Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Desert Island Discs
Presented by Sue Lawley
A religious leader who is the chief rabbi elect of Britain's Jews.
Eight records
Das Trinklied vom Jammer der Erde
Jon Vickers, London Symphony Orchestra, Sir Colin Davis
This is one of my father's favorites, and it's one of mine too.
Naftali Hershtig, Jerusalem Great Synagogue Choir
The supreme moment of Jewish prayer, the Holy of Holies of Jewish time, the Day of Atonement.
String Quartet No. 14 in C-sharp minor, Op. 131: I. Adagio ma non troppo e molto espressivo
It was in Cambridge that I discovered the late Beethoven quartets, and ever since they've been for me the most spiritual music ever written.
Tzam'ah NafshiFavourite
My soul thirsts for you. I hope one day something like that would be my epitaph, that his soul thirsted for God.
Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 77: I. Allegro non troppo
David Oistrakh, Orchestre National de la Radio Diffusion Francaise, Otto Klemperer
The most exciting piece of music that I know.
A record chosen just to remind me of the things most precious in my life, my wife and my children.
String Quartet in F major: I. Allegro moderato
The piece of music of all which never fails to cheer me up whenever I'm feeling low.
This particular recording has a history... In it are all the tears and all the faith of Jewish history.
The keepsakes
The book
The luxury
In conversation
Presenter asks
You don't have a long beard. Is this a new rabbinical trend?
Well, I left it in Jerusalem where I was staying with my family during the Gulf War. And of course, in the weeks before the war, we'd been warned about the possibility of chemical attacks. And the rule was, as soon as an alarm goes, go into a sealed room and put on your gas masks. But for those who have beards, gas masks will not fit, and please remove your beard. So when the sirens went, everyone else dived for their masks. I dived for my scissors and shaver and removed my beard. My children actually were extremely scared, and I was quite worried for them. But when the All Clear came, and I took the mask off, and they saw their daddy for the first time ever without a beard, they absolutely collapsed with laughter.
Presenter asks
Can you describe the effect that the Six-Day War had on you when you were nineteen?
In the weeks before the war, when Israel was surrounded by States who had declared their intention to drive Israel into the sea, the entire Jewish World was riveted on what seemed to be an unfolding tragedy. It looked as if a second, unthinkable holocaust was about to take place. And it made a particular impact on those of my generation who were born after the Holocaust. It made us realize just what Jews had faced the generation before, we suddenly felt ourselves in the same situation again. And all through the university people who had never identified as Jews before suddenly turned up in the university's synagogue. And there was an atmosphere that you could feel sent shivers down your spine. We were terrified. And of course, when the war was over in six days, with a tremendous victory for Israel, the release of emotion was something that I don't think will happen again in my lifetime.
The recording
Timestamps play the recording from that turn
Speaker 2
Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.
Speaker 2
The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen ninety one.
Speaker 2
And the presenter was Sue Lawley.
Presenter
My Castaway this week is a religious leader. Brought up in an Orthodox Jewish family, he went to the local grammar school in North London and then to Cambridge, where, like his three brothers after him, he won a double first.
Presenter
His belief in the importance of Judaism was reinforced when he was nineteen, and Israel fought and won the Six Day War. Ten years later he qualified as a rabbi and now, only thirteen years after his entry into full time religion, he is to become, very reluctantly, he says, the leader of Britain's Jews. He is the chief rabbi elect, Dr Jonathan Saxe.
Presenter
Reluctance apart, Doctor Saxon. We'll come to that later. The other surprising thing about you is that you don't have a a luxuriant and lengthy beard. Is this a new rabbinical trend?
Dr Jonathan Sacks
Well, I left it in Jerusalem. I've just come back from Jerusalem where I uh was staying with my family during the Gulf War.
Dr Jonathan Sacks
And of course, in the weeks before the war, we'd been warned about the possibility of chemical attacks. And the rule was, as soon as an alarm goes, go into a sealed room and put on your gas masks. But for those who have beards, gas masks will not fit, and please remove your beard. So when the sirens went, everyone else dived for their masks. I dived for my scissors and shaver and removed my beard. My children actually were extremely scared, and I was quite worried for them.
