‘If you want to rebuild the Church, make sure the social life of the parish is as active as the spiritual one’

Today’s world is confusing, the cure is to think less about ourselves and more about others, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks tells Michael Kelly

This interview was first published in the March 12 edition of The Irish Catholic. Rabbi Sacks died on November 7, 2020. May his memory be a blessing.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks is one of the foremost religious thinkers in the English-speaking world. Yet, he wears his considerable depth lightly. When we meet in his home in the London suburb of Golders Green, he is warm and hospitable. The first thing one notices in the house is the enormous dining table. Meals and table fellowship play a vital role in the Jewish faith and the Sacks home is no exception.

Golders Green is a self-consciously Jewish community with some 50 Kosher restaurants under rabbinical supervision and more than 40 synagogues and almost as many Jewish schools in the suburb.

Estimated at 291,000, Britain’s Jewish community is the fifth largest in the world. Yet, Jews make up less than half of one percent of the overall population of Britain. This makes Rabbi Sacks’ prominence in British public life all the more interesting and at 72 he shows no signs of slowing down. He is a much-sought-after public speaker and has published 30 books on issues as diverse as the future of Anglo-Jewry, the relationship between faith and science and the place of religion in the public square.

He was Chief Rabbi of the UK from 1991-2013 and in 2016 he won the prestigious Templeton Prize and was commended for spending decades “bringing spiritual insight to the public conversation through mass media, popular lectures and more than two dozen books”.

Baron Sacks is also a crossbench member of the House of Lords and has used his time in parliament to defend marriage and the family and to oppose assisted suicide.

His latest book Morality is published today (Thursday, March 12) and argues that in contemporary society we have outsourced morality to the markets on one hand, and to the state on the other hand.

I put it to Lord Sacks that even a title like Morality is controversial since people now often disagree on what the word even means.

He readily agrees: “I think we’re in a period of great confusion, of great error actually. We’ve been through now a fairly extended period of extreme individualism, and there has been the thought that you can do morality that way. But the comparison I give is: could you decide out of sheer individualism to invent your own language? The answer is, you couldn’t. Because language is a vehicle of communication, which presupposes not only a speaker but a listener, and some form of comprehension between them.

“So you can’t have a private morality any more than you can have a private law or a private language,” he insists.

Lord Sacks sees trust as key to any flourishing society. “I think we’ve been confused and mistaken as to the nature of morality, and of course, what happens then is that there is a breakdown of trust, because trust is really what morality is about: I trust you, you trust me, because we are part of the same society, the same set of rules, and we’re willing, when need be, to put the common good ahead of self-interest. Without which there cannot be a society, let alone a free society,” he says.

Rabbi Sacks is articulating a view that up until relatively recently was not controversial – that morality is an objective thing. In short, that there are discernable things that are either right or wrong and remain either right or wrong whatever the situation.

However, Rabbi Sacks things that the subjectivation of morality has gone so far that the best that can be hoped for – for now – is a sense of morality being a shared project.

“What I’ve argued in this book is not that really strong, that ultimate case that morality is objective. I think for me, right now, that was a bridge too far.

“I’ve argued that morality is something shared. Any institution is bounded by certain rules that are shared. So football has rules that are shared, you can’t just make up your own rules. Are they objective in the sense of, is there a realism about football that in some transcendental realm there’s an off-side rule? There isn’t, but there has to be an agreement. I’m not proposing a specific agreement, I’m hinting at one. Namely, that the West is the West, because it had the Judeo-Christian heritage.

“That was what shaped [John] Milton and [John] Locke, and liberalism in the 17th Century, that is what shaped the emergence of the market economy. Max Weber argued that Protestant ethic in the spirit of capitalism, Rodney Stark has argued for the Catholic spirit, as did the late Michael Novak. So somehow or other, the Judeo-Christian ethic created not some platonic ideal of the only society there can be, but it did create the society that we had, and we’re losing it,” he warns.

For Rabbi Sacks, morality ultimately comes down to making choices and taking responsibility for those choices. “We’ve outsourced the business of making choices to the market. The market tells us we can have whatever we want so long as it’s legal and we can pay for it.

