Tasks & Possibilities

The bearded old man spoke precisely, with a German accent, carefully emphasizing his words. "Providence never sends what is finished," he said. "Providence sends only possibilities and a task." Silver-haired Rabbi Leo Baeck was 80 years old last week, and Providence still keeps him busy with tasks and possibilities. Six months of the year he teaches religion at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati; six months he labors in England as president of the World Union for Progressive Judaism. And all the time he carries with him the possibilities and tasks of one who is venerated as a hero, a scholar and a man of God.

"My Place Is Here." Leo Baeck never tried to be anything but a scholar like his father and a good rabbi. Born at Lissa, Posen, which was then part of Germany, he studied at Breslau and Berlin and in 1905 wrote a book, The Essence of Judaism, which is still being studied and translated into the world's languages. He served as a chaplain in the German army in World War I, then settled down in Berlin to write and tend his flock.

With Hitler's coming, Providence presented Rabbi Baeck with his most staggering task. In March 1933, the leaders of German Jewry elected him president of the Reichsvertretung der Juden in Deutschland to represent the Jews and protect them from the Nazis.

"My policy was to send the young to other countries and for the old to remain and make this possible," he says. Before the Nazis arrested him in 1943, he had managed to get about 40,000 Jews out of Germany. "But what is a number?" the old man asks. "We think too much in numbers. We forget that each is a man with his soul and his body and his fear."

After most of the synagogues in Germany had been burned in the great purge of 1938, Rabbi Baeck went on conducting clandestine services. Once police found his meeting, raided it, and sent everyone under 60 off to forced labor in factories. But the next Saturday more people came to worship. Four times Rabbi Baeck was arrested and four times he was released. Meanwhile, from outside Germany came tempting offers. To one of them, Cincinnati's Rockdale Temple, Baeck sent a characteristic cable: "As long as there is a single, humble Jew left alive in Germany, my place is here with him."

"A Free Back." At length, at 6 o'clock one morning came the knock on his door. He told the two Gestapo men who had come to get him that they would have to give him two hours to himself or carry him bodily through the streets; then he spent the time writing to his daughter in England and paying all his bills.

In the all-Jewish concentration camp of Theresienstadt there were 45,000 men, women and children. When the camp was liberated 2 1/2 years later, only a few hundred were left alive, and 72 -year-old Leo Baeck was one of them. When the Russians rounded up some petty officials and turned them over to the camp's survivors for vengeance, Rabbi Baeck persuaded his fellow sufferers to leave them unharmed.

Rabbi Baeck now looks to the U.S. rather than to Israel as the present center of Jewish religious vitality: "American Jews must learn to be the center of Judaism, not by their own choice but by the decision of a higher power. There are 6,000,000 Jews in America. Never before in history have 6,000,000 Jews lived in liberty. America is a land without Middle Ages or antiquity. Europeans have on their back antiquity and the Middle Ages. America has a free back.

"In Europe there was no separation between church and state. Therefore, the Jews had to struggle against a state dominated by a church, and the churches were anti-Jewish . . .In America Catholics and Protestants are not in better positions than the Jews. The state is the same state to all of them."

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