82 The EconomistNovember 21st 2020
E
very morninghe could, Jonathan Sacks pulled on his track-
suit and went out jogging. He was not called the “rapid rabbi”
for nothing. Jogging, as his desk-sign reminded him, led to posi-
tive thinking. And, thanks to his noise-cancelling earphones, it
brought him peace. He heard nothing as he ran but Schubert,
Beethoven, or whoever it might be. Those same earphones—one of
the best purchases he had ever made—also enabled him when he
meditated to hear the music of creation, the quiet voice of wisdom
within it, and his response, from his spontaneous waking “Modeh
Ani”, “I give thanks”, onwards.
Otherwise, the noise was hard to lose. Every year the voices be-
came more strident and extreme. Consumerism cried “I want! I
want!” Individualism cried “Me! Me! My choices, my feelings!” un-
til even the iPhone and iPad he used all the time vexed him with
their “I, I, I”. Society had become a cacophony of competing claims.
The world gave every sign of falling apart. Even religion, his busi-
ness, could be a megaphone of hate. He never felt that more strong-
ly than when he stood in January 2002 at Ground Zero in Manhat-
tan, with the ground still smoking round him.
His answer, as the leader of the Orthodox Jews of Britain and
also as a moral philosopher, was to raise his own voice. Over his
term of office, from 1991 to 2013, he became famous both outside Ju-
daism and outside Britain for his speeches, his lectures (including
stints at New York University and Yeshiva University), his three
dozen books and his three-minute sermons on bbcRadio 4’s early-
morning “Thought for the Day”. A rabbi was, after all, a teacher. He
was a clear, kind one, still with a touch of East End about him—his
father had sold shmatters, clothes, in Petticoat Lane, and when he
was made a peer in 2009 he took the title “Baron Aldgate”. But he
was also firm, even stern. He wanted to leave his mostly secular lis-
teners in no doubt that things were good or evil, true or false, abso-
lutely, and that moral relativism was the scourge of the age.Judaism, as he pointed out, often provided antidotes to the cha-
os. The Torah, God’s will revealed in words, was an algorithm that
gave discipline to life. Keeping Shabbat was an ideal way to achieve
work-life balance. The festivals and High Holy Days reminded Jews
of their shared traditions and history: the “we”, not the “I”. Above
all, out of the suffering endured by Jews for centuries, Judaism had
distilled hope. Every crisis gave birth to opportunity. The world
could be changed not by force, but by ideas.
Unhappily, though, much of the raucousness that dogged him
came from Jews themselves. Though non-Jews saw him as the
spokesman for all the Jews of Britain, officially he was the leader of
only an Orthodox minority, the United Hebrew Congregations of
the Commonwealth. A much larger number, Reform and Liberal
and ultra-Orthodox, or Haredi, were outside his purview, but still
looked to him. Pleasing everyone was impossible. His intellectual
instincts, honed at Church of England schools and Cambridge
rather than religious shuls, were on the liberal side, and in that
spirit he made services more lively and revised the daily prayer
book, translating the Hebrew from scratch. But in practice it was
the Haredi he found himself placating most: avoiding gay groups,
doing little to advance the role of women, and—his most regretta-
ble mistake—refusing to attend the funeral of a much-loved Re-
form rabbi, Hugo Gryn, and calling him a destroyer of the faith. “A
great chief rabbi—to the Gentiles,” a fair number said, noting his
easier mixing with prime ministers and royals. The Haredi, not
won over, called him “Boychik”, wet behind the ears.
Perhaps he was. He never set out to be a rabbi; the impulse had
grown very slowly, from that first sense of the mystery of God,
when he was two or three, in the sadness of the music at his grand-
father’s tiny synagogue in Finchley. He did not even feel especially
Jewish until, at Cambridge, the Six-Day War of 1967 suddenly fu-
elled a lifelong attachment to Israel. He spent the next summer
criss-crossing America on a Greyhound bus to look for rabbis, and
Menachem Mendel Schneerson in Brooklyn, then the Lubavitcher
rebbe, was the first to suggest he might be one himself and train
others. Still he wavered, wondering about accountancy. In the end,
in the mid-1970s, it was a voice in his head that made him say—as
Abraham, ordered to sacrifice his son Isaac, had said three times to
God—“Hineni”, “Here I am.”
The task of uniting his co-religionists paled, of course, beside
the collapse of society, but this too he had to address. Every man
and woman had a duty to care for others, and thus to recreate the
bonds that held society together. “I” had to give way to “we”. Out of
great crises—climate change, coronavirus—that chance might
come. Ideally religion could drive this change, with the world’s
faiths uniting, as they had done, imams and gurus, priests and rab-
bis, at Ground Zero that day. But his argument in “The Dignity of
Difference” that all the major religions were equally valid ways to
truth had caused even more trouble with the Haredi. Instead, in his
last book, he called for a shared morality: agreed norms of behav-
iour, mutual trust, altruism, and a sense of “all-of-us-together”.
The liberty craved by “me” could be sustained only by “us”.
It was a very long shot, but he was not a pessimist. Part of his job
was to cheer people up, and he liked to wear a yellow tie, like sun-
shine, for his public lectures. If he felt depressed, music soon lifted
him out of it. So, too, did his studies. If he was stranded on a desert
island, he told a bbcinterviewer, he hoped it could be with all 20
volumes of the Talmud and plenty of pencils, in order to write
commentaries in the margins. Meanwhile, thinking and writing in
his garden study in Golders Green, with or without his invaluable
earphones, he could escape the shouting world a little.
On a visit he made once to Auschwitz, as he wept and asked, like
so many others, where God had been in the Holocaust, he seemed
to hear an answer: “I was in the words.” The words were “You shall
not murder.” If human beings refused to listen to God, even He was
helpless. But if much of the noise that humans made could be can-
celled out, they might more often hear what He was saying. 7Rabbi Lord Sacks, chief rabbi, broadcaster and moral
philosopher, died on November 7th, aged 72Words against noise
Obituary Jonathan Sacks