Thought for the Day, 29 June 2009

Rabbi Lionel Blue

At universities throughout the country, exams are ending and students gather round pass lists. Some pack and ponder what they really learnt , and others will soon arrive fresh from sixth forms.

Fifty-nine years ago I was an early arriver. I sat in Balliol college library in Oxford, moodily turning the pages of my very first set book, the Venerable Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People. What was a Venerable? And why Ecclesiastica!? And in mediaeval Latin! It didn't fit a scientific revolutionary like me. I blamed the mess on my parents, as adolescents do. We'd done a deal. After I got a degree they said their responsibility ended and I could go to hell as I pleased.

So I'd applied to every university, including some women's colleges though I didn't know it - who replied to a Miss Blue, puzzled not by her politics but by her gender. With relief I accepted a place at Balliol - which welcomed, it was rumoured, bright all-male Scots, Blacks and Jews.

I leafed through Bede's pages - and read about tough Anglian kings giving their finest horse to Celtic hermits who owned nothing, who then gave it to peasants with less than nothing. I was touched and startled. I'd fallen through a time warp and landed up in the world of my pious almost illiterate Yiddish granny, who gave her black winter shawl to a coughing woman and extended her soup to feed destitute Welsh miners. Goodness has a golden aura, whether in Bede's England or Petticoat Lane.

Now I'd always accepted that Jews had a holy history. You couldn't miss it what with the Bible but this country had its own holy history too. So I was also the inheritor of Bede, Bunyan and Blake's "Jerusalem in England's green and pleasant land." I needed to bring the two together in me- a task that awaits all who settle here in peace.

I then learnt another unscheduled lesson, not in a library but at a Balliol dance. Many girls wore the then-fashionable boned strapless dresses. One girl twirled but her top didn't. Her partner covered her and led her away. "Poor girl," I said to my own partner, "how embarrassing". "I don't know what you're talking about," she said. "A lady only sees what she's supposed to see and a gentleman likewise." At Oxford I fell in love with this country - its mysticism and mysterious manners. To my parent's surprise, I returned an almost English gentleman and student minister of religion. They thought I was taking the mickey - perhaps I was, but only a bit.