With the recent death of Jonathan Sacks, the former chief rabbi of Great Britain, the Jewish people lost one of their foremost leaders and teachers. But to Meir Soloveichik, Sacks’s greatest legacy might have been in his ability to convey Judaic ideas to people of other faiths and of no faith at all. Soloveichik writes of the man he calls “the most gifted voice for biblical belief in his time”:

Britain gave the contemporary world two of its most influential atheists, Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins. And it was the same nation’s chief rabbi who developed the most forceful response to them. . . . Sacks wrote that for all their fame as critics of traditional religion, the New Atheists lacked “the passion of Spinoza, the wit of Voltaire, the world-shattering profundity of Nietzsche.”

Europe’s embrace of secularism, Sacks noted, was followed by a refusal to have children. “Europe is dying,” he bluntly observed in 2009. He said this was an unspeakable truth but he said it all the same. And because he always spoke in a measured manner, without antagonism, his voice reverberated. In the 20th century it was Communism that posed the greatest threat to people of faith. Several European leaders capably made the case against it. In 21st-century Europe, contemporary secularism continues its societal march, and it was Sacks who most ably stood atop the rhetorical religious ramparts. Who will take his place?

In her eulogy, Sacks’s daughter Gila described how, immediately after her father’s death, she turned to his most recently published reflections on the Torah passage read in synagogue that Sabbath. Jews around the world will continue to read his exegetical insights and learn from his remarkable mind. In this we will find consolation. But for other Europeans of faith whose greatest intellectual defender is now gone, what has been lost may well be irreplaceable.

Among those Sacks influenced were not only Christian and post-Christian Westerners, but also many Muslims, as Ed Husain writes:

Rabbi Sacks brought philosophy and theology together in a modern conversation on how to live as people of faith, with love for God, but also as loyal components of the modern world. The prophets came to teach us how to live in reality, not leave it.

In this pursuit, he was a pioneer and many Muslims in the West—and, more recently in Morocco, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan—have turned to the rabbi’s books, online videos, recorded conference appearances, and social-media clips. For a long while, his books were contraband. [But] many imams and Muslim activists saw in Rabbi Sacks’s writings a deep divine wisdom, the critical spirit of Aristotelian philosophy.

Stephen Daisley writes about the slaying of Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim:

Yaron and Sarah were murdered in a climate of lies and vilification and hatred. . . . The more institutions participate in this collective madness, the more madness there will be. The more elected officials and NGOs misrepresent the predictable consequences of asymmetric warfare in densely populated territories, where much of the infrastructure of everyday life has a dual civilian/terrorist purpose, the more the citizenries of North America and Europe will come to regard Israelis and Jews as a people who lust unquenchably after blood.

The most intolerant anti-Zionism is becoming a mainstream view, indulged by liberal societies, more concerned with not conflating irrational hatred of Israel with irrational hatred of Jews—as though the distinction between the two is all that well defined anymore.

For years now, and especially after the October 7 massacre, the call has gone up from the pro-Palestinian movement to put Palestine at the heart of Western politics. To pursue the struggle against Zionism in every country, on every platform, and in every setting. To wage worldwide resistance to Israel, not only in Wadi al-Far’a but in Washington, DC. “Globalize the intifada,” they chanted. This is what it looks like.