Autobiography - American Jewish...

Autobiography

A B R A H A M C R O N B A C H

Abraham Cronbach, born on February z 6, z 882, in Indianapolis to Marcus and Hannah (Itzig) Cronbach, was ordained a rabbi at the Hebrew Union College in 1906, and awarded the degree of Doctor of Divinity nine years later. A member of the Hebrew Union College faculty since 1922, Dr. Cronbach became Emeritus Professor of Social Studies in 19 fo . Since 1939, he has served as secretary to the board of editors of the Hebrew Union College Annual.

Dr. Cronbach is a prolijc author. Among his many works, several of them rejecting his paciJism and opposition to capital punishment, are Prayers of the Jewish Advance ( ~ g t q ) , The Jewish Peace Book (1932)~ Psychoanalytic Study of Judaism (193t), Peace Stories for Jewish Children ( ~ g g t ) , Religion and Its Social Setting (1933), The Quest for Peace (1937), The Bible and Our Social Outlook ( r g q ~ ) , Judaism for Today (1953), and The Realities of Religion (1957). His essay, "Jewish Pioneering in American Social Welfare," appeared in the June, 1951, issue of American Jewish Archives.

Alfred Segal-"the [Hebrew Union College] applicant who blushed under the prank about the 'big dot' " in 189 8 (seep. 2 z , below)--wrote of him in The American Israelite of July 28, 1953:

I have always thought of Abe Cronbach as a Jew in the pattern of the Jew Jesus . . . . I guess Abe Cronbach never could be a rabbi pleasing to congregations that don't like to have their consciences bothered too much . . . . He is a rare character. In a time when free speech is held in bondage of fears, on many tongues, he was not afraid. His compassion did not falter, even though its objects [Ethel and Julius Rosenberg] were a couple of people in a most unpopular cause and to whom the gravest of public sin had been attachd.

Abraham Cronbach, the lover of peace, has often been a figure of controversy. Yet, when there is greatness in a man, it is not necessary to

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agree with him-md possible even to disagree vehemently. All that is necessary is the willingness to recognize that man for what he is. It is necessary only to recall that once Abraham Cronbach sat in an ofice of the American Jewish Archives and, with involuntary tears in his eyes, quoted these lines from Felix Adler's An Ethical Philosophy of Life:

I am like [the Swiss national hero] Arnold Winkelried, who [at the battle of Sempach in 23861 gathered the sheaf of spears into his breast, and even pressed them inward, to make way for liberty. So do I press the sharp-pointed spears of frustration into my breast to make way for spiritual liberty. For these cruel spears turn into shafts of light radiating outward, along which my spirit travels, building i t s e l nest-the spiritual universe.

It would have been possible, and appropriate, to entitle this memoir "The Autobiography of a Saint." Swh a title might have embarrassed the memorialist; if so, it would have been one of the few times in his life that the truth served to embarrass Abraham Cronbach.

M y earliest recollection is that of being in my father's stoJe (dry goods and notions) in the Pfafflin Building at the corner of Indiana Avenue and Mississippi Street (now Senate Avenue), Indianapolis. In the autumn of 1957 I saw the Pfafflin Block still standing, outwardly, at least, unchanged. Indiana Avenue runs obliquely, forming a triangle with Senate Avenue. M y father's store at the apex of that triangle was consequently three-cornered. I call to mind a small cardboard box among the boxes on the shelves. The visible side of the box carried a gilt picture of the buttons contained for sale in the box.

In that store I was attracted by the sound of breathing; it may have been my own breathing. There seemed to be approaching from the cellar or elsewhere an invisible something, transparent and shapeless, like a surge of air, continually and rapidly emitting the

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sound "hugh-hugh, hugh-hugh." Had it not been for the proximity of my parents, I would have been alarmed.

I recall the clumsiness with which, in those days, I handled a pencil, clasping it in my tiny-fisted hand and vainly attempting to use it. I can still visualize the baby cart, black in color, and my being taken in it "to the doctor." I must have been less than two years old at the time, because, when I was two years of age, my father changed the location of his business as well as the location of our home.

I recollect the political campaign of 1884. My father lifted me in his arms that I might see a torchlight procession as it passed our house. The marchers wore cone-shaped hats. I heard my father

< < say: Democrats." For years, "Democrat" meant to me someone wearing a cone-shaped hat and carrying a lighted torch.

My earliest endeavor to understand speech involved the effort to make out whether I was being called "Baby" or "Abie." I was confused also by the similarity between "pain" and "paint." I t required some time before I comprehended that "putnee" and c c pretty near" were not different words, but that the former was only a mispronunciation of the latter. "Gun" and "gum" likewise gave me trouble.

W e were by that time residing at 282 West Washington Street, on the north side of Washington Street, between West and Cal- ifornia. That neighborhood, today one of extreme deterioration, was already in those days one of pronounced shabbiness. Our home consisted of two rooms above the store and two rooms behind the store. On one side stood a pickle factory; on the other, the business department of the pickle factory. The owner of the pickle factory was our landlord, a kindly old gentleman, who would affectionately converse with me whenever he and I met.

All our neighbors similarly resided behind or above their places of business. Throughout that entire length of Washington Street there existed not one piece of purely residential property. Across the street from us was located a fire engine house whose loud bell apprised us not only when it was nine in the morning, twelve o'clock noon, and seven in the evening, but also whenever a fire broke out in the city, night or day. Reeling drunkards were a common

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sight. Street fights were frequent. Arrests and arrivals of the patrol wagon, the "Black Maria," were of almost daily occurrence. Early in my life, law violators and policemen were to me a familiar spectacle.

That impoverished neighborhood attracted a number of benevolences. One of them was a free kindergarten. I attended that kindergarten. Among the terrors of my early childhood was the kindergarten melodeon whose music accompanied the marching and the singing. Through a slit in the lower panel of the melodeon, I could see a strip of the floor. Not recognizing this for what it was, I' mistook it for some dreadful chasm replete with ghastliness. That has been by no means the last of my groundless fears.

I was exceedingly young when I experienced my first contact with death. A small girl in our neighborhood died of "brain fever." M y mother took me to the funeral. Dressed in white, six companions of the dead child carried the coffin from the house to the hearse and then marched, three on each side, alongside the hearse, to the church two blocks away. With my mother I sat in the church during the service. When I heard the music, I took the lectern to be a musical instrument played by the preacher. Though at least seventy years have gone by since that event, I still remember and am able to repeat some of the preacher's remarks. At the conclusion of the service, we passed beside the coffin and saw the dead child. She was dressed in white. Her hands were clasped as if in prayer. She looked like a beautihl doll.

Shortly after this event my mother explained to me what death signifies. It was a Sunday afternoon. M y mother was occupied at the sewing machine which stood in the store so that she could sew and tend store at the same time. I told my mother that 1 should like to drink some whisky; a rarely used bottle of whisky was kept in our kitchen. My mother replied that, if I drank whisky, I would die and that whoever dies is dead forever, absolutely forever - never, never any return to life. Thus, at my mother's sewing machine, I learnt that tremendously important truth.

My earliest playmates were children on our block, none of whom was Jewish. M y first impression of the difference between Chris- tians and Jews was that Christians ate swine's flesh and Jews did

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not. Decades before I ever heard of the anti-Semitic foetor Judaicus ["Jewish stench"], I suspected a foetor Christianus; I imagined that Christian children smelt of lard.

Three struggling Jewish families resided one block away on the other side of our street. As I grew older and began to rove, the children of those families came within my purview. I still meet occasionally, correspond with, and hold telephone conversations with one of those Jewish companions, now an aged widow.

It was at kindergarten that I first learnt about God, and from my Christian playmates that I learnt about the Devil. God I conceived to be as tall as a telephone pole. His waist girth was the size of the belt railroad encircling Indianapolis. The stars were holes in the sky through which, at night, shone the brightness of heaven. Thrust occasionally into these holes from above were the nozzles of hoses through which poured the water causing rain. Repairing the heavenly streets produced thunder. Washington Street of that day was paved with boulders. Fresh boulders had to be dumped whenever the street needed resurfacing. The noise of that dumping sufficiently resembled thunder to suggest the identification. The conception of God imparted in my home was that of God as a chastiser. Whenever I underwent a mishap, such as tripping or falling or bumping my head, my mother would immediately specify the bygone naughty act for which I was being punished.

No less implicitly did I believe in the Devil. Once on my way to school I saw smoke issuing from a manhole near a factory. I regarded it as matter of course that this smoke emanated from hell, the Devil's abode. M y neighborhood companions warned me that, if one spoke a profane word during the day, the Devil would come at night and carry one off. Many a night became for me a night of terror. How did I know but I might, that day, have inadvertently spoken a "bad word"? I marvel that I was not frightened to death one evening when the wind pushed open our door. It was summer. The weather being hot, my bed was on the floor of the room which served as bedroom, living room, and dining room. The door leading


from that room to the kitchen was fastened by a hook. That night, as I lay awake worrying about the Devil's intentions, the hook loudly slipped and the door opened. Could anything be more certain than that the Devil was entering to fetch me? Sometime afterward my fears were mitigated when my mother casually remarked that, bad as I was, I might have been worse, and that the Devil would spare me at least temporarily. I was heartened also by watching the trains on a nearby railroad. Those trains were so heavy that obviously the Devil, living underground, must, by this time, have been mashed to a pulp.

Not much later I was told by one of my playmates that the world was nearing its end. The boy explained that thus far the Devil had been kept chained-how it would have relieved me to have known that sooner!-but that God would unchain the Devil about January I, 1889, and then the Devil would destroy the universe. That alarm subsided when, at the Jewish religious school which I soon entered, the rabbi quoted: "He hath established the earth that it shall not be moved." This, according to the rabbi, proved that the world would never terminate. At no time did it occur to me to divulge my fears to my elders. Those anxieties remained secret as a matter of course.

Shortly after I entered public school, I played truant. No one paused to inquire into the reason for my misdeed, nor did I dream of taking anyone into my confidence. The cause of my truancy was my fear of a dog harbored near the schoolhouse. One day, instead of going to school, I went back to the kindergarten. On the way to the kindergarten, I was pursued by a fowl, probably a turkey. I had not the slightest doubt that the bird was either the Devil or some agent of the Devil. Hardly had I reached the kindergarten when who should arrive but my mother! My mother dragged me home and punished me severely.

When I entered the public school, I was barely five years old, my age having been misrepresented as six. In school I did poorly. After my second term, I was demoted. I showed, at that time, a marked trend toward delinquency. One evening, as I was passing a

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livery stable a few doors from our home, I noticed a man lying asleep on a bench. I grabbed the man's cap and ran with it to the drinking fountain at the corner. I was about to soak the cap in the fountain when someone seized me. It was my mother, who had either observed me or been notified of my rascality. From the boys who called me "sheeny" [an anti-Semitic epithet], I learnt how to call others "sheeny"; it made no difference whether the butts of that appellative were Jewish or not. And how I admired that auda- cious youngster in our neighborhood who was deft at taking liberties with the legs of little girls! I sought to imitate the pert fellow; but in that lofty enterprise I never attained success.

My parents decided to take me out of the school in which I had done poorly and to place me in a school situated in a different neighborhood. Admission to that more distant school was obtained on the ground that my parents wished me to receive lessons in German. The former school lacked a class in German. At this second school I performed a masterpiece of scoundrelism. The teacher of German assigned certain work to be done at home. One of the boys asked me to ghost write his homework for him. As devoid of conscience as the boy who made the request, I consented. Then I deliberately marred the boy's paper with every imaginable error. In such German as I could command, I appended a note to the teacher, telling her that the boy, who had handed in the paper as his own, had not written the paper but had asked me to write it for him, and that I had designedly made it as incorrect as I could. I no longer recall whether the excoriation I received from the teacher was in German or in English.

Meanwhile other influences were at work. My father, though himself poorly schooled, taught me the rudiments of English, German, and Hebrew. His pronunciation of the English word "them" caused me no little uneasiness. He pronounced it dem, which was also his pronunciation of "damn." And here was I believing that, if one says "damn," the Devil comes at night and hauls one away.


My father also taught me the Hebrew night prayer, not a word of which he or I understood. But, for a considerable period, I recited that prayer conscientiously, even if incorrectly. I also entered the school connected with the temple. I recall an incident of my very first day. It was in a class taught on Saturday by the rabbi [Mayer Messing]. The rabbi was telling the story of Adam and Eve. I had previously heard that story at kindergarten. While the rabbi was speaking, I raised my hand. He recognized me. I said: "Mr. Messing, you don't have to tell me that story. I know all about it already." My precocity brought forth a deluge of laughter from those present. When the incident was reported to my parents, they added it to their repertoire of amusing yarns.

It was at the Jewish religious school, before the appearance of the Jewish hymnal, that I first heard the hymn, "Nearer, my God, to Thee." The impression made upon me by that hymn was pro- found. Many years later I saw the kinship between "Nearer, my God, to Thee" and the biblical account of Jacob's dream. For a time I attended a singing class, a benevolent venture, sponsored by a noted Christian clergyman, Rev. Oscar P. McCullough. The famous clergyman, on one occasion, got down on his knees to assist me with my rubbers. The hymns sung by that auditorium full of children were entirely free of Christological references. I was deeply and beneficently affected. One of the hymns carried the refrains: "Whom have I on earth but Thee?" and "Whom have I in heav'n but Thee?" Many years had to roll by before I came to know the Seventy-third Psalm. But that hymn, based on the Seventy- third Psalm, exerted a most salutary effect.

The time came eventually, in my eighth or ninth year, when God was no longer tall as a telephone pole and girded with a waist- line the size of the Indianapolis Belt Railroad. God became a living and a loving presence. I had picked up the word "blessing." Not knowing what the word meant, I took it to signify something mystic and charismatic. It denoted to me a serene, exalted, happy, and confident frame of mind. I was often aware of a "blessing." Even when romping with the boys, I would feel my "blessing." Thirteen years later, reading Goethe's Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, I was intensely moved by the chapter entitled "Bekenntnisse einer schoenen

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Seele" ["Confessions of a Beautiful Soul"]. The beautiful soul speaks about her communion with "dem unsichtbaren Freund" ["the invisible friend"]. The "blessing" of my boyhood anticipated, in a way, my reading of Goethe's superb depiction.

In our home, lighted candles stood on our table Friday evenings. Those old candlesticks, ornamented with dangling prisms, are still in my possession. The seder would be observed on two nights. My father would chant the Hebrew and the Aramaic as best he could, though neither he nor anyone else present possessed any idea as to what it was all about. Hanukkah tapers would be kindled in our home, and my father would sing the hymn "Ma'oz Zur" ["Rock of Ages"] to the melody in vogue among the Jews of Germany, the land in which my parents originated. A memorial light would burn whenever my father observed the Jahrzeit [anniversary of his parents' deaths].

