Daniel Taub
Rabbi Sacks and the Home of Hope
Daniel Taub - Rabbi Sacks and the Home of Hope
- Good afternoon, good evening everybody. Good morning. A very warm welcome to you all and welcome back, Daniel. It is a great, great pleasure to have you with us. I am going to give a brief introduction and then I’m going to hand you over to Carly. So Daniel, thanks for being with us. Are you there? No, okay. Hi, there.
I thank you.
Oh, there you are. Good, hi. Hello. So Daniel Taub is an Israeli diplomat and international lawyer. He served as the Israeli Ambassador to the United Kingdom from 2011 until 2015, and is currently Director of Strategy and Planning of the Yad Hanadiv, The Rothschild Foundation. He was a member of Israel’s negotiating teams in the Israeli-Syrian and Israeli-Palestinian negotiations and has taught “Negotiating Theory and Mediation” in foreign ministries and the universities around the world. Daniel is the author of “Parasha Diplomatit”, a book of diplomatic insights on biblical text. And created and wrote a popular Israeli drama series, “HeChatzer, The Rabbi’s Court,” is that right?
Right.
Yeah. Set in an ultra-orthodox Hasidic sect. Daniel holds degrees from the Universities of Oxford, London, and Harvard. Wow! He lives in Jerusalem with his wife, Zehava and their six children. Absolutely thrilled to have you with us, Daniel, and we are looking forward to your presentation, “Rabbi Sacks and the Home of Hope.” Thank you.
Thank you very much, Wendy. So this whole week is a privilege for me, not only because I get to talk about Rabbi Sacks but I also get to interview some of my favourite people and my old boss, Daniel is definitely one of them. So I’m very much looking forward to the next hour. Daniel, if you want to kick off with some opening remarks and then we’ll do some Q&A.
Thank you so much. It’s such a pleasure to be with you, to take part in Lockdown University, which is really one of the real positives to come out of the COVID era. And I want to pay tribute first to Wendy, Wendy Fisher, for the vision, for realising that this period had the potential to create online communities that could educate and inspire. So thanks to you and to all the team that has put together such an outstanding series. And Carly, what a pleasure to be back with you to relive our time in the embassy in London. Now, it can be revealed that Israel has, or at least did have a secret weapon, and that was Carly and what a pleasure it’s been and how . We’ve all got to see how you’ve gone on to do such incredible things for the Jewish people. And of course, the deepest honour of all is to be part of a remembrance week for Rabbi Sacks.
It’s hard to believe that it’s a year since that event which I have to say I cannot remember in my life outside heaven forbid, a war in Israel, an event that touched so many people, so widely, so deeply in the Jewish world and beyond. And now a year on, it is so moving and actually exciting to see that it wasn’t just an event and that Rabbi Sacks has left us, I think, what we could call a living legacy, an approach which has a life of its own that continues to inspire us, to sustain us. So really we can say, may his name be, may his memory be blessed, and may his teaching continue to bless us. So I’ve been invited to speak about Rabbi Sacks’ relationship with Israel, with what he called the Home of hope. And although I grew up in the UK and I knew him slightly in my youth, I really came to know Rabbi Sacks when I was representing Israel. And it was one of the privileges of my time in London that we would see each other so often. We would sometimes joke that we could almost swap diaries, you know, as Chief Rabbi and Israeli Ambassador, we were together at all sorts of communal events. I mean, the Jewish community in the United Kingdom is an unbelievably charitable-oriented community. And that meant that almost every night, there was some wonderful dinner for a fabulous cause.
The community has a communal diary to make sure there are no clashes between events. Secretly, sometimes And I would dream of a clash between events ‘cause that might mean that we would get an evening off. But one of the bright points was that we would find ourselves sitting at a table with Rabbi Sacks and Lady Elaine. But we found ourselves at other events together. We would be painting hostels together on Mitzvah Day or we would be dancing the Zumba together at the beginning of the Jewish Community Fun Run. And I have to say, in all of the tributes to Rabbi Sacks that I’ve read over the past year, I haven’t heard anybody mention how good he was at actually doing the Zumba. And I think that’s something that deserves a mention itself. But the most special of all of our encounters were our monthly work sessions. Traditionally, Israel’s Envoy Ambassador meets with the Chief Rabbi to update him about developments in the Middle East and to learn about issues facing the British Jewish community. But very soon after we started meeting, I realised I had a very different agenda. I was meeting non-Jewish leaders in the UK, from faith leaders to political leaders, to members of the royal family, to public intellectuals. And they would confide in me what a treasured influence Rabbi Sacks and his writing had been on their lives. It was an extraordinary a credit to the Jewish people. And I was just thinking that with this opportunity, there has to be a better way for us to spend our time together. So I suggested to Rabbi Sacks that I would prepare briefing notes, so that we could deal with the business part of our meeting in 15 minutes at most, and that would leave the rest of our time to study together. And Rabbi Sacks was wonderfully willing, although the truth is our earliest efforts weren’t such a great success.
