I believe that diplomas, citations and awards should, like false teeth, be worn with discretion. That’s why I’ve never displayed my plaques and certificates, but I may make an exception for the document I received recently from the Central Conference of American Rabbis that acknowledges the 50th anniversary of my ordination.

I’ll cherish it, because I don’t see it as a reward for personal achievement, but as a token of humble gratitude to God for having kept me alive and given me the privilege to serve my people for half a century.

I became a rabbi as a largely unconscious reaction to the arid secular world in which I was reared. But in time, I also realized that a deeper reason for being drawn to the faith of my forebears was the desire to warrant the fact that, unlike most of my Polish-Jewish contemporaries, I survived the Holocaust and, therefore, felt that I had a duty to vindicate my survival by finding meaning in preserving and furthering Judaism. The rabbinate was the most obvious vehicle. I first came to it out of a desire to learn, understand and, above all, act. In the process, I found my faith.

The rabbinic college in London that accepted me was established in the shadow of the Holocaust as a successor to the Reform seminary in Berlin. It was named after Rabbi Leo Baeck, the legendary leader of German Jewry during the Nazi period who had survived Theresienstadt. Most of my teachers had been his students. However, they taught very little about the Holocaust and its implications for contemporary Judaism. Even Rabbi Baeck himself wrote about it only obliquely. It seems that what had happened had been too traumatic to be as yet articulated.

It was first in the late 1960s that the subject came onto the agenda of Jewish thought, largely thanks to Prof. Emil Fackenheim of Toronto. He maintained that the most cogent Jewish response to what Hitler had done was not to give him a posthumous victory. Our challenge must be to make sure that the Jewish people would survive and thrive.

This message further validated my rabbinate. I was now able to put my original attraction to it into a coherent context and recognize that serving God and the Jewish people was to make a much-needed contribution to the sacred struggle for Jewish survival. I also saw my commitment to the State of Israel that I had first visited in 1957, months before coming to rabbinic school, in that context.

My challenge throughout has been to formulate Judaism in ways that combine being anchored in its sources and traditions with an appreciation of the needs of contemporary Jews, not only in order to adapt Jewish observance in that light but also to express the tenets of the faith in modern terms. It’s this that made me a Reform rabbi.

In time, I also discovered that I had much in common with progressive Christians, even though most of them were oblivious to the Holocaust. They served liberal denominations and were engaged in the struggle of fusing tradition with modernity. Having discovered how much we had in common, despite our very different backgrounds, made it possible for me to engage first in interfaith work and later in joint efforts of tikkun olam, “mending the world,” another Fackenheim theme.

I believe that commitment to faith couched in the language of western liberalism is the most coherent way of keeping our civilization open, sane and vibrant, despite the current backlash of secular cynicism on the one hand and obscurantist fundamentalism on the other.

Contrary to contemporary trends, I’m not into “spirituality” as a way of Jewish renewal. This alternative to tradition seems to be more concerned with “me” than with “us,” with psychology than with theology. Too often it falsely identifies personal needs and fads with the will of God. I see it as yet another secular substitute for faith, not an authentic expression of it. 

I know that I’m in the minority, but I’m by no means alone. And one of the many rewards of the last half-century of service has been that our Israeli son, born to us shortly before I was ordained, has chosen a similar path, first as a rabbi in Haifa and now as a teacher and mentor of future generations of Reform religious leaders.