Not rarely would our entire family attend services at the temple on Friday nights. I acquired a chauvinistic pride in my Jewishness. I would engage in sectarian arguments and sometimes fights with the Italian boys who lived in the house adjoining the place to which by that time we had moved. Boasting to one of the Italian boys about the beauty of the candlelights in our temple, I received the reply that the Jews resorted to candlelights because they, the Christ-killers, were too wicked to possess a flag, the candles being a wretched substitute.

But, amid all these banalities, finer conceptions were ripening. I was nine years old when, at the opening exercises in the public school which I attended, a hymn would be sung which contained the words :

In the hour of pain and anguish, When death draws near, Suffer not our hearts to languish, Nor our souls to fear.

That hymn touched something within me. It articulated the thought


of God not as a punisher but as a helper. Many years later I grasped what Browning meant when he wrote:

A sun will pierce The thickest cloud earth ever stretched.

or when he declared:

W e fall to rise, are baffled to fight better, sleep to wake.

But the first glimmer of such insight dawned upon me at the age of nine, when I meditated upon the words sung in the schoolroom: "In the hour of pain and anguish."

Among the beneficent influences of my life, hymns have played a large role. With a hymn I associate a momentous incident which occurred when I was perhaps twelve years old. I feel somewhat uncertain about the total accuracy of what I am about to narrate; yet, in its essentials, this account is approximately correct. One day my mother said to me: "Tonight you go to the Turning School and bring home Stella." "Turning School" was a Germanism translating Turnschule; it meant "gymnasium." Stella was a Jewish girl of nearly my own age. She resided in a neighborhood from which my family had moved a short time before. That evening, at the gymnasium, Stella was to attend a dance. But Stella's home lay in a remote part of the city. My mother had arranged with Stella's mother that I was to call for Stella at the gymnasium and bring her to our house, to spend the night. Stella would return to her home the next morning.

When my mother directed me to call for Stella, I remonstrated, and I had my reasons, though I would never have confided them to my parents or to anyone else. If Stella spent the night with us, she would be occupying my own room upstairs, and I would have to sleep on the lounge downstairs in the dining room. I was afraid of being downstairs alone.

My resistance was in vain. My mother still wielded the force majmre. I did go to the gymnasium. I did escort Stella to our house. Stella must have found my company anything but delightful. Arrived at our house, Stella was greeted by my mother and taken to my room, and I was relegated to the dining room couch.

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Conditions were hardly conducive to sleep. In my disgruntlement, I remained awake. Resentful thoughts gyrated in my head. But gradually my ponderings grew less enflamed. Other thoughts arose. A tune began repeating itself in my memory, then the attendant words, a hymn sung in the course of morning exercises at school:

Lord, upon my bended knee, I would raise my soul to Thee. Make me penitent for sin; Glorify my soul within.

That night, in that silent dining room, those words began to thrill. That word "glorify" gripped me. "Glorify! Glorify!" I said to myself: "Glorify! Glorify! Yes, that is what I want. 0 God, glorify my soul within. I live not only an outer life. I live also an inner life. That inner life can shine despite outer darkness. My behavior has been unworthy. Lord, I am going to change. Glorify, glorify my soul within."

No one sent me any gifts or congratulations such as I received when I became bar mitzvah [attained the age of thirteen, the age of responsibility in Jewish tradition], or later when I graduated from high school, or years later when I graduated from the university, or still later when I was ordained. No one was told, and no one knew, about the resolve born that night in solitude. Yes, the greatest moments of our lives are those hidden moments. The publicized events are never the most important events. During my entire rabbinic career, I have refused to join my colleagues when they opposed the singing of hymns in the public schools. I regard those hymns as a godsend.

My earliest occupational choice was that of law. I aspired to become a second Abraham Lincoln who, by the route of law, attained the Presidency of the United States. Let me plead that I soon outgrew that preposterous notion.

Nevertheless, that preference for law contained the embryo of the calling which I did at length adopt. I pictured myself, while

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engaged in the work of an attorney, devoting my summer vacations to propagandizing for Judaism. In my imagination, I would address audiences assembled in the open air. I would prove to those audiences that Judaism was the only true religion. One of my arguments was to derive from the newly discovered canals on Mars. Newspapers reported that these canals formed the Hebrew word shaddai ["the Almighty"], thus indicating that the inhabitants of Mars were Jews, clinching evidence, I averred, that Judaism was the only valid faith. What stupendous folly a youthful head can hold!

Soon after entering high school I discovered that I excelled in mathematics. This begat the wish to become a teacher of mathematics. I hobnobbed with the men who taught mathematics. I took an elective course in mathematics. But my father was violently opposed to mathematics. My father reasoned that no Jew could possibly obtain an appointment as a teacher in a high school or a college. It should be explained that my father was already advanced in years. M y mother was my father's second wife. M y father was fifty-six years old at the time of my birth.

Meanwhile influences were operative which caused me once more to alter my occupational choice. When I was eleven years old, my family moved to a house in a less deteriorated part of the city. The new neighborhood, while not a wealthy one, lay within a short distance of homes occupied by people in more favored circumstances. Near us resided Albert J. Beveridge, who was to become the noted Republican liberal of the United States Senate. A stroll of a few minutes brought one to the mansion of Benjamin Harrison, who had just completed his term as President of the United States. I ofien saw Mr. Harrison walking to and from his downtown office. James Whitcomb Riley lived around the corner from the Jewish meat market to which I would be sent almost every week to purchase kosher sausage. Living amid conditions of difficulty and struggle even greater than our own, one of our close neighbors was a boy named Claude [G.] Bowers, destined for renown as a writer, orator, and diplomat.

My father no longer kept store. Our source of income was a stand on the public market. That market, greatly expanded and

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improved, is still functioning opposite the Indianapolis Court House. Assisting at that stand on Saturday nights was the bane of my existence. That form of business caused me intolerable shame. Boys of my acquaintance, seeing me there, would ridicule me as the Jew peddling "sox, collar buttons, and suspenders." How I shrank from being seen at our stand by anyone who knew me! When no customers required my attention, I spent my time mem- orizing Katie Magnus' Outlines of Jewish History in preparation for the next day's lesson at Sunday school. My father would often

, shout at me: "Cut out that damned reading! Watch for customers!" My father lived to enjoy for years our emancipation from that stand on the public market, an emancipation achieved by the money which, in the course of time, that "damned reading" enabled me to earn.

At the market, as well as elsewhere, I came cheek by jowl with extreme poverty. Those dismal conditions were woefully aggravated by the depression of I 893 to I 894. It was not unusual to see people rummaging in garbage receptacles for food. I was also familiar with the prevalence of sickness. The antitoxins for diphtheria had not yet been discovered; the death rate from diphtheria was appalling. The quarantine sign-DIPHTHERIA, KEEP OUT, BY ORDER O F T H E BOARD O F HEALTH-appeared on many a door. I was acquainted with children who died of the disease. I recall a chubby little boy who used to pummel me because I was a "G--damn sheeny." "You sheeny," he bellowed one day, "Wait till tomorrow. See what I'll do to you." When tomorrow came, the diphtheria sign glared from the front of that boy's house. A day later a crape hung on the door. The chubby little anti-Semite never carried out his intention against the "G--damn sheeny."

In those days the ravages of tuberculosis were staggering. Dr. Edward Livingston Trudeau had not yet convinced the world that tuberculosis was curable. Tuberculosis was synonymous with death. Like the other children in the neighborhood, I would loiter at neighborhood funerals, and most of those funerals had tuberculosis

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as their cause. My mother would sometimes take me with her when she called on the Posners. Within a brief period, several members of that family died of the disease. While my mother was attending the third or the fourth of the Posner funerals, I, at home, experienced my first impulse to become a rabbi.

Chiefly from the hymns which I heard, I acquired the conception of a God-conferred strength and comfort amid the disasters of life. A stereopticon exhibit crystallized my persuasion.

Despite my parents' limited resources, we owned a piano and a violin, and I took lessons on both instruments. I even played in the orchestra of our Jewish Sunday school as well as in that of the Baptist Sunday school. Though I ridiculed the Baptist theology, I was enthralled by their songs.

The man from whom I received lessons on the piano was blind. This blind man was to me more than a teacher; he was a kind of big brother and wise companion. I spent much time in this man's company. He was a devout Roman Catholic, and much of our conversation dealt with religion, but our sectarian differences did not strain our friendship. Like other friends of his, I would often lead him from place to place.

Among this blind man's engagements was that of playing the piano at the Sunday afternoon gatherings held, for men only, in the auditorium of the YMCA. I would accompany my teacher to these meetings and would afterward escort him home. I think it was in the spring of 1896 that the speaker at a Sunday afternoon service chanced to be a man from Pittsburgh; the theme of his address was "Egypt." The speaker had visited Egypt and had provided himself with an excellent set of stereopticon slides with which he illustrated his talk. My music teacher was indispensable; only a blind man could play in that stereopticon dark. The scenes of Egypt and of the journeys to and from Egypt were interspersed with the singing of hymns. The words would be projected onto the screen along with a pictorial illustration.

One of the hymns was Augustus Toplady's "Rock of Ages." Despite its pronounced Christology, that hymn was to me most elevating. The illustration showed first an ocean, then a ship on the ocean, then a storm, then a shipwreck, then hapless voyagers

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floundering in the billows; thereupon a huge rock emerging from the deep; then, clinging to the rock, a white-robed female form, symbolic of the human soul; all presently dissolving into a vast radiance betokening the hereafter-time ended, eternity begun, white-stoled forms, outstretched wings, depths beyond depths of glory! And, accompanying it all, the fervent singing of "Rock of Ages" by that tremendously stirred audience.

Years later I learnt that "Rock of Ages" was a Jewish phrase hailing from Isaiah 26:4. I was still a child when the Jewish song book appeared which, included "Rock of Ages," the hymn for Hanukkah. Still later, when conducting the shofar service in the New Year liturgy, I would read from the Union Prayer Book: "Thou art the King of Eternity, the immovable Rock amidst the ebb and flow of the ages." But, that Sunday afternoon, at the Indianapolis YMCA, all that lay in the future. Still, I adopted the metaphor, "Rock of Ages." Into my youthful mind the conviction entered that, in the Rock of Ages, the tempest-tossed human soul must seek anchorage.

In the physics course at high school, I learnt about molecules. Considerable time was to elapse before I was to hear about materialism and the supposed conflict between materialism and religion. T o me the molecular theory seemed to corroborate religion. God might well be a congeries of molecules located perhaps in the sun, stimulating action in all other molecules and, in that way, control- ling the world. It is needless to mention that I have long ago abandoned that crude theology. But, to this day, I deny that materialism conflicts with religion, except it be the type of religion which consists in rejecting the new because it is new and clutching the old because it is old. I regard materialism as philosophically unacceptable, but I do not deem it incompatible with religion of the kind that I propound.

M y sectarian arguments with Christian acquaintances, combined with the theological interest engendered by the study of physics, and, above all, my fervent conviction about the Rock of Ages led me to choose the rabbinate as my career. As long as I could I kept

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this decision to myself. But my father was beginning to prod me about my choice of an occupation. When, under pressure, I mentioned the rabbinate, my father's veto was peremptory. His verdict was: "I do not want any children of mine to be dependent upon the Jews for a living." However, there was no altercation. I simply refrained from discussion. I was confident that God would aid my purpose.

Help soon arrived. There was to be, at the temple, a children's service for Hanukkah. Rabbi Messing invited me to preach the sermonette. Although I was fifteen years old at the time, what I said was so bombastic that I might have been much younger. "Sinai and Olympus thundered at one another in mutual antagonism" is a sample of my speech. T o my sister [Gertrude], who was three years and a half my junior, and who had already begun to display her gift of humor, my sermonette furnished material for hilarious fun. Her mimicry was sidesplitting. Yet that youthful sermon became a turning point. Influential members of the congregation whose wealth and social standing commanded respect reached the conclusion that I ought to become a rabbi. As my rollicking sister put it: "That speech showed you to be so dumb as to be fit for nothing else." But when the "big" people recommended, my father heeded. My father lived to derive his main income from my rabbinic salary and a considerable part of his income from my earnings while I was a student.

My first glimpse of the Hebrew Union College occurred in August, 1893, five years before I entered and at least four years before I thought of the rabbinate as my calling. In August, 1893, my mother took my sister and me to visit our relatives in Cincinnati. W e traveled by the Cincinnati, Hamilton, and Dayton (now the Baltimore and Ohio) Railroad. The Cincinnati, Hamilton, and Dayton depot was located at Sixth and Baymiller. The Hebrew Union College was situated at 724 West Sixth Street. When our relatives, who met us at the depot, walked with us toward their home on Central Avenue, the Hebrew Union College was one of

AUTOBIOGRAPHY I9

the points which we passed. I noticed the name on a large sign over the doorway. That name fascinated me. It was the first time in my life that I had seen a public sign which indicated something Jewish. My uncle, noticing my interest, explained: "That is Dr. Wise's college." I little foresaw the part that "Dr. Wise's college7' was to play in my future.

On June 7, 1898, accompanied by Rabbi Messing, I went to Cincinnati to arrange for admission. The Hebrew Union College of those days was far different from what it is today. The building at 724 West Sixth Street, occupied by the College since I 88 I , had previously served as a private mansion. It had been slightly re- modeled for College use. I found myself in an atmosphere strikingly different from anything that I had ever viewed before. I beheld a number of bearded men of obviously prodigious learning. Rabbi Messing presented me to Isaac Mayer Wise. Dr. Wise, at that time almost eighty years old, was noticeably decrepit. As the result of a paralytic stroke, he dragged one leg when he walked. His spectacles were attached by means of a black cord which looked like a shoestring encircling his bald head. June 7, 1898, was, in Cincinnati, a day of inordinate heat and humidity. When shaking hands with me, Dr. Wise remarked gutturally: "Cronbach, it's hot." I agreed with him that it was hot. I did not agree with him a few years later when I became aware of his crusading against the Higher Criticism and against the doctrine of evolution.

M y first contact with the Hebrew Union College was disturbing. One of the instructors with whom we conversed maintained that I was not yet prepared to enter the University of Cincinnati, but that I would, for at least a year, have to attend high school in Cincinnati. I was stunned. Not only had I graduated with a good record from an excellent high school in Indianapolis; I had even completed at that high school a term as a postgraduate. Both in my parental family and decades later in my marital family, that Hebrew Union College instructor became known as "How-much-Greek- you-got," this being the question with which he had embarrassed

me. My father had sternly objected to my studying Greek on the ground that it was "impractical." Today I am spending from six to eight hours a week endeavoring to read Plato in the original. Fifty years after that disheartening conversation with the Hebrew Union College instructor, I recalled that incident in a letter to that instructor's nephew. Jestingly I wrote that I might have countered with the question: "How much English you got?" That nephew, one of my former students and a rabbi of topmost distinction, responded with a long and gracious telegram felicitating me upon the fiftieth anniversary of my first inside look at the Hebrew Union College. Less than two hours later the author of the telegram died. That message was probably the last that Joshua Loth Liebman ever dispatched.

