The job of chief rabbi isn't worth the hassle

The job of chief rabbi isn't worth the hassle
When Jonathan Sacks retires as Anglo-Jewry's chief rabbi, the role will need redefining
David Goldberg
guardian.co.uk,
Monday 20 December 2010 13.34 GMT

It was announced this week that Lord Sacks will be retiring as Orthodox chief rabbi – in three years' time. Why such long notice? Nowadays, all ambitious politicians and aspiring clerics (all of whom share many of the same characteristics, as Trollope's novels show) demonstrate their person-in-the-street credentials by declaring their lifelong passion for the local football team; in Jonathan Sacks' case, Arsenal.

It is surprising, therefore, that he didn't remember the lesson of the Manchester United manager, Sir Alex Ferguson, who has said that the biggest mistake he ever made was to announce his going prematurely. Discipline wavered. Everyone relaxed and players got lippy. One told the press that he would still be there next year, the manager wouldn't. So when Fergie changed his mind, it must have given him particular pleasure to offload that player on to, erm, Arsenal.



It is a risky strategy by Sacks and his United Synagogue employers. Sacks is despised by the Orthodox far-right for his lack of Talmudic expertise (a Cambridge double first doesn't carry much weight with them) and irritates his moderates with his timidity in engaging with the religious and secular two-thirds of Anglo-Jewry where his writ doesn't run. At a dinner the other evening before the retirement announcement, two popular and liberally inclined rabbis criticised his habitual wavering over whether or not to permit United Synagogue clergy to attend Limmud, the enormously successful, inter-denominational conference held annually over Christmas.

Sacks may be the favourite religious spokesman of those Anglicans who prefer his neatly trimmed beard and crisp delivery to the equivocations of their endearingly hirsute Archbishop of Canterbury but, gallingly for him, he is a prophet without honour among his own people. Not only do they compare him unfavourably to his predecessor, Lord Jakobovits, who at least knew his own (limited) mind and spoke it, but they will never forget the two gaffes that define his tenure. The first was his maladroit response to the death of Hugo Gryn, a much-loved Reform rabbi and Auschwitz survivor; and the second was his feeble capitulation to a bunch of backwoods ultra-Orthodox rabbis in Manchester who took exception to his mild observation in The Dignity of Difference that no one religion can claim a monopoly on the truth, and forced him to withdraw the book and rewrite the offending passage.

For the next two years the United Synagogue will be rife with plots, counterplots and blatant politicking as candidates are flown in from Israel and America to strut their stuff, and local hopefuls will exude measured gravitas in their bid to convince the selection committee that they are papabile. They won't believe it coming from me, but I sincerely advise them all, foreigner and home-born alike, not to be dazzled by the prospect of a handsome salary, a mansion in St John's Wood, a chauffeured limousine and the opportunity to rub shoulders with the great and the good, because the job just ain't worth the hassle.

Not only will the new man have to face his own fractious constituency; he won't be recognised by the growing and increasingly assertive reform, liberal and Masorti movements; and most of all, the estimated 200,000 UK Jews who don't belong to any synagogue movement will greet his appointment with supreme indifference. It would be best for all if the fiction that the chief rabbi of the United Synagogues is somehow mandated to be the religious representative for all Anglo-Jewry were quietly dropped when Lord Sacks finally retires.

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