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The Chief Rabbi of Canterbury

Last week, after a two-year search, Ephraim Mirvis was announced as the successor to Jonathan Sacks, who is stepping down after 21 years as the Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of Great Britain and the Commonwealth.  Rabbi Sacks’ tenure will end concurrently with that of the most senior clergyman in the Church of England, Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury.  The coincidence of their retirements is apt, since the two men are in many ways alike.  Both are admired in Britain and internationally for their intellect, erudition, and knowledge.  Both speak the language of Britain’s increasingly secular educated elite.  And both have struggled to lead their respective institutions.

Moreover, the Chief Rabbi has in some respects eclipsed the Archbishop as the religious voice of the country.

Rowan Williams' decade-long stewardship of the Church of England has not been a happy one.  A liberal by temperament, the Archbishop has attempted to appease liberals and conservatives in the Church but satisfied neither.  He angered liberals by blocking the appointment of Jeffrey John, a gay priest, as a bishop in 2003 and again in 2010. But he offended conservatives by failing to sanction the Episcopal Church in the United States for ordaining Gene Robinson, also gay, as Bishop of New Hampshire in 2003; the incident led to a formal declaration of schism by several African churches in 2008.  After the Episcopalians consecrated another gay priest as a bishop in 2010, Williams did impose sanctions—causing yet another rift in the Anglican Communion.  He attempted to heal the divisions through an “Anglican Covenant,” which satisfied no one.

Williams' efforts to resolve a decade-long dispute over female bishops have likewise angered both sides. His compromise amendment to a bill to introduce women bishops was defeated in 2010.  Subsequently, some 60 clergy and 1,000 parishioners, fearing that Anglican women bishops were inevitable, defected to Catholicism.  But last month the General Synod rejected the bill—through the votes of the conservative laity, which outweighed those of the liberal clergy.  Thus, Williams leaves the Church little different, but much more embittered.

If the Archbishop can be excused for failing to unify increasingly divergent Anglican opinions, he must bear some responsibility for the fact that the number of Christians in Britain has fallen by a staggering four million in the past decade: for Williams’ interventions in public life have been not religious but political.  Rather than decrying the secularism of Britain’s Guardianista elite, he has adopted its fashionable causes, attacking the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, bankers involved in the financial crisis, and politicians entangled in Parliament’s expenses scandal.  He has provoked outrage by backing the establishment of sharia courts in the U.K.  He has also condemned the current Conservative government for their modest aim of closing the national deficit by 2015 by trimming public spending (which they have, so far, utterly failed to accomplish).  After he lambasted the education and health reforms of Prime Minister David Cameron as “radical, long-term policies for which no one voted,” Cameron told Williams, in effect, to mind his own ecclesiastical business.

Thus, though the leader of Britain’s established church, the Archbishop has become an unwelcome figure to whom to turn for religious counsel.

Into this breach has stepped the Chief Rabbi.  Sacks has been embraced by not only the current government but the previous Labour government, which made him Lord Sacks.  Labour rivals Tony Blair and Gordon Brown both favor him: Blair provided a complimentary blurb for Sacks’ 2009 Covenant and Conversation, while Brown introduced Sacks at a speech the Chief Rabbi recently delivered at New York University.  Both political parties have embraced Sacks’ book The Home We Build Together as a road map for turning multi-ethnic Britain away from balkanized multiculturalism and toward a new national identity.  The book dovetails with both Cameron’s idea of the “Big Society” (dismissed by the Archbishop as “aspirational waffle”), and Labour leader Ed Miliband’s newfound shibboleth, “One Nation,” and the two men have been tripping over themselves to say so.

Despite these cozy relationships, Sacks has been outspoken on the dangers of secularism to British culture. After the riots that swept Britain in 2011, Sacks placed the blame squarely on moral decay in the modern West.  This stance gained him still more praise, as the country’s only religious leader who was both intellectually powerful and courageous enough to speak his mind.