I was grieved and dejected at the thought of having to go back to high school. But Rabbi Messing proposed: "Meet me tomorrow at the Stag Hotel, and we shall go to the University and see for ourselves." Rabbi Messing's words at the Stag Hotel the next day were such as one does not readily forget. He commented: "Man isst nicht so heiss wie man kocht." In my subsequent career, I have found that piece of shrewdness applicable to many an untoward situation. "One doesn't eat as hot as one cooksm-we must not take every remark at its face value. Rabbi Messing and I soon discovered that there was no insuperable obstacle to my entering the University. Coming, as I did, from another city, I would have to pass some examinations for entrance. The dean of the University cordially explained to us the scope and the nature of that requirement.

The summer of 1898 became the first of the many summers which have brought me no vacation but have provided something better than a vacation, namely, the opportunity for painstaking study. Preparing for the entrance examinations both at the Hebrew Union College and at the University of Cincinnati was arduous. M y knowledge of Hebrew was almost nil. I had, in my childhood, attended a Hebrew class at the temple, but the time devoted to the subject was so scant and the interruptions were so many that, when I decided to enter the Hebrew Union College, I knew very little. People who in those days tested my Hebrew reading shuddered at my ignorance.

AUTOBIOGRAPHY 2 I

In that summer of 1898 I felt at times overburdened and discour- aged, though study was to me not a new venture. I had always prepared my lessons both for high school and for Sunday school. I had memorized much of Lady Magnus' Outlines of Jewish History. I had twice won the prize for heading my Sunday school class. Still, in 1898, I did pity myself a little for the loss of my vacation. In September, 1898, I passed all the entrance examinations at the University and, together with fourteen classmates, the examination at the Hebrew Union College. The Hebrew Union College examination was not very formidable. The candidates sat around a large table in the room which was then the Hebrew Union College Library. W e were asked to read some verses of vocalized Hebrew. The examiners seemed more interested in greeting one another after the summer recess than in quizzing the prospects. "How do you know that this letter is a shin?" was one of the questions. The boy interrogated replied: "Because it has a little dot on the right." "What would it be if it had a big dot on the right?" Everyone joined in the subsequent uproar of laughter. The applicant who blushed under the prank about the "big dot" never graduated. Indeed, of the fifteen who entered in September, 1898, only six attained ordination. The one who blurted "a little dot on the right" became a well-known journalist; some forty-five years later, he served on the Hebrew Union College Board of Governors. But that September day all the 'candidates passed. W e were then told, and truthfully told, that our troubles were now beginning.

In choosing the ministry, I pictured the minister not as a public speaker but as a counselor and a consoler. I would envisage myself not as addressing audiences but as comforting troubled individuals in private conversation, directing their thoughts and their hopes to the Rock of Ages, and terminating the interview by our kneeling in prayer and thus obtaining every access of fortitude and insight. Such ideas were hardly indigenous to the Hebrew Union College. I also phantasied myself a martyr, shot at in the pulpit because of my doctrines, or toiling in the streets as a common laborer, my

2 2 AMERICAN JEWISH ARCHIVES, APRIL, 1959

teachings having brought about my dismissal and my exclusion from every position.

At the Hebrew Union College I came, for the first time, into contact with ripe scholarship. My teachers at the Hebrew Union College and the professors at the University impressed me as paragons of erudition. I marveled that a human head could compass so much knowledge. It appeared to me, nonetheless, that Hebrew bore no great pertinence to a rabbi's work until, in my third year, something happened which changed my opinion. The renowned Emil G. Hirsch delivered a course of lectures at the College in the spring of I go I . Here, indeed, was something that astounded. Hirsch was the rabbi par excellence, the peerless one, gleaming on the pinnacle of genius and success. And behold, the incomparable Hirsch was conversant with Hebrew! One of his addresses was delivered in Hebrew. It was a dazzling revelation that a Hebraist could be capable of superb English oratory and that Hebrew could enrich one's thinking and one's speaking. From that time forward I felt the incentive to master the Hebrew language and the reaches of Jewish history. I never attained either goal, but my respect for Jewish learning has not waned.

Another significant incident of my student years was my acquaintance with Ephraim Feldman, one of the Hebrew Union College teachers, widely admired by students and by alumni for his ver- satility and his brilliance. Although born and reared in Russia, and although he arrived in the United States at the age of twenty-one, Feldman acquired a command of English such as I have rarely found equalled. The English of his conversation was that of a literary masterpiece. His pronunciation was all but flawless. Feldman was not only versed in Hebrew and in Jewish lore; he was also a scholar in Greek and in Russian, and conversant with the literatures of Germany, France, and other European countries. In English literature he was a connoisseur. He was, at the same time, an expert mathematician and widely read in the philosophers. With Feldman I spent much time. I frequently visited him in his home. H e and I would walk together often and far.

Despite his extraordinary gifts, Feldman published almost nothing. An article, at rare intervals, in the Hebrew Union College Journal,

AUTOBIOGRAPHY 2 3

a student publication, a contribution to the Hebrew Union College Annual of 1904, and a paper on intermarriage in the 1905 Yearbook of the Central Conference of American Rabbis constituted, so far as I know, the entirety of what he produced for print. But his classroom discourses and his conversations were memorable.

Feldman was inclined to be censorious. Withering were his comments on persons such as we of today call "stuffed shirts," mediocre people parading as important. In his deflations of such people, he would throw us into convulsions of laughter. These caustic animadversions, directed against his colleagues and especially against President Kaufmann Kohler, landed him in serious trouble. In 1905 he was dismissed. Nothing short of herculean efforts on the part of his students and his former students availed to reverse that action. With a family of six children and a bare pittance of a salary, Feldrnan was virtually penniless. His unemployment would have reduced them to beggary.

Today I realize that Feldman might have been more tolerant of the inadequacies which he spied around him. Nonetheless, his friends were many; among them, not a few of those whom he pilloried. About the year 1909 his health began to fail. As his condition grew worse, it was decided to grant him a year's leave of absence on full pay and to signalize the occasion by conferring on him the honorary doctorate. The selfsame president and board who had ousted him in 1905 thus acclaimed him in 19 10. On November 16, 19 10, as Professor and Mrs. Feldman were leaving their home in Hyde Park to go to the college on Sixth Street for the conferring of the doctorate, Professor Feldman dropped dead. I was summoned from South Bend, Indiana, to deliver the eulogy. The ritual was conducted by the students. Feldman had been too vituperative of the local rabbis and of the Hebrew Union College faculty for any of them to participate in the obsequies, although all of them honored him by their attendance.

Feldman was a trenchant critic of prevailing theologies. H e forced his hearers to rethink their presuppositions. The influence which he wielded fostered negation and dissent. T o this day I often ask myself, regarding this, that, or the other person or event: "What would Feldrnan have said?"


Just as Professor Feldman stimulated one's aptitude for criticism, it is a non-Jewish teacher, Wyland Richardson Benedict, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cincinnati, whose memory I cherish as that of an influence making for constructiveness. Benedict was a man of homely appearance and of marked eccentric- ities. But he was inspiring. For more than sixty years, there has been never a day on which I have not thought of Professor Benedict. Throughout the years I find myself arriving, one after another, at positions voiced by Professor Benedict in his undergraduate classes. Recently, as a result of studies in semantics, I have come to notice the difference between God as something which one experiences and God as something reported. That was precisely what Professor Benedict told us more than half a century ago. How often he reit- erated that values exist, whatever we may affirm or deny about occurrences in history! "Love does exist," "Consecration does exist," "Beauty does exist," "Self-sacrifice does exist." While the critical studies at the Hebrew Union College were demolishing childhood conceptions of the Jewish past, Professor Benedict's teachings pointed out the values that survive all vicissitudes. William James, a friend of Professor Benedict, once wrote: "Philosophy never can destroy an ideal worth preserving." Professor Benedict illuminated the ideals worth preserving, while Professor Feldman's iconoclasm disposed of the rubbish and the chaff.

Another memorable feature of my college career was my discovery of childhood. Teaching by Hebrew Union College students in the Jewish religious schools of Cincinnati was already an established practice. I began to teach at the opening of my third college year. My competence was zero. With humiliation I look back upon my inability to control my class or to win the children's regard. Many years later it would surprise me when persons who had been my pupils in those initial days showed me respect- another one of those instances in which I have done poorly and then, years later, have perceived that the witnesses of my bungling retained no recollection of my discreditable performance.

AUTOBIOGRAPHY 25

After three years of teaching with indifferent success, there occurred a change. Not that my competence had noticeably increased, but I had discovered childhood. I found children lovable. M y pupils became my friends. They would often visit me in my home. I would regularly take some of them with me to services at the temple on Saturday morning after the session of the school. Among them was a little boy destined for a notable career as Edward L. Israel, gifted rabbi, whose untimely death in 1941 brought widespread sorrow. I became an enthusiast for childhood. When, at my graduation, I spoke the valedictory, I referred to childhood and its religious significance:

And not only from the men and women of Cincinnati, but also from the children must we take our leave. As teachers in the Sabbath schools, we have come to love these children. Dear little ones! Toward you our hands are uplifted in blessing. Good-bye, beloved! When we see you again, you may no longer be boys and girls. Perhaps, by that time, you will be men and women. We look unto Him that has you in His keeping: May your lives be full of sweetness. May your moments of peace and joy be many. And, should sorrows come upon you, may they find you prepared.

M y discovery of childhood ranks, along with the lectures delivered by Emil G. Hirsch and my companionship with Professor Feldman, among the noteworthy features of my Hebrew Union College days.

Related to childhood was another incident of my undergraduate career. During my last five years as a student in Cincinnati, I taught, at the Jewish Settlement House, a class in English for for- eigners. Those were the years of the Russian pogroms and of maximum Jewish immigration into our country. M y class met every Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday evening, but during the summers of 1904, 1905, and 1906, we met two evenings during the week and for two hours every Sunday morning. One of those Sunday mornings brought a turning point in my life.

T h e previous day, Saturday, June 18, 1904, commencement exercises had taken place at the University of Cincinnati. I did not attend that commencement; I may have been occupied with my Sat-

26 AMERICAN JEWISH ARCHIVES, APRIL, 19 59

urday morning class at the synagogue. M y parents and my sister did attend, my sister being, at the time, one of the University students.

My folks brought me the information that one of the graduates had been unprecedentedly honored. That graduate had been publicly declared the ablest student whom the University had ever matric- ulated. The young man happened to be also a student of the Hebrew Union College. He and I were close friends. His acts of kindness to me were many; his interest in me was most cordial. But I myself had graduated from that university two years before. Plainly, therefore, the ablest student in the history of the University was not I, but someone else. I was frantic with envy. I lost no time in sending my friend a note of warm congratulation, though inwardly I was seething with anguish.

Crushed and hopeless, I went the next day to my Sunday morning class at the Jewish Settlement House. I arrived long before the hour when the instruction was to begin. Steeped in misery, I sat alone in the classroom. Then something happened.

Into the room there suddenly jumped two or three children. They were poor children; they lived in that impoverished neighborhood. The youngsters had playfully climbed the fire escape upon which a window of my classroom opened. In a happy, friendly spirit, the children greeted me. Such was my joy in welcoming them that my envy disappeared. That very afternoon I took those children, and a few other children of the neighborhood, to the Isaac M. Wise farm located in the country a few miles away. I repeated such outings at frequent intervals during the rest of my stay in Cincinnati. Within a few days after that Sunday morning, I volunteered to help at the weekly outings given for the children of the neighborhood by the Jewish Settlement House. From that virulent attack of envy, the children of the poor brought me healing.

I was ordained on June I 6, 1906. In September, 1906, I began my duties as the rabbi of Temple Beth-El, in South Bend, Indiana. Very soon 1,realized that I would have to begin my education de novo. The presuppositions and the techniques which I had learnt

AUTOBIOGRAPHY 27

at the Hebrew Union College were largely at variance with what my congregation expected. The congregation was a new one. It had been organized in January, 1905, and the temple was dedicated in March, 1906, with Emil G. Hirsch as the dedication speaker. The congregation was strongly under Hirsch's influence. Although a few of its thirty members retained some recollection of traditional ways, most of them, and overwhelmingly the leaders, were ultra- liberal. Services were held on Sunday mornings only. Except on New Year or Atonement Day, any kind of temple activity on Friday evening or on Saturday was taboo. Following a practice which I, as a student, had begun when functioning at Lafayette, Louisiana, and at Lincoln, Illinois, during the Holy Days, I held penitential week-night meetings in the vestry room of the South Bend temple every evening between New Year and the Day of Atonement. The president of the congregation, who was also its founder, happened to be away on a European trip. The president returned on the Friday after New Year. He came to the interim service which I was holding in the vestry that evening. He proceeded to reprimand me sternly for conducting a Friday evening service. He warned me that conduct of that kind would destroy the congregation. Never again did I venture a gathering of that type in South Bend.

One of the first pieces of information imparted to me upon my arrival in South Bend was that the purpose of the temple was to demonstrate to the Gentiles that all Jews are not as indecorous as the "Pollaks" (Jews of East European origin). A few weeks before the congregation had been started, some of the older and wealthier Jewish residents had attended the funeral of an acquaintance who had retained some vestiges of Orthodox background. Those older residents, unfamiliar with Orthodox Jewish ways, were inexpressibly shocked at the bedlam of the Orthodox obsequies. There is nothing in Orthodox Judaism more repulsive to Reform Jews than the disorder of Orthodox funerals. That funeral so horrified the older Jewish residents of South Bend that, with a minimum of delay, they organized a Reform Temple for the purpose of convincing the Gentiles that there are Jews among whom funerals can be solemn and dignified.

Before I had lived in South Bend many weeks, the congregation


assembled and voted to abolish the practice of repeated rising and sitting in the course of the services. The model for the innovation was Temple Sinai of Chicago. I became completely won over to the idea. For what the members of the congregation derisively called "jumping up and down," I came to see, and still see, no raison d'ttre. Let people remain seated until it is time for the benediction, just before leaving. Even at nonsynagogal gatherings, I regret the chairman's announcing, "The audience will rise for the invocation." What possible virtue can there be in subjecting people to such discomfort or inconvenience?

