Interview on Desert Island Discs

Kristy Young:

Hello, I’m Kristy Young. And this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive. For rights reasons, we’ve had to shorten the music. The programme was originally broadcast in 1991 and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

Sue Lawley:

(music) My castaway this week is a religious leader. Brought up in an Orthodox Jewish family, he went to the local grammar school in North London, and then to Cambridge, where, like his three brothers after him, he won a double first. His belief in the importance of Judaism was reinforced when he was 19 and Israel fought and won the Six Day War. 10 years later, he qualified as a Rabbi. And now only 13 years after his entry into full-time religion, he has to become very reluctantly, he says the leader of Britain’s Jews. He is the Chief Rabbi elect, Dr. Jonathan Sacks. Reluctance apart, Dr. Sacks, and we’ll come to that later, the other surprising thing about you is that you don’t have a luxuriant and lengthy beard. Is this a new rabbinical trend?

Jonathan Sacks:

Well, I left it in Jerusalem. I’ve just come back from Jerusalem, where I was staying with my family during the Gulf War. And of course in the weeks before the War, we’d been warned about the possibility of chemical attacks. And the rule was, as soon as an alarm goes, go into a sealed room and put on your gas masks. But for those who have beards, gas masks will not fit and please remove your beards. So when the sirens went, everyone else dived for their masks, I dived for my scissors and shaver and remove my beard. My children actually were extremely scared and I was quite worried for them. But when the all clear came and I took the mask off and they saw their daddy for the first time ever without a beard, they absolutely collapsed with laughter. And my wife said, “How romantic. This is the man I got engaged to.” And from that moment onwards, the tension was broken and we were able to be relaxed.

Sue Lawley:

I presume when your wife met you, you weren’t even thinking of becoming a Rabbi.

Jonathan Sacks:

No, that was the last thing in my mind. My great ambition in life was to be an accountant. Is just as well I didn’t become one because I really don’t understand things like that.

Sue Lawley:

It was obviously also something that your parents hadn’t expected of you. You weren’t educated in Jewish schools, were you? I think you went to a Church of England school, didn’t you?

Jonathan Sacks:

I went to a Church of England primary school and to a secondary school called Christ College. Although I have to say that despite its name, 50% of its pupils were Jewish.

Sue Lawley:

All of which though, of course makes you a very unorthodox choice as Chief Rabbi doesn’t it?

Jonathan Sacks:

Well, I don’t like the word unorthodox. Could we settle for unconventional?

Sue Lawley:

An unconventional Chief Rabbi. We should learn more as to why in a moment, but let’s first of all, hear your first piece of music. What’s that to be?

Jonathan Sacks:

Well I’d like the opening of Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde. And the reason is simple. When I was in my teens, my father, who loves music and who is an amateur violinist, tried very, very hard to get me to like classical music and I resisted tremendously, but eventually I did, thanks to him. And this is one of his favourites and it’s one of mine too.

Sue Lawley:

(music). The Drinking Song of the Sorrow of the Earth from Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde sung by John Vickers with the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Sir Colin Davis and memories for Dr. Jonathan Sacks of his father.

Jonathan Sacks:

Absolutely. A memory in particular of the first time that he took me to Israel. He loves Israel very much indeed, and was always telling me that there I would find something different from anywhere else in the world. And I remember that during our visit he took me to a concert of Das Lied von der Erde. And we were going there on the bus and we were sitting near the front of the bus and he was telling me how Das Lied von der Erde was Mahler’s greatest work. And the bus driver turned round and said to him, “Well, actually I think the ninth symphony is better”. And I said, “Dad, you’re right.”

Sue Lawley:

He’s still alive, your father?

Jonathan Sacks:

Yes.

Sue Lawley:

Tell me about his origins though. He was a cloth worker in the East end. What does that mean? What did he do?

Jonathan Sacks:

He sold cloth in London’s commercial road, which was of course the Jewish centre of a generation ago.

