Shabbat Aharei Mot-Kedoshim

Thursday, 04 May 2006

Themed reading for the Liberal Judaism Biennial Weekend
Shabbat Aharei Mot- Kedoshim 5766
6th May 2006 - Cheltenham

The Essence Of Judaism: The 50th Yahrzeit of Rabbi Dr Leo Baeck (1873- 1956)

You shall love your neighbour as yourself. Rabbi Akiva said: That is the greatest principle in the Torah.
Leviticus 19:18 and Sifra ad loc.

Some men stand above the flow of time. In our days, one of these men was Leo Baeck. He taught a vision that encompassed task and mystery. It contained all because it knew the relationship of all, because it knew of the unity revealed in all. Thus Baeck spoke of the poetry of divine legislation, of the Essence of Judaism which is his message to us today.
Rabbi Albert Friedlander, 1964 in This People Israel.

The memory of Leo Baeck will live as long as Jews exist in the world. He will take his place among the very great of our people. He will be remembered as the great theologian and teacher, as the leader of German Jewry at the time of their supreme trial, as the man without fear who refused to take refuge from the fury of the tyrant and who went with his people into captivity and as a man full of human understanding and love of all his fellows.
Obituary by Rabbi Charles Berg 1956

Human beings have told you what is good; but what does the Eternal One require of you? Only to do justice, and to love kindness and to walk humbly with your God.
Micah 6:8

The prophets turned against every misdeed of history that seeks its vindication in the success of expediency. They turned against the sort of politics that creates its own moral code, they objected to any justification of right by victory. Justice is the ultimate sense of history for Jewish historiography. If right were to fail there would no longer be any sense in dwelling on earth. For living means living for justice, goodness and truth; true history is the history of the spirit, the human spirit which may at times seems powerless, but ultimately is yet superior and survives because even if it has not got the might, it still possesses the power, the power than can never cease.
Leo Baeck ‘Survival’, Address given in Theresienstadt Concentration camp 15 June 1944

It is too small a task that you should be My servant only to raise up the tribes of Jacob and to restore the survivors of Israel. I will make you a light to the nations that My salvation may reach to the end of the world.
Isaiah 49:6

I desire love not sacrifices and the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings
Cease to do evil, learn to do well
Seek Justice, relieve the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow.
Hosea 6:6 & Isaiah 1:16

I am the Eternal One, Your God; therefore sanctify yourselves and be holy for I am holy.
Leviticus 11:44

You shall be holy for I the Eternal One, Your God is holy.
Leviticus 19:2

As God is merciful, so should you be merciful
As God is gracious, so should you be gracious
As God is righteous, so should you be righteous
As God is faithful, so should you be faithful
Sifrey to Deut 11:22

With the Hebrew religion an entirely new formative principle appeared among humankind. In the history of religions it stands for a revelation, or what is the same thing, a revolution and as such it has become one of the most powerful forces of civilization and become a world religion.

In revolution we hear the voice of something that is fundamentally new. It is the first expression of an entirely different way of thinking. It claims to be an absolute beginning and therefore it completely rejects all that has hitherto existed. It demands a breach from the entire past and all that has been and with all that is. It claims to be, not an evolution, but a new creation.

The new principle is called ethical monotheism. This name is meant to denote that the root of this doctrine is ethical. The unity and the exclusiveness of the moral demand imply the unity of God. When people came to see that good and true and holy are only different names for one thing, God was recognized as the One, the Holy. It is this relationship of humanity to God that is the outstanding feature of the Hebrew religion.
Leo Baeck, God and Man in Judaism 1958 page 24

To know of this One God in whom all things find meaning, is to bear witness to God, to trust God, to find shelter under God, to believe in God – that is what Israel has taught humanity and that constitutes the monotheism, which its prophets gave the world.
Leo Baeck, The Essence of Judaism 1905 p 97

Hillel said: What is hateful to yourself, do not do to others that is the whole Torah. The rest is commentary on it, Go and Learn!
B. Shabbat 31a

You shall proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants.
Leviticus 25:10

To open blind eyes, to bring captives out of prison, those who sit in darkness from the dungeon. Is not this the fast I ask for: to unlock the shackles of injustice, to undo the fetters of bondage. To let the oppressed go free and to break every yoke.
Isaiah 58:6

That all shall sit under their own vines and under their own fig trees and no one shall make them afraid.
Micah 4:4

The whole Torah exists only to establish peace as it says: “Its ways are ways of pleasantness and all its paths are peace.”
B. Gittin 59b q. Prov 3:17

Let Justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an everflowing stream.
Amos 5:24

Jewish faith has manifested its life and its power. It has a commission and call to give voice to the moral conception of minority, to the idea that justice is really justice only when the few and the weak share in it. The importance of the religion of Israel lies not in its extensive but in its intensive aspect, not in its geographical expansion but in its living power. It has never been able to boast large numbers but it has been the most influential religious principle in the world.
Leo Baeck, God and Man in Judaism page 76

Before us stands the task. It stands before us as the task of our Progressive Judaism, our Liberal Judaism and it is set before us by our entire Judaism, in the fullness of its shapes and hopes. We are Progressive Liberal Jews not for the sake of Progressive Liberal Judaism but for the sake of Judaism, of Judaism as a whole. In all groupings of Jewry and spheres of Judaism, we have too much little Judaism- a Judaism that exhausts itself in belonging to a congregation and which in such service deems to have fulfilled its share of Jewish duty. Judaism cannot live without the Jewish congregation but the congregation is not the ultimate purpose. It is not an end in itself.

The greater Judaism is our special strength and right. We stand and fall with those great ideas and with the will to that greater conception of Judaism. Judaism must not stand aside when the great problems of humanity struggle to gain expression and find our way. We must not as Jews deny ourselves to the problems of our time, nor hide ourselves as Jews in face of them; they must not be something that goes on outside our Judaism.

New days lie before us. Twilight hovers over the earth. Does it mean sunset or dawn? We believe in the dawn of light. We should begin again, take up was interrupted. We shall ourselves grow stronger in giving to others. Therefore we must be Jews, must hold our ground, must keep the way and must widen our outlook. This is our task in the post -War world, the task of Progressive Judaism.
Leo Baeck, Presidential address at the 1946 International World Union Conference held in London.

If I am not for myself, who will be for me? But if I am only for myself, what am I? And of not now, when?
Mishnah Avot 1:14