The Movement for Reform Judaism

Rabbi Maurice Michaels, head of the Assembly of Rabbis, presented this 'Thought for the Day' on BBC Radio Essex on 9th July 2006.

On Thursday afternoon, I was with about a hundred people at a cemetery in London.  Not surprising, you might think, for a Rabbi, for whom visits to cemeteries is an occupational hazard - a large Synagogue means lots of funerals and tombstone consecrations.  But this was different.  Almost all the other people there were also Rabbis and we were visiting the grave of Rabbi Dr Leo Baeck in the fiftieth anniversary year of his death. 

Rabbi Baeck had been the leader of the Jewish community in Berlin before the Second World War and had been incarcerated in the Theresienstadt concentration camp.  Although he had had the opportunity to leave Germany, he refused to leave his community and went into the camps with them, where he continued as their spiritual leader and teacher. 

After the Holocaust, he came to this country and helped, together with other refugees from Europe, to create a vibrant progressive Jewish community in the UK.  He was one of the instigators of the establishment of a training college in 1956 for Rabbis and teachers and after his death it was named in his memory.  Since then the Leo Baeck College has graduated more than 150 Rabbis and to celebrate its Jubilee year an International Rabbinic Conference was held in London last week, the vast majority of the attendees being graduates of the College.  I myself graduated from there ten years ago.

We were privileged to learn with world renowned scholars, to listen to academics and practioners, to have the opportunity of commenting and asking questions, to network with colleagues and friends from overseas, to reflect on the past and to think about the future.  Throughout, the memory of Rabbi Leo Baeck and his legacy have been tools of immense value as we strive to make our Judaism relevant in what has become a largely secular society. 

Baeck's vision in a post-war world was not just the renewal of the Jewish people, so much of which was cruelly destroyed in the madness that ruled Europe at that time, but the continuing role that Judaism had to play.  In 1946, just after his liberation from Theresienstadt, he said, "Judaism must not stand aside when the great problems of humanity struggle in the minds of men to gain expression and battle in the societies of mankind to find their way." 

In our time too, Judaism has something to say in the struggles of humanity.  As people of all faiths look around at the problems confronting us and our world: oppression and deprivation; famine and poverty; lawlessness and terrorism; racism and xenophobia; ecological and economic abuse; Judaism confirms its continuing place as a partner with other faiths - and with God - in seeking and implementing resolution.  Despite the ordeals that Leo Baeck suffered at the hands of humankind, he never lost his humanity, nor did he lose faith in God, the Creator of humankind.  His teachings have permeated the curriculum of the College named in his honour and its graduates.  May his memory be for a blessing to us all.

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