R.I.P. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks

The news of the passing of Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, the former Head Rabbi of England and a terrific writer of popular commentaries on the Torah and related subjects is indeed a loss. I read through recently his series, Covenant and Conversation, of commentaries on the Big Five books, and they are great. His writings are popular more than works of scholarship, and are inspiring in the way of the best sermons. Along with maybe Kenneth Seeskin's recent books on the Torah and the Prophets from a philosophical perspective, they are suitable introductory or summary books on the topics, that I would recommend to anyone.

Sacks was a conservative, though it must be said that in some ways political conservatism in Jewish studies is not always all that conservative. Commentary magazine notwithstanding. The stories of liberation from oppression, the anticipations of a messianic age, without forgetting these, conservatism can only be so as a matter of what one choose to reference today. Sacks is great in drawing out what seem to be among the most fundamental values and lessons to be found in our most sacred texts. Some of those values are radical, even if our conservatives seem to take them for granted, and choose to live as if the point is to be an example of the good life rather than an activist struggling for its greater realization in a world that still seems shrouded in darkness. Judaism always was and remains a protest, and Christianity at its best inherits that, at least in part. Both our peoples reject the idea that living in the world is a cynical affair of accommodation to power in the name of expedient and efficient getting accomplished of tasks that are necessary in order to extend prosperity. Well, we work partly for that and it is good on its own terms, but there is more. The question of faith is not whether there really is a Boss of It All who manages everything or wants to, but what He, or we, can and should care most about. We care about the possibility of a world whose civilization is rather less a form of barbarism. We think people are in the image of a creative God whose justice is a realization of the desire for happiness, who holds out the good life as possible, and who holds that people, all of us, matter, and are not to be thrown away, hated, reduced to poverty, made the objects of policing and war, or simply allowed insouciantly to die off. We believe in a commanding absolute who knows that the good life is possible and promises it will happen, if only we share this concern and with the right attention and diligence. Because the world is destined to be the place of a good life, oppression can be refused or overcome. Every serious Jew believes that, as many Christian, Muslim, and other people do, whether they speak of a God or not. Therefore, one can only be so conservative and have any faith worthy of the name at all. The details are to be both worked out, and, for all observant Jews, studied.

In America, conservatives are always honoring revolutionaries from the past. Sacks often speaks of politics, and like American conservatives he is fond of celebrating certain things, and even claims, an idea that I will never understand, that the English and American Puritans had in them something of the sensibility of Judaism that is worthy of their own vaunting of it, which to me always seemed exaggerated. Sacks was fond of saying that Judaism is reformist and not revolutionary, and in that he shows that he's a British thinker and not an American, though I am sure most of his readers are Americans. His repeated mentions of the fact the Torah took a gradualist approach to the abolish of slavery might be hard to take for some readers, but I also think sounding such notes is partly a matter of emphasis. He also quotes freely from various scientific and secular political writers, invariably in the Anglosphere. English-language Jewish scholars usually are parochial in referencing only other English and American, or sometimes, usually referencing writers from a few generations back, German ones. This makes these writers conservative only in not being avant-garde. To be that, they would have to reference French and Italian philosophers, and most English and American popular writers, and hence most who are rabbis, are not so contemporary. That's unfortunate, but someone like Sacks always still had things to say, and I never read an essay of his without learning something. He also has a kind of architectural disposition, in the sense of wanting to remind us that Judaism has different aspects that go together in the grand house of knowledge. For instance, that there are priestly strands in the Torah that guard purity and the separation of categories, as well as prophetic voices, that are always urgent, political, and seeking the meaning of history. The drift of Judaism in America in recent decades has been towards the celebratory and often towards an appeal to something like tradition and ritual for their own sakes. As if always saying, you hear the music, and feel the feeling, don't you?

I suppose that many rabbis, and any head rabbi, will, especially if writing popular books, need to be something of the sales person, and leave arguments for scholars pouring over details. I could not be happy finding my sole literary edifications in reading popular Jewish religious writers like Sacks, or Joseph Telushkin, with his recent opus A Code of Jewish Ethics. I would feel like I'm losing my sense of politics and the polemical. It's important sometimes to be angry, or ill at ease, and more purely prophetic voices sell well in dark and troubled times. Reading people like this makes me feel more contented, but I know too, that is partly illusory. One can go too far in the direction of suburban contentment, and maybe that explains the great vogue of Reform Judaism today to rediscover ritual and try to feel as holy as possible as much as possible. For me, there are some rabbis writing popular books who go too far in that direction; the late Eugene Borowitz (who was the unofficial Head Rabbi of Reform Judaism) is for me an example of that, at least in some of his books. Reading him, I wonder if we lived in the same world and if he read the same newspapers. The problem with being middle class and middlebrow is it can make you milquetoast. But Sacks was not that.

Sacks was conservative enough to be quite the Tory, and was knighted, and enough to write books on "leadership"; but his sermon-like essays always seemed to me both insightful and relevant. Fortunately, the good feeling I get from reading them is deceptive if you give it thought. His commentaries are less technical than many traditional ones, like Rashi and the other great medieval commentators, or Nehama Leibovitz in the twentieth century, but reading them I always feel I have grasped or been reminded of something important.

Rabbi Sacks's memory will long be a blessing to those who love the 'sacred' literature of the Jews and Christians. I feel this blessing in reading his books.