Jonathan Sacks -The towering Rabbi who built bridges of peace

Three Global Spiritual Leaders in a Time of War and Violence

By Akbar Ahmed, Frankie Martin and Dr Amineh Hoti

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There are few things more important than promoting understanding and bridge-building between people of different religions and cultures. It is not as simple or easy a task as it seems. On the contrary, it is complex and subject to push-back from the different parties as too often some interfaith practitioners end up arguing that their point of view is better or more valid than that of their dialogue partners of other religions. Conversely, sometimes religious differences or the unique worldviews and perspectives of the “other” are glossed over or not adequately discussed—thus allowing questions and stereotypes to remain. Muslims in the early twenty-first-century in general are having a tough time in this environment. It is critical that they are involved in dialogue and promoting both the understanding of their faith and the faiths of others.
With this in mind, we the authors who are committed to building bridges and promoting understanding, are proud to present three towering spiritual leaders who have been vigorously promoting interfaith dialogue especially involving Muslims wherever they could. These three figures represent the three Abrahamic faiths and each one of them has reached the pinnacle of his society – Lord Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury for the Christians, Lord Dr Jonathan Sacks, the Chief Rabbi of the UK for Judaism, and Dr Haris Silajdzic, the Prime Minister of Bosnia and Herzegovina, for Muslims. All have seriously considered the major challenges facing interfaith and intercultural harmony in the twenty-first century and how they may be overcome. As such, they each have much to teach us about how to practically move forward with this essential and urgent task.

One day, not long after the 9/11 attacks in the US, I received a truly inspirational gift out of the blue. It was a copy of The Dignity of Difference: How to Avoid the Clash of Civilizations (2002), the best-selling book by Lord Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, the then-Chief Rabbi of the UK, with a warm personal inscription. While I had been familiar with Lord Sacks’ bold initiatives in fostering dialogue between religions, I had never before had the pleasure of meeting or interacting with him. His gift was the beginning of what would blossom into a deep friendship.
Over the years, our friendship symbolized the power of extending a hand, and has shown how friendship can go a long way in mending deep tensions despite different religious and ethnic boundaries. Two years later, in 2004, Sacks and I first met in person. He had invited Judea Pearl, the father of murdered Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, and myself to discuss recent bridge-building endeavors in which we were engaged. The three of us visited both a Muslim school—the East London school run by the famous Yusuf Islam or Cat Stevens—and a Jewish school in London together, making history by bringing the Chief Rabbi of the UK and a leading American Jew in direct contact with one of the largest Muslim communities in England.
Our visit formed part of Sacks’ annual BBC address to the nation—an honor only bestowed to the likes of the Queen of England. This encounter, widely viewed across the UK, made a huge impact on the British public and allowed people to see Jewish-Muslim relations in a more positive light. The following year, Sacks, alongside other religious leaders such as John Chane, the Episcopal Bishop of Washington in charge of the National Cathedral, Dr Haru Haisa Handa, a Japanese Shinto priest, artist, and Chancellor of the University of Cambodia, Bruce Lustig, the senior rabbi of the largest Jewish Congregation in DC, the Washington Hebrew Congregation, and Mohamed Magid, the head imam of the All Dulles Area Muslim Society, the largest mosque in the DC area, joined me at my home for breakfast in an inspiring show of interfaith harmony the morning after American Thanksgiving. Sacks and I, with our distinguished guests, dined, talked, and even prayed together, aiming to simply bring leaders of diverse faith backgrounds together in the spirit of friendship. This gesture of mutual prayer and affection moved all in the room.
At this meeting, Sacks, who is from the Orthodox Jewish tradition, described the symbolism of “two hands joining.” In Hebrew, he explained, there are numerous words which carry more than one meaning. For example, “fourteen” can also mean “friendship.” Sacks told us that there are 14 joints in a human hand, and if two hands are joined, there are then 28 joints linked together. Furthermore, the word for “twenty-eight” also means “strength” in Hebrew—thus strength comes from two hands joined together in friendship. It was just this kind of human solidarity and unity between the world’s peoples representing different religions, cultures, and ethnicities that Sacks was attempting to encourage with his work.
