Leo Baeck, the subject of these commemorative words, would have been eighty-four this month. The life of this noble man was an epitome of the German Jewish fate. Born in Lissa May 23, 1873, Baeck became a rabbi in 1897 after studying at the Jüdisch-Theologisches Seminar and the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums. First he served in Oppeln (1897-1907) and then in Düsseldorf (1909-1912), and finally he was called to Berlin to teach homiletics and Midrash at the Hochschule. In 1922 he became chairman of the liberal (or Reform) German Rabbinerverband. When, with Hitler’s advent, the Reichsvertretung der Deutschen Juden (National Chamber of the German Jews) and the Zentral Ausschuss für Aufbau und Hilfe (Central Committee for Aid and Improvement) were set up, Baeck was made head of both. And when the Reichsvereinigung der Juden in Deutschland (National Organization of the Jews of Germany) was created in 1939 he became head of that, too.
Most of the war Baeck spent in the “model” concentration camp at Theresienstadt, in Czechoslovakia, where the effect of his leadership and personal example on his fellow inmates, all Jewish, wrote one of the inspiring pages of wartime Jewish history. After liberation he took up his home in England, where, between extended visits to this country and the Continent, he passed the remaining years of his life, writing, teaching, and counselling. (This magazine published two contributions from Baeck’s pen: “Why Jews in the World?” in June 1947, and “The Jewish Spirit Among the Nations” in February 1949.) His death came on November 2, 1956, in London.
_____________
Only during the last twenty or twenty-five years of his life did Leo Baeck become a public figure. After his rescue and return from the concentration camp at Theresienstadt, when world Jewry paid him homage and loaded him with honors, he became, at least for a while, one of the most famous of living Jews. In spite of this, or perhaps because of it, he remained an unknown figure in more than one respect. Just as he had failed to win widespread recognition during the first sixty years of his life, so, later on, when large numbers of people were showing him every mark of esteem, essential aspects of his personality continued to remain hidden from many even of those who were close to him.
On the occasion of his eightieth birthday Baeck was described as an aristocrat, as the man who had been the real leader of German Jewry, at a time when the word “leader” (Führer) itself had become debased, emptied of content, indeed changed into its opposite. He was depicted both as a great theologian and as a great religious educator who did not merely interpret the essence of Judaism for the Jews and Christians of his time, but whose very life exemplified this essence. He was, moreover, a man who could be characterized in words that he himself once used in eulogizing a friend: “He labored without ostentatious display.” In other words, Leo Baeck did the opposite of what is considered the normal and usual thing in our day. He did not strive to become known, to become famous, to be conspicuous. He wanted his person to disappear in his achievements and his work; he wanted to be inconspicuous. It was healthy instinct no doubt that told him how necessary it was for him to live in this way. Despite many achievements which attracted attention, he had to remain, as it were, anonymous; he had to be permitted to work and to grow quietly.
In another sense too Baeck was and remained “unknown.” His self-control, which he possessed to the highest degree, could not but make him appear the kindly, dignified, reserved sage; and this is what he appeared as not only to the general public, but to people more closely acquainted with him. Yet this self-control, whether dearly won or whether developed early as a product of upbringing and character, was only a veneer. It would be wrong to say that it was a mask. Not only was it something much more; it was something quite different: it was his face. But behind this face, behind the self-control and the kindness, lay an enormous fund of energy, a tremendous reservoir of power and passions, which, had they belonged to another man, would have erupted in a way to attract attention and become visible and audible far and wide. We can say therefore, that in a sense Baeck is not quite aptly characterized by the words “laden with the wisdom of age”; that he did not possess the tranquillity and the serenity of his years, but rather that his heart remained young, that he was capable of passionate and generous partisanship, that the angry ardor of youth was an integral part of his innermost being.
_____________
And nevertheless, his manner frequently suggested the diplomat. It was no accident that in the office of the Reichsvertretung der Deutschen Juden he would be referred to as the “Cardinal.” He seemed to have much of the diplomacy, the prudence, the imposing presence of a prince of the Church. But this was only a half-truth; his nature rendered him something else. He was a leader who could be severe, even hard, first of all on himself, but also on others.
