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Opinion

Lord Sacks' Chief Rabbinate: A 'Devastating' Account

December 16, 2010 18:38
6 min read

Meir Persoff: "Another Way, Another Time: Religious Inclusivism and the Sacks Chief Rabbinate." Academic Studies Press, Boston, 2010.

THE FORWARD (New York):

"Another Way, Another Time" is the first full-scale study of the Sacks chief rabbinate, and the picture presented is devastating. With the aid of copious original sources such as newspapers, correspondence and interviews, British historian and veteran journalist Meir Persoff shows how Sacks's top priority has been staying in the good graces of the Haredi, or strictly Orthodox, faction, whose high birthrate has made it the fastest-growing component of British Jewry. To achieve this, he has repeatedly acted to delegitimize the non-Orthodox movements - Reform, Liberal and Masorti - sometimes in ways personally insulting to their leaders. He has even gone so far as to delegitimize himself, withdrawing the first edition of a book he published in 2002 that aroused Haredi complaints, and rewriting the offending passages before republication. Ironically, it is clear from the documentation that Persoff has gathered that the Orthodox circles Sacks strives to placate will never consider him Orthodox enough no matter what he does.

Persoff makes his case that Sacks, by nature a thinker rather than a politician, made a poor career choice in seeking the chief rabbinate. But the book does not come to grips with the question of whether even someone far more politically adroit could have succeeded, given the structural constraints of the position that Persoff himself describes in detail. Simply put, a man who represents only the most moderate form of Orthodoxy - which used to be, but is no longer, professed by most British Jews - cannot also speak for the entire spectrum of the Jewish community, which today ranges religiously from far left to far right. In that sense Sacks may be an unfortunate victim of history. If so, the book's title is certainly apt: the position of Chief Rabbi was "another way" for "another time," but not for the religiously fractured present.