How Jonathan Sacks’s Wisdom Can Help America Rebound

Pick
Dec. 20 2023
About Jonathan

Jonathan Silver is the editor of Mosaic, the host of the Tikvah Podcast, the Warren R. Stern Senior Fellow of Jewish Civilization, and the Chief Programming officer of Tikvah.

Some 50,000 soldiers serving in the IDF will soon receive a booklet, titled “Why I am a Jew,” that contains a chapter from Rabbi Jonathan Sacks’s book Radical Then, Radical Now. That the late British chief rabbi’s words have such appeal to young men and women on the frontlines is testimony to the power of his words for the Jewish people, whose fate now lies in these brave soldiers’ hands. But Sacks also possessed an unrivaled ability to share Jewish wisdom with the world at large, and that ability is the subject of this essay by Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver:

Freedom, the capacity for self-rule at the heart of the American ideal, thus expresses itself ambiguously. At times, liberty seemed a natural right, endowed to all men by their Creator. But other voices . . . suggested that liberty was not a right but a precious and hard-won achievement, the result of moral formation, a learned discipline that draws on classical and biblical resources considerably older than the American constitutional order. . . . [N]o one would convey that older and more capacious understanding of human freedom more eloquently than the British lord and chief rabbi of the United Kingdom, the late Jonathan Sacks.

Silver focuses on two addresses that convey these ideas:

Taken together, these two speeches suggest precisely what is needed for freedom in America to rebound: we must recover the arts of family formation, which not only bring love and life into society but also impress upon parents the sort of generational perspective they need to take responsible civic action. And we must be willing to do this in opposition to a culture that has mistaken liberty for license and that encourages us either to indulge shallow pleasures or at least to dull our pains. Sacks can help us recover the biblical truth that it is possible to erect structures of inner freedom even on the shores of Babylon.

Read more at Acton Institute

More about: American society, Freedom, Jonathan Sacks

Egypt Is Trapped by the Gaza Dilemma It Helped to Create

Feb. 14 2025

Recent satellite imagery has shown a buildup of Egyptian tanks near the Israeli border, in violation of Egypt-Israel agreements going back to the 1970s. It’s possible Cairo wants to prevent Palestinians from entering the Sinai from Gaza, or perhaps it wants to send a message to the U.S. that it will take all measures necessary to keep that from happening. But there is also a chance, however small, that it could be preparing for something more dangerous. David Wurmser examines President Abdel Fatah el-Sisi’s predicament:

Egypt’s abysmal behavior in allowing its common border with Gaza to be used for the dangerous smuggling of weapons, money, and materiel to Hamas built the problem that exploded on October 7. Hamas could arm only to the level that Egypt enabled it. Once exposed, rather than help Israel fix the problem it enabled, Egypt manufactured tensions with Israel to divert attention from its own culpability.

Now that the Trump administration is threatening to remove the population of Gaza, President Sisi is reaping the consequences of a problem he and his predecessors helped to sow. That, writes Wurmser, leaves him with a dilemma:

On one hand, Egypt fears for its regime’s survival if it accepts Trump’s plan. It would position Cairo as a participant in a second disaster, or nakba. It knows from its own history; King Farouk was overthrown in 1952 in part for his failure to prevent the first nakba in 1948. Any leader who fails to stop a second nakba, let alone participates in it, risks losing legitimacy and being seen as weak. The perception of buckling on the Palestine issue also resulted in the Egyptian president Anwar Sadat’s assassination in 1981. President Sisi risks being seen by his own population as too weak to stand up to Israel or the United States, as not upholding his manliness.

In a worst-case scenario, Wurmser argues, Sisi might decide that he’d rather fight a disastrous war with Israel and blow up his relationship with Washington than display that kind of weakness.

Read more at The Editors

More about: Egypt, Gaza War 2023