Count us among the countless other admirers, readers, publishers and mourners of Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, who died of cancer last Shabbat, Nov. 7, 2020.
The Intermountain Jewish News has Christians who subscribe in order to read Rabbi Sacks’ weekly Torah commentary. No rabbi anywhere in the world found a way to reach out across religious and national boundaries like Rabbi Jonathan Sacks. Communicating the uniqueness of Judaism without apology or attenuation, Rabbi Sacks found a way to demonstrate the commonalities shared by all humanity in their existential concerns and desire for faith.
His deep immersion in philosophy, honed at Cambridge, gave him a universal language, which, joined to his deep immersion in Torah, facilitated his unique power. Rabbi Sacks related to people from royalty to simple people, from Jews to gentiles, from national leaders to teachers, from great thinkers to ordinary people seeking meaning.
He crossed lines without compromising Jewish teaching and without fearing to speak up when doing so was imperative. Rabbi Lord Sacks spoke up in the British House of Lords against the threat posed by now defeated British Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, whose anti-Semitism threatened the viability of British Jewry more than at any time in centuries. We shall miss that voice of leadership!
“Leadership” came to occupy Rabbi Sacks’ interests more than any other subject in recent years. Much of his writing, including in his weekly Torah columns, was dedicated to defining leadership and motivating all of us to be leaders in our own spheres.
Rabbi Sacks did not come from a rabbinic background. His personal trajectory shows that any Jew, whatever his background, can rise to the heights of Jewish knowledge, leadership and outreach.
Rabbi Sacks was a role model for Jews entrenched in the secular world. Perhaps he best articulated this when he popularized the Lubavitcher Rebbe’s idea of a “fifth son,” the son who, unlike the other four sons at the Passover seder, wasn’t even there. Unlike the wicked son, who at least was at the table, the fifth son was too distant to care. It is the fifth son whom we must especially try to reach, said Rabbi Sacks. He began his own Jewish journey, if not as a fifth son, yet at a certain distance and ended his life as the Jewish thinker most intellectually trained to reach the fifth son.
Put Rabbi Sacks in a room full of fifth sons, or of British royalty, or of non-Jewish clergy, or of rabbinic students, or even of stutterers (a matter known to him from one of his offspring), and he could reach them all, inspire them all, instruct them all, edify them all.
From the floor of the British Parliament to the front page of the Wall Street Journal, from the classrooms of Jews’ College to the dais of the Beckett Fund, from the funeral of Princess Diana to the pages of the siddur, Rabbi Sacks wielded his courageous cadences, incisive social analysis, penetrating Biblical gaze, dignified presence, pastoral sensitivity, poetic pen and sense of history to communicate the teachings of the Torah.
Rabbi Sacks showed that ideas matter, style matters, insight matters, writing matters, teaching matters, and commitment to G-d and Torah matter.
It has been a privilege to be alive in his era.
Copyright © 2020 by the Intermountain Jewish News
