FORMER Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, Lord Sacks, died of cancer last Saturday aged 72. His funeral took place on Sunday afternoon. An obituary will appear in next week’s Tablet.

“It used to take me about 10 minutes to pass through the scanner and armed security guards at his St John’s Wood home, but when I was making documentaries such as Channel 4’s Children of Abraham, I nearly always made it my first port of call,” film-maker and former Dominican friar Mark Dowd told us. “Profound, never resorting to cliché, Jonathan Sacks was the broadcaster’s dream. You sat at his feet, sipped coffee and listened.”

Sacks and Dowd become friends. Mark remembers sitting opposite the former Speaker of the Commons, Michael Martin MP, at one of Sacks’ celebrated dinner parties. Martin kept referring to his host as “Lionel”. Was he thinking of Lionel Blue? wondered Dowd. Grace before and after the three-hour dinner was in Hebrew, with an English translation. “Our ancestors got these prayers just right. Grace before, when we’re all starving, is about 20 seconds, but at the end, when we’ve all had our fill, it just goes on and on,” Sacks told his guests.