For many years I've had an itch to write something about the phenomenon of rabbis whose egos were inflated (even more) by the prospect of global fame, turbocharged by the internet. But I always stopped short of doing so, apart from one post I did write on the self-promoting clown Shmuely Boteach. Even with that post I couldn't help writing a small addendum questioning if I'd been too harsh.
After all, with so much hostile fire against all Jews, why add your own friendly fire?
The problem is that, as prophetic writings warned us, the greatest Jewish enemies would come from within. But you don't have to be a Tomas de Torquemada or a Karl Marx to cause great damage to the Jewish people.
Which brings me onto the rabbi I have itched to write about for so long but, until now, have resisted: Jonathan Sacks. Going against someone with a big following is always off-putting; and in addition I feel weighed down by all the years of *not* writing about him. But, anyway, let's see if I can at least get some key points down "on paper", which will hopefully be helpful to me at least, therapeutically, and perhaps to anyone else who cares to look.
At this point in time, five years after the subject has died, my comments on him - going back almost three decades - are more akin to historical revisionism than belated personal reflections. It's funny (weird) how, as I age, things that don't seem very long ago to me, are considered (ancient) history by many.
I should also mention that the trigger for this blog post was an article in the Times of Israel, titled: "Five years after his death, online course aims to make Rabbi Sacks’s philosophy go global."
Sacks loved the word "leadership" and all talk relating to being a leader. His many admirers opine that he was that rarest of creatures: a leader who created leaders; similar to the Chabbad rebbe Menachem Scheerson, whom Sacks often mentioned as *his* great spiritual mentor.
Name dropping was something Sacks did often as a way of burnishing his credentials. Likewise, he never tired of referring to his time at Oxford and Cambridge as a would-be (great) philosopher. The point of these references was to show that he could have followed a secular route through life and been a man of letters, an esteemed intellectual. But because of a fateful meeting with said rebbe Schneerson, he sacrificed all this to become the Moses of his generation.
Of course he never really sacrificed anything, even assuming he would have amounted to any great shakes as a non-rabbi. What Sacks actually did is to have his cake and eat it too: he put on the hat of chief rabbi of Britain (an absurdly outdated and non-Jewish concept) while simultaneously pursuing a path towards 21st century global fame and acclaim, well beyond the parochial borders of his supposed Jewish flock.
To be continued ...