“Sometimes we’ll make bad choices, and we’ve outsourced that to the state. The state picks up the pieces of the bad choices we make. So we’ve split morality into two, and outsourced one to the market and one to the state,” he argues.

A key theme in Lord Sacks’ new book is that for society to become healthier it must move from a culture of ‘I’ to a culture where ‘we’ becomes central once again. He believes that the culture of self-help has gone too far.

“Self-esteem, self-respect, self-fulfilment, self-actualisation, the selfie – almost everything in today’s culture is about me,” he says.

Rabbi Sacks believes this is acutely felt in politics. “We’re looking at the American election, we’re looking at the Israeli election, nobody’s saying, ‘vote for my policies.’ They’re saying, ‘me, me, me. I’m better than that lot.’ So suddenly politics has become about personality rather than policies.

“We have these extraordinary cases of CEOs being paid ridiculous sums, and making very bad decisions, which they’re able to escape from because they have a golden parachute, but other people pay the price for. They’re thinking about I, they’re not thinking about we, what is my responsibility, not just to my shareholders, but also to my employees, to my customers, to the communities where our company works,” he says.

Freedoms

I put it to Lord Sacks that as societies become less religious, they become less collective and more concerned about individual rights and freedoms rather than the common good.

“I think previous generations were educated to the awareness that there’s something bigger than me. There’s something bigger than us, we are connected to something vast in space and time. Our horizons have become very foreshortened, and I think our moral imagination and our spiritual imagination have both become impoverished,” he says.

Social media is so pervasive now, it’s almost impossible to think of a world without networking like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. These are powerful tools, but according to Rabbi Sacks no substitute for real human friendships. “I think what’s happening is that at least some kids are spending their time on social media instead of going out and meeting friends face to face.

“Actually, you do need to meet friends face to face, to make them friends. Somebody’s been doing research on friendship, a new book just out on friendship, it turns out that it needs between 80 and 100 hours of face-to-face engagement to make a friend. You can’t just knock off a Facebook profile or a like or what have you, and think that constitutes friendship.”

He also believes that the key to revival in faith communities is to understand that we need to be there for one another. “If you go today to houses of worship, you will find, certainly the ones I go to, communities that are real communities where they are there for you. If, God forbid, you’re ill or bereaved, or in a state of crisis community is alive and well in those environments.

“But obviously, the place of religion in society has tended to be eclipsed, and nothing has emerged as strong as a place of worship, as a congregation by way of creating communities, nothing. People think you can have a substitute, you can’t. Just like you can’t treat Wikipedia as a substitute for memory, it’s just not the same thing. Your memory is there even if you’re not on WiFi somehow,” he says.

As we meet, the British newspapers are full of headlines about family breakdown. A senior police officer has provoked a conversation by expressing the view that, in his experience, fatherlessness contributes greatly to gang culture.

Lord Sacks sees family breakdown and the consequent isolation felt after a ruptured relationship as a huge challenge. “There’s a raging problem of loneliness in most countries today. In Britain, they’ve appointed a minister for loneliness which never existed before, because it’s become suddenly very, very real.

“Of course, family breakdown has enormous consequences for children. It’s created a whole new form of child poverty, and the government has tried to deal with this financially. But in the end, financial poverty is not the only form of poverty that kids face.

“They’re growing up in very dysfunctional and in some cases abusive families.

“According to the police, that is what is behind this surge of youth crime in London. They don’t have a male role model, and so the only thing that is there for them is to join a gang.

“So that’s really how it works out. Loneliness on one hand, and quite bad youth crime and youth poverty,” he says.

It’s a bleak picture. Are politicians aware of this, I wonder.

“I think they probably are, but they don’t talk about it because they can’t do very much about it. The family, like the words morality and marriage is completely out of favour. But, I just think we’ve got to take a risk of saying stuff that is not politically correct, especially when people are suffering – the very young or the very old.

“Politicians may feel that they can’t say these things, in which case we have to say it for them,” he insists.

As we meet, 100 British negotiators were in Brussels to meet with European Union officials to try and thrash out a post-Brexit trade deal. Lord Sacks believes that British politics is in deep trouble.

