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HIGH HOLIDAY READER Rabbi Jonathan Sacks’ Bookshelves Project

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HIGH HOLIDAY READER Rabbi Jonathan Sacks’ Bookshelves Project 2021 · 5782 HIGH HOLIDAY READER Rabbi Jonathan Sacks’ Bookshelves Project EDITED BY CHAIM STRAUCHLER HIGH HOLIDAY READER 5782 TABLE OF CONTENTS From the Tradition Archives: Alienation and Faith JONATHAN SACKS 3 The Thought Worlds of Rabbi Sacks DAVID SHATZ 20 A. J. Ayer: Language, Truth and Logic DANIEL RYNHOLD 24 Nikolai Berdyaev: The Meaning of History JOE KANOFSKY 26 Peter L. Berger: Rumor of Angels MIJAL BITTON 28 Stephen L. Carter: Civility JONNY LIPCZER 30 G.K. Chesterton: Orthodoxy BEN CROWNE 32 Response to "Chesterton's Orthodoxy" YITZCHAK BLAU 34 Leonard Cohen: You Want it Darker DANIEL ROSE 38 Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy in America STUART HALPERN 40 John Donne: “Meditation XVII,” Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions LINDSEY TAYLOR-GUTHARTZ 42 B.J. Fogg: Tiny Habits TAMRA WRIGHT 44 Viktor Frankl: Man’s Search for Meaning CHAIM STRAUCHLER 47 Sigmund Freud: Moses and Monotheism HARVEY BELOVSKI 49 René Girard: Violence and the Sacred ZISSY TURNER 78 Ibn Khaldun: The Muqaddimah ARI M. GORDON 53 Horace M. Kallen: Democracy Versus the Melting Pot HELENA MILLER 55 HIGH HOLIDAY READER 5782 Martin Luther King Jr.: I Have a Dream ZEV ELEFF 57 Abraham Lincoln: Second Inaugural MENACHEM GENACK 59 Alasdair MacIntyre: After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory MICHAEL J. HARRIS 61 Nelson Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom DANIEL ROSE 63 John Stuart Mill: On Liberty SAMUEL LEBENS 65 Eric Nelson: The Hebrew Republic RAPHAEL ZARUM 67 H. Richard Niebuhr: The Idea of Covenant in American Democracy DANIEL FRIEDMAN 70 George Orwell: The Lion and the Unicorn NESSA LIBEN 72 Robert F. Putnam: Bowling Alone JOHNNY SOLOMON 74 Jean Jacques Rousseau: On the Social Contract ISAAC FRIED 76 Michael Sandel: Liberalism and the Limits of Justice SAMUEL LEBENS 78 Benedict de Spinoza: Tractatus Theologico-Politicus DANIEL RYNHOLD 80 Charles Taylor: A Secular Age CHAIM STRAUCHLER 82 Leo Tolstoy: A Confession YAKOV DANISHEFSKY 84 Lionel Trilling: Beyond Culture JOE KANOFSKY 86 Max Weber: The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism ANDREW ROSENBLATT 88 Rabbi Sacks Bookshelves Project – A Closing Chapter CHAIM STRAUCHLER 90 And an Unwritten Chapter JONATHAN SACKS 93 Rabbi Chaim Strauchler [email protected] HIGH HOLIDAY READER 5782 Welcome to the 5782 High Holiday Reader. Thank you for joining us in prayer, thought and conversation. The High Holiday Reader brings together articles and essays to help us reconnect to what really matters in life. It asks us to think more deeply about those things. In the past, I have written short introductions to explain what I find meaningful in the piece. In some respect, the Reader this year is composed almost exclusively of such introductions, written on classics of Western thought. Tradition has been engaged in a years long project called “The BEST.” In Culture and Anarchy (1869), Matthew Arnold argues for the role of reading “the best that has been thought and said” as an antidote to the anarchy of materi- alism, industrialism and individualistic self-interest. Arnold’s idea influenced much of Rav Aharon Lichtenstein’s understanding of Western Culture and its usefulness to bnei Torah. “The BEST” attempts to highlight what things “out there” make us think and feel. What elements in our culture still inspire us to live better? We seek to share what we find that might still be described as “the best that has been thought and said.” Our writers have prepared short introductions to those works to explain something of their value. On 20 Heshvan – October 26 2021, the world will commemorate the first yahrzeit of Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks. Rabbi Sacks masterfully integrated the “Best” of Western thought with the timeless message of Torah to create a hopeful message for the Jewish people and for all humanity. We have dedicated a portion of the Best project to Rabbi Sacks’ bookshelves. Rosh Hashanah is a time to think broadly of Hashem’s world and our place within it. Rabbi Sacks’ model is a most worthwhile framework for such thinking. The Rabbi Sacks’ Bookshelves owes a great debt of gratitude to Rabbi Jeffrey Saks – editor of Tradition – who has championed this initiative and offered important guidance throughout. Thanks also to Isaac Selter, Tradition's editorial assistant, for his valuable help and advice. In addition to reviewing the Reader in shul, please bring it home and use it to spark discussion around your table. I would love to hear about the conversations that ensue. I send out a weekly e-mail with words of Torah and articles of interest (much like those included in this Reader) every Friday. If you would like to receive this weekly e-mail, please forward me your e-mail