Review
Lionel Blue is the popular and much loved Rabbi whose Thoughts for the Day have become a national institution. His life is one of apparent paradox: Britain?s most famous Rabbi and a household name, his Jewish wit and quirky spirituality never fail to entertain, yet he has lived a life on the fringes. A Rabbi who has remained true to his tradition, not only has he also found a home in Christianity, he is the first openly gay Rabbi. Through a life lived honestly, Lionel Blue has never tried to escape these contradictions. Here is a figure who ?walks his talk? and, as William Bloom encourages us to do, asserts his beliefs and values by ?talking his walk?, too. Hitchhiking to Heaven is a frank and moving story of his complex pilgrimage through spirituality, sexuality and a life lived in truth, told with profundity, originality and his ever-present trademark humour.
352pp, 128mm x 194mm, softback, 2005

Extract
Go East, Young Man, Go East!
After I decided to become a rabbi in 1953, I began to dither. I had resumed relations with the Jewish community to reacquaint myself with my base, but the legal forms of spirituality and the plethora of committees I was invited to sit on already began to dry me up. Without my inner life, I felt spiritually starved. Part of the trouble was that I didn't know what was where in Judaism, in the vast collection of codices on codices and commentaries on commentaries. There were fewer miracles, thank God, than in Christianity, and Judaism was certainly the religion God had put me in, but I wanted something more open, wider and cosmic rather than communal. I had also read Isherwood's translation of the Gita, and I liked the way Vedanta included all my life experience and didn't say God was in this bit but not in the other bit, when life didn't feel like that at all. I knew in Judaism there were vast areas I knew nothing about, like its mysticism in the Cabbalist Zohar, but when I asked about it, I was told to concentrate on Hebrew irregular verbs and the cycle of festivals. When I was forty and clean-living and of good reputation and a pure scholar I might make an attempt, but not now. It was a case of jam yesterday and jam tomorrow but never jam today!

The papers and news at the time were full of the brain drain of British intellectuals to America. Everything was bigger and better there, especially opportunities and salaries. British establishments were frightened that we rabbinic students would all Go West.

But I didn't think such materialist thoughts. If I was going anywhere I was going East - not even to the Middle East and Israel but to the Far East where terms such as Jew and Gentile had little meaning. My motive was spiritual. While my elders had been worrying about brain drains I had become aware of a soul drain. The best and holiest of my generation were moving east, far east on pilgrimage. Like the wandering scholars of the Middle Ages, they were looking for a teacher at whose dusty feet they could sit, and an ashram where they could hole up, and a Himalayan cave which they could retire into. Public school boys and Beatles all felt the urge and so did I.

I nearly went, hesitated, nearly went again and then found they'd all gone without me. Never mind, I consoled myself, the East was coming to me. I could read Kerouac hitchhiking from Oxford to London, and I sat with groups of saffron-robed disciples on street corners. I wasn't prepared to sing out Hare Krishna Hare Krishna along Bond Street, but I was willing to gingerly hold the baby of a dreamy couple that had no such inhibitions. While holding the baby, curiously peaceful like its dreamy parents, not at all like bawling materialist suburban babies (was it doped too?), I tried to work out the attraction of the East.

Spiritually speaking, western religion was tired and really rather clapped out. The Romans, the RCs, were snooty about Anglicans and so authoritarian they reminded me of my childhood Marxists. Like the latter, they had the answer to every question but after the first hundred wrong answers I had my doubts. I didn't like the gold and glitter of their churches either. I wasn't interested in hierarchies and establishments and buildings. Judaism was also declining into a Country Club-ism, cosy ghettos but platinum-plated for an upwardly mobile middle class. If you wanted spirituality they stuck you on committees. I just wanted to get to another dimension fast because I couldn't sublimate sex enough in this one and was liable to explode, and because I was convinced of that dimension's existence from my own experience, but I didn't know how to break into it.

