Clifford Longley
Western civilisation suffers from a strong sense of moral and spiritual exhaustion. Having constructed a society of unprecedented sophistication, convenience and prosperity, nobody can remember what it was supposed to be for. Just enjoying it does not seem to be enough. Indeed, enjoyment as an end in itself quickly turns to ashes in the mouth. Not only is it boringly bland. It is even more boringly purposeless. There is more to human life than comfort, entertainment, and the avoidance of suffering.
Or there ought to be. Increasingly, people of all sorts and conditions – especially young people – are becoming curious about alternatives, asking questions and seeking answers. Most of them are suspicious of panaceas and simplistic solutions, and reluctant therefore to join organisations, such as cults and fundamentalist churches, that offer short cuts. They are eclectic and even sceptical. But they are becoming open to possibilities that their parents and grandparents would have declined. The difference between the generations might be summed up by saying that the older one mutters to itself, “There are no easy answers,” then shrugs its shoulders and turns away; while the younger generation remarks, “There are no easy answers so let us consider more difficult ones.”
This is the ideal climate of opinion in which to introduce to a much wider circle of readers the sharp and unusual insights of Jonathan Sacks. Most of those who already know of him, know him as the Chief Rabbi of Great Britain, the head man of the Orthodox Jewish community in Britain. But Orthodox Jews will forgive me for saying, at least in this context, that is by no means the most important thing about him.
Even before his name became prominent in his own community, some of us had picked up rumours that there was a fresh face on the block, a new and exciting talent that had attached itself to one of the more conservative religious institutions in Britain, the United Hebrew Congregations. It was his growing reputation for originality and sheer intelligence that quickly took him to the headship of Jews College in London, which is responsible for training Britain’s Orthodox rabbis, and eventually brought him to the attention of the BBC. It was by this means that he first became a national figure, when his series of radio Reith Lectures in 1990 captured widespread attention, if a little puzzlement too, for his lucid and thoughtful warnings about the moral and spiritual state of Western society.
This was a voice we had not heard before. We are used to thinkers of past and present speaking from within a culture formed by Christianity, even if their ideas are not specifically theological or religiously orthodox. We are also used to secularised Jews as philosophers, writers and formers of opinion – one only has to think of Marx and Freud. But what we are not used to is someone speaking to us, and managing to address us where we are, from within the conservative and ancient religious tradition of Orthodox Jewry, and without compromising it in the process. Above all, we are not used to this being done in an utterly English way, with a command of English language and conceptual thought, and with a profound understanding – the sort of understanding that only comes from membership – of modern Western society. Jonathan Sacks is a next-door neighbour, a fellow Englishman, one of us. Even when he is boring, which is not very often, he is boring in an English sort of way.
Yet that is still not quite the essential point about him. He has not invented a new message. What he has done is to understand an old one, but to understand it so well that he can see what it has to say to us, even to non-Jews who inhabit an utterly different world from that in which the message first took shape.
Judaism arose from a very particular experience, the self-reflection and meditation upon God of an ancient Semitic people. Through historical circumstances at the start of the Common Era, most of all because of the way they were deprived of their special homeland for so many centuries, the Jews learnt to detach themselves from one time and place (though they never lost the deep longing for it). Thus they had to learn, as the price of their own survival, how to adapt the principles of their culture and religion to very many different settings, not least to settings which were hostile. Thus did the particular, rooted in one time and place, become the general and transcendent, at home everywhere and nowhere.
The Jews were the first discoverers of a new and radical insight into the nature of reality. They discovered monotheism: that there was but one true God. God was the creator of everything, then and now. God was also personal, able to intervene in human affairs, able even to respond to human pleas for help. Such a God has to be the author of one universal morality, ethical laws which apply everywhere. Monotheism banishes the idea of local moralities, each expressing the will of a domestic deity, where any passing stranger, not a worshipper of that local God, becomes thereby an outlaw and enemy. It is crucial to Jewish mores to acknowledge and welcome the stranger, an ancient way of saluting the fact that strangers are also children of the God of the Jews – for there is only one God.
The notion is so familiar to us we cannot imagine how astonishing it was when first encountered. Even the sophisticated Greeks had to acknowledge that it was a more advanced idea than any they had had. Monotheism is a core idea of Western thought, perhaps even the core idea. It makes the world rational, while at the same time enhancing rather than diminishing the importance of mankind in the scheme of things.