During my first year in South Bend, I taught a Hebrew class for children. This class had to meet almost clandestinely. It was resented by the president and probably by other influential members. I discontinued the class after the first year. During my nine years at South Bend, I gave a few Hebrew lessons to a knowledge-hungry Christian girl, the daughter of a prominent official of the Studebaker Corporation. For a short time I imparted Hebrew to a young man, a Catholic, who wished to become converted to Judaism and whom, with great difficulty, I deterred from that step. My only other pupil in Hebrew was, for a brief period, a small boy whose mother was a non-Jewess. The father candidly stated that the purpose of burdening the boy with Hebrew was that of compensating for the father's marriage "out of the faith."

Two DIFFERENT WORLDS

It has been said that people quarrel not when they differ greatly but when they differ slightly. My extreme liberalism was accompanied by a readiness to consort and cooperate with Jewish people of extreme traditionalism. Wherever I have lived, I have numbered the Orthodox rabbi or rabbis among my acquaintances. When not expressly forbidden by the authorities of my congregation, I have attended and addressed Orthodox services, although I feel an aversion to Orthodox ceremonial forms.

In South Bend, I was often approached by Orthodox meshullahim, those traveling solicitors of funds for East European or Palestinian benevolences. One of these meshullahim engaged me in a conversation

AUTOBIOGRAPHY 29

about my temple. I told him of our services held on New Year and on Atonement Day and otherwise only on Sunday mornings between September 1st and June 1st. I told him about our hatlessness, about the all but exclusive use of English, about the non-Jewish women who did our singing, about the organ music, and all the rest.

A few days later, I attended a Sukkoth [Tabernacles] service at one of the Orthodox synagogues. As usual, I was assigned a seat alongside the rabbi, who sat in front, facing the congregation. The rabbi was ultratraditionalist. He wore earlocks and a long beard, a long coat, and a circular fur cap, such as one sees in old pictures of East European Jewish savants. During the service, who should enter but the meshullah to whom I had imparted some insight into the ways of our temple! Perceiving me, the ultra-heretic, seated beside the ultra-conformist rabbi, the meshullah was literally par- alyzed with astonishment. H e paused. He flung up his hands. "Ach," he exclaimed, dumfounded, "Ach, tzveh fershiedene velten!"

W e did indeed represent "two different worlds." Yet, for all that, the Orthodox rabbi and I associated as friends. W e met frequently. Occasionally I would dine at the rabbi's table. Barring a few instances of malevolent interference, I lived in concord with the Orthodox Jewish community. Antipodally remote from the Orthodox in matters of doctrine and of usage, I was not at all remote from them when it came to neighborliness. This has continued throughout my career.

Before I had lived in South Bend many weeks, I was admonished to stop referring to the Bible in my sermons and to discuss questions of the day, in the manner of the much admired Emil G. Hirsch. That ended forever my preaching from a text. The congregation professed to find "those Bible matters" intolerable. I readily acceded, grieved only that I had been remiss even for a brief time. I continue to deplore the practice of preaching from a text. Textual preaching was suited to an age when the Bible was the book of the people, indeed the only book of the people. The members of most Reform congregations do not read the Bible, do not care for the Bible, and,

3O AMERICAN JEWISH ARCHIVES, APRIL, 1959

in some instances, detest the Bible. What relevance is there in substantiating one's remarks by invoking that literature and, still worse, by the homiletic manipulation which twists the biblical words into a meaning remote from their meaning?

Soon after my arrival in South Bend, I acquired my first knowledge of rummage sales. Rummage sales constitute a phase of practical theology untaught at the Hebrew Union College. People would contribute cast-off articles of clothing, furniture, or household utensils to sell for whatever they would bring, the money being destined for the fund to pay off the temple mortgage. I was apprised that the women of the temple would hold a rummage sale on a certain date. I glanced at my Jewish calendar and noticed that the date coincided with the first day of Sukkoth. Fresh from the Hebrew Union College, where Sukkoth was important and a rummage sale unheard of, I was not a little perturbed. I started for the telephone to inform the president of the Ladies Aid Society, under whose auspices rummage sales took place, that the day which had been selected coincided with Sukkoth and that Sukkoth was a significant holiday. T o reach the telephone I had to go downstairs. Halfway down the steps I paused. I asked myself: "After all, what business is that of mine? It is no more my prerogative to dictate to those people what holidays they should recognize than it is my function to prescribe what kind of glassware they should place on their tables." I did not reach the telephone. I returned upstairs. I said nothing about Sukkoth.

The day of the rummage sale arrived. The sale was held in a vacant storeroom located in the Orthodox Jewish neighborhood. I discovered that the women knew as well as I did the incidence of the Jewish holiday. They had, in fact, chosen the day for precisely that reason. Their chief customers were the Orthodox Jews who, abstinent from work because of the holiday, had the leisure to come in and make purchases. No other day would have been as well suited.

Before I was long in the pulpit, I grew painfully aware of a problem which I have never solved. By long and distressing expe-

AUTOBIOGRAPHY 3 '

rience, I had to learn that, aside from the Holy Days and a few other special occasions, nothing will bring people to religious services except excellent preaching. Vast audiences came to hear Emil G. Hirsch and Stephen S. Wise and, in later years, Abba Hillel Silver and Joshua Loth Liebman. Despite strenuous efforts, I have achieved no headway in that regard. But I am under no illusions. I myself am drawn to the excellent speaker and repelled by the mediocre speaker, and I do not expect others to respond differently. I prepare arduously for every talk that I deliver. Although I must submit to empty seats, I need not submit to emptiness in my discourses. I strive to make every one of my talks worth hearing. More I cannot do.

Already in my days as a student I was warned that my elocution was faulty. I have tried to improve, but without much progress. When I was young I assumed that the content of an address was everything and the manner nothing. M y disillusionment has been painful. I have suffered much humiliation because of my inadequacy. If I put no effort into my voice, I cannot be heard beyond a short distance. If I do put effort into my voice, my voice becomes strained and monotonous. I envy, but am powerless to imitate, those who can be heard though they speak easily and naturally in vast auditoria. I should have bestowed more heed on voice cultivation in the years of my youth.

A number of incidents stand out among my memories of South Bend. One morning I was engaged in conversation by the German Lutheran clergyman, whose church was situated half a block from our temple. I held this clergyman in high esteem. He was an exemplar of neat attire and meticulous grooming in spite of his scant income. He preached both in German and in slightly accented English. One Monday morning he and I chanced to meet at a conference on social welfare and were waiting for the belated session to open. Said my Lutheran friend: "Yesterday I was absent from my pulpit. I attended services in a near-by town. There was a long (he drew out the word "lo-o-o-ong") ritual and a very short sermon. When preachers get lazy they have lo-o-o-ong rituals." Those words of the Lutheran clergyman crystallized a thought which had been, for some time, shaping itself in my mind. How easy it is to perform rituals! How hard it is to deliver a worth-while sermon! Who knows to what


extent rabbis who advocate rituals may be under the influence of that fact? The test of a rabbi's mettle lies in his preaching.

Forty years later, when on a visit to South Bend, I narrated the incident of the Lutheran preacher to an old member of the congregation. It happened to be the very man who had introduced me to the Lutheran minister in the days long past. Then I added: "Throughout the years the suspicion has been growing in me that some member of my temple may have asked the Lutheran preacher to speak to me in that manner." The aged member of my former congregation answered with a knowing smile and a meaningful wink.

Of other quandaries incurred by the rabbinate, these are a few examples: One night, at a temple dance, the president of the temple called me aside and, in the sight of everyone, though not in anyone's hearing, scolded me severely for the previous Sunday's sermon. In that sermon I had defended a group of young men who had formed a society for debating ideas regarded in those days as radical. At that time the horrendous word was not "Communist" but "Anarchist." Those young men were allegedly "Anarchist," and I had put myself on their side. The president of the temple felt relieved at one thing, namely, that few if any Gentiles were present to hear "Anarchism" Jewishly condoned. Today some of the pillars of that selfsame temple are ex-members of that "Anarchist" group.

Once I encountered protest for reading from the pulpit the forty-seventh chapter of Genesis. What must the Christians present have thought when they heard that Joseph, a "Jew," had speculated in grain!

On another occasion a prominent member of the congregation happened to be in Europe at the time of the autumn Holy Days. This member sent me a New Year greeting with the appended request: "Give my good wishes to all." I did not know that I was to "give the good wishes to all" from the pulpit. Had I thus understood it, I would readily have done so. My failure to do so provoked that parishioner to bitter resentment and the threat to withdraw from the congregation, which would, at that time, have meant the

The First Building Occupied by the Hebrew Union College

on \Vest Sixrh Streer, Cincinnati, 1881-191 z

AUTOBIOGRAPHY 3 3

congregation's demise. The tension lasted a year and a half. It was finally resolved when, heeding someone's advice, I publicly apologized for my mistake. Shortly thereafter the wife of the offended individual looked at the trouble-making letter and pointed out to her husband that, while he may have desired the announcement from the pulpit, his letter by no means said so.

One Sunday morning I offered a prayer of thanks for the safe return of one of the temple couples from a trip abroad. This enraged another couple who had been abroad but for whose safe return no expression of gratitude had been rendered. In vain did I point out that, in the latter case, the return from Europe had occurred in midsummer when services at the temple were suspended. Thereafter I made no pulpit references to events of that kind.

My religious school at South Bend was a failure. There were not many children in that congregation of thirty members, a number of whom were childless and some of whom did not send their children to the school, and children of persons outside of the congregation were not eligible. At one time the roster of my school dwindled to four. In 191 I, at the urging of Dr. Stephen S. Wise, I obtained a leave of absence and went abroad, spending six months at the University of Cambridge, England, and three months at the Berlin Lehranstalt. During my absence the school was in charge of one of the temple women, a lady who had never attended any kind of Jewish school or received any kind of Jewish instruction. Under the direction of this woman, the school throve and grew. When I returned in the fall of 191 z, I found a surprisingly large school divided into a number of classes. The objection to admitting children of outsiders seemed to have abated. But, in January, 1914, something happened which spoiled it all.

At my Sunday morning services, I gave a series of discourses on the relation of Judaism to other religions. These talks increased my meager attendance by the presence of interested Christians. It had become my practice to submit an abstract of each Sunday's discourse to the newspapers, which would publish it on Monday, along with similar abstracts from other congregations. What I said about the non-Jewish cults was, of course, friendly. I singled out for treatment only those aspects which would impress my listeners

favorably. On one of those Sundays I discussed Catholicism. The next day one of the newspapers featured my remarks. On Wednes- day I received a letter of hearty commendation from a prominent Catholic layman. Not many days later, I learnt that the Orthodox Jews of the community were furious. T o the Jews of the non- Reform groups, a good word for a Christian church was tantamount to apostasy. At once my Sunday school began to dwindle. It got smaller and smaller. Only afier I left South Bend did the school, as well as the congregation, grow. Today it is a fine, large congregation with a superb new temple and a commodious, well-equipped, and well-used educational annex. For years services have been held on Friday evenings. Hebrew classes are no longer stigmatized.

My salary at South Bend was $roo.oo a month. After six years it was raised to $ I z 5.00 a month. I never doubted that I was being paid more than I was worth. On fifty dollars a month I lived and saved. The rest I contributed to the support of my parents.

When, on June 8, 1955, the congregation celebrated its fiftieth anniversary, one of the few survivors of my first days at South Bend arose at the anniversary dinner afier I had spoken and, in the hearing of the entire assembly, apologized to me for the scantiness of my salary during those bygone days. In the year 1906 I did not receive much salary, but forty-nine years later I did receive an apology.

Among the significant happenings at South Bend was my appointment to the case committee of the Associated Charities. Although I had, for five years of my college days, taught English to immigrants at the Cincinnati Jewish Settlement and had interested myself in various Cincinnati benevolences, it was not until I sat with the case committee of the South Bend Associated Charities that I gained some real insight into modern social service. I had linked religion with kindliness already in my childhood. In the schoolroom hymn which, running through my thoughts that night, had transfigured me, there was a second stanza which began:

When the wretched meet mine eye, Let them find a helper nigh.

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As I grew older, projects for aiding the underprivileged intrigued me more and more. On four occasions funds were raised among the constituents of the South Bend Associated Charities to send me to the National Conference of Charities and Corrections. I attended the Buffalo Conference of 1909, the St. Louis Conference of 19 10,

the Memphis Conference of 1914, and the Baltimore Conference of I 9 1 5. I little realized, at the time, that these activities were preparing me for the day when I would serve the Hebrew Union College by imparting to its students that social outlook for which I myself had to wait until my congregation, by a trivial formality, appointed me to the case committee of the Associated Charities of South Bend.

Slowly the thought developed in my mind that my goals lay not in the realm of ritual and ceremonial, nor in the realm of synagogal organization, nor in the realm of scholarship, but in the realm of the spiritual. Today I see it clearly. In my days at South Bend, the concept was still dim and blurred. Whenever I have adhered to that ideal, results have been gratifying; when I have forsaken that ideal, results have been disappointing. Troubled people did come to me, and I ministered to them with sincerity. More than once those troubled people borrowed my money and failed to repay. But, by and large, I look back, with satisfaction, upon those en- deavors.

Those were the days when the nation-wide custom originated, of devoting given religious services to certain specific themes. Like various other ministers, I would observe Child Labor Sunday, Anti-Tuberculosis Sunday, Better Housing Sunday, Mothers' Day, World Peace Sunday, Race Relations Sunday, and the like. In these, as in all our worship, I received the invaluable cooperation of the young Jewish woman who functioned as organist and who, as I write these words, has just been honored by the congregation for her forty years of blessed activity. Once I arranged a flower service, once a music service, and once a consolation service. This consolation service revealed such unusual appreciation of spiritual values on the part of the congregation that I shall describe it.

Invitations were extended by members of the congregation to bereaved, unfortunate, or troubled persons of their acquaintance. Our formal announcement read: "We shall lay our sorrows at the


altar of God." Members of the congregation brought with them to the services various persons who had encountered adversity. One of our members shared his pew with a man who as a leader among the Jewish Orthodox had often spoken disparagingly of Reform Judaism and the Reform temple. Our Orthodox guest was near his life's end; I attended his funeral a few weeks later. I saw, seated with one of our women, a non-Jewish girl who had, a few days previously, because of some indiscretion, suffered obloquy from the newspapers. In the audience there was also a Negro. It was a motley group, white and black, Jew and non-Jew; among the Jews were both Orthodox and Reform. I made little use of the Prayer Book. Indeed, I had for some time abandoned the Prayer Book, reciting from memory the few liturgic passages that the congregation still cherished. At the consolation service we did not use the Prayer Book; we prayed. Never have I seen more genuine devoutness. Our two singers, who were non-Jewish, and our beloved organist, who was Jewish, rendered carefully chosen music:

L L Not alone, for I am with you," Lord, the words are Thine. In the night of doubt and darkness, On us gently shine.

