As I watch Members of Congress and the Administration deliberate on the massive infrastructure bill and seek the truth in the January 6 insurrection and attack on our nation’s Capitol as well as everything else they do, and as healthcare workers across the nation and world do everything possible to treat those with the Delta virus, firemen fight fires in the Pacific states, teachers deal with Covid while engaging their students in learning, and more specifically my rabbinic, cantorial, and synagogue colleagues as they embark in their preparation for the High Holidays at the beginning of September, I’m reminded of how much stress I once knew as a congregational rabbi and that so many people know as they work and serve others in the variety of ways that they do.

Gandhi offers these comforting words for you, I hope: “The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.”

For those reading this who feel overwhelmed in this season, I wish for you an ometz lev (a courageous heart), savlanut (patience), ahavah (love), and sheket nafshi (peace of mind).

An Israeli-Palestinian Rap song that ought to be heard by everyone who cares about Israel and the Palestinians and a way to peace – These two young men from different worlds but the same land have become friends and are planning a second project. Millions have already seen this video. Spread it around!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuUxnfL9I_Y

“I live with uncertainty and doubt. But what I have learned is that doubt may be the most civilizing force we have available to us, for it is doubt that protects us from the arrogance of utter rightness, from the barbarism of blind loyalties, all of which threaten the human possibility.”

I recall these words often. They were spoken decades ago by my childhood Rabbi Leonard I. Beerman (z’l). I think of them (and him) especially when confronted with the rigid absolutism of others, be they followers of Donald Trump or religious and political extremists amongst my own people.

I thought of them this past Sunday morning when I learned that a group of ultra-Orthodox Jews carried panels into the pluralist egalitarian prayer space at the Western Wall of Jerusalem under Robinson’s Arch for the purpose of taking control of the space and disrupting a Conservative movement minyan on Tisha B’Av.

This prayer space, just south of the traditional Kotel plaza, was designated in 2016 after three years of negotiation that included all concerned parties for use by Reform and Conservative Jews, “Women of the Wall,” and any Jewish group of women and men wishing to pray together without interference by the ultra-Orthodox. To its great credit, the new Israeli government (with Reform Rabbi and Member of Knesset Gilad Kariv advocating for a reinstitution of the Kotel agreement) has agreed to build the plaza as intended in the 2016 agreement. It was cancelled in 2017 by former Prime Minister Netanyahu when he got political blow-back from his coalition including ultra-Orthodox political parties.

Tisha B’Av commemorates the destruction of the First and Second Temples in Jerusalem. Jews chant from the Book of Lamentations, pray, and try and make sense of contemporary Jewish identity and faith in the context of three millennia of Jewish history and experience. For Jews in Jerusalem, there is no more significant place to commemorate this holiday than the Western Wall, the retaining wall left standing by Rome after it destroyed the central institution of Judaism in the ancient world, the Temple.

But on Saturday evening, a group of ultra-Orthodox Jews decided not to allow a non-ultra-Orthodox Jewish group to pray anywhere in the vicinity of this site. They brought panels and set up a mechizah in the egalitarian prayer space, and when the Conservative movement participants began chanting Lamentations and praying, these ultra-Orthodox extremists drowned out the davening by screaming obscenities and vulgar insults.

On the first of every Hebrew month for more than thirty years the “Women of the Wall” have gathered to pray quietly at the back of the Women’s section in the traditional Kotel Plaza. Most months hundreds of ultra-Orthodox men protested angrily. They threw chairs and coffee grounds onto the women despoiling their prayer shawls. They yanked Torah scrolls out of women’s arms. They insulted, cursed, condemned, and judged non-ultra-Orthodox Jews and Judaism.

I attended twice these prayer gatherings on Rosh Chodesh and in all my years I never witnessed an uglier and more disheartening scene in Jewish communal life. All the while, the women maintained their dignity and continued praying despite the deafening noise, crass insults, and attacks.

The irony of Saturday evening’s ultra-Orthodox calumny was poignant, but I wonder if these ultra-Orthodox Jews connected the dots. The rabbis of the Talmud explained that the reason the 2^nd Temple was destroyed by Rome was sinat chinam, groundless hatred between Jews. That lesson ought to have been learned over the last two millennia by every Jew. But, these Jews committed the same sin that tradition explains resulted in the destruction of the ancient Jewish community in the Land of Israel.