Dr Jonathan Sacks
But when the All Clear came, and I took the mask off, and they saw their daddy for the first time ever without a beard, they absolutely collapsed with laughter. My wife said, How romantic This is the man I got engaged to and from that moment onwards the tension was broken and we were able to be relaxed.
Presenter
I presume when when your wife met you you weren't even thinking of becoming a rabbi?
Dr Jonathan Sacks
Ah, no, that was the last thing in my mind. My great ambition in life was to be an accountant. It's just as well I didn't become one, because I really don't understand things like that.
Presenter
It was obviously also something that your your parents had hadn't expected of you. You weren't uh you weren't educated in Jewish schools, were you? I think you went to a a Church of England school, didn't you?
Dr Jonathan Sacks
I went to a Church of England primary school and to a secondary school called Christ College, although I have to say that despite its name, fifty percent of its pupils were Jewish.
Presenter
All of which, though, of course, makes you a very unorthodox choice as Chief Rabbi, doesn't it?
Dr Jonathan Sacks
Well, I don't like the word unorthodox. Could we sent settle for unconventional?
Presenter
An unconventional chief rabbi. We shall learn more as to why in a moment. But let's first of all hear your first piece of music. What's that to be?
Dr Jonathan Sacks
Well, I'd like uh the opening of Mahler's Daslied von der Erde.
Dr Jonathan Sacks
And the reason is simple. When I was in my teens, my father, who loves music and who's an amateur violinist, tried very, very hard to get me to like classical music, and I resisted tremendously. But eventually I did, thanks to him. And this is one of his favorites, and it's one of mine too.
Speaker 4
Yeah.
Speaker 4
Yeah.
Speaker 4
Yeah.
Speaker 4
Can't be
Speaker 4
Yeah.
Speaker 4
A sealer.
Speaker 4
Let's see who
Speaker 4
A screen.
Presenter
The Drinking Song of the Sorrow of the Earth from Mahler's Das Lit von der Erde, sung by John Vickers with the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Sir Colin Davis, and Memories for Doctor Jonathan Saxe of his father.
Dr Jonathan Sacks
Absolutely, a memory in particular of the first time that he took me to Israel.
Dr Jonathan Sacks
He loves Israel very much indeed, and was always telling me that there I would find something different from anywhere else in the world.
Dr Jonathan Sacks
And I remember that during our visit he took me to a concert of Das Lied von der Erde, and we were going there on the bus, and we were sitting near the front of the bus, and he was telling me how Das Lied von der Erde was Mahler's greatest work. And the bus driver turned round and said to him, Well, actually, I think the Ninth Symphony is better.
Dr Jonathan Sacks
And I said, Dad, you're right.
Presenter
He's still alive, your father. Tell me about um his origins, though. He was a a cloth worker in the East End. What does that mean? What did he do?
Dr Jonathan Sacks
Uh no, he s he sold cloth in uh London's commercial road, which was of course the um
Dr Jonathan Sacks
Jewish centre of a generation ago.
Presenter
And was he born here or was he in India?
Dr Jonathan Sacks
He came over to this country from Poland when he was two.
Presenter
And your mother?
Dr Jonathan Sacks
My mother was born here.
Presenter
So tell me about family life in the Saxe household. You were the eldest of four brothers.
Dr Jonathan Sacks
I think we were a very happy family. My mother used to lay down limits, but they always used to be such broad limits that almost anything was possible within them. She used to say to me when I used to go off to college every time, Jonathan,
Dr Jonathan Sacks
Do whatever you like, but don't give up your Judaism. And since I had carte blanche to do almost anything, I did absolutely nothing.
Presenter
And what did they want of you, your parents? What did they expect that their boys would do with their lives?
Dr Jonathan Sacks
My parents weren't professional people.
Dr Jonathan Sacks
They knew that their children would not follow them they didn't want their children to follow them into business.
Dr Jonathan Sacks
And as a result they didn't really give us guidance. They left us to find our own way. In my case that took some years of searching before I eventually found it.
Presenter
As we shall hear, but let's pause there for your second record.
Dr Jonathan Sacks
Uh well the second record is
Dr Jonathan Sacks
A piece of music from Jewish prayer.