Lord Sacks was also a long-time supporter of Dr Hoti’s interfaith initiatives. He was a loyal patron of her Muslim-Jewish Center at Cambridge of which she was the founder-director, and she invited him to her College, Lucy Cavendish, for lunch. They corresponded and he wrote encouraging letters. In a volume edited by Burridge and
Lord Jonathan Sacks, Baylor University Press: Texas, Sacks invited Dr Hoti to contribute a chapter which he received warmly. It is called Empathy as Policy in the Age of Hatred.

At the same time, as with so many Minglers, Sacks experienced a backlash to his efforts. He told us that he had nearly lost his job as Chief Rabbi following the publication of The Dignity of Difference. In particular the controversy was over one passage in which he stated that each religion accesses the same God in their own unique way. He wrote, “God has spoken to mankind in many languages, through Judaism to the Jews, Christianity to Christians, Islam to Muslims . . . no one creed has a monopoly of religious truth. In heaven there is truth, on earth there are truths. God is greater than religion. He is only partially comprehended by any faith.” After members of his community protested—the book was condemned by certain orthodox and conservative rabbis and some accused him of heresy—Sacks agreed to revise the passage without, he argued, altering its core meaning. It now read, “God communicates in human language, but there are dimensions of the divine that must forever elude us. As Jews we believe that God has made a covenant with a singular people, but that does not exclude the possibility of other peoples, cultures, and faiths finding their own relationship with God within the shared frame of the Noahide laws.” Sacks later said of the episode, “When extremists call you a heretic, that’s their way of giving you an honorary doctorate.”
Sacks also ran into trouble while promoting The Dignity of Difference when he said of Israel in an interview with the Guardian, “I regard the current situation as nothing less than tragic...It is forcing Israel into positions that are incompatible in the long run with our deepest ideals.” Two days after this interview was published, the Jerusalem Post called on Sacks to resign. Yet Sacks weathered such storms with his integrity intact and never wavered from his Mingling message. When we were conducting our project on Islam in Europe, Journey into Europe, we welcomed Sacks to American University and he gave us an interview in which he discussed the deep ties between Jews, Christians, and Muslims in European history, the profound impact on Judaism of Islamic thinkers, and how we can learn from periods of human coexistence in the past such as Andalusia to shape an inclusive future.
Sacks’ death in 2020 of cancer was a blow to us and to many around the world. Prince Charles captured the feelings of many when he stated, “With his passing, the Jewish community, our nation, and the entire world have lost a leader whose wisdom, scholarship and humanity were without equal. His immense learning spanned the sacred and the secular, and his prophetic voice spoke to our greatest challenges with unfailing insight and boundless compassion. His wise counsel was sought and appreciated by those of all faiths and none, and he will be missed more than words can say.” Sacks had been knighted fifteen years earlier by Queen Elizabeth II, “for services to the community and to inter-faith relations.”
Sacks was born in 1948 in London to a family of Jewish merchants. Both his father and his mother’s parents were refugees. On his father’s side they came from Poland fleeing pogroms and anti-Semitism. His great-grandfather on his mother’s side had first attempted to live in Palestine in the 1870s and founded an agricultural settlement, but fled to England after encountering hostility from local Arabs.
Sacks went on to attend Cambridge University, where he studied philosophy. He had not intended to pursue a life of religious leadership but during his time as an undergraduate, he made a trip to the US which changed his life. There, he sought out and met with two towering rabbis—Rabbi Joesph Soloveitchik, the leading thinker in American Orthodox Judaism, and Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, known as the Lubavitcher Rebbe, or the Rebbe, leader of the Hasidic Chabad Movement. As Sacks told us when we interviewed him, “Rabbi Soloveitchik challenged me to think and the Lubavitcher Rebbe challenged me to lead. I found it incredibly inspiring that these great leaders that had many thousands of disciples took the time to spend with a 20-year-old student with whom they had no particular reason to be interested in and that was hugely influential with me. And though I met very many brilliant people at Cambridge and then at Oxford, these were different, these were holy people and there’s something different, there’s a humility, a sense that it’s not all about how clever I am.” While he had journeyed to learn from the rabbis, Sacks was surprised when the Lubavitcher Rebbe asked him questions—such as what Sacks was doing to strengthen Jewish life at his university, and was he befriending other students. Sacks had not before thought of himself as a leader, but now understood that “A good leader creates followers. A great leader creates leaders.”