address after Yom Tov. My e-mail address is [email protected]. With wishes for a happy and health sweet new year – shana tova Rabbi Chaim Strauchler Rabbi, Congregation Rinat Yisrael, Teaneck NJ Associate Editor, Tradition · 1 · HIGH HOLIDAY READER 5782 Rabbi Jonathan Sacks published this essay when he was a 25-year-old faculty member of Jews’ College in London, England. The essay is a testament to his intellectual and Torah courage. Rabbi Sacks challenges the phenomenology of Lonely Man of Faith, arguing that loneliness is not the normative state of the religious person—but rather is indicative of a state of sin. He goes so far as to attribute the sin of the spies to this loneliness. Much of Rabbi Sacks’ characteristic religious optimism--that would characterize so much of his later teachings—can be found in this, his first essay, in the pages of Tradition. · 2 · HIGH HOLIDAY READER 5782 FROM THE TRADITION ARCHIVES: ALIENATION AND FAITH Rabbi Jonathan Sacks TRADITION ISSUE 13.4 AND 14.1 | SPRING-SUMMER 1973 INTRODUCTION that comes on men even in the heart of a period of direct relationship. For ours is not the loneliness of the Psalmist: Of all the phenomena, spiritual and social, that charac- "I am become a stranger to my brothers and alien to terize contemporary existence, centrality of significance my mother's children" (69:8), for he can still speak the belongs to alienation. The distance at which the individual Thou and expect an answer: "For the Lord hearkens to stands. from an easy immediate and innocent identi- the needy." Nor do we face the God of Isaiah: "In truth fication with nation, society, his physical environment, you are the God who hides Himself” (45:15) Intentional and other people is a distinguishing mark of the age; and concealment is concealment for a purpose, part of the one which has its obvious spiritual reflection. For the dialectic of revelation, a gesture understood by the lover relationship between man and God is not independent of God. The Zohar speaks of this in the famous allegory of of that between man and the world. When man is prised the maiden in the castle: off the surface of the world by his technical mastery of natural forces; when this succeeds to self-consciousness The Torah lets out a word and emerges for a little and reflection; and this gives way in turn to loneliness from its concealment, and then hides herself and despair of innocence regained, then, in parallel, we again. But this she does only for those who can trace a widening gap between man and God, from understand and obey her. the Thou of revelation, to the He of the Halakhah, to the Our isolation, in contrast, belongs to our times, a time It of the philosophers, and to the hidden and unreachable when, it would seem, even the hiddenness is hidden. A God of the crisis theologians, who begin, in His absence, to story about the Baal Shem Tov explains the nature of turn to other consolations. double concealment. It is said that one day on the way he We must distinguish the ontological condition of met a child who was crying, and when he asked him why, loneliness, from the occasional mood of estrangement the child said: I was playing with my friends, and I was to · 3 · HIGH HOLIDAY READER 5782 hide. But I have hidden myself so well that they cannot redemptive. One can relate to someone else's problems find me. This, it is said in the name of the Baal Shem by entering into his situation, seeing it with his eyes; or Tov, is God's situation. To hide one's face is to seek to be by addressing his problems from one's own unchanged found; but when one is so hidden that even the fact that perspective. By the first method one wins the advantage one exists in hiding, is hidden, then the separation is of a of fully understanding his problem, at the risk of losing tragic order. all that might have enabled one to solve it, even at the risk of being infected with the same problem oneself. Together with a separation of man from God and the Because one's situation is now the same as his, it now world goes an estrangement of man from himself. If, as afflicts both. The second preserves a way of escape, the Buber says, "All real living is meeting," then the absence of possibility of new and unforeseen perspectives, but at real meeting means the absence of life, in its wholeness the cost of an unmediated distance between the one who and integrity. Identity is given in relation; a man whose asks and the one who answers. Both forms of relevance meetings are distant encounters does not even possess embody a paradox. But what must be remembered is that himself. neither has an intrinsic priority over the other. And that the possibility that Judaism might stand diametrically This, of course, is a universal phenomenon and a central opposed to a contemporary movement of consciousness datum of our political and social philosophy, psychology does not, eo ipso, entail its irrelevance to, or its indepen- and theology.
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