He wasn’t a natural study partner, or at least in our case, the imbalance between us made our study a little bit stilted. So I suggested an alternative. I suggested that rather than study a text together, I would send him in advance of our meetings a list of five or six questions that seem to me current and important. And he could choose any one of them and just speak about it. And that’s how I came to have this unbelievable gift of a private tutorial. And as you can imagine, the range of Rabbi Sacks’ erudition was breathtaking. We would talk about the history of language, the relationship of Judaism to Oriental philosophy, any subject as long as, and I think this is a theme in Rabbi Sacks’ writing, as long as it was connected in some way to the challenges of our time, on the challenges of ideas as moral forces in the real world. Questions like how do we balance our local and national, and global responsibilities? How do we harness the power of faith without unleashing the darker sides of fundamentalism? So I would’ve loved all of our time to be spent on these issues, but inevitably, Rabbi Sacks would bring the discussion back to Israel. He had a deep, personal connection to Israel.
He has close family in Israel. Before he became Chief Rabbi, he insisted on taking a mini sabbatical of several months to recharge his batteries in the only place he could think of doing that, which of course was Jerusalem. And he wanted to be able to help these rabbis, be more effective in connecting their communities to Israel. He wanted to be briefed on the security situation, the political intrigues, the state of Israel-UK relations, and he wanted to help in Israel’s and he did. Publicly, he was one of the most effective voices in making the case for Israel. Whether it was standing up in the House of Laws, defending Israel during the fighting in Gaza, whether it was making the clearest and the most persuasive articulation of why anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism. In an extraordinary piece, he wrote that anti-Semitism is a virus that morphs to depict the Jews as the antithesis of whatever is the highest value of the age. So in the Middle Ages, the highest value is Christianity. So Jews were portrayed as Christ killers. In the 20th century, when the highest value became one of Rachel’s superiority, Jews were seen as the polluting the Arian race. And in our day, he said, when the newest religion, the highest value is human rights. So then the Jewish state is portrayed as the primary violator of human rights. He was a critical public voice for Israel. And on the quiet, he helped as well.
Shortly after I arrived in London, he hosted a private dinner for me to introduce me to a group of British intellectuals who came to the dinner only out of respect for him and who I probably would not have been able to connect with otherwise. But the times that I heard Rabbi Sacks at his most emotional about his feelings for Israel were when he spoke every year on the evening of Yom HaAtzmaut, Israel Independence Day. This service, it’s held at Kinloch Shore was truly one of the surprises of my time in London. It was certainly not the United Synagogue that I had grown up with, with canonicals and top hats. The service in partnership with the Youth of Bnei Akiva had an energy and a sense of celebration that were really intoxicating. And then in the middle of this uplifting service, Rabbi Sacks would stand up and talk about what Israel meant to him. And each year, he would find a different beautiful way of saying it. But the message was always the same. Israel is a living miracle, not just the establishment of Israel, not just the Six-Day War, which had a deep personal effect on him. He called being in Israel after the war, “Almost the most mystical experience of my life.” But the day-to-day life of Israel, which he saw as nothing less than a fulfilment of biblical prophecies. He spoke about being in Israel during the Gulf War in 1991 when he was one of the only people to follow the home front orders to shave off his beard, so that his gas mask would fit. But he was there when Saddam Hussein fired 39 Scud missiles on Israel.
And all the flights to and from Ben Gurion were stopped, all except one, which was the daily flight bringing , bringing immigrants from the former Soviet Union. He said he heard this and he shivered because he felt he was seeing the fulfilment of the prophecy in Jeremiah that talks about God about the time when God will bring Jews to Israel from the North being as miraculous as the Exodus from Egypt. He spoke about visiting the farming community of Halutza in the Negev which was founded by families who had been forced to leave Gush Katif in Gaza and seeing what they had achieved in the barren desert. And when he saw it, he saw a fulfilment of the prophecy in Isaiah, comforting the ruins by making the desert bloom like a garden. And he saw something religious miraculous, too, in the technological successes of the startup nation, against all the odds with all the disadvantages of no natural resources, a million immigrants, constant security threats. And in the way that every one of these disadvantages became an advantage. He saw a reflection of the way that the book of Exodus describes the Israelites in Egypt. The harder it was made for them, the more that they flourished.