For this reason his judgments of people when in informal conversation with only a few listeners could be severe. When human foible made him angry he could, at times, shed every vestige of diplomacy and speak his mind without reserve, free of all restraint, without mincing words, without attenuation. At the same time, however, he generally expressed his verdicts in a highly polished form which betrayed that what he was saying was not the product of momentary exasperation but had been merely released by it; that it was based on keen observation, painstaking appraisal, and instinctively accurate assessment of people.
For example, there was once a man quite active in the affairs of the Jewish community, who, though himself never a Reform Jew, had often agreed with the Reform Jews and had frequently been delegated by the latter to serve on boards whose members enjoyed no mean emoluments. Of this man Baeck said, “Mr. Z. has allowed himself to be fettered to the chariot of the liberals with silver chains.” There was another man who, though of unblemished character, had something in his manner which at times made it unpleasant for Baeck to work with him. This is what Baeck said of him: “He seems to have raced through his formative years in a super-express.”
These terse, seemingly casual remarks of his were most impressive and pregnant in their effect. They were his immediate, instinctive reactions to people, despite the fact that a judicious weighing of all the pros and cons had preceded them. This was instinct which did not avail itself by mere chance of such metaphors as “silver chains,” “chariot,” and “super-express.” The aphoristic turn, the telling comparison, the charm which was always there despite anger or emotion—all these must have become part of him at an early age as the distillate of a humanistic education based on the study of Roman and Greek authors that was married to Jewish theological lore and the language of the preacher.
But now and again certain brief remarks of his had a more enduring effect than these sallies of wit—remarks which at first made the listener disagree, statements which dealt with events rather than with personalities, and which in their simplicity were free of every trace of figurative or metaphorical expression. It must have been in 1936 or 1937 that Leo Baeck made the following observation at a staff meeting of the Reichsvertretung while in a state of great excitement about some brutal and insidious regulations of the Nazi government: “This system cannot endure; it must perish and it will perish because it is built upon lies.” I still remember how we, the younger men, were moved to skeptical smiles by these words. Not during the meeting, to be sure, but afterwards. Had the “Cardinal” still not learned the ways of the world? Did he not realize how often baseness and lies were triumphant? Or, to express it in the words of Goethe, whom he loved so well and whose style—above all that of the elder Goethe—found so pure an echo in Baeck’s own writings,
If baseness have its hour,
Let none cry “Wellaway!”
For baseness—it is power
Whatever folk may say.
Our skepticism was probably seasoned with a touch of envy. Very likely we realized even then—long before Baeck was proved right—how very secure he was within himself, and that he was fortified by his personal convictions to such an extent that nothing could unnerve him. And this at a time when, although we tried to do our jobs to the best of our abilities, we were all in a state of despair—that is, had already become unbelievers.
_____________
Many of us had known for years that Leo Baeck was one of the great men of our age. To some he seemed not unlike the figure of Don Isaac Abravanel, the great representative of Spanish Jewry in the era of its decline; the one name that lives on when—in an ensuing time—we remember only the group and forget the individuals. Spanish Jewry—Don Isaac Abravanel; German Jewry—Leo Baeck. Baeck himself would certainly have taken umbrage at the comparison. Why?
We can distinguish two different kinds of men among historically important individuals. The one is aware of his greatness; the other is not, and although—as is the case with the former—his achievements are of the highest order, he is not at all aware of their import. Plato and Goethe are representatives of the former type; Johann Sebastian Bach of the latter. Are we compelled to surmise that Leo Baeck, despite all his nobility, pride, and self-reliance, was unaware of his own historical stature? One of the best psychologists of our time, a man who, though much younger than Baeck, was on close terms with him, once put it like this: the amazing thing about Baeck is that despite all his importance and attainments he is essentially nothing but an “old Rav”—thus the representative of a shrinking group; not a clergyman in the sense that Catholics, Protestants, and Jews have had clergymen over the past few centuries, but a figure descended from antiquity and the Middle Ages, untouched by modern times—the teacher of the congregation, not the mediator between man and God.
It is probably this simple interpretation of Leo Baeck’s nature and character that comes closest to the truth and which he too might have been able to accept. But only one type of greatness, if any, can apply to an “old Rav,” and that is the second. Or perhaps none at all. For he strives not for greatness, not for manifest, surpassing significance, but only for righteousness. The truly righteous man must remain unknown. To quote the Talmud, “In each generation the fate of the world depends upon thirty-six unknown righteous men.”
_____________