Sue Lawley:

Was he born here or was he an immigrant?

Jonathan Sacks:

He came over to this country from Poland when he was two.

Sue Lawley:

And your mother?

Jonathan Sacks:

My mother was born here.

Sue Lawley:

So tell me about family life in the Sacks household. You were the eldest of four brothers.

Jonathan Sacks:

I think we were a very happy family. My mother used to lay down limits, but they always used to be such broad limits that almost anything was possible within them. She used to say to me, when I used to go off to college every morning, “Jonathan, do whatever you like, but don’t give up your Judaism.” And since I had carte blanche to do almost anything, I did absolutely nothing.

Sue Lawley:

And what did they want of you, your parents? What did they expect that their boys would do with their lives?

Jonathan Sacks:

My parents weren’t professional people. They knew that their children would not follow them. They didn’t want their children to follow them into business. And as a result, they didn’t really give us guidance. They left us to find our own way. In my case, that took some years of searching before I eventually found it.

Sue Lawley:

As we shall here, but let’s pause there for your second record.

Jonathan Sacks:

Well, the second record is a piece of music from Jewish prayer, and I’ve chosen the Supreme Moment of Jewish prayer, the Holy of Holies of Jewish time, the day of atonement, and as Jews gather in the synagogue at that supremely tense and traumatic moment, our prayers begin with Kol Nidre.

Sue Lawley:

(music). Kol Nidre sung by Naftali Herstik with the Jerusalem Great Synagogue Choir. So, life in the Sacks home was very traditional, very warm, very sheltered even, would you say?

Jonathan Sacks:

Probably.

Sue Lawley:

So when you went up to Cambridge, the first of your family to do so ever as you say, it must’ve been a huge contrast?

Jonathan Sacks:

Oh, it was stunning. It was sensational. I mean, it was the pulse of the place. It wasn’t so much the timeless beauty though. I loved that as well, but the sheer pulse of so many people with so many ideas, I found that very exciting.

Sue Lawley:

And the people that mixed with you had good rooms, I understand.

Jonathan Sacks:

And I had the rooms that used to be occupied some years earlier by David Frost. And they were amazing because they had huge French windows and they overlooked the croquet lawn. As a result, in my second year, I spent all my time playing croquet and did disastrously badly in my exams. Luckily I got a bad room in my third year and did much better.

Sue Lawley:

And did you enter the debating arena at all?

Jonathan Sacks:

Oh, I used to debate in my first year in the Cambridge Union. I remember one debate where I was paired against a postgraduate who looked – just suspiciously, overweight and balding – who was Clive James, who has, of course remained the Clive James he was then.

Sue Lawley:

So academia suited you all around really. I mean, bits of all of it, you liked.

Jonathan Sacks:

Yes. It’s very stimulating.

Sue Lawley:

And then came the Six Day War, 1967. You were 19. Can you describe the effect that that had on you

Jonathan Sacks:

In the weeks before the war when Israel was surrounded by states who had declared their intention to drive Israel into the sea, the entire Jewish world was riveted on what seemed to be an unfolding tragedy. It looked as if a second unthinkable Holocaust was about to take place, and it made a particular impact on those of my generation who were born after the Holocaust. It made us realise just what Jews had faced the generation before. We suddenly felt ourselves in the same situation again. And all through the university, people who had never identified as Jews before suddenly turned up in the university synagogue. And there was an atmosphere that you could feel, sent shivers down your spine. I mean, we were terrified. And of course, when the war was over in six days, with a tremendous victory for Israel, the release of emotion was something that I don’t think will happen again in my lifetime.

Sue Lawley:

So it awoke you from a kind of complacency about Judaism, but did it do more than that? It sounds as if it took you on further and it transformed you.

Jonathan Sacks:

It planted a seed in my mind that didn’t go away for the next few years, in which I returned to again and again, that feeling that somehow or other there’s very tiny people, the Jewish people who had lived through so much for 4,000 years, now placed an enormous burden of responsibility on those of us who remained. We were very vulnerable. Somebody somehow had to do something about it.