I remember listening to Rabbi Sacks saying this the same week that I met the head of Israel’s Space Agency who was visiting London. And he told me the story of Israel’s satellite industry. He said, “You know, every country in the world that produces satellites launches them in the direction of the earth’s rotation to use that momentum. Only in Israel, we are unable to do that because if we were to do that, they would fly directly over enemy countries. So we had to develop extremely small, light satellites, so we could launch them against the Earth’s rotation.” And he said, “Nobody ever realised that one day, there would be a commercial demand for micro-light satellites. But because of our situation, we found ourselves ahead of the game.” So again, here was a wonderful example of what Rabbi Sacks was talking about, these difficulties that actually turned out in some prophetic way to be to Israel’s advantage. So every year, Rabbi Sacks would speak like this, Israel as a daily fulfilment of prophecy. And then, he would go next door to the hall to join the the young members of Bnei Akiva in their joyful dancing to celebrate Yom HaAtzmaut. So if you are a representative of Israel abroad, you want to Chief Rabbi like Rabbi Sacks, with a love of Israel that is deep, and genuine, and uncompromising. But it was also, like so much of his thought, nuanced and complex. And I think it’s worth stopping for a moment to think about this complexity and some of the challenges that he’s thinking presents to us as Israelis and as people who care about Israel.
Rabbi Sacks saw modern Israel as miraculous, as prophetic, but he stopped short of calling it Messianic like his predecessors as Chief Rabbi, Israel Brodie, and Lord Jakobovits, he did not support using the phrase in the prayer for the state of Israel, the beginning of the flowering of our redemption. He wrote, “We see Israel as religiously significant, but we are not yet ready to say that it is of Messianic significance.” I actually think this was less of a theological statement and more of a practical one. He wanted to maintain the focus on our responsibility. Yes, Israel is a miracle, but above all, it’s an opportunity, an opportunity to create a society that gives expression to Judaism in its entirety. He wrote about this opportunity, he said, “Without a land and estate, Judaism is a shadow of itself. In exile, God might still live in the hearts of Jews, but not in the public square, in the justice of the courts, in the morality of the economy. Only in Israel are Jews able, if they so choose, to construct an agriculture, a medical system, and economic infrastructure in the spirit of the Torah. And its concern for freedom, justice, and the sanctity of life. Only in Israel can Jews live Judaism in anything other than an edited version if they so choose.” That was Rabbi Sacks’ challenge.
The modern state of Israel is a canvas. Can we use it to paint a picture of a society that uses the full palette of Jewish values? It’s a challenge, but it’s also an inspiring invitation. And I think it’s a particularly important invitation for the youth of today. You know, some of us who are listening may remember the establishment of the state of Israel. I’m sure many more like myself, will remember the Six-Day War or the Entebbe rescue. But young people growing up today have a different set of formative associations in relation to Israel. They are thinking of Israel as a place of intifadas and flotillas. If you mentioned the wall to them, they’re more likely to think about the separation barrier than they are the cotton. And many of the young people that I meet with feel a sense of conflict or dissonance. In some ways, they feel that Israel is some kind of heirloom, a painting that has been handed down to them without them being asked for it. And still they’re expected to put it on the living room wall. And Rabbi Sacks’ response is, “No, it’s not a painting. It’s a canvas.” And here is an invitation for us to paint together, to make a living picture that reflects our deepest values and our deepest hopes. And that painting is still a work in progress. And Rabbi Sacks reminded us of the work that was still to be done. And I think for him, that was particularly important in relation to what may have been his greatest passion, which was Jewish education.
My last conversations with him were about the new National Library in Israel, an incredible project. And he was extraordinarily excited about it. He called it, “The home of the book for the people of the book in the land of the book.” And deep down, he hoped that it would help be an antidote to the fact that so upset him that Israeli youngsters, many of whom were the grandchildren of Jewish scholars who grew up speaking Hebrew naturally, but they couldn’t name the Five Books of Moses or the Ten Commandments. I once had him mentioned this in a discussion with Amos Oz who answered him, “And when will the Jews of the Diaspora speak Hebrew?” And Rabbi Sacks was concerned about that too. But for him, the disconnect between Israelis and Jewish tradition was a failure. Failure of Israel, a failure of Jewish educators. And I think he was frustrated himself that even as he managed to reach out beyond Britain to the United States and the rest of the English-speaking world, he wasn’t able to have more of an impact on Israeli society. And yet, this past year has shown us something remarkable. I’ve had the opportunity to participate in a number of Israeli panels remembering Rabbi Sacks. And I can’t help thinking how much satisfaction he would have to see the range of Israelis from President Herzog to Foreign Minister Yair Lapid, to Amos Oz’s daughter, Fania Oz-Salzberger, all of them testifying how deeply affected they’ve personally been by his writing. Not long ago, I was at a conference of Israeli school principals, secular and religious.
And there were three keynote speakers and every single one of them quoted something of importance from Rabbi Sacks. There’s another area where I think Rabbi Sacks had some reservations in relation to Israel, and it took me a while before I understood it properly. Originally, I thought it had to do with power. One of the things that Diaspora Jews and Israelis tend to see differently is the notion of Jewish power. You know, Diaspora Jews sometimes have a certain discomfort with the notion of Jewish power. And Israelis, well, we tend to figure that in our neighbourhood, a little power can’t be that much of a bad thing. And I thought, I could detect some of this discomfort in some of the things that Rabbi Sacks wrote. For example, he wrote that, “The reason that the land of Israel was chosen for the Jews was precisely because the terrain of Israel is such that it cannot become the base of an empire. It will constantly be a threat from larger and stronger neighbouring powers.” He very rarely waded directly into Israeli politics, but he did describe Israel’s relations with the Palestinians as a tragedy. He didn’t blame Israel. He insisted that peace is a duet that needs two partners.