That the Chief Rabbi has assumed something of the national role of the Archbishop is, in a sense, appropriate, since that is the role the chief rabbinate was set up to emulate.  The chief rabbinate was not established by secular authorities, as in France, or even by Anglo-Jewry as a whole, but rather evolved from the rabbinate of London’s Ashkenazi Great Synagogue.  Consequently, the Chief Rabbi represents only one denomination within Anglo-Jewry, namely the United Synagogue.  Professing centrist Orthodoxy, the United Synagogue not only caters to modern Orthodox Jews but is also the default home for non-observant Jews, and is thus by far the largest denomination.  Ever keen to integrate Jews into British society, the hierarchy of the United Synagogue's rabbinate was deliberately modeled on that of the Church of England—to the point that one 19th century chief rabbi, Hermann Adler, referred to himself as “the Very Reverend.”

But Sacks' success as a public religious figure has served to compensate for his failures to unite Anglo-Jewry and govern the United Synagogue.  Sacks’ tenure has been no less fractious than the Archbishop's, as he has faced similar difficulties in trying to appease both progressives and traditionalists.  As articulated in his 1993 book One People?, Sacks entered office in 1991 with the aim of unifying the Jewish community. But that agenda ran aground in 1996 when Sacks not only refused to attend the funeral of Reform rabbi and Holocaust survivor Hugo Gryn, reportedly a friend of his, but denounced him as a destroyer of the faith in a private letter to the ultra-Orthodox dayan Chanoch Padwa (who duly leaked it to the press).  Likewise, Sacks championed pluralism in his 2004 book The Dignity of Difference, ascribing theological truths to religions besides Judaism.  But after criticism from several ultra-Orthodox rabbis, including the late Rav Elyashiv, Sacks revised the second edition with an attack on relativism and a curtailment of his position on other faiths’ claims to truth.

However, even the unification of Anglo-Jewry is beyond the Chief Rabbi's remit.  He is only responsible for the health of the United Synagogue; yet on his watch, the movement has atrophied.  Under his leadership, Jews' College (now the London School of Jewish Studies), the United Synagogue's 150-year-old seminary, closed its ordination programs for rabbis and hazzanim.  As a result, United Synagogue congregations have had to take rabbis either from abroad or from Chabad, many of whom do not share the background or secular education of their congregants, or their predecessors in the pulpit.  Doubtless, this has contributed to the difficulty of finding an appropriate replacement for Sacks.  Moreover, the closure of Jews College's semikhah program represented a lack of ambition: that a major Orthodox movement balks at the challenge of training its own rabbis is hardly a vote of confidence in its future.

The rest of Anglo-Jewry has not been so stagnant.  Its most influential creation of the past 30 years is Limmud, whose annual conference is this week, and whose educational model has been exported worldwide.  Several major Orthodox rabbis, including Norman Lamm, Shlomo Riskin, and Adin Steinsaltz, have attended the conference.  Sacks used to attend—but, pursuant to instructions from the London Beit Din, has not done so since he became Chief Rabbi.  Thus, the United Synagogue has allowed Limmud to become the preserve of the non-Orthodox.

But the challenge has not come from the left alone.  With nowhere to learn within the United Synagogue, young adults have turned to Aish and the mildly haredi Jewish Learning Exchange.  Even the Sephardi community, whose membership is 20 times less than the United Synagogue’s, has been more dynamic, compensating for the closure of Jews’ College by opening its own rabbinical program in 2006, with which the United Synagogue has now partnered. Those innovations that have come out of the United Synagogue—several new schools and a somewhat successful youth movement called Tribe—have had little to do with the Chief Rabbi.  He has allowed the United Synagogue to be outflanked on the right, on the left, and, almost paradoxically, in the center too.

Unlike many of his predecessors, Sacks has adopted no specifically Jewish task of his own.  While Hermann Adler normalized the Jewish presence in England, Joseph Hertz fought against the prevalence of source criticism, and Immanuel Jakobovits founded Jewish medical ethics, Sacks has written books and articles with the broad aim of defending religion in general—and occasionally Christianity in particular.  But he leaves no legacy within the Jewish community: neither ideology, nor education, nor outreach.