Also the hymn:

My God and Father, while I stray, Far from my home in life's rough way, 0 teach me from my heart to say,

"Thy will be done!"

At the termination of the service, I stood at the exit. The departing people pressed my hand. No one said: "Doctor, you 'done' fine." No one remarked: "I enjoyed the service." People took leave of me in silence. Some faces were turned away, sometimes not swiftly enough to conceal tears. Yes, we did lay our sorrows on the altar of God. I saw demonstrated two facts: that the deep spiritual values of religion depend on no ritual conformity, and that unalloyed sincerity can go far to compensate for one's lack of professional skill.

AUTOBIOGRAPHY 3 7

Besides the conviction about the primacy of the spiritual, my experience at South Bend brought the abandonment of the notion that beliefs and rituals enhance people's morals. How uncritical that assumption! W e observe, again and again, moral shortcomings in those who conform, while splendor of character often manifests itself in those to whom theologies and ceremonials are alien.

At South Bend, from my very first day, I met with occurrences which started me toward my present convictions about ethical relativity. I had been, like everyone else, nurtured on the doctrine of ethical absolutes. Everyone whom I knew took it for granted that some things were absolutely good and some things absolutely bad. Neither at the University of Cincinnati, where I took a course in ethics under my esteemed teacher, Professor Benedict, nor at the Hebrew Union College, had I been vouchsafed the slightest intimation that ethical absolutes are chimerical. At South Bend, people told me their grievances against one another. I discovered that the disparagers of one occasion were the disparaged of other occasions, and that those whom some people admired other people scorned. I myself often found likable and worthy those whom others deprecated.

Many years had to elapse before my comprehension of ethical relativity became full-fledged. But it began in my observations at South Bend. I have often expounded the doctrine before audiences, even at religious services. With one exception, my advocacy has aroused neither enthusiasm nor opposition. In the summer of 1947 I taught a class of clergymen at Macdonald College near Montreal, Canada. I dwelt upon the doctrine of ethical relativity in the course of one of my lectures. With an abundance of illustrations, I called attention to the fact that nothing is good in the world but someone somewhere calls it bad, and nothing bad in the world but someone somewhere calls it good. That lecture provoked virulent antagonism. Incidentally, two of the well-known proponents of ethical relativity, Samuel IchiyC Hayakawa and G. Brock Chisholm, happen to be, like the dissenters at Macdonald College, Canadians. It is my


persuasion that the acceptance of ethical relativity is the only hope of the world. Wars and persecutions, animosities and exploitations are insuperable so long as people affirm an Absolute Right and an Absolute Wrong. Absolute right is nothing but that which one chances to prefer; and absolute wrong is nothing but the antithetic preference of one's adversaries.

At South Bend a turning point in my career ensued from an event which has remained unknown to nearly everyone except myself and which was of little consequence to anyone except myself. It happened shortly after my return from a year's absence in Europe. By a curious coincidence it fell on the second anniversary of the death of Professor Feldman. The time was a Saturday night. I had gotten back from Ligonier, Indiana, where, for a number of years, I had been conducting services on Friday evenings and on Saturday mornings. As always, I found the week's copy of the American lsraelite awaiting me. I picked up the newspaper, and then something happened which, in a torrent of anguish, changed my entire life.

I noticed, in that issue of the American Israelite, a brief item to the effect that Louis J. Kopald had been elected to succeed the late Israel Aaron as the rabbi of Temple Beth Zion in Buffalo. The item stated Rabbi Kopald's age. Rabbi Kopald was a few months my junior.

There resulted for me an emotional turmoil. As a child I used to pride myself on being "the youngest in the class." I had not been the youngest in my class at the Hebrew Union College; but for this I found compensation in the fact that I ranged far ahead of the others in my classification at the University. Nor did it irk me that my congregation at South Bend was the smallest and the most insignificant congregation maintaining a rabbi. After all, so I assumed, the occupants of the larger pulpits were men older than myself. That item in the American Israelite, like a terrific flash of lightning, showed me my delusion. There was no doubt about it. I was being outstripped. A man definitely younger than myself had been called to a large pulpit. I staggered.

AUTOBIOGRAPHY 39

Soon it became evident that Rabbi Kopald7s appointment had merely opened my eyes. I perceived that on every hand I was being outdistanced by persons younger than myself. Even the men older than myself had outstripped me. Looking into a few chronologies, I found that, at my age and earlier, these men had already occupied pulpits of much greater consequence than the tiny congregation at South Bend. And some of them were men whom Professor Feldman had disdained. Professor Feldman had, in fact, disliked Kopald. Feldrnan had suspected that Kopald, as a student, had been among those who sought his dismissal from the faculty of the College. Since Professor Feldman7s enemies were, in a way, my own enemies, this was plainly a case in which "mine enemies triumphed over me."

I have long since become reconciled to being outrivaled by persons younger than myself. Just as in my youth older people would encourage me and rejoice whenever I attained any success, I have long since learnt how to find pleasure in the achievements of my students and of others younger than myself. No teaching of Judaism sustains me more than the saying of the talmudic sage Ben Zoma, in Abot IV: I , that our truest honor consists not in the honors we receive but in the honors we bestow. "Who is honored? He that honors his fellow-beings."

Along with his other colleagues, I soon had occasion to grieve at Kopald's protracted illness and untimely death. On the twenty- eighth anniversary of the day when that item in the American Israelite so utterly shattered me, I called on Rabbi Kopald7s widow. I recounted to her the incident. Then we conversed, paying homage to the memory of her lamented husband, my colleague and my friend.

In February, 1947, more than thirty-four years after my day of wrenching, I had to spend a few hours in Buffalo en route to Montreal, Canada. It was a Saturday of unprecedented cold and snowfall. Convenience required that I remain alone for a few hours at Temple Beth Zion in the study of the associate rabbi. Thoughts of Kopald crowded my mind as I sat during that dark, dreary, wintry afternoon in a place which Rabbi Kopald must once have occupied. I mused: "More than thirty-four years ago I thought that the congregation should have called not Kopald but me. How

4 O AMERICAN JEWISH ARCHIVES, APRIL, 1959

fortunate that they did not! Today I see, with utmost clarity, how unfitted I would have been for that position." Then I pondered another coincidence. That very morning I had heard, at the service in that very temple, the name of the late Rabbi Louis J. Kopald read among those mentioned because that day marked the anniversary of their decease.

Worthy of mention among the incidents of my South Bend career was my meeting with the noted Jewish author, Mary Antin. Mary Antin's book, The Promised Land, stood high among the best sellers. It was foremost in an entire genre of literature popular at the time. The Promised Land was chief among several noted books written by gifted immigrants depicting their experiences in becoming Americanized.

The Promised Land was a prose poem. Unless my memory deceives me, I copied parts of it into the form of blank verse. Its English was exquisite. The story it told was gripping. Mary Antin was, in those days, the most talked-of writer-if not the most talked-of woman - in America. At the height of her celebrity she traveled from city to city, addressing large and enraptured audiences.

On one of those lecture tours, Mary Antin came to South Bend. She came at the invitation of a non-Jewish literary club, but my congregation, in token of its pride in Mary Antin and its esteem for her, took over the distinguished visitor's entertainment. She was the guest in the finest home among our membership. I, the rabbi, became her escort during the period of her stay.

On the day of Mary Antin's arrival, I went to La Porte, a town twenty-seven miles west of South Bend, and boarded the train on which Mary Antin was traveling. Having often seen her picture, I promptly recognized the small, youthful-looking woman with the black eyes and the black, curly hair. I found her napping or attempting to nap in a Pullman seat. She soon awakened, and I introduced myself. From that moment, in the fall of 1915, Mary Antin and I became friends.

AUTOBIOGRAPHY 41

A year later, in December, 19 16, Mary Antin, learning that I was now situated in New York City, invited me to come to her home in Scarsdale where she was planning to celebrate Hanukkah. She wanted me, a rabbi, to perform the Hanukkah ritual. She had obviously abandoned her antipathy to religion, that aversion described in The Promised Land.

When I left the train at Scarsdale, a number of other passengers left the train, and those also proved to be Mary Antin7s guests. Mary Antin met us at the depot. Although the evening was chilly, she was hatless and coatless. Carrying a lighted lantern, she led the way through the dark woods to the gorgeous residence which was her home.

Her husband, Amadeus William Grabau, was not present. But her mother and her daughter and other relatives were present; some of them I recognized as characters in The Promised Land. The Hanukkah tapers were duly kindled, and then everyone joined in singing "Rock of Ages." I had brought with me a chart from which the words of the hymn could easily be read by a roomful of people. The young man who accompanied on the piano was a skilled musician. Among the guests were professional singers with superb voices. Mary Antin herself sang beautifully. Never have I heard the Hanukkah hymn rendered as it was that night. Likewise other musical numbers, Jewish and non-Jewish, were performed by the gifted artists in the company. The dinner served was sumptuous.

Subsequent to that Hanukkah night, Mary Antin and I lost touch with one another, but about the year 1937 my attention was again turned to Mary Antin when an article by her appeared in the Atlantic Monthly. The article indicated that her circumstances had changed. Her days of opulence and celebrity were over. From the article one gained the impression that she was living alone, in a state of impaired health and of limited means. Her attachment to religion, however, had grown. The atheist of The Promised Land had, amid deprivation and suffering, discovered the reality of God.

I t has long been my practice to single out for special consideration, on the Jewish New Year, acquaintances who have undergone


some shattering unhappiness and who would welcome a sincere message of comfort. I sent such a New Year letter to Mary Antin. Her reply began an exchange of correspondence which continued until her death. Her letters conveyed that, for various periods, she had been hospitalized. It appears that, for a time, she served on a hospital staff.

In the course of the correspondence, she asked me to come to her. She seemed to want my pastoral ministrations. Several years elapsed before the visit could be arranged. In the autumn of 1946, having an appointment in New York City, I contrived a trip to Albany where, as the guest of my friend, the late Rabbi Samuel Wolk, I spent a day or two and visited Mary Antin in the home of her sisters.

Though still good-looking, she had aged perceptibly. She walked with difficulty; she carried a cane. The time during which I could converse with her was severely limited by her state of health. But mentally she was alert. T o serve her as pastor I had no qualifications beyond my deep reverence for her personality and my appreciation of her accomplishments. It was she, rather than I, who functioned as a religious ministrant. It was she, not I, who spoke the finest words of wisdom and of comfort. I hope some day to comply with her urging that I read the writings on anthroposophy by Rudolf Steiner

Particularly was I impressed by the devotion bestowed upon her by her two sisters, both of them much younger than Mary Antin. Though helpless, she was the honored chief of the household. Hers was the place at the head of the table. She was revered, not as a sister, but as an adored mother.

During my stay in Albany, I called on Mary Antin three times. Always there was some delay until my stricken friend could make her way downstairs. On one of my calls, while thus waiting, I went to the bookshelf and picked up a copy of The Promised Land. I turned to the last page. I read these words:

How shall I number the days of my life, except by the stars of the night, except by the salt drops of the sea . . . . Mine is the whole majestic past, and mine is the shining future.

AUTOBIOGRAPHY 4 3

And those were the words of that invalid upstairs! Hers was not the shining future, perhaps not even the majestic past. But hers was something perhaps more precious, something which she herself may have regarded as more precious. Hers was the wonderful love and the incomparable tenderness of those splendid sisters.

M y last meeting with Mary Antin occurred during March, 1948, in New York City, where she was staying with another of her sisters, also much younger than Mary. Mary Antin was lying on a couch. W e conversed about people's willingness to appear unclothed before members of their family and their reluctance to be seen thus by strangers; while the reverse obtains when it comes to the mind. Depths of our souls, which we reveal to outsiders, we keep hidden from the members of our own household. I tried to quote the words in which George Eliot voices that same observation. Mary Antin agreed with me, but appended that there were exceptions. Such an exception was the sister with whom she was then staying and who was, at that moment, occupied with callers in another room. That sister, Mary Antin assured me, was a confidante from whom not a recess of Mary Antin7s soul was concealed.

Mary Antin, leaning on her cane, accompanied me to the elevator. There we said farewell, never again to meet. On May IS , 1949, 1 received from the sisters a telegram announcing Mary Antin's death.

Another notable visitor, during my incumbency at South Bend, was the Jewish author, scholar, and leader, Israel Abrahams, of Cambridge, England. Abrahams spoke in our little temple on Sunday morning, November 10, 191 2. 1 had become acquainted with Abrahams the year before, in Cambridge, where 1 was frequently a guest at his home. I had gone to Cambridge for the purpose of studying under Abrahams. The kind attentions which I received from him were innumerable. His helpfulness left nothing to be desired.

There did occur one brief moment of misunderstanding. Abra- hams taught, at the University, a class in rabbinics. It was a small


class attended by a few candidates for the Christian ministry. I was the only Jew in the group. Unfamiliar with British ways, I fell into our Hebrew Union College usage of asking the teacher questions. How inept that was I soon learnt. One day Israel Abrahams lost his patience. "Cronbach," he snapped, "you talk too much."

I t seemed to me that, instantly after uttering those words, Abrahams was stung with regret. Hardly had the class hour ended when he said to me: "Next year I am to be in America, and among the places I wish to visit is South Bend."

I felt at the time, and still feel, that the South Bend visit was to be an act of expiation. So far as I was concerned, there was no need of any expiation.

In 191 t Israel Abrahams came to the United States, where he lectured in city after city at large universities and before huge congregations. W e of South Bend felt honored that the distinguished scholar should put our small community on his itinerary.

Abrahams came to us from Louisville. Soon an anecdote began to circulate. The story went that, when Abrahams, in Louisville, bought his ticket for South Bend, the ticket agent explained that Abrahams would board the night train at Louisville and reach Logansport about two o'clock in the morning. He would then "lay over" in Logansport until about eight in the morning, when he would take the train to South Bend. Abrahams, the Englishman, is reported to have exclaimed: "Lay ovah? Lay ovah? Cahn't I sit down?"

As it happened, there was for the distinguished visitor a literal lying over. I went to Logansport the day prior to our guest's arrival and engaged a room in the best hotel, where he rested until it was time to board the train for South Bend. When we reached South Bend, the officers of the congregation were awaiting us at the depot. Our temple, that Sunday morning, was crowded as I never saw it crowded at any other time.

