‘Talks at Google’ with Rabbi Sacks

Tim Chatwin:

Hi there. My name’s Tim Chatwin. Thank you all for joining today. It gives me great pleasure to have the opportunity to talk to Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, who has written a fascinating book which we’ll be talking about a lot, Morality.

Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks served as the Chief Rabbi in the United Kingdom and the United Hebrew congregations of the Commonwealth from 1991 until 2013, and has held a number of professorships at universities in Britain and the United States and Israel, and is the author of over 30 books, which is incredibly prolific but also a huge contribution to the intellectual landscape across the world.

So please join me in welcoming Rabbi Sacks.

Rabbi Sacks:

Tim. Great to be with you.

Tim Chatwin:

Hi there Rabbi Sacks, great to see you. How are you doing?

Rabbi Sacks:

Yeah, okay. Early on during lockdown, my rather mischievous brother in Jerusalem spoke to me on the phone and said, “Jonathan, you’re the only one who’s not going to be bothered by this because you’ve been practising self-imposed isolation since you were born.”

So I’ve kind of been quite happy with it, but really thrilled at the possibility of communication locally and globally, because I think the electronic media, this was and is their finest hour.

Tim Chatwin:

Yeah, no, I think that’s right. And I think there’s a lot that we could cover there. And reading the book and sort of many of your articles and interviews that you’ve done, it makes it feel like the book was sort of planned for the pandemic in that sense. It’s very timely. But I wondered if you could first kind of help me understand what led you to writing this book. What was the process?

Rabbi Sacks:

I felt things were coming apart. I sensed that in Britain. I sensed it in America, because I was doing a fair amount of teaching for five years in America. I sensed it in the fact that we no longer seem to be comfortable in talking across differences.

Now, talking across difference is the very essence of an intellectual civilization. You can’t actually move forward without being able to listen to the people who disagree with you, and hope that they listen respectfully to you.

So that was deeply, deeply worrying, but I could also see lots of other stuff. Post truth, fake news, identity politics, unequal economics, loneliness, isolation, teenage depression, you name it. We went right through the list in the book. And the question I asked, and it took me several years to try and struggle my way through is, are these a lot of discrete phenomena, or are they all symptoms of one thing like climate change? Climate change can translate itself into extreme heat in one place, extreme cold in another, storms in another, drought in another. And yet they’re all part of the same thing, the destruction of, as it were, the earth’s ecology.

And I came to the conclusion in the end that all of these things, they have different logics to them, but they were all symptoms of one great thing which I called “cultural climate change,” which is the loss of the idea that we need a common, moral core to society. I don’t mean that society should tell us how we should run our sex lives or anything like that, but I mean the basic sense that we are collectively responsible for the common good.

And more and more and more and more, life was being reduced in Britain and America to two kinds of competition; The market, the competition for wealth, and the state, the competition for power. And in competitive situations, it’s all about me, my interest, getting there first, trying to make sure that I get my share and that you don’t take it from me.

Now, competition is fine, but it’s only fine if it’s counterbalanced by an arena of cooperation. And what I was seeing was the progressive wearing away of that arena, and the end result was society getting more and more conflictual.

Tim Chatwin:

Yeah. So you’ve talked about that idea cultural climate change. Does the parallel exist then? We’re struggling to deal with culture, with climate change, and to get sort of agreement on global progress. Is the same true here, that it will be hard to make progress against this cultural climate change?

Rabbi Sacks:

No, I don’t think so actually. The second that you decide to act in an altruistic way, you help a neighbour who may not be able to get out and do their shopping for them, or you phone up the isolated and the alone, or you a volunteer the way three-quarters million people in Britain volunteered in the space of two days to help the NHS, every time you do good, in that sense, you discover what’s terribly important. That just as Coronavirus pandemic, bad things are contagious. So good things are contagious. And every single act that we do helps to make a little bit of contagion of good, of altruism, of human care.

Tim Chatwin:

Yeah. Okay. Because you’ve certainly said that it’s your job to cheer people up, I’ve heard you say in different interviews. But if you didn’t make it to the end of your book, you could feel quite concerned about the loss of a moral foundation. So-

Rabbi Sacks:

It’s totally miserable book for three-quarters of the way through.

