tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-79633064967740594362024-02-19T00:00:07.867-05:00The lost and found sermons of Rabbi Maurice EisendrathUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger17125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7963306496774059436.post-57235849756587954572015-07-26T10:57:00.000-04:002019-10-26T20:42:16.966-04:00Welcome<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiAj6KhCx-0c0gNgaZATm-5LbUMtOwjy52ZxxgOrQR_KXsMBniF7LEIUygPUl7kM80W_eamynIo8l5xfHM26GxAZPkx4LDJQ5i8yQIPBxfwMUgdeseYXDIZp-3D2WkjjSPi8bx_QbpzD87U/s1600/P0053-RABBI-EISENDRATH.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiAj6KhCx-0c0gNgaZATm-5LbUMtOwjy52ZxxgOrQR_KXsMBniF7LEIUygPUl7kM80W_eamynIo8l5xfHM26GxAZPkx4LDJQ5i8yQIPBxfwMUgdeseYXDIZp-3D2WkjjSPi8bx_QbpzD87U/s320/P0053-RABBI-EISENDRATH.JPG" width="241" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Rabbi Maurice Eisendrath</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span style="color: #330033;">We, Michael Cole and Howard Roger, are two members of <a href="http://www.holyblossom.org/" target="_blank">Holy Blossom Temple</a>, a Reform Jewish synagogue in Toronto, Canada. This blog records our observations,
experiences and questions as we study a cache of manuscripts of the sermons of Rabbi
Maurice Eisendrath, rabbi of our synagogue from 1929 to
1943. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="color: #330033;"><b>If you are visiting this blog for the first time</b> we recommend that you read our <a href="http://eisendrathsermons.blogspot.ca/p/introduction.html">Introduction</a> and <a href="http://eisendrathsermons.blogspot.ca/p/about-rabbi-eisendrath.html">About Rabbi Eisendrath</a> pages first.<br /><b><br />If you are a returning visitor</b> check our <a href="http://eisendrathsermons.blogspot.ca/p/whats-new.html">What's new</a> page.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="color: #330033;">You can read about us briefly <a href="http://eisendrathsermons.blogspot.ca/p/about-us.html">here</a>. Our email address is <a href="mailto:eisendrathsermons@gmail.com">eisendrathsermons@gmail.com</a>. </span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7963306496774059436.post-87703827711411672102013-10-04T19:45:00.000-04:002019-10-26T20:32:12.630-04:00Three sermons on religion and moralityNovember 17 and 24, and December 1, 1929<br />
<br />
<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
<o:OfficeDocumentSettings>
<o:AllowPNG/>
</o:OfficeDocumentSettings>
</xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
<w:WordDocument>
<w:View>Normal</w:View>
<w:Zoom>0</w:Zoom>
<w:TrackMoves/>
<w:TrackFormatting/>
<w:DoNotShowPropertyChanges/>
<w:PunctuationKerning/>
<w:ValidateAgainstSchemas/>
<w:SaveIfXMLInvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid>
<w:IgnoreMixedContent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent>
<w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText>
<w:DoNotPromoteQF/>
<w:LidThemeOther>EN-CA</w:LidThemeOther>
<w:LidThemeAsian>X-NONE</w:LidThemeAsian>
<w:LidThemeComplexScript>X-NONE</w:LidThemeComplexScript>
<w:Compatibility>
<w:BreakWrappedTables/>
<w:SnapToGridInCell/>
<w:WrapTextWithPunct/>
<w:UseAsianBreakRules/>
<w:DontGrowAutofit/>
<w:SplitPgBreakAndParaMark/>
<w:EnableOpenTypeKerning/>
<w:DontFlipMirrorIndents/>
<w:OverrideTableStyleHps/>
</w:Compatibility>
<m:mathPr>
<m:mathFont m:val="Cambria Math"/>
<m:brkBin m:val="before"/>
<m:brkBinSub m:val="--"/>
<m:smallFrac m:val="off"/>
<m:dispDef/>
<m:lMargin m:val="0"/>
<m:rMargin m:val="0"/>
<m:defJc m:val="centerGroup"/>
<m:wrapIndent m:val="1440"/>
<m:intLim m:val="subSup"/>
<m:naryLim m:val="undOvr"/>
</m:mathPr></w:WordDocument>
</xml><![endif]-->Our next three entries are on three related sermons given by
Rabbi Eisendrath in late 1929, during his first year in Toronto. They were
given on three consecutive Sunday mornings on the topic of religion and morality.
They were:
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="http://eisendrathsermons.blogspot.com/2011/07/sunday-november-17-1929.html" target="_blank">Do We Need a New Religion?</a> – November 17, 1929</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="http://eisendrathsermons.blogspot.com/2011/07/november-24-1949.html" target="_blank">Do We Need a New Morality?</a> – November 24, 1929</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="http://eisendrathsermons.blogspot.com/2011/07/december-1-1929.html" target="_blank">How Moral Then Are We?</a> – December 1, 1929</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<a name='more'></a>Taken as a whole, these sermons reveal a number of things
about Rabbi Eisendrath and his thinking at the time:</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
1.<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Although he
had arrived in Toronto only in the summer of 1929, Rabbi Eisendrath was already well
acquainted with the social and political life of the city. Elsewhere, we have
discussed the rabbi’s early contretemps with Toronto’s Jewish (and Zionist)
establishment. It seems from these sermons, and some perusal of the newspapers
of the day, that Rabbi Eisendrath was no less engaged in the civic conflicts of
the city, particularly as it involved the use of police force against left wing
protestations of government policy.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
2.<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Rabbi
Eisendrath read widely in the field of religion and philosophy. He was
acquainted with the writings of many Christian clerics, and even those of India
and China. As he remarks in the first of these three sermons, he does not find inspiration in the works of contemporary Jewish thinkers, although, as we have noted, many of
the ones who were active at the time may not have been available in English or
may not yet have hit their stride.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
3.<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Rabbi
Eisendrath obviously has a conception of God, although he does not come to it
through systematic philosophical thinking. Rather, he derives it from his
thinking about the political and social issues of the day about which he is
concerned.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
4.<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Rabbi Eisendrath’s
strength lies in the force with which he critiques the society around him, in
particular the capitalist economic order. This must have taken some courage on
his part, given that his audience, both Jewish and Christian, were mostly
merchants and small businessmen.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
5.<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Unfortunately,
we have no recordings of Rabbi Eisendrath giving these or any other sermons at Holy Blossom. Those who
remember him have told us that he was a dramatic orator who could hold his
audience for the forty minutes or more that it took to deliver his sermons.
Again, as we have previously observed, his writing involves lengthy sentences
that utilize various oratorical devices, like inverted word order,
alliteration, and poetic imagery.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
6.<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Much in our
society, and in Reform Judaism, has changed in the ninety years since these
sermons were preached. However, although their style is antiquated, they still speak
to us today, even as our economic system is still unkind to the most vulnerable
and our moral order is open to debate.<br />
<br />
MC </div>
EShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06884838895664967725noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7963306496774059436.post-15715830273103264642013-10-03T09:59:00.000-04:002019-10-27T19:48:51.819-04:00November 17, 1929<span style="background-color: white;"><b>Do we need a new religion?</b></span><br />
<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMgvTrxMe0LsOju5QXWaaxQnMJdyuZVuY70LYHmGtfHC5eW1Y0HaSMdSCEYU1IJxzxLfABPiPAnMDO62WLIeDuDfF-nHJeJPLcBmhTNFawGynGBHZiaXiIl8xLoF4b_M7ChxAShaUpHnUo/s1600/Do+We+Need+a+New+Religion+page+1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img alt="" border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMgvTrxMe0LsOju5QXWaaxQnMJdyuZVuY70LYHmGtfHC5eW1Y0HaSMdSCEYU1IJxzxLfABPiPAnMDO62WLIeDuDfF-nHJeJPLcBmhTNFawGynGBHZiaXiIl8xLoF4b_M7ChxAShaUpHnUo/s320/Do+We+Need+a+New+Religion+page+1.jpg" title="" width="200" /></a>This was the first sermon given by Rabbi Eisendrath in Toronto in which he was unrestricted by tradition or the calendar in his choice of topic. His first several sermons in Toronto were delivered at services for Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur and other holidays occurring during the first weeks of the Jewish calendar. His first Sunday morning sermon in Toronto was delivered at a special Armistice Day service and was related to that day.<br />
<br />
This then was his first opportunity to introduce to his Sunday audience his religious and philosophical outlook. It was the first of three related sermons, It was followed by "Do we need a new morality?" (November 24, 1929) and "How moral then are we?" (December 1, 1929). Rabbi Eisendrath showed himself to be erudite, modernist and unafraid of controversy.<br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
To the rhetorical question "Do we need a new religion?" Rabbi Eisendrath's preliminary answer is an unqualified yes. His detailed examination of the question, as the sermon progresses, reveals nuances and subtleties to his position, but, as his congregants were to learn, it was frequently his style to begin with a provocative and attention-grabbing assertion.<br />
<br />
The beliefs of many religions, as they have been traditionally expounded, are, Rabbi Eisendrath argued this day, yielding to scientific knowledge. Judaism, Christianity and Islam need to shed their reliance on revelation and become more scientific and humanist.<br />
<br />
Rabbi Eisendrath describes the "rude reception" received by Harry Elmer Barnes, professor of history at Smith College, when, at a December 1928 gathering of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, he told the association that their generation needed "a new conception of God."<br />
<br />
The response, the rabbi reports, was "a storm of protest." Barnes was "pompously chided as though he were a naughty and disobedient boy." Rabbi Eisendrath refuses to join the protest. (It is a sad irony that Barnes, whom Rabbi Eisendrath defends in this sermon, later became a holocaust denier.)<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="background-color: white;">
[F]ar from being disturbed or scandalized by Barnes' innocent assertion, I greet it enthusiastically and happily and use it as a point of departure for this morning's discourse because I for one would go even further than Dr. Barnes and maintain that not only do we in this modern era need a new conception of God, but that we likewise require a new interpretation of religion itself, and so I would discuss with you today the inescapable query as to whether or not we Christians and we Jews, we men and women of an altogether different age, as to whether or not we need a new religion.</blockquote>
Jewish thinkers, the rabbi says, are not in the vanguard of this re-examination of religion. <br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="background-color: white;">
Jewish voices have remained conspicuously silent ... it is to a Bertrand Russell, a Roy Wood Sellars, a Eustace Haydon, a M. C. [Max Carl] Otto, a John Haynes Holmes, a [Hermann] Keyserling, a [Alfred North] Whitehead, a [Oswald] Spengler, a Harry Elmer Barnes -- all erstwhile Christians that I must go for enlightenment and spiritual guidance ... </blockquote>
To this list of Christian names, Rabbi Eisendrath adds two "inspired spirits of the East," Gandhi in India and Hu Shih in China. Were all of these religious thinkers? Although older than Rabbi Eisendrath, they were contemporaries, born in the late 19th century and still living in 1929. [1] Was Rabbi Eisendrath correct in saying that there were no Jewish thinkers engaged in the re-examination of religion? Should he have mentioned Franz Rosenzweig, Leo Baeck, or Martin Buber? To what extent was their work known in North America in 1929? Felix Adler and Mordecai Kaplan, active in America, are also not mentioned. [2]<br />
<br />
The religion of the future, Rabbi Eisendrath states, "in its broad outlines, and with a few modifications" will resemble the movement known as Humanism. Will Judaism and Christianity, he asks, be able to adapt and survive?<br />
<br />
Rabbi Eisendrath identifies four main things that will distinguish the religion of the future.<br />
<br />
1 -- The religion of the future will have no limits in time. It will be evolutionary, gradually unfolding, ever enlarging, and without finalities. (This was already long accepted in Reform Judaism. The Pittsburgh Platform (1885) said, for example, "We recognize in Judaism a progressive
religion, ever striving to be in accord with the postulates
of reason.") The new religion will not deny the reality or importance of revelation; rather it will say that revelation is never-ending and may occur in any age.<br />
<br />
2 -- The religion of the future will have no limits in space. "[A]s it has fulfilled itself in no single event of the past, neither has it exhausted itself in any particular place or people." (This would seem to deny, for the religion of the future, the singularity and importance of the Jewish people.)<br />
<br />
3 -- The religion of the future will be guided by scientific thought. "It is science which must henceforth become the supreme arbiter of truth -- not necessarily of right my friends, but of truth, as definitely and as exclusively as infallible doctrines and dogmas have been in the past." (On this point, the Pittsburgh Platform had stated: "We hold that the modern discoveries of scientific researches in the
domain of nature and history are not antagonistic to the doctrines of
Judaism ..." However, if science is not the supreme arbiter of right, then what is? Rabbi Eisendrath perhaps implies that it will found in the 'religion of the future,' but clearly not "in the infallible doctrines and dogmas of the past"--or a singular revelation as on Mount Sinai.) <br />
<br />
4 -- The religion of the future "will concern itself more with Man than with God; it will be essentially not theistic but humanistic."<br />
<br />
But the religion of the future will not be a new form of atheism. "What do we find in human history and in the human heart if not the clearest demonstration of the Divine?"<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Deep principles of Right, exalted impulses for Good, passionate yearnings for the Beautiful, instinctive longings for Love, profound cravings for Truth--what then are these if they be not everything we have meant by the Divine ... Man, I do believe, is 'God in process,' and God, as Professor Sellars so beautifully expresses it, 'is man at his finest; man loving, daring, creating, fighting loyally and courageously for causes dear unto himself and his fellows.' Here is the sublimest spiritual truth of our day. Man, coming to a knowledge of God only through a deeper knowledge of itself. Man living with God and acting according to the divine will only by fulfilling the best in human life, only by fashioning for himself and the entire human family a statelier mansion, a lovelier home.</blockquote>
This notion of God verges on heresy, even for Reform Judaism. Where is God the creator, God the Lawgiver, or the God who brings Israel out of Egypt? If not quite atheism, it certainly comes rather close to it. <br />
<br />
Having described the religion of the future, Rabbi Eisendrath returns to answer for a second time his question "Do we need a new religion?" His answer now (in true rabbinic form) is both yes and no.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
If Christianity and Judaism insist upon remaining static and fixed [remember, Rabbi Eisendrath's Sunday audience included both Christians and Jews]; if they remain smugly satisfied with the progress they have already made and convinced that they now possess the true formulation of human faith, then must we courageously admit that these two great religions, despite the eternal truths they have given to the world ... are doomed to disintegrate, decay and die ... But if on the other hand they will slough of the false accretions and dead integuments of the past and root themselves in the few simple realities proclaimed by their common founders, recognizing no finalities in time, no bounds in space, no guide but science, no values but human values, no ends but human ends, no problem but humanity, no goal but the achievement of the utmost infinities of the human soul, then like the child succumbing in youth, and the youth fading imperceptibly into the man, both Judaism and Christianity, so changed, so different, and yet the same shall become themselves the preachers and prophets of that only possible religious faith that in the future immediately before us can ever hope to survive ...</blockquote>
Rabbi Eisendrath doesn't elaborate (at least not in this sermon) on just what the "false accretions and dead integuments of the past" are, nor on what "the few simple realities" proclaimed by the founders of Judaism and Christianity are. Presumably (from what we know of the rabbi's later sermons), the former would include the minutiae of Jewish law and the latter the moral laws of Prophetic Judaism. <br />
<br />
To traditional Jewish ears, this sermon is quite radical. Rabbi Eisendrath is perhaps merely reporting on the pervasive threads of contemporary religious thought and the challenges traditional religions face. Still, he sets out the principles of this "religion of the future" with such clarity, and in such enthusiastic language, that it is hard not to believe he is sympathetic to it. The sermon is best appreciated as a demonstration of Rabbi Eisendrath's belief that change and re-examination are Jewish imperatives. This is a principle that he will return to frequently in other sermons.<br />
<br />
HR / MC<br />
<br />
[1] Of all these, John Haynes Holmes 1879- 1964, minister of The Community Church of New York, was arguably the greatest influence on Rabbi Eisendrath, and is mentioned frequently in his sermons.<br />
<br />
Dates of birth and death for other persons Rabbi Eisendrath refers to are: Alfred North Whitehead
1861 - 1947, Mahatma Gandhi 1869 - 1948, Bertrand Russell
1872-1970, Max Carl Otto 1876-1978, Roy
Wood Sellars 1880 - 1973, Eustace Haydon 1880- 1975, Hermann
Keyserling 1880 - 1946, Oswald Spengler 1880 - 1936, Harry Elmer Barnes
1889 - 1968, Hu Shih 1891 - 1962.<br />
<br />
[2] Franz Rosenzweig 1866 - 1929, Leo Baeck 1873 - 1956, Martin Buber 1878 - 1965, Felix Adler 1851 - 1933, Mordecai Kaplan 1881 - 1983.<br />
<br />
Other Jewish thinkers, contemporary to Rabbi Eisendrath but not yet known in 1929 are Gershom Scholem 1897 - 1982, Joseph Soloveitchik 1903 - 1993, Yeshayahu Leibowitz 1903 - 1994, Emmanuel Lévinas 1906 - 1995, Abraham Joshua Heschel 1907 - 1992, and Emil Fackenheim 1916 - 2003.<br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7963306496774059436.post-59627975513392483942013-10-02T10:02:00.001-04:002023-08-01T11:03:57.149-04:00November 24, 1929<b>Do We Need a New Morality?</b><br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJvlmEB_kVApfEpJVucKveLGptlMdGJFucVo_HME0tePifFiAMHAw5qFw41RSXgVB7Bqa0mGTMf9I4SmzsExgYkplbKLEwMArIbFKpXObIjv-uGXLsv5OvRIAYAD-KT3X5CnxR_OIRzwI/s1600/Do+We+Need+a+New+Morality+page+1.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1011" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJvlmEB_kVApfEpJVucKveLGptlMdGJFucVo_HME0tePifFiAMHAw5qFw41RSXgVB7Bqa0mGTMf9I4SmzsExgYkplbKLEwMArIbFKpXObIjv-uGXLsv5OvRIAYAD-KT3X5CnxR_OIRzwI/s320/Do+We+Need+a+New+Morality+page+1.jpg" width="202" /></a></div>
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.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
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 …</blockquote>
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.) <br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.”<br />
<br />
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. <br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
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.</blockquote>
(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.)<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
This is not to say that morality is inconstant. <br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
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.</blockquote>
(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.) <br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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: <br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
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]</blockquote>
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.)<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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 …” <br />
<br />
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.)<br />
<br />
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.)<br />
<br />
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.”<br />
<br />
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:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
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.</blockquote>
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?<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
New occasions teach new duties; Time makes ancient good uncouth. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
They must upward still, and onward, who would keep abreast of Truth. </blockquote>
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.<br />
<br />
In the meantime, Rabbi Eisendrath will conclude his trio of sermons the following Sunday with “How Moral Then Are We?”<br />
<br />
MC.<br />
<br />
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 <a href="http://eisendrathsermons.blogspot.com/2011/07/january-5-12-19-and-26-1930.html" target="_blank">“Four sermons on plays by Eugene O’Neill”</a> on this play and three others on which he lectured in January 1930.<br />
<br />
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 <i>The Companionate Marriage</i>. 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.<br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7963306496774059436.post-52223988562845239642013-10-01T10:05:00.000-04:002019-10-27T17:49:48.236-04:00December 1, 1929<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCUhFuYqbk90lUGMmMYYDqxI8Dj3NYw8RYlF-Nd1EsIVv_VpmR5bCKrFriqihZ2ub_5ZwEl8SptC7nwAUsmskU6zvcYWURaKGXgetr7oslE3jLmHwKhUYsUWk784u4Ga3cM_LU3XkoFUE/s1600/How+Moral+Then+Are+We+page+1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1011" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCUhFuYqbk90lUGMmMYYDqxI8Dj3NYw8RYlF-Nd1EsIVv_VpmR5bCKrFriqihZ2ub_5ZwEl8SptC7nwAUsmskU6zvcYWURaKGXgetr7oslE3jLmHwKhUYsUWk784u4Ga3cM_LU3XkoFUE/s320/How+Moral+Then+Are+We+page+1.jpg" width="202" /></a><b>How Moral Then are We?</b><br />
<br />
Having concluded his sermon last week with an assertion that Divine Revelation is a continuing process and that our understanding of morality is ever-growing, Rabbi Eisendrath begins his next sermon, the last of a trilogy, with the question “How moral then are we?” Rabbi Eisendrath limits his discussion to an examination of two moral concerns facing contemporary society, war, and economic justice. (Sexual morality, the topic with which the rabbi began this trilogy of sermons, is not given further consideration.)<br />
<br />
Concepts of morality evolve, but, Rabbi Eisendrath says, there has been revealed to us a certain standard, a “plumb line of moral measurement,” by which we might answer this question. He mentions “the Ten Commandments of Israel, … the Sermon on the Mount of Christendom, … the ethics of Confucius, the Koran of Mohammed and the lofty Vedantas of the East” as sources of this moral truth has been embodied. This acknowledgement of the wisdom of many religions is frequently found in Rabbi Eisendrath’s sermons. <br />
<br />
To Rabbi Eisendrath the clearest test of our morality is whether we are willing or not to go to war. <br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
And the first absolute requisite for human well being and joy I find to be sure in the stubborn insistence on the part of every moral teacher of the past, the adamant, unwavering, ever uncompromising insistence upon peace. From the ancient texts of the Taoist maintaining that "there is no calamity greater than engaging in war,” [1] through the lovely dream of Isaiah of "the day when swords would be beaten into ploughshares and spears into pruning hooks," [2] down to one of the few austere commands of the Nazarene to "Resist not evil," [3] man has been warned by every prophet and seer, every dreamer and idealist, every champion and lover of humanity of the horrors and evils of war …</blockquote>
<br />
<a name='more'></a>Rabbi Eisendrath’s proof-texts for the proposition that every moral teacher of the past has had “an uncompromising insistence on peace” are open to question. Regarding the Taoist quotation (from Lao Tzu), there is a question as to the accuracy of the translation the rabbi has given. He may have been quoting from a translation by James Legge (1891), “There is no greater calamity than lightly engaging in war.” If so, the omission of the word “lightly” changes the meaning significantly. Another translation, more contemporary to the date of Rabbi Eisendrath’s sermon, conveys a different meaning: <br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