Dr Jonathan Sacks
And I've chosen the supreme moment of Jewish prayer, the Holy of Holies of Jewish time, the Day of Atonement. And as Jews gather in the synagogue at that supremely
Dr Jonathan Sacks
Tense and traumatic moment. Our prayers begin with Col Nidrai.
Speaker 4
All anywhere.
Speaker 4
They re sorry.
Speaker 4
They are
Presenter
Kol Nidre, sung by Naftali Hershtig, with the Jerusalem Great Synagogue Choir.
Presenter
So life in the Zacks' home was very traditional, very warm, very sheltered even, would you say?
Dr Jonathan Sacks
Probably.
Presenter
So when you went up to Cambridge the first of your family to do so ever, as you say, it must have been a huge contrast.
Dr Jonathan Sacks
Oh, it was stunning. It was sensational. I mean
Dr Jonathan Sacks
It was the pulse of the place. It wasn't so much the timeless beauty, though I loved that as well but the sheer pulse of so many people with so many ideas. I found that very exciting.
Presenter
And the people you mixed with. You had good rooms, I understand?
Dr Jonathan Sacks
I had the rooms that used to be occupied some years earlier by David Frost, and they were amazing because they had huge French windows and they overlooked the croquet lawn. As a result, in my second year, I spent all my time playing croquet and did disastrously badly in my exams. Luckily I got a bad room in my third year and did much better.
Presenter
And did you enter the debating arena at all?
Dr Jonathan Sacks
Oh, I used to debate in my first year in the Cambridge Union. I remember one debate where I was paired against uh
Dr Jonathan Sacks
a postgraduate who looked just suspiciously overweight and balding, who was Clive James, who has, of course, remained the Clive James he was then.
Presenter
So academe suited you all round, really. I mean, bits of all of it you liked.
Dr Jonathan Sacks
Yes, very stimulating.
Presenter
And then came the Six-Day War, nineteen sixty-seven. You were nineteen.
Presenter
Can you describe the effect that that had on you?
Dr Jonathan Sacks
In the weeks before the war, when Israel was surrounded by States who had declared their intention to drive Israel into the sea,
Dr Jonathan Sacks
Um
Dr Jonathan Sacks
The entire Jewish World.
Dr Jonathan Sacks
was riveted.
Dr Jonathan Sacks
On what seemed to be an unfolding tragedy.
Dr Jonathan Sacks
It looked as if
Dr Jonathan Sacks
A second, unthinkable holocaust was about to take place.
Dr Jonathan Sacks
And it made a particular impact on those of my generation who were born after the Holocaust. It made us realize.
Dr Jonathan Sacks
Just what, Jews?
Dr Jonathan Sacks
had faced the generation before, we suddenly felt ourselves in the same situation again.
Dr Jonathan Sacks
And uh all through the university people who had never identified as Jews before suddenly turned up in the university's synagogue.
Dr Jonathan Sacks
And there was an atmosphere that you could feel.
Dr Jonathan Sacks
Um sent shivers down your spine. I mean, we were terrified. And of course, when the war was over in six days, with
Dr Jonathan Sacks
A tremendous victory for Israel. The release of emotion was something that I don't think will happen again in my lifetime.
Presenter
So it it awoke you from a kind of complacency about Judaism. But did it do more than that? It it sounds as if it it it took you on further than it transformed you almost.
Dr Jonathan Sacks
Well, it planted a seed in my mind that didn't go away for the next few years and which I returned to again and again. That feeling that somehow or other this very tiny people, the Jewish people who had lived through so much for four thousand years, now placed an enormous burden of responsibility on those of us who remained. We were very vulnerable. Somebody somehow had to do something about it.
Presenter
Record number three.
Dr Jonathan Sacks
Uh record number three is uh
Dr Jonathan Sacks
Part of Beethoven's C Sharp minor quartet, Opus one three one. It was in Cambridge that I discovered the late Beethoven quartets, and ever since they've been for me the most spiritual music ever written.
Speaker 4
Uh
Presenter
The opening of the first movement of Beethoven's C sharp minor quartet, opus one three one, played by the Medici string quartet.
Presenter
So your religion, Jonathan Saxe, at the age of nineteen, was transformed. You became increasingly pious, I think, and travelled the world questioning professors and religious leaders about their faith.
