On Rabbi Sacks and the Jewish library

I cannot begin to imagine the loss experienced by Rabbi Sacks’ family. Dina and Gila have both given beautiful hespedim that I found incredibly moving and helpful, as I have found myself reeling and pre-occupied since his passing. I have begun to piece together in my head two aspects of my own personal experience of Rabbi Sacks that I would like to share. This is the first, in which I’ve tried to understand for my own benefit the sense of intellectual loss I am feeling.

I have this mental image of the Jewish space. It’s like a very large library that exists outside of any given geographic or time limitations. It’s too large to see the sides, and it’s not a library in any modern sense. The bookshelves are everywhere, but they only come up to waist height. On top of each, there are books strewn everywhere. Some are open and marked through constant use, some are pristine except that the sides of the books show a telling sign of having been pored over very carefully.

Because the bookshelves are only waist height, you can see that there are people everywhere. Unlike a library, they’re talking all the time. Some spend a lot of time reading and a little time talking; some are arguing with anyone they can find; but everyone is in conversation — in argument — with others around them.

The people in this room, and the books they tend to stand with, are very interesting and varied. In the same room you can see the Rambam and the Rav, the Ramban and Rav Kook, Sarah Imenu and Devorah, David Hamelech and Hizkiyahu, Moshe Rabeinu and Rabbi Akiva, the Tur and the Rama, Bruria and Yonatan, Rav Shimshon Refuel Hirsch and the Chofetz Chaim, the Besht and the Gra, Rav, Shmuel, the ibn Ezra, Chizkuni, and the Rebbe — everyone — they’re all there.

The people have naturally organized themselves a little because of who they are and their conversations, and the books they’re engaging with. There’s part of the room where they’re mainly talking about Chumash; part where they’re talking mainly about Navi; part about Gemara, about Halacha, about Hashkafa, Hasidut, Kabbalah — there’s conversations everywhere. Far too many to participate in all of these conversations.

The only part of the room that is any kind of a boundary that I can see is a kind of huge folding French window. It’s glass, so you can see clearly through it, and it’s partially open. On the other side of the huge folding French window — which spans a distance longer than you can possibly measure — is another library, just like the Jewish one. In that library is the space of non-Jewish thought. Actually, it’s part of the same library, but for a lot of people in the library, it’s hard to see that.

Anyway, in this library Rabbi Sacks was based firmly in the Jewish part of the library, right by the open part of the French window, making the opening as wide as it needs to be. And his way of being in the library was very different to most — not all, but most — of the other people in the library. He darted around the entire library — on both sides of the French window — reading everything he could, and talking to everyone he could.

When I started becoming more observant in my teens, I was rooted by temperament in the more Jewish space, but by education in the non-Jewish space. When I found Rabbi Sacks, I found a giant based in the Jewish part of the library in one of the more sparsely occupied parts, who could guide me around the whole library in a way that I understood. As he was introducing me to the ideas all around the library, I found that I didn’t have to worry about a clash across the French windows. He had already encountered more of all the parts of the library than I had — and he could help me put the ideas together.

His love for so many different parts of the library, and generosity in participating in so many of the different conversations, is awesome. His command of the sheer breadth of ideas that he found is phenomenal. Gifted in his ability to organize hugely disparate ideas into a coherent whole, he was also gifted in his ability to absorb a sheer number and breadth of ideas. And then, thrice gifted, he was able to create truly new ideas that were relevant to enormous numbers of people in that library.

I do not know anyone else with these gifts, focusing on using them for the Jewish community today. The loss is immense. His ideas, and his conversations, and his books, are now firmly in the library, and we will read them and engage with them — but I, and I think we, will miss his energy, drive, passion, love and eloquence in creating and sharing these ideas himself.