In both rabbis, Sacks explained, though they didn’t discuss it explicitly, “I sensed the extent of what Jewish life had lost in the Holocaust. In both too I felt the scale of the challenge in the present, as Jews were losing interest in Judaism, nowhere more so than on campus in their college years. Both conveyed the gravitas and depth of the Jewish soul. There was something in them that was more than them, as if an entire tradition spoke through their lips. This was not ‘charisma’. It was a kind of humility. In their presence you could feel the divine presence.” Sacks completed his degree and subsequently went on to study philosophy at the graduate level and taught the subject. Yet, as he described, his meetings with the two great rabbis “stayed with me, challenging me to learn more about Judaism. So, in 1973 I said goodbye to everything I had dreamed of doing as an academic and began serious Judaic study. Five years later I became a rabbi. Thirteen years after that I became Chief Rabbi. God kept calling and I kept following, hoping that at least some of the time I was going in the right direction.”
There are several big ideas that Sacks discusses repeatedly in his teachings that capture the core of Mingling. The first, as alluded to in the above quote, is the importance of concurrently recognizing and embracing both the universal unity of humanity and the particular strength of our own religions, traditions, and communities. When Sacks said that members of different religions approach the same God in their own particular ways and that no faith totally comprehends God, he was accused of heresy. Essentially, the charge was that he was favoring or recognizing the universal over his own community and its religion, a common accusation against Minglers. And yet, Sacks was prepared with textual evidence that he was operating firmly within the bounds of his own faith.
Sacks laid out his reasoning by arguing that in the Jewish tradition, God makes two important covenants, first with Noah and then Abraham. A covenant in the ancient Near East, Sacks explained, was a common feature of political agreements, usually between a strong and a weak nation, which set up certain terms to be followed. The strong power would protect the weak one, in return for which the weak would pledge its fealty to the strong. In the Bible, however, we find a “revolutionary” use of this concept, Sacks says—“It is now conceived of as a partnership between God and a people...In return, they are to pledge themselves to God, obeying his laws, accepting his mission, honoring his trust.” Covenants in the Bible represent a morally committing bond of love and trust.
These two covenants, with Noah and then with Abraham, operate at different levels, Sacks contends. First, after the great flood, God makes a covenant with Noah which, Sacks says, serves as a covenant with “all humankind.” Included in this covenant are what Sacks calls “moral universals—the sanctity of life, the dignity of the human person, the right to be free, to be no man’s slave or the object of someone else’s violence.” These are “the general rules of a moral society.” Then there is a specific covenant as described in the Torah between God and Abraham. This tells the Jews, Sacks explains, that they are a specific people and “confers on us loyalties and obligations to the members of our community.” It means that “We have duties to our parents and children, friends and neighbours, and the members of society considered as an extended family.” These directives are not speaking to all of humanity but “just one particular people within it.” Yet the second covenant does not negate the first. Quite the contrary, for the initial covenant with Noah tells us that “our common humanity precedes our religious differences.” As evidence, Sacks points to the narrative in the Book of Genesis which clearly discusses affairs relevant to all of humanity, including Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel, before turning to the Abrahamic covenant—and subsequently going on to describe the covenant between God and Moses on Mt Sinai. This all means, Sacks states, that Jews are concurrently part of two families, the “universal human family” and “a particular family with its specific history and memory.”
Where does this leave non-Jews theologically, who as members of the human race are associated with the first but not the second covenant? Sacks cites no less an authority than the great Rabbi Maimonides, who argued that a non-Jew who practices the basic morals of the first covenant arrived through human reason “is one of the ‘sages’ of the nations.” Sacks concludes, “According to Jewish teaching, therefore, a person does not have to become a Jew to serve God.” He also notes that “Judaism’s ancient sages maintained that ‘the pious of the nations have a share in the world to come.’” It is in this context that we may better understand Sacks’ aforementioned statement, “God has spoken to mankind in many languages, through Judaism to the Jews, Christianity to Christians, Islam to Muslims.”
Thus, this universal component is crucial, as without it, if one only were to focus on one’s own group, they would not be correctly recognizing or appreciating God. “We are not all the same,” Sacks contends, “There is an Us and Them. But God is universal as well as particular, which means that he can be found among Them as well as among Us. God transcends our particularities.” “God is the God of everyone,” he asserts, “though not necessarily in the same way.” The reality is that “every human being, regardless of class, color, culture, or creed, is in the image and likeness of God” and “You cannot love God without first honouring the universal dignity of humanity.”