Dr Jonathan Sacks
When I finished Cambridge I directly went to a religious seminary at Yeshiva in Israel.
Dr Jonathan Sacks
Home of a group of Jewish mystics. And that was an extraordinary experience. A piece of 18th-century Europe transplanted, you know, kind of seen from Fiddler on the Roof, transplanted to the middle of Israel in the midst of orange groves. And that was a very intense environment. I came back with an enormous beard and a very, very pious look in my eyes. My parents came to meet me at the airport, and they didn't recognize me at all. Eventually, somebody said, That coat belongs to our son, therefore, the person wearing it must be Jonathan.
Presenter
You went into teaching moral philosophy, didn't you? And then there came this point when you gave it up and decided that full-time religion, to become a rabbi, was for you.
Dr Jonathan Sacks
There came a moment after I had been teaching philosophy for a couple of years when I looked around my contemporaries, all of whom had been through the same experience as myself, and many of them had become deeply religious, but very few of them had actually decided to become religious leaders, to become rabbis. In fact, none of them had.
Dr Jonathan Sacks
Now I felt each of them could have made a better rabbi than me.
Dr Jonathan Sacks
This um
Dr Jonathan Sacks
A saying in Judaism, When nobody else is prepared to lead, you have to try to lead.
Dr Jonathan Sacks
And in the end I said that applies to me.
Dr Jonathan Sacks
And that's when I decided to become a rabbi.
Presenter
So in that sense it it was a vocation.
Dr Jonathan Sacks
Certainly I never felt myself particularly gifted or particularly qualified to be a rabbi. I did it because I heard some voice calling me to be one.
Presenter
So there's a also a strong sense of duty attached to it.
Presenter
Is there also that that sense of duty attached to taking the job of a chief rabbi? Because I said at the beginning, and you have said it several times since you were elected, that you are reluctant to take on that role.
Dr Jonathan Sacks
It seems to me that if you look through Jewish history, Jews are great individualists.
Dr Jonathan Sacks
There are many great Jewish leaders. There are very few great Jewish followers. So leading the Jewish people turns out to be very difficult, and I wasn't sure that I had any particular skills in doing so.
Dr Jonathan Sacks
But when I was asked, I felt
Dr Jonathan Sacks
That there really are needs in this community, and if other people have faith in my ability to do something to meet them.
Dr Jonathan Sacks
I'll have to do it.
Presenter
But you said that you kept hoping somebody else would turn up in the meantime and you wouldn't have to do it.
Dr Jonathan Sacks
Absolutely.
Presenter
Are you still reluctant?
Presenter
Of course I mean, if you follow tradition, you now stay in the role after you've taken it up on the first of September until you're seventy years old. I I work that out as the year twenty eighteen.
Dr Jonathan Sacks
Is it? That's a long time away.
Presenter
Is that daunting?
Dr Jonathan Sacks
Well, um you know there have uh only been five chief rabbis since eighteen forty five, which means that most of them started young and carried on for a long time. One of the great chief rabbis, Doctor Hertz, once put it beautifully. He said, Chief rabbis never retire and only very rarely die. So I um understand there's a long road ahead.
Presenter
Next record.
Dr Jonathan Sacks
The next record comes from that period of my life that I spent in Israel among the mystics of Lubavitch. It's called Samalachon Afshi, which is a line from Psalms which means My soul thirsts for you.
Dr Jonathan Sacks
And this comes from the world of East European Jewish piety of the eighteenth century. The Jewish mystics used to gather together towards the close of the Sabbath.
Dr Jonathan Sacks
and sit around a table and drink vodka and tell stories and sing songs, so as not to end this day of rest, and to try and cling hold to the last moments of its sanctity.
Presenter
My soul thirsts for you, sung by the Lubavitcher chorus, and better with the vodka, you say.
Dr Jonathan Sacks
Ah, well, you can't really sing it without.
Presenter
Now, you are as we've said a different generation from your predecessor as Chief Rabbi, Chief Rabbi Jakobovitz.
Presenter
Can we talk about some of the changes in emphasis that you want to bring about? I mean, are there immediately ones that you can think of?
Dr Jonathan Sacks
There are changes of emphasis. I think there are changes of temperament. You see, the Jews of my generation were born after the Holocaust. They were born after or around the time of the founding of the State of Israel.
