Search - List of Books by Lionel Blue
"It was admitted by the early rabbis that the sectarians could be as full of good works as eggs were full of meat." -- Lionel Blue
Lionel Blue (born 6 February, 1930) is a British Reform rabbi, journalist and broadcaster. He was the first British rabbi publicly to declare his homosexuality. Born in the East End of London, he was the son of a master tailor.
Blue read History at Balliol College, Oxford and Semitics at the University of London before being ordained as a rabbi in 1960. He spent time in the Army but was discharged after a nervous breakdown brought on by anxiety over his homosexuality.
He is best known for his longstanding and respected work with the media, most notably the wry and gentle sense of humour on "Thought for the Day" on BBC Radio 4's Today programme. He is also widely respected in the UK as a journalist, cook and author.
In July 1998 Blue was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from the Open University. He is also Honorary Doctor of Divinity & Fellow of Grey College, Durham.
"An aged rabbi, crazed with liberalism, once said to me, We Jews are just ordinary human beings. Only a bit more so!""At religious instruction classes, I encountered The Pilgrims Progress by John Bunyan, and the sincerity of the traveller in that book was overwhelming.""Because of my Marxism, I was not into myths or miracles, whether it was the virgin birth, the physical resurrection or casting out demons from an epileptic.""Christianity had two faces which bewildered me - two pictures which didn't fit.""Discrimination against Jews can be read in Thomas Aquinas, and insults against Jews in Martin Luther.""During the Second World War, evacuated to non-Jewish households, I encountered Christianity at home and in school.""Early on I saw the repression and idolatry of Stalinism, and when it cracked, I was open to religion again.""For a Christian, Jesus is the unique and only way that God has fully revealed himself. For a Jew this cannot be.""For a devotee or lover, the being, worshipped or loved, will always be the only one for her or him.""For some years I deserted religion in favour of Marxism. The republic of goodness seemed more attainable than the Kingdom of God.""Good things come, and I'm not just referring to riding the buses.""I am pleased now that I have lived in a gay as well as a religious ghetto, though it hasn't been very comfortable. Taken together, their limitations cancel each other out and I have seen the world more kindly and more honestly.""I began to see that my problems, seen spiritually, were really my soul's plusses.""I didn't want to be on the losing side. I was fed up with Jewish weakness, timidity and fear. I didn't want any more Jewish sentimentality and Jewish suffering. I was sickened by our sad songs.""I feel that the Christian experience and the Jewish one have much to give each other. If this open society continues and there is no return to political anti-Semitism, then this encounter, deeper than any theology, may happen.""I found that when I did something for the sake of heaven, heaven happened. These things changed my life. I owe them to my encounter with Christianity.""I have begun to sympathetically understand Paul, though I don't like him much.""I have ended as a Reform Rabbi, grateful to Christianity for so many good things.""I learnt pity, sympathy, and what it was like to be at the other end of the stick. Such lessons can't be learnt in lecture halls.""I literally fell among Quakers when I went up to Oxford.""I recovered my infant Judaism, but in a reformist version.""I still go to a Christian priory for retreats.""I thought of such Christian inventions as the ghetto and the Jewish badge of shame. The Nazis didn't have to go very far to pick up their know-how.""I was certainly open for something being on the edge of a nervous breakdown, perplexed by my own sexuality. I was gay.""I was not allowed a physical lover. Falling in love with Love was the best I could get.""I was not comfortable worshipping another Jew.""In speaking of Jesus, I must speak about Christianity because I do not think it possible or profitable to divide the two.""It is not possible to unknow what you do know - the result of that is fanaticism.""It's more fun to watch without joining in.""My mother enjoyed old age, and because of her I've begun to enjoy parts of it too. So far I've had it good and am crumbling nicely.""My mother was a modern woman with a limited interest in religion. When the sun set and the fast of the Day of Atonement ended, she shot from the synagogue like a rocket to dance the Charleston.""Old friends die on you, and they're irreplaceable. You become dependent.""On the way to work good-hearted young girls sometimes offer me their seats, which I accept and bless them in return, a transaction satisfying to all concerned.""Pious XII was too neutral to mention the gas chambers; decent people like my own family were turned into devils by crude Christianity.""Praying privately in churches, I began to discover that heaven was my true home and also that it was here and now, woven into this life.""So many plusses, so many minuses.""Some of the parables of the Kingdom made wonderful sense, but the exclusivity in the New Testament put me off.""Someone gave me a New Testament. I had never before read it systematically. Some parts made sense, some parts shocked me.""The Christian use of religion as a personal love affair both shocked me, and attracted me.""The real evidence for Jesus and Christianity is in how Jesus and the Christianity based on him manifest themselves in the lives of practicing Christians.""The real evidence is not practically speaking in scholarship but in how Jesus and the Christianity based on him manifest themselves in the lives of practising Christians. Their lives are the proofs of their beliefs.""The secular world is more spiritual than it thinks, just as the ecclesiastical world is more materialist than it cares to acknowledge.""This Christian poison hasn't stopped yet.""To change, to convert? Why bother?""To my surprise, my 70s are nicer than my 60s and my 60s than my 50s, and I wouldn't wish my teens and 20s on my enemies.""What would I have done if I'd been put to the test? Would I have risked my own life for people I hardly knew? Probably, I would have looked the other way at best or become another apologist for evil at worst."
Between 1960 and 1963, Blue was the minister of the Settlement Synagogue and Middlesex New Synagogue. He then became the European Director of the World Union for Progressive Judaism. In 1967, he began a long-term engagement as lecturer at Leo Baeck College in London.
Blue was the first British rabbi publicly to affirm his homosexual orientation and published Godly and Gay in 1981. He has been openly homosexual since the 1960s and has had three male live-in lovers. He met his most recent partner, Jim, in 1981 through a personal advertisement in Gay Times . However, his memoirs reveal that he considered marrying Joanna Hughes, a student whom he met whilst they were both students at Oxford in 1950.
He is an occasional guest speaker of the Jewish Gay and Lesbian Group. He is also a patron of Kairos, an organisation for homosexuals.
For more than 25 years, Blue has been a regular contributor to BBC Radio 4's Thought for the Day. In September 2006, a return trip to his childhood home in London's East End to mark the 350th anniversary of Jewish life in Britain was the subject of an evocative audioslideshow on the BBC News website. At a personal appearance at the Fairfield Hall, Croydon in December 2009, Lionel Blue asserted he would be back on Mondays in Thought For the Day on BBC Radio 4, in January 2010.
He was diagnosed with epilepsy at the age of 57; however, he has to date successfully controlled his disorder with medication.
During an operation in 1997, a surgeon discovered a tumour which tests proved to be malignant. He went on to receive radiotherapy and hormonal treatment to reduce any further growth.
- A Backdoor to Heaven (Fount, 1985)
- Kitchen Blues (ISIS Large Print, 1986)
- Bolt from the Blue (Hodder & Stoughton, 1986)
- Tales of Body and Soul (Coronet, 1995)
- My Affair with Christianity (Hodder & Stoughton General, 1999)
- Sun, Sand and Soul (Hodder & Stoughton General, 1999)
- Kindred Spirits (Fount, 1999). His autobiography,
- Hitchhiking to Heaven — Autobiography (Hodder & Stoughton General, 2004)