There is no error so great as to engage in battle without sufficient force. (Aleister Crowley,1923)</blockquote>
Either translation leads to a quite different understanding of the text than the unequivocally pacifist one that Rabbi Eisendrath gives it.<br />
<br />
Our understanding of Isaiah’s “lovely dream” of swords being beaten into ploughshares and spears into pruning hooks is that it is just that: a dream of a messianic era in which wars will no longer be fought. Isaiah did not issue an injunction against going to war.<br />
<br />
The quotation “Resist not evil” is taken from the following passage:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth:<br />
But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.<br />
And if any man will sue thee at the law, and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloke also. (Matthew 5:38-40)</blockquote>
Jesus’s command, read in context, seems more for individuals in the face of personal injury, physical or economic, than for a nation facing an enemy, or, in the Palestine of Jesus’s own time, occupation by a foreign power. We might question also how many in the congregation hearing the sermon understood that the quotation “Resist not evil” was a reference to turning the other cheek. <br />
<br />
An ardent pacifist, Rabbi Eisendrath is creatively using his chosen texts however he can to buttress his case that all moral religions share his view. He had earlier in this sermon acknowledged Islam as one of the moral religions. It would be interesting for us today if he had chosen a proof-text from Islam.<br />
<br />
Rabbi Eisendrath acknowledges that he has already addressed the question of war and pacifism in previous sermons. [4]<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
But this morning I shall treat this subject purely from its moral angle. I shall measure it not merely by the preachment of these prophets of the past, but rather by the standard of human happiness which we posited at the outset, and so I would ask the question this morning: Is war of any kind morally defensible; will it ever be right, that is will it ever contribute to the larger good of humankind, ever again to fare forth to battle.</blockquote>
Wars of the past, he says, have seemingly benefited humanity. <br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
If the Maccabees of old had not rallied to Israel's standard, the idealism of the Hebrew prophets might have been lost to mankind and a decadent Greek paganism may have become the dominant philosophy and cult of the civilized world. Just what would have been the stage of democracy today had there been no American or French revolution I am not prepared to say, but this much we know: that when the Athenians held back the Persian hordes at Marathon and when Charles Martel defeated the Saracens at Tours, when the invasion of the savage and barbaric Huns from the East was put to flight by spear and battle axe -- seemingly the world was benefitted thereby.</blockquote>
Of course, who we consider civilized and who barbaric is a matter of interpretation and point of view (often the point of view of the victor). The Jewish Hellenists may have looked upon the Maccabees as uncultured barbarians, and Muslims today may look upon the Saracens as more cultured than Charles Martel and the Christians. (Curiously, Rabbi Eisendrath makes no mention of the American Civil War, which, we presume, he would look upon as one in which humanity benefitted by the defeat of slavery.) <br />
<br />
But today, the rabbi says, circumstances have changed.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
For we live in an altogether different world from that in which civilization lived in tiny oases of culture and humanity, oases completely surrounded by unnumbered packs of barbarians … Today there is no need to defend civilization against savagery … The need today is the very opposite, the only need now is to protect uncivilized and backward people from the greed and the insolence of the civilized -- or the so-called civilized. </blockquote>
While insisting that he has no time to speak of such things, Rabbi Eisendrath offers this vision of future wars:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
I will not this morning describe for you the possible unimaginable consequences of those poison gases of incredible malignity and insidious power, gases to the further discovery and manufacture of which every civilized nation on the face of the earth is now devoting its most frantic efforts, not gases alone, but blights to poison crops, anthrax to slay horses and cattle, and finally, oh the wondrous ingenuity of man, oh the beneficent benediction of scientific advance -- disease germs, man is today carefully and remorselessly devising to plague not armies but whole communities -- nay I need not remind you of how man today holds in his hands the tools and instruments of his own destruction, how eagerly Death stands at attention obedient, expectant, ready to leap to battle and to sheer away, to exterminate the whole of humanity, ready if called upon, to pulverize without hope of repair what little might then be left of civilization.</blockquote>
Rabbi Eisendrath denounces contemporary rationalizations for waging war. “The futile and feeble claims of national expansion, of colonization or dollar diplomacy [5] -- all these aggressive wars which we veil and camouflage with the blessed plea of patriotism I shall dismiss as unworthy even of rational discussion.” <br />
<br />
Even self-defence as a justification for war Rabbi Eisendrath does not accept. He advocates non-resistance as a more powerful and effective response to aggression.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Now it is urged that armed resistance is necessary to protect defenceless men from slaughter or slavery, our women from abduction and rape, but what is far more important in our present society our property from destruction and theft. But may I contrast for you the probable results of non-resistance with the inevitable effects of war. It is inconceivable to me that any great power on the face of the earth could compel its common folk, who are usually kindly and sympathetic at heart, to plunder and murder a people who failed to resist its attack. Such cold-blooded brutality is impossible unless their fears and passions are aroused by war – and by war I mean the actual resistance of a foe and the fighting that it evokes. It is war that makes atrocities and if any nation would save its inhabitants from physical suffering and death, its cities and its countryside from destruction and exploitation -- they must train their citizens however provoked or ill-treated they might be, never to go to war.</blockquote>
It is startling in light of events that would follow that Rabbi Eisendrath would put such faith in absolute pacifism, or that he would really believe that the “common folk” are “usually kindly and sympathetic at heart.” He would later acknowledge his failing, and offer as an explanation (but not an apology) that his pacifist preaching (not referring to this sermon specifically) was given in a different time, “before Hitler … before the State of Israel arose from the ashes of destruction and faced the alternative of fighting for its life or dying still-born, before Korea, before Cuba, before Algeria, before Laos, before Viet-Nam; before the United Nations and before the H-bomb and the test ban.” [6] <br />
<br />
At this point in the sermon Rabbi Eisendrath transitions from issues of war and pacifism to issues of economic justice. He sees a connection between the two. War, he says, “is … a symptom of man's profound discontent with peace and the kind of life which it vouchsafes him. The surest means of ending war, therefore is inescapably bound up with the whole economic and social structure of our time.”<br />
<br />
Our economic system, Rabbi Eisendrath says, does not match our religious ideals.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
… [B]ehold a civilization which calls itself Christian and a people which designated itself as Jewish permits in this Western World of ours as iniquitous and as utterly disgraceful a distribution of wealth as the world has ever witnessed. These two so called religious groups professing in their churches and synagogues an allegiance to the sublime traditions of saviour and prophets have founded an economic system not on the principle of service and mutual sharing and sacrifice and brotherhood which their mutual past has sanctioned, but upon a motive which is quite frankly and universally and in diametric opposition to their theoretic ideals based solely upon private profit and private gain, on power and privilege rather than on public good and human weal. The savage law of the jungle, the bitter competitive strife of the most primitive peoples with its exaltation of self-interest alone, the barbaric law of each for himself and the devil take the hindmost is the foundation upon which our economic structure has today been builded… our whole social system is rotten to the core.</blockquote>
Rabbi Eisendrath’s view of modern economic behaviour as “savage” and “barbaric” parallels his view of modern nations that are striving to develop the most destructive weapons as being the “so-called civilized.”<br />
<br />
Material goods that many households possess are not evidence of economic well-being.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
[W]hile it may be contended that there is a radio in every home and that nearly every laborer owns a car, still it must not be forgotten that most of these radios and motor cars are eternally mortgaged and have been cleverly sold to penniless workers to create a never satiated market for superfluous wares, they represent the acquisition solely of debts, they represent something owed rather than owned. </blockquote>
Citing economic data from the U.S., which he believes is applicable also to Canada, he notes that “two percent [of the population] owns sixty percent of the entire national wealth and on the other side of the scale sixty-five percent of these people, these toiling classes, are revelling in five percent of the countries’ fortune.”<br />
<br />
The popular belief in upward mobility, of Canada and the U.S. as places of unlimited opportunity, Rabbi Eisendrath considers to be a myth.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
When I was a child I believed firmly and implicitly that every boy had an equal chance to become President of the U.S. provided of course that he was not a Roman Catholic or a Jew. And today we feed our children [a] similar saccharine falsehood by telling them that every boy has a chance to become a millionaire -- the highest goal in life that we may dangle before our young by the way. These stories with which we still lure our youth, stories of golden opportunities which exist for all were quite consistent with the rare opportunities of pioneer days but they are hopelessly false and hypocritical in our modern financial world. … for today; it is not industry, it is not toil, it is not labor, it is not primarily even intelligence that wins for some huge fortunes and destines others for grinding poverty. …[I]t is unearned increment gained through real estate, through chance inheritance of a property that has, through no effort of the individual who profits thereby. but through increase in population, through the building of streets and sewers and schools, all socially created values, and yet this publicly created wealth flows unprotected into private pockets, enhanced immeasurably in value through lucky investment or protective tariffs or the wasteful exploitation of natural resources all deserving of no special reward whatsoever. </blockquote>
Rabbi Eisendrath is attacking our economic behaviour on both an individual and political level. On the individual level, he is criticizing us for our materialism. On the political level, he is decrying how publicly financed infrastructure (“streets, sewers and schools”) and public policy (“protective tariffs” and “wasteful exploitation of natural resources”) serve only to create private wealth for an undeserving few.<br />
<br />
Rabbi Eisendrath is clearly no fan of capitalism, which he sees as “rotten to the core.” We don’t recall the rabbi ever describing himself as a socialist or a social democrat, but this sermon clearly puts him into that camp. We suspect that not too many of his congregants, many of whom were merchants, would follow him there.<br />
<br />
Rabbi Eisendrath also attacks the stock market, which he sees as nothing but a gambling parlour, “a monstrous Monte Carlo … in which frenzied men and women likewise drive by the lust for greed and gold have been seeking these many years to amass fortunes to which they have no moral right and to get moneys which they have not in any way earned.” <br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
I need but remind my brethren of the prophets' denunciation of the ever widening gap between rich and poor, and my Christian friends of that vivid scene in which Jesus so ruthlessly overturned the tables of the money lenders in the Temple of Jerusalem [8], to suggest the attitude of true religion toward such debauchery as today exists in our world of commerce and finance. Imagine, my fellow Jews and Christian friends, imagine Jeremiah or Jesus, imagine either one of these gentle prophets comfortably ensconced in a million dollar seat upon the Stock Exchange. </blockquote>
And there in this graphic suggestion lies the whole crux of the matter for behind it all is the ludicrous inconsistency, the ironic incompatibility between a people that vents its religious spleen and prostitutes its religious power in vice crusades and sporadic raids on comparatively harmless pool rooms and gambling houses here and there to rid society of the disgraceful spectacle of a few innocent Orientals risking a few coppers on their native game of fan tan … [9]<br />
<br />
Rabbi Eisendrath foresees such economic and social behaviours, and the ever-increasing concentration of wealth as leading potentially to a societal collapse.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
[Continuing] until in crash after crash wealth become ever more concentrated, … until the humble merchant and the exploited laborer will realize that he and he alone has paid the piper too long for this mad dance, until the whole cursed and corrupt economic system of our day which by its distorted moral code silently condones the living death of this ruthlessly acquisitive society of our, until in one hysteric outburst of revenge it be forever destroyed.</blockquote>
Repressive actions by the courts and police will not prevent such an outcome:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
If we were to avoid such an uprising, such a class revolution toward which Western Civilization is rapidly tending, we cannot do it by suppressing the speeches of communists upon our streets and parks, we cannot do it by stifling radical opinion or by jailing strikers or by bribing the courts to exercise the might of injunction against the right of the masses …</blockquote>
Speeches of communists were indeed being suppressed in Toronto. Speakers were arrested and literature confiscated. Toronto newspapers debated whether such measures were justified. <br />
<br />
An attempted gathering of communists and communist sympathisers at Queen’s Park (site of the Ontario Legislature) on August 13, 1929 was forcibly disrupted by the Toronto Police. The front page headline in the Mail and Empire the next day read “Batons and Feet Used Freely as City Police Rout Reds.” Mounted police and motorcycles were used to charge the crowd. In interviews with the press Toronto Mayor Sam McBride and Police Chief Dennis Draper supported the police conduct. <br />
<br />
Rabbi Eisendrath urges a return to moral economic behavior and our religious values:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
[W]e can perhaps prevent such a clash of the classes, as devastating any war might be, only by seeking the moral guidance of the just, by practicing as vigorously as we fervidly profess the principles of our respective faiths, the principles primarily of justice and equity for all, the principle of a just reward for honest toil and compensation for creative labour alone.</blockquote>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
This task of remedying the manifold maladjustments which exist in our world today will be tedious and long, but stupendous as the task may be it is imperative that we cease not to bend every effort step by step to make some amelioration, some approach, however piecemeal, toward a fairer distribution of the world's wealth and goods by which the greed of man are covetously owned by the few but which by the grace of god rightfully belong to all children of men.</blockquote>
At this point we encounter difficulties with the surviving manuscript. There is a page in the middle of the above-quoted extract which is clearly out of place, apparently misplaced from another sermon. The final page of the manuscript (as it was found, the pages are not numbered) is an alternate version of the sermon’s opening words. We do not know if the manuscript originally had additional pages. While we may not have the complete text of the sermon, we see certainly that Rabbi Eisendrath views economic issues as moral issues, and urges us to address them by being true to our religious beliefs. <br />
<br />
The two issues addressed in this sermon, war and economic injustice, were major concerns of a Christian movement known as Social Gospel. Rabbi Eisendrath, almost from the moment he arrived in Toronto, interacted with Social Gospel ministers. Salem Bland, a United Church minister and leading proponent of the movement in Canada attended Rabbi Eisendrath’s installation service at Holy Blossom. Writing on the editorial page of The Toronto Daily Star (under the pseudonym The Observer) Reverend Bland offered praise for the unqualified freedom that was granted by the congregation to Rabbi Eisendrath to express whatever opinions his convictions may lead him to assert. [10] <br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
<br />
By 1930 Rabbi Eisendrath was the President of the Toronto Council of the International Fellowship of Reconciliation. The F.O.R. was a group of loosely affiliated pacifist organizations in Europe and North America, created mostly under the leadership of Christian clergy. Other members of the Toronto Council were Dr. George T. Webb (Baptist Board of Sunday Schools), J.F. White (editor of the Canadian Forum), Margaret Gould (Child Welfare Council), G. Raymond Booth (Friends' Society), Professor H. Lasserre (Victoria College), Dr. T. Albert Moore, (United Church of Canada), and Rev. W.A. Cameron (Yorkminster Baptist Church). [11]<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: right;">
</div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhEipXplyEMiRp52-Mc45B8thM-8T-Yyc4yoG1c88aU022dOybSlDE6J5h7ldtTuqY5ePENwVrlAOcI3dGjUCcG8mo-a-E-bk3pbZ9v3imKqb1R3bB2uKXnwjSLGvvK4DhcgUEYsD41xvA/s1600/Poster+1930++Peace+Conference.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1058" data-original-width="819" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhEipXplyEMiRp52-Mc45B8thM-8T-Yyc4yoG1c88aU022dOybSlDE6J5h7ldtTuqY5ePENwVrlAOcI3dGjUCcG8mo-a-E-bk3pbZ9v3imKqb1R3bB2uKXnwjSLGvvK4DhcgUEYsD41xvA/s320/Poster+1930++Peace+Conference.jpg" width="247" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Poster - 1930 All Day Peace Conference<br />
(Source: Socknat, note 12)</td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
The F.O.R. convened an All Day Peace Conference in Toronto on November 10, 1930. J.S. Woodsworth, a Member of Parliament for Winnipeg, and former Methodist minister, spoke twice at the conference. His evening address was broadcast over Toronto radio station CFRB. The evening program was held in co-operation with the Women's International League with Salem Bland presiding. [12]<br />
<br />
In 1932 the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) Party would come into being in Canada, under the leadership of J. S. Woodsworth. The CCF, and its later incarnation, the New Democratic Party (NDP), was social democratic in orientation.<br />
<br />
These relations between Rabbi Eisendrath and Christian ministers in Canada with like social justice ideals show how quickly upon his arrival in Canada he acquainted himself with the Canadian religious and political environment and became a significant participant in it. <br />
<br />
HR/MC<br />
<br />
1. Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, from Chapter 69.<br />
<br />
2. Isaiah 2:4: “And He shall judge between the nations, and shall decide for many peoples; and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.”<br />
<br />
3. Matthew 5:39.<br />
<br />
4. Referring to his sermon delivered at Holy Blossom, Sunday, November 10, 1929, the day before Armistice Day, “All Quiet on the Western Front.”<br />
<br />
5. “Dollar diplomacy” – originally a policy of President Taft (1909-1913) of using economic investment to further American influence in the Caribbean, Central America and China. Rabbi Eisendrath is associating the term with the use, or threatened use, in later years, of American military power to protect those investments.<br />
<br />
6. Rabbi Eisendrath, Can Faith Survive?, p. 73, commenting in 1964 on a pacifist sermon he delivered in 1931. As is often his custom, Rabbi Eisendrath submits a list of events, not all of which would support his premise in this case as a justification for war. He was a bitter opponent of the Vietnam war. In fact, he might have used Vietnam as an example of the need to protect the “uncivilized” from the “greed and insolence of the civilized …”<br />
<br />
8. “The money lenders in the Temple of Jerusalem.” Usually translated as “money changers” (Matthew 21:12), people making it possible for pilgrims coming to the Temple from outlying areas to purchase, with whatever currency they had, animals (mostly birds) to sacrifice on the altar.<br />
<br />
9. On September 22, 1929, Toronto police raided a downtown premise and arrested 53 persons engaged in a game of fan tan, charging them with keeping a common gaming house or as found ins. Toronto Daily Star, November 5, 1929, “Denies any rake-off in game of Fan Tan; Chinese Witness Insists He Was Dealer and Took No Percentages.”<br />
<br />
10. Toronto Daily Star, November 6, 1929, “The Freedom of the Pulpit – by The Observer.”<br />
<br />
11. Suzanne Michelle Skebo, “Liberty and Authority: Civil Liberties in Toronto, 1929-1945,” M.A. Thesis, University of British Columbia, 1968, p. 122.<br />
<br />
12. Information about the Conference and copy of the poster for the event is from Thomas Paul Socknat, “‘Witness Against War’: Pacifism in Canada, 1900-1945,” Ph.D, Thesis, McMaster University, 1981, p. 244-5, 584. EShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06884838895664967725noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7963306496774059436.post-33342477211466862202013-09-27T13:07:00.000-04:002018-02-19T13:29:29.585-05:00An early sermon -- Rosh Hashanah, 1927 (Charleston, West Virginia)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
<b>"The Call to Serve"</b><br />
<br />
Among the sermon manuscripts found in Holy Blossom’s Tower is one that is undoubtedly one of the oldest in the collection. The manuscript is undated. It is clearly a Rosh Hashanah sermon. The very first sentence is, “We are at the gateway of another year.”<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: left;">
</div>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1xIZUc7hGkBT_hMjd04cfElmg2EmOJCV4qDj-2_eeaw4J-qTtuSQAIrHvLzsIrdhfopU-w78u1LW3hklKMBSNsIbI703wgdBl1sQbhhtCEofB-R0FueL8INNDukr8sbA2H5st3m05c_OE/s1600/temple+israel+1927.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1529" data-original-width="1600" height="190" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1xIZUc7hGkBT_hMjd04cfElmg2EmOJCV4qDj-2_eeaw4J-qTtuSQAIrHvLzsIrdhfopU-w78u1LW3hklKMBSNsIbI703wgdBl1sQbhhtCEofB-R0FueL8INNDukr8sbA2H5st3m05c_OE/s200/temple+israel+1927.jpg" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Temple Israel (B'nai Israel) <br />
Charleston WV<br />
Synagogue building<br />
1894 - 1960</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
We know that this is not a sermon that the rabbi delivered in Toronto, because all those sermon titles are recorded in the Temple’s Bulletin, and this one is not among them. He refers to “the short year that I have been among you…” . Rabbi Eisendrath came to Charleston in the fall of 1926, so we know that this sermon was given on erev Rosh Hashanah of the year following. He had only that summer celebrated his 25th birthday.<br />
<br />
Like many of Rabbi Eisendrath’s sermons, he begins with an extended recitation of metaphors:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
We have just passed one more milestone upon the journey of life. The months just vanished have been swallowed by the ravenous maw of the grave; the year, now ended has passed into eternity, never to return. The chapter, already recorded in our Sepher Ha Hayyim, in our ledger of time, has been closed, never to be effaced.</blockquote>