But he did say that he feared that the situation was forcing Israel into postures that are incompatible in the long run with Israel’s deepest values. And I thought I detected a discomfort with power in a passage in his book, “Letter in The Scroll” or “Radical Then, Radical Now” about the destruction of temple, of the temple and the exile. He wrote that, “While it was politically a disaster, it unleashed spiritual developments that were never fully achieved as long as Israel was caught in the arena of power.” And I had the opportunity to speak to him about this. I asked him, “You’ve described Judaism as gaining something when we lost sovereignty. Do you think that maybe we’ve lost something when we restored it?” And I’m so, pleased that I asked because his answer was categorical. He said, “After the Shoah, we cannot accept powerlessness.” He said, “Israel is the fulfilment of 100 generations of Jewish prayers.” But then he went on and said, “But we have to separate the need for power from living in fear. We should never be motivated by fear.” He said he met with world leaders, and he was frequently struck by the depth of their support and their love for Israel. He didn’t dismiss the danger of anti-Semitism or anti-Zionism, but he refused to accept it as inevitable. He wrote, “There is nothing in Judaism to suggest that it is the fate of Jews to be hated.” It’s not written into the texture of the universe or encoded in the human genome. It is not the will of God.“
He said, "Anti-Semitism can be fought, it can be defeated, but it will not be fought or defeated if people think that it is Jacob’s fate to be hated by Esau or to be the people that dwells alone.” And I think these comments reflected an attitude to the Jewish condition that permeated Rabbi Sacks’ thought and his life. “We have to be aware of the threats, aware of the dangers,” he warned us, “but we must never allow them to define us. That would give them a secondary victory. As a people, as a state, we have to chart our own goals, be true to our own mission, and build a future based not on fear, but on hope.” You know, there was a story that Rabbi Sacks loved to tell about the power of a positive identity. It related to a young woman in Moscow, a Jewish woman who had completely assimilated. Nobody knew that she was Jewish. And then one day in the street, somebody shouted at her and she was totally shaken, and she went to speak to the rabbi in Moscow and said, “What should I do?” And the rabbi looked at her and said, “You are completely assimilated. You don’t look Jewish at all. Look at me. I have a black hat, I have a black coat, and yet, nobody ever shouts at me why do you think that is?” “And she thought for a moment,” said Rabbi Sacks. And then she said, “It’s because they realise I will take it as an insult and you will take it as a compliment.”
And you know, as somebody representing Israel, this resonates with me because here also, we see the power of a positive identity, a positive agenda. You know, if I would go to speak on university campuses, I would often be met with a demonstration outside the lecture hall, sometimes inside the lecture hall. And if you looked at the people who were making up that demonstration, it was a very odd coalition. It was a combination of radical leftists and radical Islamists and what’s sometimes called the Red-Green Alliance. And if you want to break up that coalition, it’s very easy. You simply have to say to those people, I know what it is that you are against, but tell me what it is that you stand for. Are you in favour of women’s rights? Are you in favour of freedom of expression? And that coalition just disintegrates before your eyes. That’s the power of a positive identity. So alongside his deep, uncompromising support for Israel, Rabbi Sacks raises some really critical questions, critical Israelis, and we owe it to Rabbi Sacks and ourselves to think about them seriously. Can we make Israel a canvas for a full range of Jewish expression? Can we take a generation of Israelis who are raised in the language of Jewish tradition and connect them to the wisdom of that tradition? And can we act firmly, but without fear on the international stage? And there’s one more challenge that I’d like to mention because I think it’s particularly relevant to all of us in Israel and outside in the states we built together, and the communities we built together. And I think that COVID has brought it into sharp focus. In Rabbi Sacks’ last book, “Morality,” which is such a gift, a gift to the Jewish people and the world. He makes a powerful argument that “Western societies have come to rely almost entirely on the state and on the market that is on the allocation of power and the allocation of wealth.
And that in doing this, they’ve forgotten the need for social capital, for the need to nurture community, for a commitment to the shared good.” Now that book doesn’t make any reference to Israel, but in fact, the first time that Rabbi Sacks made this particular argument was more than a decade earlier in his book, “Future Tense.” And then he made it specifically in relation to Israel. He said, “It was understandable that the early Zionists who saw the birth of the European nation state as fueling anti-Semitism had been convinced that a nation state for the Jews had to be the solution.” But he went on to say that “They had gone too far, for example, with David Ben-Gurion’s policy of what was called statism, which put the state above traditional communal structures in civil society. And he wrote "The result was that though Israel managed remarkably the transition from powerlessness to power, it did so at the cost of weakening the very institutions that had been the source of Jewish strength in the past, communities, charities, voluntary associations, and community-based schools. So while the state grew strong, society grew weak.” And for Rabbi Sacks, the challenge for Israel was to nurture what he called, “Covenantal Assets.” Those non-zero sum assets like, like friendship, caring, mutual responsibility that don’t reside in the state or the market, but they live in communities and congregations. They give life to the principal. All Israel are responsible for one another. So our are not just places to . Our locked-down universities are not just places to learn. They’re crucibles of shared responsibility of civil society with a role to play on what Rabbi Sacks saw as a critical second phase of Zionism.
