Jonathan Sacks (1948–2020)

When Great Britain appointed Boris Johnson as prime minister, I took a screenshot and sent it to my husband and asked him who it reminded him of. His response was "Britain has one too??? As time passed, it became apparent that appearances were not the only similarities. But, as Sacks points out in this book, our unnaturally blond-thatched leaders are also not the only struggles our two nations(or, indeed, the Western world itself) face.

Our shared issues include:

-Global Warming
-Shattered show more Families
-Decline of Civility
-Rise in violence, racism, and hatred
-Our inability to see and care for the Other
-Unethical Businesses
-A Rise in Inequality
-Increased Loneliness
-Increased Victimisation

Somehow, they are all woven together to make one cohesive worldview. I particularly liked his reasoned indictment of inequality and capitalism. Not that he believes that Socialism(Marxism) works---don't accuse me of false advertising. His argument is rather that capitalism is created for a certain type of society and, where it may have functioned well in the past, given our current circumstances we are not that type of society.

Superb synthesis of years of personal research and observations, reasoned so that---even when you disagree---you at least understand. It was a book to be savored, which I did for over a month. I'm rather devastated that it's over.

Published in Great Britain as COVID19 was just barely crossing the continent, the US version (published months later) has the bonus of an added introduction and ending sections. I highly recommend that version. Fingers crossed that it isn't his final project and that he gets to finish that commentary on the books of Moses that he was talking about.

Jan 2021 update:

I'm heartbroken that this will be his last official book. But, more so, I'm wary for the future of our dialogue regarding our shared spaces as a society and a world. We have lost a powerful, brave, and courteous voice that was always loyal to the truth that he knew and lived. There is already a hauntingly empty space in my online social media feed. show less

Jonathan Sacks' The Great Partnership, while not short and very far from simplistic, is very readable. His basic premise is that "Science takes things apart to see how they work. Religion puts things together to see what they mean." He argues lucidly and persuasively that the two are complementary, rather than conflicting, and that it is when people use one in the place of the other that things go horribly wrong.

"Both are necessary, but they are very different. … Whole civilisations made show more mistakes because they could not keep these two apart and applied to one the logic of the other.

"When you treat things as if they were people, the result is myth … Science was born when people stopped telling stories about nature and instead observed it; when, in short, they relinquished myth.

"When you treat people as things, the result is dehumanisation: people categorised by colour, class or creed and treated differently as a result. The religion of Abraham was born when people stopped seeing people as objects and began to see each individual as unique, sacrosanct, the image of God.

"One of the most difficult tasks of any civilisation - of any individual life for that matter - is to keep the two separate, but integrated and in balance. … Things are things and people are people. Realising the difference is sometimes harder than we think."

After setting out his basic case, he systematically explores a number of themes including: finding God, human dignity, political power, freedom, morality, relationships, Darwin, the problem of evil and when religion goes wrong.

Sacks argues - rightly - that his argument related primarily to the monotheistic, Abrahamic faiths as a group, but also to each of them individually. While he obviously draws predominantly from the Jewish scriptures and traditions, he does a good job of considering Christianity. However, he doesn't really cover Islam sufficiently well to prevent that becoming an afterthought, which is a pity. Sacks focuses heavily on relationship and covenant at times, and therefore probably needed to consider the Islamic conception of man's relationship with God in contrast to those of Judaism and Christianity.

It is, despite Sacks' efforts to the contrary, a book very much centred on Judaism. There's a helpful summary of rabbinic thought included for those who are unfamiliar with historical Jewish teaching on creation, evolution and the age of the universe. As someone whose understanding of Genesis comes very much from the Christian interpretation, and predominantly the Protestant evangelical tradition, I found Sacks’ analysis of the Jewish perspective on what the book is trying to say enormously helpful. And not merely of the creation stories: Sacks’s analysis of the stories of Abraham and Joseph, as well as of the book of Esther, are both a useful contribution to the book and an interesting insight into the Jewish scriptures.

Where Sacks really shines is his ability to set out his argument clearly, in small blocks, and put those blocks together to create a larger narrative which says something important about the world, science and religion. To do, in other words, precisely what he is claiming that religion does and ought to do. But his argument is as deeply grounded in philosophy as it is in the Jewish scriptures - as is to be expected from a philosopher rabbi.