“Since 2016 and the Brexit referendum, British politics has, for much of the time, been reduced to fiasco and farce by the yes/no, hard/soft, deal/no deal drama of Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union.

“The government, for much of that time, has failed to present a united front, while the main opposition party showed itself unwilling or unable to confront the highly documented presence of antisemitism in its ranks.

“Both of these phenomena marked new lows in post-Second World War British political history,” according to Lord Sacks.

But Britain is hardly the only liberal democracy that is in trouble. Politicians across the globe have adopted and adapted the concept of alternative facts for their own agenda, I suggest.

“Today what is happening is very, very interesting. Research shows that if people are fed a string of alternative facts, of fake news, they will actually believe the bits that they agree with. The bits they don’t agree with, they’ll say, ‘no, that’s fake news.’ The end result is not only a breakdown of trust, but a growth of extremism, it’s called a confirmation bias. There’s a lot of research on this, especially in the United States. People are actually being quite credulous towards something that confirms their prejudices,” he says.

A lot of research indicates that phenomenon such as the election of US President Donald Trump and Britain’s referendum to leave the European Union came down to people feeling disenfranchised or left out by what went before. I ask Lord Sacks is this is an analysis that he shared.

“I think we’ve got to get back to the we: we’re all in this together. That’s clearly been lacking.

“You’ve got a lot of people who feel that everyone else is being attended, but not us, we’re being left out. There is huge anger, and that gives rise to what’s called populism, and it gives rise to people that they believe are strong leaders in inverted commerce. People begin to get less and less interested in democracy, and more and more interested in strong leadership.

“But strong leadership is always an illusion, because somebody promises, ‘I can deal with this.’ When they get into office, of course, they discover that they actually can’t, because it’s more complicated than you think.

“Then you get a really dangerous politics, you try and ride roughshod over everyone, which is happening in America and possibly to some extent in Britain, we’ll have to see how it goes.

“Those people who feel left out should have been listened to a long time earlier by a lot more people, because it’s quite clear that there are real winners and losers in the global economy. The winners are relatively few and they win very big, and the losers are many and they have not seen any real rise in income since 1970,” he says.

Rising tide

To what extent has capitalism failed? Do people still believe that a rising tide lifts all boats, I ask. His answer is swift: “Anyone can put up with people being successful, if it trickles down and everyone feels, ‘I’m better off now than I was a decade or two ago.’ But they don’t feel that now, so you get into very dangerous politics.

“Liberal democracy is facing its great trial, and it’s going to need leadership that is just a lot more inclusive, that people feel it, that this guy’s interested in all of us. We don’t have many of those politicians right now. This book is really sounding a warning saying that over the next decade, liberal democracy has got to get real about certain things it’s been ignoring for a very long time. One of which is we don’t really have this sense of, we are all responsible for one another,” he says.

Lord Sacks prefers to paint in broad brush strokes when it comes to politics. His focus is always on the bigger picture rather than personalities or party politics. One can often detect hints of criticism of particular leaders, but then he moves back to the broader discussion. As we meet the British Labour party is in the process of choosing a successor to Jeremy Corbyn. Lord Sacks was a vocal critic both personally of Mr Corbyn’s views and his apparent tolerance for anti-semitism in the Labour party.

He said the veteran Labour figure had “given support to racists, terrorists and dealers of hate who want to kill Jews and remove Israel from the map”.

Lord Sacks is stark in his warnings about rising anti-Jewish sentiment in Europe. “Not only am I disturbed by the return of antisemitism, every single Jew I know is disturbed by that.

“This is affecting today every Jewish community in Europe,” he says.

Lord Sacks also believes that a distinction needs to be made between legitimate criticism of policies of the state of Israel – which is not anti-semitic – and attacks on Israel’s right to exist, which is anti-semitic.