Tim Chatwin:

It’s a brilliant analysis. It’s a brilliant analysis that the trends that you’ve spotted, but it’s-

Rabbi Sacks:

I need to explain something to you, Tim, otherwise you won’t understand it. There was a very bright English Don at Cambridge called George Steiner. And George Steiner once made a really fascinating distinction between a prediction and a prophecy. He said, “If a prediction comes true, it has succeeded. If a prophecy comes true, it has failed.” In other words, Jeremiah, Jonah, Jonah gets up and says, “In 40 days, Nineveh will be destroyed.” Well, of course everyone takes him seriously. They all repent, and Nineveh is spared.

So, a prediction is telling you what’s going to happen. A prophecy’s telling you what’s going to happen unless, and you only do a prophecy because you are going to end with hope.

So really, when you do a kind of prophetic book, you warn people of the dangers that lie ahead, and then about a quarter of the way into the end you say, “But actually we can stop this happening if we do X, Y, and Z.”

So it’s a kind of prophetic book, and it’s not a kind of genre that is terribly normal these days, so I can understand people getting depressed, but actually every prophet of doom in ancient Israel was also a prophet of hope. And to them, I hope there’s the book ends with hope. I hope so.

Tim Chatwin:

Yes. And there is optimism sort of led through it as well. It’s just that the analysis is tough and true.

And one of the constructs that you talk about in the book is this idea of I/we construct. So perhaps for people who haven’t read the book, could you explain what that is?

Rabbi Sacks:

Yeah. One of the things that Darwin understood, one of the things that all evolutionary psychologists understand, is that for any life of any sophistication, even prehuman life, you need two things: You need competition and you need cooperation. Individuals have to look after themselves, otherwise they don’t survive. But individuals only survive, social animals only survive, if they’re members of groups. And when they are members of groups, they have to be altruistic. They have to put the interests of the group above their own private interests.

And that is the we consciousness, which is written into the human brain. It is even written into the brain, believe it or not, of fruit bats. Because fruit bats can’t be sure always, of finding food. So if a fruit bat finds food, he brings it back and shares it with the other bats, because he hopes and expects that they’re going to share their find with him when the time comes.

So altruism is written into all social animals. And therefore we think of the we, of the group as a hole, and I’m afraid our contemporary culture, this is what’s cultural climate change does tend to discourage us from thinking about the we.

Tim Chatwin:

Yes. And I think that the experience of lockdown has provided us sort of extreme version of I, think for many people. Where you’ve been, we’re in our modern lives, we’re so busy, we’re always filled, we’re listening to the next Podcast, we’re rushing to the next meeting. And actually, I’ve personally found that I’ve been slowed down and left with my own thoughts more often. And in some way it’s made me realise that there is too much I. And actually I crave more of that we, but it’s not there in modern society quite often.

I don’t know, would you agree with that, that idea that perhaps people have had it sort of amplified?

Rabbi Sacks:

100%. I didn’t think that I would get depressed during lockdown, but I did and I have. And most people I know have, because we are starved of that incredibly important thing, face-to-face contact. It’s part of the very essence of who and what we are, and we’ve been starved of it and therefore we feel very, very low.

I think the late John McCain front from the states who was what, a prisoner of the Vietnamese, I think, for about five years.

Tim Chatwin:

Yes.

Rabbi Sacks:

And tortured, tortured, tortured. But he said that the torture was not the worst thing at all. It was the second worst thing, but it wasn’t the worst. The worst was solitary confinement. And that of course, in small sense, is what’s been happening to all of us during the pandemic.

And therefore, one of the things I’m going to try and do within our Jewish communities is as the lockdown eased, and we’re not going to force the pace, but as it’s eased, I am going to ask all our communities to put extra double effort into establishing and strengthening those bonds. Let’s identify everyone in our communities who’s been on their own. Let’s really, really try and weave them back into the fabric of community. I think that’s a very, very big act of redemption we have to do over the next few years.

Tim Chatwin:

Yeah. And you mentioned that here in the UK, the volunteers on the NHS and around the world, there’ve been these sort of surges. And I think hopefully now there is a demand to contribute to the community that we can keep momentum up on, because it has been lacking I think.

