79 Set to launch inOctober of 2024, the institutewillwork toachieve two core objectives: first, ensuring that Rabbi Sacks’ ideas are integrated intoacademicand thewider intellectual discourse; and second, developing an alumni network guided by Rabbi Sacks’s views andcapableof influencing Israel, the Jewishpeople, and the world. It will advance its objectives by means of six components that “address every academic audience, fromundergraduates to professors at thecuttingedgeof research,”Rynholdexplains. They include theadditionof courses grounded inRabbi Sacks’swritings to the University’s mandatory Basic Jewish Studies curriculum, master’s anddoctoral scholarships for researchabout and inspired by Rabbi Sacks, and a new political studies bachelor’s degree in Democracy, Citizenship, and Leadership. The degree, which will award 18 scholarships—including four to outstanding Haredi students and four to outstanding Arab students each year—will include annual post-graduation events and activities that solidify participants’ commitment to shared values and leverage the potential of the community. “Rabbi Sacks was deeply concerned with the threat to a free democratic society posed by rampant individualism on the one hand and religious extremism on the other,” says Rynhold. “He believed that our ability to overcome these challenges depends on a certain type of civic discourse, one that wewill model in our classrooms and on campus, and which our graduates will then spread throughout the entire country. In thisway,” he concludes, “we will merge academic excellence with an outward-facing message about the role Judaism can play in creating a more cohesive society at home, and a promoting a betterworld for all.” In January, political thinkers fromaround theworld came to Bar-Ilan for a first-of-its-kind conference celebrating—and furthering— the intellectual legacy of the Rabbi Jonathan Sacks. Organized by Prof. Hanoch Ben-Pazi and Dr. Miriam Feldmann-Kaye of the Department of Jewish Philosophy and head of the Department of Political Studies Prof. Jonathan Rynhold, the conference, titled “Rabbi, Lord, Professor,” was sponsored by The Jewish News and held in partnership with The Rabbi Sacks Legacy. The three-day event featured keynote speeches by the Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam, withwhomRabbi Sacks shared a deep belief in the role of trust in building healthy communities, and Israeli intellectual Dr. Micah Goodman, who spoke about the later thought of Rabbi Sacks as an indictment against postmodernism. The conference was attended by more than 1,000 guests, including the late Rabbi Sacks’ wife Lady Elaine Sacks and his younger brothers Eliot and Brian Sacks. It also featured more than 40 speakers from Israel’s universities, the University of Oxford, Harvard University, McGill University, the University of Chicago, the London School of Jewish Studies, and more. Rabbi, Lord, Professor: The Jonathan Sacks Conference From left to right: Prof. Adam Ferziger, Director Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch Chair for Research on the Torah with Derekh Erez Movement in the Israel and Golda Koschitzky Department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry; Rabbi DavidWolpe, Max Webb Senior Rabbi of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles; Prof. Hanoch-Ben Pazi; and Prof. Michal Govrin of Tel Aviv University. Prof. Hanokh Ben-Pazi Dr. Miriam Feldmann-Kaye Prof. Jonathan Rynhold
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