Sacks further poetically phrased the nature of God thusly: “God is the One within the many; the unity at the core of our diversity; the call that leads us to journey beyond the self and its strivings, to enter into otherness and be enlarged by it, to seek to be a vehicle through which blessing flows outwards to the world, to give thanks for the miracle of being and the radiance that shines wherever two lives touch in affirmation, forgiveness and love.” While we all seek to reach God, we can only do so from our own unique positions: “The divine light is infinite but to be visible to us it must be refracted through finite understanding.” This should bring us a certain degree of humility as we try to understand God and also understand that others are trying to do the same thing from their own perspectives and positions.
Sacks is talking here about an awareness, acceptance, and celebration of the diversity of the world. Indeed, there is no way for it not to be so. Even selecting the example of a single animal, the beetle, Sacks notes that there are 40,000 different varieties. Not only is diversity a reality that we cannot nor should not change, but it is beautiful. “God loves diversity, not uniformity,” he states, and argues that “Every attempt to impose uniformity on diversity is, in some sense, a betrayal of God’s purposes” —“Any attempt to impose…an artificial uniformity in the name of a single culture or faith, represents a tragic misunderstanding of what it takes for a system to flourish. Because we are different, we each have something unique to contribute, and every contribution counts.” “Difference does not diminish” but “enlarges the sphere of human possibilities.” He cites an ancient Jewish saying: “When a human being makes many coins in the same mint, they all come out the same. God makes every person in the same image—His image—and each is different.”
Sacks also makes the point that it is not even possible to think of a human being as a human being alone in the abstract, a sort of Platonic form of a human, because the moment we start to talk about real people, they are embodied in some cultural or ethnic context. We all have a particular language that we were brought up in, for example, a culture we are a part of. We grow up inside, not outside, of these particular contexts. “What is real,” Sacks says, “and the proper object of our wonder is not the Platonic form of a leaf but the 250,000 different kinds there actually are.” This again reiterates his point that we must concurrently think of ourselves and our own groups and localities in terms of the universal and particular at the same time.
Speaking of monotheism generally, Sacks states that while it is commonly believed that in monotheism there is “one God, therefore one path to salvation,” this is actually not the case. “To the contrary,” he explains, “it is that unity is worshipped in diversity. The glory of the created world is its astonishing multiplicity: the thousands of different languages spoken by mankind, the proliferation of cultures, the sheer variety of the imaginative expressions of the human spirit, in most of which, if we listen carefully, we will hear the voice of wisdom telling us something we need to know.”
It is the case that “no single faith is the faith of all humanity” and “there are many paths to the Divine Presence.” According to Sacks, God is “capable of being comprehended in any human language, from any single point of view.” “God’s world is diverse,” Sacks concludes, “There are multiple universes of wisdom, each capturing something of the radiance of being and refracting it into the lives of its followers, none refuting or excluding the others, each as it were the native language of its followers, but combining in a hymn of glory to the creator.” This should “lead us to respect the search for God in people of other faiths and reconcile the particularity of cultures with the universality of the human condition.”
We run into trouble, Sacks believed, when we attempt to go too far towards either the universal, which can lead to attempts to enforce or project conformity on the “Other” and fail to recognize their own unique contexts, or the particular which results in tribalism and an aversion to the “Other.” Being pushed towards a global or universal culture could be seen as threatening to identity. This is why Sacks believes that “universalism is an inadequate response to tribalism, and no less dangerous. It leads to the belief—superficially compelling but quite false—that there is only one truth about the essentials of the human condition, and it holds true for all people at all times.”
The reality is, that to one another we are “the same and different, human beings as such, but also members of this family, that community, this history, that heritage.” The relationship between the universal and the particular is even more indivisible because, as Sacks puts it, “Our particularity is our window on to universality…Because we know what it is to be a parent, loving our children, not children in general, we understand what it is for someone else, somewhere else, to be a parent, loving his or her children, not ours. There is no road to human solidarity that does not begin with moral particularity—by coming to know what it means to be a child, a parent, a neighbour, a friend. We learn to love humanity by loving specific human beings. There is no short-cut.”