<a name='more'></a>Interestingly, the rabbi tells his congregants that the ledger has been closed, “never to be effaced.” He does not refer to the traditional New Year’s message of the <i>unatana tokef</i> prayer, that “on Rosh Hashanah it [our fate] is written, and on Yom Kippur it is sealed,” or that “Repentance, Prayer, and Charity avert the stern decree.” Rather, he goes on to quote a poem by “the Persian mystic philosopher,” Omar Khayyam (whom he does not name):<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The moving finger writes, and having writ<br />
Moves on, nor all your piety nor wit<br />
Shall lure it back to cancel half a line<br />
Nor all you tears wash away a word of it. </blockquote>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_2xJEPlI3aI8WxJo-0-610kFZorjIm8Ern4GeJsnZtDBC0QPl6OK18Pa18TotQsqhAJOXKIBmUY29M5i6x6IH_GBo7L5yS1-W7Fa4zuvirOkg0N0NGOsPN6cDkMBPuqGI1cOfB32ANE2c/s1600/The+Call+to+Serve+1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1011" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_2xJEPlI3aI8WxJo-0-610kFZorjIm8Ern4GeJsnZtDBC0QPl6OK18Pa18TotQsqhAJOXKIBmUY29M5i6x6IH_GBo7L5yS1-W7Fa4zuvirOkg0N0NGOsPN6cDkMBPuqGI1cOfB32ANE2c/s200/The+Call+to+Serve+1.jpg" width="126" /></a></div>
<span id="goog_1617307147"></span><span id="goog_1617307148"></span>This is not a sentiment (nor an author) usually mentioned by rabbis on Rosh Hashanah. He goes on with another unusual simile:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
As the year vanishes, the mighty waves of time are reaching for us and our life, like the traditional ark of the Bible is being borne forth upon the crest of angry, restless billows, tossed and driven by the relentless winds of fate. Nor does anyone know whither it will be carried, nor where it will finally find rest—whether upon the solid rock of Mt. Ararat of power and opulence or in the slimy vale of misfortune and defeat.</blockquote>
Rabbi Eisendrath then turns to the story (which “you all remember”) of Jacob on his journey from Beersheba to Haran, where he has a dream “wherein he beheld a silvery ladder with its base resting upon the earth and the top of it reached forth even unto the heavens, and behold lovely white clad angels of God were ascending and descending on it. And then, from over the top of it, the Lord appeared unto Jacob and spoke with him whereupon Jacob awoke out of his sleep and said ‘Surely this is the Lord’s abode and I knew it not …’ ” <br />
<br />
The rabbi goes on to make the connection with erev Rosh Hashanah:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Like Jacob of old, the sun of another year is set and the shadows of night have fallen about us. We too have arrived at a way station in our lives where we would fain tarry for an hour or two in the twilight of the new year to reflect, to survey the road that we have already traversed and to contemplate the rolling fields that lead into the future … </blockquote>
Rabbi Eisendrath is quite creative with his Biblical quotation and with its interpretation. There is no mention in the Bible of the ladder being silvery or of the angels being clad in white. And God does not appear to Jacob at the top of the ladder, but rather “the Lord stood beside him …” More important, the rabbi leaves out what it is that God communicates to Jacob: that “The land whereon thou liest, to thee will I give it, and to thy seed …” This text is, of course, a proof-text for the Jewish connection to the land of Israel and indeed for modern Zionism, notions which the then strongly anti-Zionist Maurice Eisendrath would not want to make part of a high holiday sermon. <br />
<br />
What the rabbi really wants to talk about is selfishness and self-aggrandizement. As his congregants look back upon the year that has passed, there are “those who like Jacob at the beginning of his career, in blind selfishness seek the end and aim of life in their own selves … whose sole ambition and only aspiration is to secure happiness and glory and satisfaction for themselves alone …” He goes on to reference the <i>Akeda</i>, “a lesson which teaches that we can never win the blessings and rewards of life through self-seeking alone.” How the story of the binding of Isaac teaches this, the rabbi does not explain. Rather, he continues on at great length as to our propensity for selfishness and self-seeking. (He also partially quotes the saying usually attributed to Hillel: "If I am only for myself, said the wise Akiba, what am I?") <br />
<br />
To this point in his sermon, the rabbi has been speaking in generalities. Indeed, from this sermon, it’s impossible to say with certainty where or in what year it was delivered; unusually for Rabbi Eisendrath, there are no specific references to time or place. We have even considered the possibility that this was a ‘generic’ Rosh Hashanah sermon given as a student assignment at Hebrew Union College. However, the reference to “the short year that I have been among you…”and subsequent observations about his congregation prove otherwise.<br />
<br />
The sermon itself reveals the spirit of a young man with enormous
chutzpah, ready to castigate his elders for their sins of selfishness and
greed as opposed to tending to the life of the spirit. His language is
strong. <br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
My observance of a year has revealed that the major trouble here in our own midst is our unwillingness—nay, I might say our inability to give anything of any kind be it of ourselves, of our moneys, of our time and our talents, to give anything whatsoever to any cause other than ourselves. We grumble when we are called upon to give of our wealth—not the traditional tenth which Jacob vowed to God—but a mere mite, a mere infinitesimal fraction sometimes of the moneys we spend on amusements, pleasures, and on the comforts, nay the luxuries with which we surround ourselves.</blockquote>
There is in the manuscript we have an interpolated page (of a different size and colour) which reads as follows:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
How disappointing it is to discover in our midst men—and women too—and often young men who are not yet affluent enough to contribute to things worth while—whose total selfishness is indeed because of their tender years—men and women too— and their youths, self indulgent sybarites who believe the world a playground and life a perpetual holiday, who sometimes spend more in one night around a green covered table than they would dream of giving to religion or education for an entire year, who have not yet been roused from their drunken stupor to the realization of the sobering truth that gambling, pleasure hunting, living on the periphery of life, possessing no serious purpose outside the self can lead but to ultimate moral ruin and spiritual death. </blockquote>
Elsewhere in the manuscript, Rabbi Eisendrath warns his congregants that “… unless you discover the error of your ways, this holiday season will be in vain and will serve but a hollow mockery not unlike … an evangelistic tent show.” This sermon, itself, has echoes of such an event: the castigation of the congregation in extreme language, the contrast between the sinful life and the spiritual life, quotations (sometimes inaccurate) from the Bible. From people who remember him, we know that Rabbi Eisendrath’s delivery was dramatic, even flamboyant. His congregants in West Virginia would probably be familiar with evangelistic tent shows and camp meetings. Their rabbi would not take it as a compliment to be likened to a camp meeting preacher, even if the comparison were apt.<br />
<br />
If his congregants do recognize the error of their ways, Rabbi Eisendrath (like the evangelist at a tent show?) tells them how they can redeem themselves:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Humble yourselves, depart from your selfish ways, think of others, share your possessions, give of your time and efforts and perceive how joyous it is to labor in an ideal and noble cause.</blockquote>
One noble cause, the only one the rabbi mentions, is the synagogue.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Why must you be begged and cajoled into service? Why do you consider it a favour to your rabbi or president to devote yourselves to its tasks—why do you deign on infrequent occasions to participate in its problems—why if not because of your hopeless egotism which considers yourselves as superior to your congregation, your religion, your fellow creatures?</blockquote>
This from a man who has spent but a year among his congregation. However, it would seem from his comments (or rant) that this particular synagogue is not doing too well:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Forget your petty jealousies and your iron-bound cliques—so selfishly conceived—that together we may breathe into these dead bones—a Temple with empty pews, a Sisterhood but partially supported, a Council gone a-begging, a B’nai Brith become moribund, a young people’s League grown restless … </blockquote>
The last part of the sermon returns to Jacob’s dream and how “as soon as we do not exist for ourselves alone but that each one of us is but a means to a higher end … Just so soon will Jacob’s dream be ours.” He goes on: “Awakened from your dream, may you be content like Jacob of old with your portion.” This is an odd conclusion, given that, at the conclusion of his dream, Jacob, while acknowledging that “Surely the Lord is in this place ..,” also is so self-absorbed that he strikes a deal with God whereby if God will be with him and give him bread to eat, and raiment to put on, so that he comes back to his father’s house in peace, then shall the Lord be his God. Rabbi Eisendrath was also certainly aware that, at the end of Jacob’s life, he tells the Egyptian Pharaoh that the days of his life have been “few and evil.” The rabbi may have wanted an example of a Biblical figure who dreamed great dreams, and Jacob certainly did that, but it is something of a stretch to say that he was content with his portion.<br />
<br />
It might be instructive to compare this erev Rosh Hashanah sermon with the first erev Rosh Hashanah sermon that Rabbi Eisendrath delivered <a href="https://eisendrathsermons.blogspot.ca/2011/07/rosh-hashana-1929.html" target="_blank">in Toronto</a>. Both sermons employ flowery language, long sentences, and extensive vocabulary that are hallmarks of any Eisendrath sermon. But the structure of his Toronto sermon is tighter and his sentences more disciplined and less repetitive. (The Charleston sermon could easily be condensed into one a third the length without doing any injustice to the content.) <br />
<br />
Most important, while the message of the Charleston sermon is unfocused, simply a castigation of his congregants for their selfishness and a plea for more attention to congregational needs, the Toronto sermon focuses on the need to ‘reform’ Jewish practices to be more in tune with modern times. However, even in Toronto, the rabbi uses strong, even excessive language to drive home a point. If in Charleston, he refers to the synagogue youth as spending their time at gambling tables in a drunken stupor, in Toronto he makes a plea for a new building by referring to “Our little children … choked and stifled in their narrow, sordid, and hazardous quarters … crying out to us to erect for them a structure conducive to the study of their faith.” Both scenarios, we suspect, are unlikely.<br />
<br />
This Rosh Hashanah sermon is clearly the product of an impetuous and impatient young preacher. By the time Maurice Eisendrath delivers his first Rosh Hashanah sermon in Toronto, his style has greatly matured, even if he employs many of the same rhetorical devices. We have in our possession several more sermons from Rabbi Eisendrath’s Charleston years. It is not always easy to date them or even to establish the order in which they were written. Nevertheless, it is possible to trace the evolution of a young rabbi’s maturing homiletical style from Charleston to Toronto. We may do this in future postings.<br />
<br />
The years in Charleston were, of course, the high point of Coolidge prosperity in the United States, the ethos of which we can get a glimpse of in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Such a society, consumed with money and what it could buy, was fodder for any preacher, and Maurice Eisendrath was no exception. He returned to the topics of greed, materialism, and frivolous behaviour while in Toronto. But a few short weeks after his arrival, the stock market crashed, and with it the society that he rails against in his Charleston sermon. In Toronto, unemployment and poverty became more suitable subjects on which a more mature Maurice Eisendrath preached to his congregants.<br />
<br />
MCUnknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7963306496774059436.post-30238407028763400842012-03-22T16:50:00.000-04:002016-04-12T11:53:55.921-04:00March 23, 1930<b>This Nordic Nonsense</b><br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8n0QuuZFRYDun2UVkVXL8KTkc-p-9VR9iyBl0J2HTCrjbzb9HcJS0YHbEEcSOfl9o5MF5ub5HPYReCquN4UjM7IdJl7o9e5lVCXfeU453fnTmenYhzRkbt1NTIE3XTRv2mPulsMpRvjRR/s1600/This+Nordic+Nonsense+page+1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8n0QuuZFRYDun2UVkVXL8KTkc-p-9VR9iyBl0J2HTCrjbzb9HcJS0YHbEEcSOfl9o5MF5ub5HPYReCquN4UjM7IdJl7o9e5lVCXfeU453fnTmenYhzRkbt1NTIE3XTRv2mPulsMpRvjRR/s320/This+Nordic+Nonsense+page+1.jpg" width="207" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
On Sunday, March 23, 1930 Rabbi Eisendrath delivered a sermon regarding the Ku Klux Klan. He was responding to events of the past month in Oakville, Ontario, a small town 20 miles west of Toronto. <br />
<br />
What had happened in the Town of Oakville was this: Isabel Jones, who was white, and Ira Johnson, whom her mother and the Klan regarded as black (he was later to assert that he was part Cherokee, part white), were engaged to be married. Isabel’s mother was upset; she turned to the Klan for help. On the evening of February 28, 1930, between fifty and seventy-five gowned men arrived in Oakville. They planted a cross on a downtown street and set it on fire. They found the couple at the home of Ira’s aunt. Isabel was driven to her mother’s home and then taken and placed in the care of a Salvation Army captain. Ira was placed in a separate car and driven back to his house. A cross was nailed to the aunt’s home and set ablaze. Ira’s mother, who was present, was warned “that if Ira…was ever seen walking down the street with a white girl again the Klan would attend to him.”<br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
As they left town, the convoy of Klan members was stopped by the Oakville Chief of Police. But he took no action against them. He recognized several of them as “prominent Hamilton businessmen.” (Hamilton is a city 20 miles west of Oakville.) He shook their hands and let them continue on their way. This was a group that described itself as "Invisible Empire Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Canada, Hamilton Clan No. 10, Hamilton Ont.". Organizationally, the Klan in Canada was separate from its American namesake, but its purpose, save for a professed mission to protect Canadian or British civilization, rather than American, was the same.<br />
<br />
A provincial investigation ensued, and three men were brought to trial. Each was charged with “having his face masked or blackened, or being otherwise disguised by night, without lawful excuse.” This was a section of the Criminal Code meant to prevent burglaries, hardly suitable for the offences that had occurred. <br />
<br />
Rabbi Eisendrath, in an editorial in the <i>Canadian Jewish Review</i>, worried that the accused might escape conviction on the technical ground that they had no intention of committing burglary. [1] <br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
It seems to us that a grave responsibility rests upon those seated in judgment upon the Klan's recent "peaceful demonstration" in Oakville, and those of us familiar with its bigotry, its boycotts, its lynchings and its savage, medieval, primitive intolerance in the United States cannot but pray that technicalities will not rule the day, but that the full spirit of a law intended to safeguard ordinary civil rights will be exercised, that the Klan's action will be unmistakenly and unambiguously branded as without the law, that the perpetrators of this ugly, night prowling, and hooded demonstration be summarily punished …. </blockquote>
At trial the evidence was insufficient to prove that two of the men had been masked; they were acquitted. Only one person, chiropractor William A. Phillips, was convicted. Although the maximum penalty was five years in prison, he was fined only $50. <br />
<br />
This was the state of affairs as Rabbi Eisendrath stood to deliver his sermon. There was no need for him to describe all that had occurred. From newspaper coverage his audience was well aware of the events. Rabbi Eisendrath launched directly into a condemnation of the Klan, and the threat posed by its program and philosophy. He set himself two tasks: to caution his Canadian listeners against apathy and indifference, and to present to them the “vapidity and malignity” of the Klan’s doctrine of Protestant white supremacy. <br />
<br />
For an authoritative statement of Klan doctrine, Rabbi Eisendrath referred to an essay by Hiram Wesley Evans, “Imperial Wizard and Emperor, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan” [2] That doctrine could be boiled down to this: that the Klan represents the Nordic race, “the race which, with all its faults, has given the world almost the whole of modern civilization;” that in America (and in Canada too, the Canadian Klan would say) the Nordic race is threatened by foreign races; and that “the Klan is organized to defend our loved ones and our culture from the danger of these foreign races.” From such assertions the Klan derived its well-known prejudices: against Catholics, against negroes, and against Jews. Catholics are dominated by non-Nordic Italian popes; negroes can never claim equality with whites; Jews stubbornly refuse to assimilate.<br />
<br />
Rabbi Eisendrath was emphatic that such principles constituted a threat to the very existence of Canada. His language is possibly the most passionate, most angry of all his sermons that we have read.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Impudent in action, sinister in motive, bestial in conception, vicious in method, pernicious in purpose, flagrant and frenzied and fanatic in the execution of its illegal, its irreligious, its un-British designs, it threatens the moral integrity and stability of our nation, and unless summarily and speedily brought to justice - by the prostitution of the ideals of this Dominion, it will turn one people against the other in hatred and contempt - Protestant against Catholic, white against negro, Christian against Jew, until even this wondrously cosmopolitan land will be torn by inner dissension and strife, until it perish in the blood of its own internal feud.</blockquote>
He made it clear that there was no scientific basis for accepting the racial categories spoken of by the Klan, or for believing in white superiority.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Anthropology to be sure is the youngest of the sciences and although it has yet come to no definite conclusions with regard to such highly complicated problems as the various races of men, still it is absolutely certain according to Professor [Alfred Cort] Haddon, … that "there is no such thing as racial culture. The culture of any given people is primarily dependent upon their mode of life which is itself largely an expression of geographical conditions,” and the division of men into races, Nordic, Alpine, Caucasian, Mongolian, Semitic, etc. is solely for the purpose of convenience as a means of categorizing different groups - but a pure racial type, he emphatically concludes, exists purely in our imagination. And Prof. [George Amos] Dorsey goes him one better when he states that "we have no anatomical nor psychological evidence which can prove that physically or mentally the white race is the highest type of man." …</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Now I have no objection to anyone claiming that he is better than his neighbour. That is his prerogative; any man has an inalienable right to make a fool of himself, but when such sentiments are wholly false and set brother against brother and destroy all discipline and co-operation, then they become in very truth not merely a nuisance but a positive menace.</blockquote>
Rabbi Eisendrath provided numerous examples of contributions to civilization made by non-Nordic people.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
It was the Renaissance, born in Italy, that ushered in our modern day; it was southern Europe, Italy and Spain that discovered the New World, and, by the way, it was a Catholic at that who explored it and gave it its name. It was a Pole, Copernicus, who revolutionized the whole astronomic thinking of the world and prepared the way for the conquest of scientific thought.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
And it is indeed a moot point as to whether the art and music of Italy even today are inferior to those of England; as to whether the literature of Dostoievski and Turgenev, the literature of Russia, is so far beneath the standard of Norway and Scandinavia. Indeed, race is not the measure of all things. </blockquote>
The rabbi, who was more knowledgeable about the American scene than his Canadian audience, named several notable black Americans: activist and scholar W.E.B. Du Bois, actor Charles Gilpin, tenor and composer Roland Hayes, educator Booker T. Washington , performer and composer J. Rosamond Johnson, and poet Countee Cullen. All, he took care to point out, had risen to prominence within sixty years of the end of slavery.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The fact of the matter is the negro has made good and has taken his rightful place in the industrial, educational, cultural, and religious life of America and thus has become himself the most potent demonstration of the truth that there are no permanently superior or inferior races, that even the lowliest and most backward when given the proper opportunities rise to heights of eminence and culture.</blockquote>
It is jarring today to realize that when this sermon was delivered in 1930, the complete abolition of slavery in the United States, which occurred in 1865, was still within living memory of some citizens.<br />
<br />
Fear, the rabbi believed, was at the root of these demonic behaviours – “fear of losing jobs, of being declassed and degraded, of relinquishing fond hopes for the future.” <br />
<br />
Rabbi Eisendrath’s criticism was not only for members of the Klan. He warned of “tacit submission” to Klan gospel and denounced those who publicly condemn the Klan for its tactics, but privately approve of its goals. <br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Somehow too many of us though violently opposed to the lawlessness which the Klan has practiced silently condone the work which it seeks to achieve. The Klan is saying and doing those very things which myriads of our fellow citizens actually believe.</blockquote>
The end of the manuscript is unclear. There is a paragraph about racial conflict in Asia and Africa and then a quotation from a poem by John Oxenham. Rabbi Eisendrath often ended his sermons with a quotation from a poem. But then there is an additional page. “Append to last page from Zangwill,” he has written, followed by an excerpt, slightly reworded, from Israel Zangwill’s play “The Melting Pot.” This suggests that Rabbi Eisendrath was considering two different endings, and the manuscript we have is in not quite final form. <br />
<br />
<u>Aftermath</u><br />
<br />
A report of Rabbi Eisendrath’s sermon appeared in the Hamilton <i>Spectator</i> the next day, “Rabbi Calls K.K.K. Lawless Body.” It was also reported in the papers that Isabel Jones and Ira Johnson had married on March 22. They remained in Oakville and raised three children.<br />
<br />
Phillips appealed his conviction and sentence and the Attorney General counter-appealed. On appeal the sentence was increased to three months in jail. Ontario Chief Justice Sir William Mulock who delivered the decision stated, regarding Phillips and his companions: <br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
[T]hey committed not only an illegal offence as regards [Isabel Jones], but also a crime against the majesty of the law. Every person in Canada is entitled to the protection of the law and is subject to the law. It is the supreme dominant authority controlling the conduct of everyone and no person, however exalted or high his power, is entitled to do with impunity what that lawless mob did. The attack of the accused and his companions upon the rights of this girl was an attempt to overthrow the law of the land, and in its place to set up mob law, lynch law, to substitute lawlessness for law enforcement which obtains in civilized countries. Mob law, such as is disclosed in this case, is a step in that direction, and like a venomous serpent, whenever its horrid head appears it must be killed, not merely scotched. …</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
We are therefore of the opinion that the monetary fine imposed by the magistrate was a wholly inadequate punishment, a travesty of justice, and we substitute therefor imprisonment for a term of three months. This being the first case of this nature that has come before this Court, we have dealt with the offence with great leniency and the sentence here imposed is not to be regarded as a precedent in the event of a repetition of such offence.</blockquote>