Rabbi Sacks:

There’s something huge here, potentially. I wish I could be sure that it was going to happen. I’m not. We have had for decades now, the call to bring back national service as a way of relating all the bits of Britain or America to one another, because we’re all in our little silos and our little ghettos. And I can tell you for a fact that in Israel, which is a country that has national service, which is nonetheless a fissured and fragmented society, what that national service

Rabbi Sacks:

… service does it really does make friends across those divides. I’ve seen it with my nephews and my niece. At their weddings, their closest friends are the people with who they served on national service. And those friends are completely different backgrounds, ethnically, religiously, everything. Now we are going to have a generation of young Brits and young Americans who are going to find it very hard to get a job for the next couple of years, as the economy is pretty much, almost, in free fall. At the same time we’re going to have enormous needs for things like testing and tracking. 300,000 people minimum to actually do that, at least in the states. Now, if we could only marry those two things. I can’t imagine any other time before or afterwards where national service would make so much more economic and social sense. It would avoid the real sense of frustration and even despair among a generation of young people. It would induct that generation into working for the common good. And I just think, this is an opportunity that really should not be missed.

Tim Chatwin:

Yeah. I think it’s a very interesting idea. I think also we’ve seen young people robbed of their rites of passage as well. Whether that’s your A-Level results or your opportunity to leave school in some celebratory way. So yeah, there’s a generation that doesn’t have that rite of passage right now. And so I think replacing it with something else… In the U.S they’ve had the peace Corps for many decades and that was a successful rite of passage for many people. So, yeah, that’s right.

Rabbi Sacks:

What we have here… I think, the nearest. I’m not sure if it is the nearest but it’s good, is teach first.

Tim Chatwin:

Right.

Rabbi Sacks:

And that’s really impressive. But that’s relatively small numbers, I think.

Tim Chatwin:

Yes. Yes. Another idea you talk about in the book is the difference between contracts and covenants. And there’s lots of conversations at the moment about the altered social contract. Do we need to rewrite the social contract? Should we be writing a new social covenant instead? How should we think about that?

Rabbi Sacks:

Well, it’s interesting. Covenant was the key word that led to the free societies of the worst. It began with the Calvinists. And so the first place where it became real, politically was in Geneva and then in Holland, and then in Scotland. And then around the 1620s in both England and America. England, certainly in the form of John Milton, who was steeped in the Hebrew Bible. Paradise lost, of course, is based on the Hebrew Bible. But I mean, he is a man who did huge numbers of translations of the [inaudible]. I mean, he was totally, totally biblical in his political theory. In America it was the Mayflower compact of 1620, which was a covenant, not a compact. It was the most famous early speech in American political history. John Winthrop aboard the Arbella in 1630.

And so covenant was the word in the 16th and 17th century, which spoke about the moral basis of a free society. And which, for the first time, said you don’t need to bind a society together by everyone having the same religion and anyone who didn’t have that religion wasn’t a full citizen with rights. What John Locke is doing is saying, “Forget about religion, just talk about morality.” And so all of that was part of European culture or, at least, Calvinist Europe. And it was the transformational moment in Western political history.

But it tended to disappear quite fast in England after the settlement of 1688. We don’t hear very much. We are not in England a covenant society. But it stayed that in America. America remains covenantal, explicitly or implicitly. In other words, what they basically do is tell the story, which turns out to be the story of the book of Exodus with England being the Egyptians and Georgia the third being the wicked pharaoh and the Atlantic Ocean being the Red Sea and they escape from England to America and make a covenant. And that covenant is defined very clearly in Lyndon Baines Johnson’s inaugural address of 1965.

But it’s there also in the declaration of independence. And it’s there in the Gettysburg address, which is that America is a moral enterprise dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain rights among them, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. GK Chesterton joked about this and he called America a nation with the soul of a church. But the fact is that America succeeded, pretty much until recently, by this idea of covenant and the key words of American politics are covenant words. Namely, “We the people.”

Now, you know and I know, Tim, that nobody in Britain ever uses the words “We the people” because it’s not “We the people.” We are her majesty’s loyal subject. I mean, this is not a covenant thing at all. This is top-down authority. But covenant is sideways authority. It says we come together to achieve these ends for all of us together. Now I find that the best politics ever. And when I see America losing it, and boy is it losing it, I get very sad.

Tim Chatwin:

And so in that… In the section “Democracy in danger”, you seem to be saying that it’s impossible now for politics to deliver in a society where it’s all about I and where people aren’t bought into that covenant. So can, and it’s not often I get to talk about Rousseau, but there was that idea of, we have to force people to be free. We have to force them to engage, perhaps, in that covenant. What does that process look like?

