Encounters with God

For Jews and Christians alike, the significance of God's covenant with the Jews is one of history's great theological mysteries. Why did the Creator entrust his revelation to an obscure tribe of ancient Palestine? Why have the chosen people become a nation of exile, torment and holocaust? Just published in the U.S. is one of the century's most profound and moving attempts to unravel the meaning of Judaism: This People Israel, by the late Rabbi Leo Baeck (Holt, Rinehart & Winston; $9.50).

Baeck, who died nine years ago, is revered as a saint of modern Judaism, and as one of the last towering figures of the German Jewish renaissance that produced such men as Freud, Einstein, Kafka and Martin Buber. Born in Prussia, he studied philosophy at the University of Berlin, and as a rabbi in Silesia, Dusseldorf and Berlin emerged as one of Germany's great articulators of Reform Judaism. When Protestant Theologian Adolf von Harnack declared Judaism to be a spiritually inferior faith in his The Essence of Christianity, Baeck replied with The Essence of Judaism. Baeck defended Judaism as a classical religion, and argued that Christianity became romantic and sentimental when it departed from its Hebraic origins. But he acknowledged the importance of Jesus as a Jewish teacher who revered the tradition of the Prophets.

Survival by Accident. In 1933, Baeck became president of the Representative Council of German Jews. He did what little he could to mitigate the hardships of life under the Nazis and arranged for the emigration of more than 40,000 Jews. Baeck refused to go into exile himself; in 1943 he was arrested and sent to the Theresienstadt concentration camp in Czechoslovakia, where his four sisters died. Baeck survived only by accident: the SS assumed that they had liquidated the leader of German Jewry when another rabbi, named Beck, died.

For 2 1/2 years at Theresienstadt, Baeck conducted illegal services and seminars at night, took charge of a camp governing body that cared for the sick and the aged. When the camp was liberated, he persuaded the surviving prisoners not to take their vengeance on Nazi officials turned over to them by the Russians. Until his death, at 83, Baeck lived in London, although for five years he commuted to Cincinnati's Hebrew Union College to lecture on Jewish history. The future of Judaism, Baeck believed, lay in the U.S.--the only country in history that has allowed 5,000,000 Jews to live in freedom.

Great Dissenters. Much of This People Israel, which was first published in Germany in 1955, was written on scraps of paper at Theresienstadt; yet it is a book that breathes a spirit of peace and hope. Writing a theology of history, Baeck traces the unfolding of Judaism's central concepts--Torah, Talmud, Halacha--from the Exodus to the Nazi holocaust and the creation of modern Israel. The history of Judaism, he says, is a story of a people's encounters with God; the Jews were the first to perceive the unique oneness of God, the first to proclaim that true freedom is only to be found in compliance with the divine will, the first to understand the divine origin and goal of history.

If Jewry is unique, Baeck adds, it is also a surrogate for humanity. Every people is a mystery, and "each is a question which God has asked." God's question speaks stronger in Israel; yet his covenant is not for one nation but for all. "It is the covenant of God with the universe, and therefore with the earth; the covenant of God with humanity and therefore with this people contained in it; the covenant with history and therefore with everyone within it."

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