Rabbi Sacks’s cancer overtook him quickly. It was only a few weeks ago that his office announced he was unwell. And many even in the Jewish community were unaware quite how poorly he was. In many ways, Jonathan Sacks was an intensely shy and private man. A scholar, a man of faith, a family man, with great personal warmth, a twinkle in his eye, and a very gentle yet penetrating sense of humour — but you probably wouldn’t call him emotionally demonstrative.

For a public figure, there was a deep reserve about him, which makes it all the more remarkable that he was able to communicate as directly and passionately as he did. His lush, resonant baritone voice made him a natural broadcaster, but it was his ideas and his way with words that enabled him to talk so directly into many people’s lives, touching things that made a difference to them whether Jewish or not. He was a serious person in the very best sense of that word. He took his responsibilities seriously: “To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God” as the prophet Micah put it. He will be remembered as one of the greatest Chief Rabbis this country has ever known.

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The last time I saw him was at Shabbat dinner in Golders Green, just before the first lockdown began. We drank whisky, we chatted about theology, we sang loudly, thumping the table with delight. He was, of course, typically urbane and erudite. But he also danced about and played with my young boys crawling under the table, who are themselves Jews but with a Christian father. Taking the funeral in a chilly north London cemetery yesterday afternoon, Rabbi Harvey Belovski, the senior Rabbi at the Golders Green synagogue (where Rabbi Sacks had made his spiritual home for the last seven years) made reference to that evening, which he had hosted. It was, Rabbi Belovski suggested in his eulogy, evidence of Rabbi Sacks’s remarkable ability to reach out to those on the edge of Jewish life, indeed even to those beyond it, not only to make them feel personally valued but also to make them feel included in the great enterprise of connecting to the divine.

This inclusiveness did not always win him friends within the more conservative parts of the Jewish community. “Chief Rabbi to the gentiles” was how some unkindly put it. Indeed, he went to a Church of England school and he didn’t come from a long line of distinguished Rabbis like many of his predecessors. He was an East End boy and the first in his family to go to university.

Throughout his tenure as Chief Rabbi, he had the unenviable task of providing a point of focus for a very divergent family of communities, some deeply conservative, some liberal. The fact that he didn’t please all of the people all of the time was more an indication of the diverse nature of Anglo-Jewry than of his own failings. He didn’t attend the popular Reform Rabbi Hugo Gryn’s funeral, for which he was attacked. He did attend his memorial service, for which he was also attacked. He couldn’t win.

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To many of us outside the Jewish community, he was the familiar voice on Thought for the Day who could read out the telephone directory and make it sound profound. His voice was calming, steady, resonant with purpose. And what he said was so full of hope. We need a new social settlement, he argued in his last book. One based on the priority of the “we” over the “I”. In Jewish theological terms, what we need is a covenantal relationship with each other, not just a legal contract based on our contractual obligations. And he was excoriating towards the anti-Semitism, the oldest hatred, that had been allowed to develop in the Labour Party. He also believed that Christian-Jewish relations in Britain are the best in the world.

But despite his willingness to speak into contemporary concerns, all of what he said was grounded in a very intense personal relationship with God. It ran through him like the words in a stick of Blackpool rock. And here, I think, we get to the most remarkable thing about Rabbi Sacks as a religious leader: he was not a man who threw around cheap certainty. He did theology without any of the sort of intellectual defensiveness that lesser religious leaders can sometimes adopt. His wasn’t a brittle faith of dogmatic assertion, it was something that grew out of decades of daily interrogation of the infinite.

In his eulogy, Rabbi Belovski made reference to the troubling story in the Book of Genesis, the Aqedah, in which God asks Abraham to sacrifice his son. Those who ponder its dark mystery find no easy answers. Indeed, as many of the great rabbis of the past have argued, it is a text that won’t allow a simple resolution. Theology often feels contradictory, at odds with itself. But for men like Jonathan Sacks, this became a source of strength not of weakness; an invitation to “antifragility” — an idea that he was much taken with. Living the contradictions meant refusing cheap understanding, and so became an invitation to a more capacious appreciation of the world in all its profound and disturbing complexity.

