Whilst I cannot claim to have read every obituary and post-mortem appreciation of the late former chief rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the British Commonwealth, Jonathan Henry Sacks (who died on 7 November 2020), I have certainly read a great many. With very few exceptions, they follow a common pattern. If they mention the multiple failures and shortcomings of his chief rabbinate at all [and most do not], they are notoriously economical with the truth, treating these as aberrational, incidental to his life and peripheral in their significance and impact. They concentrate rather on his reputation in the wider world, beyond the orbit of British Jewry, and they argue that if that reputation was high – even outstanding – then his numerous communal embarrassments must be discounted, or even entirely ignored. This is not a view that I share. I have in fact perused with astonishment some of the encomia that have been heaped upon him. Here are very short extracts from three.