Just before the discourse, according to the order of our Sunday morning service, a song was rendered by the choir. No one except Abrahams and myself knew the slightest about the unfortunate moment in the classroom at Cambridge. No one except the choir people knew what was to be that morning's selection to be sung

AUTOBIOGRAPHY 45

just before the sermon. The selection was a musical setting of Psalm 3 2 :

Happy is he whose transgression is forgiven, Whose sin is pardoned.

I shared my thoughts with no one until long after Abrahams' death. I rejoice that everything possible was done to make that expiation delightful.

In my contacts with Israel Abrahams, there was another occurrence too significant to forget. The incident happened in London. I was in London just before Easter. I attended three of the services at the (Christian) City Temple, where I heard the renowned Christian preacher, Reginald Campbell. One of the services was held Thursday noon, one on Sunday morning, and one on Sunday evening. The enormous edifice had a seating capacity as large as that of any indoor auditorium in the United States. Every seat was occupied at every one of the services. It was tremendous. The music, the prayers, and the preaching were unsurpassable.

The day after that Sunday was the eve of the Jewish Passover. I had been invited to a seder held in a London Jewish home. The guests were many, among them Israel Abrahams. While we were waiting for the others to assemble, Abrahams and I stood chatting.

Abrahams asked whether I had heard Campbell and what I thought of him. I answered: "As I left that church last night amid that huge multitude, I said to myself: 'When, 0 when, will a Jewish preacher speak that way to a Jewish audience?' In Campbell's preaching, spirituality soared to perfection." Then I quoted some of Campbell's amazingly exalted utterances. "Cronbach," said Abrahams, "I fear that the realization of your wish is doubtful. Our religion is, after all, a superficial religion."

Abrahams was no anti-Semite. Abrahams was an outstanding Jewish leader. He was a Jewish scholar of repute. He knew whereof he spoke. Still, I did not agree with Abrahams. I do not agree, with Abrahams, that Judaism is necessarily superficial. It is superficial

46 AMERICAN JEWISH ARCHIVES, APRIL, 19 59

only if we allow it to be such. It need not be superficial. I have been present on Jewish occasions pervaded by a genuine spirituality, and a spirituality articulated in Jewish modes of speaking.

My third reminiscence of Abrahams is in a lighter vein. Early in the year 1912, I attended the installation of the late Israel I. Mattuck as leader of the Liberal Jewish Synagogue in London. The chief speaker at the installation was the late Claude G. Montefiore. The following day, in Cambridge, Israel Abrahams asked me: "How did you like Montefiore's address?"

I replied: "I had a fault to find with that address. Mr. Montefiore indulged in roseate predictions about the future of Liberal Judaism in England. May his predictions come true! Perhaps they will come true. Yet no human being is qualified to make predictions. Amos denied that he was a prophet. No one is a prophet if 'prophet7 means 'predictor7 or 'soothsayer.' "

Abrahams replied: "Your criticism greatly interests me. I was the one by whom Montefiore's speech was written."

For the temple at South Bend, the period from 19 I 2 to 19 1 5 was one of dire uncertainty. New memberships did not suffice to compensate for losses due to deaths and to removals from the city. The very man who had organized the congregation was among those who predicted its imminent dissolution. Along with this, the superior status of colleagues younger than myself turned my thoughts toward the handicaps of age. I feared that some day I would be destitute. The conclusion forced itself upon me that I ought to do something for my own security before it was too late. Sadly and regretfully I decided to accept any new position that might be offered.

In November, 19 I 5, I received a call to the pulpit of Providence, Rhode Island. I preached at the Providence temple on a Friday evening and Saturday morning. On Sunday morning, Harry Cutler, the nationally known president of the congregation, came to me in great perplexity. Mr. Cutler assured me that the call extended to me by the congregation had been bonaJide and that the congregation would adhere to its agreement. The impression which I had created

AUTOBIOGRAPHY 47

by my preaching had been, however, woefully unfavorable. Mr. Cutler quoted his wife as remarking: "If that man becomes the rabbi, I shall never again set foot in that temple." Alas, Mrs. Cutler did not in any event set foot in that temple many times more. She was already ailing; her death occurred not long afterward.

That Sunday morning there was a meeting of the temple board. I was asked to be present. Everyone was downcast. Without hesita- tion I said: "You have seen and I have seen that I am not qualified to be your rabbi. You have no obligation toward me." The regret seemed mutual. Crushed in spirit, I took my leave. Many years afterward, Maurice Davis, an exceedingly fine and gifted young man from Providence, became my son-in-law. Students of mine who have occupied the Providence pulpit apprise me that no one in Providence recalls my failure. Again my setback appears to have been remembered by no one except myself. Thirty years to the day after that unsuccessful Friday night I, as guest preacher, again occupied the Providence pulpit. In an audience which filled the temple, not one person was present who had witnessed my dCbAcle of thirty years before, and not one individual among the many whom I met had ever heard anything about that bygone frustration.

A few days before that unsuccessful appearance at Providence, I had received a letter from Dr. Stephen S. Wise asking me to join the staff of the Free Synagogue. When it became obvious that my future did not lie in Providence, I accepted Dr. Wise's offer. In New York I saw "how things are done in a big way."

M y work at the Free Synagogue was largely that of supervising some schools and directing a social center. I preached hardly ever at the main service in Carnegie Hall, but I preached occasionally at the East Side Branch on Clinton Street and sometimes at the branch in the Bronx. There was a depressing contrast between the meager attendance when I was the announced speaker and the vast throngs which crowded the halls when the expected preacher was Dr. Wise. In less than two years, Dr. Wise asked me to resign.


At the Free Synagogue I had worked arduously. I clung to my spiritual interpretation of Judaism. A circle of devoted young people gathered around me. With some of these I am still in contact. I never lost the friendship of Dr. Wise himself. Before I left New York, I married Rose Hentel, a teacher at the Free Synagogue school. Dr. Wise officiated at our marriage. Six years later, when we adopted our daughter, Marion, it was through Dr. Wise's assistance.

A certain incident of my association with Stephen Wise merits recounting. In the spring of 1916 I had charge of his confirmation class. Following a usage which had worked well in South Bend, I held with the class an "hour of consecration." The hour of consecration was a project which I would broach to my confirmation classes about a month in advance of confirmation day. I would say:

"We are now rehearsing for confirmation. In all likelihood you will recite your parts well. You will make a good impression. You will win the plaudits of many, and bring happiness to your relatives and friends.

"But perhaps there is in us a hunger for something higher. Display is, after all, not the loftiest thing in life. Winning people's admiration may be desirable. Still, our souls can yearn for something grander. There may be within us a longing for God. As the Psalmist says: 'My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God.'

"Would you care to have an hour devoted to that concern? An hour when we would assemble not to rehearse our parts, not to practice marching up and down, not an hour to fuss over arrangements, but an hour when God and His righteousness will be upper- most in our thoughts. W e would be entirely by ourselves. No prospective admirers would be present."

As a rule, the children would blurt out: "Yes, yes, let us have that." T o which I would reply: "No, we must not decide offhand. I want you to take time to think about it. I shall make no further mention of this. Further mention must come from you and not from me. If nothing hrther is said, the proposal is dropped. But if, between now and four weeks from now, you express your wish to have a consecration hour, then and only then shall we have such an hour."

AUTOBIOGRAPHY 49

Nearly always some child or committee of children, speaking for the class, would in due time ask that a consecration hour be held. The hour would be scheduled for some time between the last rehearsal and the day of the confirmation ceremony. The tone of the consecration hour would invariably be one of deep reverence. The children would express themselves, setting forth their ideals, their hopes, their aspirations. Sometimes a child would break forth into prayer. With the children's consent, I would, in closing, speak a benediction embodying their various thoughts.

A consecration hour was requested by the confirmation class of the Free Synagogue. W e held it on a Saturday morning, confirmation coming the next day. A fervently devout spirit prevailed. Un- suspected holiness and beauty were disclosed by those opened hearts. At the height of the impressiveness, Stephen Wise entered the room. He motioned me not to yield to him, but to continue leading. Attentively he listened to the children. Then, as if he were himself one of the children, America's foremost Jew shared with us his thoughts. He spoke simply and briefly. He said that, between God and him, there was a barrier, a thick wall which he was unable to penetrate. The sense of God's presence was the blessed experience of others. Much as he desired it, the experience was not his.

How well I understood him! God is near the hearts of the lowly, but to be lowly is, for some of us, impossible. Some of us have duties by which lowliness is precluded. The boon of humility was not consonant with Stephen Wise's gigantic work. His mission in life did not permit him to experience the divine. But that did not exclude him from our devotion. The love which emanated from those youthful souls embraced many. Our great leader came, by all means, within its folds.

During my brief tenure in New York City, Dr. Wise introduced me to Felix Adler. I retained the friendship of Adler to the end of his life. On one occasion I accompanied Dr. Adler on a two-mile walk through the streets of Philadelphia. That walk was one of the high lights of my career.

so AMERICAN JEWISH ARCHIVES, APRIL, 1959

It was the last Sunday in November, I gz 5 . I had been attending a conference in New York City. Prior to my leaving home, I had written Dr. Adler to ask, not for an interview, but merely for an opportunity to step in and greet him and express my esteem. Through some irregularity of the mails, Dr. Adler's kind and gracious reply did not reach me until after I had gotten back to Cincinnati. In fact, Dr. Adler was not in New York when I was in New York. He had gone to address the Ethical Society in Philadelphia. My own journey took me to Philadelphia, where I visited my sister. I was in Phila- delphia on the very morning when Dr. Adler spoke before the Ethical Society at the Philadelphia Academy of Music.

I went to the Academy of Music and, without any assurance that Dr. Adler had received my letter or even had any recollection of my existence, I handed my card to the leader of the society and asked him to convey to Dr. Adler my respects. In a few minutes, the leader returned with word that, while Dr. Adler was unable to greet me before his lecture, he would be pleased to see me afier the meeting. I was to await him at the exit door of the stage.

Before an audience which filled the immense auditorium, galleries included, Dr. Adler, then seventy-four years of age, delivered an unforgettable address. Speaking in a conversational tone of voice- a biographer once called it speaking as if he were thinking out loud- the small-statured, serious-faced man presented thoughts of super- lative consequence. He synopsized his philosophy about eliciting the best in others and thereby nurturing the best in ourselves, and about the role of frustration in the forging of personality. His thinking was that of a great philosopher, but a washerwoman could have understood him; such were his simplicity and lucidity. The vast audience was stirred.

As the throng poured from the edifice, I went to the stage exit to which I had been directed. There I perceived Dr. Adler surrounded by handshaking friends. The moment he saw me his words were: "Cronbach, we walk." There was a slight guttural inflection of the T. I understood him to mean that we would walk together through the corridor to a waiting automobile, where we would separate. But that was not what he had in mind. When the others had departed and he and I were alone, we walked through the

AUTOBIOGRAPHY s 1

corridor, but continued to walk in the street. W e walked and walked and walked to the Fels residence in West Philadelphia. A Phila- delphian, whom I later consulted, estimated the distance as two miles.

W e walked together that autumnal Sunday noontime. Dr. Adler did not dissent when I remarked that many rabbis had abandoned the cultural lag which was the cause of Dr. Adler's rejecting the rabbinate in 1873. Presently Dr. Adler broached the subject of the 'm ha'arez, the unschooled rustic, the object of scornful references in the Talmud. He expressed himself as bitterly displeased with that intellectual snobbishness. He listened courteously when I commented that talmudic thinking on that subject was not unan- imous. I recalled having come across talmudic passages friendly to the 'm ha'arez, and I promised to send him a list of those quota- tions. The list was duly sent and cordially acknowledged.

At our leave-taking, when we reached the Fels residence, Dr. Adler remarked: "Cronbach, I should like to have you lunch with me, but I am myself a stranger in the city, and the guest of someone else."

I exchanged letters with Dr. Adler a number of times; his letters to me now repose in the American Jewish Archives. Adler's identification of religion with reverence for human personality has impressed me strongly. Just as, with the passing of the years, I find myself more and more in accord with the teachings of Professor Benedict, so, as I get older, I agree more and more with Felix Adler that the best in religion lies not in its rituals and not in its dogmas, but in its recognition of human personality. I am persuaded that, when "God" signifies reverence for human personality, "God" acquires a meaning beyond the assaults of science and immune to the apathy of disillusionment.

By a grandmother who, when a teen-ager, had been one of my Free Synagogue following, I was recently asked to embody in this autobiography something about the "Twilight Hour." The Twilight Hour was observed late every Saturday afternoon; it spanned the

transition between day and dark. I would sit in a convenient room of the Free Synagogue House on Clinton Street, and presently there would enter one or two teen-agers. I would greet them and begin a conversation. Soon other teen-agers would arrive and join in the conversation. Then others would come, and still others, until the little room held as many as it could seat.

Conditions favored exalted themes. The topics were God, Prayer, Self-Sacrifice, Humility, Temptation, Adversity, Immor- tality, and the like, discussed not as subjects of a curriculum but as vital personal concerns. The spirit prevailing was one of intense devoutness. The words of Jacob, "Surely the Lord is in this place" (Genesis 28: 16), would aptly have served as a motto. Indeed, those hallowed gatherings were often held in a room on whose wall hung the framed inscription, "In every place where I cause My name to be remembered, I shall come unto thee and bless thee" (Exodus 20: 2 I). Sometimes we would pause and listen to sacred music, for which some of the boys would manage the records in the victrola. The Twilight Hour fulfilled some of my fondest hopes as a teacher of religion. Far into the years, those who participated have recalled it with gratitude.

On one occasion, an incident of the Twilight Hour brought into vivid contrast the difference between the ritual side of religion and the spiritual side. Some girls of the group came to me one day and spoke to me about another one of the girls, Esther H. I was told that Esther had been absent from the Twilight Hour for a number of Saturdays, absent to her extreme regret. The Twilight Hour, they assured me, had been meaningful to Esther as nothing else was meaningful to her. But Esther's father had objected to her attending. Esther had been grieving and weeping. Could I do something about it? I replied that I would call on Esther's father and find out what was wrong.

Let me now note that I am writing about an event which occurred forty-two years ago. My account will, nevertheless, be essentially correct.

One bright summer afiernoon, I went through the teeming streets of New York7s East Side, past the long rows of tenements, and at a point not far from the East River I reached the gloomy edifice in

AUTOBIOGRAPHY 53

the basement of which Esther's father maintained a little shop for manufacturing sausages.

Mr. H. was a small-statured man with a short beard. He was, if I remember correctly, an Austrian by birth. Though the weather was warm, he wore his hat in the house. Our conversation proceeded somewhat as follows:

I: I would not be troubling you, Mr. H., were it not for the wishes of your daughter. Esther yearns to join her friends at our Twilight Hour. I want to do what I can to make her return possible.