Rabbi Sacks:

You know, at his request, I officiated at the funeral of Isaiah Berlin. So you will know he was not impressed by Rousseau forcing people to be free. I mean, to be fair to Rousseau, he’d been dead for a while before the French revolution. I mean, I don’t blame him for that. So, but I mean, force people to be free is the ultimate prelude to tyranny. And therefore don’t go anywhere near there. The fact is that, to my amazement, I think I mentioned this in the book. Ray Dalio, one of America’s richest men and the owner of the most successful hedge fund in the whole of America. So Ray Dalio is a pretty capitalist guy and Ray Dalio in April of 2019 called the income in equality in America, an existential threat to the future of the United States.

What I am picking up here, there, and everywhere. I mentioned some people in the book, [inaudible] Rajon, the former economic advisor of the world bank and Sir Ronald Cohen, Britain’s first venture capitalist. And what they’re saying is our current situation of capitalism is not going to work. And these capitalists, they really are, but they’re saying that things have got very, very skewed. And I know many, many very successful business people who feel the same thing. So I don’t think we’re going to need to force people to be free. I think we’re going to have to listen to some very wise people who are economists or business people and who are telling us that this is unsustainable.

Tim Chatwin:

And I think, yeah. And I think that’s absolutely right. I think one of the other trends, though, that you touch on is that we’re losing our ability to disagree. And so in that process, there will be lots of hard truths for people and listening is not necessarily something that comes natural to people these days. So, have we lost that ability to disagree? Do you think we can listen to one another again?

Rabbi Sacks:

Isn’t that what we’re doing right now, Tim?

Tim Chatwin:

Well, I would hope so.

Rabbi Sacks:

I mean, the fact is that in a non listening age, the prize goes to the best listeners. I mean, just do the contrarion thing. What did Warren Buffet used to say? When everyone’s selling buy, when everyone is buying then sell. I think there’s a huge opportunity right now, using the technology that we’re using right now and using podcasts and all that kind of thing to establish real, genuine searching conversations and people will listen. They really will come and listen. I’ve made it my business, for instance, as a religious leader, to hold big public conversations with the best atheists I can find. Whether it’s Richard Dawkins here in Britain or Steven Pinker in Harvard or the late [inaudible] in Israel. And those have been glorious conversations. I mean, really, really glorious conversations. And so, I think the hunger for conversation has not diminished one little bit.

Tim Chatwin:

Yeah. I think that’s right. And I think that the… There was a phrase which I now can’t find in my notes. Where actually, I think you were referring to your wife, which is that we learn the most from the people who are most different to us. So is that it? That we need to find ways, perhaps through technology, of getting people together who do actively disagree?

Rabbi Sacks:

Yeah. I said about my wife and my dead dog. It’s the people not like us who make us grow. And I have to give you an example of this, which is not my wife because my wife is just so… I don’t compare her to anyone. But it’s just great because she’s nice and I’m not and she’s cheerful and I’m not. And all the good things in life. That’s what she has brought into marriage and into our family. But my goodness me, when I began my doctoral research, my supervisor was the late Sir Bernard Williams. And Bernard Williams was an atheist, but I mean, a really, really brainy atheist. And I had just got very religious and it was a weird, weird relationship. But I loved every minute of it because he was very respectful towards me. And in the end… The end was that I learned more from him than almost anyone else because not everything he said was tied to atheism. So I really, really learned a lot from him. And I make it my business, really, to read the opposition.

I’m sure that in the book, Morality, I quote Nietzsche more than anyone else. Now, in case you didn’t know, Tim, Nietzsche was not an Orthodox Jew. I mean, he could not be more hostile to any and everything I stand for. But because Nicha was a really, really stunningly bright human being who told it the way it is, when you really listen to Nietzche, you learn a great deal from him and you don’t have to agree with him at all.

Tim Chatwin:

Yeah, I’m afraid my brain is spoiled by Monty Python. So I can never think about Nietzsche without that song running through my head. But anyway-

Rabbi Sacks:

[inaudible] one I can’t remember that one.

Tim Chatwin:

There’s nothing Nietzsche couldn’t teach her.

Tim Chatwin:

So we’ve touched a bit on technology. Imagine you had the chance to talk to an audience that might be made up of people from a large American technology company. What role can technology play in this change?

