November 24, 1929

Do We Need a New Morality?

Rabbi Eisendrath begins this sermon by commenting on the popularity of moral themes in sermons, plays and novels. Many, he argues, would attribute this popularity to a prurient interest in sex. [1]  The rabbi considers this view superficial and discerns a deeper motivation. We are today, he believes, seeking guidance through a profound moral chaos.  “Why all this doubting and challenging so characteristic of our day? …  Because, in the first place, the fear of the Lord is no longer upon us.” In the past, people feared God and knew what was right and what was wrong. No longer! In the past, we believed in Revelation at Mount Sinai.

Having received the Laws, Moses descends from on high, delivers his message to the people, who have but one alternative. “Nishmah ve na'aseh,” if I be permitted the paraphrase. “We have heard, we must obey,” the people answer …

The rabbi here is indeed paraphrasing, as he reverses the order of things as recorded in the Torah, where the people exclaim, “Na’aseh v’nishmah—we will do and we will hear.” (Exodus 24:7. The Hebrew nishmah denotes both hearing and obeying.) The two orders suggest very different things in terms of commitment to the Divine Command. The first (Rabbi Eisendrath’s) suggests that we will hear the commandments and then do them, supposedly because we think that they make sense; the second suggests that we are committed to doing the commandments even before hearing them, such is our trust in God. (Alternatively, it may suggest that not until we have performed the commandments, and experienced their effect, can we truly “hear,” i.e., understand, their value and meaning.)



Why would Rabbi Eisendrath reverse the order of these words? We don’t know the answer to this question. We are missing the next page (and probably several more) of this sermon. Perhaps because, as a Reform rabbi, he assumes rationality on the part of human beings, that understanding must precede belief.

As we continue reading the surviving pages, Rabbi Eisendrath comments on “erotic and wanton willfulness,” and on our current belief that morality is “natural rather than statutory,” that it is a part of human development rather than handed down from on high. “In short,” he says, “man is vitally concerned in moral problems, because old sanctions are gone and the new have not come into being…” The rabbi avers that “we need today, more than anything else, a new sanction, a new authority for moral conduct.”

The rabbi goes on to outline a utilitarian (our word) guide to finding moral authority. That is, we find our moral authority in that conduct which works, which provides the greatest good to the greatest number of people.

The Ten Commandments are right not because they divine, but they are divine because man has found them to be right. Lying and stealing and cheating are wrong not because some imaginary being in the skies designated them as such but because the finer spiritual striving of mankind which we might well designate as divine proved them to be inimical to individual and social welfare. Murder and covetousness, adultery and war are evil not because Moses designated them as such, not because they are graven on ancient tablets or stone, but because they [interfere?] with the rights and happiness of our fellow beings.

(Moses, of course, never designated war as evil, but to Rabbi Eisendrath, a dedicated pacifist at the time, it was the greatest evil of all.)

Rabbi Eisendrath does not leave God out of the picture entirely. Rather, he rejects a single moment of Revelation at Mount Sinai (in which “God has ordained in addition to the command to cherish your neighbour as yourself, likewise the behest to hew your enemies to bits, to burn witches and own slaves …”) in favour of a “gradually and humanly unfolding will of God which we are ceaselessly seeking, in a will of God that is not a fixed and final revelation granted yesterday but an ever enlarging desiring to be made tomorrow. It is not an achievement but a quest …” The problem with a moment of divine revelation at Sinai is that it also reveals commandments that we view today as quite immoral.

This is not to say that morality is inconstant.

With Immanuel Kant I do firmly believe that there exists a "categorical imperative" of virtue that lays its hand on every soul, the same today as yesterday and yet tomorrow -- but the actual application of this inner law, ah there's the rub.

(How many of the congregation that day were acquainted with the concept of  categorical imperative or with Kant? Rabbi Eisendrath presumes a familiarity which for most of his congregants is probably not justified.)

The rabbi wants to be clear that he is not equating the continuing experience of divine revelation with human conscience. Conscience alone cannot help us determine correct moral behaviour. He outlines a few scenarios in which conscience will be unhelpful. In wartime, a person may have to choose between serving in the military out of loyalty to his  native land or going to jail for advocating peace.  A person may have to decide between attending a church he despises out of loyalty to parents or attending another one “to satisfy the stirrings of his own famished spirits.” As yet another example, the rabbi asks whether a  person’s conscience will require “feigned devotion to a wife he hates or will it justify the consummation of a seemingly divine but illegal love?” Our conscience, in all these instances, is an unreliable guide. The conscience-driven answer as to what is right and what is wrong will vary from person to person, age to age and place to place. In the rabbi’s estimation, conscience will as often perpetuate evil as it will propound  good.

At this point in the sermon, Rabbi Eisendrath goes off on a tangent about Christianity and Pauline doctrine and Puritanism. He claims that, much “as we Jews frequently take umbrage at the assertion,” we live in a Christian country, if not a Christian civilization—not, however, in Christianity’s earliest and purest form, but in its “late and Pauline connotation.” It’s clear that he is concentrating on sexual morality in this discussion. He is critical of the Puritanical attitude towards sex and marriage:

The underlying ethical idea of the past, based not upon Jesus but on Paul, has been that sacrifice of pleasure and joy in this world that greater bliss and more ecstatic raptures might be reaped in the world to come. And in no instance is this theory of earthly repression better illustrated than in the Puritanic attitude toward sex which has for so long [been] maintained, and so blind has been the official church against the fine and more delicate nuances of the senses that one of the most gifted and most analytic of our modern minds has written: “Of all the forces in the world which have been instrumental in producing that type of marriage destined for unhappiness, tragedy and the divorce court, the Church of Puritanism stands first.” [2]

This is not the morality we should be following, and Puritanism’s view of marriage is contrary to natural law. (Which “official church” the rabbi means in the above quote is not clear. The Roman Catholic Church is decidedly not Puritanic, and there is no official Church of Puritanism.)

