Big Think - Big Think Interview With Lord Rabbi Jonathan Sacks

Short Summary

Main recommendation: Jewish communities, and Jews generally, should stop defining themselves as a people who dwell alone and should instead share Judaism as "the voice of hope in the conversation of humankind," engaging the wider world confidently. Lord Jonathan Sacks argues that this self-image of isolation, shaped by the Holocaust, 9/11, the isolation of Israel, and rising anti-Semitism, is untrue, self-pitying, and risks becoming self-fulfilling.

Key Points

• Sacks describes the Chief Rabbi role as a semi-ambassadorial, semi-diplomatic position representing the Jewish community, which is constituted in Britain and Europe as a religious community, to the public, other faiths, the Royal Family, and the government.
• Under his leadership, the community grew more vibrant and knowledge-focused, notably through the Limmud learning week (about 3,000 young people, 600 courses, exported to 47 other places worldwide).
• Jewish day school enrollment among British Jewish children rose from 25% in 1993 to 65% about 17 years later, with more day schools built in 15 years than in the prior 350 years of Anglo-Jewish history.
• Sacks presents anti-Semitism as a mutating virus, tracing four stages: religious hostility after Christianity's birth, demonic anti-Judaism after 1096, racial anti-Semitism named in 1879, and today's "demonic anti-Zionism" targeting Jews as a nation-state.
• He argues the fight against anti-Semitism must not be led by Jews alone, citing Britain's all-party Parliamentary Committee on Anti-Semitism and the 2009 international parliamentarians' conference hosted by the British government.

Details Worth Noting

• Concrete instructions: The speaker gives no step-by-step procedure. The actionable advice is to define Judaism outwardly (as a voice of hope in human conversation rather than a self-image of isolation), to avoid self-pitying framing, to share Jewish ideas openly without seeking conversion, and to have non-Jews lead anti-Semitism-fighting efforts alongside Jews, as Britain has done.
• Sacks's book "Future Tense" is cited as the source of this argument, and he says seven of his books have been serialized in the national press.
• He notes that Jews make up about 0.5% of Britain's population, yet he says the community has influence far beyond its numbers through BBC broadcasting, national press writing, and television and radio (he also broadcasts to a British public that is 99.5% not Jewish).
• He cites the example of Shlomo Carlebach's remark that Jews are identifiable by answering "I'm just a human being," as an illustration of universal Jewish identity.
• He says Britain and the United States differ institutionally: the US lacks a centralized religious leader like the Archbishop of Canterbury, while Britain has a Chief Rabbi, and Sacks says Muslims, Sikhs, and Hindus envy the Chief Rabbi model.

Bottom Line

Sacks argues that Jewish influence depends less on size, which is small in Britain, than on confident, outward-facing engagement, and that a victim mindset is both inaccurate and dangerous.