First published in 1990 and reprinted by Maggid Books in 2023, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks’s Tradition in an Untraditional Age is a collection of essays that covers a broad range of topics. It features the thinking of some of modernity’s great Jewish thought leaders.
These fifteen essays are divided into three subsections. The first, titled “Responses to Modernity,” includes six essays on the birth and evolution of Modern Orthodoxy. After devoting four chapters to the legacies of Rabbis Samson Raphael Hirsch, Moses Sofer, Abraham Isaac Kook, and Joseph Soloveitchik, Rabbi Sacks offers two essays that describe his own considerations about this topic. The essay titled “An Agenda of Future Jewish Thought” encourages Modern Orthodoxy to reinvest in Jewish unity and actively seek to repair the rifts that have erupted between traditional Jewry and the secular and non-Orthodox Jewish communities. Rabbi Sacks warns the Modern Orthodox community that it cannot “withdraw into segregation without abdicating the responsibilities of religious leadership.”
The second section, titled “Topics,” includes five essays on diverse subjects like the Holocaust, Jewish-Christian relations, combating poverty, and repentance. In one essay, “Jewish-Christian Dialogue: The Ethical Dimension,” Rabbi Sacks speaks of the need to engage in a substantive interfaith conversation that embraces pluralism while still maintaining its unique religious perspective. This helps to minimize religious fundamentalism and allows us to face the questions, “Can we live together? Can we learn from one another?”
The third section, “Thinkers,” explores the thought of Martin Buber, Franz Rosensweig, and Joseph Soloveitchik. Sacks is critical of Buber, calling him a “theologian of Jewish secularism” who separates halacha (Jewish law and practice) from the encounter between G‑d and humanity. In contrast, the final two chapters review the philosophy of Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik and the importance of halacha.
These essays were all written prior to 1991, when Rabbi Sacks accepted the position of Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth and his reputation as a religious leader began to come into focus. Here, he introduces themes that continue to take shape in his more universally recognized books, including Morality, To Heal a Fractured World, and Not in God’s Name. While this collection is more academic in nature, it is accessible to an educated reader, and it serves as a milestone in the development of Rabbi Sacks’s Jewish thought and his articulation of Judaism’s purpose in the modern age.