This is, above all, a thought-provoking book. It is a book—and an argument, and a narrative—which needs to be pondered and wrestled with, rather than assessed on a simple, binary true/false basis. In that, it both embodies its own argument, and repays the effort.

(Also, for further examination of the problem of confusing people and things seen from a slightly different perspective, see Terry Pratchett's Carpe Jugulum.) show less

A remarkable piece of writing. Rabbi Dr Sacks is a consummate communicator, and in To Heal a Fractured World he takes his reader deep into the heart of Jewish and indeed human ethics. This is not a book whose readership should or could be limited to Jewish practitioners: underlying the ethos of the entire volume is the belief, stated early in the text, that "Unless the holy leads us outward toward the good, and the good leads us back, for renewal, to the holy, the creative energies of faith show more run dry" (9). With that premise in mind Sacks leads us on a masterful tour through the thoughts of figures from Plato to Beethoven, Yeats to Piaget to Nietzsche to Girard to ... and above all though a sort of applied Moses Maimonides, though the texts of the Hebrew Bible, through the great thoughts of ethicist literature, through the dark labyrinths of the holocaust, into the challenge of being a decent human being. This could be a compulsory text for every practitioner of compassion, regardless of creed, faith or a-faith: this is a spiritual masterpiece. show less

One of the advantages of an e-reader is that you can perfectly check how many times a certain word occurs in a book. In this case, Jonathan Sacks uses the word 'morality' more than 500 times, roughly twice per page. He literally slaps you in the face with it. There is nothing wrong with that, unless the author does not properly explain what he means by that word. And that is somewhat the case here.

Jonathan Sacks (1948-2020) was a prominent voice in the field of societal responsibility. For show more decades he was Chief Rabbi of the Jewish Community in the United Kingdom, and in that capacity also a member of the House of Lords. In other words, someone who was constantly acting on the public stage. And that is clearly noticeable in this book, where he examines the loss of a common morality in our modern society. Using a striking image he speaks of a 'cultural climate change': universal moral values have given way to relativism and 'devaluation' of the common good.

Sacks analyzes how it has come to this, in a very detailed argument, where the emphasis is on the bad consequences of individualism gone too far, and with the cultural revolution of the 1960s and postmodernism in a leading role. He occasionally suggests that the loss of a common moral pedestal threatens to degenerate into decadence and decay, with the obligatory reference to the end of the Roman Empire. Sacks clearly couldn’t avoid the dangerous cliff of the clichés. Moreover, this example makes it clear that he primarily has in mind the social, unifying function of morality. In that sense, his concept of morality is closely related to Emile Durkheim's concept of religion. Hence the suggestion by some reviewers that the title of this book should have been on what is now the subtitle, namely 'restoring the common good in divided times'. By the way, the term 'common good' only appears about 80 times.

It should therefore come as no surprise that at the end of his book Sacks argues for a new covenant, a commitment by citizens in a society to appreciate that collective good, to respect other opinions and try to look for the middle ground, knowing that our society has become far more complex and diverse than, say, 100 years ago: “We can no longer build national identity on religion or ethnicity or culture. But we can build it on covenant. A covenantal politics would speak of how, as a polity, an economy and culture, our fates are bound together. We benefit from each other. And because this is so, we should feel bound to benefit one another. It would speak about the best of our traditions, and how they are a heritage we are charged with honouring and handing on to future generations. It would be warmly inclusive. A nation is enlarged by its new arrivals who carry with them gifts from other places and other traditions. It would acknowledge that, yes, we have differences of opinion and interest, and sometimes that means favouring one side over another. But we will never do so without giving every side a voice and a respectful hearing. The politics of covenant does not demean or ridicule opponents. It honours the process of reasoning together. It gives special concern to those who most need help, and special honour to those who most give help.”

Of course, I can only adhere to such a plea against polarization; it is a necessary condition to help to build up a rightful society. But at the same time it isn't a sufficient one, it’s very clear that it stops short of offering real and helpful proposals to reach that middle ground, of offering a positive project. In other words, Sacks’ discourse remains stuck in vagueness, only pleading for a general kind of tolerance. So, despite its commendable perspective and its discussion of pertinent issues of our society, this book did not live up to its expectations. Maybe that’s also because it also leaves a lot to be desired in terms of form: at various times you seem to be reading a general intellectual treatise, a collection of interesting but divergent reflections, rather than a book focused on a central topic. show less