Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, former chief rabbi of Great Britain has died
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, the much respected former chief rabbi of the UK, has died aged 72.Still stuck in a time warp
Sacks was highly esteemed around the Jewish world for his erudition, his wisdom, and his prolific authorship of works on Jewish thought. Sacks announced in the middle of October that he had been diagnosed with cancer and was undergoing treatment, but passed away on Saturday morning.
Rabbi Sacks served as the Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth from 1991 to 2013, succeeding Immanuel Jakobovits. He was succeeded by the current chief rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis.
Before being appointed as chief rabbi of the UK in 1993, Sacks served as principal of Jews’ College, now the London School of Jewish Studies, and Rabbi of the prestigious Marble Arch synagogue in Central London.
During his time as chief rabbi, Sacks became an ambassador for the Jewish community in the UK and was respected by many in UK Jewry and in the non-Jewish world as well.
He was widely seen as a voice of morality and ethical integrity, and his positions and opinions were frequently sought by the British media on crucial issues of the day, including in a regular column in The Times newspaper, and as guest on current affairs TV and radio shows.
Some of you will probably be familiar with a charming German movie called “Goodbye, Lenin,” the story of which concerns a woman in Communist-ruled East Germany who falls into a coma and wakes up a few months later in a unified, democratic Federal Republic of Germany. To avoid another shock to her delicate nervous system, the woman’s two children carefully preserve her old living environment, so as to fool her into believing that her Socialist fatherland is still intact and that the outside world is exactly the same as when she temporarily left it.Einat Wilf: Let’s lay the myth to rest: Rabin wouldn’t have brought peace
The United Nations lives in a similar alternative universe. Since its creation in 1945, a good part of its internal life has revolved around an endless cycle of committee meetings, work plans and resolutions that take little account of how the outside world is changing. On certain occasions, its deliberations can seem so out of touch with reality that you wonder whether the directors of “Goodbye, Lenin” are lurking somewhere in the background.
Last week (a momentous, exhausting week, as we all recall) was also a busy one at the world body. On Tuesday and Wednesday, the U.N. General Assembly’s Fourth Committee—an entity that remains concerned with “decolonization” in an age when territorial empires are a thing of the past—passed seven resolutions, all of which focused on Israel and the Palestinian Arabs and all of which condemned Israel in resolute terms.
One resolution expressed dismay that the descendants of the Palestinians who fled during Israel’s 1947-48 War of Independence, whom the United Nations still classifies as “refugees,” were still awaiting repatriation.
Another resolution referred to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem as al-Haram al-Sharif, its Islamic nomenclature.
Yet another resolution decried Israel’s actions in the “occupied Syrian Golan,” as if the apocalyptic civil war in neighboring Syria, in which hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were murdered, tortured and ethnically cleansed, had never happened.
The sense of a time warp is magnified by the list of member states who vote in favor of these resolutions, which is the vast majority of those present. The roster of nations that lined up last week to tar Israel as a rogue state included the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Sudan—the three Arab Gulf states that signed normalization agreements with Israel over the last few months, marking the most profound change in the dynamics of the Middle East situation in decades. The spirit of the Abraham Accords was rudely locked out of the Fourth Committee’s deliberations.
A foreign-policy realist can counter that the Fourth Committee’s deliberations mean very little, irrespective of the size of the majorities behind its various anti-Israel resolutions. Only at the United Nations is the Palestinian question still regarded as the key to regional, if not global, peace, when that view has become an anachronism everywhere else.
There is a reigning myth that when Yigal Amir assassinated Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin on November 4, 1995, he also assassinated peace. It is, like many myths, at once comforting and entirely wrong.
This myth is comforting because it reinforces the kind of foundational story that Western civilization is based on, from Christ to the modern superhero. In these stories, a savior figure or leader shapes history through sheer force of will and against all odds. Transplanted to the Middle East, this foundational myth sets the stage by casting peace between Israelis and Palestinians as requiring an end-of-times salvation. And Yitzhak Rabin is the savior who could have brought about salvation and peace on earth had he not been martyred.
But this myth also reinforces another foundational Western trope, in which Jews are always cast as having an outsized role in shaping human affairs. This is why Jewish agency is always elevated over Palestinian agency in the context of the Middle East. Had Rabin been alive there would have been peace, the myth goes, and since Rabin was assassinated by a Jew, there is no peace. Thanks to the addition of the Jewish trope, the actions, goals and world view of Palestinians have no bearing on the possibility or impossibility of the attainment of peace. Rabin's contribution was recognizing us as partners. Don't erase his. by the Forward
But the reason to be suspicious of the myth of the Rabin assassination killing peace is not just because of how neatly it fits into the wishful thinking of Western storytelling. The myth has persisted for another reason, too: because it rests on the belief that we cannot know what would have happened had he lived.
But we actually do: When he died, Rabin was already on his way to being trounced in direct elections by the up and coming Benjamin Netanyahu. Rabin was going to lose because there was a cavernous gulf between the handshakes on manicured lawns following elevated speeches about peace on the one hand, and the bloody massacres carried out by Palestinian suicide bombers against Israeli civilians on the other. And this gulf did not endear Israelis to the cause of peace. In the highly unlikely case that Rabin would have won the elections, the Israeli public would have pressured him to put the breaks on the so-called peace process, and there is evidence that he was already planning to do so.