Dealing with insults

Last night Beit Knesset Hanassi held an event to mark the second yahrzeit of Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks. In the course of an address in which he sought to place Rabbi Sacks’s within a broad social and communal context, Rabbi Berel Wein contrasted the deep and affectionate respect in which his memory is now held with the vituperative criticism Rabbi Sacks received while he was in office as Chief Rabbi to the United Kingdom’s United Synagogue.

This observation brought back memories for me, since I was responsible for running the Court of the Chief Rabbi in the first years of Rabbi Sacks’s term of office.

One of the things I clearly recall is that many of the people who criticised Rabbi Sacks in public were the same people who visited his office in private, to ask for his help in raising funds or to seek his advice on politically sensitive communal matters. His door was always open to them and he treated them with kindness and respect. Rabbi Sacks was a sensitive man who was not impervious to criticism and abuse, but he let neither his office nor his personal feelings stand in the way of his preparedness to entertain his adversaries and to engage with them where he could.

The first Baraita in the sixth chapter of Avot lists nearly 30 advantages to be derived by studying Torah for its own sake. These include patience and the ability to forgive insults. I believe that Rabbi Sacks displayed both those qualities. For him, public insults and criticisms splashed across the front pages of the Jewish newspapers were not just wrong in themselves: every time a disagreement leads to insult, this marks the end of dialogue—or “conversation”, as Rabbi Sacks would have preferred to call it. His way was characterised by conversation, by exchanging views and seeking to understand the other side’s perspective. He candidly recognised that not all dialogue leads to the peaceful resolution of differences, but he did believe that it was the best available means of doing so.

May his memory be a blessing to us.

Rabbi Sacks

 It was with shock and with great sadness that I learned of the death of Lord Sacks. Jonathan Sacks was an outstanding commentator on the ethical dimension of the Torah and a philosopher whose theoretical analyses never lacked a practical outcome. He was truly a Pirkei Avot man, as this video clip of his daughter Gila indicates. He was however a good deal more than that, as the flood of testimonials and tributes has shown.

For four years during the 1990s I worked with Rabbi Sacks, during the transition of the Chief Rabbinate in the UK from Lord Jakobovits. He was a wonderful work colleague: cheerful, positive, polite, caring, accessible and humble. While many have praised his oratory and presentational skills, I recall that he was also an attentive and sympathetic listener -- a skill which, unlike speaking, cannot be easily recorded for posterity by modern technology.

May his family and friends be comforted in their memories of a truly great figure.