Rabbi Jonathan Sacks remembered

Catholic Herald, 27 December 2020

Rabbi Sacks was a master at making people sit up and take notice of things which they had long seen, but did not understand.

The late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, who died on November 8, had legions of admirers. I am one. He combined a brilliant mind with sparkling rhetoric, dazzling secular audiences with lines like this: “Science takes things apart to see how they work. Religion puts things together to see what they mean.”

Lord Sacks was able to get a hearing from those who otherwise consider themselves closed to biblical wisdom. For that, the former chief rabbi of Great Britain was sometimes called by his detractors “chief rabbi to the Gentiles”. I think that rather a compliment, actually.

This Gentile was a grateful follower of his work because he helped me better understand the history of salvation. His work taught me much about the Torah – but also the Pauline epistles, as the apostle worked out the enduring encounter and entanglement of Christians and Jews.

Nearly five years ago, I hosted Rabbi Sacks at a public conversation where he gave a virtuoso performance of biblical scholarship at a packed theatre in downtown Toronto. Afterward, he related that it was one of the best public interviews he had ever had. The reason was clear; his interlocutor did not demand that he phrase his biblical exegesis in secular terms, but rather joined him in an exploration of the Word of God had to say to us today.

That Toronto night Sacks spoke about the origins of violence, Freudian psychology and what Genesis has to teach us about both.

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