Rabbi Eisendrath praised the decision in the <i>Canadian Jewish Review</i>. [3] “Worthy of highest commendation and widest publicity is the forthright and unequivocal decision recently handed down by Sir William Mulock, Chief Justice of Ontario …” But he was not content that the other members of the mob received no punishment.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Surely if the inadequate fine originally imposed on Phillips was a "travesty of justice," this imprisonment of a single man out of a mob of over fifty is likewise a miscarriage of law. It is a pity indeed that such a ringing judgment as was read by Sir Mulock was not passed on all the accessories to the deed.</blockquote>
Constance Backhouse devotes a chapter of her book <i>Colour-Coded: A Legal History of Racism in Canada </i>to the events in Oakville, and names Rabbi Eisendrath as one of the parties whose efforts impelled the Attorney General of Ontario to commence legal proceedings against the Klan. [4] Regarding the long-term effects, she writes:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The ramifications of the KKK raid, the legal proceedings, Dr. Phillip’s conviction, and the increased sentence were substantial. Some have pronounced the Oakville trial a symbolic death-knell for the KKK in Canada. They suggest the glare of publicity, the official intrusion into KKK affairs, and the ringing condemnation of Klan methods from senior governmental and judicial circles, all combined to sap the growth of the hate-mongering movement. Others have suggested that the undeniable diminishment of the Canadian Klan was due more to its own internal and structural problems. Whatever the reasons, publicly discernible Klan activity dropped off significantly in the 1930s, not to revive until the 1960s.</blockquote>
Rabbi Eisendrath continued to be engaged with issues of racial justice throughout his life. His 1964 book <i>Can Faith Survive?</i> has a chapter “The Racial Revolution – From Law to Love.” In 1965 he joined Martin Luther King in a famous march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama.<br />
<br />
HR.<br />
<br />
[1] “Within or Without the Law?”, <i>Canadian Jewish Review</i>, March 14, 1930.<br />
<br />
[2] "The Klan's Fight for Americanism", <i>The North American Review</i>, March-April-May, 1926, pp. 33-63. <br />
<br />
[3] “Justice in Ontario – Speedy and Sure”, <i>Canadian Jewish Review</i>, April 25, 1930.<br />
<br />
[4] Backhouse, Constance, <i>Colour-Coded: A Legal History of Racism in Canada, 1900-1950</i>, Chapter 6.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7963306496774059436.post-19488215921914689672011-08-11T08:36:00.000-04:002019-10-26T20:39:16.086-04:00The Divine Betrothal<b>Installation sermon, Friday night, November 1, 1929</b><br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJglM636ZSCZPZJKHQARkMH0dsF1jZjtPF0XpKlJl59I05hRCYWvVbZbBhXwBhMK5nqBtUUMCOf8YjyfxH_9b0Xmw_cNAyXV52YvA5k8i23aOGLiHP8TLQYO9AVxPUlSZEAf27uLaxqVcA/s1600/Office+Lens+20151112-213116.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJglM636ZSCZPZJKHQARkMH0dsF1jZjtPF0XpKlJl59I05hRCYWvVbZbBhXwBhMK5nqBtUUMCOf8YjyfxH_9b0Xmw_cNAyXV52YvA5k8i23aOGLiHP8TLQYO9AVxPUlSZEAf27uLaxqVcA/s320/Office+Lens+20151112-213116.jpg" width="233" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Rabbi Eisendrath in 1930</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Although the occasion of his installation on a Friday night was not the first opportunity for his congregation to hear Maurice Eisendrath, it was an opportunity for them to hear just how their new rabbi viewed his relationship to them. Most of them would have heard Rabbi Eisendrath preach on the high holy days. They would already have seen and heard a tall twenty-seven year-old man with dark brilliantined hair parted in the centre, sporting a black moustache and rimless spectacles—and no head covering!-- lecture them on their materialistic behavior and their need to build a new synagogue. They would, doubtless, also be familiar with the community brouhaha that had arisen, even prior to their rabbi’s arrival in the city, over an article that he published in the <i>Canadian Jewish Review </i> prompting calls from some for him to be dismissed from the pulpit from which he had yet to preach. (More about that later.)<br />
<br />
If the sight of their new rabbi was a surprise to the members of Holy Blossom, Holy Blossom and Toronto must have been a surprise to the rabbi. Maurice Eisendrath was the son of a culturally assimilated German Jewish family in Chicago, and he himself was brought up in a Reform Temple. At age sixteen, he went to study for eight years at the University of Cincinatti and Hebrew Union College. Cincinatti was the heartland of the American Reform movement. One of his student pulpits was in Muskogee, Oklahoma, which was, in the rabbi’s own words, a “virtually non-Jewish milieu.” (It was there that he met his wife, Rosa.) Rabbi Eisendrath’s first pulpit was in Charleston, West Virginia, another town with a small Jewish population.<br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a> Toronto, on the other hand, had, by 1929, a large and vibrant Jewish population, and Holy Blossom was the only Reform congregation in town and one of only three in Canada. The majority of Toronto Jews (including many Holy Blossom members) came from Eastern European, Yiddish speaking background, and they were fervent in their Zionism. (Rabbi W. Gunther Plaut, one of Rabbi Eisendrath’s successors at Holy Blossom, recalls in his memoirs that, when he came to Toronto from Minnesota in 1961, he was astonished to discover that members of his Board still made jokes in Yiddish.) The congregation that Maurice Eisendrath addressed on November 1, 1929 was quite unlike those of Charleston, Muskogee, Cincinatti, or even his hometown of Chicago.<br />
<br />
It is in these circumstances that on Friday evening, November 1, 1929, Rabbi Eisendrath formally accepts the call to Holy Blossom Temple. [1] He begins by referring to the story of the prophet Hosea and his faithless wife, Gomer. He calls the story (with which he presumed all his listeners were "fully familiar") “the immortal saga of an all-consuming love.” The story, he points out, is an allegory of the love between God and Israel: “God ... in his all-consuming love would ever pursue Israel through whatever depths of degradation she might wander and return her unto himself in never-ending love.”<br />
<br />
The rabbi likens the connection between Hosea and Gomer, and between God and Israel, to the connection between rabbi and congregation. “What then,” he asks, “is the purpose of this solemn and impressive service if it mark not the sacred betrothal of congregation and rabbi in bonds of unbounded love and selfless devotion one to the other?” He quotes the words of Hosea often repeated at wedding ceremonies: “I shall betroth thee unto me in Truth and thou shall love the Lord.”<br />
<br />
The rabbi does not extend the parable so far as to imply to his congregation that they, like Gomer and like the people of Israel are faithless, but he does suggest that the rabbi’s task is to bring his people to faithfulness to the ideals of their religion. His task as a rabbi is to proclaim “not the passions, prejudices, and predilections of men, but the ideal as the prophet Hosea and his contemporaries, by virtue of their religious genius were privileged to observe it, the ideal of perfect justice, perfect truth, and perfect goodwill, insofar as I may be blessed to see it.”<br />
<br />
The next part of his address is both a compliment to the free pulpit of Holy Blossom and the right of the rabbi “to champion unpopular though righteous causes,” and a consideration of just how difficult it is for a rabbi to do this in the face of opposition and temptation. <br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
I know that in your midst there are those who will never permit this ideal of Holy Blossom to be besmirched and to be drageed into the mire of mere opportunism and pleasant compromise. Some there will be, no doubt who will urge the easier way, who will tempt us to temporize and plead with us to please, to tickle the ears of the multitutdes and tread upon the whims and caprices of none. But such will we, who are entralled by the prophetic vision of Justice, of Truth, of Love, we, who will have burned into our memories this sacred betrothal night, such will we ignore, notwithstanding the bait, the rewards with which they would lure us from our cause: inceased budgets and membership, lowered mortgages and cheap acclaim.</blockquote>
We do not know if this remarkable passage refers to an actual event in which the economic consequences of the rabbi’s views were discussed with him. It is certainly a reference to the controversy that had erupted regarding the rabbi’s pacifist musings in the <i>Canadian Jewish Review</i> on September 20, 1929, and there can be no doubt that his congregants that night understood that he was referencing this. [2] He had written in that article <br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Soldiers, cannon, bayonets, and military law, however, will not permanently remedy the situation [in Palestine]. It were well that we who, throughout the ages, have flaunted at our adversaries the prophetic dictum, ‘Not by might, nor by power, but by My spirit’ heed the selfsame injunction.</blockquote>
This editorial was written in opposition to the efforts by some members of the Toronto Jewish community “to press the British into accepting a brigade of young Canadian Jews as part of a proposed Jewish Legion to safeguard the Jews in Zion.” [3] In writing this the rabbi had, as he recalls in his memoirs, “… committed … the most unpardonable sin in Toronto. I supported the so-called ‘Magnes line,’ the course urged by Judah Leon Magnes, renowned American Reform rabbi who was then President of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He and his group, known as the Ichud, advocated reconciliation with the Arabs and a binational (Jewish-Arab) state in Palestine.” <br />
<br />
The rabbi, according to Rabbi Eisendrath, must first decide and then proclaim the truth. He is not a shoddy imitation of the parish priest “hired to carry censers and to ooze sweetness.” Nor is he to be “merely a great preacher ... to flatter and placate the paltry demands of his petulant parishioners ...” He must, rather, courageously preach the truth no matter the consequences. He must make the synagogue a house of prayer for all people and, like Hosea, extend mercy to all the children of God.<br />
<br />
Rabbi Eisendrath closes his sermon with this uncited paraphrase of Deuteronomy 29: 13-14: “Not alone with you standing before me this day did I seal this covenant said God unto his people Israel—but likewise with those who are not in your midst this day—yea every living creature would he bring into this divine and holy bond.”<br />
<br />
Is the rabbi suggesting that “every living creature” is part of the covenant between God and Israel? A more usual interpretation of the text is that the covenant is between Israelites standing on Mount Sinai and their as yet unborn descendants. What the rabbi more likely is suggesting is that he sees himself as ministering to everyone in the community in which he lives, Jews and non-Jews alike. He pledges that he will be an<i> or l’goyim</i>: a light to the nations. <br />
<br />
Rabbi Eisendrath returns at the very end of his sermon to the marriage metaphor, saying, “I betroth thee unto me this night, I betroth thee unto me, my already beloved congregation, in justice and righteousness, in kindness and love, I betroth thee unto me in truth, as companions, as friends, as devoted brothren, as lovers in very truth… ,” and he asks the same commitment from his congregants.<br />
<br />
We have no recorded testimony from the congregants of Holy Blossom of their reaction to this installation address. We do know that Rabbi Eisendrath remained with them for the next fourteen years. Many people vocally disagreed with the rabbi’s opinions, particularly on Zionism, but his congregation (and many others, Jew and non-Jew) attended his Sunday morning lectures, and he had the respect and admiration, if not always the agreement, of everyone in the community.<br />
<br />
Rabbi Eisendrath, for his part, was grateful for the opportunity to speak his mind. As he writes in his memoirs, referring to this controversy surrounding his first days in Toronto:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The august board of Holy Blossom Congregation would not be panicked, nor would its members be so unprincipled as to jeapordize a rabbi’s entire career because of a single unpopular statement. That was the first of many evidences that the members of Holy Blossom Congregation would invariably support a ‘free pulpit.’ </blockquote>
We have heard a few installation addresses from Rabbi Eisendrath’s successors, both senior and junior rabbis, but none like this! These addresses tend to be short and appreciative of the opportunities given the rabbi in his or her new congregation. They are not occasions for the rabbi to chastize the congregation. Nor is the new rabbi likely to compare the relationship between him or her and the congregation to a marital union. Rabbi Eisendrath, however, was never one to avoid controversy, even on a celebratory occasion such as his installation.<br />
<br />
MC<br />
<br />
[1] The rabbi’s installation was in fact a weekend-long event . The other speaker on Friday evening was Dr. Felix A. Levy of Emanuel Congregation, Chicago, Rabbi Eisendrath’s childhood rabbi. The Saturday morning sermon was given by Rabbi Harry J. Stern of Temple Emanu-El, Montreal (who served that congregation from 1927 to 1972). Ironically, given the controversy surrounding Rabbi Eisendrath, Rabbi Stern was a life-long follower of Ze’ev Jabotinsky and Revisionist Zionism. The speaker on Sunday morning was Rabbi Eisendrath’s predecessor at Holy Blossom, Rabbi Ferdinand M. Isserman, then of Temple Israel, St. Louis.<br />
<br />
[2] Another evidence of Holy Blossom’s free pulpit was the board’s willingness to permit its male members—and especially the rabbi—to worship bareheaded. Unlike almost all American Reform synagogues, Holy Blossom (which, when Rabbi Eisendrath arrived, had been officially Reform for only about eight years) had retained the custom of men’s wearing yarmulkas during prayer. One of the rabbi’s first acts on his arrival, just before Rosh Hashana, with the far from unanimous approval of the board, was to make the wearing of head coverings optional for congregants, and, to the shock of its members, to himself lead services on the holy days without a yarmulka. He notes in his memoirs that, by Succot, all but a few of the men had abandoned head coverings.<br />
<br />
We are not sure if the rabbi would be amused or annoyed by the fact that today at Holy Blossom, all but a few old-time members wear kippot, and many also wear tallitot. (Many women also wear kippot and tallitot.) Our clergy have worn both since the late 1970s. We even have a few regular attendees of weekday shacharit services who don tefillin, a practice that would be totally foreign to Rabbi Eisendrath.<br />
<br />
[3] Quotes not otherwise identified are from Rabbi Eisendrath’s memoir, <i>Can Faith Survive?</i>, pages 52-53.<br />
<br />
MC.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7963306496774059436.post-35644905200072660802011-08-10T22:23:00.000-04:002019-10-26T20:47:51.423-04:00Charleston, West Virginia; Toronto and Chicago<b>Jesus and Christianity</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
In his memoirs, <i>Can Faith Survive?</i> Rabbi Eisendrath recalls the negative responses that he received from two addresses that he delivered on the topic of Jesus. The first was given at Holy Blossom Temple in Toronto in 1934, and the second he delivered at a Biennial convention of Reform Jews in Chicago in 1963. Rabbi Eisendrath is particularly disheartened by the negative reaction to the latter address. He had hoped that in the more open society of 1960’s America, the era of Pope John XXIII and a revised Roman Catholic attitude towards Jews, Jews would be open to re-evaluating their attitudes towards Jesus.<br />
<br />
"How long," Rabbi Eisendrath asked in his Biennial address,"before we can admit that [Jesus’s] influence was a beneficial one—not only to the pagans but to the Jews of his time as well, and that only those who later took his name in vain profaned his teaching?"<br />
<br />
The rabbi goes on in his memoirs to encourage the teachings of Jesus in Religious Schools and synagogue services. "What conceivable objection could there be ... to including the majestic sentences of the Sermon on the Mount among the other post-Biblical readings in our synagogues?" Further, “... I would teach such moving stories and utterances [as the Good Samaritan] diligently unto our children along those of Moses and Hillel."<br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a>In fact, Rabbi Eisendrath’s fascination with Jesus goes back much further than 1963 or 1934. We have, in manuscript form, no fewer than seventeen sermons on Jesus and Christianity written between 1929 and 1931. It’s not an exaggeration to say that the topic was, for the rabbi, something of an obsession in his early rabbinate. Although with the coming of the Great Depression, the rise of Hitler, and the ensuing World War, Rabbi Eisendrath preached less about Jesus and Christianity, this obsession never really left him, as evidenced by his Biennial address and the chapter in <i>Can Faith Survive?</i><br />
<br />
It is perhaps not surprising that Rabbi Eisendrath would be so obsessed with Jesus and Christianity. The world he lived in was Christian. Canada in the 1920s and 30s was much more an identifiably Christian country than it is today. Jews who wanted to be successful in business and the professions had to break into a decidedly Christian environment. Reform Jews in Toronto were, in many cases, a generation ahead of their Orthodox coreligionists in this respect, and they were attempting to leave the world of their parents behind and make good in the wider Christian world, yet without abandoning their Jewish faith. It’s no accident that, in 1897, Holy Blossom built its new synagogue structure, not in the centre of Jewish Toronto, but close by several of the establishment churches of the day. It’s also no accident that, forty years later, Holy Blossom’s new building, which Rabbi Eisendrath urged upon the congregation, was among the most imposing houses of worship in the city.<br />
<br />
Given the desire of his congregants to work (and, to some extent, socialize) in a Christian world, while at the same time retaining their Judaism, we can begin to understand the rabbi’s concern with Christianity. He wanted to demonstrate to Jews that the faith of their neighbours is rooted in their own, but at the same time, he wanted them to understand that the two faiths are distinct. He wanted them to be respectful of Christianity, but to remain Jews. Likewise, he wanted Christians to understand that Jesus came from a Jewish background that still held validity for Jews in the contemporary world.<br />
<br />
The earliest sermons on Christianity among our collection were delivered in the United States, at Rabbi Eisendrath’s first congregation, Temple Israel in Charleston, West Virginia, a pulpit he held from the time of his ordination in 1927 until he came to Holy Blossom in 1929.<br />
<br />
Three sermons, probably given on successive weeks in 1929, are worth looking at: "Is Judaism Superior to Christianity?" "Is Christianity Superior to Judaism?" and "Must Judaism and Christianity Be Surpassed by Humanism?" These sermons are a response to a series of sermons with slightly different titles given by John Haynes Holmes, minister of the Community Church in New York City in 1928. Rev. Holmes' sermons, we have recently discovered, were titled "Where Judaism is superior to Christianity", "Where Christianity is superior to Judaism" and "The religion superior to both Judaism and Christianity."<br />
<br />
<b>John Haynes Holmes</b><br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://izquotes.com/images/john-haynes-holmes.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://izquotes.com/images/john-haynes-holmes.jpg" width="246" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Rev. John Haynes Holmes</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Because Rabbi Eisendrath refers frequently in his sermons (not only these three but many others over the years) and seems to have been influenced by Holmes’s views of both Christianity and Judaism, it is worth a moment to look at this man and his life’s work.<br />
<br />
Born in 1879, John Haynes Holmes was a generation older than Maurice Eisendrath. He was ordained a Unitarian minister by Harvard Divinity School in 1904 (when Maurice Eisendrath was two years old). Like Rabbi Eisendrath, he was an ardent pacifist, especially during the First World War, a position that earned him opprobrium from other Unitarians, including former President William Howard Taft, at the time president of the Central Conference of Unitarians. Holmes was also a committed socialist, a position with which Rabbi Eisendrath would have sympathized, as he often inveighed against the evils of commerce and materialism.<br />
<br />
Holmes was a co-founder of both the NAACP and the ACLU. In 1924, he debated Clarence Darrow on the topic of prohibition, taking the side in favor of the continuance of the practice in the United States. We have a copy of this debate from Rabbi Eisendrath’s personal library. (We don’t know the rabbi’s opinion on the subject, but we do know that Holy Blossom Temple was, except for the ceremonial use of wine, ‘dry’ until 1960, long after the rabbi had left.)<br />
<br />
John Haynes Holmes was Minister of the Unitarian Church of the Messiah from 1907—1918, at which point he insisted that, as a condition of his remaining there, the church rename itself the Community Church of New York and become just that, ministering to anyone, Unitarian or not, who wished to join, and becoming “a living center for developing work outside the community.” Holmes remained as senior minister there until 1949.<br />
<br />
Early in the twentieth century, Holmes worked closely with Rabbi Stephen S. Wise to clean up the civic life of Mayor Jimmy Walker’s New York City. Their friendship has been recorded in a book by Hermann Voss, <i>Rabbi and Minister: The Friendship of Stephen S. Wise and John Haynes Holmes</i>.<br />
<br />
In a 1921 sermon, Holmes declared “The Greatest Man in the World” to be Mohandas Gandhi. In 1931, in a sermon in Toronto, Rabbi Eisendrath gave Gandhi the same honorific. In 1961, John Haynes Holmes and Maurice Eisendrath were jointly awarded the Gandhi Peace Prize for their efforts in promoting “Internal peace, universal socio-economic justice, [and] global environmental harmony.”<br />
<br />
It will be interesting for us to explore, through a search of their respective archives, what meetings or communication existed between Holmes and Eisendrath before 1961. It’s clear that Rabbi Eisendrath was deeply influenced by the teaching and preaching of John Haynes Holmes.<br />
<br />
John Haynes Holmes died in 1964, Maurice Eisendrath in 1974.<br />
<br />
<b>"Is Judaism Superior to Christianity?"</b><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2rUawCu5s2ENUVHjCh-WooNYnRHPh28y7Cb2fnXPLrX0RiyAm6lqcpl4tKEozBOJtd5sns0EooeZkuWNaLHZrcF3MN0Vi2z9Nyt5cNpWh01CgwvpqeCvkGoBxadMv8gFp-45OI9o0z07I/s1600/Is+Judaism+Superior+to+Christianity+1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2rUawCu5s2ENUVHjCh-WooNYnRHPh28y7Cb2fnXPLrX0RiyAm6lqcpl4tKEozBOJtd5sns0EooeZkuWNaLHZrcF3MN0Vi2z9Nyt5cNpWh01CgwvpqeCvkGoBxadMv8gFp-45OI9o0z07I/s320/Is+Judaism+Superior+to+Christianity+1.jpg" width="202" /></a><b><br /></b>
This was title of the first of Rabbi Eisdendrath's responses to Rev. Holmes. Although the title appears on the handwritten manuscript, we do not know if it was ever used when the sermon was delivered. Nevertheless, the difference between the titles of the two sermons is telling. Rev. Holmes asserts that there are aspects of Judaism that are superior to Christianity; Rabbi Eisendrath puts his title in the form of a question, postponing any assertion to later in his address.<br />
<br />
It’s clear that Rabbi Eisendrath had either been to the Community Church in New York City and heard Rev. Holmes preach or that he had read Holmes’s sermons. It’s remarkable that even a minster as liberal as John Haynes Holmes would, in 1929, deliver a lecture on the superiority of Judaism to Christianity. Of course, the minister’s subsequent sermons may have given a more nuanced view of the matter.<br />
<br />
<span style="white-space: pre;">R</span>abbi Eisendrath begins his sermon with encomiums to Rev. Holmes, and then he goes on to say that any errors in Holmes's evaluation of Judaism is due to his confusion of Orthodox with Liberal Judaism. (This is a remarkable statement, and, in our view, an unnecessary put-down of Orthodoxy on the rabbi’s part.)<br />
<br />
Rabbi Eisendrath then outlines the three arguments that Holmes gives for his conclusion that Judaism is superior to Christianity. (It would be more appropriate to say the three ways in which Judaism is superior to Christianity.)<br />
<br />
1.<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Judaism is superior because of its emphasis on the moral law, as opposed to Christianity’s emphasis on theological belief. Conduct, in Holmes’s view, is more important than faith, law more important than creed.<br />
<br />
