The biggest problem with Rabbi Jonathan Sacks's new book is its cover design. A close second may be its title, "To Heal a Fractured World: The Ethics of Responsibility." Neither the title nor the simple artwork clearly convey the depth of this generally brilliant, comprehensive work, which seamlessly mixes parshanut (Torah commentary), philosophical discussion and psychological and sociological insights with fine story-telling and literary flair.

The result is a compelling case for mankind to follow the Jewish perspective, as Rabbi Sacks sees it, regarding responsibility toward one's community, one's country and the world.

Rabbi Sacks, who is chief rabbi of Great Britain, has written for a general audience including non-Jews, yet has firmly grounded his thoughts on a Jewish perspective, and does so with ample sources. Admittedly, a fair share of his sources are from non-Jewish and non Orthodox thinkers and writers. But it is his reading of the insightful aphorisms of Chazal and of the texts of Tanach, especially Bereishis, that form the foundation for his manifesto.

The subtitle of the book could have been "A Call to Responsibility," because in it Rabbi Sacks makes the case for all people, not only Jews, to help fix the parts of the world that have not yet been completed. God purposely left the world with some imperfections and charged man with the duty to complete His creation. Each individual, with his unique abilities and situation, has his own specific rebuilding task.

So how do we "mend the world"? Rabbi Sacks lays out the Torah's instructions in Part 1 of the book. In it he has chapters on tzedakah, chesed, sanctifying God's name, and darchei shalom (literally, "the ways of peace"), among other topics.

These classical Jewish ideas are often bandied around without much thought or intelligence. And so chesed becomes simply "acts of kindness" and tzedaka becomes "charity." Some terms, like tikkun olam (of which the book's title is a rough translation), are often vaguely conscripted to help further this or that social cause.

But instead Rabbi Sacks has eloquently infused these topics with depth and sophistication. He shows how the Jewish perspective on, say, tzedaka, is magnificently original, and how the world would be a better place if more people would live by its ideals.

Rabbi Sacks also takes on the accusation of Karl Marx that religion allows the oppressed and trampled-on masses to live with the status quo and that it gives them succor to withstand life but not the courage to try to change it.

The author's forceful response: not in Judaism. He shows how the Jewish ideal is to protest against what is wrong in this world and try to correct it.

"In Judaism," Rabbi Sacks asserts, "faith is a revolutionary gesture - the exact opposite of what Karl Marx took religion to be."

The book serves as a counter-argument to the clichés about Judaism put forth by its critics. In answer to portrayals of Judaism and its Torah as a simplistic enabler of "groupthink," impractical for this world, "To Heal a Fractured World" shows the Torah's unique place in Wetern thought, its sophistication, and its perfect harmony with the desires and needs of human beings.

To a certain degree, this is why Rabbi Sacks wrote the book - to show the deep, positive message and instruction of the Jewish Bible. Disaffected Jews are in fact its primary intended audience. As Rabbi Sacks said in an interview with The Jewish Press, "British Jewry has never really gone for Jewish education in a big way." One effort to counter this, he said, is this book - which is intended for committed Jews as well.

The book is part of what he called a "positive campaign" to reach out to Jews, as opposed to all the longstanding "negative campaigns of intermarriage, shock, horror."

In many ways, he told me, the book is a challenge to British Jewry:

"Instead of trying to lower the bar of Judaism I decided to raise it and set people a real challenge. And my calculated guess was that young Jews would respond to a really altruistic message much more than the message of 'let's cut Judaism down to a size that fits you.' "

The conceptual impetus of the book was also, partially, to counter the deadly fanaticism that we've seen in the name of religion, especially since 9/11.

In any case, he makes sure always to keep in mind his non-Jewish audience. As he put it wryly, "In America my books sell to Jews. In Britain they sell to Jews and non-Jews alike." "To Heal a Fractured World" was even serialized in The Times of London.

We also talked about the difficult balance of insularity and openness for Jews and Jewish communities.

"To be a dissenting voice is an honorably Jewish vocation," Rabbi Sacks said. "Years from now, people will look back at this time and will say that for the first time in history, in 4,000 years, the Jews had a home, sovereignty, and a state in the Land of Israel, freedom and equality in virtually every country of the Diaspora. Never was the world more open to them, and never were they less open to the world." He said that he simply wanted "to be a voice that said, 'That's not the way to do it.' "

He said isolationist Jews are often reacting to the Holocaust and "the emergence of a new anti-Semitism." But later on he defended them. "I've always explained to people that it's the seesaw principle," he said.

"The fact that Jewish the community is moving to the right is actually the way it maintains equilibrium with the secular society, which has moved so sharply to the left. The move to the right is a good and appropriate thing which I celebrate, but just because you move to the right, doesn't mean to say we have to disengage from the great ethical issues of today.

"The frummer a Jew is, the more he should be concerned with the state of the world."

Where Rabbi Sacks may get in trouble is in his equal-chairs-at-the-table approach (even though he assured me that "people far more traditional and less outgoing than [he is]" have already more or less screened and approved the book. It was this stance that landed him trouble in a previous book, "The Dignity of Difference." But he maintains that he has "steered a rather elegant course around that obstacle." Nevertheless, he said, "this is a book with some fairly bold speculation," including "a chapter wondering whether we are responsible for the societies in which we live. Is there a covenant of human solidarity? As far as I know nobody has answered 'yes' before to that question."

"But," he pointed out, "I'm not doing much more than what Rav Soloveitchik wrote in his essay "Confrontation." We do work together [with non-Jews] on general issues of human concern.

But we don't engage in theological dialogue. I've always kept those parameters."

I would also add in his defense that the fact the book is for a general audience may be the reason he has focused more on Judaism's man-to-man mitzvot and philosophies than on those between man and G-d The latter, for the most part, are for Jews, but the former are what the Torah demands from everyone.

As a Jewish reader, I would have enjoyed some thoughts about how some of the rituals work into Rabbi Sacks's overall scheme. Why are Jews commanded to perform a bris milah, or keep kosher, and how, if at all, should that affect our relationship to the non-Jews of the world?

Without a sense of how numerous aspects of the Torah help to "heal a fractured world," the Jewish reader, at least, may be left wanting more.

The other concern is that the book treads close to a liberal Jewish definition of what it means to be Jewish - basically the idea that any tried and true humanistic social cause is at the heart of the Jewish mission, and forget about the whole not eating pork stuff.

But this book does not descend to that. Rabbi Sacks offers a comprehensive view of what G-d wants from mankind - with traditional sources galore to back him up - and urges mankind to heed the call.

And the truth is that many Jewish readers could stand to spend some more time -and give more profound thought - to the Torah's concepts of tzedaka and chesed and tikkun olam, and hopefully do more to heal a fractured world.

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