Mr. H.: I definitely forbid any of my children to go to your place. I am a Jew. I want my children to be Jews. You are a destroyer of Judaism.

I: Why should I be a destroyer of Judaism? Am I not a Jew myself?

Mr. H.: Can you deny that, late one Saturday afternoon, when the young people were gathered around you, you raised your hand and took hold of the cord which operates the electric bulb in the ceiling and that you pulled that cord?

I: I always pull that cord when the room gets dark. Mr. H.: Were you sure that the Sabbath was over? It may

have been dark in the house. Was it dark outdoors? You kindled a light on the Sabbath. Is that the kind of example to be followed by my children?

I: But, Mr. H., all of that is so trivial. At the Free Synagogue we stress not the puny things in Judaism but the big things in Judaism: "Love thy neighbor as thyself," "Do justly, love mercy, walk humbly," "My soul waiteth for the Lord more than they that watch for the morning," "Whom have I in heaven but Thee? And beside Thee I desire none upon earth!" (I quoted those passages in Hebrew.)

Mr. H.: You may be saying those things in Hebrew, but are those things exclusively Jewish? Christians also believe in those things. Can you deny that, in your Synagogue House, there hang on the walls Hebrew inscriptions and that you and others, in the very presence of that Hebrew, go around bareheaded? Is that what you call Judaism?

I: Yes, we do go bareheaded. That is the American custom.


Mr. H.: Can you deny that, at your services on Friday evenings, someone plays the piano? Do you not know that the playing of a musical instrument or even listening to a musical instrument on the Sabbath is Sabbath desecration?

Mr. H. was unyielding. I withdrew in defeat. His daughter never returned.

The incident occurred in 19 I 7. On November 28, 1945, more than twenty-eight years later, I was in Worcester, Massachusetts, to lecture at a forum held in the Reform Temple. I was sitting in the rabbi's study, waiting to go upon the platform, when an usher opened the door and said: "Doctor, a lady and a gentleman are here, Mr. and Mrs. W. , prominent workers in our temple. They would like to meet you."

I replied: "I shall indeed be happy to meet Mr. and Mrs. W. My only regret is that the time is so brief. Not many minutes remain before my lecture is to begin."

Mr. and Mrs. W . entered and were introduced, whereupon Mrs. W. interposed: "Doctor, you and I have been introduced already, many years ago. Do you remember Esther H.? I am Esther H."

My first remark was: "Esther, tell me about your father." Mrs. W. answered: "My father is no longer living. He died

within recent years. He continued inflexibly orthodox to the end of his life."

I responded: "Your father and I once waged a tug of war for the possession of your soul. I was beaten. Your father won."

"No, no, no,'' rejoined Mrs. W. "My father did not win. You won. My Judaism was, is, and will be your Judaism, not my father's Judaism."

Mrs. W. told me that she was the mother of two children, the older a student at Clark University, the younger still in high school preparing for college. The children had attended the Worcester temple's religious school and had been confirmed in Reform Jewish style. In that school, Mr. W. himself was a teacher.

One of my favorite fairy tales is the Scandinavian story of Thor at Jotumheim, a story in which the hero is defeated in every one of his contests only to discover eventually that his defeats were illusory

AUTOBIOGRAPHY 5 5

and that he had, in reality, been the victor every time. The incident of Esther H. was one of several, in the course of my life, when the role of the vanquished yet victorious Thor was the part given me to play.

My dismissal from the Free Synagogue obliged me to seek another position. In 1917 I conducted High Holy Day services at Akron, Ohio. On the intervening Friday evening, I mentioned the fact that, while strolling the previous Saturday night, I had been shocked at the sight of the numerous drunkards. It seemed as if every third or fourth man on the street was reeling with intoxication. Very soon I became aware that no fewer than eight members of the temple dealt in liquor and that some of these were influential in the congregation. The reaction to my talk was anything but pleasant. It is still inexplicable to me how I ever came to be chosen for that pulpit. Still, I was elected and, in October, 1917, I went with my bride to dwell in that city.

At the outset, the temple attendance was good. But gradually the attendance dwindled until those Friday evening services became to me a nightmare. Officially and unofficially I was told that my preaching was poor.

That was the period of the First World War. It was my first adult experience of war. At the time of the war with Spain in 1898, I was in my teens. But in 1918 I saw war for what it is. I was horrified at the disregard for truth which characterized the war propaganda. I noticed the savagery into which the war spirit threw otherwise kindly, well-mannered, scrupulous, and responsible people. That dreadful flouting of customary ethical standards drove me into pacifism. I did not preach pacifism in the pulpit; still I did not escape trouble. I forbore to grant the war mania my support. I refrained from saying the usual venomous things about Germany. For this, I was more than once reproved. In later years, when ideas about the Firstworld War came to be modified, nothing that I heard or read surprised me. I had felt that way about the W a r while i t was still raging. But my abstinence, at that period, from


war diatribes in the pulpit was more than the congregation could tolerate.

The end of the First World War, like the end of the Second World War, found us at bitter odds with our former ally, Russia. Everyone was expected to pour unlimited vituperation on the Bolsheviks. Somehow those endless vilifications failed to comport not only with more sober accounts of what was happening in Russia, but also with that which was humanly probable. If someone tells me that a mother feeds broken glass to her child, I may not be an eyewitness to testify to the contrary. But there is such a thing as likelihood. I have never visited Russia. I have never known any Russians except immigrant Russian Jews. But the humanly probable does sometimes enter into our reckoning. The excoriations heaped upon Russia at that time simply exceeded the humanly probable.

I stated this one Friday evening at a religious service. On the evening of April 2 5 , I g 19, I preached a sermon entitled "Bolshevism: Bane or Blessing?" in which I enumerated the contradictions in the prevailing accounts. There happened to be in the gathering a young man who had never attended temple before and never attended afterward. At the end of the service the stranger asked that he might address a few words to the audience. I consented. The young man, betraying a heavy foreign accent, spoke in an excited, unintelligible manner. In his remarks, Bolshevism was apparently praised and apparently recommended for adoption by America, although his enunciation was so rapid and indistinct that it was difficult to fathom what he was trying to say.

The following Sunday I was summoned to a meeting of the temple board. The only times, either at South Bend or at Akron, at which I was asked to such meetings were when I was to be scolded. The censure I underwent for that talk on Bolshevism was so severe that I decided not only to resign from the Akron pulpit, but to abandon the pulpit entirely. I wrote my letter of resignation. I delayed mailing the letter until a meeting of the congregation would be held at which I was to stand for re-election. I was sure that my re-election would not occur and that resigning would, therefore, prove unnecessary. I carried my letter around with me in order to have it on hand instantly if, as, and when needed. At the meeting

AUTOBIOGRAPHY 5 7

of the congregation I was, strange to say, re-elected. Immediately upon being notified o f m y re-election, I went to the nearest mailbox, and m y resignation was on its way. My letter read as follows:

Akron, Ohio, June 18, 1919. T o the Trustees of Temple Israel, Gentlemen :

While highly appreciative of the honor conferred upon me in my re-election to the pulpit of Temple Israel, I am obliged to announce my withdrawal not only from this pulpit but from the regular Jewish ministry altogether, after the expiration of my present term on October 15th.

The reason is that my views on public questions are such as to render the average pulpit position no longer tenable. My recent discourse on Bolshevism and the subseauent censurin~ I received from the Board of

0

Trustees are only an exaAple of what I believe bound to recur in the future and to recur with even greater tension and friction, so long as I am placed where I shall be required to discourse on the questions of the day and where, at the same time, I shall be required to hold paramount, considerations other than those of conscience.

I wish to state, with utmost emphasis, that this reason and this reason only prompts me to this step. Personal considerations are involved in no way whatsoever. The members of Temple Israel have been, beyond my deserts, indulgent toward me and kind to me and mine. Friendships acquired while in the service of the Temple will always be remembered and cherished.

Respectfully,

My wife told me, a few days later, that she had met a friend of ours, an elderly non-Jewish man, a member of the Bahai Society, who appears to have been so intimate with the leaders o f our temple as to possess a minute knowledge o f temple affairs. My wife quoted the aged man as telling her that i t had been planned to re-elect me and then to have a committee of cordially disposed people go to me and, in a friendly way, ask me to resign. Later, when I myself met that elderly member o f the Bahai cult, he drew near and began to speak to me in a subdued voice. But, before he could get well started, some bystander intervened and interrupted our conversation. This happened on two occasions. Did the bystanders know what the old man was going to say and did they thwart him designedly?

s8 AMERICAN JEWISH ARCHIVES, APRIL, 1959

Was the aged man going to tell me what he had told my wife? A few weeks ago, in connection with this autobiography, I wrote to one of the survivors of those events and asked whether that had really been the plan: to re-elect me and then to follow up my re- election with a kindly hint that I resign. I received a reply which included the following sentences :

The month and year of the congregation meeting to which you refer in your letter of May 2nd I cannot confirm. The balance of the statement regarding your re-election and the plan of a small committee to wait upon you, is correct.

The meeting was not a turbulent one . . . . They were your friends who took such action as seemed least hurtful to you.

Throughout these involvements, friends and defenders were not lacking. Soon I was befriended by everyone. I have frequently been invited to return to Akron as a guest speaker. On the very first of those occasions, the chairman of the dinner was the man who had been the leader of the group by which I was opposed. In introducing me, this man remarked: "We made a mistake that time." I myself believed that the mistake had been made not by them but by me. My mistake lay in my faulty preaching. Had my preaching been abler, I would have commanded sufficient prestige to avert those antagonisms.

Whenever I visit Akron I am amazed at the regard shown me by people who have every reason to think of me with disparagement. The same has happened as happened elsewhere. The people of Akron treat me as if I had done well. If queried, they flatly deny that I had ever merited any deprecation.

Prior to my ordination, my competence for the rabbinate was questioned more than once. In my parental home a recurrent joke pertained to a remark made to my mother by Mrs. Messing, the wife of our rabbi. My mother and Mrs. Messing disliked one another. Their mutual antipathy begat candor. When I entered the Hebrew Union College, the rabbi's wife slurred at my mother:

AUTOBIOGRAPHY 59

"Never will that boy of yours make a rabbi. He lacks the brains. The most that he will ever become will be a college professor." Long years after Mrs. Messing was no more, I did become a college professor. T o convey the news to my mother, all I needed to say was: "Mrs. M.'s prophecy has come true."

My own classmates at the Hebrew Union College, although they elected me class valedictorian, earnestly counseled me to avoid the rabbinate. When, just before graduation, I was offered the headworkership of the Cincinnati Jewish Settlement, and similarly when I was offered a position in the Hebrew Union College Library, my classmates urged me to accept either appointment rather than enter the ministry.

I left Akron in October, 19 19. Never again did I function in the pulpit except as guest speaker or as Holy Day officiant. From Akron I went to Chicago and became the Jewish institutional chaplain for the Chicago Federation of Synagogues. I ministered in prisons and in the free wards of hospitals. At one time there were thirty institutions on my schedule. More nearly than at any time before, I now approached the ideal of pointing troubled souls to the Rock of Ages. Warm friendships sprang up between my parishioners and myself.

Here also I committed some errors. At the Chicago Municipal Tuberculosis Sanatorium, which today has almost no Jewish patients at all, but which at that time accommodated about fifty Jewish children and fifty Jewish adults, the Jewish men and women asked me to procure for them permits enabling them to spend the High Holy Days at their homes. I promptly appealed to the superintendent for that privilege. But the superintendent declined. He regarded the proposal as medically ill-advised. He apprehended that such visits to the homes might cause setbacks in the slow process of achieving a cure. When I reported this to my parishioners, they were indignant-indignant not at the superintendent, but at me. They contended that it was I who had maneuvered the refusal in order that I might enjoy the honor of conducting Holy Day services at the institution. After much effort and some assistance from influential persons on the outside, the permission was at length obtained. But, during the delay, I had to cope with some bitter opposition.

60 AMERICAN JEWISH ARCHIVES, APRIL; 1959

Once, as I was leaving a prison, the wife of one of the prisoners happened to be in the prison office attempting to speak to one of the officials. The woman could not speak English, wherefore the official asked me to interpret her Yiddish. I did so. The entire'procedure lasted a few minutes. Yet, some days later, I received, from the Jewish Bureau of Personal Service, a letter sharply remonstrating that I had obtruded beyond my domain and into the province of the bureau.

At the Joliet Penitentiary I found it difficult to convince the prisoners that the Jewish Bureau of Personal Service claimed jurisdic- tion over many of the favors which they asked of me, and that this inhibited my action. Responding to the prisoners' importunities, I finally assured them that I would prevail upon the Bureau of Personal Service to send to the prison a representative who would listen to their complaints. After much effort on my part, the bureau consented to send its representative. But the representative failed to keep the appointment. Again I approached the bureau, and again the appointment was broken. The prisoners meanwhile blamed not the representative; they blamed me.

On one occasion a warden took me to task for permitting at my assemblies a period of questions and answers. I discontinued the practice despite its obvious helpfulness to the prisoners.

By and large, my relationships with the institutional inmates were congenial. My parishioners evinced few ritualistic preposses- sions. I did occasionally supply phylacteries and prayer books and lead in reciting the Kaddish, the prayer for the dead. Once, during the week of Tabernacles, I carried with me the traditional citron and palm branch. But this proved inadvisable. Some of the poor folk, seeing me approach, suspected with terror that I was bent on obtaining money by charging them for the privilege of using those objects. On the whole, ritualistic demands were few. The keynote of my ministrations was friendliness and understanding. Among my parishioners, particularly among the children and the youth, there developed instances of genuine spirituality.

AUTOBIOGRAPHY

In December, 1920, at the invitation of President Kohler, I delivered before the combined senior and junior classes of the Hebrew Union College a series of lectures describing my chaplaincy procedures. These lectures, entitled "The Ministry of the Jewish By-ways," were afterward published in the Hebrew Union College Monthly of January-February, March, and April, I 9 2 I .

Before the end of I 9 2 I Kaufmann Kohler retired from the presidency of the college, and Julian Morgenstern became his prospective suc- cessor. One morning, in March, 19 22, as I was about to leave for my day's work at the Chicago institutions, I received a telephone call asking me to meet Dr. Morgenstern at the home of Rabbi Elkan C. Voorsanger. I assumed that Dr. Morgenstern wished to discuss with me a project of relief which I had broached to him in behalf of the war-stricken Lehranstalt fiir die Wissenschaft des Judenthums, the Institute for the Science of Judaism, in Berlin, a school which both Dr. Morgenstern and I had attended. That, however, was not to be the topic. After the initial amenities, Dr. Morgenstern asked me into another room, away from the rest of the company. Here it was that Dr. Morgenstern invited me to join the faculty of the Hebrew Union College.