Rabbi Sacks:

Listen, I think there’s a very, very important general picture, which might help us think about where we are now. I believe that the most profound changes in civilization occur when there is a revolution in information technology. Other revolutions change something, but information technology revolutions change everything. The first revolution obviously was the invention of writing in Mesopotamia four and a half thousand years ago. And that was the birth of civilization because it meant for the first time, knowledge could be accumulated that was larger than the scope of a single human memory. The second revolution, even more important, I believe, was the invention of the alphabet. The invention of the alphabet took this huge numbers of symbol sets of Mesopotamian cuneiform or Egyptian hieroglyphics, and reduced it to 22 characters. That’s the first alphabet, proto Semitic alphabet, 38 centuries ago, the earliest form of Hebrew and alphabet made possible for the first time, the concept of universal access to knowledge, and that raised the dignity of the human person unprecedentedly.

And that goes hand in hand with the birth of monotheism. The one God faces the one human being, and endows both with significance. The next change, well, probably the codex, the book. Now, the codex was invented long before Christianity, but Christians were the first people who really used the codex. Greeks and Jews both used scrolls. And the way a codex works, the way book works with pages is completely different from the way a scroll works. And so you have, for instance, four gospels. You would never have that if you only had a scroll. So, the codex leads to Christianity. The invention of printing leads to the reformation and the birth of the modern, all the rest of it.

And so we go all the way through national newspapers, which is the birth of nationalism, to radio, which suddenly gives enormous power to the dictator, or at least the very prominent leader, whether it’s Roosevelt or Churchill, or as it were on the other side, Hitler. And then you suddenly get the revolution we are into at the moment whose classic example obviously is Google. And we thank you for the hospitality. The truth is it’s true, which has done as it were the ultimate in democratising access to information. It is in that sense, the culmination of four and a half thousand years of development.

All of these things are really, really important for human equality and human dignity, because I believe that knowledge and access to it is the basis of human dignity. Now, obviously during the pandemic, these electronic media have come into their own. And one of them is Google classroom, which has allowed most of our schools to function. So, what we are on the brink of here is a general understanding that we are now in a new world in which electronic communication will take its place with direct face-to-face human communication. And the question will be, what will be the spiritual transformation that will happen? Because all the others had spiritual consequences. And it’s too early to say, but I would definitely say watch this space because this may be the most important thing that’s happened in the last year.

Tim Chatwin:

Fascinating. One other thing that’s happened in the last year is this is the Black Lives Matter movement. And I wonder if in some ways, if that moved from we to I, because it helps us deal with some of the issues around Black Lives Matter so long as we can move back to we again, because it allows people to introspect and perhaps criticise the we groups that existed in the past. I don’t know. Have you thought about that at all?

Rabbi Sacks:

Look, it’s a really, really difficult one because you know, my ideals and my dreams were formed by that friendship, if you like, between Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy, the two of whom were assassinated within three months of one another in 1968. In fact, Robert F. Kennedy, when he heard the news of Martin Luther King’s assassination, gave an impromptu eulogy, which is one of the finest speeches of the 20th century. He gave a much more formal speech the next day, but there was something very special there. And what happened between those two men was that this was all about let’s do this together. Martin Luther King was challenging white America to live up to the ideals of white America, and that made it so very special and moving and within the great traditions of Abraham Lincoln. And so now that kind of approach has been supplanted, I think, by a lot of anger and therefore we have a therapeutic issue to deal with straight away, straight away.

When there is real anger in the body politic, you have to lean into it. You have to listen to it and show that you are listening to it. Otherwise, all you get is violence and violence is not going to do Black Lives Matter any good at all. So, it’s a really, really tough one. And for heaven’s sake, Tim, you know that you can be sitting at the very heart of 10 Downing street and you still not entirely sure what is the right thing to do. So, if we’re sitting here in Britain wondering about Black Lives Matter in America, I think we have to have the humility to be able to say, I really do not understand the depths of this. And it would be flip of me to offer any kind of practical solution.

Tim Chatwin:

Right. Which I think takes us back to that idea of the ability to listen, which many people have lost. Before I run out of time, it would be remiss to talk about, I’d love to hear your views on rising antisemitism around the world, because it is obviously a present issue, not just in the UK, but in politics around the world and it must connect with much of what you’re talking about as well. What do we do?

Rabbi Sacks:

Antisemitism in this case is a dependent variable, not an independent variable. The antisemitism floating around right now has got nothing to do with Jews. It’s got to do with political turbulence. And when there is political turbulence and antisemitism follows as night follows day. When people feel a sense of loss, they’ve lost economically, they may have lost their jobs, they’re not sure where the world is going, they’re not sure whether politicians are listening to them. And when that happens, any group can ask one of two questions. It’s an either/or, you can’t ask both. Any group that feels a sense of loss can either say, what did we do wrong? Or it can say, who did this to us? And if it asks the second question, it’s going to find somebody to blame. And the candidate of choice for the last thousand years has been the Jews. So that’s why it’s happening.

