karl Barth and his book Body of Faith is very unusual. In other words, I don’t feel completely alone. From assessing the challenges of Jewish existence in the twenty-first century and the way that Jewish philosophy could respond to them, I want to move to Jewish Studies. From your experience as the Principal of Jews’ College, how do you assess Jewish Studies in terms of impact on Jewish life, relevance, and contribution to the intellectual strength or weaknesses of Judaism? I think there’s something extremely important which I have tried to practice myself which the English call “middlebrow.” Some Americans are absolutely masters of this style. I have in mind Martin Novak, for example, whose book Super Cooperator was written with a professional writer. These enable distinguished academics to write for the general market. Daniel Kahneman’s book Thinking Fast and Slow has been at the top of the best-seller list in nonfiction in Britain. This is not an easy book, but it’s beautifully written. This real task here is lucidity and simplicity and engaging the reader. Over the years my writing style has become, I think, progressively simpler. If you read my early books, they’re pretty unintelligible but I changed after my first conversation with the Rebbe of Lubavitch who told me, “Don’t use such long words.” Then I became a congregational rabbi while I was head of Jews’ College, and the congregational experience taught me further and improved my style; you can’t use long words in the sermon. If the congregants can’t understand you in eighteen minutes, they’re certainly not going to sit there patiently. Jewish audiences are not known for their patience. The real challenge for Jewish Studies today is to take academic scholarship and make it intelligible. Fackenheim wrote a lovely little book called What is Judaism? where he did just that, and I am sure there are many other academics who have written similar books. The problem is that the academia still does not value that kind of writing. As an academic discipline Jewish Studies is not interested in popularization of scholarship.



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I think in order to be Jewish you have to have a commitment to the democratization of knowledge. Moshe Greenberg points out in his book on biblical prose that the prophets spoke in language people could understand. They were not oracular, by and large. The rabbis, too, in their homilies dealt with deeply philosophical subjects but in a most simple and accessible manner. Abraham Joshua Heschel is an example of a modern thinker who was able to communicate deep philosophical reflections in an accessible manner. Jewish Studies should bring a little bit of “Jerusalem” into the academic “Athens.” I feel very strongly about that. To be a Jewish academic means to speak in a language that people can understand. Unlike Plato’s vision for the ideal state, we are not philosopher-kings, and to use Plato’s metaphors, we, academics, are not the “gold” whereas all other Jews are “silver.” As people of Torah, we Jews are the people of accessible knowledge. Within the English-speaking philosophical tradition I can mention several great philosophers who were also master communicators: John Locke, David Hume, John Stewart Mill, and in terms of sheer lucidity, Bertrand Russell, above them all. You don’t get to be a better writer than Bertrand Russell, even though he is also the author of Principia Mathematica, perhaps the most important philosophical work in the twentieth century. I too adore him and I agree that his writing style is exemplary. But, alas, we do not have such examples in Jewish philosophy, except perhaps you! The word “philosophy” is carrying too much weight and the word “Jewish” is not exercising its sufficient influence. So, how can Jewish philosophy retain its vitality or its rigor in the twentyfirst century? Should Jewish philosophy be more Jewish, so to speak? No. I personally feel that the Jewish voice is a unique one. There are very, very fundamental Judaic truths that don’t translate without remainder into a Greek-based ontology, epistemology, and metaphysics. I deal with this very, very briefly and cryptically in the book A Letter in the Scroll. I call it the difference between the logical imagination and the chronological and dialogical imagination. I think Judaism has important and unique things to say about human freedom, human dignity, the historicity of humanity—of identity, the covenantal nature of much of morality, and so on and so forth. These are very, very important insights.