Sue Lawley:

Record number three.

Jonathan Sacks:

Record number three is part of Beethoven’s C-Sharp Minor Quartet Opus One Three One. It was in Cambridge that I discovered the late Beethoven quartets. And ever since, they’ve been for me, the most spiritual music ever written.

Sue Lawley:

The opening of the first movement of Beethoven’s C-Sharp Minor Quartet Opus One Three One, played by the Medici String Quartet. So your religion, Jonathan Sacks, at the age of 19 was transformed. You became increasingly pious, I think, and travelled the world, questioning professors and religious leaders about their faith.

Jonathan Sacks:

When I finished Cambridge, I directly went to a religious seminary, or yeshiva in Israel, home of a group of Jewish mystics. And that was an extraordinary experience, a piece of 18th century Europe transplanted, a kind of scene from Fiddler on the Roof, transplanted to the middle of Israel in the midst of orange groves. And that was a very intense environment. I came back with an enormous beard and a very, very pious look in my eyes. My parents came to meet me at the airport, and they didn’t recognise me at all. Eventually, somebody said, “That coat belongs to our son, therefore the person wearing it must be Jonathan.”

Sue Lawley:

You went into teaching moral philosophy, didn’t you? And then there came this point when you gave it up and decided that full-time religion, to become a Rabbi was for you.

Jonathan Sacks:

There came a moment after I’d been teaching philosophy for a couple of years. When I looked around my contemporaries, all of whom had been through the same experience as myself, and many of them had become deeply religious. But very few of them had actually decided to become religious leaders, to become Rabbis. In fact, none of them had. Now, I felt each of them could have made a better Rabbi than me. There’s a saying in Judaism, when nobody else is prepared to lead, you have to try to lead. And in the end, I said, “That applies to me.” And that’s when I decided to become a Rabbi.

Sue Lawley:

So, in that sense it was a vocation?

Jonathan Sacks:

Certainly. I never felt myself particularly gifted or particularly qualified to be a Rabbi. I did it because I heard some voice calling me to be one.

Sue Lawley:

So there’s also a strong sense of duty attached to it. Is there also that sense of duty attached to taking the job of the Chief Rabbi? Because I said at the beginning, and you have said it several times since you were elected, that you are reluctant to take on that role.

Jonathan Sacks:

It seems to me that if you look through Jewish history, Jews are great individualists. There are many great Jewish leaders. There are very few great Jewish followers. So leading the Jewish people turns out to be very difficult. And I wasn’t sure that I had any particular skills in doing so. But when I was asked, I felt that there really are needs in this community. And if other people have faith in my ability to do something, to meet them, I’ll have to do it.

Sue Lawley:

But you said that you kept hoping somebody else would turn up in the meantime and you wouldn’t have to do it.

Jonathan Sacks:

Absolutely.

Sue Lawley:

Are you still reluctant?

Jonathan Sacks:

Yes.

Sue Lawley:

Of course, I mean, if you follow tradition, you now stay in the role after you’ve taken it up on the 1st of September until you’re 70 years old. I worked that out as the year 2018.

Jonathan Sacks:

Is it? That’s a long time away.

Sue Lawley:

Is that daunting?

Jonathan Sacks:

Well, there have only been five Chief Rabbis since 1845, which means that most of them started young and carried on for a long time. One of the great Chief Rabbis, Dr. Hertz once put it beautifully. He said, “Chief Rabbis never retire and only very rarely die.” So I understand there’s a long road ahead.

Sue Lawley:

Next record.

