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Hello John, Hello Justin, Hello everybody. No, I won’t try and impersonate him. But it’s a mark of just how great a broadcaster he was that even the way he said hello he made his own. I only met Rabbi Lionel Blue a couple of times, but even so I felt he was my friend - though I suspect I’d have probably felt that way even if I’d never met him. For the warmth of human compassion just leapt across the airwaves, from this studio to millions of people out there munching on their cornflakes. He had a great gift - and later today Lionel Blue’s friends and colleagues will gather at his memorial service to raise a glass, to say goodbye, and no doubt to tell a few corny jokes. But don’t be fooled by the jokes, though. They were incredibly serious. "Jokes are [the] ways in which people cope with problems they can't solve" he once explained. For the great Rabbi, jokes and laughter were a war against the darkness – a bit like that riddikulus spell in Harry Potter, a way of laughing at the things we most fear, thus to bring them down to a more manageable scale. And this meant he could talk about subjects that others would run a mile from. Under the guise of humour, Lionel Blue would suck up a great deal of the human condition and tackle the darkest of subjects without ever scaring us. Some people didn’t detect the God in his words, but God was certainly there. It’s just that he didn’t believe religion was a form of magic that could make life’s problems disappear. And he didn’t pretend he had easy answers. Rather, he’d say things like: ‘this is what’s worked for me’. Or, ‘this is what my life experience has taught me’. And what a life it was. Being both Jewish and gay, he described himself as having lived in two ghettos. He understood completely the pain of loneliness and rejection. But Lionel’s very human genius was to take all this pain and transform it into something that made living bearable, even into something resembling joy. And that’s the reason he was so loved: he used his own vulnerability as a gift for other people. And sometimes at considerable cost - for there are always those who can’t resist using another person’s vulnerability against them. But despite this, he remained astonishingly undefended. I remember him talking about how he’d been too fearful to go to the funeral of the woman who ran his local gay sauna lest he’d be recognized. How many of us can manage that degree of honesty about our little and not so little betrayals? I won’t finish with a joke. I’m no good a telling them. But I will finish with a thank you. And I suspect I speak for a great many whose life was touched by this lovely man. As they say in Hebrew: zichrono livracha. May his name be blessed. Lionel Blue.