Anne Applebaum, a journalist, historian, and author of Twilight of Democracy and the Seductive War of Authoritarianism (Doubleday, 2020) wrote about the damaging authoritarian attitude that gives rise to political, ideological, racist, cultural, antisemitic, Islamophobic, homophobic, and misogynist fanaticism:

“Authoritarianism appeals to the people who cannot tolerate complexity. There’s nothing intrinsically left-wing or right-wing about this instinct at all. It is anti-pluralist. It is suspicious of people with different ideas. It is allergic to fierce debate. Whether those who have it ultimately derive from their politics, from Marxism or naturalism, is irrelevant. It is a frame of mind, not a set of ideas.”

I add to Applebaum’s thesis this – those who give themselves over to authoritarianism by nature lack curiosity and the willingness to learn from others and through their own mistakes. They refuse to embrace ambiguity, paradox, and uncertainty. They are closed to logic and imagination, to science and art, to an appreciation of the inter-connectedness of all things and phenomena. They are resistant to doubt and abhor risk. They choose not to recognize the legitimacy in the other’s narrative. They are presumptuous, arrogant, and often they claim to possess ultimate Truth. Out of fear and intimidation, many are all too willing to hand over responsibility to their illiberal and threatening leaders who speak on their behalf and act without reason or moral restraint. They tolerate the suffering of others, and they self-righteously justify themselves in their rectitude. They are illiberal, fiercely partisan, and passionately tribal. They worry not at all about the harm they cause to those outside their tribal camp. They are, in their minds, always right, never wrong. To them life is a simple choice between black and white. There are no grays in their world, only their way or the highway.

In our uncertain age in which so many feel unsafe, unsure, and afraid as a consequence of Covid, climate change, terrorism, war, economic distress, social unrest, immigration, multi-culturalism, disinformation, and conspiracy theories – it ought not to be a surprise that events such as what happened at the Kotel on Saturday evening, at the nation’s Capitol on January 6, in the increasing rate of gun violence, police brutality, racism, and antisemitism, that the gravitational pull towards authoritarianism should be growing in so many places in the world.

Thankfully – and this is important to remember too – there are millions of people everywhere who are resisting authoritarianism, who cherish living in a pluralistic, liberal, and democratic society and culture, who care about the well-being of others, who have not given in to despair, who maintain hope and act according to their better angels without giving in. We’ve seen this spirit of hope, compassion, and concern over and over again in recent years despite the growth of an authoritarian culture in America and elsewhere. We can’t forget that this too is a reaction to crisis and that so many of us do resist the demise of culture and society that authoritarianism seeks to exploit, dominate, and crush under its boots.

Living with uncertainty and doubt is an important virtue because it opens the heart, keeps us humble and curious, and fortifies us as we seek (and sometimes fail) to embody higher values and virtues.

This blog is also posted at the Times of Israel – https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/living-with-uncertainty-and-doubt/

Being afflicted with Alzheimer’s disease is like walking into one’s office, going to a file cabinet, opening a drawer, and discovering that it’s empty. Thus did a woman describe her memory loss due to this awful disease. (‘Some Hope Is Better Than Having No Hope,’ NY Times Daily Podcast, 7/7, 2021). This Daily Podcast episode was inspired by the FDA approval last month of the new controversial, questionably effective, and exorbitantly expensive drug Aduhelm for people with early-onset Alzheimer’s.

I watched my mother suffer memory loss this way over the last five years of her life. Though her dementia was not Alzheimer’s, her experience was extremely frustrating for her and heart-breaking for me. Granted, she lived almost a century and enjoyed excellent health well into her early 90s, so one can’t complain – but memory loss at any age and in any degree is devastating.

The most startling moment for me in the development of my mother’s disease came when I met her one day for lunch at her assisting living home when she was ninety-five.

“Hi Mom,” I said as I approached her table. She’d forgotten I was coming and was already half-way through eating her lunch.

“Hello,” she responded.

“Did you forget I was joining you for lunch today?”

“I should know who you are, but I don’t?” She said.

I thought she was joking. When I told her I was her son John, she said: “You don’t look like John.”

“You’re kidding! Right?”

“You say you’re John, but you don’t look like John. He’s much younger than you.”

She apparently was remembering a much earlier period in her life and mine, when I was a teenager or a twenty-something.

