An early sermon -- Rosh Hashanah, 1927 (Charleston, West Virginia)

"The Call to Serve"

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.”

Temple Israel (B'nai Israel)
Charleston WV
Synagogue building
1894 - 1960

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.
   
Like many of Rabbi Eisendrath’s sermons, he begins with an extended recitation of metaphors:

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.

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 unatana tokef 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):

    The moving finger writes, and having writ
    Moves on, nor all your piety nor wit
    Shall lure it back to cancel half a line
    Nor all you tears wash away a word of it.

This is not a sentiment (nor an author) usually mentioned by rabbis on Rosh Hashanah. He goes on with another unusual simile:

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.

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 …’ ”

The rabbi goes on to make the connection with erev Rosh Hashanah:

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 …

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.

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 Akeda, “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?")

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.

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.

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.

There is in the manuscript we have an interpolated page (of a different size and colour) which reads as follows:

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.

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.

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:

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.

One noble cause, the only one the rabbi mentions, is the synagogue.

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?

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:

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 …

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.

It might be instructive to compare this erev Rosh Hashanah sermon with the first erev Rosh Hashanah sermon that Rabbi Eisendrath delivered in Toronto. 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.)

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.

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.

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.

MC