It’s worthy of note that, in this sermon, Rabbi Eisendrath does not define Pauline doctrine, Puritanism (which he uses almost synonymously with the former), or natural law. Does he really assume that his congregants are familiar with these terms? Those who could follow his argument (and they would need some background in philosophy and religion) might argue that Pauline doctrine is not the same as Puritanism and that using natural law as a basis of sexual morality would also entail a ban on birth control and abortion—bans with which Rabbi Eisendrath would likely not agree.

Interestingly, Rabbi Eisendrath follows this discussion with a very long sentence in which he rails against the Pauline notion of the “insolubility of marriage no matter how profane and despicable it may have become,” the idealization of “absolute chastity and virginity,” and the rejection of “the erotic impulse out of wedlock …”

He then segues to a discussion of happiness and the need for a different conception of the world today. He alludes to the psychology of Sigmund Freud, which “has lured [modern man] … from the absolute standards of asceticism to scientific experimentation even in this most sacred realm of sex.” (How scientific Freud was, in fact, is an object of some debate today.)

The rabbi quotes from Bertrand Russell’s recently published Marriage and Morals to the effect that “the enemy of love today is not the Church but big business.” This observation falls nicely line with Rabbi Eisendrath’s thinking, big business being a frequent target of his pique. (Of course, the rabbi does not comment on other aspects of Russell’s philosophy, including his profound atheism or his permissive view of marriage.)

Yes, Rabbi Eisendrath concludes, we do need a new standard of morality (if not an entirely new morality). We need to adjust the moral code that we have accepted since childhood, but not, he emphasizes, in favour of moral chaos and confusion. We are not “alley cats and curs.” Nor is he arguing for “the indulgence of shallow appetites” or “loose Bohemianism.” What he is advocating is a more intelligent and “ a less absolute and dogmatic application of morality … that will be warmly and genuinely sympathetic to human happiness and joy … and the necessary wisdom of restraint.”

This new morality will not be based on historical Revelation, but rather on something “discovered and forever discoverable” by man himself …” We learn things about our physical universe from human exploration. So it is too with morality. As for God:

God has not spoken but once to man and forever held his peace. God has lived with and in man revealing to him gradually and almost imperceptibly his divine will. Thus and thus alone has man found through ages of trying and failing and trying again those values that make for human happiness and those vices that make for inhuman pain.

It occurs to us that there may be a fundamental flaw in the rabbi’s theophany. The very fact that he brings God into the process of revelation at all means that human beings are not entirely responsible for discovering morality on their own. Who is to say that, in their strivings to discover “a new morality,” people will not come up with something that God does not approve of? And do we dispense with the morality of the Torah, and Revelation on Mount Sinai, when it does not pass of Rabbi Eisendrath’s test of bringing about more human happiness? Bertrand Russell would no doubt say yes. Would Rabbi Eisendrath?

While he doesn’t mention the Torah on the manuscript pages that survive (except for the Ten Commandments, noted above), as a guide to morality, he does mention other guides: “… there is a right way and a wrong way of living … embodied in the prophetic spirit … the Sermon on the Mount … the Vedas …” It would seem that the rabbi sees multiple religious traditions as acceptable moral guides, but with a decided caveat: these guides must be given an “intelligent and wholly rational interpretation.” And one suited to modern times. “Our times,” he says, “are altogether new.” Morality, therefore, is not absolute, but in need of ever-evolving re-creation and reinterpretation.

Rabbi Eisendrath is optimistic. He quotes the American Transcendentalist Theodore Parker: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” He ends with a poem by Parker’s Massachusetts contemporary, James Russell Lowell (unattributed), “The Present Crisis,” which also reflects an optimistic view of modernity:

New occasions teach new duties; Time makes ancient good uncouth.

They must upward still, and onward, who would keep abreast of Truth.

This optimistic view of our ability to discern morality through our own efforts will be severely challenged in the years ahead with the advent of the Great Depression and the coming to power of the Nazi Party in Germany. It will be interesting to see how the rabbi responds to these challenges in future sermons from Holy Blossom’s pulpit.

In the meantime, Rabbi Eisendrath will conclude his trio of sermons the following Sunday with “How Moral Then Are We?”

MC.

1. Interestingly, the rabbi would soon attend a performance at Toronto’s Royal Alexandra Theatre, of Eugene O’Neil’s “Strange Interlude”. He would later deliver a lecture on this play and observe that the audience’s reaction to the play demonstrated this prurient interest. See “Four sermons on plays by Eugene O’Neill” on this play and three others on which he lectured in January 1930.

2. It is not altogether clear whom the rabbi is quoting here. The most likely source of this quotation is Judge Ben B. Lindsey, who in 1927 published a book called The Companionate Marriage. In it is found the rabbi’s quotation. However, “the Christian Church” is used, in place of “the church of Puritanism”. We don’t know if this is a deliberate substitution on Rabbi Eisendrath’s part, or simply an error.  A later sermon “Shall Marriages Be Companionate” most likely delivered in December 1930 or perhaps early in 1931 returned to this topic, as we intend to in another blog post.