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I think we want to build on the work of a very dry Oxford philosopher, but who could write rather wittily at times, J. L. Austin, the author of How to Do Things with Words, which discusses the use of performative utterances. I think two philosophers in particular, Nietzsche in the Genealogy of Morals, and Hannah Arendt in The Human Condition, understood that morality is born in the concept of promise. That’s a very important insight. How can we build structures of mutual trust without the use of coercive force? Only if we can place ourselves under an obligation and a promise is the paradigm case of a performative utterance. It’s a fact we create by words, by utterance. Mutual promise is covenant. So it’s very interesting that Nietzsche did not like Judaism at all, and on second thought, perhaps Hannah Arendt didn’t either, actually. Her relationship to her Jewish identity was complicated, to say the least. Horrendous, horrendous! To say that forgiveness is born in Christianity is, if I may say so, unforgivable. Yet, nobody has really unpacked her insights and developed it further. I once said to my youngest daughter, “You have a right to think that in a hyperintellectual and self-conscious tradition like Judaism, after four thousand years, everything that can be said has been said.” But the truth is, most hasn’t yet been said. So I think the future for Jewish philosophy is immense but it will require, number one, a very, very strong grounding in Jewish literacy. And that’s not just a matter of knowing texts; it’s a matter of knowing how people think. And there is a halakhic mind and there is an aggadic mind, and so on and so forth. There is a Jewish sensibility, a Jewish way of thinking, as Rosenzweig understood in his brief and cryptic notes in The New Thinking; his observations are most suggestive. Rosenzweig understood this open-ended conversation which is at the heart of the Jewish way of thinking: where you end up is not where you began and you couldn’t predict it. Put differently, there is a distinctive Jewish mind-set and that will make itself felt to a wide public if it can be communicated. The need to communicate leads us to the task of education. Philosophical activity cannot take place without education. And yet, Jewish education, at least in the United States, is not in a good shape. I would say the West is not in good shape. Because after 9/11, both George Bush and Tony Blair, and Gordon Brown and probably Barack Obama, as well, have said that the battle is as much of a battle of ideas as of weapons. But I haven’t seen a battle of ideas yet.



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The battle for ideas has not been articulated at all. When Isaiah Berlin delivered his lecture on two concepts of liberty, he was engaged in a battle of ideas with what he saw as the greatest single threat to liberty: Communist China, or Communist Russia. The struggle with Communism formed his life when he left Riga, Latvia, in 1917. Like Isaiah Berlin, Karl Popper and Friedrich Hayek engaged in the battle of ideas. But where has been our battle of ideas? Paul Johnson, the Catholic historian, called rabbinic Judaism “an ancient and highly official social machine for the production of intellectuals.” But today, show me rabbinic Judaism’s current intellectuals! It is not surprising that Rabbi Soloveitchik wrote The Lonely Man of Faith; indeed, Jewish intellectuals, especially Jewish religious intellectuals, are lonely men and women of faith. As I said in Future Tense, Nietzsche framed the choice that faces all human beings: it’s either the idea of power or the power of ideas. And Judaism has been the power of ideas as against the idea of power. That’s what Judaism is about. This is a beautiful way of stating the task of Jewish philosophy and of being Jewish. Thank you so much for taking the time to share your ideas and insights.

Selected Bibliography Chief Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks Books 1. T  raditional Alternatives: Orthodoxy and the Future of the Jewish People. London: Jews’ College Publications, 1989. Published in the United States as Arguments for the Sake of Heaven: Emerging Trends in Traditional Judaism. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1991. 2. Tradition in an Untraditional Age: Essays on Modern Jewish Thought. London: Vallentine Mitchell, 1990. 3. The Persistence of Faith: Religion, Morality and Society in a Secular Age. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1991; republished, London: Continuum, 2005. 4. Crisis and Covenant: Jewish Thought after the Holocaust. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992. 5. One People?: Tradition, Modernity, and Jewish Unity. London: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1993. 6. Will We Have Jewish Grandchildren? Jewish Continuity and How to Achieve It. London: Vallentine Mitchell, 1994. 7. Community of Faith. London: Peter Halban, 1995. 8. Faith in the Future. London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1995. 9. The Politics of Hope. London: Jonathan Cape, 1997; 2nd ed. with Foreword by Gordon Brown, London: Vintage, 2000. 10. Celebrating Life: Finding Happiness in Unexpected Places. London: Fount, 2000; London: Continuum, 2006. 11. Radical Then, Radical Now: The Legacy of the World’s Oldest Religion. London: Continuum, 2001. Published in the United States as A Letter in the Scroll: Understanding Our Jewish Identity and Exploring the Legacy of the World’s Oldest Religion. New York: The Free Press, 2000. 12. The Dignity of Difference: How to Avoid the Clash of Civilizations. London and New York: Continuum, 2002. 13. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks’s Haggadah: Hebrew and English Text with New Essays and Commentary. London: Harper Collins, 2003; New York: Continuum, 2003. 14. From Optimism to Hope: Thoughts for the Day. London: Continuum, 2004.

