A Scholar and Leader
Dieses Volk: Juedische Existenz (This People: Jewish Existence)
By Leo Baeck
Frankfort On The Main: Europäische Verlagsanstalt. 182 pp.
Leo Baeck’s last act, an hour before his death, was to affix his signature to the completed manuscript of the still unpublished second volume of Dieses Volk: Jüdische Existenz. Of the first volume, published, in accordance with his wishes, in Germany in 1955, he says in the Preface that “it was written in a dark time”—the time when the Nazis were systematically exterminating his people. During much of this time, as President of the “Reichsvertretung,” Leo Baeck represented the German Jews before the Nazi government. When it became clear that it was impossible for him to do anything for his fellow Jews in that capacity, he voluntarily followed them into the concentration camp at Theresienstadt. Early in the Nazi terror, Baeck had incurred the wrath of the Nazis through the Yom Kippur prayer, read in synagogues throughout Germany, in which he answered the Nazi denigration of the Jews with the ringing declaration, “We bow our heads before God, but we stand upright before men!” Now he carried on his justification of Jewish life in secret, writing the pages of this volume on chance scraps of paper and managing to bring them forth with him from Theresienstadt at the time of liberation.
Yet there is not a single direct allusion to the fate of the German Jews in this book. What we find instead is a profound midrash on the Pentateuch. That he could have written such a book in such a place and not allow one note of bitterness, one agonized cry to God, one tormented doubt to enter in, would suggest an incredible and not altogether admirable detachment in any lesser man. But Baeck’s personality included in unique fashion both the enlightened scholar of the “Wissenschaft des Judentums” and the courageous and unflinching leader of his people.
Separate and detached from one another as Leo Baeck the scholar and Leo Baeck the leader may have appeared, they were rooted in a common soil—his deep, lifelong loyalty to Judaism; and they were united in a single figure—Leo Baeck the teacher. It is as the teacher, justifying Jewish life and the Jewish people at the very time that they were being ruthlessly destroyed, that we must understand the author of this book.
Its subtitle—“Jewish Existence”—suggests a significant contrast with The Essence of Judaism, the title of his earlier, best-known work. It is not at all as the liberal scholar concerned with extracting the “essential” that Baeck now writes, but as a man deeply involved in past and present Jewish existence. In America, liberal Judaism has often contented itself with the affirmation of universal values, seeing Biblical and Jewish history as the mere occasion for the manifestation of those values—a problem for study, not a living historical reality in which we can participate.
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If we cannot call the author of this book an anti-rationalist, neither can we call ham a rationalist. He includes both the rational and the non-rational in a calm and comprehensive understanding which is as far, on the one hand, from the irrational worship of “reason” of many American Jews as it is, on the other, from the anguished paradoxes of some contemporary European existentialists and “crisis” theologians. “The spirit of Israel has always wanted to grasp the unity of the total reality,” writes Baeck. “The natural and the spiritual, the outer and the inner cannot be separated from each other, if they are rightly understood. They spring from the One: they are one creation, one revelation. The rational and the non-rational do not contradict each other . . . .”
Leo Baeck also stands in clear opposition to the trend within modern Judaism to make the survival of the Jewish people an end in itself and the Jewish religion a means to that end. The Jews are a people only by virtue of the Covenant. “Through the fulfillment of the command of God the people shall become a genuine people. . . . It can only comprehend its existence, its history, as a mission.” It does not find its meaning only in relation to itself or to other people, as those who tend to absolutize “Jewish peoplehood” believe, but in the Covenant with the one God.
Very much like Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig, Baeck understands this Covenant and the command that issues from it as the relation of the divine “I” to the human “Thou,” of the human “I” to the “Eternal Thou.” “The eternal I that addresses us, this I of all I’s which creates all, determines all, beholds all, receives all, is for each at the same time the enduring Thou, the Thou of all Thou’s.” Man becomes “Thou” through God’s “Thou shalt” and he becomes “I”—a real self—through his response to that command. “From being merely an individual, he becomes a person, one who is called.” He becomes a unique person because God addresses, summons, and commands him. “This command is forever the same command because it is the command of God, yet it is ever new, because it is the command of each new hour.” The law is from God, but it becomes hour by hour the task of man.