Celebrating our innate human diversity can also aid our search for knowledge, which is fundamental in Judaism, as Sacks explains: “In Jewish tradition, God wants us to pursue knowledge. The first thing Solomon asked for, and the first thing we ask for in our three-times-daily prayers, is wisdom, understanding and knowledge, and that includes science…the rabbis instituted a blessing over scientists, whether they shared Jewish faith or not.” “Each culture has something to contribute to the totality of human wisdom,” Sacks states, “The sages said: ‘Who is wise? One who learns from all men.’ The wisest is not one who knows himself wiser than others: he is one who knows all men have some share of wisdom, and is willing to learn from them, for none of us knows all the truth and each of us knows some of it. Nothing has proved harder in the history of civilization than to see God, or good, or human dignity in those whose language is not mine, whose skin is a different colour, whose faith is not my faith and whose truth is not my truth. There are, surely, many ways of arriving at this generosity of spirit, and each faith must find its own.”
In terms of how to treat the “Other” or the “stranger,” Sacks argues that treating the stranger well
is deeply embedded in Judaism, and centers on the fact that Jews were once themselves oppressed. When we interviewed him, Sacks said, “There is one thing that to me speaks very powerfully from the Hebrew Bible. Jews experience slavery in Egypt and then Moses, having taken them out, says, ‘Never oppress a stranger because you know what it feels like to be a stranger.’” Sacks also has pointed out that in the Hebrew Bible, the verse “You shall love your neighbour as yourself” occurs once, but “in no fewer than 36 places” the Bible “commands us to ‘love the stranger.’” Sacks calls for us to converse with each other, to listen to each other, and to hear their perspectives. He cites the anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski on the importance of conversation—Malinowski said that conversation establishes “bonds of personal union between people brought together by the mere need of companionship.” Sacks urges us, “if only we were to listen closely to the voice of the other, we would find that beneath the skin we are brothers and sisters, members of the human family under the parenthood of God.”
We all can benefit from the Jewish insight of role reversal, Sacks argues, and should remember that even if we are not being persecuted now, we may have been in the past and could be in the future. Sacks urges us, “To be cured of potential violence towards the Other, I must be able to imagine myself as the Other” —“We have to remember that we were once on the other side of the equation.” He argues, “The best way of curing antisemitism is to get people to experience what it feels like to be a Jew” and “The Hutu in Rwanda has to experience what it is like to be a Tutsi. The Serb has to imagine himself a Croat or a Muslim.” “The best way of curing hostility to strangers is to remember that we too, from someone else’s perspective, are strangers.” “I learn to be moral,” Sacks teaches, “when I develop the capacity to put myself into your place.” How do we gain this capacity? It is only by having contact with others—“that is a skill I only learn by engaging with you, face to face or side by side.” “To be fully human,” in other words, “we need direct encounters with other human beings. We have to be in their presence, open to their otherness, alert to their hopes and fears, engaged in the minuet of conversation, the delicate back-and-forth of speaking and listening. That is how relationships are made. That is how we become moral beings.”
In order to foster more inclusive societies, Sacks embraces and promotes the concept of the covenant. Informed by its use in his own tradition, Sacks believes that it has much to teach us about how to live together in the twenty-first century. He explains that in the Jewish tradition, in the Hebrew Bible and among the rabbis, society was seen as a covenant with God. Yet this idea goes beyond the Jewish tradition, also having “deep echoes in Christianity and Islam.” The concept of the covenant has also been invoked in such cases as the Mayflower Pact, by the Dutch Republic, by John Calvin in Geneva, and Sacks discerns the idea of a covenant in the US founding documents. A covenant, Sacks says, “is a collective moral undertaking on the part of ‘We, the people,’ all the people.” They are about love and trust, “the attempt to create partnership without dominance or submission.” A covenant ultimately “binds people together in a bond of mutual responsibility and care.” It can be small, for example the bond between a husband and wife, but it can also be vast—“there is, I believe, a covenant of human solidarity that binds all seven billion of us alive today to act responsibly toward the environment, human rights, and the alleviation of poverty for the sake of generations not yet born.” Covenants are “about what we have in common despite our differences” and have the potential to turn “self-interested individuals into a community in pursuit of the common good.”

Sacks sees the idea of the covenant as a way to foster inclusive notions of national identity today. A covenant, like a nation, Sacks says, is about a story or narrative. “In the case of the Bible,” he argues, “it is the story of the Exodus. In the case of the United States, it is about a journey from oppression to freedom in the new world, the almost promised land.” The story of a nation “is the basis of its collective identity” and recognizes that “We are part of a story, begun by those who came before us. They have entrusted us to write its next chapter in such a way as to do justice to, and keep faith with, what went before. We cannot change our colour; most of us do not wish to change our religion; but we can learn a new story and teach it to our children. That is why, when nations have stories, they can be inclusive.” The reality is, unlike the past, a nation can no longer “be held together by a single dominant religion or family of religions” —nations are simply too diverse for this now. We need to shape our national stories in such a way that recognizes that “our fates are bound together. We benefit from each other…A nation is enlarged by its new arrivals who carry with them gifts from other places and other traditions.”