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15. T  o Heal a Fractured World: The Ethics of Responsibility. London: Continuum, 2005; New York: Schocken, 2005. 16. The Authorised Daily Prayer Book of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth. London: HarperCollins, 2006. 17. The Home We Build Together: Recreating Society. London and New York: Continuum, 2007. 18. Covenant and Conversation: Genesis: The Book of Beginnings. Jerusalem: Koren Publishers Jerusalem, 2009. 19. Future Tense: A Vision for Jews and Judaism in the Global Culture. London: Hodder, 2009. Published in the United States as Future Tense: Jews, Judaism, and Israel in the Twenty-First Century. New York: Schocken, 2010. 20. The Koren Sacks Siddur. Jerusalem: Koren Publishers Jerusalem, 2009. 21. Covenant and Conversation: Exodus: The Book of Redemption. Jerusalem: Koren Publishers Jerusalem, 2010. 22. The Great Partnership: God, Science and the Search for Meaning. London: Hodder, 2011. 23. The Koren Sacks Rosh HaShana Maḥzor. Jerusalem: Koren Publishers Jerusalem, 2011. 24. The Koren Sacks Yom Kippur Maḥzor. Jerusalem: Koren Publishers Jerusalem, 2012. Edited Books 25. Tradition and Transition: Essays Presented to Chief Rabbi Sir Immanuel Jakobovits to Celebrate Twenty Years in Office. London: Jews’ College Publications, 1986. 26. Orthodoxy Confronts Modernity. New York: Ktav Publishing House, 1991. 27. Torah Studies: Discourses by the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson. New York: Kehot Publication Society, 1996. Short Books and Pamphlets 28. The Chosen: A Personal View—Issues in Jewish Thought, 2nd ed. London: United Synagogue Publications, 1982. 29. Evolution: A Personal View—Issues in Jewish Thought, 2nd ed. London: United Synagogue Publications, 1982.



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30. Explaining Suffering: A Personal View—Issues in Jewish Thought, 2nd ed. London: United Synagogue Publications, 1982. 31. Faith and Reason: A Personal View—Issues in Jewish Thought, 2nd ed. London: United Synagogue Publications, 1982. 32. Future Worlds: A Personal View—Issues in Jewish Thought, 2nd ed. London: United Synagogue Publications, 1982. 33. The Holocaust: A Personal View—Issues in Jewish Thought, 2nd ed. London: United Synagogue Publications, 1982. 34. Israel and the Jew: A Personal View—Issues in Jewish Thought, 2nd ed. London: United Synagogue Publications, 1982. 35. The Meaning of Freedom: A Personal View—Issues in Jewish Thought, 2nd ed. London: United Synagogue Publications, 1982. 36. The Messianic Age: A Personal View—Issues in Jewish Thought, 2nd ed. London: United Synagogue Publications, 1982. 37. The Place of Doubt: A Personal View—Issues in Jewish Thought, 2nd ed. London: United Synagogue Publications, 1982. 38. Wealth and Poverty: A Jewish Analysis. London: Social Affairs Unit, 1985. 39. A Time for Renewal: A Rabbinic Response to the Kalms Report. London: Office of the Chief Rabbi, 1992. 40. From Integration to Survival to Continuity: Studies in Renewal 1. London: Office of the Chief Rabbi, 1993. 41. The Crisis of Continuity: Studies in Renewal 2. London: Office of the Chief Rabbi, 1993. 42. The Secret of Jewish Continuity: Studies in Renewal 3. London: Office of the Chief Rabbi, 1993. 43. Rethinking Priorities: Studies in Renewal 4. London: Office of the Chief Rabbi, 1993. 44. From Jewish Continuity to Jewish Continuity: Studies in Renewal 5. London: Office of the Chief Rabbi, 1993. 45. Morals and Markets. London: Institute of Economic Affairs, 1999. 46. (With  James Q Wilson) Moral Sense. London: The Smith Institute, 2001. 47. (With  Amos Oz) Judaism and the State: Israel, Dreams and Reality. Tel Aviv: Bar Ilan University, 2001. 48. Ten Days, Ten Ways: Paths to the Divine Presence. London: Office of the Chief Rabbi, 2007. 49. Hope and Tragedy. Tilburg, Holland: The Nexus Institute, 2009.