Tim Chatwin:

So it’s about making sure that people can ask the right questions. Okay.

Rabbi Sacks:

A hundred percent. When masses of people are into conspiracy theories, we’re in trouble.

Tim Chatwin:

So I think we were starting to have some questions coming in, so I’ll keep an eye out for those. Earlier on, you talked about that we can tackle this in the way that we can tackle climate change by individually altruistic changes. What would your advice be for an individual on how to live a more moral life?

Rabbi Sacks:

Volunteer? One of the things I did in the course of research for the book is discover, to my amazement, the sheer health benefits of volunteering. Extraordinary. You feel better psychologically. You actually become better physically. Your immune system is strengthened. It’s called the helper’s high, and it’s a remarkable thing. And, if more and more people do volunteer, more and more people do join charities, do join communities that are reaching out to the isolated and so on, they’re going to be doing good for everyone. The people they are helping, the society as a whole, and themselves. So, that’s why and how.

Tim Chatwin:

Great. Well, simple, brilliant. Well, I think we have some questions ready to come and they will pop up on the screen. Here we go.

What role do you think social media is playing in dividing people along moral lines? Does it amplify people’s compulsion to pick sides rather than being open to all argument?

Rabbi Sacks:

I don’t want to be mean to social media. They’re a disaster, as far as that is concerned. We have something called the confirmation bias. We believe the views that agree with us and the social media make this possible. What used to happen, for instance, the BBC does, it’s called broadcasting. It means that you communicate with lots and lots of people who are very different from one another. What social media do is narrowcasting. It’s communicating with people who by and large have the same views as you. And Cass Sunstein of Harvard has done a lot of research on this, that if you associate electronically or personally with people whose views are the same, then you and they will become more extreme. So, just because of the phenomenon of narrowcasting, the social media are increasing divisiveness in society.

Tim Chatwin:

So again, perhaps that comes down to asking the right questions, seeking out the people that, that you disagree with to hear their views.

Rabbi Sacks:

A rule in life that I’ve observed ever since I wrote my first book was always read the opposition and I commend that.

Tim Chatwin:

I think that’s very good advice. Brilliant. Let’s see the next question.

So from Hearshoe, how much is increased competition due to decreased cooperation versus the decline of previously dominant ethnic, economic, religious power centres? Doesn’t democratisation always involved power struggle?

Rabbi Sacks:

Democratisation always involves power struggle. The beautiful, beautiful thing about the liberal democratic state is that it allows power struggles

Rabbi Sacks:

Struggles to take place in nonviolent ways. And likewise, the market economy, which is about the pursuit of wealth. Again, the market economy, although it’s full of selfishness, as it were, is also unparalleled, in its capacity to encourage creativity. Without the market economy, without competition, we wouldn’t have Google, we wouldn’t have Microsoft, we wouldn’t have Apple, we wouldn’t have Amazon. So these two things, are very competitive and they’re very creative. What I’m talking about is not democratisation. I’m talking about the pre-political virtues, the things that have to happen in order for democratisation to proceed in a fair, just, and gracious way. And that is basically the moral infrastructure, the moral climate, if you like. Democracy always will be competitive and conflictual, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Tim Chatwin:

I think that’s right. I heard a lot here in the UK, Laura Shaughnessy on Radio 4 a few weeks ago, talking about democracy and just, it’s all right to disagree with one another. So long as you can eventually agree that you’re going to reach a goal. So that competition is okay, because it forms the beautiful sculpture, the better policy, or the better, whatever it is, that the end goal or assess.

Rabbi Sacks:

Right.

Tim Chatwin:

Is there another question? There we go, from Lorna. “Do you think more needs to be done within education systems to emphasise how much difference should be celebrated and different perspectives can help shape your own values and ideas?”

