Jonathan Sacks

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, who died on Saturday at the age of 72, was a modern Maimonides, a guide to the perplexed in an age of spiritual confusion and moral dissolution. A philosophy student before he entered the rabbinate, Sacks combined the legacies of Athens and Jerusalem and became the leading public intellectual and ethicist of our time. A source of pride to Britain’s small and sometimes beleaguered Jewish community, Sacks did not just work to improve the moral state of the Jewish people and defend the state of Israel. Adeptly linking the particular to the universal, he defended the religious conscience, and identified the common ground through which interfaith negotiations have transformed Jewish-Christian relations.

The former chief rabbi, Lord Jonathan Sacks, died yesterday at the age of 72. In an article for The Spectator, republished here, he wrote about the need for less 'I' and more 'we': Last Monday night and Tuesday were our Jewish festival of Purim, when we recall the events described in the Book of Esther. It is the oddest of all festivals. There is rejoicing, which starts a fortnight before at the beginning of the Jewish month of Adar. There’s a celebratory meal on the day itself. We send charitable gifts to the poor and presents to friends. There’s riotous noise during the reading of Esther whenever the name of the arch-villain Haman is mentioned.

Last Monday night and Tuesday were our Jewish festival of Purim, when we recall the events described in the Book of Esther. It is the oddest of all festivals. There is rejoicing, which starts a fortnight before at the beginning of the Jewish month of Adar. There’s a celebratory meal on the day itself. We send charitable gifts to the poor and presents to friends. There’s riotous noise during the reading of Esther whenever the name of the arch-villain Haman is mentioned. And it’s the one day in the year when it’s considered a religious duty to drink slightly too much alcohol.

I love the remark made by one Oxford don about another: ‘On the surface, he’s profound, but deep down, he’s superficial.’ That sentence has more than once come to mind when reading the new atheists.