Remembering Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, Who Extolled the Power of Interfaith Understanding

In April 2016, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, who died last Saturday, appeared at the 9/11 Memorial Museum, as part of our continuing series of discussion programs focused on the possibilities of interfaith understanding. By then retired as chief rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the British Commonwealth, Lord Sacks maintained an extraordinary level of public engagement, writing, studying, teaching, and lecturing around the world. Perhaps it was the depth of his rootedness in his own Jewish tradition that had, over the years, brought him to the pinnacle of interfaith exchange. He was revered within the Jewish community and by leaders of other faiths seeking a shared path across the landscape of belief.

His recent book Not in God’s Name: Confronting Religious Violence was the starting point for the conversation he and I shared. As a thinker committed to the sacredness of foundational scripture, Rabbi Sacks sought to understand how these texts could be put to the purposes of violence, how religious fanaticism could emerge from the depths of faith.  Religion itself was not the problem, he argued. Rather, he said, “the human mind is the weapon of mass destruction.”