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Why doubt matters to the relaxed Rabbi
Ruth Gorb talks to the Rabbi behind Radio 4’s Thought for the Day spot about his latest book the Best of Blue
WHEN Lionel Blue told his mother he was going into the ministry, she burst into tears.
“You’re doing it to spite us,” she said. She relented slightly, and over a conciliatory gin and curry asked him: “ Will all those years of religion make you nicer?”
Years later a sad and wise Rabbi Blue says that as you can see from the newspapers, religion can make you very nasty indeed. “Born-agains,” he calls extremists, whatever their religion. And he, the kindest and gentlest of men, says that at the beginning of his own religious journey, he was pretty unpleasant.
“It was the 1930s, and my father had managed at last to get a job, in a factory,” he says. “What he really wanted was to be a gardener, and the only time he could work in a garden was at the weekend. I would not allow it on the Sabbath. Even my old grandfather had to smoke in the loo on Saturdays so as not to offend my spirituality. Smug, awful – until God said: ‘Look, Lionel, if you go on like this I’ll break your bloody neck’.”
Rabbi Lionel Blue, Radio 4’s much-loved Jewish teddy bear whose Thought for the Day musings have cheered up many a dismal morning, lives at the end of a quiet cul-de-sac in Finchley with his partner of 15 years, Jim.
The sitting room, chintzy and cosy with lots of good pictures, looks onto a bird-filled garden.
In this house, with his elderly mother and aunt, and with Jim, Lionel Blue re-created the old East End family they used to be.
It was Jim, who is not Jewish, who used to light the Sabbath candles on Friday nights.
Lionel Blue’s mother and aunt both lived well into their 90s, their wits about them, their love of life unimpaired.
He talks of them a good deal, and of the grandmother who brought him up while his mother was out at work.
It was she, he says, who first showed him the importance of the soul.
“It was her hospitality,” he recalls. “I used to sit on the boiler and watch her cooking great cauldrons of borscht, giblets, potato latkes on toast when we were really poor, food for everyone, all the neighbours. My grandmother’s goodness, her spirituality, got to me.”
This did not prevent him bunking off Hebrew classes and becoming a streetwise urchin.
He escaped the original sin within him, he says, and ended up in religion, but it came to him through an unexpected route.
He had, to his parents’ delight, gone up to Oxford. “They wanted me to get out of poverty, out of the ghetto,” he continues. “My mother dreamed of me reaching the heights of Brighton and Westcliff, even Hampstead and Highgate.”
He was at that time a disillusioned Marxist, didn’t know how to handle religion, and had landed up in a city full of churches.
What’s more, he was reading history, a subject in which religion could not be avoided.
Then in November, 1951, he ventured into a Quaker meeting to get out of the rain.
He found there a spirituality that has stayed with him ever since, despite misgivings, breakdowns, psychoanalysis, and this discovery: “I learned a very hard truth, that there is no compulsive material evidence in regard to such non-sensible realities as the soul, God, heaven or conscience.”
It is with this hard truth that he starts his new book, Best of Blue. It is a collection of short pieces that range from childhood to death and the “beyond-life” – which he says he cannot prove. It is a book about faith, his own and what he sees as something accessible to everyone.
Chubby, dressed in a jaunty red polo shirt, he sits in a straight-backed chair (“terrible back-ache if I don’t”) and talks easily and discursively about huge issues.
His conversation has the same quality as his radio broadcasts, full of anecdotes, sometimes elliptical, even surreal.
It is a style like no other, and which has made him a radio success.
He doesn’t like to add to people’s woes, he says, so he tells jokes.
“London can be a lonely place and for years I used to hire a hall in the Portobello Road, one Friday a month, and invite everyone to come, whatever their religion.
“They brought their own vegetarian food, and they all came: Aussies waiting for the pubs to open, students, a peer of the realm, an evangelical choir.
“We turned ourselves into a congregation, with adjustments. When the choir sang that the Messiah had come, we sang that the Messiah will come.”
Add to all this his regular cookery columns in the Catholic magazine, the Tablet, and it comes as something of a surprise that this maverick has been a rabbi in two synagogues – in the East End and in Hendon – and is honorary vice-chairman of the Reform Synagogues of Great Britain.
Never mind the titles, it is his acceptance of doubt that is at the heart of his extraordinary wisdom.
“Born-agains do not see the importance of doubt,” he says. “Religion has to grow if it is to live.
“You have to accept that God is a great mystery. I have conversations with Him because I need strength to do the next thing.
“How? I used to have nausea at the smell of blood. I ended up as a chaplain to people who are ill or wounded or dying.
“God tells me to stay around a bit. And I get the strength to do it.”
But he fears the involvement of religion with nationalism. “All detachment and holiness is gone when God is made to shout ‘up the Irish’ (or the English), or authenticate uncertain rights to promised lands,” he says.
Religion, he adds, is a very huge subject, and a very simple one.
When its hugeness overwhelms him he goes into retreat, to a Carmelite monastery.
(Judaism, he says, is not very good at silence).
The chapel there is very bare, private and silent. Everyone, he thinks, needs time to find God.
“Go to a silent place of worship, give yourself 15 minutes, and see if there is anyone there for you.”
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