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50. Letters to the Next Generation: Reflection on Yom Kippur. London: Office of the Chief Rabbi, 2009. 51. Letters to the Next Generation 2: Reflections on Jewish Life. London: Office of the Chief Rabbi, 2011. Book Chapters 52. “The  Role of Women in Judaism.” In Man, Woman, and Priesthood, edited by Peter Moore, 27–44. London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1978. 53. “Practical  Implications of Infinity.” In To Touch the Divine: A Jewish Mysticism Primer, 59–90. New York: Empire Press, 1989. 54. “Creativity  and Innovation in Halakhah.” In Rabbinic Authority and Personal Autonomy, edited by Moshe Sokol, 123–68. Northvale, NJ: J. Aronson, 1992. 55. “From  Integration to Survival to Continuity: The Third Great Era of Modern Jewry.” In Jewish Identities in the New Europe, edited by Jonathan Webber, 107–16. London: The Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies by Littman Library, 1994. 56. “Law,  Morality and the Common Good.” In The Warburton Lectures 1985–1994, 83–94. London: The Honourable Society of Lincoln’s Inn, 1995. 57. “Foreword.”  In Christian-Jewish Dialogue: A Reader, edited by Helen P. Fry, xi–xiv. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1996. 58. “Leadership  and Crisis.” In Hazon Nahum, Studies Presented to Norman Lamm on His 70th Birthday, edited by Yaakov Elman and Jeffrey S. Gurock, 3–10. New York: Michael Scharf Publication Trust of the Yeshivah University Press, 1997. 59. “Judaism  and Politics in the Modern World.” In The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics, edited by Peter L. Berger, 51–64. Washington, DC: Ethics and Public Policy Center; Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999. 60. “Mutual  Destiny, Mutual Responsibility: A Mystical Covenant.” In Feeding Among the Lilies, edited by Baila Olidort, 257–70. New York: Kehot Publication Society, 1999. 61. “The  Judaic Vision of Citizenship Education.” In Tomorrow’s Citizens: Critical Debates in Citizenship and Education, edited by Nick Pearce and Joe Hallgarten, 55–63. London: Institute for Public Policy Research, 2000.



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62. “The  Hebrew Tradition.” In Citizen 21: Citizenship in the New Millennium, edited by David Alton, 57–72. London: HarperCollins, 2001. 63. “Markets,  Government and Virtues.” In Policymakers on Policy, The Mais Lectures, edited by Forrest H. Capie and Geoffrey Wood, 185–94. London: Routledge, 2001. 64. “Global  Covenant: A Jewish Perspective on Globalisation.” In Making Globalisation Good, edited by John Dunning, 210–31. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. 65. “Foreword.”  In Judaism and Homosexuality: An Authentic Orthodox View, by Chaim Rapoport, vii–x. London: Valentine Mitchell, 2003. 66. “Looking  Forward: From Jewish Interest to Judaic Principle.” In Religion as a Public Good, edited by Alan Mittleman, 295–319. Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003. 67. “A  New Antisemitism?” In The New Antisemitism? Debating Judeophobia in 21st-Century Britain, edited by Paul Iganski and Barry Kosmin, 38–53. London: Profile, 2003. 68. “Tikkun  Olam: Perfecting God’s World.” In Public Policy and Social Issues: Jewish Sources and Perspectives, edited by Marshall Breger, 35–48. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003. 69. “Antisemitism:  Mutations of a Virus.” In Anti-Semitism: The Generic Hatred—Essays in Memory of Simon Wiesenthal, edited by Michael Fineberg, Shimon Samuels, and Mark Weitzman, 301–13. London: Valentine Mitchell, 2007. 70. “Rabbi  Nachum Rabinovitch: A Tribute.” In Birkat Moshe: Maimon­ idean Studies, i–x. Maaleh Adumim, Israel: Hotsaʼat Maʻaliyot she-a and Yeshivat Birkat Mosheh, 2011. Journal Articles 71. “The Power of Jewish Prayer.” Jewish Action (Fall 2009): 24–31. 72. “Markets and Morals.” First Things (August/September 2000): 23–28. 73. “Love,  Hate, and Jewish Identity.” First Things (November 1997): 26–31. 74. “To Be a Prophet for the People.” First Things (January 1996): 27–29. 75. “Democracy:  a Jewish Perspective.” World Faiths Encounter (July 1994) 4–15. For a number of years, Chief Rabbi Sacks was the editor of L’Eylah: A Journal of Judaism Today, published by the Office of the Chief Rabbi and

