Erev Yom Kippur, 1929

A Three-fold Atonement

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.”

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.”

In a masterful use of parallel structure, the rabbi outlines the process by which Jews dishonor or reflect upon their fellows:

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]

“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.

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.”

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

“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.”

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.

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.

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.

MC

[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.

[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.