Tanya White, the Sacks Scholar and lecturer at Bar-Ilan University on Jewish philosophy, alongside The Rabbi Sacks Legacy organization, has launched “Books & Beyond: The Rabbi Sacks Podcast.”
Created and hosted by White, the podcast series delves into four of Sacks’s most powerful books and focuses on how his teachings can guide us in today’s post-Oct. 7 reality.
The series includes eight episodes in total, exploring Sacks’ books: A Letter in the Scroll, Future Tense, Morality and To Heal a Fractured World. Each book is covered in two episodes. Episode 1 offers a stimulating introduction to the central ideas and structure of the book. Episode 2 takes the listener on a carefully curated unique audio journey, featuring leading Jewish voices engaging deeply with Sacks’ timely ideas, and how they apply to today’s crucial conversations and challenges.
White is joined by 16 distinguished leaders and prominent voices from the Jewish world, including Natan Sharansky; American social psychologist and author of The Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt; Israel’s special envoy for combating antisemitism, Michal Cotler-Wunsh; award-winning author of People Love Dead Jews, Dara Horn; and KIND founder and Shark Tank investor Daniel Lubetzky.
The vision behind the podcast emerged in the aftermath of Oct. 7 when White, who is also a senior lecturer at Matan Women’s Institute of Torah Learning, set out to create a podcast series that would go beyond Sacks’ books to address a question many had been asking her: “If Rabbi Sacks were alive today, what would he say in response to this unimaginable tragedy?”
“While we cannot know what Rabbi Sacks would say today, we do know what he did say, because he left us a treasure chest of material from the written books to video to audio,” said White. “All we need to do is take a deep dive into the many books he left behind to find an answer. Four years ago, I started a class focused on deep engagement with Jewish philosophy, where we immersed ourselves in Rabbi Sacks’ writings, critically exploring their relevance to our reality. In the wake of Oct. 7, despite our shock and grief, we turned back to his book Future Tense which we had just finished and began asking hard questions about how his teachings speak to us in this shattered and unprecedented reality.”
- Episodes one and two focus on A Letter in the Scroll and feature Sharansky, Erica Brown, Sivan Rahav-Meir and Rabbi Meir Soloveichik.
- Episodes three and four explore Future Tense with Mijal Bitton, award-winning author Horn, and Cotler-Wunsh.
- Episodes five and six, focus on To Heal a Fractured World (featuring Rabbi Dr. Raphael Zarum, Daniel Lubetzky, Yoav Heller, Alan Sacks and Gila Sacks).
- Episodes seven and eight focus on Morality (featuring Dr. Sam Lebens, Jonathan Haidt and Dan Sacker).
Key Highlights
Discussing Rabbi Sacks’ book A Letter in the Scroll in episode two, Natan Sharansky reflects on how Rabbi Sacks’ teachings reinforced his commitment to bridging divides between Jewish communities and Israel, while also engaging with the broader world.
“I spent nine years in prison, nine years in the Israeli government, and nine years as the head of the Jewish Agency,” said Sharansky on the podcast. “Throughout these roles, I felt that building more bridges between different Jewish communities and Israel was the key to our future. This, I believe, is crucial. Of course, if your mission is to improve the world, or to reduce hatred towards Jews, you must also engage with the non-Jewish world. Rabbi Sacks made it clear to me that you don’t have to change who you are when transitioning from the Jewish world to the non-Jewish world.”
In episode six, discussing To Heal a Fractured World, Daniel Lubetzky (KIND Snacks founder and executive chairman) shares how he and Rabbi Sacks agreed to write a book together about how Jewish ethics informs business ethics.
“Unfortunately, he left us too soon and I never got a chance to do that, but I hope somebody will do this because I think Jewish values really inform so much more than we realize and really can answer a lot of the questions that we have today,” said Lubetzky. “Some of the books that he wrote are just incredibly important pieces of that puzzle that we need to get to and read because they’ll help all of us, particularly during these very difficult times.”
Jonathan Haidt (leading American social psychologist and author of bestselling books such as The Anxious Generation and The Righteous Mind) praised the eternal relevance of Morality in episode eight.
“Rabbi Sacks has produced a work of extraordinary depth, beauty, urgency, and erudition. If the prophets of the Hebrew Bible came back to guide liberal democracies and anxious citizens through this difficult time, but first they studied modern history and social science, this is the book they would write for us.”
“The Books & Beyond” podcast is available on popular podcast platforms including Spotify and Apple Podcasts.