Leo Baeck and the College That Bears His Name I Did Not Have the Privilege of Meeting Rabbi Dr
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Leo Baeck and the College that bears his name I did not have the privilege of meeting Rabbi Dr. Leo Baeck. I know him through his writings and reading about his history, but even more so through my experience of his pupils and disciples whom I was fortunate to number amongst my own teachers at Leo Baeck College. The College was founded through the efforts of Rabbi Dr Werner van der Zyl with the intention of becoming the successor of the great Berlin Liberal seminary, the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums, the Higher Institute for the Scientific Study of Judaism. In the years between 1939 and 1941 there were efforts to transfer the Hochschule to England. One of the stumbling blocks was the refusal of Leo Baeck to abandon his German Jewish community, only agreeing to visit the UK for one term each year as a compromise. In the end, the outbreak of the war prevented it happening. Only in the 1950’s did it become possible to create what was to be called the Jewish Theological College of London, with two recent graduates of Oxford as its first students, Lionel Blue and Michael Leigh. The attempt had Baeck’s enthusiastic support, but sadly he died on the 2nd of November 1956, shortly after the opening ceremony on the 30th of September. His former student Rabbi Dr. van der Zyl, who became the first Director of Studies, renamed the new institution Leo Baeck College. In a memorial volume to Rabbi Baeck, Dr. van der Zyl wrote about his teacher. In Leo Baeck personality and scholarship formed a convincing unity… Baeck was a man of two centuries; born in 1873 he grew up in the intellectual climate of the 19th Century; the Century of Kant, Hegel, Darwin and Marx, to name only a few, and in a Jewish world of Emancipation, Enlightenment and Assimilation and Juedishe Wissenschaft; and he was a man of the 20th Century; the Century of Einstein, Freud, A century of tremendous social changes and the beginning of the atomic age. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Baeck did not become a disciple of any defined system. He withstood the temptation to explain Judaism in line with Kantian, Hegelian or any other schools of philosophy…He wrote: Through Judaism goes the path of world history. All that is World history is met by it earlier or later.’ … His books, his writing, his lectures are not intended to speak about Judaism but to speak out of Judaism and be concerned with the whole problem of man and the Universe.1 Leo Baeck was born on the 23rd of May 1873 into a rabbinic family in Lissa in the Province of Posen, part of the then German Empire. He studied at the ‘conservative’ Jewish Theological Seminary of Breslau before moving to the ‘liberal’ Hochschule. At the same time he also studied philosophy at the University of Berlin, because the combination of Jewish and academic studies was required by the State in order to be qualified as a rabbi. He served as a rabbi in Oppeln, Duesseldorf and Berlin. Dr. Baeck’s early fame rests on his publication in 1905 of ‘Das Wesen des Judentums’, ‘The Essence of Judaism’, a response to Adolf von Harnack’s ‘The Essence of Christianity’. Harnack had dismissed Judaism as based on outmoded rituals and laws. Instead, Baeck saw Judaism as an evolving, perpetually modern tradition of critical thought. The German version of his book went through eight editions during his lifetime. I learnt recently that it is currently being studied in a course on Jewish studies at the University of Frankfurt. Dr. Baeck served as a chaplain in the Imperial Army during the First World War on both the Western and Eastern Fronts. Amidst the minutes of the chaplains’ conferences one finds the practical day to day realities of providing facilities for Jewish soldiers and for looking after the local Russian Jewish population. But they 1 ‘Memorial Tribute’ Werner van der Zyl in In Memoriam Leo Baeck (World Union for Progressive Judaism, London ?1956) 21-26, 21-22. 1 Rabbi Dr Jonathan Magonet also contain a comment by Baeck on current religious trends which indicates the breadth of his thinking mentioned above by Dr. van der Zyl: He wrote: ‘Rationalism, as it has ruled during the past few decades, has been replaced by experience and intuition of the depth of the private nature of the religious world of thought. Rabbis too must consider this.’ After the war, as well as his congregational duties, he lectured on Midrash and Homiletics at the Hochschule, where he had received his rabbinic diploma in 1897. In his scholarship, he epitomised the commitment to the German concept of ‘Bildung’, education in its deepest sense. Thus, he read the Hebrew Bible in Hebrew; the New Testament, much of which he personally translated into German, and the Greek philosophers, in Greek; the Church fathers and some of Luther in Latin, and used all these sources in his scholarly work. The same erudition and commitment to precision was to be found in his preaching, having memorised his text beforehand and speaking without notes. Fritz Bamberger, a fellow German-Jewish scholar, remembered that, ‘when Leo Baeck preached, he did not talk down to an audience. Choosing each word carefully, building each sentence for measure and rhythm, speaking somewhat monotonously in a strangely vibrating high-pitched voice, now and then underlining a phrase with a movement of his sensitive hands, more often revealing the importance of a thought by an increased sharpness of his eyes, it appeared that he expected the response to his words not from his listeners but from somewhere beyond. Although one community leader labelled the rabbi’s sermons “Baeck’s private conversations with God,” the congregation accepted him as their leader and teacher.2 Alongside his congregational and academic roles, he took on important communal tasks, including as President of the B’nei Brith. Though not a Zionist, he was not an Anti-Zionist and was one of only two rabbis who refused to vote against the German Rabbinical Association’s condemnation of political Zionism. When the Nazis rose to power in 1933 he was elected president of the Reichsvertretung der deutschen Juden, an umbrella organisation of German-Jewish groups founded to advance the interests of German Jewry in the face of Nazi persecution. Famously, at the inaugural meeting in 1933 he declared: ‘The thousand years’ history of German Jewry is at an end’. Nevertheless, he worked to maintain the morale of German Jews, alleviate the discrimination and persecution, and help Jews emigrate from Germany. In August 1939, he brought some children to safety in England. Rabbi Charles Berg writes: I shall never forget a talk which some of his pupils (amongst them myself) had with him when on a visit to this country at the end of August, 1939, he came to Kitchener Camp where at the time thousands of German-Jewish refugees had found shelter. We begged him not to go back to Germany. Our pleas were in vain. He was determined not to forsake those who were left behind and to whom he perhaps still could be of some help. He was conscious of what a return to Germany at that time entailed. Still he returned.3 In 1943 Dr. Baeck was deported, with his family members, to Theresienstadt concentration camp. During his time there he continued to teach, holding lectures on philosophy and religion, 2 ‘Leo Baeck: Theologian who stressed the ethical centre of Judaism’ Matt Plen (My Jewish Learning http://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/leo-baeck/2/ ) 3 Rabbi Charles Berg From ‘The Synagogue Review’, London, December 1956, reprinted in Worte Des Gedenkens Für Leo Baeck (Verlag Lambert Schneider, Heidelberg 1959) 228. 2 Rabbi Dr Jonathan Magonet which were credited with helping prisoners survive their confinement. Following the liberation, he prevented the inmates from killing the guards who had been handed over to them. During his time there he began work on a book that he would complete after liberation, Dieses Volk – Juedische Existenz, ‘This People Israel: The Meaning of Jewish Existence’. I mentioned earlier that I knew Dr Baeck through his students who had been my teachers at the College. One of them was Dr. Ellen Littmann, our lecturer in Bible. She drew our attention to a change that occurred between the publication of his two major books. One of the central mysteries in Judaism is the nature of the divine name, the tetragrammaton, the four-letter name of God, yod- heh-vav-hey, revealed to Moses at the burning bush. It seems to be derived from the verb ‘hayah’, ‘to be’. Traditionally, rather than pronounce the name in its written form, Jews have substituted the word ‘adonai’, ‘Lord’. But already Moses Mendelssohn in his eighteenth century German translation of parts of the Bible tried to go back to the original form of the name. As a philosopher, he conceived of ‘being’ as indicating the eternal existence of God, and so translated the divine name as ‘Der Ewige’, the Eternal. It is this name that Baeck used in his first book ‘The Essence of Judaism’. However, in the twentieth century Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig, in their monumental translation into German of the entire Bible, used a very different approach. For them the ‘being’ of God meant the existential presence of God. Instead of providing a name, they translated the word where it appeared according to the context as either ‘ER’, ‘HE’ or ‘DU’, ‘THOU’, the God who could be encountered and experienced. Dr. Littmann pointed out that in This People Israel, instead of the Mendelssohn version, ‘the Eternal’, Baeck had used, ‘Er, der ist’, ‘He who is’, which she thought reflected the intimacy with God that he had experienced in Theresienstadt.4 After the war, Dr Baeck settled in London, but spent time each year teaching at the Hebrew Union College, Cincinnati.