Lord Sacks
Long-serving Chief Rabbi who steered a careful path to preserve tradition in a changing world
LORD SACKS, who has died aged 72, was the Chief Rabbi of Britain and the British Commonwealth from 1991 to 2013. Officially he represented only the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth – whose principal constituent is the United Synagogue (Anglo-jewry’s largest Orthodox synagogal organisation, established by an Act of Parliament in 1870) – and thus he was not recognised as the religious authority for other movements such as the Haredi (strictly Orthodox) or Reform (nonOrthodox). Sacks, none the less, was widely regarded as the figurehead of all British Jewry.
As Chief Rabbi, an Orthodox Jew who believed that the Torah must be taken as fundamental, he often provoked controversy.
He accepted an invitation to attend a reception to mark the 50th birthday of the Prince of Wales on a Friday evening, and because it was the Sabbath, he made the journey to Buckingham Palace on foot. Even so, this outraged his Jewish community, who criticised him for not being together with his family on the Sabbath.
In vain, Sacks insisted that it was an established protocol for chief rabbis to accept direct royal invitations and that one should make an exception for the “expression of Jewish loyalty to the country and its head of state”.
On another occasion, he infuriated ultra-orthodox Jews, who accused him of profaning God’s name, following his decision to attend the memorial service of Rabbi Hugo Gryn, a leading light of the Reform, non-orthodox movement.
Sacks had strong views on society in general and he never hesitated to express them. Of Margaret Thatcher’s famous remark that “there is no such thing as society”, he said: “This is a tenable view, and there is only one thing to be said against it. It has been tried and it has failed.”
He advocated compulsory community service for all, the return of traditional educational methods in schools, and more power to local, self-governing institutions.
Sacks took a strict line on behaviour that threatens the integrity of the family, particularly adultery.
He also vigorously criticised the growing materialism of modern society, arguing, in a 2009 address, that Europeans had chosen consumerism over the self-sacrifice required for parenting children.
In a 2011 interfaith reception, attended by the Queen, he repeated his attack on consumerism, declaring: “The consumer society was laid down by the late Steve Jobs [founder of the Apple company] coming down the mountain with two tablets, ipad one and ipad two, and the result is that we now have a culture of ipod, iphone, itune, i, i, i. When you’re an individualist, egocentric culture and you only care about ‘I’, you don’t do terribly well.”
But it was a sign of his status in British life that in May 2013, at a dinner to mark his departure as Chief Rabbi, Prince Charles hailed Sacks as “a light unto this nation, a steadfast friend and a valued adviser”.
A shopkeeper’s son, Jonathan Henry Sacks was born on March 8 1948, in Lambeth, the eldest of four children of Louisa (née Frumkin) and Louis Sacks.
The last rabbi in the family was Jonathan’s great-grandfather, Arye Leib Frumkin, who was born in Lithuania, wrote the history of the sages of Jerusalem, and emigrated to “Eretz Yisrael” (the land of Israel) in the 1870s, where he became an agricultural pioneer and built the first house in the first Jewish agricultural settlement in Palestine – Petach Tikvah.
When the five-year-old Jonathan asked his father about Judaism, the answer he received was: “I can’t tell you about these things because I didn’t have a good [religious] education, but one day you will be able to tell me.”
Jonathan grew up in the East End, the hub of London’s Jewish life, and later in Finchley, north London, where he attended Christ’s College, the local grammar school.
He then read Philosophy at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. His time at the university, he later recalled, was “the most thrilling” of his life.
It was during his years as an undergraduate that Sacks started contemplating religious life. There were two influences which resulted in his becoming a rabbi.
The first was the outbreak of the Six-day War of 1967 between Arabs and Israelis in the Middle East. “I genuinely feared that Israel faced extinction – a second Holocaust,” he told an interviewer. “For me this was the real beginning of Judaism.”
The second came from a leading rabbi in New York, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, who agreed to meet Sacks, then on a family visit to Los Angeles. Sacks wished to meet leading rabbis: when confirmation came that Rabbi Schneerson would see the young student from Cambridge, Sacks jumped on a Greyhound bus, arriving in New York 72 hours later.
At their meeting, following an “intellectual, philosophical conversation”, as Sacks later recalled, “the rebbe started asking me questions: How many Jewish students are in Cambridge? How many get involved in Jewish life? What are you doing to bring other people in?”
Young Sacks was taken aback. “Here I was, a nobody from nowhere, and here was one of the greatest leaders in the Jewish world challenging me not to accept the situation, but to change it.”
Returning for his second year at Cambridge, Sacks arrived wearing a skullcap and complete with a beard; even his closest friends could hardly recognise him.