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Jews’ College/London School of Jewish Studies, London, 1976–2001. His published articles therein include: 76. “On the Definition of a ‘Good Jew’ ” (no. 3, 1977): 29–31. 77. “The  Administered Territories in the Light of Halakhah” (no. 6, 1978): 16–20. 78. “Britain in the 80’s: A Jewish Response” (no. 5, 1979): 10–15. 79. “Medical Ethics” (no. 7, 1979): 5–9. 80. “Ideology and Tolerance” (no. 1, 1980): 19–28. 81. “Rev Isaac Livingston” (no. 9, 1980): 26–28. 82. “The Search for Ideology” (no. 9, 1980): 6–13. 83. “Halakhah—Recent Responsa” (no. 2, 1981): 7–11. 84. “Cosmetic Surgery” (no. 3, 1982): 14–21. 85. “Recent  Responsa: Mentally Incompetent Persons as Organ Donors; Induction Labour; Women’s Liberation” (no. 5, 1983): 6–13. 86. “Expounding  the Weekly Sedra between Portions of the Reading” (no. 6, 1983): 6–10. 87. “Zero Response: The Rabbinate” (no. 6, 1983): 20–25. 88. “Modern Orthodoxy in Crisis” (no. 7, 1984): 20–25. 89. “Jews’ College” (no. 19, 1985): 23–26. 90. “Rabbi Joseph B Soloveichik: Halachic Man” (no. 19, 1985): 36–41. 91. “The  Word ‘Now’: Reflections on the Psychology of Teshuvah” (no. 20, 1985): 4–9. 92. “Perspectives” (no. 21, 1986): 41–47. 93. “Contemporary Halakhah” (no. 22, 1986): 54–60. 94. “Perspectives” (no. 22, 1986): 14–20. 95. “Ideas in Circulation” (no. 23, 1987): 32–36. 96. “Towards 2000—The American Experience” (no. 23, 1987): 23–27. 97. “Ideas in Circulation” (no. 24, 1987): 21–25. 98. “Jewish Education: Some Recent Research” (no. 25, 1988): 32–35. 99. “Jews  and Christians: The Moral Concerns We Share” (no. 26, 1988): 13–20. 100. “Building the Jewish Future” (no. 27, 1989): 11–19. 101. “One People? Thinking about Jewish Unity” (no. 29, 1990): 3–8. 102. “Torah Umadda: The Unwritten Chapter” (no. 30, 1990): 10–15. Newspaper Articles The Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks is a regular monthly contributor to the Credo column published in The Times. He also published a weekly article on biblical scholarship entitled “Covenant and Conversation.”



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His most recent articles include: 103. “Morals: The One Thing Markets Do Not Make.” The Times, March 21, 2009. 104. “Why Money Does Not Bring Wealth.” The Jewish Chronicle, May 8, 2009. 105. “Work Is Essential to Human Dignity.” The Jewish Chronicle, May 15, 2009. 106. “Self Restraint Is the Essence of a Free Society.” The Times, June 20, 2009. 107. “Future Tense.” The Jewish News, July 24, 2009. 108. “The Pope Is Right about the Threat to Freedom.” The Times, February 3, 2010. 109. “Even Great Science Tells Us Nothing about God.” The Times, September 3, 2010. 110. “The Pope Will Find More Glory without Power.” The Times, September 14, 2010. 111. “There Is Only a Problem When the Duties to Honour Life and to Save Life Are in Conflict.” The Guardian, January 14, 2011. 112. “Having Pride in Britain Protects All Cultures.” The Times, February 7, 2011. 113. “Is Academic Freedom Still Honoured in British Universities?” The Jerusalem Post, March 24, 2011. 114. “Passover Tells Us: Teach Your Children Well.” The Huffington Post, April 17, 2011. 115. “We’ve Been Here Before and There Is a Way Back.” The Times, August 12, 2011. 116. “Reversing the Decay of London Undone.” The Wall Street Journal, August 20, 2011. 117. “Ten Years On.” Standpoint, September 8, 2011. 118. “The 9/11 Attacks Are Linked to a Wider Moral Malaise.” The Times, September 8, 2011. 119. “Democratized Holiness: Yom Kippur and Moral Responsibility.” The Huffington Post, October 6, 2011. 120. “Has Europe Lost Its Soul to the Markets?” The Times, December 12, 2011.