2.<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Judaism is concerned with life in this world; Christianity is concerned with life beyond the grave. According to Holmes, a majority of Christians have little concern with anything except heaven and hell.<br />
<br />
3.<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Judaism is about community; Christianity is about individual salvation. Holmes contrasts John Bunyan’s <i>Pilgrim’s Progress </i>with the Hebrew Bible. In <i>Pilgrim’s Progress</i>, Christian (a character in the story), at the counsel of Evangelist (another character), flees the doomed city to save his soul. In the Bible, Abraham argues with God to save the city of Sodom if there be but ten righteous men in the city. In defence of his emphasis on community, Holmes asserts, “... if this make us [the Community Church] more a synagogue than a church, I am not ashamed but proud.”<br />
<br />
In responding to Holmes’s arguments, Rabbi Eisendrath emphasizes that, while Judaism may be superior to Christianity, Jews don’t always live up to its standards. Jews need to practice their faith. In the same way, liberal Christians will come to bring these [Jewish] truths to their Christian faith. Christianity, the rabbi reminds his audience, was Judaism, and Christianity is rediscovering Judaism.<br />
<br />
Holmes, as Rabbi Eisendrath so often does, notes the progression from legalistic Judaism to the prophets. The rabbi quotes Holmes’s statement that it is “from the Jew that the moral idealism of the race has come and insofar as this idealism is central to the problem of human life upon the earth—I affirm that Judaism is superior to Christianity.”<br />
<br />
Rabbi Eisendrath goes on to comment that “Christianity is a system of salvation for a future life. Remove this element from the texture of Christian faith you would have nothing left just as you would have nothing left in Judaism should you efface its vision of the day when the Lord will cause right and peace to spring forth before all the nations.”<br />
<br />
The rabbi also notes other elements in Judaism “which Holmes had no time to consider”: the absence of original sin (a “pessimistic conviction”), faith in the future rather than the past, and the sense that the divine pervades all things. Once again, however, the rabbi stresses that it is Judaism, not Jews, in which these qualities reside. He castigates Jews who elevate ritual above the moral law.<br />
<br />
Rabbi Eisendrath encourages Christians to rediscover their roots in Judaism, in the Old Testament (his term) and the prophets. He notes that the inscription on the wall of the Congressional Library is from Micah, not the New Testament: the injunction "to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God."<br />
<br />
<b>"Is Christianity Superior to Judaism?"</b><br />
<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHty96sFrtYPAv0wow9ciQKsq3-OhB6GB3LIOzG24eIomQ_q2vWLZA0EVa8VBvXdI8e3tYBj2W5pOu5vSMICaBdLbLQgt3UxvfZVGz8AizV4JGPlWGHcMtEa2m_SMbqBO2QgNgHtk5RHKv/s1600/Is+Christianity+Superior+to+Judaism+1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHty96sFrtYPAv0wow9ciQKsq3-OhB6GB3LIOzG24eIomQ_q2vWLZA0EVa8VBvXdI8e3tYBj2W5pOu5vSMICaBdLbLQgt3UxvfZVGz8AizV4JGPlWGHcMtEa2m_SMbqBO2QgNgHtk5RHKv/s320/Is+Christianity+Superior+to+Judaism+1.jpg" width="202" /></a>The second sermon in this series is again a response by Rabbi Eisendrath to a sermon given at The Community Church in New York by John Haynes Holmes. This sermon of the rabbi’s presents us archivists with some special problems. First, the handwriting in the manuscript is in places difficult to decipher. Second, the rabbi often uses incomplete words and short forms, and third, his sentences are often poorly constructed. It’s as if (and it may in fact have been the case) he were writing this manuscript for himself, to be finalized and typed at a later date.<br />
<br />
The topic must have presented a conundrum for Rabbi Eisendrath. Although he regarded Jesus as among the pantheon of Jewish prophets, as a rabbi he could not agree with the proposition that Christianity is superior to Judaism; Rev. Holmes, maverick minister that he was, could so agree, even while arguing that Judaism is in some ways superior to Christianity. In fact, Rabbi Eisendrath announces at the outset of his sermon that he will take issue with John Haynes Holmes, even while acknowledging him as “the noblest exemplar of religion.”<br />
<br />
Holmes sees Jesus as a paragon of human behavior, “the noblest personal embodiment of religious idealism the world has ever seen.” This characterization disappoints Rabbi Eisendrath. While he is prepared to say that Jesus was a great prophet, he is not prepared to say that he was the greatest prophet. Jesus may be the embodiment of religion for Christendom, but he cannot be that for Jews. (Nor, he adds, for India, for whom Buddha is that, or China, for whom Confucius is that. The rabbi’s understanding of eastern religions may be less than his insight into Judaism and Christianity.) However, Rabbi Eisendrath avers that Holmes is correct in saying that Jesus should be included among the prophets.<br />
<br />
Rabbi Eisendrath also says that Homes is correct in his suggestion that Jesus was right in his ranking faith above ritual, but that Holmes is wrong in his interpretation of the principles of Judaism. That is to say, Holmes is right in his recognition of Jesus’s justified critique of Jewish practice but wrong in seeing this as a critique of Jewish principle. All of which, of course, is consistent with Rabbi Eisendrath’s conception of Reform Judaism as a religion that emphasizes principle over practice and ethics over ritual. Just which principles trump which practices he does not, at this point, elaborate on.<br />
<br />
The rabbi goes on to say that whatever truths Jesus spoke, he was not the first to speak them. As illustration, he refers to Jesus's statement that “anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart” [Matthew 5:27]. Rabbi Eisendrath says that this moral principle has precursors in Judaism. As proof, he includes paraphrases of the texts of Proverbs 23:7 and Jeremiah 31:31.<br />
<br />
Holmes refers to the old canard (our word) of Christianity’s being the religion of love, whereas Judaism is the religion of law. Again, Rabbi Eisendrath refutes this characterization:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
All hearts hunger after love and thirst for right and without minimizing or denying to Christianity its own ideals of love and mercy we firmly maintain that both before and after Christianity these ideals constituted an essential part of Judaism, flesh of its flesh, spirit of its spirit for the world <i>Olam hesed yiboneh</i> [Psalm 89:3], the world itself according to the Jew is founded in love, upon it rests the hope of all human happiness and peace.</blockquote>
Finally, Rabbi Eisendrath responds to Rev. Holmes’s charge that Christianity is a universal religion while Judaism belongs to a nation and a people. The rabbi declares (again in keeping with Reform ideas of the time) that Judaism is not overly particularistic, that there is a universal element to Judaism, especially of the liberal variety, namely that it is the duty of Jews, by practicing their religion, to raise the level of ethical behavior of all humanity.<br />
<br />
Rabbi Eisendrath accuses Rev. Holmes of being inconsistent and self-contradictory, in as much as Holmes himself had by then divorced himself from mainstream Christianity and the [Unitarian] Universalist Church for being too particularistic and exclusionist. It’s difficult to know, says the rabbi, whether Holmes is being critical or admiring of Jews when he mentions their belonging to a nation or people.<br />
<br />
Rabbi Eisendrath ends this sermon with some rather provocative ideas, first, that Jesus added to Judaism his own personality, and, more startlingly:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
As Christians are going to the Old Testament we agree that Judaism should go forward into the New. As the history of Christendom is worthless without the history of the prophets, so the story of Judaism is incomplete without the story of the Nazarene. We are knit together we Jews and Christians whether we like it or not. Ours is one story, one tradition, one dream, one vision, one hope. Why not also, we ask with [Rev. Holmes], why not also one family, one fold?</blockquote>
<b>"Must Judaism and Christianity Be Surpassed By Humanism?"</b><br />
<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfRoMFDVtR44a-oku90geK_55TOrYnen_y3ozZpJKbWbvx867zgVZRWTqHfyZpwy_3EZXirm6RRVDXV-kCuv49lx4eEQj-n89Y-8tNicRW2XaQOffd0_aUzmEX_nf704UywuT7Ace-_QfX/s1600/Must+Judaism+and+Christianity+Be+Surpassed+by+Humanism+page+1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfRoMFDVtR44a-oku90geK_55TOrYnen_y3ozZpJKbWbvx867zgVZRWTqHfyZpwy_3EZXirm6RRVDXV-kCuv49lx4eEQj-n89Y-8tNicRW2XaQOffd0_aUzmEX_nf704UywuT7Ace-_QfX/s320/Must+Judaism+and+Christianity+Be+Surpassed+by+Humanism+page+1.jpg" width="202" /></a>In his final sermon in his series, Rabbi Eisendrath, following John Haynes Holmes in his corresponding sermon, provides an outline of Humanism, which both men regard as the religion of tomorrow. <br />
<br />
The religion of tomorrow, Holmes says, will be truly universal. Like the universe itself, it will be evolutionary, "an unfolding, enlarging, ever changing form of spiritual experience which will stop with no revelation or discoveries of the past but will move ever onward, with the unceasing progress of the race."<br />
<br />
There is, Holmes says and Eisendrath agrees, no one-time Revelation of the Truth on Mount Sinai or in the person of Jesus. (Here Holmes, it appears from Rabbi Eisendrath's manuscript, quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson about Christianity dwelling “with noxious exaggeration about the <i>person</i> of Jesus.” Indeed much of Holmes’s Humanism is Emersonian in content and tone, which is not surprising, given Holmes’s background in the Unitarian Church.)<br />
<br />
According to Holmes, science must be the arbiter of truth as much as the Codes and Bible were such arbiters in the past. “Science is invincible,” Rabbi Eisendrath maintains, “and will yet conquer the last outposts and fortresses of irrational truth.”<br />
<br />
Rabbi Eisendrath, like Rev. Holmes, does not believe in the truth’s being revealed once only to Moses on Mount Sinai. He says that even Moses and Jesus could not foresee the future as we know it today, and therefore their revelation would be inadequate to the task. Nor does the rabbi believe in a divine source of ritual practices. He places his faith in science. However, he is not prepared to give up on Judaism if it can meet the challenge of the time and evolve “truly in the present moment … preparing for a new and greater revelation yet to be.” (Note: It’s not clear whom the rabbi is quoting here. It could be Holmes.) Rabbi Eisendrath makes the same claim for Christianity, that it need not be surpassed by Humanism if it evolves and, importantly, that it not seek to convert others.<br />
<br />
Rabbi Eisendrath uses the occasion to be critical of the Judaism that, to his mind, does not evolve, the Judaism (or the majority of its adherents) that wants to retreat into a self-enclosed community that would exclude “the hog-eating gentile.” He lambastes this narrow minded Judaism for its <i>pilpul </i>and mysticism. The rabbi avers that the prophets “vehemently repudiated the whole legal code.” (He is, we believe, on very shaky ground here. The prophets may have said that the ‘legal code’ had no value if its practitioners were lacking in moral and ethical practice. They did not anywhere suggest that the legal code, and ritual practice, had no authority over Jews or should not be adhered to.)<br />
<br />
The rabbi maintains that both Judaism and Christianity have “within themselves the very seed which has helped to create the lovely tree which men are just beginning to behold.” He looks forward to “rediscovering the soul of our common prophets, including, of course, the preacher of Nazareth… .”<br />
<br />
Rabbi Eisendrath concludes by saying that, if Christianity and Judaism remain fixed and static, then John Haynes Holmes’s Humanism is superior to both. However, if these two religions “slough off the false accretions and dead integuments” of the past, then they may yet have a viable future.<br />
<br />
Rabbi Eisendrath liked to end his sermons with a poem. Here, he ends with a hymn by Edwin Henry Wilson from the hymnal of the Unitarian Universal Fellowship (not coincidental given his topic). As usual, he does not identify his poem’s source. The first stanza is:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Where is our holy church?<br />
Where race and class unite<br />
As equal persons in the search<br />
For beauty, truth, and right.</blockquote>
What are we to make of these sermons? They were given very early in Rabbi Eisendrath’s career. He was only twenty-seven years old when he delivered them, and he had not yet made his move to Toronto and Holy Blossom Temple. It was also a period of great optimism in American life in the 1920s. The rabbi was clearly impressed by John Haynes Holmes and saw in him a kindred spirit. He was drawn to his vision of an evolutionary and universal religion, unencumbered by revelation or ritual. Like Holmes, he was attracted to Jesus as an exponent or prophet of such a religion, not as part of the divine or more than human.<br />
<br />
But Maurice Eisendrath was also a rabbi, the spiritual leader of Jews, and as such he could not be entirely universal, even if he emphasized the universal within Judaism. Holmes’s Humanism appealed to hem, but he could not, in the end, as a Jew and a rabbi, fully embrace it.<br />
<br />
These three sermons record the beginning of Rabbi Eisendrath’s encounter with Christianity and with Jesus. It was an encounter that would continue throughout his life.<br />
<br />
MC / HR<br />
<br />EShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06884838895664967725noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7963306496774059436.post-84615752598131689252011-08-09T18:34:00.000-04:002019-09-27T10:04:09.111-04:00December 28, 1930<b>"If Jesus Came Again"</b><br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhoL2AteJH02I6gQaDdq3PFUepajgOuogcfpbW1QyQZDEpbbPDc1_ZFveCp953OEbE0mTmETOD1UpSikTN_Iz5fPlEPUKeurLgLwaRzrXxCDO2lB8J0Jdcnb6DMP-hx9GJqn9ZR7BGHD5oE/s1600/HBP.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhoL2AteJH02I6gQaDdq3PFUepajgOuogcfpbW1QyQZDEpbbPDc1_ZFveCp953OEbE0mTmETOD1UpSikTN_Iz5fPlEPUKeurLgLwaRzrXxCDO2lB8J0Jdcnb6DMP-hx9GJqn9ZR7BGHD5oE/s1600/HBP.jpg" width="210" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Page from <i>Holy Blossom Pulpit</i>, v. 1</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
On December 28, 1930, the Sunday morning after Christmas Day, Rabbi Eisendrath delivered a sermon entitled “If Jesus Came Again.” The rabbi’s Sunday morning sermons (or lectures, as he often referred to them) were attended as much by Christians as by Jews—such was the rabbi’s reputation as an eloquent speaker with something important to say. It would, then, take some courage to speak about Jesus and Christianity to such a mixed group. He could easily offend either Jews or Christians. (According to him, he succeeded in offending at least the Jewish part of his audience.) <br />
He begins by referring to Jesus as “the rabbi of Nazareth … a prophet like Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, and Jeremiah.” The picture he goes on to paint of him is one of a person, like himself, who is an anti-materialist and a passionate pacifist. (“The rabbi of Nazareth” is a term that Rabbi Eisendrath frequently uses for Jesus—a usage that grates on the authors of these articles, although Jesus is addressed a number of times in the Gospels as Rabbi. Further, we suspect a bit of projection on his part in casting Jesus as anti-materialistic and a pacifist. He may also be reading the prophets selectively to suggest that were cast in that mold.)<br />
<br />
The rabbi says that Jesus would be scorned and shunned by Christians today, especially in their churches, especially the establishment churches. He suggests also that Jesus would be uncomfortable in synagogues today: “In the Orthodox circles his iconoclasm and free spirit would be despised; in Reform Temples his uncompromising hatred of all injustice, luxury, exploitation and greed would be greatly feared even before his name be known.” The rabbi suggests that he would be feared even more after his name were known.<br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
Rabbi Eisendrath mentions John Haynes Holmes, an eminent Protestant minister much admired by the rabbi and to whom he refers often in his sermons. He quotes Rev. Holmes as saying that “it is to our [Jews] growing shame that we still bar this humble Hebrew prophet from our bosom and banish his lofty teaching from our midst.” This is a sentiment that Rabbi Eisendrath endorses.<br />
<br />
Interestingly, Rabbi Eisendrath quotes Jesus directly only once in his sermon. Jesus refers to the Pharisees as “these hypocrites who like whited sepulchres outwardly appear beautiful but inwardly are filled with dead men’s bones and all uncleanness.” [Matthew 23:27] It’s clear that Rabbi Eisendrath shares Jesus’s dislike of the Pharisees and what the rabbi refers to as their “pious pecadilloes.” He doubtless equates the historical Pharisees of Jesus’s day with Orthodox Jews of his own time, obsessed as they were with the details of ritual observance. (He would, we assume, be aware of the Pharisees’ positive side: that their reforms of ritual observance made possible the survival of Judaism after the destruction of the Second Temple.) In this particular sermon, the rabbi is most critical of the worshipper, Jewish and Christian, whom Jesus encounters in the synagogues and churches that he would visit were he to appear in them in 1930.<br />
<br />
The rabbi imagines Jesus visiting the most affluent house of worship:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
And, as in despair he would leave that church filled with men and women lavishly attired, studded with diamonds, with their chauffeurs waiting obsequiously at the curb, he would not wonder long as to why his word and way are trampled under foot and scorned.</blockquote>
Jesus, according to the rabbi’s imaginative scenario, would move on to the slums, where “the conviction would grow upon him that more wicked and selfish and greedy and sinful is this generation than the one which sent him to the cross …” However, as he attempts to speak out against the inequities of 1930s Toronto, <br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
… the arm of the gentle Jesus would be rudely grabbed by a brutal officer of the law, he would be stunned by a savage blow on the head from a policeman’s mace, and roughly thrown into a patrol car, to be summarily dispatched to jail for ‘obstructing traffic,’ and besides, for giving voice to such traitorous and Bolshevistic ideas.</blockquote>
Rabbi Eisendrath imagines that Jesus would be dumbfounded by the theology that has arisen around him, particularly that he was the product of a virgin birth. And he would be critical of the Christian doctrine of salvation through belief, regardless of a person’s deeds. The rabbi wants it to be very clear that he is not making a case for Christianity, only for Jesus as an exemplar of ethical behavior. (He refers to the Gospels as “spiritually searching, morally revolutionary and ethically enobling.”)<br />
<br />
This lecture is only the first in a number of sermons given on the subject of Jesus and Christianity during Rabbi Eisendrath’s years in Toronto. He employs the clever device of having Jesus reappear on earth and be disgusted by what he observes preached and perpetrated in his name. There is, however, as we have indicated before, a danger that Rabbi Eisendrath, in his sympathy with Jesus, may project his own concerns onto Jesus and speak on Jesus’s behalf. He certainly sees Jesus belonging to the line of Hebrew prophets, and perhaps as a precursor of social activist rabbis like himself (hence his calling him “the Rabbi of Nazareth”).<br />
<br />
In further posts, we will examine other sermons that Rabbi Eisendrath delivered on this subject and attempt to discover how he developed, and perhaps changed, his ideas on Jesus and Christianity in relation to Judaism and the Jewish people.<br />
<br />
MCUnknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7963306496774059436.post-69919014267377823152011-08-08T10:21:00.000-04:002019-10-26T20:38:50.155-04:00January 5, 12, 19 and 26, 1930<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7963306496774059436" name="more"></a>
<br />
<b>Four Sermons on Plays by Eugene O’Neill</b><br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg87xsbmQD9e04U9mufHNhBIwkwfQ7YhXsQGSZmvTlligIQDQblYp_YTc5q9T55-FsOCPFJjwTkgSl-VF2R13ScfGZ36uvlyO_KChMRRw8rBvP-sjP9hZo6rHosqZbmjVUZ9SWODui6nSo/s1600/Eugene+O'Neill.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg87xsbmQD9e04U9mufHNhBIwkwfQ7YhXsQGSZmvTlligIQDQblYp_YTc5q9T55-FsOCPFJjwTkgSl-VF2R13ScfGZ36uvlyO_KChMRRw8rBvP-sjP9hZo6rHosqZbmjVUZ9SWODui6nSo/s320/Eugene+O'Neill.jpg" width="241" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Eugene O'Neill in 1924</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
In the winter of 1930, Rabbi Eisendrath delivered four Sunday morning sermons, each on a play by the American playwright Eugene O’Neill. These plays were: <i>Strange Interlude </i>(January 5), <i>Dynamo </i>(January 12), <i>Marco Millions </i>(January 19), and <i>Lazarus Laughed</i> (January 26). <br />
<br />
Rabbi Eisendrath was a great admirer of Eugene O’Neill’s dramas, believing them to depict “man’s craving for life—a more abundant life.” It is noteworthy that, although O’Neill was already an established artist, with several successful plays to his credit, his most often produced plays were yet to come: <i>Mourning Becomes Electra</i><b> </b>and <i>Ah, Wilderness </i>would come out in the next few years, while <i>The Iceman Cometh, Long Day’s Journey Into Night</i>, and <i>A Moon for the Misbegotten</i> would be written in the following decade. (<i>Long Day’s Journey Into Night</i>, perhaps the author’s most famous play, would not be performed until 1956).<br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a>Of the plays that the rabbi considers, only <i>Strange Interlude</i> is still in the repertoire, and it was the only one made into a movie (in 1932 starring Norma Shearer and Clark Gable). It is also, likely, the only play that Rabbi Eisendrath actually viewed. He tells us that he recently witnessed a performance of the play (probably in New York, although he doesn’t specify this), and that the audience behaved badly, from his point of view, having come to the theatre “for prurient reasons.” The play was banned in Boston because of its treatment of the topics of adultery, abortion, and (implied) homosexuality. Undoubtedly, this banning of the play led to increased attendance at the Broadway performance. The other plays about which the rabbi speaks he probably would have known through reading them; he tells us that he has carefully read and reread almost all of O’Neill’s plays.<br />
<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span><br />
It was not (and still is not) unusual for rabbis to review books in their sermons as well as in study groups. Usually, these were of current best sellers, often of novels with a Jewish connection. Rabbi Eisendrath was no exception. It was (and is) less usual for a rabbi to review plays, especially plays that are not currently in performance in the city of his congregation. It is even more unusual for him to review a play that likely neither he nor his congregants have seen. None of O’Neill’s plays is about Jews or features a Jewish character, with the possible exception of Lazarus Laughed, which is based, very loosely, on a New Testament character.<br />
<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span><br />
Why then, would Rabbi Eisendrath choose to discuss these plays on four successive Sunday mornings? I suggest that it is because their themes appealed to him, and that he and Eugene O’Neill had the same criticisms of American society, especially the materialism that they both saw around them in the years before the Great Depression. Both men are critical of business as a source of social injustice, and both are critical of American foreign policy. Both are suspicious of the worship of science as a new kind of god, displacing the God of religion. And both men are critical of a society that treats people as objects on a social and commercial ladder rather than as individuals with an inner emotional and spiritual life to which we must give attention.<br />
<br />
<i>Strange Interlude</i><br />
<br />
This play, which won a Pulitzer Prize, is notable for the dramatic device, unused since Shakespeare’s time, wherein the characters speak their inner thoughts out loud in the form of ‘asides’ that are not heard by the other characters onstage. This is a lengthy play, running close to five hours. Rabbi Eisendrath notes that the performance he saw began at the ‘inconvenient hour’ of 5:30. (He tells us that there was no a dinner break, much to the audience’s displeasure, but, in fact, the play is sometimes given with one.)<br />
<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span><br />
