The world is still turning to Rabbi Sacks

In 2001, I received my first Rabbi Sacks book. At the end of a Bnei Akiva summer camp, the leaders were each given a copy of Radical Then, Radical Now as a thank-you gift.

In it, Rabbi Sacks described each of us as a letter in the scroll of the Jewish people, with something essential to contribute. He connected the story we inherit to the choices we make about our own lives, and presented Jewish identity as a source of purpose and responsibility. Those ideas helped shape the direction of my life, through years in Jewish education and now at The Rabbi Sacks Legacy.

As we mark his sixth yahrzeit, the memories of those who knew him remain precious. But I find myself just as moved by the people who are meeting him for the first time.

Rabbi Sacks gave people both a way into Judaism and a sense of how much it has to offer. He could step back from an individual text or teaching and show us the larger vision: an account of what it means to be human, how to live with others and what gives a life purpose. These are questions we are all asking, whether or not we frame them in religious terms. He helped people recognise in Judaism a response to their own search for meaning, belonging and purpose.

He had the rare ability to make complex ideas accessible without reducing their depth. You did not need a background in Jewish learning or philosophy to follow his thinking, but there was always more to discover when you returned to it. That combination of intellectual breadth and clarity is part of what makes his work so compelling today.

People turn to him because he takes seriously their need to belong, while asking them to take other people seriously too. He gives us a Jewish language for responsibilities we might otherwise struggle to put into words, and ways of thinking about disagreement that preserve our relationships.

A popular influencer, known for her Talmud videos on TikTok, credits Rabbi Sacks with inspiring her to study daf yomi. His description of Jews around the world being on the same page, like members of a huge book club, excited her. She now brings others into that conversation.

In Israel, young people encounter his teachings in classrooms and leadership academies, often just as they are asking what sort of people they want to become and what they owe the society they are about to serve. President Herzog quotes him regularly. The latest book to be translated into Hebrew, Celebrating Life, became an instant bestseller and has already sold 20,000 copies. A British chief rabbi’s voice has become part of Israel’s national conversation.

His readers are not only Jewish. Former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams devoted last year’s memorial lecture to Rabbi Sacks’ vision of society, and Muslim scholar Akbar Ahmed recently wrote about Rabbi Sacks’ teachings on faith, difference and coexistence. His books are read in Korean and Chinese, Hungarian and Czech, alongside Hebrew, French and Spanish, and his weekly Torah essays are shared in Arabic and Persian. His words now reach people whose questions he never heard, in places he never visited.

Rabbi Sacks once wrote: “Optimism is the belief that things will get better. Hope is the belief that, together, we can make things better.” That word “together” sits at the heart of his thinking. For Jews facing renewed antisemitism and Israelis living with deep divisions, it has particular force. He understood that a society is sustained by what people learn in families, schools and communities. His idea of covenant, a commitment to mutual responsibility, asks us what we can build together, even when our interests or beliefs differ.

We cannot know what he would have said about events he did not live to see. We can study the habits of thought he taught, and accept the responsibility of applying them ourselves.

He spoke from a particular tradition, with confidence in its wisdom, and he invited others to bring their own deepest convictions to the conversation. That depth gave people something real to engage with. They could disagree with him and still find their thinking enlarged.

Much of our work at The Rabbi Sacks Legacy is helping leaders and educators find ways to bring his ideas into their own communities and classrooms. For me, the most hopeful sign of his continuing influence is the person who discovers that Jewish learning has something to say to them, and then shares it with someone else.

Perhaps the most fitting way to mark this yahrzeit is to put one of his books into someone else’s hands. Twenty-five years after receiving my first, I know how deeply the ideas within it can shape a life, and how far they can travel.

Jonny Lipczer is Director of Communications at The Rabbi Sacks Legacy.