To aid us in fostering plural societies, Sacks told us when we interviewed him, he recommended communities getting to know each other at a local level: “Tip O’Neill said all politics is local, I think all great interfaith is local as well. Then I think communities can do just that, if a rabbi or an imam arrange for their congregations to get together. And if they’re able to do that in order to do acts of kindness or social action to other people in the neighborhood, that’s what I call side by side and that really is a very powerful builder of friendships. And to my mind friendship is the essence here. We don’t always need to engage in high-level interfaith dialogue. Sometimes just being friends is even more powerful.”
We should follow a model of what Sacks called “integration without assimilation” in our nations—whereby we each have our own particular identities but then apart from that have another larger identity that enables us to come together and contribute things that only we with our unique identities and gifts can. Sacks characterized a nation as a “home we build together” wherein, “we have our own private rooms, but we also have our public spaces, and those public spaces matter to all of us, which is why we work together to make them as expansive and gracious as we can.” If, however, we remain within our own private rooms or communities without this shared space where we can “celebrate our common humanity,” the arrangement will not work as we will simply be fragmented, disconnected, and lonely. He recommends, for religious groups in the nation, that “Each church, synagogue, temple of mosque should have some project of kindness to strangers: unconditional kindness, with no element of evangelism or hope of conversion.” Beyond the nation, this concept can work at a world level, Sacks believed, and he called for a “global covenant…framing our shared vision for the future of humanity.”
Sacks also suggested that to build inclusive polities in the present and in the future, we should draw on those times in history where there was coexistence between different peoples, times where people could preserve their own identities but also contribute to a social project that was much larger. Speaking about Andalusia, Spain under Muslim rule where Jews, Muslims, and Christians lived together, he brilliantly summed up his big idea, “Andalusia is one of the most important facts about our present situation. The reason is when you talk about good relations between faiths at moments of high intensity conflict, people think you’re being utopian, people just aren’t that good. So what brings these aspirations from utopia to reality is the knowledge that we have been there before. Andalusia showed how it could be done and showed that it could be done...We have a precedent, we know what it looked like.”
Not only do we have examples like these, but we have the lingering effects of these examples in our own traditions that attest to their impact. As Sacks explained to us, “I think any study of Judaism or Christianity will see exactly how Islam contributed to these other faiths.” He gave the example of Maimonides, who was from Andalusia: “Moses Maimonides, the greatest rabbi of the Middle Ages whose, not only his philosophy, but almost every aspect of his work was influenced by and stimulated by Islam. His creation of this magnificent legal code was inspired by sharia codes. His formulation of the principles of Jewish faith was inspired by the fact that Muslim thinkers had done this wonderful presentation of Islamic faith. So, it spread from Islam to Judaism. It then spread to Christianity through Maimonides and influenced a figure like Aquinas.”
In order to improve relations between peoples, Sacks said that the mutual grief of communities in conflict can bring them together. Sacks recollected, “I once asked Prince Hassan of Jordan, shortly after the assassination of Israel’s prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, whether there was anything that might bring Israelis and Palestinians, Jews and Muslims, together. Was there a bridge over the abyss? He answered, ‘Our shared tears, our history of suffering.’ That was a wise remark. There are 6,000 languages spoken today, but only one is truly universal: the language of tears. It is to that language and its covenant of human solidarity (‘I will be with him in time of trouble’ [Ps. 91:15]) that ‘the ways of peace’ belong.” As Sacks told us, “I think just looking at our own tears must make us realize that the other side has had those tears. And it does seem to me that there are moments when there is something very human that reaches out to the other across the divide, and in that moment of contact a hope is born. I think the other thing is the experience of being a parent, or even a grandparent. It kind of makes us want to leave our children and grandchildren a better world than we currently inhabit…Let us present our children with a more hopeful world.”
