3 min read
ByHoward Jacobson, howard jacobson
'He drew no distinction between the serious and the playful, the learned and the popular'
November 12, 2020 10:05We are blessed if our most lasting memory of someone we knew is a happy one. I will never forget the expression of pure mischievous joy on Lord Sacks’s face when, at a dinner party at his residence, he told us in what manner he’d addressed the Pope on meeting him in the Vatican on the eve (I think) of Shavuot. “I’d been wondering if I’d ever get the opportunity to say it,” he confided, deliberately keeping us waiting as to what exactly he had said. He turned those searching grey eyes on each of us in turn. Well? Could we guess? Of course we couldn’t guess, and anyway, we wouldn’t have wanted to spoil the pleasure he was taking in our not guessing. “No, Chief, tell us what you said to him.” He waited until he had our undivided attention. I could picture the Pope himself transfixed, wondering how the distinguished rabbi was going to address him. “Good Yontiff, Pontiff,” he told us, at last.
What made him a great rabbi was what made him such good company. He valued the comedian in himself as much as he valued the minister. He could pivot from stern to mirthful and back again in a second, not simply because he was versatile but because, when it came to the totality of experience, he drew no distinction between the serious and the playful, the learned and the popular, a midrash on the Akedah and a song by Leonard Cohen. He officiated at my wedding, presiding with fearful stringency over the bedecken of my bride, Jenny but, after the exchange of vows, he led everyone who had been under or around the chupah — Jew and Gentile, young and old — in a wholly unrehearsed and unexpected dance that managed to be at the same time bacchic and halachic.
The fact that he’d offered to marry us at all says a great deal about him. He knew we weren’t religious Jews. But he understood how opposites could concur, and why the gravitas of an Orthodox service might answer to something in the hearts of the non-Orthodox. It was no accident that one his many books was entitled The Dignity of Difference. I want you, he imagined God saying to Abraham, to be different. “God,” he wrote, “lives in difference.” He made argument central to his Jewishness, not only because he believed it furthered understanding, but because it was in itself an exhilarating challenge to live life fully.
At his dinner parties were guests of every persuasion. Though they were never less than convivial, there was something of the seminar about these events. Somewhere towards the end of dessert he would call us to order — not by tapping a glass but simply by altering the temperature around him — propose a topic of comtemporary concern, and invite one of his guests to address it. This could be frightening if you weren’t a natural public conversationalist, but he had a sixth-sense for embarrassment and never shamed anyone into talking who didn’t want to. He had a distinctive way of squeezing his eyes at difficult moments which I took to denote not just sympathy but fellow-feeling with awkwardness. But oh, how he loved conversation.
We had a joke between us that we might have been better suited to doing each other’s job — the rabbi becoming a writer, the writer becoming a rabbi. I quite fancied the idea myself. Chief Rabbi, yes, why not. But I’d require him to teach me for the next 100 years. He, on the other hand, needed no instruction to become a writer. He leaves behind him a formidable body of work, some of it exegetical, some of it philosophical, but all of it addressed to practical questions of how to live today. At the heart of his teaching was the conviction that we are always in the process of coming to understand. In To Heal a Fractured World he talked of having the “courage to live with uncertainty”. When I told him this reminded me of Keats’ “negative capability — that is when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason,” he squeezed his eyes at me, as if to say, “Do you really think I don’t know whose intellectual company I keep?” Considerable Torah scholar though he was, he never lost touch with the vitality of the written and the spoken word.
In his public lectures and broadcasts, he brought a rare eloquence to explaining Jews to themselves and to non-Jews alike. There was nothing otherworldly about his presentation, just as there was nothing abstruse in his thinking. Without patronising his listeners or demeaning the subject, he rescued the very idea of spirituality and made it feel urgent, not of somewhere else but of the here-and-now. And right this minute it is hard to imagine our fractured here-and-now without him.
