Conversation with

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks on cancel culture, restoring morality and Israel’s missed opportunities

BY LAURA E. ADKINS

(JTA) – Jonathan Sacks, the former chief rabbi of Great Britain, has written dozens of books about religion and politics – but he also believes that mixing the two leads to “terrible politics and even worse religion.”

It’s a tough line to toe, especially when – that there are certain loves that are

you’ve just written a book highlighting the decline of fundamental values in society that for most of human history have been inextricably linked to religion.

In Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times, Sacks makes the case that society has undergone what he calls “cultural climate change,” in which individualism has eroded collective morality. As with meteorological climate change, he argues, there are forces fueling a dangerous shift – he points to social media as a leading one – but there is also time to avert disaster.

The way to become moral, Sacks writes, is both simple and a great challenge: “We need direct encounters with other human beings. We have to be in their presence, open to their otherness, alert to their hopes and fears, engaged in the minuet of conversation, the delicate back-and-forth of speaking and listening.”

The Jewish Telegraphic Agency spoke with Sacks, Great Britain’s top rabbi from 1991 to 2013, about how that vision squares with “cancel culture,” how Israel embodies the ethos he wants to advance (and how it doesn’t), the role of religion in morality and novelist. Another is Steven Pinker – Steven or Robert Putnam of Harvard. These are

other issues raised in his book, which was released by Basic Books in the United States on Sept. 1.

The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

JTA: Your new book argues for moving from an “I” to a “we” mindset. What are some guidelines for engaging with those that we love who also espouse views that we find harmful?

SACKS: Dealing with people who espouse views different from our own – isn’t that the typical Jewish family? Other people have conversations; we have arguments. But with “cancel culture,” we’re losing a sense of being able to talk to the people with whom we disagree.

I think this extraordinary thing that Judaism brings into the world – of course, nowadays everyone associates it with Christianity – but it’s Judaism who says God is our father, is a relative. Some people have God as a friend; we have God as family. The first thing that God tells Moses to say to Pharaoh is that Israel is his firstborn son. And God relates to us even though we have views that he regards as

That is the existential nature of family unconditional, even while you reserve the right to argue strenuously against those views. It’s really disturbed me, you know, that people nowadays say the views are more important than the family. That’s a real error of priorities.

JTA: I’ve been thinking a lot about the idea of Jewish peoplehood. It doesn’t seem clear that there are so many things that unite the Jewish people today in terms of central values that all Jews can agree on. Does the Torah even have a clear, singular morality in your view, or some common threads we can all agree on from the beginning?

SACKS: When it comes to talking about Jewish unity or Jewish peoplehood, talk is cheap. I think you have to walk the talk. And that’s why, for instance, I’ve always had public conversations with people who really

RABBI JONATHAN SACKS AND HIS BOOK “MORALITY.” (COURTESY OF THE OFFICE OF RABBI SACKS)

reject every single thing that I stand for.

One of them was the late Amos Oz, the is the thinking person’s atheist, right? And I love Steven. We feel this bond of Jewishness between us. And I have that with David Brooks of The New York Times, or the American philosopher Mike Sandel, abhorrent.

people with whom I have a real bond, despite the fact that their approaches to Judaism are often totally and absolutely different from mine.

You have to have these conversations, in public as well as private, and show it can be done. And I think it makes an impact when it’s done.

When Jonathan Haidt wrote The Coddling of the American Mind, his publishers asked me to help him launch the book. So we had a big event in the West End of London. And one of the panelists at the event, a professor of Black studies, kept saying, very adamantly, that Britain is built on and inextricably entwined with racism, colonialism and genocide. This is a fairly alienating thing to say. Most of the audience members knew that they weren’t personally racist or genocidal. And after half the evening, I said to myself, this is just plain boring.

So I turned to him directly and I basically said, look – if I had been born in the circumstances in which you were born at the time when you were born, I think I would have the same attitudes as you have. How can we take that anger and do the antifragile thing, turn those negative energies into positive ones? Let us see if we can think through from those attitudes toward a better future.

Some individuals in the audience told me that there was a palpable shift in the audience at that point. They actually noted that instead of these two sides hurling abuse at one another, it was a little moment in which somebody showed he was willing to cross the divide and enter into the mindset of somebody who thought that I was a racist, a colonialist and a committer of genocide. So I just sensed the power of saying “OK, guys, let’s get beyond this. Let me try and understand the world through your eyes. And let us see if we can walk forward together.” And I don’t see enough of that being done in today’s world.

JTA: You have written that cancel culture has gotten out of control. But it is often legitimate anger and grievances that motivate the impulse to suppress individuals or ideas. What is a better model for dealing with anger and grievances, especially when debate of the kind you described isn’t possible?

SACKS: There are times when cancel culture-type attitudes are entirely appropriate. They are a very, very brutal weapon, but sometimes you need that if you’re absolutely going to change attitudes.

I think the response to the issue of sexual harassment was entirely justified, for example. I think the Black Lives Matter protest against the killing of George Floyd, apart from the rioting, which I think had all sorts of strange people getting involved, was justified.

I think anger is sometimes a necessary weapon. The Rambam rules that anger is never justified, ever. But, he says, sometimes it is permitted to look as if you’re angry. [Laughs] Because that is the thing that makes an impact on people.

When anger erupts in a body politic, there is quite often a justified cause. But then the political domain has got to take that anger and deal with it very fast.

You have to acknowledge that there were certain cultures of systemic sexual

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