The Dignity of Difference by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks

The Dignity of Difference was written in 2002, but I only became aware of Rabbi Sacks about a year ago. Now I’m a regular reader of his weekly drash at his website, and I own a few other of his books. One of my professors highly recommended this book in particular, and the copy I got from the HUC library is personally inscribed “To Gene Boworitz – in admiration of your outstanding work – wishing you a New Year of blessing, healthy and fulfillment.” Dr. Eugene Borowitz is alive and well, thank God, (and still teaching at HUC) in New York, so I’m not sure why he went ahead and gave away this copy to the HUC library. Ah well, glad I got my hands on it, at any rate.

            The book was written mainly as a response to 9/11 and the problem of a “clash of civilizations.” Rabbi Sacks argues that, globally, the gap is growing between the haves and have-nots, that we do not properly accept and understand other cultures. These problems are what lead to fundamentalism and terror. These arguments have been made elsewhere, and seem to end up placing the blame for jihad terror attacks on us – and I don’t agree. Poverty does not cause terrorism, and Western pluralism surely surpasses anything in the Muslim world, anyway. When I read these premises in the first chapter, I actually put the book down because I thought it was going to be a boring rehash of leftist idealism. A rash of snow days combined with a lack of new reading material led me to pick it up again, and I’m very glad I did. Rabbi Sacks definitely does not do the usual lefty-liberal routine, once you get past the introduction.

I found that Rabbi Sacks includes an amazing variety of writers and thinkers. Not every author would use quotes from George Soros and Roger Scruton within just a few paragraphs of each other, and both to support the author’s point about free markets and tzedakah. Sacks does, and very smoothly. Sacks’ familiarity with an incredible number and variety of thinkers and writers - and his ability to incorporate them into his own arguments – is a major part of his appeal for me.

            I also enjoy when Sacks compares Greek/traditional philosophy to Jewish thought. This is something that Leon Kass frequently does in his commentary on Genesis, too. p. 51 “Against Plato and his followers, the Bible argues that universalism is the first, not the last, phase in the growth of the moral imagination….” This is part of Sacks’ discussion on how universalism can only be understood or apprehended through particularism. Another noteworthy quote from this part of the discussion is this: “Judaism has a structural peculiarity so perplexing and profound that though its two daughter monotheisms, Christianity and Islam, took much else from it, they did not adopt this: it is a particularist monotheism. It believes in one God but not in one exclusive path to salvation. The God of the Israelites is the God of all mankind, but the demands made of the Israelites are not asked of all mankind.” (52)  I thought this was a wonderfully succinct statement about a complicated idea.

            Rabbi Sacks discusses the value of particularity and diversity because he seems to think that we (his readers) aren’t quite tolerant enough of cultural differences. Not long after the above mentioned quote on Israelite particularist monotheism, Sacks describes how we might be if we were more tolerant: “What would faith be like? It would be like being secure in one’s home, yet moved by the beauty of foreign places…it would be like being fluent in English, yet thrilled by the rhythms and resonances of an Italian sonnet one only partially understands…” (65) Except that Rabbi Sacks doesn’t get much deeper than those differences, and the unfortunate reality is that one of the main religious differences between my culture and that of fundamentalist Islam is not about food or music preferences but over my right to exist. Tolerance has to work both ways and that doesn’t seem to be the case these days.

            But Rabbi Sacks himself is one of the most bi-partisan, pluralistic writers I’ve seen, and he walks the inclusive talk. He even seems to contradict himself across parts of the book. Here’s an example: In his chapter on “environmental sustainability” (yes, I dreaded getting through this one – but there was nary a mention of global warming in it!) he writes, “Most significant of all is the pressure on he environment by the growth of the human population…” and proceeds to quote Jared Diamond on the subject. So he buys into Jared Diamond on this theory of overpopulation. But earlier in the book, he seems to refute what I thought was a major premise of Jared Diamond’s main book, Guns, Germs, and Steel. Sacks writes: ““One of the questions he [David Landes] raises, for example, is why the industrial revolution took place in Europe, not China…Landes answer’ is broadly this: that culture, not natural resources, climate or other material factors, makes the difference. Europe had what China did not: a Judeo-Christian ethic…” If I remember correctly, Diamond was of the opinion that culture didn’t play so much as a part as did the presence of a few certain microbes or the fecundity of the soil here versus there. There isn’t anything wrong in disagreeing with some things that an author writes and agreeing with others – but it is interesting to see it played out in so subtle a manner.

            In describing that “Judeo-Christian ethic” that played such a part in the rise of Western civilization, Rabbi Sacks addresses civics: “First is the biblical respect for property rights…The brief answer is that the Hebrew Bible is an extended critique of what we would today call big government. At one extreme is the biblical portrait of ancient Egypt, a nation which builds extraordinary buildings at the cost of turning human beings into slaves. At the opposite extreme we have the justly famous eighth chapter of I Samuel…Even constitutional monarchy, in other words, will involve a sacrifice of rights of property and person…

…Long before Hobbes, Locke and Jefferson, biblical Judaism is a theory of limited government…God, in the Hebrew Bible, seeks the free worship of free human beings, and two of the most powerful defences of freedom are private property and economic independence.”

            But before you put Rabbi Sacks on the invite list to your next Tea Party, you might wonder at this statement which comes in a different chapter on tzedakah: “Tzedakah is a concept for our time. The retreat, set in motion by Reagonomics and Thatcherism, from a welfare state, together with the deregulation of financial markets throughout the world, has led to increased and increasing inequalities both in developed countries and the developing world.” Rabbi Sacks certainly defies easy categorization.

            This reminds me of another author I wrote about recently – Lionel Trilling. I thought it intriguing how Sacks and Trilling both identified the Victorian Age as one of “confidence.” Sacks mentions the Victorians in a discussion about the rapid changes that our society has witnessed:  “The nineteenth century was also a time of immense change…Writers from Dickens to Disraeli spoke of child labour, poverty, the bleak urban landscape, and new forms of social division (Disraeli’s ‘two nations’_. Urban crime was so widespread that it was unsafe to walk city streets at night. Yet these problems, though they gave rise to social criticism and political activism, did not generate the kind of uncertainty we feel today…It was, in ways that seem remote to us now, an age of confidence.”

And here’s Michael Kimmage, on Trilling’s thesis: ““To the despair of modernist literature, Trilling preferred Jewish humanism, an elevated ideal for assimilating into America, or he preferred the self-confidence and vigor of the Victorians.”

            Rabbi Sack’s insight into actual biblical analysis, and comparisons to Greek philosophy or other Western secular ideas, is always brilliant. I was disappointed that Rabbi Sacks doesn’t get into more profound differences of the “clash of civilizations” than preferences for worship styles or opinions on birth control, but the diversity of various writers and thinkers that he includes is inspiring and makes for a very good read.