We sat together, talked about nothing in particular, and I hoped that by the end of the hour she’d remember who I was. She didn’t. The next time I visited, her memory was back and she knew me immediately. I reminded her of what happened the week before. She didn’t recall my coming. Such is the nature of dementia – memory comes and goes.

Mark Twain said: “When I was younger, I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not; but my faculties are decaying now and soon I shall be so I cannot remember any but the things that never happened. It is sad to go to pieces like this but we all have to do it.”

Perhaps Twain was right but science holds out the hope that treatments will be developed to slow dementia and spare many of us the effects of this debilitating and humiliating disease.

The woman suffering from Alzheimer’s had worked for decades as a clinical social worker. After each client session she recorded notes from memory of everything that was said. In the early stages of the disease before she was diagnosed, however, she couldn’t remember anything that happened during her sessions. She complained about it to her wife of 45 years who tried to comfort her: “Don’t worry. It’s just aging. It happens to everyone. We all forget things.”

Yes, aging causes everyone to forget some things – a word here and there, the name of a book or film, even the names of friends. I experience some of that myself, but that isn’t dementia – yet. I confess, having watched my mother’s memory disappear that I worry that it will happen to me too.

Physicians proscribe many things we can do to maintain good mental health and memory: getting enough sleep (7-8 hours/night for older adults), keeping our weight down, eating less fatty foods, drinking daily two to four cups of coffee, eating chocolate (in moderation), exercising daily, staying engaged with work, learning a foreign language, playing a musical  instrument, creating art, listening to lectures, reading, joining a book group, writing, doing crossword puzzles, playing chess, Ma Jong, and Bridge – activities in which we’re intellectually challenged and compelled to focus our attention. Also, staying connected with family, friends, and community, and even flossing our teeth to prevent tooth decay and gum disease that neurologists claim is an antidote to the early onset of dementia. But, when dementia comes there’s really nothing ultimately we can do now to stop it before we fade away.

One other thing I think we ought to do before any of that happens – write our stories while we can, describe the most significant events and people in our lives, our memories of parents, grandparents, and mentors, of what’s been important to us over decades, and share them with our children and grandchildren, nieces and nephews, the next generation in our families. If your parents are still in this life, persuade them to write their stories if they’ve not done so already.

Memory defines who we are, and our collective memories are the essence of the culture we’ve inherited and carried forward, and so losing our memory is not only a catastrophe for us individually but for our community as well.

Simon Dubnov (1860-1941), the Jewish historian of the Riga Ghetto who perished there, put it like this: “Yiddin, Shreibt und farschreibt – Jews, write it down, write it all down” lest our children and those to come never know.

This blog is also posted at The Times of Israel – https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/when-i-was-younger-i-could-remember-anything-mark-twain/ 

I don’t remember having sleep problems when I was younger, except one time on a plane to Israel that ended up embarrassing me before hundreds of thousands of Israelis.

This past week my friend from New York, Rabbi Ammi Hirsch, visited Los Angeles and we reminisced about an emergency mission to Israel that he called twenty-two years ago when he served as the President of the Association of Reform Zionists of America (ARZA) representing 1.5 million American Reform Jews.

Ammi had invited me to join a group of twelve Reform Rabbis from the United States and Canada who would join with our Israeli Reform leadership to protest the government’s plan to change Israel’s 1950 Law of Return with respect to conversion. The Law states that any Jew can become a citizen of Israel. It does not mention those who convert to Judaism but by presumption includes every Jew-by-choice. The ultra-Orthodox political parties and the Israeli Chief Rabbinate sought to change the Law to exclude converts whose conversions were overseen by Reform, Conservative, Reconstructionst, and even modern Orthodox rabbis, and include only those who convert according to the strictest standards of Jewish law and with the approval of the ultra-Orthodox Chief Rabbinate.

I traveled the farthest of anyone in the group and did not sleep on the plane. We arrived in Tel Aviv at 10 PM Israeli time, thirty hours after I awoke in Los Angeles to catch my planes to NY and Israel. Waiting for us at Ben Gurion Airport were a swarm of media and an enthusiastic welcoming delegation of Israeli Reform movement leaders. We were quickly whisked away by bus to Jerusalem to meet with Prime Minister Netanyahu and the Minister of Finance Yakov Ne’eman, an Israeli litigator who led the commission charged with overseeing the change to the Law of Return. Bibi and Ne’eman kept us in the PM’s office until midnight trying to persuade us gently not to oppose the government’s agreement with the ultra-Orthodox and Chief Rabbinate out of concern for what they said was the principle of Klal Yisrael, the unity of the Jewish people.