The implications of the Covenant are unfolded in the Exodus, the way of liberation. The Exodus is not only the Exodus from Egypt, but the path of the Jewish people in history. But God has led forth all peoples into freedom, not just this people, that each might win for itself a history through discovering its own defining idea. The more it became certain that the existence of all peoples is determined by a higher world, the more the Jewish people acquired the sense of its own calling and the courage for its special existence. Because the Jews held insistently and consciously to their individuality, therefore universalism could become their task and commandment. If the “Thou shalt” of the commandment was not heeded on one day, then the “you must” of fate stepped in on the next. But both, the days of freedom and the days of compulsion, belong together as the way of this people in history. As much as Judaism always means a Thou and a Now, as much as it always addresses the man who exists in this hour and the people that is here today, yet at the same time it sees both individual and people in the progression of the generations, in the continuity of the law.
It is illuminating to compare Baeck’s attitude toward Biblical revelation with that of two leading contemporary Jewish theologians-Martin Buber and Abraham J. Heschel. Buber sees Biblical revelation principally within the bounds of dialogue, the relation of the I to the Thou. Heschel’s central category is “the awareness of the ineffable.” For him, man’s response to the awe, glory, and majesty of God is the beginning of religion in general and Biblical religion in particular. Baeck’s approach to revelation would seem to include both Buber’s I-Thou relation and Heschel’s awareness of the ineffable—not in the way that Buber includes wonder and Heschel dialogue, as secondary derivatives, but as of equal importance and equal reality. Yet Baeck leaves us without an adequate understanding of the relation between the ineffable and the “Thou shalt.” He uses the term “one” at times in the Greek sense of a single universe or cosmic order, and at other times in the Hebrew sense of the oneness of God and the oneness of man’s life in relation to God. Nor can we be satisfied with that division of revelation into subjective poetry and objective law which enables Baeck to stress the unconditionality of the law and at the same time give unqualified acceptance to the whole of the Talmud, medieval Jewish philosophy, and the Cabbala as valid responses to new situations. This relativizing of one part of the Bible and absolutizing of the other breaks down as soon as one asks what is meant by the unconditionality of a law bound to words and situations as much as any poetry.
Whereas the Greek Cynics and the Hindu yogis sought for independence and equanimity, writes Baeck, “this people” was ready to renounce inner tranquillity and satisfaction to do the will of God. If Baeck had translated this observation into modern terms, he would have been forced to draw a contrast between two groups within the Jewish people itself—those who look on Judaism as a means to “peace of mind” and spiritual comfort, and those who see it as walking with God whether He lead us through the valley of the shadow or beside still waters. That Baeck should have seen Judaism as a dialogue with God rather than a search for inner peace is evidence of his greatness of vision and marks him off from many liberal Jews; but that he did not translate this insight into a question confronting the modern Jew suggests that his vision was not accompanied by prophetic power—that power which sees the depth both of the teaching and of the present situation, and speaks to that situation out of the teaching.
Emunah, faithfulness or trust, is perhaps the characteristic trait of the Jews, writes Baeck. As emunah is the great reconciler of the “I” and “Thou” of two men, so it is the great reconciler of the “I” and “Thou” of groups and peoples. The final goal of mankind is not the likeness of all, but the faithfulness of all toward all, faithfulness in the sight of God. Faithfulness thereby creates the only unity that can and should exist in the human sphere. It is the living, human contribution to the covenant that God has made with man. A three-fold reality must grow in man, Baeck concludes: the experience of his uniqueness—that divine likeness which each man possesses through his personal existence, the consciousness of being free each day to give one’s unique personal response to God’s command, and the certainty that above all contradictions is an Eternal, so that, like Abraham, Job, and the pious of all ages, one can expect from God His answer.
In Baeck’s emphasis on Biblical emunah, and the connection he makes between it and the I-Thou relation, as in so much else in This People, one cannot fail to find echoes and corollaries of the thought of Martin Buber. The convergence of the thought of these two men is paradigmatic of a direction which liberal Judaism might have to take to remain modern and relevant without sacrificing its moral and intellectual liberalism or the spirit of Biblical Judaism that inspired it.
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