Rabbi Jonathan Sacks - Judaism and Modernity

Last night, Rome’s “Il Pitigliani” Cultural Centre hosted the third conference in the Lechaim – To Life! series, a journey into Jewish identity. The evening was devoted to a paradigmatic figure of contemporary Judaism: Rabbi Jonathan Sacks - thinker, rabbi, moral philosopher, British public intellectual, and tireless interpreter of the Torah.

Linkiesta.it journalist Ruben Della Rocca explored Sacks’s cultural influence in conversation with Riccardo Di Segni, Chief Rabbi of the Jewish Community of Rome, and Shulim Vogelmann, president of the Giuntina publishing house and curator, for ten years, of Rome’s International Festival of Jewish Culture.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks

The evening was introduced by Daniel Cohen, president of Il Pitigliani, who welcomed the audience with remarks centred on the universalist message promoted by Jonathan Sacks: Western civilisation and the Jewish religion share deep foundations, speaking to the conscience of modern humanity without severing its bond with the past.

Ruben Della Rocca opened by explaining the meaning of his initiative, whose success has also depended on the presence of distinguished companions along the way. Lechaim – To Life! was born as an inquiry into Jewish identity and the many dimensions that define it: historical, religious, linguistic, political, and moral. The presence of Monsignor Ambrogio Spreafico sealed the initiative’s vocation for pluralism — a vocation for which Sacks remains a significant interpreter. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks embodied the rabbi who sought constructive dialogue, one in which mutual respect arises precisely from deep fidelity to one’s own culture.

The title by which he is known, Lord Rabbi Sacks, contains his dual identity. Within it one may glimpse the complex, and in some ways unfinished, relationship between the British Crown and Mandate Palestine. Sacks was born and died in London. He refused to leave Britain permanently and chose to live out his rabbinic mission within British society, making the English diaspora a place of religious, civic, and philosophical reflection.

Throughout his career, he devoted himself to university teaching. He served as Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth from 1991 to 2013, was a member of the House of Lords from 2009 to 2020, and held professorships at Yeshiva University, King’s College London, and New York University. He received a doctorate in theology from the Archbishop of Canterbury, was appointed a baronet, and was invited to the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton as the representative of the Jewish community of the Commonwealth. His family, too, remained linked to British public life: his daughter Gila served as an adviser to Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

The first question of the evening immediately addressed his intellectual identity: should Sacks be considered a philosopher lent to the rabbinate, or a rabbi lent to philosophy? Rabbi Riccardo Di Segni replied by recalling that Sacks, in one of his books, states that he was first and foremost a philosopher, having studied the discipline at Oxford and Cambridge, mostly under professors who were distant from religious sentiment. This position made him, in the image he himself coined, an “amphibious creature.” Sacks used the metaphor of the amphibian to describe his intellectual condition: the ability to move between different environments, between general culture and Jewish tradition, between philosophical modernity and spiritual leadership.

His role was essential in mediating between the most recent developments in general culture and Judaism. He possessed an authority recognised far beyond the British sphere, even though the Haredi world listened to him less than it might have. Sacks was not the reference rabbi for that world; rather, he became a reference Jew for British identity and for those seeking a Jewish voice capable of engaging Western society.

Rabbi Di Segni evoked Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz, who in The Golden Candelabrum writes that the Jewish people outside Eretz Yisrael are like fish out of water. Fish die when they leave the water; likewise, Jews cannot abandon the Torah without losing their vitality. This parallel recurs frequently in Sacks’s intellectual formation. Judaism can cross the world, speak to universities, institutions, and other religious traditions, but it remains itself only when it stays immersed in Torah.

Sacks’s sources are traditional, and he moves through them with confidence. He is at home in midrashic and exegetical tradition, knows the thought of Maimonides, dialogues with the great Central European intellectual currents between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, absorbs Orthodox reactions to modernity, and upholds the primacy of Halakhah. He possesses a solid intellectual foundation and, at the same time, a rare quality: he thinks with his own mind. He receives tradition, studies it, questions it, and translates it into a thought addressed to the present.

Shulim Vogelmann introduced Not in God’s Name, the first book by Sacks published in Italian by Giuntina. Its theme is the relationship between religion and violence. According to Sacks, religions have nothing to do with violence in themselves; they can, however, degenerate into fundamentalism when they interpret Scripture in rigid and aggressive terms. Genesis, shared by the Abrahamic religions, becomes a privileged text for understanding fratricidal conflicts and difficult relations among religious cultures.

Vogelmann emphasised two central aspects. The first concerns the moral ascent narrated by biblical stories. Cain kills Abel. Jacob and Esau live through the trauma of the stolen blessing, followed by reconciliation. Joseph and Judah introduce a higher level of conscience, because Judah recognises his error and repents. Moses and Aaron offer a virtuous example of cooperation and coexistence. The Torah presents a moral journey in which fraternity, initially shattered by murder, is slowly educated toward responsibility.

