Responsibility for the Other in the Thought of Rabbi Jonathan Sacks
Sacks Seminars Launch Event
On Monday 12 May we marked the launch of The Sacks Seminars with a lecture on responsibility for the other in the thought of Rabbi Sacks. The new initiative is a partnership between Gonville & Caius College and The Rabbi Sacks Legacy, dedicated to bringing Rabbi Sacks’ ideas into dialogue with the intellectual life of Cambridge.
In the inaugural lecture we explored the transformative power of areivut—mutual responsibility—and its implications for moral and political philosophy. Through a close reading of Rabbi Sacks’ writings alongside figures like John Rawls, Isaiah Berlin, Emmanuel Levinas and the Rebbe.
The event drew students and scholars from across the University, setting the stage for what promises to be a powerful exploration of Rabbi Sacks’ vision of covenantal responsibility. Below, you can find the full audio recording and transcript of the lecture. I invite you to listen, read, and join the conversation.
Transcript
Introduction
Good evening, and welcome to the launch event of The Sacks Seminars.
The Sacks Seminars is a collaborative initiative between Gonville & Caius College and The Rabbi Sacks Legacy, conceived to honour and advance the intellectual and moral legacy of Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks.
It is especially meaningful that this programme begins here, in the very College where Rabbi Sacks began to develop his distinctive voice and vision. He often spoke about his time at Caius as formative, where his sense of responsibility first took root, and where he discovered that faith and reason, tradition and modernity, could speak meaningfully to one another.
This seminar series is designed to carry forward that legacy by creating a space where students can engage seriously and rigorously with Rabbi Sacks’ teachings, particularly his vision of: covenantal community, universal morality, and the moral and spiritual challenges of the modern world.
Beginning next academic year, we will be running a bespoke course that invites undergraduate and graduate students to explore Rabbi Sacks’ thought in depth.
These sessions will not only study his writings but also train participants to communicate his ideas thoughtfully and compellingly to wider audiences. While the programme will be rooted here at Caius, it will also welcome students from across the University.
Rabbi Sacks was not just a towering figure within Jewish thought; he was a global moral voice whose ideas resonate far beyond the boundaries of any one tradition. His books and lectures speak with striking clarity to the challenges of our contemporary world: challenges of isolation, ethical disorientation, and the weakening of communal bonds.
Yet it was his doctoral work at King’s College London, completed in the early 1980s, that crystallised the theological and ethical framework he would carry forward throughout his life. The forthcoming Sacks Seminars will be structured around a thorough investigation of the themes and the argument in this doctoral thesis which carried the title: Rabbinic concepts of responsibility for others: a study of the Commandment of Rebuke and the idea of mutual surety.
Our intention is not simply to create a space for academic reflection but to build a living conversation, one that is faithful to Rabbi Sacks’ insistence that ideas must shape not just how we think, but how we live together.
This evening’s lecture and reception is the first step. It is our hope that the discussions that begin tonight will continue over many seminars, and over many years, and that together we can help ensure that Rabbi Sacks’ voice contributes to shaping the intellectual and moral life of Cambridge for generations to come.
Tonight, I invite you to begin this journey with me into the heart of Rabbi Sacks’ early thought, as we unpack the two foundational themes from his thesis: Mutual Surety and Rebuke. These concepts, drawn from the rabbinic tradition, will be shown to not be relics of an ancient past; they are bold, living ideas that challenge us to reconsider what it means to live ethically in relationship with others.
Tonight, we will explore how mutual surety (areivut) and the commandment of rebuke (tokhechah) form the backbone of Rabbi Sacks' vision of covenantal responsibility. These principles push us beyond a privatised ethics of personal virtue into a shared moral landscape, where our fates—and our obligations—are deeply intertwined.
Over the course of four seminars in the planned series, we will unfold this vision in stages: first, by examining Rabbi Sacks’ articulation of covenantal responsibility; second, by placing this thesis in dialogue with major currents in political philosophy; third, by extending the conversation into ethical philosophy; and finally, by exploring its resonance with Jewish mystical thought.
This evening, we will map out the terrain, introducing key questions and initial lines of inquiry in each of these fields, setting the stage for the deeper explorations that lie ahead.