Jonathan Sacks:

The next record comes from that period of my life that I spent in Israel among the mystics of Lubavitch. It’s called Tzam’a Lecha Nafshi, which is a line from Psalms, which means, “My soul thirsts for you.” (Psalm 63:2) And this comes from the world of East European Jewish piety of the 18th century. The Jewish mystics used to gather together towards the close of the Sabbath and sit around a table and drink vodka and tell stories and sing songs, so as not to end this day of rest and just try and cling hold to the last moments of its sanctity.

Sue Lawley:

My Soul Thirsts For You, sung by the Lubavitcher Chorus, and better with the vodka, you say.

Jonathan Sacks:

Well, you can’t really sing it without.

Sue Lawley:

Now, you are, as we’ve said, a different generation from your predecessor as Chief Rabbi, Chief Rabbi [Jakobovits z”tl]. Can we talk about some of the changes in emphasis that you want to bring about? I mean, are there immediately ones that you can think of?

Jonathan Sacks:

There aren’t changes of emphasis. I think there are changes of temperament. You see, the Jews of my generation were born after the Holocaust. They were born after or around the time of the founding of the state of Israel. Just 60 or 70 years ago, Jewish life was concentrated overwhelmingly in Europe. Today, Jewish life is concentrated overwhelmingly in Israel and America. The whole Jewish world has changed, and some of our sentiments and habits have changed. I think we’re less mournful as a people. We’re more happy. We’re more self-confident as a people. Jews are prepared to be recognised as Jews.

Sue Lawley:

The other way, of course, in which you’re different from your predecessors is that you’re very British. I mean, prominent Rabbis, again for generational reasons, have been slightly foreign in accent and in style. You’re very English, aren’t you?

Jonathan Sacks:

Well, I grew up here. I love England. I think to be a Jew for the last 1,800 years is to learn how to be yourself and faithful to your Jewish heritage while somehow or other interacting with another culture. In my case, that’s an English culture that I grew up in, and I’m very attached

Sue Lawley:

Are you any different from your predecessor in your attitude to the role of women in Judaism, I wonder. Because they are excluded from so much aren’t they, as I understand it, from that which takes place in the synagogue?

Jonathan Sacks:

Well, I have a strong attachment to Jewish women. My mother was one, my wife is one, and my daughters are too. And therefore I feel for them, especially for my daughters, that they should have a Jewish education that is fully equal to that of my son. That Jewish girls and Jewish women should not feel excluded from the most fundamental act of all of Jews, which is to study our own heritage and to feel oneself to be a master of it. And that really is something that I will work on very hard once I become Chief Rabbi.

Sue Lawley:

Do you believe that Jewish women should be allowed to sit in the body of the synagogue, for example?

Jonathan Sacks:

I don’t, for this simple reason. That there is a point at which men and women mixing are a certain kind of social atmosphere, simply distracts from the unmediated intensity of prayer. In prayer, I want to speak personally to God, and I don’t want to feel that in some way I’m part of a social situation where I have to be self-conscious. And that’s why Orthodox Jews have always believed that the sexes should pray as it were physically separately, although as part of one congregation.

Sue Lawley:

So the women will remain in the gallery?

Jonathan Sacks:

The women will remain in the gallery. And I believe they will find that they can pray much more easily if they pray as women, rather than as some hybrid that is neither male nor female.

Sue Lawley:

Some more music.

Jonathan Sacks:

Well, my next piece is simply the most exciting piece of music that I know, the First Movement of the Brahms Violin Concerto.

Sue Lawley:

Part of the first movement of Brahms Ciolin Concerto, played by David Oistrakh, with the Orquesta Nacional De La Radio Difusion Francesa, conducted by Otto Klemperer.

One of the main problems, Dr. Sacks, presumably for British Jewry as I understand it, is the contraction of Jewish communities, falling birth rates and marrying out, Jews marrying gentiles. What do you say to the young Jewish boy who’s fallen for the beautiful gentile girl. Do you say, “You cannot marry her, it is wrong.”