In replacing Rowan Williams with Justin Welby, the Church of England has chosen a relative outsider, a former oil executive who has been a bishop for only a year.  As a former businessman, it is hoped that he will be equipped to address the religious and moral challenges of Britain’s economic stagnation.  By contrast, in picking Ephraim Mirvis, the United Synagogue has chosen an established figure who has served as both Ireland’s Chief Rabbi and a congregational rabbi in England.  He is widely regarded as a stop-gap figure, a safe pair of hands.  But his communal credentials may be precisely what the movement requires. Mirvis’ synagogue has recently opened the United Synagogue’s only kollel, with six full-time fellows who teach within the community; that is a start.  Lord Sacks has spoken about Judaism as a religion that begins with the universal but progresses to the particular: perhaps his successor will be the one to put that into practice.

Simon Gordon is Assistant Editor of Jewish Ideas Daily.

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COMMENTS

charles hoffman on December 24, 2012 at 7:18 am (Reply)
The question isn't how many audiences with the Queen, or how many speeches before Parliament, or how many mentions in the Times of London. The question is how many 9-year-olds are learning chumash, how many fathers are sitting in shul with their children on Shabbat, and how many intermarriages.

those are the statistics that matter, and those will be the the ultimate measuring stick for the success of Lord Sachs or his successor.
Martin on December 24, 2012 at 11:35 am (Reply)
To paraphrase Winston Churchill; an empty car pulled up in front of the Western Marble arch synagogue and Chief Rabbi Sacks got out ....
Martin on December 24, 2012 at 12:49 pm (Reply)
Oops, that's Western Marble Arch Synagogue....
Jodi Lewis Lipsitz on December 24, 2012 at 1:10 pm (Reply)
Well, Rabbi Sacks has certainly inspired me and my husband to learn more... and we aren't even British!
Ben Tzur on December 24, 2012 at 6:07 pm (Reply)
What a curiously carping article from Simon Gordon. It is almost as much about the woes of Archbishop Rowan Williams as about Chief Rabbi Sacks. But Williams is irrelevant to R. Sacks' significance and authority either in the Jewish world, which after all is his key concern and presumably is Gordon's, or in the general non-Jewish British community; in any case Chief Rabbi Sacks would have the high respect of the general community no matter what sort of person Williams is, simply because he is such an extraordinary, important and persuasive thinker. He is unique not only in the Jewish world, but beyond it, and is the only person offering a persuasive vision of Western culture fully modern but at the same time wholesomely restored to its roots in the Biblical tradition. He is able to present all of this with remarkable knowledge, clarity, skill and eloquence, which is why R. Sacks is a towering figure also in the U.S. and in the E.U. (he has been invited to address the E.U. Parliament, and has been received there with universal respect and applause -- this has nothing to do with Rowan Williams' problems). No one else has his extraordinary combination of extraordinary mastery of Western thought, pithy brilliant analysis and loftiness, applying all this to the fundamental spiritual and social problems of our era, of concern to Jew and non-Jew alike. I dare say that he is the most influential Jewish philosopher and social analyst of our time. He is a source of great pride and dignity for the entire Jewish community, Orthodox and non-Orthodox, just as he intended to be and the office of Chief Rabbi should ideally be. For Simon Gordon, however, all of this is not due to R. Sacks' own personal attributes but is just social flim-flam and due anyway to Rowan Williams' failings.

But aside from those undeniable non-Jewish triumphs, this article manages to play down almost all the very many positives about R. Sacks. Even the account of his ground-breaking books, the chief reason for his international stature even amongst politicians, is a travesty of the subject, focussing on negatives and passing over in near-silence the positives. For example, what exactly was presented in The Home We Build Together to win such bi-partisan support from all major British political parties is left unexplained. Much is made of the storm-in-a-teacup row with the ultra-Orthodox that occurred with his book The Dignity of Difference, exaggerating the changes that R. Sacks introduced into it to allay ultra-Orthodox concerns (the changes were very few and did not touch the central affirmations of pluralism which R. Sacks continued to support vigorously, including the traditional Jewish views acceptable also to the ultra-Orthodox that there is Noahite truth in other religions and that salvation can be gained through them; the criticism of relativism was already in the first edition of the book and was not added to mollify the critics).

As for internal Jewish community matters, the article blames him personally for actions attributable to the Beth Din strictures he must operate under or that are due to donors' whims. This is not a satisfactory account of Chief Rabbi Sacks' difficulties in dealing with internal matters in the Jewish community, nor even of the actual situation in the Orthodox community today. The problems that Chief Rabbi Sacks had to deal with will remain problems also for his successor. They are not unique to him.