The second aspect concerns the very nature of the Torah. It is a living, pulsating text, one that responds according to the interpretive criterion with which it is read. If approached with violence, it produces violence. If read with moral depth, it reveals a path of responsibility. In Sacks, there emerges the idea of a shared salvific destiny among the various religions, one that does not dissolve into syncretism and does not require the erasure of identities.

The decision to publish Covenant and Conversation comes at a moment of dramatic rupture in the history of Am Yisrael: a trauma comparable, in symbolic intensity, to the threat of Hellenism or the destruction of the Temple. The response to difficult moments must be measured. Sacks offers a source of inner strength and ideas that dispel fear. Jews, marked by persecutions, have often doubted their own values and become fragile. Sacks’s work responds to that fragility by bringing back to light the constructive and positive Jewish values that sustain the journey of a community under pressure.

Within this context falls the project to translate the Babylonian Talmud, restoring to the transmission of knowledge a decisive function. The study of the word, interpretation, and responsibility become instruments of moral resistance.

Vogelmann cited Arik Glasner and the epitaph of a famous Tel Aviv pub on Ahad Ha’am Street, titled Partial Consolation. The reference points back to an 1895 article addressed to Jews confronted with the blood libel. When the whole world claims one thing and a single people opposes it, doubt may begin to enter the neshamah, the soul. This means that when doubt penetrates the soul, questions of identity emerge. Antisemitism works in this way too: it pushes the Jew to ask whether his own truth can withstand the compact pressure of the outside world.

Rabbi Di Segni recounted an anecdote linked to the interpretation of the Book of Bereshit. In 2006, during preparations for Benedict XVI’s visit to the synagogue, the question arose of what theme should be raised. Rabbi Sacks, consulted by telephone, suggested presenting the story of the brothers. Benedict XVI sat in the tevah and, listening to that address, received the message and made it his own. The story of the brothers became a bridge between Judaism and Christianity, between the memory of the wound and the possibility of recognition.

The dialectical relationship between Sacks and the Christian world was evident in an episode at the British Embassy to the Holy See, in Piazza del Quirinale. From the tower of the building one can see all of Rome, with the domes of the churches shaping the skyline of the Eternal City. Looking out over it, Sacks exclaimed: “It is a religious city.” Rome appeared to him as a religious city in its visible structure. Whoever believes in God, Sacks observed, stands on a higher plane, because he recognises a measure that exceeds immanence and reaches toward the celestial dimension.

Sacks died in 2020. An inevitable question concerns how he would have responded to October 7. Rabbi Di Segni recalled that Sacks had already anticipated the theme of contemporary antisemitism. Antisemitism is a beast that constantly changes its clothing, appearing in ever-new forms: first religious anti-Judaism, then racial and eugenic anti-Jewish hatred, and today anti-Zionism in all its branches. In his 2016 address to the European Parliament, Sacks stated that contemporary antisemitism largely coincides with anti-Zionism, that is, with the idea that Jews should not be allowed to live collectively in their ancestral land.

A more painful question followed: would Sacks today have criticised certain Jewish, or rather, less-than-Jewish behaviours in Israel? On one side lies the awareness of being attacked by ruthless enemies; on the other, the pain of seeing, within Eretz Yisrael, conduct that appears to depart from Judaism’s moral measure. During the evening, the case was cited of the death penalty law advanced by Itamar Ben-Gvir. In the Israeli Parliament, a religious minister pronounced a blessing over the death penalty: a gesture described as blasphemous, because it bends religious language to a logic foreign to Jewish sensibility.

Rabbi Di Segni also recalled the Malbim, the Romanian commentator denounced by Jewish assimilationists because he was judged too rigorous. They sent pigs and crabs to his home, transforming legitimate dissent into insult.

The condition for criticism is love. If criticism is born of care, it can exist within a community. Pointing the finger, by contrast, becomes slander and creates discomfort. Jewish criticism cannot be reduced to the public exposure of the other, because words always carry moral weight.

Ruben Della Rocca then introduced the theme of family. During Shabbat, the family becomes a chosen nest, one that heals conflicts and recomposes fractures. Sacks analysed the family also through statistics. Studying demographic evidence, he observed that the traditional family was dissolving. Children growing up in single-parent households or without family stability had increased dramatically. This sociological drift struck him as deeply alarming.

The traditional Jewish model should serve as a counterweight to nihilism. Yet even in the Jewish world, the number of divorces, already contemplated by rabbinic law, is rising significantly. The family remains a pillar of society, despite the limits and errors that every educational form may encounter. Winston Churchill argued that democracy was preferable to dictatorship; likewise, the family represents a model of defence against totalitarianism. Shabbat adds spiritual depth to the family dimension: it is sacred time that sustains order, the transmission of values, and reconciliation.