From this intellectual base, all his book and sermons, lectures and broadcasts flowed. Rabbi Sacks became a powerful emissary for orthodox Judaism throughout our national life — and internationally too. And no Jewish thinker could avoid being in mental conversation with his ideas. “All modern Jews are students of Rabbi Sacks, whether they know it or not, whether they acknowledge it or not, or whether they like it or not,” as Rabbi Belovski claimed yesterday.

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The ceremony itself was modest, given lockdown — bleak even. The current Chief Rabbi was unable to attend, having received a message to confine himself to home from a test and trace app message received on Friday. In normal times, thousands would have been there. But in the end, it was fittingly simple, with family and senior Rabbis standing in a flat and exposed landscape, saying farewell to the man who had done so much to inspire the Jewish community over the last half a century. Dayan Ivan Binstock, senior Rabbi of the St John’s Wood Synagogue, read out a message from the Prince of Wales. The tone was perfect.

“It was with the most profound personal sorrow that I heard of the death of Rabbi Lord Sacks. With his passing, the Jewish community, our nation, and the entire world have lost a leader whose wisdom, scholarship and humanity were without equal. His immense learning spanned the sacred and the secular, and his prophetic voice spoke to our greatest challenges with unfailing insight and boundless compassion. His wise counsel was sought and appreciated by those of all faiths and none, and he will be missed more than words can say.”

He would not have been out of place in Frankfurt or Berlin in the 1850s, where the great rabbis of German Jewry, of whom Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch was the exemplar, reconciled modernity and Orthodoxy. They built new Jewish Communities in which tradition and citizenship, Kant and Moses were brought together, under the slogan Torah im Derech Eretz — Jewish teaching and respect for the way of the land. It is to the great credit of Rabbi Sacks and Anglo-Jewry that he held the office of Chief Rabbi for 22 years and resurrected that tradition in Britain, so that the voice of the dead could be heard once more.

In the book, Rabbi Sacks defines us as “meaning-seeking beings” for whom relationships are central, and he reveals an Aristotelian turn in seeing happiness as the “expression of the soul in accordance with virtue”. He laments the passing of a ‘Common Good’ in favour of twitter echo chambers, the hateful denunciation of those who disagree, and the apotheosis of self-definition rather than recognising that other people have something to say about whether you are a good person or not.

His statement that “love is the supreme redemption of solitude” is worth repeating. The chapter on self-help being no help at all is instructive, and his critique of multiculturalism and safe spaces is a reasoned refuge from a demented kind of liberalism.

His central thesis is that while there has been a parallel growth in the power and scope of both the state and the market, there has been a simultaneous disintegration of civil society, which is the source of relationships, ethics and happiness. We have never had more things or more rights; and we have never been so unhappy. This paradox is the driving force of the book. It is its greatest strength and its greatest weakness.

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In lamenting the disintegration of a shared public culture, Sacks develops certain dualities, between selfishness and altruism, power and morality, contract and covenant — in which the first term has become dominant when the second term should prevail. He particularly identifies politics as “about power and the distribution of resources”, and morality with “civil society”. The problem is that the examples he gives of a covenant are profoundly political, citing the American Revolution and the Burkean Covenant between the generations.

But the American Revolution was constitutively political, and it embodied a certain form of ethics; life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It enshrined the separation of the powers and the primacy of rights. In the case of Burke, it refers to Parliament, the Monarchy, the Church and the body politic as embodied in the sovereignty of the Ancient Constitution.

Brexit is a sublime example of this ambiguous duality. The Remain side accepted Sacks’s view of politics, and fought the battle on the terrain of policy and prosperity, emphasising the threats to our livelihood imminent in rejecting the sovereignty of the European Court of Justice, the Customs Union and the Single Market.