At a time when individualism often overshadows interdependence, Rabbi Sacks offers a vision of moral life that is both radical and redemptive: to be human is to be responsible not just for oneself, but for the other. In his thesis, Rabbi Sacks dives into the rabbinic tradition not just as a historian or legalist, but as a philosopher and theologian seeking answers to universal human questions: How do we live together? What do we owe one another?
His thesis is a meticulous yet passionate exploration of how Jewish ethics—rooted in the covenant at Sinai—offers a model of communal responsibility that transcends time and place. The themes of this early research would later blossom into books such as To Heal a Fractured World, The Dignity of Difference, and Morality, but its seeds are here, in his bold reimagining of covenant as a call to moral interdependence
The Radical Idea of Mutual Surety (Areivut)
In the Easter Term of 1968, Jonathan Sacks, then an undergraduate philosophy student at Gonville and Caius College, was awarded the College’s Patten-Taylor Travelling Scholarship. This grant enabled him to travel to America during the storied summer of 1968, a time marked by social upheaval and cultural transformation. But for the young Sacks, the journey would become transformative in a different sense.
It was during this trip that he met the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, in what would later be described as a life-altering encounter. Reflecting on that meeting, Rabbi Sacks would recount how it reshaped his understanding of Jewish commitment and redirected his path towards a life dedicated to Jewish thought and communal leadership.
A decade later, the now Rabbi Sacks, returned to America for another audience with the Rebbe—this time seeking career advice. Torn between becoming a barrister or pursuing an academic career in philosophy, he expected the Rebbe to weigh the pros and cons. Instead, the Rebbe's response was resolute: "You must become a rabbi for Anglo-Jewry." What began as a career consultation transformed into a mission statement, one that would redefine Anglo-Jewish leadership for decades to come.
The Rebbe’s influence extended also into Rabbi Sacks' academic work. At the same audience, Rabbi Sacks discussed with the Rebbe his plan to write his PhD thesis on a topic in contemporary philosophy, however, the Rebbe encouraged him to switch course and focus on something rabbinic. He also requested that upon completion he should send a copy as the Rebbe would like to read it himself.
Four years later and with some hesitation, Rabbi Sacks shared the completed manuscript with the Rebbe, never expecting a reply amidst the thousands of letters the Rebbe received weekly. Yet, to his surprise, a handwritten response arrived—not only acknowledging the work but critiquing it.
We will return to the contents of that handwritten note and its importance for our project shortly. In the meantime, let us dive into the central themes of the dissertation.
The first theme we’ll examine is areivut, or mutual surety, encapsulated in the Midrashic and Talmudic principle: "Kol Yisrael areivim zeh bazeh" – All of Israel are guarantors for one another.
On the surface, this might read as a straightforward call for communal solidarity, a reminder to look out for each other. But Rabbi Sacks uncovers a far deeper and more provocative meaning. Areivut is not just a sentiment of care; it is a claim about the nature of covenantal existence.
To be an arev—a guarantor or surety—is to say: "Your moral life is not separate from mine. Your failures implicate me, just as my actions bear on you."
Rabbi Sacks roots this idea in the covenant at Sinai, which he sees not as a contract between individuals and G-d, but as the birth of a collective moral entity, a people bound together by shared purpose and responsibility.
The principle of areivut transforms the ethical landscape. It insists that moral responsibility is not divisible; it is held in common. No one stands alone in the covenant; each is a guarantor for the other.
This is a striking departure from a certain notion of the autonomous self, where moral agency begins and ends with the individual. In the rabbinic vision Sacks articulates, we are not islands of righteousness. The Hebrew word arev is etymologically associated with notions of mixture or interweaving, suggesting a profound entanglement of lives.
Let us bring this idea into conversation with a contrasting political philosophy. John Rawls' political philosophy emphasises justice as fairness, grounded in the idea that if individuals were placed behind what he calls a "veil of ignorance"—a thought experiment that strips away knowledge of one's own race, class, religion, or personal advantages—they would choose principles of equality and liberty that ensure fairness for all.
Imagine a group of people deciding how to divide a cake without knowing which slice they’ll receive. Their lack of knowledge about their own share encourages them to make the slices as equal as possible. This is Rawls’ way of ensuring fairness: designing society's basic rules as if you don’t know where you’ll personally end up.
