Diary of a Chief Rabbi

The People of the Book

THEY SHOULD NEVER HAVE ASKED. The other week I spent an evening at the Spiro Institute discussing, with Clive Marks, my ten favourite Jewish books. Ten? That’s like asking the late Bruno Walter his ten favourite pieces of classical music. There are thousands, each special, each worth reading, each a piece in the massive, never-finished jigsaw that makes up our picture of Judaism and the Jewish people. The People of the Book should be surrounded by books.

Just before Rosh Hashanah I spent an evening with David Blunkett, Secretary of State for Education, who was just about to launch his Year of Reading. I told him how we in the Jewish community were responding to his call. The Agency for Jewish Education is running its own Year of Jewish Reading, a marvellous programme for children. I also told him that, at that time of the year, our custom is to give people the blessing that they should be “written in the book of life”. When Jews think of life, I said, they immediately think of a book. He loved the idea.

Which is why I am so great an admirer of Jewish Book Week. It’s a feast of literacy dozens of booksellers, tens of thousands of books, and a glittering array of Jewish writers from around the world, discussing their latest work. The more events we have like this, the better. Reading and writing, arguing and debating, the love of words, an almost mystical sense of the power of language, interpretation and ideas – these are the very pulse of Jewish life. Heinrich Heine once called the Torah the “portable homeland of the Jew” and he was right. We are the people whose home is the Book.

REMINISCING ABOUT BOOKS that night, I couldn’t help but mention my favourite Jewish Internet sites.

Jews are among the world’s most effective users of the Internet. There is a stunning array of Jewish educational resources, including hundreds of studies on the sedra of the week. Through the Net you can read (and in some cases hear) the thoughts of some of the great Torah teachers of our century, including the late Rav Soloveitchik, Nechama Leibowitz, and our own much missed preacher, Rabbi Isaac Bernstein of blessed memory.

The Internet is one of the most wondrous developments of all time. The sages said that when the Torah was given at Mount Sinai, the voice of G-d travelled throughout the world. There was instantaneous global communication. That miracle has become our reality.

The Jewish implications could not be more significant. From its earliest days thousands of years before the West caught up with the idea – Judaism was predicated on universal education and democratic access to knowledge. Knowledge, said Francis Bacon, is power. That is why, through most of history, it has been jealously guarded by elites.

Judaism is not a religion of elites, least of all in the arena of knowledge. Almost the first Jewish words a child is taught to say are: “Moses commanded us the Torah, the heritage of the congregation of Jacob.” The meaning of this verse is that Torah is the heritage of every Jew. We all have a share. We are all expected to learn. We each have a right to know.

Today, because of the Internet, the vast treasury of Jewish knowledge is open to everyone. It will never replace the essential encounter with a teacher. That is what we call “Oral Torah”, the face-to-face meeting with a Torah personality who is a living embodiment of Jewish values. But what the Web allows us to do is to share the thoughts of teachers throughout the world and sense the fact that we are a truly global people, linked by the shared act of learning.

THERE IS SOMETHING ELSE about the Net that is profoundly Jewish. Virtual communities are quite different from the communities of the past. Until now a community was defined by space. They were people in the same building, the same neighbourhood, the same region. A virtual community is different. Within the foreseeable future someone will be able to give a lecture or shiur in Jerusalem to an audience whose members are spread from Los Angeles to Liverpool to Lithuania. He will see them. They will see him. They will form a community not because they are in the same place but because they are engaging in a conversation at the same time.

The Chief Rabbi quizzed by a member of Hale synagogue over a video link

It was the late A. J. Heschel who pointed out that whereas other ancient civilisations found sanctity in holy places, Judaism found it in holy times. The first thing God declared holy was a day – the Sabbath. Perhaps because of our long experience of exile and dispersion, Jews have long found religious meaning in time rather than space. In the twenty-first century the Internet will profoundly change the way we experience the world. Perhaps it will teach us afresh what our ancestors long knew, that there is something special and sacred about the dimension of time.