“I was in a school a couple of years ago when the children asked, they were 17, 18 year olds, and they asked me, ‘is it anti-semitic to criticise Israel?’ I said to them, ‘how many of you think it’s legitimate to criticise the British government?’ They all put their hands up. ‘How many of you think Britain has no right to exist?’ None of them put up their hands. If it was clear to them, it should be pretty clear to anyone else. Criticism of Israel is not anti-semitic, a calling to question of Israel’s right to exist is undoubtedly anti-semitic.

“This was a state promised in the Balfour Declaration of 1917, ratified by the League of Nations in 1922, and voted on by a two-thirds majority in the United Nations on November 29, 1947. To call into question the right of such a state to exist, and to call into question no other state’s right to exist, many of which are much younger – that’s anti-semitic: anti-semitic in a really, really fundamental and troubling way,” he insists.

Lord Sacks’ time as Chief Rabbi witnesses a flourishing of sorts for Britain’s Jews with the population increasing. It is a trend that has continued and, despite Britain’s increasing secular culture, Rabbi Sacks believes that the voice of Faith still has a vital role to play in public discourse.

“The enormous power of religion, the enormous power of Christianity, is to go among the vulnerable and welcome them in. That’s a very, very moving thing. To my mind, whenever I read the prophets, whoever it is, Amos or Isaiah or Jeremiah, and they’re telling kings, ‘don’t think a country is secure by virtue of its army or its numbers or its economy. A country is secure if and only if there is justice and compassion.’ Only if the widow, the orphan, the stranger are given shelter and food and respect.

“Somehow or other, religion has always drawn its credibility from the acts of goodness that it undertakes, and it has that credibility with everyone. It doesn’t matter how big an atheist you are, somehow or other, if you see a religious person helping the poor, that’s very moving,” he says.

I ask Rabbi Sacks about the flourishing that the British Jewish community has experienced in recent years and whether there might be a lesson for the Catholic Church.

His immediate answer surprises me somewhat. “The fact is, number one, that we took a leaf out of the Catholic book and built a lot of Jewish schools. Many, indeed most of them, associated with a synagogue. That means the children would bring their parents to synagogue, that’s number one, and these synagogues have become much, much more child-friendly places. In some cases, child-centred places, so that’s really, really important”.

He says that religious communities must not be afraid of being counter-cultural to thrive. “You don’t have to be in line with the wider culture, you just don’t. The megachurches in America succeed, and these churches with congregations of 40,000 people, and 25,000 is the average attendance on a Sunday.

“They are offering an alternative culture, one that values altruism, values marriage and the family, values the elderly and the very young. They’ve created an alternative culture, and you have to do this in a very accessible and upbeat way. I don’t think anyone’s going to listen if you get up and do any finger wagging in the wider culture. Everyone knows the wider culture’s there, you don’t need to do anything about it.

“But if you offer a really engaging and energising alternative, people will come. They really will, there are a lot of people who feel lonely today and they would like nothing more than to join the congregation.

“I don’t know what a service looks like in the Catholic Church, I have no idea, but as soon as the synagogue service is over on a Saturday morning, it’s a long service, three hours, there’s a kiddish [celebratory meal]. You sit and you drink and you eat and it’s almost a communal meal. I think that’s a pretty good ‘loaves and fishes’ New Testament direction. So if you want to regain the congregations, make sure that the social life of the church is as active as the spiritual one,” he says by way of advice.

Co-operation

It’s an optimist that has characterised our entire conversation and while Rabbi Sacks’ warnings are in parts dire, he remains upbeat. And his formula is surprisingly simple: “Just realise that an important part of life is co-operation, not just competition. That what often matters is not just self-interest, but the common good. And that we are stronger when the ‘we’ is strong. So any football team of 11 divas is not going to win its matches, but any football team that really works as a team is going to win its matches. So every time there is a really strong sense of the team being bigger than the player, that is when you get the moral sense.

“Do a search and replace operation in your mind, and every time you see the word self, delete it and write other. So instead of self-esteem, other-esteem. Instead of self-respect, other-respect. Just do that, and you’ll find that you will be much happier, your relationships will improve, and you will feel that your life is meaningful in a way that it wasn’t before,” he insists.

It’s surely worth a try.

Morality: Restoring the common good in divided times by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks is out now, published by Hodder & Stoughton.