Indeed, like the other Minglers, Sacks stresses the importance of hope. He provides a dramatic image to make the point: “‘Even if the blade of a sharp sword is resting on your neck,’ says the Talmud, ‘do not lose hope.’” Hope is different, Sacks believes, from optimism: “Optimism is the belief that things will get better. Hope is the faith that, together, we can make things better.” It is hope and not optimism that “empowers us to take risks, to offer commitment, to give love, to bring new life into the world, to comfort the afflicted, to lift the fallen, to begin great undertakings, to live by our ideals.” Pluralism is itself “a form of hope, because it is founded in the understanding that precisely because we are different, each of us has something unique to contribute to the shared project of which we are a part.”
We can also all learn lessons from the Jewish mystical concept of tikkun olam, or healing a fractured world, Sacks believed, which captures this sense of hope and the positive impact that each individual can have. Here again Sacks returns to his point about the necessity of diversity. This gives us hope, because “we are here, now, in this place, among these people, in these circumstances, so that we can do the act or say the word that will heal one of the fractures of the world.” “We cannot change the world altogether in one go,” he reminds us, “but we can have an effect, one act at a time, one day at a time, one person at a time. That is what it is, intimates Maimonides, to be awake: to know that our acts make a difference, sometimes all the difference in the world.” There also exists, Sacks affirms, “within nature and humanity, an astonishing range of powers to heal what was been harmed and mend what has been broken. These powers are embedded within life itself, with its creativity and capacity for self-renewal. That is the empirical basis of hope.”
Tikkun olam additionally holds that even in evil acts “there is a fragment of good that can be rescued and redeemed. Every profound experience of suffering is a form of disintegration. The world we had taken for granted is no longer there. Something is missing, lost.” What tikkun olam represents, however, is “re-integration” and “Every good act, every healing gesture, lights a candle of hope in a dark world…We never know, at the time, the ripple of consequences set in motion by the slightest act of kindness.” Sacks again cites Maimonides, who said that “A single act, performed for its own sake out of love, gives us…a share in the world to come.” Sacks also informs us that the rabbis argued that a single life “is like a universe. Change a life, and you begin to change the world. Every generous deed, each healing word, every embracing gesture brings redemption nearer.”
Sacks inspires us to reach out to all in what he called “loving kindness, across boundaries. We must love strangers as well as neighbors.” We should “see the divine presence in the face of a stranger” and understand that “the ethnic outsider is in God’s image even if he or she is not in our image.” In doing this, we can turn “strangers into friends” and cannot go wrong, as “what renders a culture invulnerable is the compassion it shows to the vulnerable.” Sacks asserts that “humanity is indeed a single extended family” and affirms, “This, then, is my credo. I believe that the idea that the universe was created in love by the God of love who asks us to create in love is the noblest hypothesis ever to have lifted the human mind.”
Let us conclude by relating how Sacks ended his interview with us—with a prayer for the future. He said, “Jews always end every set of prayers with a prayer for peace. It’s our highest hope but we know it tends to come last. But we always say this prayer, and this is the prayer I share with Muslims, Jews, and Christians and people of other faiths throughout the world: ‘Oseh shalom bimromav.’ ‘May God who makes peace in his high places help us make peace down here on earth. Amen.’”

Akbar Ahmed is Distinguished Professor and the Ibn Khaldun Chair of Islamic Studies, School of International Service, American University, Washington, DC, and Wilson Center Global Fellow. He was described as the “world’s leading authority on contemporary Islam” by the BBC. Among his many books are his quartet of studies examining the relationship between the West and Islamic world published by Brookings Institution Press: Journey into Islam (2007), Journey into America (2010), The Thistle and the Drone (2013), and Journey into Europe (2018).

Frankie Martin is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Anthropology at American University. He was senior researcher for Akbar Ahmed’s previous quartet of Brookings Institution Press studies on the relationship between the West and Islamic world and holds an MPhil in Anthropology from the University of Cambridge. His writing has appeared in outlets including Foreign Policy, CNN, the Guardian, and Anthropology Today.

Amineh Ahmed Hoti is Fellow-Commoner at Lucy Cavendish College, University of Cambridge and Governor, St Mary’s School, Cambridge. She was also a senior researcher for Akbar Ahmed’s quartet of Brookings Institution Press studies on Western-Islamic relations. She received her PhD from the University of Cambridge and co-founded and directed the world’s first Centre for the Study of Muslim-Jewish Relations at Cambridge. Her most recent book is Gems and Jewels: The Religions of Pakistan (2021).