Crucially, Rawls doesn’t exclude moral responsibility from public life. His concept of "overlapping consensus" allows people with very different beliefs, religious or secular, to still agree on certain basic principles of justice.
It’s like neighbours with very different lifestyles all agreeing that the street should be clean and safe, even if their reasons for wanting that differ. For Rawls, political justification must be accessible to everyone, regardless of personal beliefs, so that society can function smoothly despite deep differences.
Rabbi Sacks’ account of mutual responsibility, by contrast, challenges the adequacy of this framework. While Rawls envisions citizens respecting each other’s rights and cooperating fairly, areivut calls for something deeper: an existential commitment to one another's moral and spiritual well-being.
The arev is not simply a good neighbour who respects boundaries; they are more like the family member who takes responsibility if you can’t pay your rent, not just out of kindness, but because they see your well-being as bound up with their own. Where Rawls draws boundaries to protect freedom from coercion, ensuring that nobody is forced to adopt a specific moral or religious view, Sacks argues that freedom without shared moral responsibility leads to fragmentation.
Imagine a block of flats where everyone agrees not to disturb one another, but no one checks in on their neighbours or shares any sense of common life. It might be peaceful, but it’s also isolated.
Areivut provides a post-liberal corrective: it doesn’t reject Rawls’ concern for fairness but shows that fairness alone cannot create a true community.
Let’s try to anchor this concept textually. The Talmud in Sanhedrin 27b compares areivut to the role of a guarantor in a loan. If a borrower defaults, the guarantor must step in—not out of charity, but obligation. So too, in the moral realm, if one member of the covenant falters, the others are called to act. This isn’t about blame; it’s about burden-sharing. Rabbi Sacks extends this analogy: our responsibility to each other is not just about stepping in when things go wrong but also nurturing growth and potential in one another.
Where Rawls' model aspires to a just structure, Sacks envisions a just society animated by personal commitment and mutual responsibility—a covenant, not just a contract. It’s the difference between fairly sharing a meal and cooking for one another out of love and commitment.
Rabbi Sacks’ account of areivut can also be fruitfully read in dialogue with the work of Alasdair MacIntyre. MacIntyre’s After Virtue begins with the provocative claim that our moral discourse today is in a state of grave disorder.
We use moral terms—justice, rights, duty—as if we shared a common understanding, but in fact we do not. The words remain, but the traditions that once gave them coherence have eroded. We are, as he puts it, living among the fragments of a once-shared moral vocabulary.
In response, MacIntyre calls for a recovery of virtue ethics grounded in shared narratives and thick communal traditions. He argues that the self can only be understood as narrated, as embedded in a story that stretches backward and forward through time, and within a community that gives that story moral shape.
Rabbi Sacks agreed with much of this diagnosis and quoted it often, but he frames the solution not only in terms of narrative but in terms of covenant. Areivut offers exactly the kind of thick moral fabric MacIntyre longs for. It binds individuals together in mutual responsibility not by coercion or contract, but by shared story, sacred commitment, and moral interdependence.
And where MacIntyre turns to Aristotelian traditions of virtue as a way forward, Rabbi Sacks turns to Sinai—to covenantal ethics. In both thinkers, we find a rejection of the isolated, autonomous moral agent so valorised in Enlightenment liberalism. Instead, the self is constituted through its relations to tradition, to community, and to shared purpose.
Rabbi Sacks once wrote, "I am not a self-contained ‘I’. I am part of the covenantal 'We'." This might be read as an echo of MacIntyre’s claim that “I can only answer the question ‘What am I to do?’ if I can answer the prior question ‘Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?’”
Maybe one way to express this philosophically is to say that both MacIntyre and Sacks affirm the primacy of moral formation over moral reasoning. The question is not just “What is the right thing to do?” but “What kind of person should I become, and in what kind of community?”
Areivut is then more than a halakhic principle or rabbinic aphorism. It is a moral anthropology, a way of understanding who we are and what we owe each other. It demands that we reimagine moral responsibility as something shared, reciprocal, and rooted in story.
