Click here to listen to the Chief Rabbi talk from the Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival

The home we build together: recreating society

The Chief Rabbi has a booming voice, a quick wit and the ability to make ordinary insights seem unutterably profound. His performance on Thursday at the Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival was a highly enjoyable masterclass in public rhetoric.

His critique of our tendency to think about society in narrowly dualistic terms - the state vs the individual, the government vs the market – was scarcely original. Nor was his line about the third element needed in society: the voluntarist, community, neighbourhood, family stuff. And yet, and yet…this was still a great talk.

He illustrated the difference between America and Britain by describing and quoting the inscriptions on all the great memorials in Washington DC – from the Lincoln to the Jefferson and beyond. These memorials, he said, all tell stories.

Then he asked us to name any memorial in this country which bears more than the name and date of the person commemorated. (Alas, poor Rabbi: he was in the wrong town for that sort of game, since the Martyrs’ Memorial in Oxford clearly tells the story of the burning at the stake of Latimer, Ridley and Cranmer – but no matter….he’d clearly never heard of it and brushed away the audience-member who brought it up.)

His point was that our memorials, unlike the American ones, don’t on the whole tell stories. Why not? Because they don’t need to. Because we all know what they stand for.

I think this was meant to illustrate the ‘fact’ that America has always thought of itself as a nation of immigrants. And Britain hasn’t. He then underlined his point by saying that America was a nation with a covenant – the 1776 Declaration of Independence – and Britain wasn’t. We need, apparently, to change and renew our own ‘social covenant’, and, um, build a home together. If we do this – and he didn’t say how – we will discover a new sense of national identity and of national pride.

I know that without the lift supplied by Chief Rabbi's undeniable charisma this may look banal: but Sacks’ rhetoric and his humour were really exceptional. Between stories, jokes and perorations urging us on to build a new society, he dealt brilliantly with a foul-mouthed shouty lout whose swearing outside the tent threatened to bring us back to planet Earth with a nasty bump. He ended his performance by saying: “I don’t ask anyone to agree with me.” This being Oxford, of course, most of the audience had no intention of doing so, but it was sweet of him to say it all the same.

Listen to the podcast - Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks talks about memorials and multiculturalism

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