Rabbi Sacks:

100%. I can’t imagine education functioning, without that actually. Can I just tell you something that’s sort of very Jewish, but nevermind. In ’69, I graduated from Cambridge. And we had in Cambridge this thing, the university library where, if you coughed, you were kind of sent into exile in Siberia, the quietest thing you could imagine. After graduating, I went for a few months to study in a rabbinical seminary in Israel, and you could hear the noise of the study hall from, 400 yards. Everyone was standing up and arguing with one another, because the Mishnah and the Talmud, the classic Jewish texts, I once said, Judaism is the only culture I know all of whose canonical texts are anthologies of arguments. So in Judaism to think is to argue. And that’s how you educate somebody.

That’s how actually we educate somebody. We get them to replay some of the great arguments of 2000 years ago. And each student has to take a certain position among the people who actually did argue 2000 years ago, and then they have to do the whole thing again, but taking a different position. So they’re actually learning the skill, of what it is to see something from this perspective and argue from that perspective, and at the same time to see things from a different perspective, and argue from that different perspective. That contains an enormous amount of intellectual flexibility, and actually, I think that flexibility is what we need right now, because the world is full of clamour, a very sharply held and very different beliefs. And I think it becomes terribly important to be able to enter into each of those serially, and your ability to enter into different positions, does not in my view, compromise your ability to come to an independent position, as to who is right and who is wrong, but everyone is a voice in the conversation.

Tim Chatwin:

Great. Yes. Brilliant. Thank you. The, I think we have another question then from Anne. So, “How can we change the approach of people in our communities, particularly political leaders, who lead from “I”, and not “We”? (Thinking of how you recently described politics as “What should we do?”)”.

Rabbi Sacks:

That is a incredibly good question, because, politics is in great danger of becoming a personality cult. And I can’t think of anything more unattractive. It’s not what democracy is about. Democracy is not about following the charismatic leader. It’s about listening to the will of the people. So I think somehow or other, we have to bring back, loudly and clearly, the concept of political leadership as service. The leader serves the people. The people do not serve the leader. And you will know Tim as well as I, that it wasn’t that long ago, when people did indeed think that way. And, you and I, I think probably have been very moved by the fact, that we have known people at the very top of the political ladder, who at the end of the day knew full well, that they were only servants of the people.

Tim Chatwin:

Right.

Rabbi Sacks:

And that they were there to serve some interest, far larger than their own.

Tim Chatwin:

Yeah, I think that’s absolutely right. And a great answer to that question. We have a question from Sam. “Judaism relies on communal/family experiences and Google thrives on teamwork and a spirit of “Googleyness”. What advice would you give to Google and your community to thrive in this era of lockdown?”.

Rabbi Sacks:

I’m sure you noticed this Tim, but the sheer flourishing of creativity, which appeared almost as soon as lockdown began. There were families recording YouTube videos, lip syncing to this and acting out that, and doing funny sketches. And, I don’t have enough time to watch all this stuff. So I really can’t tell you what happened, but it was great stuff. I mean, really, really great stuff. And all I can say is Britain’s got talent. As far as we’re concerned, within the Jewish community, virtually every community I know, has created all sorts of virtual engagements, synagogue magazines through Zoom. It’s kind of around interviewing people and, and profiling people, and really allowing people to learn a little bit about the people, who’ve been sitting opposite in them, in the synagogue for 25 years, but they never knew who they were, and suddenly, wow! With this, the synagogue magazine, now I know who they are.

There have been creative use of Zoom for services of various kinds, stunningly creative use of Zoom for educational purposes, adult education. I have been teaching audiences right around the world, pretty much fairly nonstop since the beginning of lockdown. So, this is become one of the great periods of creativity. And I’ve no doubt, that a lot of it is going to last.

That said, if you need X, you need 10 people to constitute a quorum for Jewish prayer. 10 people gathered together by Zoom, do not constitute a quorum in Jewish law. Jewish law says, you’ve got to actually be there in person, physically, for it to count. So while being creative, on these electronic media, we have been keeping as far as we could, a real synagogue services is going, obviously much limited, but by keeping them going. And that second fact, should remind us that, electronic communication is never a real substitute, for the real thing, when it comes to personal psychology, the touch of two selves. But, I do think people have been very, very creative during this period. And what of that is going to last? I don’t know, but quite a lot of it is.

Tim Chatwin:

Brilliant. Rabbi Sacks, thank you so much for spending time with me today, and for answering these questions. I can highly recommend this book “Morality”. It was a Sunday Times bestseller here in the U.K., and published in the U.S., last week on the 1st of September. So please do go out and get your hands on a copy, and read what is such an incisive analysis of the world today. Thank you very much.

Rabbi Sacks:

Thank you.