Dr Jonathan Sacks
Um just sixty or seventy years ago Jewish life was concentrated overwhelmingly in Europe.
Dr Jonathan Sacks
Today Jewish life is concentrated overwhelmingly in Israel and America. The whole Jewish world has changed and some of our sentiments and habits have changed. I think we're less mournful as a people, we're more happy, we're more self-confident as a people. She was prepared to be recognized as Jews.
Presenter
The other way, of course, in which you're you're different from your predecessors is that you're you're you're very British. I mean prominent rabbis, again for for generational reasons, have been slightly foreign in accent and in style. You are very you're very English, aren't you?
Dr Jonathan Sacks
Uh well, I mean it uh I grew up here. I love England. I think to be a Jew for the last eighteen hundred years is to learn how to be yourself and faithful to your Jewish heritage while somehow or other interacting with another culture. In my case, that's an English culture that I grew up in and I'm very attached to.
Presenter
Are you any different from your predecessor in your attitude to to the role of women in Judaism, I wonder? Because they are excluded from so much, aren't they, as I understand it, from that which takes place in the synagogue?
Dr Jonathan Sacks
Well, I have a strong attachment to Jewish women. My mother was one, my wife is one, and my daughters are two, and therefore I feel for them especially for my daughters.
Dr Jonathan Sacks
that they should have a Jewish education.
Dr Jonathan Sacks
That is fully equal to that of my son.
Dr Jonathan Sacks
that Jewish girls and Jewish women should not feel excluded from the most fundamental act of all of Jews, which is to study our own heritage and to feel oneself to be a master of it. And that really is something that I will work on very hard once I become Chief Rabbi.
Presenter
Do you think, do you believe that Jewish women should be allowed to sit in the body of the synagogue, for example?
Dr Jonathan Sacks
I don't, uh for this simple reason.
Dr Jonathan Sacks
that there is a point at which men and women mixing or a certain kind of social atmosphere simply distracts from the unmediated intensity of prayer. In prayer I want to speak personally to God.
Dr Jonathan Sacks
And I don't want to feel that in some way I'm part of a social situation where I have to be self conscious. And that's why Orthodox Jews have always believed that the sexes should pray, as it were, physically, separately, although as part of one congregation.
Presenter
So the women will remain in the gallery.
Dr Jonathan Sacks
Other women will remain in the gallery, and I believe they will find that they can pray much more easily.
Dr Jonathan Sacks
If they pray as women.
Dr Jonathan Sacks
Rather than as some hybrid that is neither male nor female.
Presenter
Some more music.
Dr Jonathan Sacks
Well, my next piece is simply the most exciting piece of music that I know, the first movement of the Brahms violin concerto.
Presenter
Part of the first movement of Brahm's violin concerto played by David Oustrach with the Orquestre Nacional de la Radio Diffusion Francaise conducted by Otto Klemperer.
Presenter
One of the main problems, Doctor Zach's, presumably for British Jury, as I understand it, is is the contraction of Jewish communities, falling birth rates, and marrying out, Jews marrying Gentiles. What do you say to the young Jewish boy who's fallen for the beautiful Gentile girl?
Presenter
Do you say you cannot marry her? It is wrong.
Dr Jonathan Sacks
I would try and sit with him and just trace through that
Dr Jonathan Sacks
Incredible Line of Ancestors
Dr Jonathan Sacks
all of whom might have made the choice not to carry on.
Dr Jonathan Sacks
The heritage to the next generation.
Dr Jonathan Sacks
Two hundred generations of that young man's ancestors had against all odds survived and lived.
Dr Jonathan Sacks
and had faith as Jews.
Dr Jonathan Sacks
And I would honestly ask him would he want that two hundred generational tree to die with him.
Presenter
But if then it were your own son sitting in front of you weeping buckets and saying, But, father, I love her
Presenter
She is my life.
Dr Jonathan Sacks
Yeah.
Dr Jonathan Sacks
What would I say?
Dr Jonathan Sacks
That w that is the tragedy which I think is avoidable.
Dr Jonathan Sacks
If we educate our children so that Judaism is the most important thing in their lives, then it will surely be the most important thing in their marriages.
