TEL AVIV — Three years ago, Jerusalem-based publisher Matthew Miller got a call from the head of Israel’s largest bookstore chain.
Steimatsky chief executive Ayal Grinburg said he was watching translations of works by the late Jonathan Sacks fly off the shelves and wanted to know why a British rabbi was connecting with Israeli readers often indifferent to outside voices.
Miller, a Brooklyn native who had lived in England before settling in Israel, took Grinburg to lunch to explain the “phenomenon” of Sacks, the former chief rabbi of the United Kingdom. In his writing and frequent public appearances, Sacks brought Torah values to bear on philosophy, politics and ethical debates of the day. Even as he sometimes tussled with Jews both to his right and his left, he held a stature as a public intellectual that few Jewish leaders of his generation could match.
When Sacks died from cancer in 2020, a wide array of British leaders sang his praises. Keir Starmer, then the leader of the Labour Party and today Britain’s prime minister, said, for example, “He was a towering intellect whose eloquence, insights and kindness reached well beyond the Jewish community. I have no doubt that his legacy will live on for many generations.”
Miller spelled out that significance for Grinburg and now is assuring Sacks’s legacy lives on — in English and in Hebrew. In 2007, Miller acquired the historic Koren Jerusalem Publishers in 2007 specifically to publish Sacks’s work. The Koren Sacks Siddur was published in 2009, followed by the Koren Sacks Mahzor, or festival prayer books, also with his commentary. Both were later translated into Hebrew. According to the publishing house, Israelis had rarely before adopted machzors that included contemporary commentary alongside the traditional text.
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks. (Photo credit Blake Ezra)
Just as he was beginning to enter the consciousness of the Israeli public, Sacks began work on an English translation and commentary of the Five Books of Moses, which Miller said the rabbi regarded as his flagship project. When he died at age 72, the project had not been completed.
This month, this scholarly trajectory culminates in the publication of the Koren Sacks Humash, an extensive Torah commentary brought to press nearly five years after his death. The project was overseen by his niece, Jessica Sacks, who led a small team of scholars that reviewed 40 years of his writings, lectures and media appearances to assemble the work.
The translation is plain and readable. “Gone are the yea’s and the thous,” said Dayan Ivan Binstock of London’s Beth Din, who reviewed the text. “It reads very nicely to the contemporary ear, at the same time being an accurate and faithful translation of the Hebrew.”
The edition departs from convention by placing the Hebrew text on the left side of the page, in contrast to the ArtScroll Chumash, which has dominated synagogue pews, particularly in Orthodox congregations, for decades. The Sacks volume is expected to challenge ArtScroll’s hold on the market, which has been critiqued for drawing its commentary exclusively from a narrow group of haredi Orthodox rabbinic sources.
The layout reflects Koren’s hallmark style, pairing Sacks’s commentary with punctuated traditional commentaries by Rashi and Onkelos in clean, readable typefaces. The publishing house was established in 1961 by Eliyahu Koren, a master typographer who produced the first Jewish-designed Hebrew Bible in centuries. The Koren Tanakh became an emblem of the young state and is presented to every IDF soldier at their induction ceremonies.
An example page from Rabbi Jonathan Sacks’ Humash with commentary. (Courtesy)
In late 2023, IDF soldiers encountered Sacks’s words in a different format. Koren produced a Hebrew booklet of his essay “Why I Am a Jew,” distributing tens of thousands of copies to combat soldiers. The project was dedicated to Yossi Hershkowitz, a school principal and father of five who was killed in Gaza.
Years after his lunch with Miller, Grinburg has acknowledged that Sacks was not a passing sales trend but a lasting presence that continues to “shape cultural discourse and Jewish identity.” For Steimatsky’s secular customers, he said, his books often provide “their first and most meaningful taste of the Jewish world.”
Although a tiny minority of Israeli commentators have debated how well Sacks’s Anglophone ideas fit the local context, most highlight his ability to make Jewish thought relevant to contemporary issues anywhere in the world. Tanya White, a lecturer in Tanach (the Hebrew bible) and Jewish philosophy at Bar-Ilan University and host of a podcast on Sacks’s work, noted his influence on world leaders, including on British monarchs and prime ministers.
“What he managed to do was connect the universal world — even the secular and atheist — with fidelity to Torah and halacha, and from that synthesis derive principles from the Torah that speak to all humanity,” she told Ynet in a Hebrew-language article that set out to explain his appeal among Israelis.
At least three Israeli presidents and as many prime ministers have spoken of Sacks with reverence and drawn on his writings. Opposition leader Yair Lapid, who is secular, said he was “the only person I’d be happy to have as my rabbi,” and during his premiership he distributed copies of Sacks’s “The Dignity of Difference” to ministry director generals.
The Rabbi Sacks Legacy, directed in Israel by his younger brother Alan Sacks, has launched programs across the country in partnership with Bar-Ilan University and other institutions, bringing his thought into schools, pre-military academies, universities and civic groups.
Sixteen of his books now have Hebrew editions, covering Bible commentary, philosophy and ethics. Most were translated by the Israeli poet Tsur Ehrlich, who had never worked in prose before taking on the task. Alan Sacks said the choice was deliberate, since his brother’s “mastery of language” was central to his appeal.
“It was vital for us to find someone with the emotion and sensitivity to communicate [his] message without losing any of his personality,” he said, adding that Ehrlich’s work gives “full credit to the original.”
The Koren Sacks Humash is intended as the core text for current and future editions. Sacks’s translation already appears in the Koren Tanakh and in a 50-volume edition of the chumash, and Koren has issued smaller versions for synagogue and personal use, with adjustments for British or American spellings.
Plans are also underway for new adaptations, including a graphic novel and a Hebrew edition by Ehrlich. Alan Sacks said the expansion shows how his brother’s message of “fundamental moral values has spread from England to Jerusalem, and now from Jerusalem to the citizens of the State of Israel.”
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