In contrast, the Leave side drew on the idea of the renewal of a covenant between the generations, of keeping an ancient promise, the restoration of Sovereignty through the reclamation of the inheritance of Parliament, the common law and our tradition of combining democracy and liberty.

“Take back control” is not best understood as a policy decision. Brexit was political but it was also moral in its assertion of the primacy of democracy as the ultimate decision-making process. That is what made it so alarming and threatening.

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As a result, Sacks’s narrow view of an instrumental and utilitarian politics, a desacralised politics, gives the book a whiff of a lament for the era that has passed — of the Third Way, of Blair, Brown, Cameron and May, in which the nation state was a regional administrator of a global system of capitalism and individual rights. There is no recognition here of the power of democracy to resist the domination of capitalism, of the primacy of people over things. This was the crux of the issue in Brexit and is absent from the conception of the Common Good developed by Sacks.

Left to itself, capitalism pursues the highest rate of return on its investment at the greatest speed. Invariably this involves the attempt to turn human beings and nature into commodities organised in labour, land and food markets. In other words, in a language familiar to Rabbi Sacks, capitalism wishes to commodify creation itself. This is unsustainable to life, community, society and ethics, and is at the heart of the inequality he dislikes and the ill-defined ‘populism’ he fears, which is mentioned eight times in two pages in the chapter entitled “Democracy in Danger”.

The problem, as mentioned, is that in denying the ethical content of the resistance to globalisation, the move is reduced to “populism”. But the demonic energy of capitalism needs to be constrained, and democratic politics is the traditional way of doing so.

Perhaps there are two reasons why Sacks relegates politics and democracy in this way. The first is a lack of a mediating principle between selfishness and altruism, which would be that of mutuality and reciprocity, of self-interest broadly conceived as a political concept embodied in shared institutions. Civic peace, mutual security and a reciprocal welfare system are political as well as civic achievements.

At one point Sacks refers to “reciprocal altruism”, but this phrase indicates that what binds us in political community is mutually beneficial and not altruistic at all. Sacks argues that both Darwin and De Tocqueville conclude that both co-operation and competition are necessary for a good society, despite their different disciplines and objects of observation. But this is not developed politically.

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The second problem with the book is its lack of recognition of the power of capitalism as an incentive system. Sacks uses the phrase “structure of grace” to describe the well-ordered relationship between market, state and civil society. It echoes that used by Pope John Paul II in describing capitalism as having a “structure of sin”, in incentivising vice in the form of greed, selfishness and unconstrained desires.

Catholic Social Thought, though, does not turn to the state as the exclusive refuge and remedy, but to decentralised institutions, worker representation on boards, regional banks that can only lend in the areas in which they work, and the upholding of vocation and status in the form of apprenticeships as a necessary condition of labour market entry. These are civic institutions but they are not voluntary: the state underwrites the strengthening of society and constraints on capital by embedding mediating institutions within the economy.

Catholic Social Thought recognises the need for ethical constraints within a competitive market which preserves a sense of relational accountability. It also stresses the need for limits on interest rates and for a living wage in response to inequality and the dehumanisation of people as mere commodities. But despite the lauding of civil society in this book, it does not present any institutions through which the market and the state could be constrained or held to account.

The final problem in a book subtitled “Restoring the Common Good in divided times” is that the Common Good, as a tradition of thought and practice, has always been political and participative in both its secular and religious forms. It is rooted in the governance of cities with a recognition of estranged interests and the necessity of their reconciliation within the polity.

In other words, the Common Good requires an active citizenry engaged in democracy which respects the dignity of difference and the mutual interests that bind them. It is an ancient tradition of immediate contemporary relevance. And while Jonathan Sacks deserves great credit in restoring it to our national conversation, he does not quite recognise the radical consequences of its restoration for the redistribution of power and the renewal of our democracy.

You can't have morality without politics

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