Presenter
So you don't believe, because of the education you have given your son, that
Presenter
He would even arrive at that point.
Presenter
He would not allow himself to fall for a Gentile.
Dr Jonathan Sacks
Yes, I I would never want a child of mine.
Dr Jonathan Sacks
To feel there is an act I couldn't do because it would give my father pain.
Dr Jonathan Sacks
I would say
Dr Jonathan Sacks
I wish would wish him to feel there's an act that I can't do because it would give me pain.
Dr Jonathan Sacks
And that's what I've tried to teach my children, not very well, but I hope well enough for them to sense something of what I've sensed in Judaism.
Presenter
Do do you have, do you think, Doctor Saxe, a a a dilemma in the sense that you are you are a very human person, you are a a a liberal thinker, you are a broad minded man, you are a moral philosopher, you are
Presenter
You are some one who will quite naturally see two sides always of an argument, and yet you are about to become chief rabbi where you will be required to to take a line always, to know exactly what the answer should be and is.
Dr Jonathan Sacks
Well, you know, there's this famous story which sums up the rabbinical dilemma about the bickering husband and wife who come to a rabbi for advice, and the wife tells her story to the rabbi, and the rabbi says, You know you're right. And then the husband comes in and tells the story.
Dr Jonathan Sacks
And the Rabbi says, You're absolutely right. And the disciple of the Rabbi turns to him and says, How can they both be right? And the Rabbi turns to the disciple and says, You know, you're right. Now I don't think I'm going to take that view. I try very hard to understand and respect positions that are different from mine. But that doesn't mean to say I don't have an absolute conviction that there is truth and falsity, that there is good and evil. I don't think all things are true. I don't think all things are relative.
Presenter
Record number six.
Dr Jonathan Sacks
A record number six I've chosen just to remind me of the things most precious in my life, my wife and my children.
Dr Jonathan Sacks
and the wonderful times we have together around our family table. And here is one of the songs that we love singing, Am Yisrael Chai, The People Israel Lives.
Speaker 4
Odavino.
Speaker 4
Oh the
Speaker 4
Oh god.
Speaker 4
Odavino, Oda Vino.
Speaker 4
Uh
Speaker 4
Oh fine.
Speaker 4
What have we no car, what have we no? What have we no car? What have we
Presenter
Am Yisrael Chai The People Israel Lives sung by Shlomo Kalbach
Presenter
Perhaps in the face of uh all these problems we're discussing, Doctor Sachs, Chief Rabbi Elect, you may like the idea of escaping to a desert island.
Dr Jonathan Sacks
Come as great relief.
Presenter
What do you envisage you'll do there all day?
Dr Jonathan Sacks
Uh well, I I don't know. I I shall have to learn to look after myself, which will come as a novelty to me. I should think that'll keep me quite busy for the first week or two.
Presenter
Is there a practical man in there as well as the moral philosopher?
Dr Jonathan Sacks
Well, there is. I am severely practical when I have to be, but on no other occasion. I'm a reasonable carpenter. I'm a pretty terrible gardener, but I think I could cultivate some plants. Probably wouldn't have the patience to fish, but I may well be forced to.
Presenter
Haven't you got your your own desert island at the bottom of your garden in in Golder's Green, in the form of a hut, that you disappear to?
Dr Jonathan Sacks
Well, I'm a bit offended you should call it a hut. It's a magnificent brick built study. But it's absolutely a desert island. That's where I go away to think and write, and it's totally cut off from the world. I should think it's rather more isolated than the desert island.
Presenter
And will music be an escape to you? I mean, obviously these records um that you're taking with you to the island mean a tremendous amount. But do you use music in that sense? Do you put on can you put on a record and go somewhere else in your head?
Dr Jonathan Sacks
Oh, music isn't an escape for me at all. Music is for me a way of reengaging with the world. You know, I sometimes in fact quite often
Dr Jonathan Sacks
feel um quite depressed at the sheer difficulty of some of the tasks that I've set myself. And whenever I fall into that kind of temporary despair, music just lifts me up.
Dr Jonathan Sacks
and allows me to go back fighting into the world.
Presenter
Let's have some more of it then.
