it possible to achieve what he calls integration without assimilation, where each community contributes to the common good in its own unique way? He finds the answer in a Torah-based concept of society. When the people of Israel stand before Mount Sinai, Rabbi Sacks writes: Moses brings them God’s proposal, and asks them, in effect, to decide whether to accept it or not. The fact of choice is fundamental, for the Bible portrays God not as an overwhelming force but as a constitutional monarch. The supreme power makes space for human freedom. There is no justified government without the consent of the governed, even if the governor is the creator of heaven and earth . . . God makes space for human freedom and invites an entire people to become, in the rabbinic phrase, “His partners in the work of creation.” The Bible, Rabbi Sacks claims, has universal significance for human society: The story of the Bible is the tangled tale of the consequences of God’s fateful gift of human freedom. Faith, or more precisely, faithfulness, is born where the freedom of human beings meets the freedom of God in an unconstrained act of mutual commitment. That is why historically, wherever the Hebrew Bible has made an impact on political life—usually in some form of Calvinism—it has done so in the name of “a new birth of freedom.” This citation In crisis, the wrong question to from the Gettysask is, “What have I done to deburg address resserve this?” The right one is, onates with “What am I now being summoned American politito do?” Each of us has a task. cal thought, to be Every life has a purpose. We can sure, but it is still bear the pain of the past when we remarkable for discover the future we are called the world to be on to make. instructed on the universal value of “Answering God's Call,” Huffington Post, the Biblical May 18, 2013. covenant by a rabbi who sits in Britain’s House of Lords. In a chapter entitled “A religious defense of liberal democracy,” Rabbi Sacks concludes, “Earthly authority is subject to overarching ethical imperatives. No earthly power is ultimate. That is the great religious contribution to liberty.” And Rabbi Sacks adds this remarkable assertion: “The concept of the moral limits of power is more important to freedom than is democracy. For democracy contains within it a fatal danger. Tocqueville gave it a name: the ‘tyranny of the majority.’ A majority can oppress a minority. The only defense against this is to establish the moral limits of power . . . Biblical politics is limited politics—the political of liberal democracies, not of the Greek city state.” Here we see a clear distinction between Torah insights and run-of-the-mill secular political science, which emphasizes the mechanics of the democratic process rather than the overarching principles that govern it. As the American Orthodox Jewish philosopher Michael Wyschogrod argues, “To discuss theological criteria for the constitution of a secu-
lar republic runs against the grain of modern political thought, even though constitutional restrictions on popular sovereignty imply reliance on an authority that is greater than human.” Rabbi Sacks makes the startling claim that the covenant between God and Israel at Mount Sinai has universal applicability to human affairs, and that the Jewish experience is normative rather than idiosyncratic. It is a deeply rooted understanding of politics that offers a religious alternative to the impoverished thinking of modern secular society. The unique circumstances of his office gave Rabbi Sacks a bully pulpit, but he has brought to that pulpit an encyclopedic command of Western thought, profound Torah scholarship and a boldness of expres“Judaism is the refusal to give sion. The role of way to despair.” rabbi as public intel“The Case for God,” BBC1, first aired lectual, pioneered by September 6, 2010. Rabbis Jakobovits and Sacks, might be transplanted to America. At Yeshiva University, for example, Rabbi Meir Soloveichik leads the new Zahava and Moshael Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought. (Rabbi Soloveichik, who gave the benediction at the 2012 Republican National Convention, writes on rabbinic thought and American democracy.)
TO SAVE THE FUTURE, R E M E M B E R T H E PA S T !
THE HOLOCAUST A HISTORY FROM A JEWISH PERSPECTIVE BY CHARLES SARWAY
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Fall 5774/2013 JEWISH ACTION 17