Duluth, Minnesota (OpEdNews) January 22, 2023: I first learned about Rabbi Jonathan Sacks' work when I read the self-styled conservative American columnist David Brooks' review of his book Not in God's Name: Confronting Religious Violence (Schocken Books, 2015) in his column titled "Finding Peace Within Holy Texts" in the New York Times (dated November 17, 2015).
The late Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks (1948-2020; Ph.D., University of London, 1982) was a respected conservative English Jewish leader and a prolific public intellectual whose many learned books and multi-media commentaries gained for him an international following. The essay collection The Power of Ideas: Words of Faith and Wisdom (Hodder & Stoughton, 2021) brings together a wide-ranging sampling of 91 selections of his learned writings over the years 1981 to 2020, grouped together in five chronologically arranged parts.
In 2003, Rabbi Sacks delivered the Sir Isaiah Berlin Memorial Lecture in London. His lecture is published here as "On Freedom" (pp. 279-294). In it, he reports that Sir Isaiah Berlin's "literary executor, Henry Hardy, [selected] as the title of one of the volumes of his collected essays [the title] The Power of Ideas [Chatto & Windus, 2000]" (p. 281).
Yes, in Rabbi Sacks' 2021 essay collection The Power of Ideas, he does refer to David Brooks (pp. 54 and 208). I'd not be surprised if the two of them had met one another.
Nevertheless, Rabbi Sacks does not even mention Donald J. Trump by name even once in the 91 selections in this 2021 360-page essay collection. Why not?
In any event, the five parts of Rabbi Sacks' posthumously published essay collection are as follows: Part One: "Thought for the Day" (27 selections; pp. 1-56); Part Two: "Credo" (25 selections; pp. 57-129); Part Three: "Articles" (14 selections; pp. 130-181); Part Four: "The House of Lords" (10 selections; pp. 183-210); and Part Five: "Speeches and Lectures" (15 selections ; pp. 211-361).
The "Foreword" (p. xi) is by His Royal Highness, the Prince of Wales, now King Charles III (born in 1948; reigned 2022-). The "Introduction: A Polymath of Our Age Who guides Us Still" (pp. xiii-xviii) is by Henry Grunwald OBE, QC (born in 1949), Chair of the Rabbi Sacks Legacy Trust. No editor is explicitly identified.
In Grunwald's "Introduction," he says the following: "Part One of this collection contains a selection of transcripts from Rabbi Sacks' Thought for the Day broadcasts on BBC Radio 4" (p. xiv); "Part Two is a selection of Rabbi Sacks' Credo columns, originally published in The Times" (p. xv): "Part Three includes a selection of articles written for a variety of newspapers and publications" (p. xv); "Part Four features a selection of his speeches from the House of Lords" (p. xv); and "Part Five includes a small selection of his many and varies speeches and lectures" (p. xvi).
The volume is rounded off with a "List of Published Works [Books] by Jonathan Sacks" (pp. 363-364) and an "Index" (pp. 365-379). The "Index" is not thorough (for example, it contains no entry on Ruth Benedict, mentioned below). However, the entry on Biblical references includes sub-entries on each and every book of the Hebrew Bible (pp. 366-367). In addition, the list of his published books now needs to be updated to include not only The Power of Ideas (2021), but also I Believe: A Weekly Reading of the Jewish Bible (2022).
In Rabbi Sacks' 2011 essay "Books" (pp. 113-115), he says, "I have argued that Judaism took the form it did because of one of the great revolutions in information technology, the invention of the alphabet as opposed to the sign-based systems of Mesopotamian cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphics. To understand those systems, you had to memorize hundreds of symbols, which meant that only a minority could do so. The result was literate elites and hierarchical societies. The first alphabet, Proto-Semitic, which appeared in the Sinai desert some thirty-eight centuries ago, had little more than twenty symbols. For the first time the possibility was born of universal literacy. . . . From the beginning, Judaism became a religion in which education was the fundamental act. . . . The holiest object in Judaism is a book, the Scroll of the Law. The reverence we pay it is astonishing" (pp. 113-114).
For an accessible discussion of the invention of the alphabet, see the American Jesuit Walter J. Ong's book Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (Methuen, 1982, esp. pp. 78-116).
In Rabbi Sacks' 1998 essay "Markets and Morals" (pp. 226-244), he says, "Not the least significant of Judaic contributions to the development of Western civilization was its emphasis on, perhaps even invention of, linear time. Ancient cultures tended to think of time as cyclical, seasonal, a matter of eternal recurrences to an original and unchanging nature of things. The Hebrew prophets were the first to see time in a quite different way - as a journey towards a destination, a narrative with a beginning and middle, even if the end (the Messianic society) is always beyond the horizon. It is ultimately to this revolution that we owe the very notion of progress as a historical category, the idea that things are not predestined always to remain what they were. Hope, even more than necessity, is the mother of invention" (p. 236).
Ong critiques cyclic accounts of time in his 1957 book Frontiers in American Catholicism: Essays on Ideology and Culture (Macmillan, pp. 54, 83, and 112).
For an accessible popular discussion of linear time versus cyclic time, see the later Thomas Cahill's book The Gifts of the Jews: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels Nan A. Talese/ Doubleday, 1998, esp. pp. 5, 64, 126, 127-128, 130-132, 145-146, and 237-239). For Ong, the classic study of the linear time versus cyclic time is Mircea Eliade's book The Myth of the Eternal Return, translated from the French by Willard R. Trask (Pantheon Books, 1954; orig. French ed., 1949).
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