Dr Jonathan Sacks
Well, uh my seventh record is the piece of music of all which never fails to cheer me up whenever I'm feeling low, Ravel's string quartet.
Presenter
Part of the first movement of Ravell's string quartet in F major by the Chillingirian string quartet.
Presenter
You take over in September, doctor Zach. Is there an official ceremony, an induction, or?
Dr Jonathan Sacks
Yes, I am inducted on the first of September this year, and that's when I officially take over from Lord Jacobovitz.
Presenter
But in the midst of your very proper modesty about being elected to take on the role and your reluctance in taking on the job that we've discussed, is there also
Presenter
A degree of pride there must be that you can confess to at having been chosen to follow in such a distinguished line.
Dr Jonathan Sacks
No. I uh I I don't have pride. Simply a sense of
Dr Jonathan Sacks
The responsibility of the future of many Jewish lives depending on my leadership, and I certainly don't intend doing it alone. I intend doing it with people.
Dr Jonathan Sacks
Because really the strength of Judaism is not the strength of its chief rabbis, it's the strength of its individual families and individual members. So I want this to be a very grassroots, a very close to the people, chief rabbinate.
Presenter
Your last record.
Dr Jonathan Sacks
Well the last record
Dr Jonathan Sacks
Is Kel Moleirachamim the Jewish Memorial Prayer for the Dead?
Dr Jonathan Sacks
And this particular recording has a history to it.
Dr Jonathan Sacks
Um
Dr Jonathan Sacks
It's sung by a canticle Shalam Katz.
Dr Jonathan Sacks
Who was imprisoned and taken to a concentration camp during the Nazi regime?
Dr Jonathan Sacks
He, along with two thousand other Jews, was ordered to be shot and killed. And before that the Nazis ordered this group of two thousand people to dig their own graves.
Dr Jonathan Sacks
As Scholem Katz stood with his colleagues in front of his own grave, he made one request of the German authorities that he be allowed to sing the prayer, the memorial prayer for the dead. He sang it.
Dr Jonathan Sacks
and the camp officials were so impressed with his voice that they spared his life. He was liberated from Auschwitz and sang this song in memory of the six million Jews who had fallen. In it are all the tears and all the faith of Jewish history.
Speaker 4
Yeah.
Speaker 4
More draw me.
Speaker 4
Shaohei Bang Rohan
Speaker 4
Hamze Nachom
Speaker 4
Tahaus confay.
Presenter
Keel Molle Rach Hamim, the memorial prayer, sung by Sholem Ketz.
Presenter
I wonder which one of those eight records you would choose as being most essential to you in your isolation on the desert island?
Dr Jonathan Sacks
Tomalochal Nafsi.
Dr Jonathan Sacks
My soul thirsts for you.
Dr Jonathan Sacks
Quite simply, I hope one day something like that would be my epitaph, that his soul thirsted for God.
Presenter
And your book. We supply the complete works of Shakespeare and the Bible.
Dr Jonathan Sacks
Well, many books have influenced my life, but the book I would choose without shadow of doubt to take on a desert island is The Talmud, the greatest of all works of rabbinic literature, a work which has kept the greatest Jewish minds occupied for the last 1,500 years. It's a very big book. It comes in twenty large volumes. I suppose I'd only be allowed one, would I? Or could I have all twenty?
Presenter
Ooh, difficult.
Presenter
Twenty volumes. I mean, does it come bound in one?
Dr Jonathan Sacks
Uh you can get them printed very small, bound in four volumes, if necessary in one. I'd settle for that, if that were possible.
Presenter
You might have to make do with a small print, right?
Presenter
And a luxury. Perhaps you should have a bottle of vodka to drink with the with your record you chose.
Dr Jonathan Sacks
No, I would choose, if I could, an extremely large supply of pencils, and I could then do what it's always been my ambition to do, to write a commentary in the margins of the Talmud, that I should have added my own commentary to the Jewish heritage.
Presenter
Dr Jonathan Sachs, Chief Rabbi Elect, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your desert island discs.
Dr Jonathan Sacks
Sue, many thanks.
Speaker 2
You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio four.
Presenter asks
You went into teaching moral philosophy and then gave it up to become a rabbi. What made you decide?
