Rabbi Jonathan Sacks and the Key to Eternity

I first encountered Rabbi Jonathan Sacks of blessed memory in the book shelves of the University of Toronto library in 1991. Not the flesh and blood Jonathan Sacks of course, but rather the beginning of his immense trail of scholarship, which in subsequent years seemed to unravel continuously like a spool of yarn that stretched as far as his endless curiosity and immense writing skills could take him. And he never seemed short of thread.I was teaching English Literature at the university. Every so often I would get up from my desk in the library and go to the ninth floor where the Judaica collection was, and browse books. And that is when and where we met.First there was his book Tradition in An Untraditional Age, and then it seemed like 5 minutes later he produced The Persistence of Faith; perhaps another ten minutes went by and he wrote Crisis and Covenant.After a brief coffee break, or so I imagined, Rabbi Sacks published One People? followed by Will We Have Jewish Grandchildren? Then Faith in the Future, and after that The Community of Faith. Then The Politics of Hope. I was winded, out of breath, just keeping up with this prodigious productivity. But every so often I would get up from my chair and, there it was, a new Rabbi Sacks book.You have to understand that I knew nothing about Rabbi Sacks. I did not live in England. He was not my teacher or my rabbi or my mentor. We had not exchanged one real life word together. But at the time, with each trip to the stacks and the shock and pleasure of seeing yet another new Rabbi Sacks title, all of them with his customary fierce intelligence and burning desire to speak his truth, I remember thinking of a scene out of the movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.Butch and Sundance are two bank robbers, and they are being tracked up and down, through days and nights and weeks on end, across all sorts of terrain and yet, through it all, they cannot escape their patient and dogged pursuers, who always seem to end up locating them. So at one point Butch Cassidy, played by Paul Newman, says “Who are those guys?”And that is exactly how I felt about Rabbi Sacks. He is what the novelist Graham Greene had in mind when he said that “every creative writer worth our consideration is a man given over to an obsession.” With each passing year, there would be a new book, a seemingly inexhaustible supply, nothing less than an obsessive need, in the very best sense, to communicate what he felt was going in our times and what he perceived needed to happen. Again, and then again and again with each new offering. I said to myself “Who is this guy?He was utterly unafraid of pointing out what he thought was brilliant or unusual or transformational in someone else’s work or ideas. He was unfailingly generous in his praise of others and had a genuine desire to highlight a writer’s strengths that I have scarcely seen matched in the academy or elsewhere.It spoke to his humility and his quest for truth. Yet, on the other end, he would quietly but thoroughly dismantle a spotty or incomplete argument. The books took no prisoners, but they were so beautifully eloquent (I could feel the English accent rising off of the ink) that it never grated or struck a false note.For me, he was Google and Sefaria and social media all in one, long before those cornerstones of our time made their mark. If you wanted to have your world expanded, then you would find out whom Rabbi Sacks was reading. Whom he had discovered that you would now discover. Whom he found exciting, so that youcould not help but be touched by that excitement.And yes, one day in London, about 18 years after I “picked up” Rabbi Sacks, so to speak, in the library, I met the man himself, not this time a cipher between book covers, but a real person standing in front of me. We met up a couple of more times in my visits to England, and I proposed to him a series of interviews. Initially he was hesitant, but eventually he agreed.I have interviewed many people and moderated many panels. Rabbi Sacks was about as prepared an interviewee as I have ever seen. He was always on time, and he came committed to the task. He would give you the last ounce of what he had to give and he was focused on saying what he felt he had to communicate, and he would not shortchange you, even if he was tired or stressed or overextended. He was a professional in the finest way.Backstage, at one event, with a thousand people out there waiting for us, I just threw out a question to him about whether he liked a certain author. He paused, and said, not unkindly, a definitive “no. I actually think there is someone else you should read,” and he named a writer from the Middle Ages and then one from the nineteenth century.To me that did not feel like a suggestion, it felt like a moral imperative. I better check out these people and what they had written. There was a pause for a few moments, and then I said “What about so and so?” and I named another writer. And he thought about it and said, “yes, she’s quite good, isn’t she?”Then we discussed an idea from that person and I mentioned a book, that wonder of wonders, he had not read, and I talked about why he might like it. And finally, for the first time, he broke into a broad smile, and again for the first time, met my eyes, and said, with full force of deliberation, “thank you.”I had some of his books with me that evening, and he inscribed them all. I did not pay attention to what he wrote until I got home, and then I was stunned to read, in one of them, the following: “To Elliott. In friendship and admiration.” When I thanked him the next day for his inscription, which I silently felt was either pro forma or exaggerated, he said to me that we had shared important ideas, and that was a permanent link between us.Anyone in the past 30 years who has taught Jewish thought knows that they have a debt to Rabbi Sacks that is virtually unpayable. Using an idea of his in any kind of educational setting instantly raised the bar and brought a new level of seriousness and yet accessibility to the discourse. He was a teacher’s best friend and I have shamelessly used him over and over again in classes.Whatever preconception one has about religion, whether you define as fervently observant or just as fervently secular, Rabbi Sacks found a universal language to reach across difference and speak to minds and hearts, whenever and wherever human beings were interested in listening to and being in dialogue with him.So any time anywhere you shares his ideas, communicating matters of substance and lasting value, and continue those conversations that meant so much to him, you are his friend, for now and for eternity. And when we carry on the spirit of his work, each of us in our own unique ways, at an elevated and more intense level than we had before, we are friends with Rabbi Sacks in eternity.R. Sacks was interested in nothing less than changing the world, one thought or word or act at a time, and to create some kind of redemption in the midst of our modern chaos, so that we could all learn to live better, fuller, more worthy lives.As for me, going to the library will never quite be the same again. I will always recall the visceral thrill of a book in my hand with Rabbi Sacks’ name on the cover.In a biopic about CS Lewis, Shadowlands, a student of Lewis’ recalls that his own father, a humble schoolteacher, told his son that “we read to know that we are not alone.” Reading and listening to Rabbi Sacks, who to me is both Lewis and the school teacher in one, made one feel just a bit less alone in this world.The phrase זֵ֣כֶר צַ֖דִּיק לִבְרָכָ֑ה --the memory of the righteous is for a blessing-- comes from Proverbs, Chapter 10. It means that our memories of that person, and what those memories cause us to feel and understand about how we should live, which we then pass on to others, creates more blessing on earth. It is only fitting that Rabbi Sacks’ memory be a blessing, because surely his accomplishments and his contributions have already brought enormous blessing to Judaism, and grace and dignity, faith and hope, to a fractured world.He will be missed.