Everyone in the government knew we were in Israel and why. Overnight, an international conference call was convened between the leaders of the Reform and Conservative movements resulting in our unanimous agreement to stand against the government and oppose any change in the Law of Return. We believed then that such a change would indeed threaten the unity of the Jewish people and alienate much of world Jewry from the State of Israel.

After meeting Bibi and Ne’eman, we checked into our hotel and got a few hours’ sleep. We awoke early, had breakfast, and scurried to a press conference stating our resolve to oppose any change in the Law of Return. We met again with Minister Ne’eman who did not sit down and screamed at us charging that “your opposing this change in the Law is the worst calamity to confront the Jewish people in 2000 years since the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem.” Ridiculous hyperbole, yes – but, Ne’eman’s courtroom dramatics were shocking and unnerving, and they set the tone for what was to come.

From there we drove the short distance to the Knesset to meet with four or five political parties including the Labor Party leader and future Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Likud Minister of Trade Natan Sharansky. Not only did the Members of Knesset we met tell us we were going to lose this battle, but our being in Israel was the lead story on the hourly Israeli radio news (Kol Yisrael) and on the front pages of all the Israeli newspapers. The pressure on us was enormous.

The Knesset convened in the afternoon and the bill was scheduled to be introduced by the Prime Minister. Ammi and I sat together in the balcony watching and listening to a raucous screaming match between different Members of the Knesset who opposed or supported the bill. The Speaker of the Knesset warned everyone that whoever continued to interrupt the session would be removed by security. At least 10 MKs were escorted one at a time out of the hall.

When the noise finally ceased, Netanyahu took the podium and began to speak. I was so weary by then that I fell asleep and don’t remember anything he said, though I learned later that he repeated what he told us in his office the night before.

After the Knesset session, to be continued later that night, I hailed a taxi to take me to the airport to return to LA for a funeral I promised to lead the next day. I was in Israel for only 28 hours. It took me a week to recover.

The night I left Israel, the news anchor on Israeli television introduced the story of our being in the Knesset on the evening news saying: “The Prime Minister exhausted a delegation of American Reform Rabbis in Israel who came to oppose changes to the Law of Return.” A few seconds passed and there appeared my picture sleeping in the Knesset balcony. My slumber was broadcast to hundreds of thousands of Israelis in their homes.

Ammi still laughs when recounting the story. When he told me about it after I returned home, I was mortified but in hindsight appreciate the humor of it all. By the way – we won that battle and the change to the Law of Return was tabled. It would come up again. Thankfully, the Law remains untouched and with this new government and with Reform Rabbi Gilad Kariv as the Minister of Law and the Constitution, it won’t come up anytime in the near future.

After that truly exhausting experience, I vowed never to go on an emergency mission to Israel. Shakespeare was right: “Sleep is the chief nourisher in life’s feast.”

This blog is also posted on my Blog at the Times of Israel – https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/almost-sleepless-in-jerusalem/

Peter Beinart has written a thoughtful and, I believe, an accurate article explaining American Jewish attitudes towards Israel that I reprint here in its entirety. Though Peter does not advocate in this piece for a post-Zionist position calling for a purely democratic Israel-Palestine between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea (as he has argued elsewhere), I want to be clear that I do not agree with him. I remain convinced that only a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict can preserve Israel’s democracy and Jewish character, and that a one-state solution cannot work and is a recipe for violence, the loss of Israel’s democracy and Jewish character. There is discussion amongst left-wing pro-Zionists of an interim confederate position that could lead to a two-state solution, but that discussion is for another time.

Here is Peter’s piece:

“What determines American Jewish attitudes toward Israel? Let’s say you had to guess an American Jew’s views on Israel-Palestine by asking a series of questions, none of which could involve politics. What would you ask?

Here are my top four.

Question One: How old are you?

The data is extremely consistent: Young American Jews are less connected to Israel, and less supportive of its policies, than their parents and grandparents. The less connected part is mostly a product of assimilation: Israel is a Jewish state and younger American Jews are less connected to almost everything Jewish (states, synagogues, holidays) than are their elders. According to the newest Pew Research data, roughly one in six Jews over the age of 65 deny that being Jewish is important to them. Among Jews aged 18-29, the figure is one in three.   