Jonathan Sacks:

I would try and sit with him and just trace through that incredible line of ancestors, all of whom might have made the choice not to carry on the heritage to the next generation. 200 generations of that young man’s ancestors had against all odds survived and lived and had faith as Jews. And I would honestly ask him would he want that 200 generational tree to die with him.

Sue Lawley:

But if, then, it were your own son sitting in front of you, weeping buckets and saying, ‘But, father, I love her. She is my life.”

Jonathan Sacks:

Yeah. What would I say? That is the tragedy, which I think is avoidable. If we educate our children so that Judaism is the most important thing in their lives, then it will surely be the most important thing in their marriages.

Sue Lawley:

So you don’t believe because of the education you have given your son, that he would even arrive at that point? He would not allow himself to fall for a Gentile?

Jonathan Sacks:

Yes. I would never want a child of mine to feel, “There is an act I couldn’t do because it would give my father pain.” I would say I would wish him to feel, “There’s an act that I can’t do because it would give me pain.” And that’s what I’ve tried to teach my children, not very well, but I hope well enough for them to sensed something of what I’ve sensed in Judaism.

Sue Lawley:

Do you have, do you think, Dr. Sacks, a dilemma in the sense that you are a very human person. You are a liberal thinker, you’re a broad minded man. You’re a moral philosopher. You are someone who will quite naturally see two sides always of an argument. And yet you are about to become Chief Rabbi, where you will be required to take a line always, to know exactly what the answer should be and is.

Jonathan Sacks:

Well, there’s this famous story, which sums up the rabbinical dilemma about the bickering husband and wife who come to a Rabbi for advice. And the wife tells a story to the Rabbi and the Rabbi says, “You know you’re right.” And then the husband comes in and tells the story. And the Rabbi says, “You’re absolutely right.” And the disciple of the Rabbi turns to him and says, “How can they both be right?” And the Rabbi turns to the disciples and says, “You’re right.”

I don’t think I’m going to take that view. I try very hard to understand and respect positions that are different from mine. But that doesn’t mean to say I don’t have an absolute conviction that there is truth and falsity, that there is good and evil. I don’t think all things are true, I don’t think all things are relative.

Sue Lawley:

Record number six.

Jonathan Sacks:

Record number six. I’ve chosen just to remind me of the things most precious in my life, my wife and my children, and the wonderful times we have together around our family table. And here is one of the songs that we love singing, Am Yisrael Chai, The People Israel Lives.

Sue Lawley:

Am Yisrael Chai, The People Israel Lives, sung by Shlomo Carlebach.

Perhaps in the face of all these problems we’re discussing, Dr. Sacks, Chief-Rabbi-Elect, you may like the idea of escaping to a desert island.

Jonathan Sacks:

Comes as a great relief.

Sue Lawley:

What do you envisage you do there all day?

Jonathan Sacks:

Well, I didn’t know. I sure will have to learn to look after myself, which will come as a novelty to me. I should think that’ll keep me quite busy for the first week or two.

Sue Lawley:

Is there a practical man in there as well as the moral philosophy?

Jonathan Sacks:

Oh, well, there is. I am severely practical when I have to be, but on no other occasion. I’m a reasonable carpenter. I’m a pretty terrible gardener, but I think I could cultivate some plants. Probably wouldn’t have the patience to fish, but I may well be forced to.

Sue Lawley:

Haven’t you got your own desert island at the bottom of your garden in Golders Green in the form of a hut that you disappear to?

Jonathan Sacks:

Well, I’m a bit offended you should call it a hut, it’s a magnificent brick-built study. But it’s absolutely a desert island, that’s where I go away to think and write. And it’s totally cut off from the world. I should think it’s rather more isolated than the desert island.

Sue Lawley:

And will music be an escape to you? I mean, obviously these records that you’re taking with you to the island mean a tremendous amount, but do you use music in that sense? Can you put on a record and go somewhere else in your head?

