Rabbi Lionel Blue

Can you remember in the East End in the thirties, hearing those first rumors from the continent about anti-Semitism?

Oh yes, it was like living in a nightmare. There were always the refugees coming over, each one with a more terrible tale to tell, and also there were pretty dreadful things going on in the East End itself. Um there was the time of the Mosley marches down the East End. I remember that uh My father ended in trouble with the police, my grandfather was in a hospital. Attacking the black shirts as they were. Yes, there was a pitch battle in in Allgate, and I was carrying pails of water, you know, for an elderly lady who was going to throw them from her window. And there would have been terrible trouble if they had managed to break through.

Can you find in yourself any forgiveness for what happened?

I can tell you this. I went the first two times I went to Germany. I turned back at the frontier. I just couldn't make it. And then when I did have thee Carriage to go in I found I liked Germans very much. They were lovely people, and I found myself having to explain one generation to another. I found that I was Needed there. The other thing is that, quite frequently in life, You cannot um take the past and say I accept it all or I forgive it all or that sort of thing. The best thing to do is then concentrate on something else. There is so much real work you know to be done in the future that I've just concentrated on that and gradually the past has dropped into some kind of perspective. The greatest disaster would be to think that Nazis are only members of the National Socialist Party in Germany in the nineteen thirties. There's a bit in me, there's a bit in everybody else too, and unless one realizes that, then we're in for a rerun of the whole thing.

You went up to Oxford and experimented with every faith there was, other than the Jewish faith. What happened?

Yeah, I did, and the result was with all these cultural um bits and pieces, I ended up with a superb breakdown. And I remember. I was feeling awfully low. I just couldn't pit put all the fragments of my life together. It was like a jigsaw puzzle which just doesn't work out. and I was at a party in London. And I started singing a song which seemed to express how I felt. and it was an old number of Bessie Smith. And then A bloke came into the room and said looked at me and said I think you'd better come and see me to morrow morning at ten o'clock. So I did. And he was an an psychoanalyst. A follower of Wilhelm Reich. And An analysis started. in which for the first time I really got to Know myself. And It was Like a revelation, you see The Scriptures say the kingdom of heaven is inside you. The same thought comes up in Jewish and Christian Scriptures. Now You cannot know more about God than you know about yourself, if you try to know God without knowing yourself. Because God is inside you, the kingdom of heaven is inside you, you'll only end up with fanaticism or folly. The two have to go hand in hand. You can't use the knowledge of God as an avoidance of knowledge of yourself. So I went back to this chap, And Our sessions used to last sometimes eight or or nine hours. You know, I jumped through through early childhood trauma, you know, like a performing seal. But it really it really remade me. And I ended up beginning to like myself a little, which I never had before and because I was able to like myself a little, I think I was able to like other people a lot.

What do you say to those Orthodox Jewish people who are deeply offended by your reforming approach?

I'm certainly not orthodox, and don't pretend to be so. I think we're trying to do two very different things, and God alone knows uh Which one which Which of our work is going to survive? I can only answer the question which has been set me in my life. I don't criticise people who are asking a different one.