For Jews and for Gentiles, Jonathan Sacks Was a Prophet Who Warned of the Dangers of Secularism

Nov. 16 2020

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.

Read more at Wall Street Journal

More about: Jewish-Christian relations, Jewish-Muslim Relations, Jonathan Sacks, Judaism, New Atheists, Secularism

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