He wrote, “Zionism phase 1 gave back to Jewry what it lacked in dispersion, sovereignty and estate. Zionism phase 2 must re-appropriate what Jewry had, even when it lacked the state. A profound sense of responsibility to the weak, the poor, the socially marginalised, the neglected, and the unheard. It must build a society worthy of being a home for the divine presence by honouring the divine image in all of its citizens.” And I think this is an extraordinary and unbelievably relevant challenge for us as citizens of Israel, for people that care about Israel. How can we recapture those lost, shared assets, use them to build resilient communities and together create truly a home of hope. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Daniel. I’m not sure how I’m supposed to follow that, but I’ll try. So I want to shift tacks a little. And when I used to travel with you in the UK, one of my favourite parts was when you used to teach a class on negotiations. And I will tell you, it put me in very good stead when I got to HBS and had the negotiations class, and was already ahead of the game. But one of the things I wondered is, you know, Rabbi Sacks actually spent a lot of his time doing negotiations, whether it was intra-negotiations in the Jewish community or in the way he built bridges with interfaith groups and broader dialogues. What do you think we can learn from the way he navigated some of those challenges that is applicable in a wider audience today?
I think one of the things, you know, I asked myself last year and since, why is it that Rabbi Sacks and his teaching has had such resonance throughout the Jewish community and beyond the Jewish community? And I think there are a number of reasons for that. I mean, I think he was all, writing about issues that are so close to the heart of people’s identity and their society. But I think one of the reasons, and I think this touches on your point, is he was always looking for the point of inclusion. I don’t think he saw himself as being in a negotiation in the sense of advancing one set of interests against another set of interests. He was asking himself, what are the interests that we actually share? If there is a difference between us, how can we each climb up our ladder to a higher set of values where we will find some common ground? You know, it’s interesting you look at some of his online discussions and debates with people who are very different, who come from different places than him. Yuval Noah Harari would be one. Fania Oz-Salzberger would be another. And all of the time his question is, “What is it that we both care about? What is it that we actually have together?”
And I think by the way, the same holds true for a sort of internal negotiation that each of us conducts with ourselves. I think one of the reasons that Rabbi Sacks’ writing is so, and thinking is so relevant for today, is we are living in an era of really complex, divided identities. Many of us feel torn apart. And what Rabbi Sacks holds out is a possibility of bringing these disparate halves together. He would write about the fact that Jews live both in their own society and in broader society, not as a disadvantage, but as an extraordinary asset. He talked about cultural bilingualism as being a tremendous resource and all of his writing, which uses worldly wisdom to deepen our understanding of Judaism and draws on Jewish wisdom in order to make a significant contribution to world problems. I think in a sense, that’s moving beyond negotiation, it’s moving even beyond getting to yes, in the Harvard School of Negotiation that you studied, to a higher level, where there’s what Harav Kook used to talk about, as being “The unity of opposites.” That’s higher level where we can actually see an integrated picture where everything is a part of an organic whole.
And to kind of continue along that theme, when I was at HBS, you’ll remember that I asked you to answer five questions about lessons in leadership, and that I also asked Rabbi Sacks to answer the same. And I showed our Lockdown University participants yesterday exactly the same thing. I showed them the video of my lessons in leadership and explained to them about, that he’d kind of overreached and given me a video. But what do you think are some of the key lessons we can take from Rabbi Sacks about a leader, especially in today’s world, where perhaps leadership is morphed and changed, and the world very much needs it.
So first of all, apologies that I didn’t do a video for you like Rabbi Sacks, you know, you really did make me feel inadequate.
I’m still holding it against you, but it’s okay.
I owe you, I owe you a video. I would say this, I was thinking about the first time I heard Rabbi Sacks speak, and actually it was, I was very young, I wasn’t even Bar Mitzvah yet. And he came to apply for the job of Rabbi in my parents’ . And I went to hear him speak, and I don’t remember him speaking, but what I do remember is that he didn’t get the job. He was still very much a Cambridge intellectual, and he hadn’t mastered the art of how to speak to a United Synagogue Congregation. I have, actually, I have them here. I have, a treasured possession of mine. I have a series of pamphlets that when I was a youngster in JYSG, Jewish Youth Study Groups may it’s memory be a blessing. Rabbi Sacks, as a young rabbi, wrote a series of pamphlets on philosophical issues that trouble young people, faith and reason, evolution, the Holocaust, the Messianic age, and so on. And there’s something really moving about the fact that a busy young rabbi would take the time out to try and help young people grapple with these issues. But the truth is, when you read them, they’re really interesting, but they do not carry with them that soaring language of “Radical Then, Radical Now” or the “Dignity of Difference” or the “Great Partnership” or any one of his extraordinary books.