The central character in the drama is Nina Leeds, and the rabbi says that he has a “profound understanding and infinite pity “ for her. She is, he comments, a creature created by her past and the war. Before the war, she was engaged to Gordon, a man with whom she was deeply in love. However, before he goes overseas, she refuses to consummate their love, at her father’s insistence, because they are not yet married, and Professor Leeds wants her to wait for marriage until Gordon returns home—which, of course, he does not. Nina is devastated by his death, and, in her attempts to find happiness without him, she embarks on a series of acts that have unintended consequences for her and the other characters. We may judge her harshly for actions, the rabbi tells us, but, knowing her story (partly through the thoughts she reveals to us through her asides), we should not be so quick to condemn her. (Ever the pacifist, the rabbi refers to Nina’s heart “that the war had blown to bits.”)<br />
<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span><br />
“Primarily,” Rabbi Eisendrath tells us, he sees the drama as “the story of woman… crying out for the tender affection of the father, the passion of the lover, the protection of the husband, the devotion of the child.” What Nina seeks is happiness from a relationship with a man who can live up to the example of her dead lover. The rabbi goes on to talk about the nature of happiness, which is what Nina and all the other characters in the play are seeking. The problem is that happiness is not attained simply by seeking it. “Like the characters in the play, we feel that happiness is an end to seek rather than a reward which comes unsolicited and unsought.” Happiness, the rabbi suggests, comes to us when we devote ourselves to other ends. (He is not terribly specific about just what those ends might be.)<br />
<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span><br />
At the conclusion of the play, one of the characters comments that “We must not learn the cry for happiness.” Rabbi Eisendrath believes this sentiment to be the theme of the play, and he goes on to say:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Only when we forget the cry for happiness and plunge ourselves into the battle and struggle for life; when we seek to solve the complex problems of existence, our own and our neighbors, only then do we become truly happy.</blockquote>
This sermon consists both of an in-depth analysis of the play and its characters and an appreciation of its theme. The rabbi has tremendous admiration for the plays of Eugene O’Neill, and this particular play provides much fodder for his sermonic skills.<br />
<br />
<i>Dynamo</i><br />
<br />
Rabbi Eisendrath begins by telling us that, compared to<i> Strange Interlude</i>,<i> Dynamo</i> is a disappointment. He expected more from a playwright whose dramas he had enthusiastically anticipated since his early one act plays. However,<i> Dynamo</i> does explore an important problem and present us with an “eternally perplexing and profound” theme.<br />
<br />
In fact, the play is not considered among O’Neill’s best, and it ran on Broadway in 1929 for only fifty performances. It is rarely revived.<br />
<br />
The subject of the play is the conflict between religion and science, or more properly between religion and modern technology, in this case the dynamo that produces electricity. We are presented with two families, neighbours who are quite unalike. Reverend Light and his family are deeply religious, while Ramsay Fife is the superintendent of a hydro-electric plant and a firm atheist. While the two men cordially dislike each other, their children, Reuben Light and Ada Fife, take a liking to each other. However, the play is no update of Romeo and Juliet. Due to the results of a prank played by Ramsay Fife on the Light family, Reuben leaves home for fifteen months. He returns as completely devoted to the ‘religion’ of electricity—and to the dynamo in particular—as his father is to his fundamentalist Protestant religion, with disastrous consequences for Ada and himself.<br />
<br />
It’s not surprising that this play would appeal to Rabbi Eisendrath, if not as drama, then as material for a sermon on religion and technology. He dwells at length on Reuben’s crisis of spirit when he believes that his ardently religious parents have betrayed him. The rabbi believes that the play is a critique of primitive belief (like the Reverend Light’s) that, when found wanting, leads to agnosticism or atheism or materialism. For Reuben, electricity becomes his god and the dynamo his idol.<br />
<br />
For Rabbi Eisendrath, the play reveals a great truth about religion:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
... that every faith, no matter how enlightened or superstitious, no matter how civilized or how pagan, no matter how primitive or how advanced, that every faith that man has ever know regardless of its creed, has evoked in its followers the selfsame devotion and deeds, the identical practices and routine.</blockquote>
The rabbi goes on to comment that, like Reuben’s worship of the dynamo, many “blind and credulous believers” also worship objects, or at least “never think of the spiritual reality behind the objects they so feverishly worship: the Torahs, the Crucifixes, the sacraments and the Scriptures, the Churches, the Temples which they regard as holy and inviolate and sacred and sacrosanct in themselves.”<br />
<br />
Rabbi Eisendrath also sees in Reuben a reflection of “the youthful scientists of our day, among our university students and scoffing sceptics who bow down to a new born God of Matter and Motion, of Energy, and Might and Force…” as well as those who make idols and gods of “the state, the flag, the constitution, the laws of gravitation, the harmony of the spheres, the struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest, all of which, since Einstein at least, may be as transitory, as ephemeral, and fleeting as any creed and dogma of the past.”<br />
<br />
It seems to me that the rabbi is getting a bit carried away here. O’Neill’s play concerns itself only with the tendency of those who lose their faith to find a new faith in science and technology, which will likewise, in the end, prove unsatisfying. O’Neill comments not at all on nationalism or social Darwinism, even if, to the rabbi’s mind, they too are gods that fail us.<br />
<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span><br />
In what, then, can we put our fate? Rabbi Eisendrath believes that O’Neill fails to answer this question, at least in this particular play. He fails to reveal to us that in which we may truly sense the Divine: man himself.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
… in so far as there is any spiritual destiny for the cosmos, it rests in man alone, in him only is there evidence and promise of the living God…The spiritual, in short, overflows man’s life and in one form or another is implicit in all that is. Where then has man come from, if not from the hidden sources of being that are behind him.</blockquote>
Whether this is a particularly Jewish view of the world is open to question. It strikes me as more Emersonian or universalist than Jewish. In this sermon, the rabbi makes no mention of anything Jewish, except Torah and Temples, which he cites as objects of idolatry among some believers. But we must remember that he is here speaking to a congregation composed probably of as many non-Jews as Jews, and he is responding to a play that is not at all concerned with anything specifically Jewish. He is also responding to what he sees as the great challenges to religion (including the Jewish religion) of his time, namely the challenges of science and technology and materialism, challenges that O’Neill also saw. We can understand why, in spite of his calling the play ‘mediocre,’ he would nevertheless include it among the plays he chose to discuss in a Sunday morning lecture.<br />
<br />
<br />
<i>Marco Millions</i><br />
<br />
This play, which Eugene O’Neill wrote between 1923 and 1925, made its Broadway debut in 1928. Rabbi Eisendrath refers to it, as early as 1930, as “another of the less familiar of Eugene O’Neill’s always artistic plays.” It remains less familiar even today; however, there was a New York revival in 2006 that played to at least a few good reviews. It has also been performed, from time to time, in other cities. The rabbi makes note of the fact that, although its theme is very serious, it is also a lot of fun, employing satire as a means of getting its point across. There are also some songs, and they are sometimes performed with instrumental accompaniment.<br />
<br />
Rabbi Eisendrath characterizes this play as one that demonstrates the contrasting values of the west and ‘the orient,’ and he clearly prefers the latter:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
For here in this book we find all the vapidity, all the spiritual emptiness, the froth and ultimate futility of our modern mechanistic and commercially dominated West, which threatens so tragically to spread its fangs Eastward, there to poison and slay an ancient, a rich, a colorful, and a profound culture and to drag down amid the roar and thunder, the whir and wail of its merciless machines the whole of human civilization.</blockquote>
The rabbi then proceeds to give a rather detailed synopsis of the plot. It is clear that he has read the script. (Note that in the above quote he refers to the play as “the book.”) We do not know if he ever saw a production of the play, but he assumes, no doubt correctly, that his congregation has neither seen nor read the play. The action comprises twenty-six years in the journey of Marco Polo, along with his father and uncle, on a sales mission to the Orient, through Moslem and Buddhist countries, culminating in the China of Kublai Khan. The Polos react to their surroundings as typical western salesman, engaging in typical chamber of commerce banter with the local merchants while, among themselves, mocking their hosts for their unsophisticated practices. In time, Marco becomes mayor of one of the Chinese towns, where he proceeds not only to do business, but to invent the cannon, a device that, because of its immense destructive power, will end war (a very costly pursuit) and bring lasting peace—and prosperity—to the world. Only the Khan and his court philosopher see that this world will be without a soul. (Today, we might see this scene as a mocking of the postulate of ‘mutually assured destruction’ brought about by the atomic bomb, long before the invention of the bomb. Rabbi Eisendrath and Eugene O’Neill would no doubt have been amused by Dr. Strangelove.)<br />
<br />
The play, as Rabbi Eisendrath notes, is a satire of the western, and particularly the American, credo that “business is business.” This credo is, in fact, the title of the rabbi’s discourse. He refers to (and expects his audience to know) Babbit, the fictional subject of the eponymous novel by Sinclair Lewis that also satirized the commercial obsessions of 1920s America.<br />
<br />
For Rabbi Eisendrath, the notion that “business is business” is the source of just about every evil. It prevents social justice and leads to such international consequences as the United States’ invasion of Nicaragua (presumably to promote American business interests, which was, in fact, the case.)<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Thus does this battle cry gag the critics, hobble the investigators, hoodwink the press, stifle religion, and muzzle the law. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
It is this catchword which enables otherwise sensitive and intelligent and wholly humane persons to trample upon human rights and to render subservient to commercial interests human aspirations and strivings.</blockquote>
The rabbi gives, as proof of this rather broad charge, an article in the current issue of The Nation, written by the American playwright, Sherwood Anderson, in which he describes child laborers in the textile mills of Tennessee. Their working conditions cannot be improved because “business is business,” reports Anderson.<br />
Rabbi Eisendrath also avers that this maxim has subverted religious life, and even prevented people from objecting to a production of the Freiberg Passion Play by Morris Gest and David Belasco (both Jewish):<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Business is business they retort, and thus, at the price of human suffering and woe, they perpetuate blindly a Christian lie and a Jewish libel that their profits might wax fat.</blockquote>
The rabbi concludes his sermon with the words of Kublai Khan, the one person in O’Neill’s play who sees through the superficiality of the dogma that “business is business.”<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
In silence—for one concentrated moment—be proud of life. Know in your hearth that the living of life can be noble. Know that the dying of death can be sublime. Be inspired by life, be exalted in death. Be humbly proud, be proudly grateful. Be immortal because all life is immortal. Contain the harmony of womb and grave within you. Possess life as a lover as a lover of all men, then sleep requited in the arms of eternity. If you awaken, then love once more. If you sleep on, then rest in peace. Who knows? What does it matter? It is nobler not to know and, regardless, bravely, heroically, generously, to live and to love.</blockquote>
This sermon was first given in The United States. We are not sure on what date this sermon was given, but we have its typescript. It makes many references to “our country,” and “our president,” and so on, that tell us that this was given before an American audience. (It also refers to “this evening,“ so we know that it was not delivered on a Sunday morning.) The typescript was not professionally typed. There are many spelling and punctuation errors, and the rabbi has hand-edited many sentences. The handwritten manuscript is even more heavily edited, so much so that it is quite difficult to follow. It is somewhat expanded (the rabbi’s Sunday morning sermons would last for almost an hour), and a few emendations are made on the page to tailor it for a Canadian (or at least non-American) audience. No specifically Canadian references to the power of business are made, but “our president,” has been changed to “president of the U.S.”<br />
<br />
A number of ironies emerge from reading this sermon. One is that, from the time of its delivery in the States to its delivery in Canada, the stock market had crashed, and the Great Depression had begun. To chastise a group of people for their worship of business, whose own businesses were now threatened with closure, and they themselves with financial ruin, is more than ironic; it is downright cruel. Was Rabbi Eisendrath aware of the irony? Harsh as he might be in his criticism of his congregants’ values and behavior, he was certainly not a cruel man.<br />
<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span><br />
It is perhaps more ironic that this sermon and the play on which it is based, with their critique of unbridled commercialism, are perhaps more appropriate now, when free enterprise, small government economic policies are being advocated in many quarters, than they were when the rabbi delivered his sermon at Holy Blossom in 1930.<br />
<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span><br />
Another irony is that the rabbi would soon come to prevail upon his congregants, especially those untouched by the vicissitudes of the Depression, to contribute to the building of a new—and magnificent—Temple. Rabbi Eisendrath’s project of constructing a splendid new home for his congregation would depend on the generosity of those members who were most successful in business.<br />
<div>
<br /></div>
<br />
<i>Lazarus Laughed</i><br />
<br />
Subtitled “A Play for Imaginative Theatre,” Lazarus Laughed had its premiere performance in 1928 by the Pasadena Community Players. According to Wikipedia, It featured 151 actors portraying 420 roles. After its premiere, there were no further major productions of the play until 1971, when the American Repertory Theatre in Europe, with a cast of 40 mostly student actors portraying 150 different roles took it on a European tour. The play was performed in English in several ancient outdoor amphitheatres in Italy and received rave reviews from major Italian newspapers.<br />
<br />
Unless he attended the Pasadena premiere of the play (and he surely would have mentioned it had he been there), Rabbi Eisendrath would have been familiar with the play only from reading it. And yet he tells us in this sermon that he considers it O’Neill’s best play, and O’Neill himself “our foremost prophet of life.” What he especially likes about this play, he tells us, is its “humanism” and its protest against the “materialistic spirit of our age.”<br />
<br />
The play concerns itself with the character of Lazarus of Bethany, he who was raised from the dead by Jesus. Returned to life, and being unique among men for knowing what lies beyond the grave, Lazarus responds to all queries, from his family, from the Jews, from the Romans, only with the assertion that there is no death, only “God’s eternal laughter.” Lazarus himself laughs throughout the play, even when he loses the members of his family, including his wife (who grows older even as he himself becomes more youthful and strong). In the end, he laughs as Tiberius burns him at the stake.<br />
<br />
Rabbi Eisendrath acknowledges that the play is Christian, but he maintains that it contains within it<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
… the very essence of our faith … a Judaism pure and prophetic, of a Judaism uncontaminated by ghetto accretions or rigid creeds, of a Judaism which quite in contradistinction to Christianity … and in contrast likewise to the religions of the east … [contains] the theme of an eternal and unwavering acceptance of life.</blockquote>
The rabbi attempts to connect the play to Judaism by linking Lazarus’s response to his critics to those of Job to his critics (“Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him …” Job 13:15) and Joseph to his brothers (“… you meant evil against me; but God meant it for good,” Genesis 50:20). He makes mention of the scene in Lazarus’s home in Bethany, attended by “Orthodox Jews” and Nazarenes (followers of Jesus). Both groups consider themselves betrayed by Lazarus when he tells them that there is no death, only life. He also mentions Akiba’s dying not with concern for his own future but only for that of Judaism.<br />
<br />
Rabbi Eisendrath refers to an arms conference that took place in London the week in which he gave his sermon on Lazarus Laughed (probably the London Naval Conference, January 21 to April 22, 1930). He is contemptuous of such conferences, and asks, “Do we really need arms to protect ourselves?” He answers, “No! We need more laughter which will show how ‘fictitious’ such needs as arms are.”<br />
<br />
Rabbi Eisendrath is enthralled by this play because of its portrayal of Lazarus as one who simply loves life for its own sake, not for power or prestige or material goods, but simply for itself. He likes the play’s evocation of eternal life as part of a greater whole: we defeat death simply with our affirmation of life. We are immortal, he tells us, “not because we will be resurrected or live in a pearly gated heaven, but because we never really die. We are part of the great life force.” We need to remember, he tells us, to laugh as we did as children. As always, the rabbi tells us that we pursue too seriously our materialistic goals.<br />
<br />
There is much in this sermon (if not the play) that I find troubling. The rabbi’s attempt to portray “the essence of Judaism” as “unwavering acceptance of life” may be true as far as it goes; however, an acceptance of life is surely not reducible to laughing at everything life throws at us, as Lazarus does. The rabbi’s sermons throughout his tenure at Holy Blossom (and even before) are clear evidence that he did not view life as a laughing matter—even before the Great Depression and the rise of Nazism.<br />
<br />
Furthermore, I’m not sure what “a Judaism pure and prophetic … uncontaminated by ghetto accretions or rigid creeds” is. Is it Classical Reform Judaism of the kind Rabbi Eisendrath brought to Holy Blossom? The prophets surely did not view life as a laughing matter. The books attributed to them are not exactly full of laughs, and I cannot recollect any accounts of the prophets themselves laughing. Koheleth tells us that there is time to laugh, but it is not all the time. Lazarus laughs all the time.<br />
<br />
There is, of course, something called Jewish humour, often characterized as “laughter through tears.” But this humour is often precisely that humour conditioned by the ghetto and by the Jewish experience of persecution and of being ‘other.’ In short, I fail to make the connection between Judaism of any kind and Lazarus’s approach to life. As for Rabbi Akiba, he went to his death affirming the sh’ma, convinced that he now understood its true meaning. He wasn’t laughing!<br />
<br />
Also, Judaism does, in fact, affirm life beyond the grave. The Reform Union Prayer Book used by Rabbi Eisendrath speaks of “those who have finished their earthly course and been gathered to the eternal home. Though vanished from bodily sight, they have not ceased to be, and it is well with them; they abide in the shadow of the Most High.” Lazarus’s claim that there is no death, only life, is not in keeping with Jewish belief. We may indeed defeat death, or, more precisely, cope with death by affirming life, but that is not the same thing as denying the existence of death as Lazarus does.<br />
<br />
Of all the sermons on the plays of Eugene O’Neill, I find this one the most unconvincing, even as I rather disliked reading the play itself. Rabbi Eisendrath does not summarize his comments on the four plays he reviews taken as a whole. It would, of course, be fascinating to have his comments on the O’Neill plays yet to come, including his acknowledged masterpieces. Unfortunately, we have no record of the rabbi issuing any further reviews (at least while in Toronto) of the plays of the man he considered the outstanding dramatist of his time.<br />
<div>
<br /></div>
<br />
MC<br />
<br />
<div>
<br /></div>
EShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06884838895664967725noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7963306496774059436.post-40457412829639276892011-07-06T09:56:00.000-04:002019-10-26T20:34:22.140-04:00November 10, 1929<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7963306496774059436" name="more" style="position: absolute; top: -4em;"></a><br />
<b>All Quiet on the Western Front</b><br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4LtI97XR2ZJVxftfqYKEQhnhrywwgfPw92-wd0JHfR6RSdOXZP07Q3uT0kWAAv0ixtLR316eWUfb42hCdFGHx45FluM03-rlAxD5xb2qNqLH14sUPTE4fllJHyfZLs5T9DTQp3QTU6g7o/s1600/All+Quiet+on+the+Western+Front+page+1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4LtI97XR2ZJVxftfqYKEQhnhrywwgfPw92-wd0JHfR6RSdOXZP07Q3uT0kWAAv0ixtLR316eWUfb42hCdFGHx45FluM03-rlAxD5xb2qNqLH14sUPTE4fllJHyfZLs5T9DTQp3QTU6g7o/s320/All+Quiet+on+the+Western+Front+page+1.jpg" width="201" /></a></div>
This sermon takes its title from the anti-war novel of the same name by Erich Maria Remarque, published in German in 1928 and in English translation in 1929. Delivered on the day before Armistice Day, this sermon was a demonstration of Rabbi Eisendrath's pacifism and his disregard for the personal consequences of proclaiming it, Canada's strong allegiance to the British Empire and its contribution to the Great War notwithstanding.<br />
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
Armistice Day was to Rabbi Eisendrath a "day of bitter memories", and "tragic retrospection", but also in 1929 a day that could be celebrated in an atmosphere of "awakening faith," </div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="font-family: inherit;">
... for I do believe that during the single year just gone by mankind has made more distinct progress toward peace than during the entire decade since that memorable day, November 11th, 1918. It has witnessed the ratification of the Kellogg-Briand treaties by over half a hundred nations, [1] it has seen adopted the Young Plan which finally makes a gesture toward the solution of that financial mess perpetuated by the Versailles Treaty, [2] it has gazed at last upon the long-delayed evacuation of the Rhineland by French and British troops, it has beheld the leaders of the two mightiest nations, [British Prime Minister Ramsay] MacDonald and [American President Herbert] Hoover met together in friendly interchange of views, it has heard their respective pledges in behalf of disarmament and their promises to pursue permanent and abiding peace. </blockquote>
<a name='more'></a><div style="font-family: inherit;">
This progress, the rabbi said, came none too soon, for already some were forgetting the horrors of war. There were conventions of veterans where men might seek out their old buddies and assure each other "It was a great old war", and there was, too, a new generation of youth "bred and suckled once more on the false ideals of war." Post-war writers, he believed however, were preserving the true memory of the war.</div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="font-family: inherit;">
Contemporary authors [Henri] Barbusse, [André] Maurois, [Arnold] Zweig and Bruno Frank will not permit this generation to slip into a lethargic and somnolent apathy toward war. They have poured forth a flood of novels and essays and diaries which are stripping war of all its mock heroics and false posturings ... These writers of our day will not permit us to forget, they would hold before us, and particularly our children, constantly the true picture of war with its writhing bodies, its headless torsos, its greenish and gangrenous limbs, its dung filled trenches, its maddened minds and stunted souls ...</blockquote>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
