Rabbi Jonathan Sacks and ‘Good Society’

(Oct. 15, 2026 / JNS)

Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks taught many things. But perhaps the one we need most now is this: Human beings are not helpless before history. We have agency.

That was one of the deepest messages of Rabbi Sacks’s Judaism. Faith was never an escape from the world. It was a call to responsibility. We are not only shaped by forces outside us: politics, trauma, markets, ideologies, fear. We are also choosers, builders and repairers.

That is why Rabbi Sacks still speaks so powerfully to this moment.

As we mark his yahrzeit, 20 Cheshvan, which falls this year on Oct. 31, close to the civil anniversary of his passing on Nov. 7, 2020, I find myself returning not only to Sacks the chief rabbi, broadcaster, Torah teacher and defender of Israel, but to Sacks the teacher of the Good Society.

Most people carry one version of the rabbi in their minds. Mine has increasingly become the rabbi who asked what kind of society we are building.

Years ago, when I wrote Upgrading ESG: How Businesses Can Thrive in the Age of Sustainability, I was trying to understand whether the language of sustainability could become something deeper than corporate reporting. The idea of ESG (environmental, social and governance) business policy was everywhere. Climate change was the great moral cause of the age. Swedish activist Greta Thunberg had become a global symbol.

Rabbi Sacks helped me see that the real question was not about acronyms but responsibility. It was about the question: What kind of society are we building?

For him, morality was not a private decoration. It was the architecture of society. In The Dignity of Difference, he wrote that morality restores “the dignity of agency and responsibility.” It helps us see our lives as choices and responsibilities, not just as products of external forces.

That is the essence of a Good Society. A Good Society is not built by government or markets alone. Markets create wealth. States create order. But neither can create meaning, trust, family, community, covenant or hope. A Good Society is built when people, communities, businesses and governments accept responsibility for the common good.

That is why the rabbi was, in a deeper sense, an environmentalist thinker. Not because he reduced Judaism to climate politics. He did not. But because he saw creation as entrusted to us. We are not owners of the world. We are guardians.

How quickly moral fashions change.

Much of the activist energy that once focused on climate has now shifted toward the Palestinian cause. Greta Thunberg herself has become one of the most visible symbols of that shift. Yet droughts, food insecurity, water scarcity, agricultural fragility and climate volatility have not gone away.

Here lies one of the great ironies of our time: The same Israel so often demonized in international forums is also one of the countries whose innovation helps the world confront environmental challenges. Israeli drip irrigation, desalination, watertech, foodtech, agritech, emergency medicine and resilience systems are practical tools for building a global Good Society.

Israel is not only a country that must defend itself. It is a country whose knowledge can help others live. That may be the tragedy of our moment: Too much of the world’s moral energy is wasted demonizing Israel, and not enough is invested in creating a Good Society.

This brings us back to agency.

Rabbi Sacks taught that faith is not an escape from responsibility. “Judaism is God’s call to human responsibility,” he wrote, “to bring the world that is closer to the world that ought to be.”

People have agency, communities have agency, governments have agency, companies have agency, and nations have agency.

This insight is urgently needed in the conversation about Israel and the Palestinians.

There is a strange asymmetry in much of the international debate. Israel is treated as having almost unlimited agency, expected to solve the conflict, provide solutions, absorb criticism and carry responsibility even for the choices of others.

Palestinians, by contrast, are too often spoken of as if they have no agency at all. Their leaders are rarely held seriously accountable for corruption, incitement, rejectionism, the militarization of civilian life or the failure to build the institutions of a Good Society.

That is not compassion. It is a denial of dignity. If Palestinians are to have dignity, they must also have responsibility: for leadership, education, governance, rejection of terror and recognition of Jewish national life. That does not remove Israel’s responsibility. Quite the opposite.

Rabbi Sacks was an unapologetic Zionist. But his Zionism was not crude nationalism. It was rooted in history, faith, memory and moral purpose.

He often told the story of his great-grandfather, Rabbi Aryeh Leib Frumkin, who made aliyah in the 19th century and helped build Petach Tikvah. The name came from Hosea: the valley of trouble becoming a gate of hope. That phrase could almost summarize Rabbi Sacks’s Zionism.

Israel was not only a refuge from persecution. It was a gate of hope: a place where Jewish memory became responsibility, where ancient promise became public life and where the Jewish people returned not only to survive, but to build.

It is also telling that one of the rabbi’s cultural projects was a two-CD collection of Jewish and Israeli music called “Israel: Home of Hope.” He loved music, and understood that music carries identity, memory and longing in ways argument alone cannot. “Home of Hope” was not incidental. It captured something central to his understanding of Israel—not perfection, not escape, but hope made concrete through people, land, culture and responsibility.

Rabbi Sacks would have treated “a light unto the nations” not as a boast or claim of perfection, but as a responsibility. Jewish particularity was never meant to end with ourselves. Israel’s task is not to proclaim itself a light, but to build a society rooted in justice, dignity, creativity and moral courage, through which light can be seen.

This brings us to another idea we urgently need: the dignity of difference.

In Israel and the Middle East, difference is not theoretical. National identity is real. Religious identity is real. Jewish peoplehood is real. Palestinian identity is real. None of these can be wished away by diplomats, intellectuals or slogans.

Rabbi Sacks wrote in Future Tense: “The only adequate response to the fear and hatred of difference is to honor the dignity of difference. That is the Jewish message to the world.”

That may be the central challenge facing Israel and the region: to move from the fear of difference to the dignity of difference. Peace will not come by pretending Jews and Palestinians are the same or by asking either group to abandon its deepest identity. The task is not to erase difference. The task is to dignify it. That requires agency on both sides.

Israel must ask how it builds a society worthy of its prophetic ideals. Palestinians must ask how they build institutions, education and leadership capable of creating a future. The wider world must ask whether it is helping build responsibility or merely rewarding grievance.

Rabbi Sacks’s voice is badly missed because he would have elevated the conversation. He would have asked not just “How do we defend Israel?” but “What is Israel for?” Not only “How do we answer our enemies?” but “How do we build a society that gives our answer substance?”

The answer is agency. Agency is the bridge between the rabbi’s Judaism, his Zionism, the Good Society and the future of the Middle East. Without agency, dignity becomes sentiment; with agency, dignity becomes responsibility.

The world today is full of causes. Some are noble. Some are corrupt. Some begin in compassion and end in hatred. Rabbi Sacks gives us a way to test them: Do they deepen responsibility? Do they honour difference? Do they build a Good Society? Do they call people to agency or trap them in grievance?

Perhaps that is the message Israel, the Jewish people and the world most need to recover: We are not only what happens to us. We are what we choose to build.