Would Louis Jacobs have made a difference as Chief Rabbi? - The Jewish Chronicle

Louis Jacobs was the last kind of Anglo-Jewish rabbi who was a rational thinker, an outstanding academic and a traditional talmudist; an alumnus of the Gateshead Kollel and a pupil of the outstanding Rav Dessler.

He was senior lecturer at the now defunct Jews' College, where Torah and academia co-existed. He was expected to follow Isidore Epstein as its head. In 1961 he was blocked by Chief Rabbi Israel Brodie, who, persuaded by a more right-wing Beth Din, was worried that the appointment would guarantee that Rabbi Jacobs would succeed him.

The objections were that his rational approach to Jewish ideas bordered on the heretical. Yet his book We Have Reason to Believe was well received by the Orthodox press. Rabbi Jacobs retained his positions as senior lecturer and rabbi of the New West End Synagogue. Over the next three years he was removed from these positions and was forced to leave the established United Synagogue. Yet he was committed to an Orthodox way of life for the whole of his life.

There was a political aspect to the controversy. The editor of the Jewish Chronicle, William Frankel, had an agenda to get the United Synagogue to ally itself with the Conservative movement of the USA. Even though Anglo-Jewry was at the time more in sync with Conservativism, there was no way Anglo- Jewry would support a rebellion against established authority.

Although Rabbi Jacobs shared a degree of sympathy with the great scholars of the Jewish Theological Seminary, Louis Finkelstein and Saul Lieberman, he never wanted his community to join the movement and always described his new community as "non-fundamentalist Orthodox" .

We might remember that Maimonides was regarded as a heretic in many quarters over his philosophy

My late father and others begged him not to let himself be drawn into the controversy. Had he not joined Frankel in his attack on Anglo-Orthodoxy, I doubt the outcome would have been his exile. Or that his subsequent treatment by the Orthodox establishment as cruel and vindictive.

Could it have been avoided? And if he had become Chief Rabbi, would he have changed the course of Anglo-Jewry? His theology was based on careful reading of rabbinic texts, which themselves were ambiguous about the actual process of revelation on Sinai, as they were on almost every theological idea mentioned in the Talmud.

A rational thinker stands in the middle between faith and mysticism on the one hand and science and rationalism on the other. On a mystical level, the commitment to believe is a commitment to accept. On a rational level, it questions.

Someone who is loyal to both approaches accepts Torah from Sinai as divine revelation and yet can see the processes that are the inevitable by- products of any transmission over time. This was Rabbi Jacobs' position. Fundamentalism is black or white. There is no room for nuance. Once the United Synagogue embraced such dualism.

Had Rabbi Jacobs remained in the Orthodox camp, those who choose to openly question and search would not have found a dogmatic establishment suffocating. I know many thinking Jews now who want and need the commitment and passion of Torah Judaism and its institutions but cannot agree with a medieval theological mindset. They usually choose to remain silent or give in to pressure. Under Rabbi Jacobs they could have outed themselves.

Would that have made any difference to Anglo-Jewry? I think not. The inexorable movement to the right and the near-collapse of the middle has been a feature of all Jewish communities around the world. The greater the assault from the outside, the greater the need to retreat into conformity and orthodoxy. And whenever you have such intensification, those who stand in the middle are often shouted down by the extremes. Perhaps the hour requires such intensity.

I admired Louis Jacobs very much for his scholarship, his learning and above all for his goodness. He was a modest man. He avoided the limelight, the self-publicising aspect of the rabbinate, to tender to his flock and pursue a scholarly life. I have always been drawn to the tzaddik nistar, the hidden saint. I did not in all humility agree with some of his ideas and public stances. I believe he made some tactical errors precisely because he was not a politician and hated hypocrisy.

He was and remains a beacon of integrity and intellectual rigour. If he is out of fashion in Orthodoxy, we might remember that Maimonides was regarded as a heretic in many quarters for his philosophical Guide for the Perplexed. In Provence his books were burned. He remains a giant within Orthodoxy because of his halachic masterpiece. Nevertheless, his philosophy remains a vital point of reference for those Jews who want to think for themselves theologically. He remains an essential alternative paradigm to the inward-looking orthodoxy of fundamentalism and so does Louis Jacobs. That is why his legacy is so important.

When the Lubavitcher Rebbe needed an expert on Chasidism, he invited Louis Jacobs to give evidence on his behalf in an American court of law. If only Anglo- Jewish Orthodox leadership would have been as magnanimous.