And I mentioned that because I think we are letting ourselves off lightly when we think that here is a man who had God-given gifts of oratory, of draughtsmanship, of poetic style. I think we lose sight of the work, the effort that he invested in sharpening a whole range of communication skills, every single one of them, a challenge in itself. How do you give a, the most effective thought for the day or a Ted Talk or an animated video? And every single one of those, Rabbi Sacks devoted himself to and became a consummate expert. But I, you asked me what is the lesson that we learned from leadership is to look beyond the talent and see the hard work, see the passion that was required. The other thing that I would mention is the passion, I have to say. I think one of the things that Rabbi Sacks confided in me, he may have mentioned it in in the video that you’re talking about, is that the role that he took on was not a role that he felt entirely comfortable with, was not something that he had would normally have chosen for himself. I remember once, we were learning the story of the 12 spies who were sent into the land of Israel and 10 of the spies, of course, gave a bad report, argued against, you know, fighting to enter Israel. And Rabbi Sacks had a very radical rereading of that text. He said that those 10 spies were scared not of defeat, but of victory.
They were scared that if they succeeded in the battle, they would have to take on the challenge of facing the real world. And when he said that, I remember thinking here is somebody who himself has to take on the challenge of leaving the ivory tower and take on the, you know, the challenges of the real world. And he did it, I believe, because he truly realised this was this was the call of the moment. This was the time when he had to step up because if he didn’t, there were very few people who could do it in the way that he would.
And I wanted to dig a little deeper on your time together in the UK and talk a little bit about, you know, there’s a joke that I’ve heard several prime ministers in the UK give, Tony Blair did it on Monday night, and David Cameron once famously introduced Rabbi Sacks to then, Prime Minister Netanyahu as this is my Rabbi. And I think you were probably even there at that event. Why do you think it was that actually the British establishment and government were so comfortable with having Rabbi Sacks around, especially since often in the UK society, religion and government are kept at kind of somewhat arm’s length?
I think there is an unbelievably narrow tightrope that needs to be walked between faith and policy. And very few people have the gift of walking that tightrope. You know, the old Jewish saying, “The world is a narrow bridge and the main thing is not to be afraid.” At the end of the day, most issues, critical issues of public policy boil down to values. They boil down to our core beliefs and it’s very hard to have a meaningful discussion about them that simply remains on that narrow, shallow surface of public policy. But there’s always a terrible fear that when you make way for the faith discussion, who knows what that door is going to let in? Are we going to let in the spectres of fundamentalism and so on? And I think Rabbi Sacks had an awareness of the importance of faith, but also a sensitivity to the suspicions of faith. I mean, his book, “Not in God’s Name,” was his most direct attempt to tackle those suspicions. He had made the argument 20 years earlier in his read lectures for the persistence of faith. Everybody was making eulogies, for the death of faith and look, it’s still going strong.
And 20 years later, it looked like he was right, but perhaps not in the way that he had wanted. That faith was still this spectre and it seemed to be a force that was giving cover to some of the most problematic aspects of human nature. So to have somebody who was a voice that could give the resonance of values, the depth of a sort of historic, biblical Judeo-Christian force to some of the issues in public debate. But all of the time, recognising those fears, recognising those concerns, recognising that we have to look at faith with spectacles of humanity again, in “Not in God’s Name.” He has an extraordinary and a courageous chapter where he talks about “Our responsibility to reinterpret difficult and problematic texts in our tradition.” And that’s something that’s unusual to hear from a person of faith. And I think that’s something that made him not just acceptable, but made him inspirational to people who were involved in policymaking on a day-to-day basis.
So one of the things that both you and Rabbi Sacks are very passionate about and you touched on earlier, is the role of education. And I know, ‘cause I sat around many a table with you and at the time, that I worked for you in my early twenties, we used to grapple with some of this stuff about how you reach young Jews, whether it was young British Jews in this case, and build their connection to Israel. You know, you used to say to me, “Don’t let your relationship with Israel be defined by defending it.” And as the person whose job it was to defend it against BDS, it wasn’t always the easiest ever of mantras to hang onto. And Rabbi Sacks’ the same, you know, you both convened groups of young Jews to look at kind of how you engage and kind of bridge some of the divides that we see today. You know, what do you think in the time that’s passed, not even just the legacy of Rabbi Sacks, but you know, your opinion as well, is the way to kind of reach young Jews of today with some of the messages that both you and Rabbi Sacks felt were so important?