There came a moment after I had been teaching philosophy for a couple of years when I looked around my contemporaries, all of whom had been through the same experience as myself, and many of them had become deeply religious, but very few of them had actually decided to become religious leaders, to become rabbis. In fact, none of them had. Now I felt each of them could have made a better rabbi than me. A saying in Judaism: 'When nobody else is prepared to lead, you have to try to lead.' And in the end I said that applies to me. And that's when I decided to become a rabbi. Certainly I never felt myself particularly gifted or particularly qualified to be a rabbi. I did it because I heard some voice calling me to be one.
Presenter asks
You have said you are reluctant to become Chief Rabbi. Is that sense of duty attached, and are you still reluctant?
It seems to me that if you look through Jewish history, Jews are great individualists. There are many great Jewish leaders, there are very few great Jewish followers. So leading the Jewish people turns out to be very difficult, and I wasn't sure that I had any particular skills in doing so. But when I was asked, I felt that there really are needs in this community, and if other people have faith in my ability to do something to meet them, I'll have to do it. Are you still reluctant? Absolutely. Chief rabbis never retire and only very rarely die. So I understand there's a long road ahead.
Presenter asks
Are you any different from your predecessor in your attitude to the role of women in Judaism? They are excluded from so much in the synagogue.
Well, I have a strong attachment to Jewish women. My mother was one, my wife is one, and my daughters are two, and therefore I feel for them especially for my daughters that they should have a Jewish education that is fully equal to that of my son. That Jewish girls and Jewish women should not feel excluded from the most fundamental act of all of Jews, which is to study our own heritage and to feel oneself to be a master of it. And that really is something that I will work on very hard once I become Chief Rabbi. ... I don't [believe women should sit in the body of the synagogue] because there is a point at which men and women mixing or a certain kind of social atmosphere simply distracts from the unmediated intensity of prayer. ... Orthodox Jews have always believed that the sexes should pray physically separately. ... I believe they will find that they can pray much more easily if they pray as women rather than as some hybrid.
Presenter asks
You are a very human, liberal, broad-minded moral philosopher who sees two sides of an argument, yet as Chief Rabbi you will be required to take a line. Do you have a dilemma?
Well, you know, there's this famous story which sums up the rabbinical dilemma about the bickering husband and wife who come to a rabbi for advice, and the wife tells her story to the rabbi, and the rabbi says, 'You know you're right.' And then the husband comes in and tells the story. And the Rabbi says, 'You're absolutely right.' And the disciple of the Rabbi turns to him and says, 'How can they both be right?' And the Rabbi turns to the disciple and says, 'You know, you're right.' Now I don't think I'm going to take that view. I try very hard to understand and respect positions that are different from mine. But that doesn't mean to say I don't have an absolute conviction that there is truth and falsity, that there is good and evil. I don't think all things are true. I don't think all things are relative.
“But when the All Clear came, and I took the mask off, and they saw their daddy for the first time ever without a beard, they absolutely collapsed with laughter.”
“And all through the university people who had never identified as Jews before suddenly turned up in the university's synagogue. And there was an atmosphere that you could feel sent shivers down your spine. We were terrified. And of course, when the war was over in six days, with a tremendous victory for Israel, the release of emotion was something that I don't think will happen again in my lifetime.”
“Incredible Line of Ancestors all of whom might have made the choice not to carry on. The heritage to the next generation. Two hundred generations of that young man's ancestors had against all odds survived and lived and had faith as Jews.”
“Well, you know, there's this famous story which sums up the rabbinical dilemma about the bickering husband and wife who come to a rabbi for advice, and the wife tells her story to the rabbi, and the rabbi says, 'You know you're right.' And then the husband comes in and tells the story. And the Rabbi says, 'You're absolutely right.' And the disciple of the Rabbi turns to him and says, 'How can they both be right?' And the Rabbi turns to the disciple and says, 'You know, you're right.'”
“He, along with two thousand other Jews, was ordered to be shot and killed. And before that the Nazis ordered this group of two thousand people to dig their own graves. As Scholem Katz stood with his colleagues in front of his own grave, he made one request of the German authorities that he be allowed to sing the prayer, the memorial prayer for the dead. He sang it. and the camp officials were so impressed with his voice that they spared his life.”