But assimilation doesn’t fully explain why young American Jews are more alienated than their elders from Israel’s policies. Because even if you look at the least assimilated, young, and non-Orthodox American Jews—say, young Conservative and Reform rabbis—you find that they’re far more critical of Israel than their older counterparts.

The answer has to do with life experience. Older American Jews are more likely to have been shaped by Israel’s wars in 1948, 1967 and 1973. Younger American Jews have been more influenced by Israel’s recent history: Its invasion of Lebanon in the early 1980s, the first and second intifadas, its periodic wars in Gaza, and its deepening occupation of the West Bank. The 1970s and 1980s constitute the generational dividing line. Older Jews came of age watching Israel battle Arab armies, which—at least in the American Jewish perception—threatened Israel’s existence. Younger American Jews came of age watching Israel battle stateless Palestinians (even Israel’s invasion of Lebanon was aimed at expelling the PLO). And since younger American Jews are more likely to see Israel’s adversary as a stateless people rather than a collection of enemy regimes, they’re more conscious of Israel’s massive power advantage and its denial of Palestinian rights.

Palestinians themselves are largely responsible for this shift in American Jewish consciousness. After the 1967 War, as Edward Said has observed, the Palestinian national movement came out from under the shadow of Arab regimes. Then Palestinians launched an intifada in the late 1980s and a global, non-violent, pressure campaign in the 2000s. Without these acts of national self-assertion, it’s less likely that younger American Jews would have defected from their parents and grandparents views.     

Question Two: Are you Orthodox?

Everything I’ve just written requires a giant asterisk. While younger Reform, Conservative and unaffiliated American Jews are more critical of Israel than their elders, the generational division is far less stark among the Orthodox. Orthodox Jews of all ages are strongly pro-Israel (and pro-Republican). They’re also disproportionately young. That’s why it’s misleading to assume that American Jewry’s demographic changes will necessarily shift American Jewish politics to the left. Although the Orthodox remain a minority among American Jewish Millennials and Zoomers, they constitute a growing minority that generally cares more about Israel than do their more secular counterparts. And in the decades to come, their pro-Israel intensity may counterbalance the numerical advantage of their less Israel-enamored, non-Orthodox peers.

Why are the Orthodox (with the exception of a small group of ultra-Orthodox anti-Zionists) so supportive of Israel and so unsympathetic to Palestinian rights? Because American Orthodox Jews are more influenced by the attitudes of Israeli Jews. They’re more likely to have family in Israel and to have lived there themselves. (Many American Orthodox Jews spend a year in yeshiva in Israel between high school and college). And American Orthodox Jews aren’t just influenced by Israeli Jews as a whole; they’re particularly influenced by Israeli Orthodox Jews—the most right-leaning segment of Israeli society. In part because of the Israeli Orthodox influence, American Orthodox Jews are far more nationalistic, and far less universalistic, than their non-Orthodox counterparts. They’re more likely to see the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in zero-sum, us-versus-them, terms. 

Question Three: How long has your family been in the United States?

When I meet young, non-Orthodox, American Jews who lean right on Israel, the first question is ask is: When did your parents come to the US? More often than not, their parents are immigrants—from the former Soviet Union, from South America, from Iran, from South Africa or from Europe. This shapes their experience in two ways. First, Jews whose families hail from smaller and more precarious Jewish communities can more easily imagine needing Israel as a refuge than can Jews whose families have lived in the United States for more than a century. Second, Jews whose families haven’t lived as long in the US are less likely to conflate Jewishness with political liberalism. They’re less steeped in the story that many non-Orthodox American Jews proudly tell about the American Jewish role in the labor movement, the civil rights movement and the women’s rights movement. They’re less likely to have been raised on tales of Schwerner, Cheney and Goodman being murdered in Mississippi or Rabbi Heschel marching in Selma. Non-American Jews have their own traditions of leftist activism, of course. (Think of Joe Slovo or Jacobo Timmerman). But compared to other Diaspora Jewish communities, American Jews are more likely to put progressive politics—and less likely to put Zionism—at the center of their Jewish identities. Which means that young American Jews with stronger ties to other Diaspora Jewish communities are more likely to diverge from the (non-Orthodox) norm.

Question Four: How much time have you spent listening to Palestinians?