This, the rabbi's audience must have recognized by now, was not to be an Armistice Day address of the traditional sort, remembering the patriotism of our soldiers, and honouring their sacrifice. He continued,</div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="font-family: inherit;">
And so the past year has brought us two more such gruesome portraits of war. The English play [by R. C. Sherriff] <i>Journey's End </i>and the German novel [by Erich Maria Remarque <i>Im Westen nichts Neues</i>]<i> - All Quiet on the Western Front</i>.</blockquote>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
Was the message of these authors being heeded by civic leaders? Rabbi Eisendrath feared it was not. </div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="font-family: inherit;">
Else we would tomorrow have an Armistice Day far different from those which I have always sorrowfully, regretfully and disappointedly witnessed. Sham battles, the roar of cannon ringing in our ears, magnificent parades with flashing, blazing bayonets, endless speeches on the courage and heroism of those who fell in their "country's cause".</blockquote>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
What, the rabbi wondered, would the Unknown Soldier say, of the ceremonies at his tomb on Armistice Day?<br />
<br />
At this point in the sermon, the rabbi quotes at length a work that he has "chanced upon", a fantasy, an imagined monologue, by the Unknown Soldier himself. [3] The soldier has little regard for the political and military leaders paying tribute to him.</div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="font-family: inherit;">
"You know how they used to take bullocks in olden days and dress them all up and play music and march in splendid procession ... round the altars in the temples and then kill the dumb and helpless creatures, smear their blood all over the place and called this slaughter a religion? Well that's what they did to us. That's exactly what they did to us. They took us like so many beasts, dressed us up in fine uniforms, played stirring music, marched us in procession amid wondrous fireworks and pageantry and slaughtered us and now they smear our blood upon this altar, this tomb, and they - they call it also a religion.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="font-family: inherit;">
"... I thought they'd let me rest in Flanders field, 'neath the poppies and the sun. But they dug me up, they put a flag on my coffin, they brought me home and suddenly I was something, something more than dust and bone, I became a symbol and a name. I was carried by crowds and paraded in pageants and blessed by holy men and now they bring little children to my grave and teach them how beautiful it is to be a soldier, and how glorious it is to die for one's own, one's native land, and they hold festivals on holidays, with prayers and songs and magic rites - every day they slay me again, every hour they lay me fresh upon the altar and spill my blood. Will they never be done - will they never forget me and leave me to rot in peace?"</blockquote>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
There are other graves, the Unknown Soldier says, of heroes "braver and nobler and more inspired." He mentions several: in Russia, of Leo Tolstoi who said "I know that all men everywhere are my brothers"; in Germany, of Karl Liebknecht "who they imprisoned and tortured and killed because he could not slay his fellow"; in France, of Jean Léon Jaurès, "assassinated as the war began for his crime of loving peace"; in America, of Eugene Debs, prosecuted for the crime, to which he willingly confessed, of obstructing the war; and in Britan, of E.D. Morel "imprisoned and slowly slain for loving peace too well." </div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="font-family: inherit;">
"And there are graves far off of prophets who said 'Love your enemies, bless them that curse you' and 'Have we not all one father, hath not one God created us all - wherefore then do ye deal treacherously each man with his brother.' " [Matthew 5:44, Malachi 2:10]</blockquote>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
These, Rabbi Eisendrath says, (still quoting his Unknown Soldier) are the real heroes. "Here build your altar of faith and hope and love, and here let your children worship and bow down and pray."<br />
<br />
The manuscript that we have concludes here, at the bottom of the twenty-fourth page, somewhat abruptly and sooner than most of his Sunday sermons, which were often as long as forty pages. [4] Perhaps we are missing some additional pages.<br />
<br />
How was this sermon, so unreservedly pacifist, received? We have no record of the community's reaction. But this was not the first expression of Rabbi Eisendrath's pacifism, nor the last. He had previously written an editorial <a href="http://multiculturalcanada.ca/node/160665" target="_blank">"We Pacifists?"</a> for the <i>Canadian Jewish Review</i>, that <a href="http://eisendrathsermons.blogspot.ca/p/about-rabbi-eisendrath.html" target="_blank">caused great controversy</a>. A sermon "Must we have war?" delivered in 1931 had a pacifist message. Several of his students recall the time he sent a young man home from confirmation class because the boy was wearing a military cadet's uniform.<br />
<br />
Events that followed forced the rabbi to change his views. He documents this in his 1964 memoir <i>Can Faith Survive?</i> in a chapter entitled "The Dilemma of a Pacifist". Still, pacifism was always important to him. He greatly admired the non-violent philosophy of Martin Luther King, and the very last sermon that he wrote (in 1973, he died the day before he was to deliver it), condemned the American war in Vietnam.<br />
<br />
HR<br />
<br />
[1] The Kellogg-Briand treaty was a multi-national agreement renouncing recourse to war for the solution of international controversies. Great Britain, with Canada and other Commonwealth countries, France, Germany and the United States as well as Belgium, Italy, Japan, Poland and Czechoslovakia were the original signatories in 1928, with many additional countries adhering to the agreement by mid-1929. It had, unfortunately, no mechanism for enforcement.<br />
<br />
[2] The Young Plan was an agreement restructuring and reducing the obligations of Germany to pay war reparations.<br />
<br />
[3] The quotation appears to be taken, inexactly, from a sermon "The Unknown Soldier Speaks" by John Haynes Holmes, later published in an anthology of his sermons, <i>The Sensible Man's View of Religion</i>, Harper and Brothers, 1933.<br />
<br />
[4] Manuscript pages were about 6" by 9".</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7963306496774059436.post-79237071055155700712011-07-05T22:06:00.000-04:002019-10-26T20:58:22.739-04:00Yizkor Yom Kippur, 1929<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7963306496774059436" name="more" style="position: absolute; top: -4em;"></a><b>The Eternal Secret</b><br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9a/Rene_de_Saint_Marceaux_Genie_gardant.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9a/Rene_de_Saint_Marceaux_Genie_gardant.jpg" width="230" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="background-color: #f9f9f9; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 19.200000762939453px;"> </span><i style="background-color: #f9f9f9; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 19.200000762939453px; text-align: start;">Génie gardant le secret de la tombe </i><br />
<span style="background-color: #f9f9f9; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 19.200000762939453px;">[<a href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Rene_de_Saint_Marceaux_Genie_gardant.jpg#filelinks" target="_blank">Wikimedia</a>]</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Our text for this sermon comes from an undated manuscript, the title of which matches the title given in the Holy Blossom Bulletin for the sermon for the Memorial Service for Yom Kippur 1929.<br />
<br />
Rabbi Eisendrath recounts his thoughts and emotions as the yizkor service for Yom Kippur draws to a close. He recalls a statue he has seen.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The figure which my imagination places at the threshold of memory's shrine has been beautifully carved into stone and is on exhibition in an art gallery of one of our larger cities. It is a statue portraying an angel seated upon a tomb, covering with its hands the orifice of a lovely vase by its side. This strange and somewhat perplexing modernistic creation bears the inscription Angel guarding the secret of the tomb. What an illuminating and what a profound thought has this sculptor chiseled into this block of marble. ... The angel carefully guards the tomb and its secret from the prying eyes of men. We strain our energies ... but the angel remains forever silent.</blockquote>
<a name='more'></a>The sculpture referred to may be a work by René de Saint-Marceaux (1845-1915). The original marble, pictured above, is now in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris. A plaster cast created for the Art Institute of Chicago may be what the rabbi saw. For photographs of the sculpture from other angles, see <a href="https://flic.kr/p/6iWNtm" target="_blank">here</a> (Paris) and <a href="http://lcweb2.loc.gov/service/pnp/det/4a20000/4a26000/4a26200/4a26223r.jpg" target="_blank">here</a> (Chicago). Online references refer to it in English as "Spirit guarding the secret of the tomb".<br />
<br />
The spirit does not stand guard like a sentry. Rather, he is portrayed in a posture as if taken by surprise. Seated, almost with his back to a burial urn, he turns his head to his right to see a presumed intruder and at the same time, with his torso twisted, reaches back awkwardly to his left to hide the contents of the urn from view.<br />
<br />
The statement that the sculpture is on exhibition in "one of our larger cities" suggests the sermon was originally written to be delivered in the United States. We do not know if it was ever delivered there or to what extent it was revised when delivered in Toronto.<br />
<br />
The secret being guarded by the spirit, the rabbi says, is the answer to the question "when a man dies, shall he live again." To this question, the scientist can provide no answer.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
In wonderment he confesses, "It is strange. Nature is wondrously provident and conservative - not a thing seems lost in the economy of the universe, not a sound, not a melody once produced ceases to vibrate in the immensities of space, not a particle of energy is wasted, not a single motion is lost. Yet the spirit of man eludes my grasp, my unerring instruments cannot probe his mysterious being."</blockquote>
But where the scientist fails, the religious teacher can provide an answer.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
[H]e feels with the sage of old that the spirit of is the candle of the Lord [1] - a spark from God's fountain of eternal light. Confidently he asks - if man contains within himself a thread of the divine, can his essence e'er be completely extinguished. When the spirit of man is darkened can it wholly disappear.</blockquote>
The question, however, is only answered in part; some things remain unknown.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Others have conjured up vivid pictures of the state of the soul after death - of blessed islands, shady groves filled with music and gardens of unending [?] delight for the righteous, and also of regions of horror, of eternal torment, of fire and brimstone for the wicked - all of them mind you based on matter and sense - all of them failing to glimpse the reality and unknown nature of the spirit.</blockquote>
Rabbi Eisendrath is making a logical argument here: that we cannot extrapolate from this world to the next, and that we have no reason to conclude that in the hereafter the human soul will be rewarded or punished by gifts or afflictions of a particular material or sensual nature.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
And although our religion has not always escaped these phantasmagoria of the mind - of <i>Gehenna</i> and <i>Gan Eden</i>, of Hell and Paradise, although we too have had our mystics who have dreamed rapturously of material rewards and dreaded fearfully physical punishments, Judaism itself has laid little stress upon such considerations. Standing before the silent tomb it declares: Let the angel guard zealously the secret of death, but as for man let him master well the secret of life. Let man dwell on the cardinal truths of this world rather than of the beyond. Guided by the candle of the Lord, let him strive to illumine and render more radiant his universe, and so make life, death and the vast forever, one grand sweet song.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Living thus in tune with the infinite and in harmony with the spiritual ideals of life we have no cause to fear the future. The god-like elements in our life, our love, our tenderness, our fellowship, our goodness ... our striving after harmony and justice, are endowed with permanent and enduring qualities. </blockquote>
The sermon continues with additional illustrations of the enduring power of good deeds. Rabbi Eisendrath names Amos, Jeremiah, Isaiah, Lincoln, Wilson, Beethoven, Raphael, Jesus, St. Francis, [Solomon ibn] Gabirol and [Samson Raphael] Hirsch as persons who "have not perished from this earth - their lights have not been extinguished, their beauty has not faded." This list shows us some of the diverse persons from whom Rabbi Eisendrath took inspiration. But his decision to mention these famous names at this time, especially his more unconventional choices, in a yizkor service intended for remembering family members, may have been for some of his congregants an unwelcome digression.<br />
<br />
He concludes with a short poem "<a href="http://www.bartleby.com/101/618.html" target="_blank">Music when soft voices die</a>" by Shelley.<br />
<br />
This sermon demonstrates the rabbi's interest in sculpture and poetry. Future sermons would reveal his interest in theater. In 1930 he delivered four sermons on plays by Eugene O'Neill. But the arts, for him, were not simply an entertainment; they had a clear moral core, which made them useful subjects, or at least jumping-off points, for his sermons.<br />
<br />
Rabbi Eisendrath has transitioned in the course of the sermon from a discussion about the nature of the afterlife, to a traditional message of consolation, that the lives we remember at yizkor have lasting elements of goodness. He has also set up a contrast between the questions about "the secret of death" and the hereafter asked by the sculpture (and by extension, the general culture which the gallery represents and in which he and his congregants live) and the questions about "the secret of life" which Judaism addresses.<br />
<div>
<br /></div>
HR<br />
<br />
[1] Rabbi Eisendrath is quoting Proverbs 20:27, traditionally attributed to King Solomon, "The spirit of man is the candle of the Lord."Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7963306496774059436.post-88598482762343749712011-07-04T17:40:00.000-04:002019-10-26T20:35:52.769-04:00Yom Kippur, 1929<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7963306496774059436" name="more" style="position: absolute; top: -4em;"></a><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKEWhtbSXuunkHQmFFvYLNSqVIvIyOO_vIBjwf3M81G1ZL2E-r1MVl1IAhMJMmMICxDgLDYkt7A2tk5AIzdLyS6n8uDzR0EMpBnGBmcST_9Hk2c51Cdqj66AlFmlNn-7fkCWwmhi2qRiWP/s1600/The+Basis+of+Jewish+At-One-ment+page+1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKEWhtbSXuunkHQmFFvYLNSqVIvIyOO_vIBjwf3M81G1ZL2E-r1MVl1IAhMJMmMICxDgLDYkt7A2tk5AIzdLyS6n8uDzR0EMpBnGBmcST_9Hk2c51Cdqj66AlFmlNn-7fkCWwmhi2qRiWP/s320/The+Basis+of+Jewish+At-One-ment+page+1.jpg" width="246" /></a></div>
<b>The Basis of Jewish At*One*Ment </b><br />
<br />
This was the title of the sermon delivered by Rabbi Eisendrath on Yom Kippur day in Charleston, West Virginia in 1928 and in Toronto, Canada in 1929. [1] The title plays with name of the day - Day of Atonement - and with one of the themes of the day, Jewish unity.<br />
<br />
On this day Jews around the world come together in their congregations at a common time, for a common purpose, to atone, individually and collectively, for their sins. Rabbi Eisendrath uses the name of the day as a point of departure to ask whether Jews truly are "at one" on this day, and further what it means to be at one, and what should unite us.<br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a>Jews, Orthodox and Reform, gathering this day in their separate venues to pray, will, he predicts, show little respect for one another. His language is heavy with sarcasm.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Here again will be heard a venomous diatribe against those<i> meshumodim</i>, those hateful converts ... who desecrate the Sabbath, pray to a Hebrew God in a foreign language which he cannot possibly understand, sit even in the Temple beside their loved ones ... and give ear to the iconoclastic and traitorous addresses of a clean-shaven priest.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Here we will find others who will look with contempt upon the richly beautiful ceremonies and symbols so precious to their parents, who will boastfully vaunt their superiority and sophistication before their pious elders, who will enter the gilded portals of the reform temple with pride and disdain as though by this means alone they had risen just one step higher upon the ladder of social aspiration...</blockquote>
Both groups, he says, fail to understand the principles upon which their practices are based, and regarding this, his criticism of Reform Jews is the most caustic.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
[H]ere are gathered in old-fashioned synagogue those wholly unmindful of what orthodoxy truly implies and here are assembled many sublimely innocent of the profound and significant implications of Reform, who regard it as but a convenient, a socially and economically useful form of religion with many advantages and but few responsibilities or demands, as near Christian forms and habits, manners and methods as their Jewish background permits them to wander, embarrassing them but little as Jews and at the same time shielding their precious and pampered offspring from the hardships and privations of their unfortunate heritage.</blockquote>
Jews, the rabbi says, have always responded to changing circumstances by making reforms. It is appropriate to do so and the differences that arise thereby should not cause Jews to distance themselves from one another.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
There is no need for all Jews to think alike nor to act alike, there is no need because our ancestors did thus and so that we should do thus and so likewise or be excluded from the ranks of our people; there is no need because the rabbis and thinkers who preceded us were so influenced by the environment of their day as to adopt certain philosophical concepts and modes of conduct that we dare not be influenced by our own environment as well. To me at least thoughts and beliefs, theologies and dogmas, practices and symbols need not include or exclude a single soul from the household of Israel.</blockquote>
(It is important to remember when reading these sermons, that when the rabbi uses the name "Israel" he is not referring to the state of Israel; it was not then in existence. He is referring to the Jewish people as a whole.)<br />
<br />
Loyalty to the Jewish ideal (something he will define later in the sermon) should be the sole essential for Jewish unity.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
It is an ideal alone which should render us all akin and which should make for Jewish at-one-ment today. It is a great faith, a mighty longing and a fervent aspiration which ought make <i>Kol Yisroel Haverim</i> [all Jews comrades].</blockquote>
He vigorously defends the initiatives of Reform Jews to modernize the religion so long as they adhere to that ideal.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
We of the reform wing in Jewry have not liberalized ourselves from Judaism merely because we have liberalized ourselves within Judaism. We are not outside the pale, no matter what our diet nor our departure from orthodox detail, no matter how far afield we choose to roam from the narrow and dismal pathway which the ghetto alone prescribed. We are not renegades nor religious heretics because we are honest enough to admit that there was much that was not beautiful nor poetic nor healthful in the encumbering mass of ceremonial held so sacrosanct by our fear-ridden ancestors and because our imaginations are so vast and so sympathetic and so fertile as to seek pleasanter pastures and more modern environs than the dull and distant legalism, not of the prophets and the seers, the saints and the martyrs of Israel, not of the dreamers and the poets, the true founders of our faith, but merely of our more immediate, persecuted and ghettoized forebears. We are Jews so long, and only so long, as we share in the former’s ideals and upon this basis alone can there be any solidarity in Israel. </blockquote>
The Jewish ideal is not, Rabbi Eisendrath tells us, what Christians envision it to be, “the religion of the Old Testament … a preparation for a higher dispensation.” Neither is it, as Orthodox Jews assert, the covenant of God with Israel, completed with Moses at Sinai, and thereafter to be regarded as essentially inalterable.<br />
<br />
Regarding the Orthodox position, Rabbi Eisendrath says this:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
I shall not indulge, however tempting the opportunity, in any argument to refute this position. I shall merely state that to this interpretation of Judaism I take radical exception, nor will I even be so magnanimous as to feel sympathetic towards it. Though granting it also has the right to exist in a universe where variety is the sole law of progress, still I cannot but bitterly oppose it for to permit its domination of Jewish life were to lead us backward into the restraints and limitations, the narrow horizons of the ghetto rather than forward to the light and freedom of the Dispersion.</blockquote>
Rabbi Eisendrath turns now (at last) to articulating his own understanding of the Jewish ideal and of what Judaism is.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
For me Judaism is not a polity, a nation, a race, nor even essentially a people, but a faith, not a contract nor a covenant but a living inspiration, not a survival nor a tradition but a development, a continual growth, an expanding idea, a universal ideal, a consuming task. However misunderstood by the cursed world and caricatured by our own, Judaism is neither foil nor stepping stone for Christianity, nor racial exclusiveness, nor national pride clustering bygone glories, shattered dynasties and painful martyrdoms. To me Judaism is a spiritual force, a moral impetus, an ethical dynamic, a social vision. It came into this world not as the invention of a priest, nor the policy of kings, nor the dialectic of rabbis, nor the superstitions of the masses, but as the burning inspirations of prophets, as the spiritual illumination and profound insight and universal outlook of the religious genius of our people, the bards, the prophets, the psalmists, the poets of our past.</blockquote>
The prophet Micah, the rabbi says, has crystallized the true basis for Jewish at-one-ment.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
For what doth the Lord require of thee: Only to do justice, to practice kindness, and to walk humbly with thy God. [Micah 6:8]</blockquote>
This ideal has been inherent in Judaism from its origin.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The very first summons and charge given to Abraham was "v’heye Brocha" "be thou a blessing" [Genesis 12:2], to teach his child and his household the rudiments of justice and love.</blockquote>
The key, the rabbi says, to understanding Israel’s mission is this:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>Israel is more than a religion and a theological system. Israel is more than a nation, a race, a people, a sect. Israel is a moral force, a national corrective, a social ideal. It is a united effort, a common quest to regulate more sanely and more justly the relation of man to brother man, of nation to sister nation, of group to fellow group.</i></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>This is the tendency and temper and drift of the Jewish mind, forced by its very minority to be liberal and broad and even radical. </i>[Italics added.]</blockquote>
These sentences, delivered early in Rabbi Eisendrath's years, exemplify his passion and his philosophy of Judaism throughout his life.<br />
<br />
He continues with a sentence full of the oratorical flourishes typical of his style.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Israel the suffering servant of humanity can yet be the Messiah unto Mankind bringing a message of social regeneration, moral rebirth and spiritual unity to all the children of men, if only on this atonement day in practice rather than pretence, in conduct rather than creed, in deed rather than delay, in action rather than intent, in righteousness rather than ritual, in fact rather than form – we do ourselves become united, harmoniously as one harking back to what is truly more basic and fundamental than all the rigors and rites prescribed by Talmud and codes, more vital and essential to Judaism than ceremonial and symbol – the social vision and moral challenge of the prophets.</blockquote>
