Hodder £18.99 pp340

Listeners to Lionel Blue’s Thought for the Day on Radio 4’s Today will be familiar with the rabbi’s brand of affability, generosity, unorthodoxy, humour and homespun wisdom. His particular style has endeared him to his public for many years and has probably enabled him to sneak in some of his sharper comments. But this exceptionally frank and surprisingly meaty autobiography reveals that one of his greatest fears is “putting on the style”, and that he regards it as one of the greatest barriers to spiritual honesty. Preventing himself from falling at this barrier has been, it seems, a lifelong battle.

Putting on the style might have meant falling in with the plans his parents hoped would spirit him out of the East End ghetto into which he had been born. His mother, an entertaining if not always likable presence here, wanted him to be a lawyer, his father a champion boxer. When he announced his intention, towards the end of his days at Oxford, to become a rabbi, his mother accused him of doing it to spite them, although she came round quickly. His other revelation was that he was homosexual, which caused her to pack him off to an analyst, who asked him to draw a symbol. Informed by the ideologies that had been whizzing around his precocious head for years, he drew a hammer and sickle, which the analyst diagnosed as a sign of buggery. Blue denounced him as a dirty old man and never went back.

Searching for an identity in which he felt at home became a quest that has dominated Blue’s life and which he recounts with extraordinarily moving candour. As a child, he was rewarded with chicken giblets when he recited a set speech (“What Trotsky should have said to Stalin” was his party piece), but he also experienced torment over his inarticulated sexual desires and fell, in early adulthood, into deep depression and a rich but isolated fantasy life. “I sometimes wondered if I was God,” he recalls of his childhood, “and felt guilty because I couldn’t fulfil the role.”

As an adult recovering from a breakdown and aided by a Reichian analysis that “rebirthed” him, he discovered that eclecticism and openness were the way forward. Training to be a Reform rabbi in the 1950s, in the newly emergent, progressive wing of Judaism, he also found enlightenment in the deep peace of the Quaker meeting room, a certain style in Anglo- Catholicism and integrity in Eastern religions. In recollection, he is ruthless in admitting his own uncertainties and aspirations: “I wasn’t a Catholic,” he notes, “but I would have liked to be a Pope.”

He also became a true internationalist, leading organisations to promote Jewish-Muslim-Christian understanding, developing a passion for Germany and Holland and struggling with the post-Holocaust tensions between Jewish nationalism, whose treatment of the Palestinians continues to vex him, and religious Judaism, which he sought to separate from the suburban pieties he repeatedly encountered. Alongside him on his journey (and here comes some of the famous cosiness to which Radio 4 has been treated) is God, otherwise known as Whomsoever Whatsoever (WW), Fred and old Smokey. Belief in WW, he counsels, is as much a matter for the body as for the brain, and for the emotions as for the mind.

There is much that is searingly painful in Hitchhiking to Heaven, not least Blue’s anguish as he battles to find a place for his confusions within (semi-)organised religion, and it becomes apparent that his cheeriness, although genuine, is also a coping strategy. “He was a lovely man, even if he did give information to the Stasi, God bless him!” he writes of a German pastor, which is a rather extreme example of Blue’s tendency to see the best in everyone. But he never lets us forget that his “career as a joker” is perhaps the biggest joke of all, given that he started life as “a Dostoevskian depressive and a po-faced pedant”. Monday mornings wouldn’t have been the same if he had stayed that way.

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