This is the game-changer. In my experience, nothing is as likely to make American Jews rethink their views on Israel as listening to Palestinians. The basic thrust of establishment American Jewish discourse about Palestinians is dehumanizing. Palestinians are talked about but rarely talked to. The average American synagogue, Jewish school or pro-Israel organization neither hosts Palestinian speakers, screens Palestinian films, nor assigns books by Palestinian authors. Hillel’s Israel guidelines—which prohibit inviting speakers who oppose a Jewish state or support BDS—virtually ensure that the primary Jewish institution on most college campuses never hosts Palestinian speakers. Birthright, which has taken hundreds of thousands of American and other Diaspora Jewish twenty-somethings to Israel, rarely takes them to meet Palestinians in the West Bank. For an essay I wrote in 2013, I counted the number of Palestinian speakers at the conferences convened that year by AIPAC and American Jewish Committee. Of AIPAC’s more than two hundred advertised speakers that year, two were Palestinian. Of the AJC’s 64 speakers, none were Palestinian. 

It is precisely because so many American Jews live inside this Palestinian-free cocoon—and have absorbed racist stereotypes of Palestinians as violent, primitive, Jew-haters—that human interactions can be so transformational. I suspect that one reason American Jewish leaders worry so much about the experience of Jewish students at college is that it’s at college where many of these interactions first occur. It’s where Jewish students are most likely to encounter a poem by Mahmoud Darwish or a first-hand account of the Nakba or where they’re likely to make their first Palestinian friend. In establishment Jewish discourse, these encounters are often portrayed as menacing and anti-Semitic. But for many young American Jews, they’re liberating. They’re liberating because they involve a confrontation with discomforting and previously inaccessible truths—which is exactly what college should provide.

This isn’t only true for young people. I’m a huge fan of Encounter, which takes American Jewish leaders to the West Bank and East Jerusalem to meet Palestinians. In a testimonial, one participant admitted that, “After one day of your trip, I felt like I had never been to Israel before, and I am considered a professional Israel expert who travels to Israel several times a year.”

This is why I worry about “anti-normalization,” the decision by some Palestinian activists to oppose any “dialogue” about Israel-Palestine that “occurs outside the resistance framework.” In my experience, when American Jews listen to Palestinians, and thus witness both their humanity and the brutality they endure, many begin a journey that leads them to resist Israel’s policies. But that transformation comes as a result of the interaction. If you make resistance the prerequisite you lose the chance to influence those people who need influencing the most.

Why do I feel so strongly about this? Because listening to Palestinians (something I started doing too late in life) has had a profound impact on me. I’m fifty. My parents emigrated to the United States. I’ve attended Orthodox synagogues my entire adult life. My answers to questions 1-3 would peg me as an AIPAC guy. Question four has made all the difference. It’s a big part of why I write this newsletter at all.”

Those wishing to learn more about what occurred within the pre-WWII German Jewish community, an in-depth biography of arguably the most important pre-war German Jewish leader, Rabbi Leo Baeck, as well as Baeck’s contribution to modern Jewish thought, the well-researched and compellingly written book just published by Dr. Michael A. Meyer called Rabbi Leo Baeck – Living a Religious Imperative in Troubled times (University of Pennsylvania Press: 2021) is well worth reading.

Rabbi Leo Baeck was the pre-eminent leader of German Jewry throughout the 1930s. He was a brilliant scholar, philosopher, theologian, teacher, liberal congregational and community leader, and principled moralist who interacted with all elements of Germany’s Jewish and Christian communities. Baeck unified German Jewry in an increasingly fractured and tragic era. Conservatives, liberals, orthodox, Zionists, and assimilationists revered him.

Baeck was fearless in the face of the Nazi menace, emotionally steady, and a source of strength, courage, and inspiration for Germany’s Jews. He refused to abandon what remained of his people as antisemitic persecution intensified in Germany before the war. As a moral actor he followed his people into the concentration camps, though his daughter, son-in-law, and granddaughter escaped to the United Kingdom. His beloved wife Natalie died from a stroke in 1937, perhaps due to the extreme anxieties of the times. Most of his closest colleagues, associates, assistants, students, and friends were murdered, including his five sisters and two brothers.

In 1933, Germany’s Jews numbered 533,000 souls. Fewer than 200,000 Jews remained after Kristallnacht on November 9, 1938, the turning-point in Nazi Germany’s persecution of the Jews. Of that number only 10,000 escaped deportation, some by hiding until the end of the war, and others captured and murdered. Many chose suicide.