Even Leslie Shepard, my analyst, to my surprise caught the bug. He went far east too and ended up in an ashram, and he attained enlightenment through an exploding tooth abscess. He then told me that the greatest guru he had discovered was life itself. This thought lodged in me and became part of my thinking, subsequently confirmed by the BBC and by my own common sense. Life was my great guru and I could learn from my guru any place, any time, anywhere. The journey outside was just a metaphor of my journey to enlightenment inside. This made sense. In my Marxist days I had met so many people trying to get to Moscow, and what they had found there it was best not to think about. Enlightenment could be found in Balliol and Basingstoke as well as Benares - so was my journey far east really necessary? Not really, it was just another romanticism and I did not want to use holy things as escapisms - that was a real blasphemy. If I used them in that way I would never respect them. The realisation of this was another nugget of wisdom.

I asked how Leslie liked being back in the comforts of England after sleeping rough on the pavements of Bombay. I then tried to sort out in my mind the distinction between comfort and happiness. It took me a long time to understand comfort was things outside me and happiness a state of mind inside me. I had been brainwashed by adverts. There's a lady with the beatific smile on her face and her arm is resting on a fridge freezer. It is a materialist sermon. If you buy that make of freezer the beatific vision will come along with it as a freebie like trading stamps or points. It doesn't happen. Or a young man lies on a palm-fringed beach. The sun is shining, the sea is blue and a girl is lying at his feet. The moral isn't hard to work out. If you take a holiday like that the sun will shine for you and a girl will lie at your feet and you will both find true love, hey presto! It is all a confusion of internal and external worlds. Looking back on my own holiday experiences, I realised that I had been both happy and unhappy in grotty boarding houses and in five-star hotels. Yes, I would far prefer to be unhappy in a five-star hotel than in a boarding house, but that isn't the point, is it? Another very basic point to learn!

Unlike many of my teachers, my mother, who knew me better, took my far eastern hankerings seriously and my hankerings to set up as the local guru. So she now encouraged me fervently to continue my rabbinical studies which was by far the least worst option.

She even joined a synagogue and dropped in unannounced when I was giving one of my first trial sermons. Unfortunately for her it was about God visiting the sins of the parents upon the children to the third generation. She took umbrage and left hurriedly before I had time to notice her presence or absence. She couldn't read Hebrew, of course, but made up noises which sounded like it, and these convulsed or awed the whispering congregants around her.

On the other hand she had a natural goodness unfettered by dogma. She noticed other 'outsiders' in the synagogue who sat at the back or at the sides. One was a German woman who had never converted to Judaism but who left her own country with her husband in the Nazi time. She had no children and her Jewish husband had died. She was alone. It was Ma who put her arm round her and listened to all she had endured in her own homeland. Dad presented her with flowers from his garden. It took me some time to realise what kind people my parents were. Being dysfunctional wasn't their fault. Painfully, I was growing up. I could no longer say gravely, 'My parents didn't understand me, you know. They were bourgeois.' Perhaps they understood me only too well.

To my surprise I found that I wasn't the only one looking to the East. A fellow rabbinical student was also the disciple of a swami, and a traditional Jewish minister was contributing to a Vedanta journal. One of the greatest holy teachers in India itself, I was told, even the great Ram Das, had once studied for his Bar Mitzvah - confirmation in a synagogue or temple in success-hypnotised America.

The writings of Swami Vivekananda had a profound influence on my thinking. Even the gods were the creation of our imagination. Behind them and us and in them and us was a cosmic power not a national or institutional one of which we were all manifestations. I saw that most religious disputes were the results of different paths to that undifferentiated core. Christianity looked at in this way was Bhakti Yoga - the way to that core through the path of love and the feelings. And Judaism was a western path of Karma Yoga, the way to self-realisation through the performance of duty and obligation and keeping the world going around. Most of the disputes in the synagogues I knew were about different paths of Yoga. I kept away however from Tantric Yoga, an approach to the divine using sexual energy. Prudently, I realised I wasn't up to that one yet.

I tried to worship and meditate in Vedanta style but found I needed mythology for practical purposes. Whosoever Whatsoever (Fred) was the fruit of my imagination in part but my soul, my better self, and my heavenly home were real. It was the closest I could get and the best I could do.

I asked a holy man where the universe was heading. 'To lift matter into spirit,' he said. It is better than most answers.

From Hitchhiking to Heaven, ?2005 by Lionel Blue, published by Hodder & Stoughton.