First of all, just to pick up on something that you said there, and I think in a way, that’s channelling the spirit of Rabbi Sacks, not allowing a negative agenda to define your relationship with Israel. And certainly, I didn’t just say it to you, I said it and meant it. To anybody who was active in the campaign for Israel, I would say it’s wonderful, but please don’t allow that to define your relationship with Israel because your relationship should be based around something that is positive because only that is going to be sustainable in yourself, and only that is something that you’re going to be able to pass on to your children. You know, sometimes when we would visit schools, I would say, do you do any Jewish schools? I would say, do you do any Jewish education? And the response I would get would be something like, well, you know, in our lower sixth form, we have one semester where we have a Israel Advocacy course, what to answer the anti-Zionist. And I would find myself saying, if you have only one semester to devote to Israel, please don’t devote it to Israel advocacy. Leave that to me, leave that to Carly, leave it to the embassy. Use that time to develop, to nurture a positive relationship, something that is going to be sustainable, something that’s going to resonate.
And I think that’s become more challenging because society has moved from broadcasting to narrow-casting. There is no longer one size that fits all. Everybody has their own point of entry. And so, something else you will have heard me say, which I would say to the staff in the embassy, I say, Israel is a house with many doors and our job is to give out as many keys to as many of those doors as possible. For some people, the thing that is most deeply connected for them, their entrance point into Israel might be cultural, it might be spiritual, it might be the extraordinary social entrepreneurship in Israel. And what we want to do is to try and find ways for people to see their values and their passions reflected in Israel. And I think one of the things that Rabbi Sacks modelled was how we have to be at the cutting edge of harnessing technology to do that. He wasn’t just an incredible communicator, but he was always on the lookout for new methods of communication. When it was Israel’s 60th anniversary, he produced these two incredible DVDs, “Israel, The Home of Hope”. Later it was producing animated YouTube videos. And you know, I have no doubt that today, we would be seeing Instagram and TikTok, and goodness knows what, because for him, these were not, you know, these were tools. And part of the mission of Judaism is to take whatever tools are available and to harness them as part of his passion for spreading the message. So I think those are some of the things that he taught us, and certainly we tried to adopt.
And we spent a lot of time and I had a conversation that we’re saying yesterday about Rabbi Sacks and the Muslim world and you know, the archbishop and former Archbishop of Canterbury were at the event on Monday night. We spent a lot of time talking about Rabbi Sacks and his ability to engage with people across faiths. You know, in your experience with him and something I know you also had to do, how do you think he navigated with people who had no faith or who didn’t have those kind of same perhaps, Judeo-Christian based values that he often leaned on?
My suspicion, I’ll be honest, is that he was sceptical when people described themselves as having no faith. I think he understood that for many people, it was hard to express their faith through established religions, through established, you know, religious organisations, and so on. But I think he saw the depths of values and concerns, and I’m just going to look here for a quote for you. Here. You know, I think one of the things that Rabbi Sacks had a genius for was finding faith even in places where people didn’t know they had it. And I think actually that’s one of the things he saw when he looked at Israel. Here, I just wanted to bring a quote, I was thinking of mentioning it in my remarks, I didn’t get to it, so thank you for the question, Carly. He talked about the faith of the secular people of Israel. He wrote, “How do you live with the constant threat of violence and war?” He said, “That takes faith.” “Israel is the people that has always been sustained by faith. Faith in God, in the future, in life itself. And though Israel is a secular state, it’s very existence is a testimony to faith, the faith of a hundred generations that Jews would return. The faith that led the pioneers to rebuild the land against seemingly impossible odds. The faith that after the Holocaust, the Jewish people could live again. The faith that in the face of death, continues to say, choose life.”
And in terms of some of the more, you know, kind of thorny issues that happened when you were ambassador and in the UK with then Chief Rabbi Sacks, especially around Israel. You know, he was always good at, as you say, looking for common ground and steering clear of kind of commenting on policy positions or you know, the actions of the Israeli government. But obviously, he was asked to talk from time to time about his position on a two-state solution or some of the other issues that, you know, rabbis perhaps sometimes try to steer clear of. How do you think he kind of navigated that challenge as someone who’s, as you say, used to have this very strong connection to Israel, and always made that joke that he was the only one who shaved his beard off as told when the gas mask had to go on, and was born the same year as the existence of the state of Israel? How did he navigate that challenge between supporting Israel as a whole and kind of not wading into policy decisions and debates?
So it would surprise you. We actually didn’t have that many conversations directly about that. I was busy trying to steer our conversations off into philosophy and he would occasionally try and bring it back onto what’s the latest gossip from the Knesset and so on. I think he really was cautious to try and avoid making explicitly political statements, particularly on issues that divided the community. I mean, I mentioned some of comments that he’d made in relation to what he saw as the tragedy of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And he made those in an interview in The Guardian relatively early on in his Chief Rabbinate. And I think he suffered a fair degree of aggravation, certainly from parts of the community from having said that. And I think without him having said that, I think that by and large, his approach was he would deepen relations with Israel by modelling the relationship rather than arguing for it. And I think that’s what he tried to do. I think it was absolutely clear to people that his deepest emotional resources were activated, were excited, were energised by connection with Israel, by visiting Israel, by connecting with Israelis. And I think his hope was that by modelling it, maybe he would be able to get the message across without being drawn into debates that would be divisive.