Rabbi Baeck was arrested by two plane-clothes Gestapo agents early in the morning on January 27, 1943 and taken to Theresienstadt (Terezin in Czech), a medieval fortress founded in 1780 and located forty-four miles northwest of Prague. The Nazis had emptied all civilians from the town and turned it into a concentration camp. Of the 140,000 Czech, German, and Austrian Jews sent to this ghetto throughout the war, including 15,000 children, only 6,000 survived. Many died of hunger or disease, or were sent by train to Auschwitz. Baeck survived there until liberation by the Russian army in 1945 partly because the SS gave him better accommodations as the leader of German Jewry and because, mistakenly, the Nazis thought he was already dead. Another Rabbi “Beck’s” death had been registered.

Throughout his internment, the SS in Terezin permitted scholars and teachers to give public lectures – 520 lecturers and at least 2430 lectures in all. Baeck’s friend Jacob Jacobson said that “Baeck’s earnest moral challenge, his profound discipline of thought, and the charm of his personality could not but inspire reverence; and in revering Dr. Baeck and his words, reverence was, in fact, shown to the very essence of Judaism.” (p. 158)

Baeck regarded the Biblical Prophets as the “religious geniuses of Judaism, occupying a role in religion equivalent to that of the greatest painters or sculptures in their respective fields…The Prophets embody the essence of Judaism, which Baeck defines as the unmitigated moral imperative. It was the Prophets, not the priests, who distinguished Israel from other nations and made the religion of Israel unique. For Baeck, not surprisingly, it is the history of the prophetic message – not the history of judges, monarchs, and Second Temple priests – that constitutes the true history of Judaism in biblical times and up to the present day.” (p. 21) Baeck taught that Jews were inherently a people of nonconformists. Courage to follow the universal moral path despite the overpowering force of the State defined the Jewish people.

During his internment at Terezin, Baeck “… believed [that to remain strong], required two qualities: patience and imagination. Patience meant a resilience that did not allow the will to live to give way. Imagination meant the vision that allowed one, despite everything to see a future. Each quality required the other. Patience without imagination could sink the ghetto dweller into an acceptance of the slavery imposed by the environment; imagination without patience could become a personal daydream, a dangerous turn away from everyday reality. For Baeck, in characteristic fashion, both qualities were linked to the moral sphere: moral patience made it possible to hold onto fellow human beings and not allow the bond between self and others to be severed; moral imagination enabled persons to see themselves in the place of others and to feel with them both their grief and their happiness.” (p. 153)

Baeck also emphasized the importance of justice as “the ultimate meaning of history. Were justice to perish, it would be meaningless any longer to live on earth…. True history is the history of the spirit, of the human spirit, which may sometimes seem powerless, but which in the end remains superior; which survives because even if it does not possess power, nonetheless it possesses strength, strength that can never cease.” (p. 159)

Upon liberation by the Russian army, Baeck – emaciated after losing seventy pounds – joined his daughter, son-in-law, and granddaughter in London on July 5, 1945. After a short period of convalescence, he picked up where he left off before war as a leader, scholar, and teacher. He was welcomed into the centers of power in the new Germany, the United States, and Israel. He regarded the Zionist project as “rational in purpose but also mystical in significance, a refuge for the survivors and at the same time a hope for the future.” (p. 190). He believed deeply in the new Jewish State as a cultural, spiritual, and political center of Judaism but warned against the politicization of religion by the Chief Rabbinate and the potential for enmity between Jew and Arab.

Rabbi Baeck was harshly judgmental of the failure of German universities and intellectuals, the German churches, and all Germans of Nazi youth age and older for the evils they perpetrated and/or permitted by their silence. For a short time, he doubted the notion of “steady moral progress.” Yet, he emphasized again that “Justice is the foundation; upon it, and upon it alone, can and should humanity be built, in order that human society may be firmly founded, a society in which all shall have their place to live for the high tasks for which the Creator has made them, each with his individual nature, each with his unique personality.” (p. 172)

Dr. Michael Meyer, the Adolph S. Ochs Professor of Jewish History Emeritus at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Cincinnati, has synthesized brilliantly the thought and life of Rabbi Leo Baeck as well as his noble legacy forged during the darkest years in Jewish history.

This blog also appears on my Blog at the Times of Israel – https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/a-new-biography-of-rabbi-leo-baeck-leader-of-pre-wwii-german-jewry/