The question of alternatives opens many complex scenarios. A book titled 2126 was cited, conceived as a multi-voiced reflection on the Jewish world one hundred years from now. Society is changing through technological progress and artificial intelligence. One of the spheres most affected is reproduction. Women tend to have fewer children and to give birth later. Surrogacy introduces a paradigm shift in public opinion and could produce a division between slaves of hedonistic sex and slaves of reproductive sex. These are dangerous scenarios, in which bioethics carries anthropological implications.

Rabbinic discussions on the identity of the unborn child are already open: does that identity derive from the egg or from the womb? A niche of experts debates the permissibility of the practice known as “gestation for others.” Orthodox society watches these phenomena carefully, divided between rejection and adaptation. Sacks invites existential reflection because he forces us to measure modernity without losing sight of the fundamental question: what makes life human?

Vogelmann mentioned Sacks’s discourse on human responsibility as that of a free agent. Sacks’s work can be read as a long narrative demonstration of the freedom to choose. In the verse of Cain and Abel, sin crouches at the door. Before the murder, there is a choice: Cain could have mastered the impulse. Noah, when compared with Abraham, is judged also in relation to the decision whether or not to save Sodom. Abraham argues, intercedes, exposes himself. Noah obeys and is saved, but remains enclosed within his own destiny.

Sacks invites us to live with the past in order to evolve constructively in advancing times. To live in the past means to block development; to live with the past means to carry memory into present responsibility. A Hasidic story recalls that when a woman becomes pregnant, much of the unborn child’s destiny is decided. One thing, however, is never established: whether that child will be good or bad. Human beings can always choose. Deuteronomy entrusts this freedom to moral conscience.

The idea is individual, but it belongs within a collective bond: all Jews are bound to one another. Ruben Della Rocca returned to the theme of recognising the other, through the dispute between Sarah and Hagar, the story of Ishmael, and the confrontation between Jacob and Esau. Jews must learn to recognise the other. But are they recognised as such?

Rabbi Di Segni distinguished among different scenarios. There are people who sincerely admire Judaism. There are people who are indifferent and do not know how to receive the Jewish gift. Finally, there are people who overturn that gift and consider it harmful. The example of Albert Sabin was used to show a different possibility. Sabin helped eliminate the terrifying spectre of polio, which had spread panic across Europe. According to the anecdote recalled during the evening, he was blind in one eye because antisemitic boys had thrown a stone at him. Yet he chose not to profit from his discovery and transformed hatred into love.

Human greatness lies in discernment. Vogelmann added that when one abdicates one’s own worldview, one has already lost from the start. It becomes useless to answer every defamatory accusation. Judaism possesses, in Leviticus, a distinctive moral feature: love for one’s neighbour and for the stranger. The Exodus from Egypt symbolises freedom regained. In To Heal a Fractured World, Sacks cites the verse in which the Lord tells the Jews, as they leave Egypt, to ask their Egyptian neighbours for gold and silver. Those same resources would later be used to build the golden calf.

Della Rocca posed a decisive question: if we fail to uproot hatred, do we risk becoming strangers in our own land? Judaism has long had to rework the theory of the persecuted minority. In collective memory, Jews became bearers of a precise image, marked by vulnerability, survival, and dependence on external powers. Jewish statehood has brought to the surface needs that were previously ignored, transforming the very perception of freedom.

Moral teachings must not be forgotten, but present reality must be measured by understanding what is happening today. The statehood of the Jewish people creates the need to make choices that the diaspora had the luxury of avoiding. The state imposes new responsibilities: defence, power, decision, security, conflict, and the use of force.

Vogelmann used the following phrase: “Servants of kings, not servants of servants.” Why did Jews fail to understand the Shoah? One part of Jewish history had privileged the direct path to the king, through intermediaries, as a guarantee of survival. This choice protected communities for generations, but it came at the expense of the horizontal dimension of politics. The legacy is ambiguous and dangerous, because it can assume the form of vassalage.

Finally, Rabbi Di Segni recalled a critical letter from Sacks. When Sacks came to Rome and met the Pope, Di Segni replied to him with great respect concerning his vision of Jewish-Christian dialogue, because the Roman Papacy differs from the English Catholic Church. Dialogue, too, requires historical precision, which means knowledge of institutions. Goodwill alone is not enough.

The evening concluded with a splendid phrase by Sacks on the relationship between aesthetics and Judaism: “Greek civilisation sought the holiness of beauty; Judaism seeks the beauty of holiness.”

Lorenzo Cianti studies Political Science and International Relations at Roma Tre University. He writes for Italy’s oldest opinion magazine L'Opinione delle Libertà, as well as for the online magazine Atlantico Quotidiano and the Mises Institute. He writes about economical, philosophical cultural and political topics. 

This article previously appeared on the website of L'Opinione https://opinione.it/politica/2026/05/08/lorenzo-cianti-rav-jonathan-sacks-ebraismo-e-modernita/

Image credits: L'Opinione