The world lost a veritable sage last Wednesday, when Rabbi W. Gunther Plaut died in Toronto at the age of 99. Spiritual leader, writer, human rights activist and among the pre-eminent Jewish scholars of his time, Plaut was Canada's rabbi, the unofficial leader of the country's Jewish community until Alzheimer's disease sidelined him about a decade ago.
In fact, he was one of the most prominent rabbis in the world, a New York Times obituary noted, pointing to his magnum opus, a commentary on the Torah (the first five books of the Bible). It was a mammoth work that, as the first liberal Torah commentary published in English for congregational use, has become the standard text in Reform synagogues around the world. The Plaut Commentary, as it is known, spans 1,800 pages, and has sold more than 120,000 copies.
A stalwart of Reform, or liberal Judaism, Plaut (rhymes with doubt) served as rabbi at Toronto's Holy Blossom Temple, the country's largest Reform synagogue, from 1961 to 1977, and thereafter as its senior scholar. While opening channels of dialogue with his Conservative and Orthodox counterparts, who if nothing else respected his intellect, he believed that Jews should free themselves of their insularity and parochialism and engage the larger world, or at least the struggles of those who also have also known prejudice.
That zeal drove him to co-found Toronto's Urban Alliance on Race Relations. From 1978 to 1985, he served as vice-chair of the Ontario Human Rights Commission. He was the first rabbi to become president of the Canadian Jewish Congress. He wrote 25 books, including two novels, and an opera libretto. He received 19 honorary degrees. Inducted into the Order of Canada in 1978, he was promoted to Companion in 1999.
But he never forgot the ego-checking words of a feared but admired cousin back in the old country. "You got everything going for you except that you are intolerably arrogant," cousin Leo told him. "You think you know it all and you are so impressed with yourself that it makes me sick."
Plaut remembered the words verbatim, and they kept him modest. Leo "did a lot for me," he wrote in his autobiography, Unfinished Business.
Wolf Guenter Plaut was born Nov. 1, 1912 in Münster, Germany to Selma Gumprich and Jonas Plaut, a teacher and school headmaster. Plaut often told the story of an anti-Semitic bully, Schultz, who tormented him at school. Each day, Schultz would face young Gunther and smack him squarely across the mouth. This was accompanied by the ritual exclamation, "that's yours for the day, shitty kike."
Plaut attended law school in Berlin and watched Adolf Hitler rise to power. He graduated in 1934 but, as a Jew, could not practise law. So he began studying Jewish theology. "I wanted to know what it truly meant to be a Jew if I was made to suffer for it," he said in a 1998 interview.
The following year, he accepted a scholarship to study for the rabbinate at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati. "Torah grabbed me," he later said, and he was ordained in 1939. He took a pulpit in Chicago and only hours after receiving American citizenship in 1943, he signed up to become an Army chaplain.
Assigned to the 104th Infantry's "Timberwolf" Division, he assisted in the Allied liberation of the Nordhausen-Dora concentration camp in Germany. Plaut was heartened to learn that Jewish survivors yearned for religious articles more than for food, but the sight of the camp "was something altogether different."
Put in charge of burying piles of decomposing corpses, the young chaplain insisted that local residents, who pleaded ignorance of the camp's existence, pitch in. "We did not have enough spades to do the work," Plaut wrote later, "but in my anger - now turning towards revenge - I told the burghers to use the knives, spoons and forks from their homes. I ordered the women to come out and wash the bodies. "
