Our Chief Rabbi, Lord Sacks, has given an interview to Big Think, an American website. Because it is meant for an American and general audience, the questions are rather basic. Strangely enough, though, the result is at least one fascinating answer:
Question: What did you set out to accomplish as Chief Rabbi?
Lord Rabbi Jonathan Sacks: I wanted to turn a rather staid and quite predictable Jewish community, not very creative one, into a much more effervescent community and I think the community really has been transformed. We do things in Anglo Jewry today that are not done anywhere else in the world or if stimulated developments elsewhere in the world, we have something called Limmud where almost 3,000 young people come together to study for a week at the end of the year, studying 600 different courses. Now Limmud has been exported to 47 other places in the world from Moscow to New York and Los Angeles and almost everywhere else, so we have a very vibrant cultural life, which we didn’t have before.... [Continued here - MS.]
Is the Chief Rabbi really taking credit for Limmud, a conference he has conspicuously avoided as chief rabbi and which most of his rabbis are still afraid to visit for fear they will be deemed 'radicals' (G-d forbid)? It sure sounds like it.
(Also of interest: his very first answer, in which he talks of the chief rabbinate in terms of 30-year cycles. Are rumours of his imminent retirement exaggerated?)
No comments:
Post a Comment