In an age of fractured communities and ethical fragmentation, both Sacks and MacIntyre call us to rebuild from within: not through abstract principles, but through lived commitments and embedded traditions. If MacIntyre points us to the virtues needed for moral renewal, Rabbi Sacks shows us how those virtues are cultivated in covenantal relationships, where every “I” is already a “we,” and every self is a guarantor for the other.
This idea scales beyond the interpersonal. In a divided society, areivut challenges us to bridge the gaps. It asks: What if we saw ourselves as guarantors not just for those we like or agree with, but for those whose views unsettle us?
This is covenantal ethics at its most demanding—and potentially its most transformative.
Responsibility to Prevent Harm – From Rebuke to Moral Intervention
Building on areivut, the second theme takes us into the active dimension of responsibility: a duty not just to avoid harm, but to prevent it. This emerges from Leviticus 19:17:
"You shall not hate your brother in your heart; you shall surely rebuke your neighbour and not bear sin because of him."
This verse introduces the mitzvah of tokhechah—here translated as rebuke—which Rabbi Sacks explores as a cornerstone of rabbinic ethics. At first glance, rebuke might seem like a license to judge or correct others. But Rabbi Sacks reveals its deeper purpose: it’s about shared moral accountability. The phrase "and not bear sin because of him" implies that if you fail to intervene when you could have, you share in the consequences of the other’s wrongdoing.
This is a natural extension of areivut. If we are guarantors for one another, then we cannot stand idly by when harm looms—whether that harm is spiritual, ethical, or physical. Yet Rabbi Sacks points out an obvious tension here: How do we balance responsibility, with respect for the other’s autonomy? When does intervention become coercion? How do we correct without condemning?
Isaiah Berlin’s concept of value pluralism—the idea that multiple, often conflicting values can be equally legitimate—offers a powerful lens for understanding moral diversity. Berlin argues that values like justice and mercy, freedom and equality, often clash in ways that cannot be fully reconciled.
Imagine someone trying to be both a rigorous judge and a compassionate friend; the demands of each role can pull in different directions, and resolving that tension is not always possible.
Berlin is wary of attempts to force one value to dominate over others, fearing that such moral certainty can easily slide into coercion. His concern is not passive indifference, but a recognition of tragic necessity, an outcome that is painful but unavoidable.
This wariness parallels one of the dangers Rabbi Sacks highlights in the practice of rebuke: the temptation to correct others in ways that become invasive or demeaning. For Berlin, the insistence that one vision of justice must triumph over all others risks erasing the moral complexity of real life. Rabbi Sacks acknowledges this risk but does not retreat into moral detachment. Instead, he proposes a covenantal ethic in which tokhechah is not about asserting my truth over yours, but engaging in a shared pursuit of moral repair. The purpose is not domination, but healing.
While Berlin emphasises the need to protect pluralism by avoiding moral absolutism, Rabbi Sacks suggests that a covenantal society offers a deeper solution: a community that respects difference not by privatising moral discourse, but by rooting responsibility in empathy and humility. It’s the difference between neighbors who agree not to interfere with each other’s lives and family members who take responsibility for one another's well-being.
Berlin fears the tyranny of moral certainty; Sacks envisions the possibility of moral responsibility without coercion—a covenant where shared values are held not through force, but through love and mutual commitment.
To address these concerns, he turns to Maimonides, who offers two lenses on rebuke in his Mishneh Torah (Hilchot De’ot 6:7). The responsibility model: Rebuke as a duty to prevent sin, ensuring the community’s moral integrity, and the therapeutic model: Rebuke as an act of restoration, aiming to guide the other back to righteousness with empathy.
Rabbi Sacks argues that both are essential. The mitzvah of rebuke, when properly understood, is not an act of judgment but an act of love. It is the courage to care enough to correct, to speak truth with humility. This is where areivut and tokhechah converge: mutual surety gives us the framework; the duty to rebuke gives us the tools. Together, they form a theology of proactive responsibility, a call to be moral actors, not spectators, in the lives of others.
This is a perfect moment to engage with the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, who perhaps more than any other modern thinker, places responsibility to the Other at the centre of moral life. For Levinas, ethics begins in the face of the Other—a silent summons that precedes all contracts, rationalities, or social structures.
