What do the former Prisoner of Zion, Natan Sharansky, the Shark Tank investor (the US equivalent of Dragons’ Den) Daniel Lubetzky, and the Israeli special envoy for combating antisemitism, Michal Cotler-Wunsh, have in common?
The answer is that they all interacted with the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, who died in 2020 and who left a remarkable legacy of books, videos and audio material.
Now the UK-born Dr Tanya White, a Sacks scholar and lecturer at Bar-Ilan University, has launched a fascinating podcast, Books and Beyond, in which she and 16 global Jewish voices discuss Rabbi Sacks’ teachings, and attempt to answer the question: “What would Rabbi Sacks Say?” in response to the challenging issues facing the Jewish world after 7 October 2023.
“I’d been teaching about Rabbi Sacks’ books over many years to many of my students,” Dr White says, “and when 7 October happened, we had been reading [his book] Future Tense, which is a very positive outlook on the Jewish narrative, in which Judaism engages with the world, and holding out our hands to our non-Jewish friends. And I remember that we came back after 7 October and we were really stalled, asking, what are we going to do with this narrative now— is it still relevant?”
Dr Tanya White (pic Zara Brooks)
Acknowledging that “no one knows [exactly] what Rabbi Sacks would say”, Dr White nevertheless believed that there was sufficient rich material available to allow for “deep and critical engagement”.
Her vision, she said, was “to get the ideas in his books out to a wider public, not just the few hundred women that I teach every week.”
So she approached 16 individuals, each of whom had been wrestling with these philosophical questions themselves, and who had also had interaction with the late Rabbi Sacks.
Dr White interviewed each person and drew on the ideas in four of Rabbi Sacks’ most important books for discussion. “I always knew that Rabbi Sacks had impact, but I found that the majority of [the interviewees] had consciously incorporated his thinking in their particular fields today.”
“Natan Sharansky is a classic example”, says Dr White. “He and Rabbi Sacks had almost a parallel trajectory in their lives. It sounds ridiculous — one lived in the Soviet Union, one lived in England. But they both had this epiphany moment in 1967. Sharansky says that until 1967 he called Judaism a ‘chronic disease’ that he had to put up with and shut up about, but in 1967 he suddenly realised that Judaism was a lot more than what he had been taught it was. [In that year] Rabbi Sacks had the same epiphany in Cambridge. The podcast episode shows that their life trajectories mirrored each other — and how they moved from thinking that Judaism was something that they had to endure, to looking at it as a gift which they could work towards.”
Another contributor was Daniel Lubetzky, founder of the Kind Snacks food group and a now permanent member of the Shark Tank. A leading voice in working with moderate Israelis and Palestinians, Lubetzky had planned to write a book on business ethics and Judaism with Rabbi Sacks, a project that was cancelled because of the rabbi’s untimely death. “It was incredible to hear from him how Rabbi Sacks had influenced him, both in his personal encounters and through his writings….people who heard the podcast episode were just blown away by that connection.”
The podcast series includes eight episodes in total, exploring Rabbi Sacks’ books A Letter in the Scroll, Future Tense, Morality, and To Heal a Fractured World, with each book covered in two episodes.
Contributors include a renowned American social psychologist and author of The Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt; Israel’s Special Envoy for Combating Antisemitism, Michal Cotler-Wunsh; award-winning author of People Love Dead Jews, Dara Horn; and UK scholars and thinkers such as Rabbi Dr Raphael Zarum and Gila Sacks.
Dr White says if she is able to do a second series of podcasts she will focus on Rabbi Sacks’ groundbreaking book, The Dignity of Difference, which explores how Judaism can reach out to the non-Jewish world, perhaps engaging non-Jewish voices.
A UK launch of the podcast series will take place in London on March 3 with Dr White, Lord Finkelstein and Gila Sacks.
