Getting Critical with Rabbi Sacks

By DANIEL SEPTIMUS

TO HEAL A FRACTURED WORLD
The Ethics of Responsibility
By Rabbi Jonathan Sacks
288 pages. Schocken. $25.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks has been chief rabbi of Britain since 1991, and in that time he has published 15 books. This would be prolific for a full-time writer, and it's almost supernatural for a scholar with such an active public life. The books are impressive for another non-literary reason, as well. They suggest that not only does Rabbi Sacks find time to write, he finds time to read. Rabbi Sacks engages contemporary scholarship in a way that is unfortunately unique in the Orthodox Jewish world today.

To be fair, Rabbi Sacks' books are somewhat repetitive. His frames of reference change, but his arguments and ideas are packaged with a sense of déjà vu. Still, the ideas he repeats are positive and productive. He espouses a theology that is tolerant, intellectually engaged, and humanistic.

In his latest book, To Heal A Fractured World, Rabbi Sacks continues his appeal for a thoughtful, morally inspired Judaism. "Judaism contains mysteries, but its ultimate purpose is not mysterious at all. It is to honor the image of God in other people and thus turn the world into a home for the divine presence."

To Heal A Fractured World is, above all, about responsibility, and from the outset Rabbi Sacks' Judaism is one in which Jewish responsibility extends to all of humanity. Judaism is concerned about the image of God "in other people" not just Jews. It wants "the world," not just the Jewish community, to be filled with the glory of God.

Rabbi Sacks' writing is visionary and utopian, and it might even be prophetic if it didn't lack one fundamental aspect: critique.

Rabbi Sacks too often merges the prescriptive and the descriptive. His Judaism is compassionate and meaningful, but it doesn't acknowledge that there are people presenting other—less laudable—visions of his faith. He writes about what should be as if he were writing about what is. That there is work we need to do and ideas we need to fight before we can describe Judaism in such gushing terms is lost in the shuffle.

For example, early in To Heal a Fractured World Rabbi Sacks writes that, "Jewish ethics is refreshingly down-to-earth. If someone is in need, give. If someone is lonely, invite them home. If someone you know has recently been bereaved, visit them and give them comfort."

As a prescription for Jewish life, this is a praiseworthy goal. But it is misleading as a description of Jewish ethics. Judaism is not nearly so straightforward in its moral calculus. Rabbi Sacks might want Judaism to be humanistic and universal but that doesn't mean it is: Traditional Judaism certainly makes distinction between helping Jews and non-Jews.

This miscue is even more extreme because Rabbi Sacks introduces this part of the book with a discussion about Maimonides, who in some circles is hailed as the gentile-hater par excellence. One Maimonidean source should suffice in highlighting the folly of Rabbi Sacks' reductionism.

In his legal work Maimonides writes: "As for Gentiles with whom we are not at war… their death must not be caused, but it is forbidden to save them if they are at the point of death; if, for example, one of them is seen falling into the sea, he should not be rescued, for it is written: 'neither shalt thou stand against the blood of thy fellow'—but [a Gentile] is not thy fellow" (Mishneh Torah, Laws of Murder 4:11).

This is a far cry from Rabbi Sacks' "If someone is in need, give." Additionally, I doubt we can achieve the ethical vision Rabbi Sacks dreams of without honestly confronting the darker corners of Jewish tradition.

Rabbi Sacks isn't any more critical of his contemporaries. In discussing Jewish morality, he duly notes the biblical laws that take care of the poor. Farmers were required to leave the corners of their fields and their forgotten sheaves for the less fortunate. In the sabbatical year, all debts were erased. "In these ways and others," writes Rabbi Sacks, "the Torah established an early form of welfare state."

One would hope this understanding of the laws would be unanimous, but it isn't. In fact, a recent article in the Jewish journal, Azure, expressed a contrary position.

YosefYitzhakLifshitz's “Foundations of a Jewish Economic Theory” (registration required) is an extreme capitalist defense of property rights from a Jewish perspective. In a shorter version of the article published in the New York Jewish Week, Lifshitz wrote: "Under no circumstances, then, does Judaism absolve the poor of responsibility for themselves through the redistribution of wealth. As opposed to classical Christianity, Judaism views the property of the wealthy as entirely theirs and subject entirely to their whims. Even in a society marked by vast differences in income, the poor have no legal claim against the wealthy."

The idea seems absurd in light of the above-mentioned laws, but Judaism has enough texts to create a theological narrative around most ideologies. Today, as many Jews are more secure than ever in their financial situation, it makes sense that an economically conservative theology of wealth might arise.

I certainly cannot fault Rabbi Sacks for failing to disagree with a specific article, but I can—and do—fault him for continuously presenting his Judaism as the Judaism, thus not critiquing the Jewish community where it falls short of his values.

It may be unfair to criticize an author for the book he or she did not write, but the same does not apply to communal leaders. Leaders should be held accountable for their sins of omission. Rabbi Sacks writes beautifully about responsibility. Given his position and his knowledge it is his responsibility to be a prophet, not merely a cheerleader.