The sermon ends with this flowery passage:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Live up to your faith, sanctify your lives by helping to bring nigh the day when barriers will fall and divisions be no more, when all men will be recognized as brethren, as lovers, as friends, drinking in with rapturous and transcendent bliss the vision:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
When our old world reborn in beauty's image<br />
Unto the morn of prophecy shall come,<br />
And every tower be raised with mirth and music<br />
And every harvest brought with singing home. [2]</blockquote>
</blockquote>
What can be said about this sermon that does not shy away from the use of mockery and sarcasm? It seems out of line (especially on Yom Kippur!) and designed more to inflame divisions than to heal them. Can we find a justification for Rabbi Eisendrath's remarks, or at least understand what his motivation was?<br />
<br />
The answer, in my opinion, is that he wanted his congregants to understand the foundations of Reform Judaism. The sermon showed that there is a logical argument, with biblical underpinnings, for the Reform Jewish point of view, and taught his congregants that they could be Reform Jews for strong ethical reasons, and not merely for reasons of social convenience. His passion as an advocate of prophetic Judaism and his uncompromising nature overwhelmed any impulses he may have had to be conciliatory.<br />
<br />
Issues of Jewish unity would continue to trouble Rabbi Eisendrath throughout his career (for more on that read the chapter "Can Jews Unite?" in his book <i>Can Faith Survive?</i>) but he never stopped preaching "the social vision and moral challenge of the prophets."<br />
<br />
HR<br />
<br />
[1] Our text of the sermon comes from a typescript with handwritten changes and a notation on the final page "Morning, Day of Atonement, Charleston W. Va. 1928". From the Holy Blossom Bulletin we know the sermon given by Rabbi Eisendrath one year later in Toronto had the same title.<br />
<br />
[2] Adapted from the concluding lines of a poem “Of Lyric Labor” by Elizabeth Waddell, published in<i> The Cry for Justice: An Anthology of the Literature of Social Protest </i>(The John C. Winston Co., 1915).<br />
<div>
<br /></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7963306496774059436.post-60354234569983151762011-07-03T22:04:00.000-04:002019-10-26T20:36:33.471-04:00Erev Yom Kippur, 1929<b>A Three-fold Atonement</b><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirFfD8AHeooKOU51Vz0kqvmoChbhMCDAmLl-4ak0mLeAUzwObhugtAcgxLVP3bVdQItDRfr0bTn6EEPmWyusx3B5WWGwzFIY2w2zPDUdsroWrXRx6Alg5QbtyrmRiicRDO-q7GZEmjE6s/s1600/A+Threefold+Atonement+page+1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirFfD8AHeooKOU51Vz0kqvmoChbhMCDAmLl-4ak0mLeAUzwObhugtAcgxLVP3bVdQItDRfr0bTn6EEPmWyusx3B5WWGwzFIY2w2zPDUdsroWrXRx6Alg5QbtyrmRiicRDO-q7GZEmjE6s/s320/A+Threefold+Atonement+page+1.jpg" width="209" /></a></div>
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7963306496774059436" name="more" style="position: absolute; top: -4em;"></a>
In this sermon, his first Kol Nidrei sermon in Toronto, Rabbi Eisendrath addresses his new congregation, appropriately, on his conception of sin and the means by which we atone for our sins. He recalls the ancient rituals of atonement performed in ancient Israel as prescribed in the Bible. He makes note of the slaughter of animals “by the score” and outlines in some detail, the sending of the scapegoat into the wilderness, bearing the sins of the community. He refers to the ritual as “the climax of an elaborate and most impressive cult” and as “rather complicated and wholly superstitious.” He notes that our ancestors thought of sin primarily as an infraction of ritual observance that could therefore be atoned for also by ritual. However, since the destruction of the Temple, we atone “through inner contrition and sincere repentance” for moral and ethical, not ritual infractions. The rabbi sees sin almost entirely as an omission, a failure to live up to our highest ideals.<br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a>However, the basis of Rabbi Eisendrath’s sermon is the ceremony in which the priests in the Temple made a three-fold atonement, first for themselves, then for their families, and finally for the whole household of Israel. [1] The rabbi suggests that this approach of a three-fold atonement is appropriate for all of us today. He outlines how each of us is responsible for first our individual sins, then for those of his family, and then for the sins of the Jewish community.<br />
<br />
The rabbi begins by discussing how Judaism, at least since the days of the scapegoat, stresses individual responsibility. There is no longer any form of vicarious atonement: no scapegoat, and no “savior upon a martyr’s cross.”<br />
<br />
Rabbi Eisendrath then turns to the family. He points out that we as individuals do not atone vicariously for the sins of our family members. (He does not address the question of whether this was what the ancient priests did, in fact, do.) Atonement on behalf of our family members, Rabbi Eisendrath avers, is not a contradiction of the individual responsibility that he has just stressed. However, “the actual blame itself, the true responsibility [for misdeeds] rests not alone on the shoulders of the sinner but upon the entire family as well.” In fact, he goes on to discuss only the responsibility of parents for the misdeeds of their children. He does so in great detail.<br />
<br />
Parents have given their children wrong values and set bad examples for them. He accuses them of being “a careless, willful, vanity seeking, sporting, and frivolous generation.” He asks, “Are you not happiest when … your daughter has been selected as the sole Jewess in the most exclusive school or your son has made the most iron bound gentile frat?” He characterizes parents as giving too much attention to commercial and professional success and not enough to the life of the spirit. The rabbi goes on to implore parents to teach respect for the synagogue and lead their children not simply to it but into it. He admonishes them to make their homes not simply grand dwellings, but “mansions for their souls.”<br />
<br />
The third atonement that must be made is on behalf of the Jewish community. Rabbi Eisendrath speaks of the need for mutual responsibility, and he notes that Jews have always been responsible for each other. But his focus in this regard is not on the need for Jews to care for one another’s welfare, but on their need not to bring shame on each other. By our bad behavior, we bring shame on the community. He gives some interesting examples of this bad behavior. He refers to rabbis and congregations who deal in the sale of “superfluous sacramental wine” in the country from which he has come. (The United States was still in the grip of Prohibition. Canada was not.) He also speaks out against the practice of advertising high holy day services and the selling of seats for the holy days, which, “with all [the] commercialized banality as is found among our modern congregations … [together with] loud displays of economic triumph … have helped to heap calumny upon the honored name of Jew.”<br />
<br />
In a masterful use of parallel structure, the rabbi outlines the process by which Jews dishonor or reflect upon their fellows:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Let one Jew be loud, and we are all boors; let one Jew be a scoundrel and we are a race of scamps; let one Jew be a profligate and we are a generation of libertines; let one Jew be rich and we are an International Conspiracy of Bankers; let one Jew flout his holy days to pursue his business and we are a mob of irreligious atheists; let one Jew genuinely love peace and persistently pursue righteousness and we are all pink-hued pacifists or filthy Reds. [2]</blockquote>
“The gentile,” the rabbi goes on to say, “is yet ready to ferret out our faults and to condemn us all because of the behavior of our irresponsible few.” Rabbi Eisendrath here displays a sensitivity to 'what the goyim think' that today might be considered unwarranted. I suspect that in 1929 it was not. The image of the Jew in the gentile world would be a continuing preoccupation of the rabbi throughout his tenure in Toronto.<br />
<br />
More serious than these examples of bad behavior, however, is the sin of Jews despising one another. (This is a topic that the rabbi will address in more detail the next day in his sermon, “The Basis of Jewish At*One*Ment.) The rabbi gives examples: the native Canadian who spurns the newcomer, the West European who believes himself superior to the East European, the educated and sophisticated Jew who scoffs at the pious Jew. All these show “an utter lack of responsibility, of a proper feeling of duty and devotion to the community of Israel.”<br />
<br />
Rabbi Eisendrath ends on a note of nostalgia for the old fashioned synagogue in which the whole congregation trembled, clad in their shrouds, smiting their breasts in a physical demonstration of their repentence. He wishes to see<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
“a spectacle equally as thrilling. May not each one of us, as we leave this house of God, humbled before the altar of our inmost soul, clad in the pure white garments of our thought, cleansed and purified in the purity of our aspiration and loyalty; resolve to forswear our wrongs and consecrate ourselves anew to the the highest within ourselves, our homes, our faith.”</blockquote>
This is, in some ways, an impressive sermon. The rabbi links, I think successfully, the three-fold atonement of the ancient priests with the contemporary process of atonement. I think that he perhaps unfairly caricatures his congregants, whom, after all, he has just met. Were they really so concerned with money and status as he suggests, and was it only those values that they passed on to their children? (He characterizes these children at one point as “boisterous and self-assertive.” Was he having problems in Sunday school class control? If so, he soon overcame them. The students whom I have talked to remember him as a very effective teacher.) It was certainly brave, if not a bit chutzpadik, for a twenty-seven-year-old recently arrived rabbi, himself not a parent, to chastise his congregants in so severe a fashion for the upbringing of their children.<br />
<br />
His nostalgia for the old fashioned synagogue is interesting. Rabbi Eisendrath himself did not come out of such an environment, and he rarely speaks with admiration of old world Orthodox Jewry. He is perhaps envious of rabbis who could witness visible evidence of their congregation’s intensity of atonement, while some of his own, as he suggests, skipped services altogether in favor of doing business.<br />
<br />
In any event, the rabbi’s criticisms of his congregants’ commercialism and status seeking would soon become dated if not moot. Within a fortnight, the stock market would collapse, and he and they would be faced with the much larger challenge of the Great Depression.<br />
<br />
MC<br />
<br />
[1] In fact, the original three-fold atonement made by the ancient High Priest was first for himself and his family, second for the whole House of Aaron, and third for the whole House of Israel. This division is reflected in the current Reform machzor, Gates of Repentance. In the holy day prayer book used by Holy Blossom in 1929, the Union Prayer Book, Volume 2, there is really only a two-fold atonement attributed to the High Priest: first for himself and his household and second for “the whole congregation of Israel.” His making atonement for the House of Aaron is not mentioned. Rabbi Eisendrath has divided the first atonement into two, separating the atonement made by the High Priest for himself from that for his family.<br />
<br />
[2] Rabbi Eisendrath was himself a pacifist, a position which landed him in trouble with the Toronto Jewish community even before his arrival there. His linking pacifism with boorishness and profligacy doesn’t quite make sense, even if they are all subject to the stereotyping and “calumny” of non-Jews.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7963306496774059436.post-71989363156276658072011-07-02T10:05:00.000-04:002019-10-26T20:37:23.451-04:00Rosh Hashana, 1929<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7963306496774059436" name="more" style="position: absolute; top: -4em;"></a><b>To Be or Not to Be</b><br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEijtUbdZJ5wOIupvCbBMe10VwyLMXCb6MINqvdHfSnsWQEXfiJpbgb7GCOJ_k-g0xeQH59yIpUEky7Y41rj0ZRc3d48TA1V_H4_epWpEQ-l-SX1862w5kb5qOPJUJwQksBorhc7sSEcL5Rx/s1600/To+Be+Or+Not+To+Be+page+1.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEijtUbdZJ5wOIupvCbBMe10VwyLMXCb6MINqvdHfSnsWQEXfiJpbgb7GCOJ_k-g0xeQH59yIpUEky7Y41rj0ZRc3d48TA1V_H4_epWpEQ-l-SX1862w5kb5qOPJUJwQksBorhc7sSEcL5Rx/s320/To+Be+Or+Not+To+Be+page+1.jpg" width="209" /></a></div>
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 <br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
“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?”</blockquote>
<br />
<a name='more'></a>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".<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
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<span style="background-color: white;"> </span>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.</blockquote>
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.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
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.</blockquote>
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.)<br />
<br />
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…”<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
MCUnknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7963306496774059436.post-577445532027361282011-07-01T10:07:00.000-04:002019-10-26T20:37:57.974-04:00Erev Rosh Hashana, 1929<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="more" style="position: absolute; top: -4em;"></a><b>Retreat or advance?</b><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: 1.0cm 42.55pt 2.0cm 70.9pt 3.0cm 99.25pt 106.35pt;">
<div style="text-align: right;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFVBzj7McIB8oIfq4cxV81o0Gd7YF6qydmaz66ZoRDYC-k6UVPdjNno3LSddTcQfKflIIRS1ajLomnmrPYN4E1cG5T4ycwSmJvzxQwhzSozQliuvymsojVKr5lmeT4J6vjYW6Lwl9kGZ3G/s1600/Retreat+or+Advance+page+1.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFVBzj7McIB8oIfq4cxV81o0Gd7YF6qydmaz66ZoRDYC-k6UVPdjNno3LSddTcQfKflIIRS1ajLomnmrPYN4E1cG5T4ycwSmJvzxQwhzSozQliuvymsojVKr5lmeT4J6vjYW6Lwl9kGZ3G/s320/Retreat+or+Advance+page+1.jpg" width="209" /></a></div>
<br />
<span lang="EN-US">Rabbi Eisendrath gave his first major sermon to his new congregation on Erev Rosh Hashana, October 4, 1929. In this sermon, which he entitles “Retreat or Advance,” the rabbi outlines the theme that he believes will be “the lesson that shall be the very burden of my ministry among you … the lesson that is the keynote and the challenge for all religion, all life.” He takes this ‘lesson’ from Koheleth, whom he proceeds to quote first in Hebrew:<i> </i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: 1.0cm 42.55pt 2.0cm 70.9pt 3.0cm 99.25pt 106.35pt;">
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="background-color: white; color: black;">
<span lang="EN-US"><i>Dor holech v’dor ba, v’haaretz l’olam omedet</i>:</span> </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="background-color: white; color: black;">
<span lang="EN-US">One generation goeth and another generation cometh—but the earth abides </span><span lang="EN-US">forever.</span></blockquote>
<span lang="EN-US">He goes on to say that “This is the deepest, the truest, the most absolute and inescapable law of life.”</span><br />
<br />
<span lang="EN-US">The rabbi sees Koheleth (the writer of Ecclesiastes, identified by tradition with King Solomon) as an early subscriber to Reform Jewish tenets: </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="background-color: white;">
<span lang="EN-US">Confronted, even as we are today by numerous innovations, he did not mawkishly rue the days that were gone, nor did he execrate his brethren for their more liberal tendencies, but rather did he probe to the very source of life and proclaim to his age and to all which followed his profound philosophy of existence …</span></blockquote>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<a name='more'></a><span lang="EN-US">It is this need to abandon those traditions (mostly ritual observances) that do not speak to modern times that will preoccupy Rabbi Eisendrath in the years to come in Toronto. In their place, like Koheleth he would emphasize more spiritual and ‘eternal’ values:</span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="background-color: white;">
<span lang="EN-US">… [it is] far easier to reduce religion to a few harmless and ceremonial, ritualistic forms, it is easier, far easier, to say that the wearing of hats, the circumcision of the young, the prohibition of swine, the reciting of the kaddish, the kindling of lights, the davening night and morning—it is easier, far easier, to say that this is Judaism. It is difficult; it is hazardous, it is dangerous to apply our Judaism to life itself. </span></blockquote>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">Note that the rabbi lumps together as “harmless and ceremonial” the wearing of hats (a practice he would go on to oppose with some force in the years to come) with circumcision, a practice that was observed by almost all his congregants (and which we have no record of his ever opposing) and kashrut, which we know he did not himself observe, with worship itself, which, presumably, he favored (even if not “night and morning”). </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"> </span><br />
<span lang="EN-US">But what does Rabbi Eisendrath mean when he speaks of applying Judaism to life itself. What is “life itself”? He defines life itself as “the institutions of Parliament, the courts, the factory, the marketplace.” We might see this as a call to ‘social action’ or ‘prophetic Judaism’. The message of the prophets, the rabbi tells us, is the Judaism we don’t have enough of. Ritual is important only as it leads to social action, and most rituals do not. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"> </span></div>
Throughout his sermon, in true Reform spirit (at least the Reform spirit of 1929), that which is modern and up-to-date is seen as good. Rituals which don’t jibe with modern times should be discarded:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="background-color: white;">
… it were foolhardy; nay it were suicidal to force upon ourselves religious ideas and sentiments, principles and practices, customs and ceremonies, regulation and rites which cannot be spontaneously associated with modern life, which are incongruous and irreconcilable with our present day habits of thinking and feeling.</blockquote>
Two things are worth noting. The first is that, in 1929, Holy Blossom Temple had been connected to the Reform movement for less than a decade. It formally affiliated in 1921, after obtaining its first rabbi, Barnett Brickner, from the Hebrew Union College in 1920. Founded in 1856, Holy Blossom began as a thoroughly Orthodox congregation, and only gradually ‘reformed’ its rituals and modes of worship until its formal affiliation with the American Reform movement. Previous to that, its orientation (and its rabbis) had been traditional and British. <br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"> </span><br />
<span lang="EN-US">Rabbi Eisendrath, whose only other pulpit had been in Charleston, West Virginia, would likely have been quite taken aback by the Jews and the Judaism that he encountered in Toronto. By 1929, a good number of the congregation was of Eastern European, as well as British, background, and, although they would all be fluent in English, many of them would have had a knowledge of Yiddish and a feeling for traditional ‘yiddishkeit’. Toronto, including Holy Blossom, was also a bastion of fervent Zionism, of which the rabbi was deeply suspicious. This would lead to some interesting conflicts, and the subject of other sermons to come.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"> </span><br />
<span lang="EN-US">The second thing worth noting is that Rabbi Eisendrath would, over the years, come to revise many of the biases that he brought with him to Toronto and preached to his congregation here. His anti-Zionism is one such bias; his intolerance of head coverings is another. He outlines these changes of opinion in his memoir, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Can Faith Survive?: Thoughts and Afterthoughts of an American Rabbi</i> (McGraw-Hill, 1964). </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"> </span><br />
<span lang="EN-US">Interestingly, Rabbi Eisendrath, in this his very first message to the congregation, ends by advocating for a new building. In vivid language, he describes the unsatisfactory conditions in which the students in the Religious School study:</span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="background-color: white;">
<span lang="EN-US">Our entire community is looking to Holy Blossom, most revered and honoured of all synagogues in our land, to build a house of worship and a home of learning worthy of its long hallowed name. Our little children, huddled and cramped, choked and stifled in their narrow, sordid, and hazardous quarters below are yearning, dreaming, longing, crying out to us to erect for them a structure conducive to the study of their faith.</span></blockquote>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">It would take a while. Less than a month after Rabbi Eisendrath preached this sermon, the stock market would crash and his congregation would experience the onset of the Great Depression. What is quite remarkable is that, by 1938, at the very height of the Depression, Holy Blossom was in fact able to open the doors of a grand new structure “worthy of its long hallowed name.” That it was able to do so was in no small measure due to the efforts of its rabbi.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"> </span><br />
<span lang="EN-US">On that Rosh Hashana evening in 1929, the congregants of Holy Blossom were to have their first experience of listening to an Eisendrath sermon. Something must be said about this experience. Rabbi Eisendrath made demands upon his listeners. His sermons were long, easily forty minutes or longer. His vocabulary was extensive and often obscure. (People who were there have told me that “you had to bring a dictionary with you to understand Rabbi Eisendrath.”) His style was flowery and orotund. He had a love of rhetorical devices such as poetic imagery, periodic sentences, inverted word order (a favorite of his), parallel structure, and alliteration. Consider the introduction to this sermon, the very first words many of his congregants would hear from him:<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i></span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="background-color: white;">
<span lang="EN-US">My dear friends: This very moment as we sit here, silently ruminating, the last lingering grains of sand are falling through the mighty hourglass of the centuries, and according to Israel’s reckoning a year is passing out of our sight and another is coming into view. By the hallowed custom of our people we are assembled here tonight solemnly to bid farewell to the dying year and with prayers and meditations and hymns to welcome the new born messenger of eternity. True it is that in the light of sophisticated intelligence this habit of ours to gather in our synagogues in autumn rests upon an utter illusion. To some in fact the custom might appear even childish and absurd… both time and space are immeasurable and vain seems our human conceit to divide month from month and year from year as the ever flowing stream of days beats incessantly against the eternal bastions of endless time.</span></blockquote>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">These are probably not the words with which a young rabbi today would introduce himself to his new congregation. But this was a different era, in which rhetoric was admired, people’s patience in the pews was greater, and rabbis, even very young rabbis (at least this young rabbi), had about them a sense of gravitas.</span><br />
<br />
<span lang="EN-US">Maurice Eisendrath, who was only 29 when he arrived in Toronto, was a master of rhetoric and an extremely well-<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7963306496774059436" name="_GoBack"></a>read and erudite scholar. He was a tall, handsome, and imposing man who radiated authority. He must have impressed those congregants who heard him on that first Rosh Hashana evening. He remained at Holy Blossom for fourteen years, and left when he was chosen to head up the Reform movement during World War Two. Many of the themes that Rabbi Eisendrath introduced to his congregants that evening in 1929, as well as his sermonic style, would become familiar to them over the intervening years. </span><br />
<br />
<span lang="EN-US">MC </span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0