And for our last few minutes, I wanted to perhaps to reflect on kind of Rabbi Sacks, the person versus the Chief Rabbi. You know and I know from spending time with him, whether it was his love of kind of going to Highbury when appropriate, you know, midweek or watching the “West Wing” on the treadmill or his love of music, which we’re going to focus on the weekend. What is an anecdote you can share with our audience about your time with him that that may surprise them or give them a kind of glimpse of the man behind the magic?
So I think, and it’s strange to say for somebody that was so mature, but I really think there was a child within Rabbi Sacks that he had managed to keep alive all of the years. When you think about the situations in which his eyes would light up, it was obviously with music, with dancing with children, you know, if he had the opportunity to sing with children or dance with children, I think there are many people in public life who do it because of the photo opportunity or because of the, you know, they feel it’s required or whatever. But for him, it genuinely touched the chord. There was a, Rabbi Sacks was, and it’s one of the things that’s surprising because he’s such a brilliant intellectual, but in many ways, he was a Hasid, not just the Hasid of the but he was a Hasid in the sense that he saw joy and celebration and connection as ways of spiritual expression. And so, it was wonderful to see him with young people. I think that I mentioned before that he didn’t see himself always a people person, and sometimes he had a hard time schmoozing with grownups. And that was something that required a certain amount of effort. I don’t think it required effort for him for young people. I think if he was invited to spend time with young people, if he saw young people engaging in Jewish life, kids singing Jewish songs and celebrating, I think that was something that struck a deep chord with him.
Yes, he used to say that “He was fine with a thousand people. It was the one, two, or three that used to give him a problem.”
And you know what, Carly, if I’ve got a moment, ‘cause I don’t know if it’s happening in the course of this week, but there’s something that I do feel should be said. You know, you talked about lessons in leadership and I talked about the journey that Rabbi Sacks made, but there’s something else that I think should be said. He was aware of the things that he felt he felt short on, and to make up for them, surrounded himself with a really extraordinary, talented group of people. And I think all of us, people who have been inspired by Rabbi Sacks owe an unbelievable debt of gratitude. First of all, to Lady Elaine, who was his rock in so many ways, but also to the people in his office who managed him and managed us. And I’m thinking of Dan and Joanna and all of the other remarkable people who enabled his voice to get out in the ways that were harder for him to do. And who have been so instrumental in this past year in making sure that voice continues to grow, to be heard, to be a living legacy.
Well, I didn’t set that up, but we are ending our hour and Joanna is going to thank you. So she’s going to feel I conspired and I did not. But I can tell you if someone who spent over 10 years with Rabbi Sacks’ team who consider Joanna and Dan as mentors and advisors, and people I would always call in a foxhole, I absolutely echo your words. And as who, when I had returned from a security shift or whatever else, were always the first people to make me tea, so thank you Daniel. This was a real pleasure for me and I know that our audience really enjoyed it. What I am going to ask you to do is tell us where that quote came from that you read from about faith because we’ve had a few people ask and you can put it in the chat box,
[Daniel] Right.
and I’m going to hand over to Joanna to wrap us up. Thank you.
Thank you Daniel. This that was inspirational. It was just lovely hearing you talking about Rabbi Sacks and the various aspects of your engagement and friendship with him, and that’s came across so wonderfully. I’d like to thank you on behalf of Wendy and Lockdown University, myself, and the Rabbi Sacks Legacy Trust. And thank Carly and Lauren, and the team, and Wendy at Lockdown University for putting on this week. It’s been incredible and there’s still more to come. Daniel, Rabbi Sacks cherished your friendship and he loved the time that you spent in London as our ambassador. And you were an inspirational ambassador. We were very blessed to have you here in the UK for, were you almost five years?
[Daniel] Mm-hmm.
It was really incredible. He looked forward to your regular meetings as you alluded. And hearing, he was very eager. He wanted to know what has, “what’s Daniel sent me to discuss this week?” He really looked forward to discussing those issues with you and exploring the questions on your mind in your sessions, even though they’re, as you said, “They weren’t quite sessions.” You very kindly hosted at least two events for us in Jerusalem. The launch of “Not in God’s Name” as you called, NIGON, at the Great Synagogue and an intimate, and very interesting gathering in the foreign office. I have a wonderful picture of the two of you deep in conversation at the National Library of Israel’s Global Forum. That was an interesting gathering, but he loved the time that he spent with you and really cherished it. And thank you for your really inspiring, thoughtful, and heartfelt words about him tonight.
[Daniel] Thank you so much.
Thank you all very much. And we’ll be back in an hour with Gidi Grinstein, and Joanna’s colleague, Dan, to reflect further on Rabbi Sacks. Thank you, Daniel very much.
[Daniel] Thank you.