Today, Judaism in all its forms is still intensely monotheistic. But the very universality of its creed now commands our attention. Jews do not speak of a Jewish God. He is universal, or else He does not exist. Not the least of the attractions of Orthodox Judaism, many will find, is its extreme disinclination to evangelise. It is not interested in pulling people into its coils. It can be allowed to be an influence, from outside. For the Jews, that is as it ought to be. They are “to be a light unto the gentiles,” not to turn the gentiles into Jews.
This digression should help to explain why I find Jonathan Sacks so significant, and why I think others will do so too. He is not just a leader and spokesman for his own religious community, which now rightly enjoys so much esteem in Britain. He is also a natural and gifted communicator, who is burning with the desire to convey his ideas to others. He is as Jewish as they come, but also as English as they come, and he has a deep regard for his country and his fellow countrymen whatever their race or faith.
Dr. Sacks shares the widely accepted view that we are a nation living off our moral capital, having abandoned most of the doctrines of our traditional beliefs; but we have not yet been able to replace it with a moral code which relies on science and rationality alone. Fifty years ago it was widely assumed that that time would come. Now we are not so sure. There is a streak of mischief and wickedness in human nature that defies our modern analysis, and which drives us back to shelter behind the religious and moral codes of our ancestors. Dr. Sacks’ own analysis is that the very survival of modern civilisation may ultimately depend upon the survival of three things: faith, the family and the community. And of these, faith is fundamental.
Now this is ancient wisdom, some might say inspired by God, some might say the fruit of 4,000 years of deep reflection on the human condition. Nobody who reads, say, the book of Proverbs or Wisdom or the Psalms, or even Job, can fail to be impressed by the humanity and intelligence of their authors, or the extent to which they seem to have shared many of the experiences and anxieties that we also have undergone. Often they seem wiser than we are. And a religious people which is regularly immersed in that literature is likely to become wiser in turn.
Of all the problems facing modern democracies in the future, morality is going to be the most difficult. Democracy may be the most fair and just system of government yet discovered, in the way it treats all its citizens as equal before the law and before the ballot box. Similarly, attempts to improve on a market-based economic system have not so far unearthed an effective alternative. But neither democracy as a political system nor the free market as an economic system can fill a moral vacuum. They are both about method rather than content. They put power in the hands of individuals, so that they can live their lives more nearly as they choose, but they offer no guidance as to the choices themselves: which goods and services to buy, which policies to support. This maximisation of personal autonomy could become very dangerous, once it is perceived as an end in itself. The libertarian dream, as Dr. Sacks recognises, could quickly become a nightmare. It is morally bankrupt. Human freedom is only a benefit once we know what freedom is for.
There are moral systems contending to fill this vacuum, of course, and the most useful are likely to be those which rely on ideas of transcendental morality, of universal laws not invented by particular societies – or even worse, by governments – but whose validity is perpetual. Democracy, if it is to have any moral content, will have to learn how to cherish those sources of transcendence in its midst, because in the long term they are its one sure hope.
Democracy will have to outgrow its silly habit of rejecting all that is old and wise simply because it is not new and startling. All those with something to offer to the moral debate will have to be allowed, and if necessary invited, to put their contribution forward. The faith communities in Britain, including the Christian Churches, the Jewish community, and the religions of the Indian sub-continent now amply represented among us, will have to be treated not as anachronisms but as among our most vital national assets. They are our spiritual gold reserves.
But this requires an institutional habit of tolerance that goes beyond peace between factions, and deepens into an ability and willingness to listen and to learn. Faith communities will have their own clear principles, but may find that the uncompromising insistence upon those principles is possible only within their own ranks. They should not for that reason reject the effort to influence the community at large, nor should they give up if they are not totally successful. Faith communities serve the wider needs of society every time they offer moral principles that are out of step with the fashionable morality of the age, even when that offer seems not to have had any effect. In any event, how can they know?
These are among the key principles for the conduct of a plural society, of one that no longer holds strongly to any particular creed. It is difficult to overstate the importance to such a society of the contribution of a man like Dr. Jonathan Sacks. It follows that there can be few more important books published this decade than Faith in the Future. It is not a religious book in any denominational sense. It is more about us, the majority gentile community, than it is about the Jews. If we neglect it, we shall be passing a vote of no confidence in our own future. For we shall be rejecting the only sort of medicine that can save us. Better by far that we should acquire a taste for it. Thankfully, Dr. Sacks makes it so enjoyable to swallow, we are hardly aware it is doing us good.