I believe that Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks will be seen in future generations as the only figure in modern Jewish history to attain the stature of Maimonides in the Middle Ages as a "guide for the perplexed of our time." People like him do not come along in every generation, or even in many generations.
charles hoffman on December 24, 2012 at 7:36 pm (Reply)
Ben Tzur -
R. Sachs is an articulate "modern Orthodox" rabbi with a nominal constituency far beyond his real authority or influence. As to his being compared to Maimonides, he'd need to spend the next 20 years building a literary legacy, which would then need the test of at least 200 years.
An Old Jews' College Boy on December 24, 2012 at 9:24 pm (Reply)
An Ayatollah with a fancy accent who loves to drop names of the dons he studies with at Oxford. Sacks, who was ordained at Jews' College and had no solid Yeshiva training was afraid to go against the Charedim on his own Beit Din, and so under his watch British Modern Orthodoxy died; he allowed his own rabbinical school -- a venerable institution since 1855 -- to die without any effort to salvage it. Thanks to him the United Synagogues, which appointed him Chief Rabbi has been subject to a hostile takeover by Chabad and Gateshead rabbis. He was always far more driven by ego and his reputation, than a concern for the welfare of moderate Orthodoxy, which ceased to exist in the UK thanks to him. Basically, Sacks was an egomaniacal empty suit. His books, too many of them, keep repeating the same superficial rhetoric. His treatment of rabbi Gryn was shameful enough, but his horrid disrespect for the greatest Jewish theologian and Judaica scholar in British history, Rabbi Dr. Louis Jacobs, z"l, was abhorrent. When Jacobs attended the aufruf for his own grandaughter's forthcoming nuptials at the Bournemouth United Synagogue, Sacks ordered that he be denied an aliyah. Of course, Sacks was threatened by Jacobs' far superior learning and deep scholarship, but that is no excuse. His tenure as Chief Rabbi was an abject failure; while he traveled the world impressing naive modern Orthodox Jews with his accent and superficial citations of British analytic philosophers peppered with well-known Talmudic aphorisms, Anglo-Jewry's long simmering divisions deepened. He had an opportunity to heal a community that had never recovered from the shameful "Jacobs Controversy" of the 1960's. Instead, he allowed things to get only worse. Speak to anyone who has tried to convert to Judaism in the UK and one gets just a small sense of how Sacks allowed the Charedim -- who never respected him and (rightly, alas) considered him an to be am ha-aretz -- to to run roughshod over him and all of British Jewry. This is a fine article, but far too easy on the Ayatollah Sacks. Good riddance !
Ben Tzur on December 25, 2012 at 1:35 am (Reply)
The unreliability of "An OId Jews' College Boy," self-declared at least (he lets slip that he despises the rabbinic semichah awarded there as not being of "solid yeshivah" standard, so if he attended at all it was a wash-out), is shown by his statement that Rabbi Sacks is a Jewish Ayatollah, about which one can only laugh in disbelief, and that "His tenure as Chief Rabbi was an abject failure." Far from it: it has been one of the peaks of the British Commonwealth Chief Rabbinate, which has had a remarkable number of outstanding rabbinic leaders. The accuracy of the dismissive judgements is also indicated by the flippant characterization of "his books, too many of them," that they "keep repeating the same superficial rhetoric." So naughty Rabbi Sacks has written too many books. And their content is merely the same old repetitious superficialities. How very odd, then, that these repetitious books cover such obstensibly diverse topics as contemporary global culture and Western civilization itself, the conflict of religions and re-phrasing the foundations for inter-faith dialogue, philosophical and theological issues relating to science and religion per se (dealing with the current atheistic attacks on religion), ethical problems in Jewish perspective, commentaries on the Siddur and Passover Haggadah along with new translations and editions of each that are marked improvements on most older versions, modern Jewish philosophy (in effect re-thinking Judaism for the modern world), surveys of the current situation within Orthodox Judaism, and issues facing all Jews regardless of religious affiliation, etc., etc., etc.

