Yom Kippur, 1929

The Basis of Jewish At*One*Ment 

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.

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.

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.

Here again will be heard a venomous diatribe against those meshumodim, 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.

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...

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.

[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.

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.

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.

(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.)

Loyalty to the Jewish ideal (something he will define later in the sermon) should be the sole essential for Jewish unity.

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 Kol Yisroel Haverim [all Jews comrades].

He vigorously defends the initiatives of Reform Jews to modernize the religion so long as they adhere to that ideal.

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. 

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.

Regarding the Orthodox position, Rabbi Eisendrath says this:

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.

Rabbi Eisendrath turns now (at last) to articulating his own understanding of the Jewish ideal and of what Judaism is.

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.

 The prophet Micah, the rabbi says, has crystallized the true basis for Jewish at-one-ment.

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]

This ideal has been inherent in Judaism from its origin.

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.

The key, the rabbi says, to understanding Israel’s mission is this:

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.

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. [Italics added.]

These sentences, delivered early in Rabbi Eisendrath's years, exemplify his passion and his philosophy of Judaism throughout his life.

He continues with a sentence full of the oratorical flourishes typical of his style.

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.

The sermon ends with this flowery passage:

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:

 When our old world reborn in beauty's image
    Unto the morn of prophecy shall come,
 And every tower be raised with mirth and music
    And every harvest brought with singing home. [2]

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?

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.

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 Can Faith Survive?) but he never stopped preaching "the social vision and moral challenge of the prophets."

HR

[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.

[2] Adapted from the concluding lines of a poem “Of Lyric Labor” by Elizabeth Waddell, published in The Cry for Justice: An Anthology of the Literature of Social Protest (The John C. Winston Co., 1915).