Rosh Hashana, 1929

To Be or Not to Be

The title of the sermon "To Be or Not to Be" refers to the question of whether or not to remain Jewish. Rabbi Eisendrath begins by citing the case of a medical student who was forced to abandon his medical studies at “an eastern college,” even though he was a top student in his first year there, because of a quota on Jewish students. The young man had asked the rabbi why he should not at least change his name to a less identifiably Jewish one so as to be accepted into his school, and later on to the staff of a hospital and into the fraternity of physicians. In fact, since 
“I don’t believe in the superstitions I learned at cheder and schul and I am much too rational to feel any emotional loyalty to my people and no use at all for conventionalized religion … why can’t I become just as worthy a citizen and surely a far more eminent healer of men, even though I renounce my plagued Jewish identity?”

Although the rabbi does not tell us precisely what he told the young medical student, he uses his most bitingly sarcastic language to characterize those who would renounce their faith as "… renegades, those cringing, sniveling, crouching half breeds who ask the question for … sordid and ulterior reasons".

Rabbi Eisendrath goes on to give an answer to the question of why we should remain Jews, in spite of the practical disadvantages of doing so. We should remain Jews because we are the people who discovered the one controlling God of the universe, the source of justice. At some length, the rabbi speaks of the Jewish people’s prophetic ideals, their upholding of, if not inventing, the ideas of social justice and peace in a pagan world bereft of such notions. We would be betraying our heritage if we were to abandon our Jewish identity for material gain.

Interestingly, Rabbi Eisendrath also says that we should remain Jewish so that Christians will live up to the ideals of Jesus. The world needs the Jew, says the rabbi, to remind Christians of the roots of their faith.
As long as in theory [Christians] believe in a compassionate, merciful, forgiving, and Peace Loving Savior [his capitalization] and in practice they disobey his every teaching; as long as in their churches they remember primarily their Christ and in the streets and marketplaces, their schools and homes they forget irreverently the Jesus who made him possible; as long as such incongruities, such hypocrisies, such glaring and blatant evils exist, just so long will I remain true to my Jewish ideals … just so long will there be a need not for a personal Messiah punished for our sins in a remote distant land, but for a Christ people, a Messianic people, willing and eager today, tomorrow, and for all time to serve, to suffer, and to die, if need be for the sins of all mankind.
Such, the rabbi says, is his reply to the young medical student. We must remain true to the teachings of our faith for the sake of all humanity.
For this reason we exist; for this reason, for this goal, for this ideal; for the fulfillment of this dream and aspiration we can, we must, we will remain forever Jews.
This would seem to be an appropriate end to the sermon. However, there is more. Rabbi Eisendrath goes on to discuss the responsibilities of parents to prepare children for the spiritual challenges they, like the young medical student, must face. Parents do their children no favour by “taking the path of least resistance” and making them believe that they are just like all the other children around them. They will discover the truth, the barriers placed before them, in their adolescence. We must give them a firm Jewish identity in their youth so that they will be prepared for the future that awaits them. (The rabbi does not go into details as to how this is to be done.)

Rabbi Eisendrath ends his sermon by saying that one of the reasons for remaining Jewish is simply that it cannot be otherwise: the gentile world will see to it that we are reminded of our Jewishness even if we seek to hide it. The rabbi comments that this is “not a very noble reason for remaining Jews, to be sure—but an irrefutable and inescapable one none the less.” There is also, he maintains, a more positive one, and that is pride in our Jewish heritage. We seem to be missing the final pages of this sermon, but it is clear that what he has in mind is a sense of pride in a “proud people … called upon after over four thousand years of history, bustling with service and sacrifice, heroism and determination…”

We don’t know in what form this sermon was actually preached. Some pages of the manuscript seem to be missing. The pages are unnumbered, and there is a page with an unattributed poem inserted into the manuscript at an odd point. (Often, a poem ends the rabbi’s sermons.) Much of the end of the manuscript seems to repeat what has gone before.

It is also not clear that this sermon was composed with Rabbi Eisendrath’s new Canadian congregation specifically in mind. We don’t know if the young medical student whom he refers to is Canadian or American. The reference to “an eastern college” would seem to indicate the latter. Nevertheless, the desire to cast off one’s Jewish identity (and certainly to change one’s name) for the sake of material advancement was not an American phenomenon alone. Certainly the anti-Semitism that the rabbi remarks on as an everlasting condition of the Jew was also a problem facing Canadian Jewry at the time. It would, of course, become an even greater problem in the 1930s with the onset of the Great Depression and the rise of Hitler in Germany.

What’s perhaps most original in this sermon is the attention given to Christianity. It is a subject to which Rabbi Eisendrath will return again and again, almost obsessively, in his sermons. Here, however, he advances the notion of Jews remaining true to their faith as a way of showing the Christians the true path of their own faith and of their being faithful to Jesus. Again, the idea of Jesus as a Jew, even a Jewish prophet, is one to which the rabbi will give much attention in the years ahead—and one for which he will receive much criticism from his rabbinic colleagues, even in the Reform movement and as late as the 1960s.

It is revealing, and as we shall see in future sermons, typical that the reasons for remaining Jewish are grounded in the notion of a prophetic Judaism of peace, justice, and reason. Nowhere does the rabbi mention the beauty of the Jewish holidays, including the Sabbath, and certainly not the celebration of mitzvoth and Jewish rituals in the home. Ritual practice was anathema to him; he was much more concerned with the ethical behavior and social justice that he saw as the heart and soul of Judaism—and the reason for remaining Jewish.

MC

2 comments:

  1. I found your blog through Roshpinaproject and will be back to read more of and or by Rabbi Eisendrath. Thank you for taking the time to inform interested readers like myself.

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  2. As a Gentile with Jewish lineage, this article strikes to the heart of my walk in God. As soon as I discovered my Jewish roots and determined to walk in truth about my ancestry, real hardship has come upon me. As a follower of Christ, I consider it an honor not only to suffer for Christ but also for being a relative of his. When I am true to this, I walk in his glory.
    Lois Jean Neuenschwander

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