Erev Rosh Hashana, 1929

Retreat or advance?

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: 

Dor holech v’dor ba, v’haaretz l’olam omedet:

One generation goeth and another generation cometh—but the earth abides forever.

He goes on to say that “This is the deepest, the truest, the most absolute and inescapable law of life.”

The rabbi sees Koheleth (the writer of Ecclesiastes, identified by tradition with King Solomon) as an early subscriber to Reform Jewish tenets: 

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 …

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:

… [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.  

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”).

            
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.

            

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:

… 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.

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.

            
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.

            
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, Can Faith Survive?: Thoughts and Afterthoughts of an American Rabbi (McGraw-Hill, 1964).

            
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:

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.

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.

            
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: 

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.

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.

Maurice Eisendrath, who was only 29 when he arrived in Toronto, was a master of rhetoric and an extremely well-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. 

MC