After completing his studies and gaining a First in Philosophy, Sacks enrolled in a traditional Yeshiva, rabbinical seminar, and in 1976 gained his rabbinic ordination from Jews’ College in London, one of the world’s oldest rabbinical seminaries, as well as from London’s Yeshiva “Etz Hayyim”.
He then went on to pursue postgraduate studies at New College, Oxford, and King’s College, London, completing a PHD in 1981.
Throughout his many years as a student, Sacks also worked as a lecturer. From 1971 to 1973, he taught Moral Philosophy at Middlesex Polytechnic and, in 1973, he began teaching at Jews’ College, where he taught Jewish philosophy and thought.
From 1978 to 1982, he served as the Rabbi of the Golders Green Synagogue in London’s most Orthodox neighbourhood and, from 1983 to 1990, as the Rabbi of the renowned Marble Arch Synagogue in central London.
At the time of his appointment to the post of Chief Rabbi – he succeeded Immanuel (Lord) Jakobovits – on September 1 1991, Sacks was Principal of Jews’ College, where he also held the Chair in Modern Jewish Thought and instituted novel programmes in rabbinic pre- and in-service training.
As the new Chief Rabbi, he embarked on a “Decade of Renewal” for British Jewry. This was an uphill task, as his community was shrinking in numbers as a result of assimilation and lower birth rates, and had lost much of its importance as Israel and the United States became the leading centres of post-holocaust Jewry.
While trying to hold his fractious community together, and speaking plainly on general national, social and moral issues, Rabbi Sacks also kept an eye on international Jewish affairs. He kept close links with the leadership of the State of Israel and, in the 1990s, supported the prime minister Yitzhak Rabin over the peace process.
He wrote a letter to Rabin urging him to pay as much attention to Jew-on-jew dialogues as to Jewish-palestinian dialogue. In 1995 Rabin was assassinated by a Jew and, as Sacks recalled, “I found a letter in reply from Rabin the day I arrived back from his funeral.”
Sacks was among the most prolific writers on Orthodox Judaism, publishing more than 30 books addressing contemporary spiritual and moral issues.
In Tradition in an Untraditional Age (1990), Orthodoxy Confronts Modernity (1991) and Will we have Jewish Grandchildren? (1994), he explored the clash between tradition and modernity and the difficulties preserving Jewish traditions in a fastmoving, modern, untraditional age.
His most recent work, Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times was published earlier this year. His other books included The Dignity of Difference: How to Avoid the Clash of Civilisations, which was the winner of the Grawemeyer Prize for Religion in 2004 for its success in defining a framework for interfaith dialogue between people of all faith and of none.
A notably gifted, clear communicator, Rabbi Sacks was a frequent guest on television and radio and regularly contributed to the national press. His 1990 Reith lectures for the BBC were published in book form as The Persistence of Faith.
Within his own congregation, however, his media savviness and close links with the British establishment sometimes provoked carping that he was “the chief rabbi of the goyim [non-jews].”
But he was trenchant in speaking up for the Jewish people. In a 2019 debate on anti-semitism in the House of Lords, Sacks stated that “there is hardly a country in the world, certainly not a single country in Europe, where Jews feel safe”, and that societies tolerating anti-semitism had “forfeited all moral credibility”.
He denounced Jeremy Corbyn, saying: “We have an anti-semite as the leader of the Labour party and Her Majesty’s Opposition. That is why Jews feel so threatened by Mr Corbyn and those who support him.”
Jonathan Sacks was known among his admiring staff as the “rapid rabbi”. On his desk he placed a sign bearing the message: “Daily jogging leads to positive thinking and goal achievement”.
He would often start his day by putting on his track suit and going out for a jog, listening to music on his Walkman, with his security staff sometimes jogging alongside him and at other times following on their bicycles.
Sacks was awarded some 18 honorary doctorates, including a Doctor of Divinity, conferred to mark his first 10 years in office as Chief Rabbi, by the Archbishop of Canterbury at the time, George Carey.
Among his many other accolades there was the 2016 Templeton Prize for progress in religion.
He was knighted in 2005 and created a life peer in 2009.
On his battles with cancer – there were three, the first in his thirties – Sacks observed: “I’ve stood eyeball to eyeball with the angel of death and I said, ‘Hashem [God], I leave this one to you.’ I was not afraid on either occasion. I was extraordinarily relaxed … I put my faith in God and the surgeons and both of them did what they had to do.”
Jonathan Sacks was a vegetarian and a family man. “The nicest possible way to end the day,” he said, “is over a game of pingpong with the kids.”
Jonathan Sacks married, in 1970, Elaine Taylor; they had a son and two daughters.
Lord Sacks, born March 8 1948, died November 7 2020