Jonathan Sacks: A Rabbi Whose Vision of the Jews as a Creative Minority Was a Message to All People of Faith

The former chief rabbi of England, Jonathan Sacks—who died last Shabbat—was, in Mark Gottlieb’s words: “perhaps the last of [an] increasingly rare breed: the orthodox sage on the world stage; counsel to kings, queens, presidents, and prime ministers.” Examining the hopefulness and wisdom with which Sacks confronted the problems of our age, Gottlieb writes:

Although sometimes depicted as a conservative for certain social-cultural stands, in his politics Rabbi Sacks retained classical liberal loyalties. This was true from his days as an undergraduate at Cambridge to his last publication, Morality, released just last month. His principled aversion to political correctness throughout his life is more a token of his classical liberalism and embrace of epistemological pluralism than any purported conservatism, but he also had definite communitarian leanings, evident especially in his philosophically traditionalist The Home We Build Together.

Tellingly, upon taking his seat in the House of Lords after being awarded a lifetime peerage, Rabbi Sacks was a “crossbencher,” avoiding party allegiances to Labor or Conservative lines. For Rabbi Sacks, as his spiritual mentors Rabbis [Menachem Mendel] Schneerson and [Joseph B.] Soloveitchik emphasized, human experience is dialectical and Orthodoxy must always transcend and absorb right and left, conservative and liberal—or even progressive.

Transcending what he viewed as the false alternatives of cultural secession and assimilation to the deepening demands of secular consumerism, relativism, and anomie, Rabbi Sacks powerfully articulated a third way, what he playfully but seriously dubbed the Jeremiah option. . . . Rabbi Sacks . . . argued for the durability and lasting relevance of the “creative minority,” something all people of faith, and not just Jews, must now identify with.

Read more at First Things

More about: Jonathan Sacks, Judaism, Religion

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society