Rabbi Sacks’ areivut can be read as a communal concretisation of Levinas’ individual ethical insight. Where Levinas speaks of being “held hostage” by the Other’s vulnerability, Sacks gives this idea institutional form: the covenant makes each of us a guarantor, an arev, bound not by consent but by the call of shared story and sacred responsibility.
However, unlike Sacks, Levinas insists that ethics is asymmetrical—I am responsible for the other, even if they are not responsible for me. Whereas for Sacks, covenant transforms asymmetry into mutuality. Sacks’ areivut is thus distinct from the notion of the Levinasian other: not only the Other’s face, but the community’s collective moral fabric is what binds me to that face again and again.
This has implications for rebuke as well. Levinas would likely reject rebuke if it risks reducing the Other to an object of correction, the Other being reduced to the Same. Rabbi Sacks meanwhile reframes rebuke as response rather than intervention: it begins not in judgment but in concern, in seeing the Other not as a moral failure but as a partner in shared destiny.
Now that we have familiarised ourselves with the argument in the thesis and how it might be brought fruitfully into discussion with both political and ethical philosophy, let us now return to the contents of that scribbled note from the Rebbe that in just a few short comments attempted to push the boundaries of Rabbi Sacks’ thinking surrounding these two primary themes of rebuke and mutual surety.
In the first comment the Rebbe expresses his disappointment at the translation of tokhecha as rebuke, however, unlike Rawls and Berlin who may have concerns with coercion, the Rebbe felt the English word implied a negative tone of rejection which would be a contradiction to the foundational commandment to love your neighbour as yourself. The Rebbe points out that even though Rabbi Sacks confronted this issue head on in chapter 3 of the thesis, the impact of the translation choice will still be felt by the reader. Whichever way you slice it, rebuke implies a harshness that fails to abide by the demands of brotherly love.
In the second comment, the Rebbe highlighted the absence of Chapter 32 of the classic Chabad Chassidic text, the Tanya, which discusses areivut (mutual responsibility), not merely as a legal principle but as a mystical ontological reality. The Rebbe argued that areivut rests on the Chassidic understanding of the unity of souls—a unity so profound that each person is inherently responsible for the moral and spiritual welfare of another.
Rabbi Sacks would later reflect on how this critique reshaped his thinking. In his memorial lecture for the Rebbe in 1994, he described how this comment on his PhD thesis transformed his understanding of covenantal responsibility, not as a cold legal obligation, but as a spiritual bond rooted in shared destiny and collective love. It was, as he put it, a covenant not just of law, but of the heart.
In his own words: “When we live at the level of the soul, we fulfil the command that you shall love your neighbour not as yourself, but because he is yourself. And it is that mystical idea that lies at the heart of Jewish law.”
Conclusion
These themes from Rabbi Sacks’ early work didn’t remain academic exercises, they became the foundation of his lifelong mission. In his later writings, we see areivut and the responsibility to prevent harm evolve into a global ethic.
The mutual surety he first explored within the Jewish community expanded to encompass all people, urging us to see our differences not as divisions but as strengths. Similarly, his early focus on preventing harm grows into a call for moral leadership, urging individuals, communities, and nations to confront injustice with both conviction and compassion.
This continuity reveals Rabbi Sacks as a thinker whose ideas matured over time, always in dialogue with the world’s shifting needs. His doctoral thesis wasn’t a detached study; it was a blueprint for healing a fractured moral landscape. A vision he carried into his rabbinate, his writings, and his public voice until his untimely passing in 2020.
What emerges from Rabbi Sacks’ thought is a theology of moral interdependence that feels urgently contemporary. Responsibility is not an afterthought to covenant, it is its essence, the thread that binds us as ethical beings. Long before he became a global advocate for dignity and difference as well as the dignity of difference, Rabbi Sacks was crafting this vision in his thesis: a world where we are not merely accountable for the other, but to the other.
In our age of polarisation, where virtue is often performative and community is strained, Rabbi Sacks reminds us that responsibility is a blessing, not a burden; a calling, not a constraint.
The rabbinic tradition, as Rabbi Sacks understood it, insists that we are not solitary souls chasing righteousness alone. We are bound together by design, by duty, and by the possibility of a better world.