However in the world has Rabbi Sacks managed to fill all these very different books with the same old superficialities, mere "rhetoric"? How can that be done? Is not that a seventh wonder of the world? And how can it be that these works are received world-wide as profound, ground-breaking in constantly new directions, and important for Jews of every religious outlook everywhere to read, and as well for non-Jewish social, political and cultural leaders to read and absorb, winning high acclaim from authorities in each of the fields they deal with? Obviously none of these people have the deep understanding of so-called "Old Jews' College Boy," who sees through all this diverse wisdom and profundity to the same old tired "superficial rhetoric" hidden far beneath the surface.

But let us turn from such theoretical matters to things that really agitate "Old Jews' College Boy," namely personal gossip. There is pretend-outrage at Rabbi Sacks' "horrid disrespect" for R. Louis Jacobs, z"l, whose rejection from the Chief Rabbinate role was not his decision at all, and as Chief Rabbi he had to accept the dictates of the Beth Din and his own electors that Rabbi Jacobs was not to receive any honors in Orthodox surroundings including synagogue celebration of his granddaughter's nuptials. The tragedy of R. Jacobs was not one due to R. Sacks. Far from R. Sacks being an Ayatollah he has not been able to act freely even in personal matters because of the same factors that determined official policy at the United Synagogue, a treatment he did not personally desire. The attempt to blame him is unjustified. More generally, easy slurs against his inability to rein in the Haredim within the Orthodox community ignore the realities affecting the Chief Rabbinate as such, which no occupant of that post can avoid. The same problems will face his successor. The truth of the matter is that the Haredim are a huge proportion, and growing, of the Orthodox community in England and elsewhere, e.g., in Israel itself where their presence has also made a big difference no matter what secularists and even other Orthodox desire. They simply cannot be ignored and their views must be taken into account, if there is to be any hope of a "United Synagogue" or unified Orthodox community at all. Neither are they as terrible as "Old Jews' College Boy" claims. The end of the world is not nigh. "Old Jews' College Boy," if he himself were appointed to the extremely difficult post of Chief Rabbi, could do no better in regard to the tension between modern Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox, and in fact it is quite certain with the hard-line views on show here that he would do a lot worse and split Orthodoxy irretrievably.
hengott on December 25, 2012 at 12:19 pm (Reply)
Dr williams pushed the both the Anglican and church of England into the 22nd century... And yes he left some hurt toes but his guidance will be remembered by countless generations ......

I'm not sure what sacks and this new chief rabbi will probably do, but they so far have done even less........

And more and more of us will join reform (ed) congregations, and friday nite havurans, while the so called orthodox practice some strange form of temple worship.
A.Schreiber on December 25, 2012 at 2:10 pm (Reply)
The article's observations of the criticism levied against both the Christian clergyman and the Jewish, from both the right and the left, as well as the comments here about Rabbi Sacks both pro and con, all simply underscore what everyone already knows - you can never make everyone happy. Not a single public rabbi or community official in Jewish history has made everyone happy. While (contrary to what some rabbis think) this does not mean that one can simply brush off all criticsim as inevitable (rather than making an effort to correct it), it does allow to put negative attacks in persepctive.
martin brody on December 30, 2012 at 9:43 pm (Reply)
Although CR Sacks edited, albeit only slightly, the second edition of Dignity of Difference, he only did so for shalom. At the same time he issued 100 pages of scholarly footnotes supporting the "offending" comments. As far as I know, nobody rebutted those footnotes.(And all of those"offending statements" had been said before or since with no uproar!)
Jews College was in decline, not so much because of the decline in Modern Orthodoxy, but because of the success of Israeli Yeshivot.Why bother to get a University degree(from a prestigious college such as UCL), when Semicha was more easily earned in Israel?
The influence of Chabad and Gateshead, on the United Synagogue congregations, is greatly overstated.
CR Sacks was never going to be a force in the Beth Din (That power had been taken away from the Chief Rabbinate ever since CR Hertz handed that role over to Dayan Abramsky)
The years of the Sacks' Chief Rabbinate were turbulent, to be sure, but he is exiting that role as the number one spokesperson in the the English speaking world for Torah Judaism. And no longer having the strictures of that office constraining him, I expect even more brilliance from the man I proudly call my Rebbe.

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