The U.K.’s top rabbi hopes to make the country’s Jewish voice “much more self-confident and willing to engage with the world.”

Question: How did you become England’s Chief Rabbi?
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rnLord Rabbi Jonathan Sacks: Well, there aren’t that many Chief rnRabbis.  I’m only the sixth since 185… 45, so we’ve served on average rnabout 30 years each and that’s a great luxury because you start young rnand then you have a lot of time.  A lot of people who said to me when I rnwas chosen at the age of 42, aren’t you a little young for the job, and Irn replied, no, in… believe me in this job I’ll age rapidly.  So… and rnindeed I found so every 30 years or so there is a year or so of search rnfor the next Chief Rabbi.  There’s a vote and I won.
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rnQuestion: Where did the idea of having a Chief Rabbi originally comern from?
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rnLord Rabbi Jonathan Sacks: It was established because in Britain,rn throughout Europe actually, the Jewish communities constituted as a rnreligious community.  And that means that the community must have a rnhead, an official spokesman, if you like, who represents the community, rnvis-à-vis, the public, vis-à-vis, the other religious leaders, the royalrn family, the government and the prime minister.  It’s a kind of rnsemi-ambassadorial semi-diplomatic role and obviously there is a Chief rnRabbi of Britain for the same reason, Lehavdil as it were, it’s not rnquite the same thing, as there is an Archbishop of Canterbury in rnBritain.  So there’s a head of the Christian church, so there’s a head rnof the Jewish community which is constituted, as I say, as a religious rnrather than as an ethnic community.
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rnQuestion: What did you set out to accomplish as Chief Rabbi?
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rnLord Rabbi Jonathan Sacks: I wanted to turn a rather staid and rnquite predictable Jewish community, not very creative one, into a much rnmore effervescent community and I think the community really has been rntransformed.   We do things in Anglo Jewry today that are not done rnanywhere else in the world or if stimulated developments elsewhere in rnthe world, we have something called Limmud where almost 3,000 young rnpeople come together to study for a week at the end of the year, rnstudying 600 different courses.  Now Limmud has been exported to 47 rnother places in the world from Moscow to New York and Los Angeles and rnalmost everywhere else, so we have a very vibrant cultural life, which rnwe didn’t have before.  I wanted to make Anglo Jewry a more religiously rnknowledgeable community and in 1993, a couple of years into my Chief rnRabbinate when I launched my program Jewish Continuity, 25 percent of rnAnglo-Jewish children went to Jewish day schools.  Today, 17 years rnlater, that figure is 65 percent and rising.  That means we have built rnmore Jewish day schools in the last 15 years than in all the previous rn350 years of Anglo-Jewish history so I’m pretty proud of that.
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rnBut in particular I wanted to take the Jewish voice and make it a voice rnin the human conversation.  So I do a great deal of broadcasting for thern BBC and other national broadcast media.  I do television programs, a rnlot of radio.  I write for the national press.  Seven of my books have rnbeen serialized in the National press.  And when you consider that the rnJewish community in Britain is only one-half a percent of the populationrn of Britain, it means that we have an influence out of all proportion torn our numbers.  I’d like to see the Jewish voice much more self-confidentrn and willing to engage with the world.

Recorded on May 24, 2010
Interviewed by Jessica Liebman