Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks — Powerful Books, Mystics, and More

Tim Ferriss speaks with Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks about faith, leadership, and morality in divided times. Sacks defines faith as the ability to hear the music beneath the noise and recounts the life-changing meeting with the Lubavitcher Rebbe that pushed him toward leadership. The conversation centers on his book Morality and the thesis that Western society has too much 'I' and too little 'we', illustrated through history, the pandemic, and cultural change. He also discusses safe spaces, free speech, the value of intellectual opposition, and the Jewish refusal to accept anything as inevitable.

• Sacks defines faith as the ability to hear the music beneath the noise, calling noise-canceling earphones the most religious objects he ever came across.
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• At age 20, after a 72-hour Greyhound bus trip, Sacks met the Lubavitcher Rebbe, who told him 'you don't find yourself in a situation, you put yourself in a situation' and effectively charged him to become a leader.
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• Sacks distinguishes that 'good leaders create followers; great leaders create leaders,' which is what the Rebbe did for him in that single meeting.
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• Standing at Ground Zero after 9/11, Sacks confronted religion as hate versus religion as love, which inspired him to write The Dignity of Difference.
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• His central thesis: we pass on genes as individuals but survive as groups, and the West has pushed radical individualism too far, leaving too much 'I' and too little 'we'.
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• Sacks urges deleting the word 'inevitable,' noting Judaism rejects fatalism, contrasting the failed 'I'-society after 1918 with the successful move to a 'we'-society after 1945.
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• He argues there is nothing less safe than 'safe space,' redefining real safe space as the courteous discipline of respectful listening to opposing views.
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• He introduces 'cultural climate change,' citing a Google Ngram showing 'I' began to predominate over 'we' starting in 1964.
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• Sacks always wore a yellow tie for important speeches to cheer people up, owning about 50 of them, after switching from a large collection of silver ties around 2016.
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• At a TED rehearsal, Chris Anderson objected to Sacks's tie; they compromised so he wore his yellow tie for the talk then untied it for the rest of the conference.
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• Sacks told atheist Richard Dawkins his problem was being 'tone deaf' to the music, and Dawkins replied: 'Yes, it's true I am tone deaf, but there is no music.'
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• Sacks names Edith Eger's 'The Choice' as deeply inspirational, describing her as a female Viktor Frankl who survived Auschwitz and the death march and became a psychotherapist.
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• The line that caused calls for his resignation was 'no religion has a monopoly on truth'; he resolved the controversy by changing 'truth' to 'wisdom' in a second edition in about three hours.
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• Sacks shares the principle 'win the respect of people you respect and you can forget the rest' as one of the most powerful life tools he ever found.
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• He observes the two most individualistic societies, the US and UK, fared worst in the COVID-19 pandemic, while balanced societies like South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, New Zealand, and Germany coped well.
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• Sacks notes Israeli children rarely have peanut allergies because a popular snack contains peanuts, using it as an analogy for building intellectual immunity through exposure to challenging views.
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• He recounts that Csanad Szegedi, a leader of Hungary's anti-Semitic Jobbik party, discovered his grandparents died at Auschwitz and that he was Jewish, later devoting himself to fighting anti-Semitism.
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• Sacks reveals he dated his wife Elaine only about three weeks before getting engaged, and they celebrated their golden (50th) wedding anniversary during lockdown.
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