Jonathan Sacks:

Oh, music isn’t an escape for me at all, music is for me a way of re-engaging with the world. I sometimes, in fact quite often, feel quite depressed at the sheer difficulty of some of the tasks that I’ve set myself. And whenever I fall into that kind of temporary despair, music just lifts me up and allows me to go back fighting into the world.

Sue Lawley:

Let’s have some more of it then.

Jonathan Sacks:

Well, my seventh record is the piece of music of all, which never fails to cheer me up whenever I’m feeling low. Ravel’s String Quartet.

Sue Lawley:

Part of the first movement of Ravel’s String Quartet in F Major by the Chilingirian String Quartet. You take over in September, Dr. Sacks. Is there an official ceremony, an induction or…

Jonathan Sacks:

Yes, I am inducted on the 1st of September this year, and that’s when I officially take over from Lord Jakobovits.

Sue Lawley:

But in the midst of your very proper modesty about being elected to take on the role and your reluctance in taking on the job that we’ve discussed, is there also a degree of pride? There must be, that you can confess to it, having been chosen to follow in such a distinguished line?

Jonathan Sacks:

No, I don’t have pride, simply a sense of the responsibility of the future of many Jewish lives depending on my leadership.

And I certainly don’t intend doing it alone. I intend doing it with people. Because really the strength of Judaism is not the strength of its Chief Rabbis. It’s the strength of its individual families and individual members. So I want this to be a very grassroots, a very-close-to-the-people chief rabbinate.

Sue Lawley:

Your last record.

Jonathan Sacks:

Well, the last record is Kel Moleh Rachamim, the Jewish memorial prayer of the dead, and this particular recording has a history to it.

It’s sung by a cantor called Sholom Katz, who was imprisoned and taken to a concentration camp during the Nazi regime. He, along with 2,000 other Jews, was ordered to be shot and killed. And before that, the Nazis ordered this group of 2,000 people to dig their own graves.

Sholom Katz stood with his colleagues in front of his own grave. He made one request of the German authorities, that he be allowed to sing the prayer, the memorial prayer for the dead. He sang it and the camp officials were so impressed with his voice that they spared his life. He was liberated from Auschwitz and sang this song in memory of the 6 million Jews who had fallen. In it, are all the tears and all the faith of Jewish history.

Sue Lawley:

Kel Moleh Rachamim, the memorial prayer sung by Sholom Katz. I wonder which one of those eight records you would choose as being most essential to you in your isolation on the desert island?

Jonathan Sacks:

Tzomo Lechah Nafshi, My Soul Thirsts For You. Quite simply, I hope one day something like that would be my epitaph, that his soul thirsted for God.

Sue Lawley:

And your book, we supply the complete works of Shakespeare and the Bible.

Jonathan Sacks:

Well, many books have influenced my life, but the book I would choose, without shadow of doubt, to take on a desert island is the Talmud, the greatest of all works of rabbinic literature work, which has kept the greatest Jewish minds occupied for the last 1,500 years. It’s a very big book. It comes in 20 large volumes. I suppose I’d only be allowed one, would I? Or can I have all 20?

Sue Lawley:

Oh, difficult. 20 volumes? I mean, does it come bound in one?

Jonathan Sacks:

You can get them printed very small, bound in four volumes, if necessary, in one. I’d settle for that, if that were possible.

Sue Lawley:

You might have to make do with a small print, right?

Jonathan Sacks:

Ah, then I shall be happy on the desert island for years.

Sue Lawley:

And a luxury. Perhaps you’d have a bottle of vodka to drink with your record you’ve chosen?

Jonathan Sacks:

No, I would choose, if I could, an extremely large supply of pencils and I could then do what it’s always been my ambition to do, to write a commentary in the margins of the Talmud, that I should have added my own commentary to the Jewish heritage.

Sue Lawley:

Dr. Jonathan Sacks, Chief Rabbi Elect. Thank you very much, indeed, for letting us hear your Desert Island Discs.

Jonathan Sacks:

Sue, many thanks.

Speaker 1:

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