To Heal a Fractured World: The Ethics of Responsibility

Jay Newman is a professor of philosophy at the University of Guelph. His
books include Inauthentic Culture and Its Philosophical Critics and
Biblical Religion and Family Values.

Jonathan Sacks is a leading figure in British Jewry; he holds the
position of Chief Rabbi and is active in the media. He conceives his
project here as an effort at constructing an adequate account of Jewish
social ethics, and he appropriately focuses on the idea of
responsibility. Yet what he has actually served up is essentially a
sermonic, homiletical work cluttered with a surfeit of references, many
to cultural icons from various humanistic and social scientific fields.
The sermonic character of the exercise is manifested in Sacks’s
fondness for telling heartwarming, edifying stories about “ordinary”
folks and about the dear old eccentrics of the rabbinic tradition, in
his often stiff and self-congratulatory high-mindedness, and in his
circumvention of complex theological problems by the use of pietistic
singsong. Like A.J. Heschel—whom, along with many other progressive
Jewish thinkers, he conspicuously ignores—Sacks routinely offers us
poetry when what is called for in the context is authentic, carefully
developed philosophical or theological argument.

Sacks does effectively blend Jewish and non-Jewish literature to
illuminate traditional Judaic moral conceptions such as “sanctifying
the name” and “mending the world”; but he does not make much of an
effort to address the concerns of the keenest critics of rabbinic
ethics. In this respect he fails to live up to his own realization that
Biblical faith demands courage. For example, he seems thoroughly
oblivious with regard to the concerns of Jewish feminist scholars; and
here he would have done well to attend to Eliezer Berkovits’s
observations about the courage needed to introduce the halakhic changes
required “in recognition of the human dignity of the Jewish woman of
today.” Sacks also assigns insufficient importance to the distinctive
and highly important Torah value of humility.

There are some genuinely inspirational passages in this book, which
even at its most tiresome is never unintelligent. The proper audience
for this volume is university-educated Jews who believe that it is
“good for the soul” to be preached to by someone who is at ease
quoting from Soloveitchik, Schneersohn, Wittgenstein, and Rawls.