Rabbi and broadcaster

Born: February 6, 1930;

Died: December 19, 2016

RABBI Lionel Blue, who has died aged 86, was a liberal Jewish cleric in the Reform tradition and the first British rabbi openly to declare his homosexuality; from this unlikely, apparently niche, position he became one of the UK’s best-respected religious figures, with one poll in 2001 finding that the public trusted and admired him more than either the Pope or the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Blue’s popularity sprang from his frequent appearances, for more than a quarter of a century, in the Thought for the Day slot on Radio 4’s Today programme, usually on a Monday morning, just before 8 o’clock. From this pulpit he would muse on the trials and vagaries of life, steering well clear of religious prescriptions, before concluding with a Jewish joke – the older the better.

At its most anodyne this formula rather resembled Billy Connolly’s parody of a Christian minister in the same slot (“My son asked: ‘Daddy, did Jesus play for Tottenham Hotspur?’ And, you know, in a way he did.”).

But it suited not only Today listeners, whom Blue called “congregation of all faiths and none – mostly none”, but an increasingly secular age that liked to pick and mix from religious wisdom without the burden of dogma. And it was rooted in Blue’s own religious experience.

He came to religion after an early flirtation with Marxism, a psychological crisis over his sexuality, and an encounter with Quakers. He considered training as an Anglican priest and even after becoming a rabbi admitted that he “didn’t exactly believe” in his faith. But he came to trust the practice of religion and his conversations with God (whom he called “Fred”) as a route towards goodness.

Lionel Blue was born in London’s East End on February 6 1930, in a family of Russian Jewish descent. The family name, originally Blustein, had been shortened under the impression that, like Green or Black, Blue was a common surname.

His father Harry was a tailor by trade, though he was frequently out of work during the Depression of the 1930s, while his mother Hetty worked as a secretary in a law firm. Lionel was largely brought up by a grandmother and, after the outbreak of the Second World War, was evacuated to 16 different households. But his mother was a dominant force in his life, and in later years, lived with Blue and his partner until her death in her 90s.

Blue claimed to have handed out tea at the Battle of Cable Street, aged six, when many locals and Communist activists halted a march by Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists and to have abandoned Judaism for Marxism when God failed to answer his prayer to strike down Mosley and Hitler. He gave differing accounts of when this occurred, but he had no religious belief by the time he left sixth form at Hendon County School for Balliol College, Oxford.

He first enrolled for his national service, but was swiftly invalided out after a breakdown, which he said was prompted by anxiety over his sexual preferences. At university, a close but chaste relationship with a girl called Janny from Lady Margaret Hall failed to resolve his confusion. After one disastrous date, he found himself sheltering from the rain in the doorway of what turned out to be a Quaker Meeting House. He was deeply impressed by their service after being invited in.

Blue’s mother reacted with horror when, after graduating in history, he told her he was considering joining the Church of England as a monk. By the time he finished a course in semantics at University College London, however, he had reverted to Judaism and answered an advertisement for the first trainee rabbis at the newly-founded Leo Baeck College in north London.

This did not placate his mother (she had hoped Lionel would become a solicitor). “We worked our fingers to the bone to get you out of the ghetto,” she said, unconsciously anticipating Isaac Hayes. “And you’re climbing back in.”

There was a blip on the road to ordination when Blue disappeared for three months to Amsterdam in 1955, during which time he “never saw daylight”. When his rabbi came to persuade him to return, Blue insisted on taking him to the gay saunas and cafés he frequented as proof of his unsuitability. When his teacher burst into tears, they turned out to be tears of laughter. Telling Blue that he hadn’t seen anything like it since the Weimar Republic, he declared: “I can only have one of you, Lionel, but one of you I’d better have.”

After ordination, Blue, whose sexuality was no great secret amongst his friends and many of his congregation, had some low-profile rabbinical posts at the Settlement and Middlesex New synagogues before becoming director of the World Union for Progressive Judaism in 1963 and, four years later, becoming a lecturer at his old training college, a post he held for many years.

He fell into broadcasting accidentally at the end of the 1960s, at first on commercial radio, but was soon noticed by the BBC. His warmth, good humour and reluctance to be judgmental soon made him a fixture with listeners. When he formally came out as gay (to no one’s great surprise) in 1980, he was the first rabbi, and one of the first clerics of any faith, to do so. Afterwards, he published Godly and Gay (1981) and became involved in a number of LGBT charities. He was appointed OBE in 1994.

Blue had a handful of long-term relationships; he met his partner Jim Cummings through an advert in Gay Times in 1981 and they lived together in a cluttered semi-detached house in Finchley, north London. Cummings died in 2014.

Lionel Blue had serious health issues in his later years, and was diagnosed with epilepsy, two bouts of cancer, heart problems, pneumonia and Parkinson’s disease. Nonetheless, he remained cheerful and strengthened by his faith.

“I like to think of death in a way as like being in the departure lounge of an airport when returning home,” he said. “You make yourself as comfortable as you can, you make acquaintances — and then you go off, but not at a time of your own choosing, to the next stage of your journey home. You don’t have to wait for heaven to happen though: any unselfish action is an invitation for heaven to be present.”

He told one interviewer that while he believed in heaven, he had no idea what it was like and was in no rush to leave Finchley, and quoted his mother’s advice: “Lionel, what you’ve done in life you’ve done, and everything else is gravy.”

ANDREW MCKIE