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| Rabbi Sacks and (then) Prince Charles (Forward) |
I had the privilege of attending one of Rabbi Sacks lectures when he was a scholar-in-residence at a shul here in Chicago a few years ago. I can attest to the fact that Rabbi Sacks epitomized what a Torah leader in Klal Yisreol should be. He can easily be placed in the same rarified atmosphere inhabited by Rav Yosef Dov Soloveitchik (the Rav) and Rav Aharon Lichtenstein. All 3 shining bright lights of Modern Orthodox Jewish thought in our day. Each in a class by themselves. They are true expositors of Modern Orthodoxy’s positive engagement with the secular world and its intersection with the Torah.
Paul Shaviv’s long term and close personal relationship with
Rabbi Sacks gives him insights into Rabbi Sacks that few people have - who
he was and what he was really all about His
words follow unedited - in their entirety
We recently marked the fifth yahrzeit of Chief Rabbi Lord
Jonathan Sacks, who is emerging as the most popular, and perhaps the most
significant Jewish thinker of the modern age.
I knew him well, over a period of six decades, from the time we were
teenagers in London, through time together as students at Cambridge, and years
of subsequent friendship with him and Lady Elaine. My late wife Judy z”l was his private
secretary when he became Chief Rabbi.
In these depressing
times, how his voice is missed!
Rabbi Sacks had a world-class intellectual brain, and was
regarded as the Philosophy student of the decade in Cambridge. Rav Nossan Ordman z”l, of London’s Yeshivah
Etz Haim, who gave Rabbi Sacks semichah, is reported to have said that Rabbi
Sacks was one of the two best minds he had ever taught, including the years he
taught in pre-war Europe. For nine
years, Sacks learned daily with Rav Nachum Rabinovich z”l – himself a stellar
Talmid Chacham, and, it can be noticed, like Rabbi Sacks, something of a Rabbinic
outsider.
And yet Rabbi Sacks’ remarkable appeal to the Jewish world
is that of a popular communicator. He is
easily the most-quoted Rabbi in North America.
This didn’t come naturally to him.
He had to work on it, in writing and in speech. In his early years in the rabbinate he was
impossibly academic and highbrow – I remember him delivering a sermon to a very
suburban congregation on “Wittgenstein and Maimonides”. He worked on his communication skills
because he determined that his mission, and his unique potential, was to
communicate Judaism to the widest audiences.
Virtually ignored in the almost 400-page Tradition volume,
published to mark the Yahrzeit, is his impact on the non-Jewish world. In the late 1980’s/early 1990’s, discussion around his candidature for the UK
Chief Rabbinate focused entirely about how he could impact the ‘younger
generation’ of the Jewish community.
No-one foresaw his wider impact on British society. Yet when he retired,
the farewell dinner in Whitehall’s Royal Palace Banquetiing Hall was chaired by
then-Prince, now-King Charles, and featured several former Prime Ministers,
numerous Bishops, Archbishops, religious and intellectual leaders. (The Haredi community was conspicuous by its
absence.). Even before he was Chief
Rabbi, he was invited to give the BBC-sponsored ‘Reith Lectures’ – roughly the
UK equivalent of winning the Nobel Prize for Culture, and during his tenure he
was a hugely popular regular broadcaster on UK media. No rabbi, especially Orthodox rabbi, has ever
come close.
He was a prominent, respected and admired participant,
thinker, philosopher and advisor in media, political, religious and academic
forums. He was the recipient of some
twenty honorary doctorates (!) and of numerous prizes, including the Templeton
Prize. When Pope Benedict visited the UK
in 2013, he was the choice of the UK’s religious leaders – of all faiths - to
extend greetings to the Pope on behalf of them all. [The recording of this, and mountains of
further material, can be found on the excellent website,
www.rabbisacks.org] Many of his books
address world issues. Sadly, the
Tradition issue seems to miss this; instead, it seems to be seeking to
‘capture’ Rabbi Sacks into the orbit of Y. U.
Please, break out of that Soloveitchik mold, and see him for
the broad, universal intellect that he was!
That is perhaps his greatest gift to the contemporary Jewish world,
which is day by day turning against science, culture and every product of the
world around us!
The second major event around his Yahrzeit is the
publication of the Koren Sacks Chumash.
The work of editor and compiler Jessica Sacks (Jonathan’s
niece) and her team is monumental – thanks, and congratulations! Koren publishers in this, as in so many other
projects, is superb. Jessica Sacks and
her colleagues have surveyed all of Rabbi Sacks ouvre – both the written
and the spoken word. They have extracted
every comment which is rooted in a pasuk in chumash. I found it to be a (superb!) anthology of
notes on chumash, peppered with highly original thoughts and broad-brush
interpretations. It isn’t, strictly
speaking, a commentary, which is occasionally frustrating.
It is quite a heavy volume, running to almost 1,700 pages,
with very generous Hebrew and English print size, and generous layout of the
accompanying Rashi and Onkelos
The first note on Gen
1:1 refers to Plato. There are many
other references to non-jewish authors – philosophers, critics and even
novelists. But I can’t give you a
comprehensive, or representative list – because – inexplicably! - the book
lacks an index!
Every shul, and every Jewish house, should have copies of
this inspirational chumash. But to
ensure a copy in every worshipper’s hand, we need a lighter, more portable
edition – including a good index!!!
Please??!!
Paul Shaviv is a retired Jewish educator, nowadays commuting between Florida and Jerusalem.
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