I had often yearned for an opportunity to meet Hebrew Union College students and to share with them what I had learnt from the tribulations of my career. But that I should ever become a member of the faculty exceeded my fondest hopes. I hesitated to leave my work as a chaplain. Here I had advanced further than at any time before in the ideal of "pointing storm-tossed souls to their anchorage in the Rock of Ages." As I continued in the chaplaincy, I learnt more and more about the institutions and how to avoid their pitfalls. There was only one consideration which made me willing to change, and that was the physical hardship. Day after day, in all kinds of weather, sometimes as early as five in the morning, I would start on my rounds. I did not begrudge these exertions. I shouldered them willingly. I did, nevertheless, fear that, if I persisted at this work until old age, I might become physically disqualified. In 1922 I was forty years old. I felt able to carry on in that way for many years


more. But a time would come when I would be physically incapable, and then what would I do?

Yet I seriously questioned my competence to be a professor. Although I had kept up my studies as well as I could amid the many interruptions, these studies could be pursued intensively at no time except during the brief periods of vacation. I did achieve considerable reading in the course of my travels from institution to institution. During my brief residence in New York City, I had learnt about psychoanalysis. The subject aroused my interest, and I continued my readings in psychoanalysis during my residence in Chicago. The late Emil G. Hirsch, who befriended me in various ways, lent me books on psychoanalysis; Hirsch, with his incomparably ver- satile mind, had, as matter of course, delved into that domain. While in Chicago, I wrote an article, "Psychoanalysis and Religion," which was published in the Journal of Religion. I was also, at times, engaged to lecture for the Jewish Chautauqua Society, and the preparation of those lectures entailed not a little study. Yet this was far from constituting adequate equipment for a professorship at the Hebrew Union College.

I accepted Dr. Morgenstern's call, but I determined to study incessantly, endeavoring to improve my qualifications; to avoid all pretensions of learning or scholarship; and to forswear envying my abler colleagues.

In the course of my New York sojourn, I had made the acquaintance of the noted American Freudian, the late Dr. Abraham Arden Brill, to whom I once paid three dollars for a half hour, not of treatment, but of conversation. An incident of that conversation may be worth recounting. I asked Dr. Brill whether I was correct in surmising an affinity between the doctrines of Freud and the doctrines of Spinoza. It had seemed to me that psychoanalysis could have, in Spinoza, a patron saint. Said Dr. Brill: "Turn around and look at that picture on the wall." I turned, and behold, a portrait of Spinoza peered out upon the room.

A number of years later chance brought me to an interview with

AUTOBIOGRAPHY (5 3

Alfred Adler, enunciator of the Inferiority Complex. Adler, who had once been a follower of Freud and had then become a schismatic opponent of Freud, was to lecture at the University of Cincinnati. I had been asked to prevail upon him to lecture also at the Hebrew Union College. I went to the Gibson Hotel, where Adler was stop- ping, and called him on the house telephone; I expected, in that way, to get his answer, "Yes" or No." But Adler insisted upon my coming to his room. He greeted me cordially and introduced me to the lady who was his secretary and whose recourse to cigarettes kept the room densely fogged with smoke.

Alfred Adler did not accede to my request that he speak at the Hebrew Union College, but he did engage me in a long and fas- cinating conversation. He asked about the history of the Hebrew Union College and about its founder, Isaac M. Wise. He inquired about my own parentage and about my interests, ideals, and compunctions. Then and there the discoverer of the Inferiority Complex imputed an Inferiority Complex to me. He further recalled for me the name of a Scandinavian psychoanalyst with whom I had corresponded but whose name I could not remember. Nor did he neglect to regale me with a contemptuously obscene reference to his opponent, Freud.

Early in my career as a professor at the Hebrew Union College, I collided with the Board of Governors. I had attempted to form an organization of Jewish pacifists. For an entire evening, June 17, 1924, the board "had me on the carpet." Those who did the severest scolding have long ago passed away. There was nothing I could do except abandon my undertaking. The Jewish Peace Fellowship came into existence eighteen years later. With other rabbis, I had a part in creating this religious organization of Jewish persons who believe war to be as futile as it is fiendish.

In 1935 I discussed with leaders of the American Friends Service Committee the feasibility of bringing together, under their auspices, some representative Jews and some representative Nazis or Nazi sympathizers, that the two groups might discuss their points of


conflict and explore the possibilities of reconciliation. The president of the Hebrew Union College, as well as the late Isaac M. Rubinow, general secretary of the B'nai B'rith, while far fiom sanguine as to results, expressed a friendly interest in the attempt. There was first to be a gathering of Jewish representatives only. This was to be held at the Pendle Hill Quaker Center in Wallingford, Pennsylvania. That meeting failed to materialize. I t was then suggested by such Quaker leaders as Rufus Jones, Henry Cadbury, and Clarence E. Pickett that good might result if the Jews of the United States would extend a token contribution, say, of $5,000, to the Quaker relief program in Austria, where people of many groups, Jewish, Nazi, Christian, anti-Nazi, were being succored. An act of magnanimity by the Jews toward the Nazis might moderate their hostility.

I set about raising $5,000 for that purpose. A number of Jewish persons contributed. Others rebuked me savagely. Some Jewish newspapers assailed me; others mentioned the undertaking without

, reprehension. Before I had proceeded very far, an emissary from the Hebrew Union College Board of Governors admonished me that the very idea of aiding those dastardly foes of the Jews was outrageous. I was compelled to give up the venture. Overwhelming support of the opposite policy became the honored attitude. Jews devoted their entire strength to a course not of reconciliation, but of harrowing the Nazis to the utmost. Within a few years six million Jews perished through violence. The method of hatred and revenge, whatever it may have achieved, did not deliver the Jews from those unprecedented horrors. The men who overthrew my proposal did not intend that cataclysm. Yet the rescue of our people was hardly among their accomplishments.

Of incomparable spiritual moment to me was our adoption of a baby. Our baby [Marion] was three weeks old when, in 1923, we obtained her through the adoption committee of the Free Synagogue. At first she did not thrive. My wife and I waged a long and anxious struggle for her life. W e won that battle, and our daughter became

-

Corrrlesy. Liii Kohler. New l'ork

DR. KAUFhlANN KOHLER President, Hebrew Union Collcge, r 90;-192 I

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AUTOBIOGRAPHY 6~

the focus of affection such as I have never seen equaled. Adopted children are often the best-loved children. That was surely true of us.

A few months after entering upon my Hebrew Union College duties, I was chatting, one Saturday afternoon, with some students who happened to be loitering in my classroom, as students frequently did after the Saturday afternoon services in the College chapel. Our conversation veered to the subject of heroisms other than that of warfare, such as the heroisms of industry and of mater- nity. W e decided to make the following Decoration Day an occasion for honoring the fallen heroes and heroines of peace. Early in the morning of May 30, 1923, a group of us, both students and outsiders, assembled at the Spring Grove Cemetery in Cincinnati and placed flowers upon the graves of a railroader, a factory worker, a police- man, and a firefighter who had lost their lives in the discharge of their duties, and of a woman who had died in childbirth. There was an impressive address by the aged Rev. George A. Thayer, pastor emeritus of the Unitarian church. There was an appropriate reading selected for us from the writings of Horace Traubel by John Haynes Holmes of the Community Church, of New York City. The observance included a hymn, an invocation, a benediction, and an appropriate sentence spoken at each grave.

These exercises were repeated annually. In later years some local poet would read a poem especially composed for the occasion. W e always contrived to have on the program at least one Jew, at least one Roman Catholic, and at least one Protestant. W e always arranged that at least one of the participants should be a colored person and at least one of them a woman. With various modifications both of organization and of program, such exercises were, for nineteen years, held annually on or near May 30th~ at Spring Grove Cemetery or at the German Protestant Cemetery. The last of the Peace Heroes memorials was conducted, amid a deluge of rain and a cannonading of thunder and lightning, at the German Protestant Cemetery in June, 1941.

Sheer lack of time forced me to discontinue this undertaking. T o raise finds seemed unfeasible, while volunteer assistance proved unobtainable or unreliable, notwithstanding a widespread interest,


the imitation of our exercises in other cities, and a membership in our Peace Heroes . Memorial Society representing many parts of the Union and some foreign countries. When the United States entered the Second World W a r in 1941, I realized that, in addition to the large amount of corresponding, interviewing, conferring, composing, and telephoning -which devolved upon me, I would also have to wrangle with those who resented putting anyone else upon a level with the armed fighter. In 1946, the W a r being over, I managed a modest revival of the project, but already the cold war was tightening its coils. Increased duties at the College and elsewhere rendered i t impossible for me, all but singlehandedly, to arrange Peace Heroes exercises, to supply Peace Heroes information in reply to inquiries from many places and, at the same time, to cope with probable assailants. I trust that some day someone more capable than myself at fund raising or at enlisting volunteer assistance will resurrect the idea.

O n March 18, 1946, I sent the following letter to the president of the American Jewish Committee, Judge Joseph M. Proskauer:

Dear Judge Proskauer :

If one has a wish, the least one can do for the fulfilment of that wish is to communicate it to someone who may possess the power of fulfilment, even while realizing how remote fulfilment may be.

My wish relates to those Nazi and Nazi dominated officials who are being brought to trial and who will be brought to trial for the cruelties perpetrated against the Jews.

Th.is is my wish: That the Jews might beseech clemency for their tormentors and the slayers of their people.

I can fancy organized Jewry represented at the trials by someone authorized to speak as follows:

"We Jews have suffered inordinately. Neither our own tragic history nor that of any other people contains any precedent for the afflictions which we have recently undergone.

"All that we Jews ask is surcease of our sufferings. All that we crave is that Jews all the world over be guaranteed freedom, equality, and opportunity, and that they be forever shielded against anti-Semitism.

AUTOBIOGRAPHY 67

"We seek human rights not only for Jews. W e seek them for all men everywhere. To seek them for the Jews alone would be self-defeating as well as ignoble.

"The unspeakable miseries which have come upon the world follow a certain pattern with dismal uniformity, the pattern, namely, of retaliation-retaliation for grievances real or imaginary. That vicious circle of retaliation and counter-retaliation must be broken. Otherwise there is no hope for the world. W e Jews hereby offer to break that vicious circle. Organized into associations officially represented here, we urge clemency for these defendants."

I shall not protract this letter with any "arguments" in favor of my proposal. How such an act might impress the world, you will surmise for yourself. I will only add that organized Jewry must include not only the American Jewish Committee, the American Jewish Congress, and the American Jewish Conference to whose heads I am sending this letter. It must also include our brethren in the afflicted countries. They who have been the chief sufferers must, of course, be heeded.

I am not using my printed stationery for this letter, because that stationery contains the name of the Hebrew Union College. Neither at the Hebrew Union College nor anywhere else have I, as yet, found anyone who seconds my proposal. I do not anticipate that your own reaction will be favorable. However, in writing to you, to Dr. Wise, and to Mr. Monsky, I take the one and only step which I have the power to take. I need not reprove myself for neglecting to do the one and only thing which I was able to do.

Respectfully yours,

I mailed the identical letter to Dr. Stephen S. Wise, president of the American Jewish Congress, and to Henry Monsky, president of the American Jewish Conference. Dr. Wise and Mr. Monsky sent replies which were courteous, though dissident. As anyone could have anticipated, their response was that the enormous wick- edness of the war criminals could not and should not go unpunished. A few months later, Judge Proskauer, in Cincinnati to receive an honorary degree, apologized to me for his failure to acknowledge my letter. Judge Proskauer explained that this was by no means the only instance in which subordinates in the office of the American Jewish Committee had neglected to pass up to him communications which he himself would have wished to answer.


On numerous occasions I have been asked to append my signature to various petitions addressed to Congress or to the President, such as the one beseeching the avoidance of war, or the petition to abandon the use of the atomic bomb, or petitions against the anti- labor union "yellow-dog" contract of the 189o's, or in behalf of amnesty for conscientious objectors, or in behalf of clemency for the Rosenbergs, or in behalf of repealing the McCarran Act. Though I question the efficacy of such manifestoes, the invitation to sign always puts me "on the spot." T o decline means recreance to causes which I acknowledge to be righteous, although to consent is to endanger myself for the sake of tactics to which I do not unreservedly subscribe.

I have a collection of scurrilous, usually anonymous, communications provoked by such idealism. Sometimes vilification has taken the form of anonymous insults over the telephone. Once I received a vituperative letter from someone who, in his ardor for Judaism, upbraided me because, in a pamphlet printed some ten years earlier, I had quoted the talmudic dictum: "Make thy Sabbath a weekday rather than become dependent [on someone else for your support] ." M y angry correspondent held me to blame for the prevalent disregard of the Jewish day of rest. I have also been denounced for stating that the purport of the dietary and the quarantine laws in the Bible was not hygienic, but ritualistic. When, together with a number of prominent American clergymen, including Rev. Theodore D. Walser, who had languished in a Japanese war prison, I gave my name to a petition against the further use of the atomic bomb, a postal card, sent by some woman, berated me as a generator of anti-Semitism. These invectives have all but invariably originated with people who did not know me and who had, in all likelihood, never heard of me before.

On two occasions, queries of mine have brought replies from John Dewey, one of them typewritten by himself, the other in his own handwriting. Both of these now repose in the American Jewish

AUTOBIOGRAPHY 69

Archives. Dewey's philosophical teachings have helped me more than those of any other writer. Dewey's works have afforded me extraordinary intellectual satisfaction.

Early in my readings on psychoanalysis, I had surmised that psychoanalysis proffers new and important insights touching religion. T read everything which came to my notice regarding the religious import of the Freudian doctrine. Almost from the beginning of my incumbency at the Hebrew Union College, I urged that a course in the psychology of religion be placed in the curriculum. Eventually the president of the College directed me to add such a course to my own department. The teaching of that course brought me strong inducement to extend my studies in that field.

Meanwhile I became interested in semantics. It was a professor of theology, the late William Adams Brown, of Union Theological Seminary, who called my attention to the brilliant, though anti- theological, work, The Meaning of Meaning, by [Charles Kay] Ogden and [Ivor Armstrong] Richards. It dawned upon me that semantics also had much light to shed upon the religious processes. Psychoanalysis and semantics can enable us to discuss religion with some awareness of the real points at issue and without becoming bogged down in the spurious and irrelevant.

Those disciplines have much to contribute likewise toward handling the problems of society. How it would advance the cause of international peace if people at large understood the psychological phenomenon of rationalization, so that "national defense," the rationalization for war, ceased to be regarded as the reason for war! And what an antidote to the crass persecutions now prevailing if both the semantics of the word "Communism" and the psychology of the terror evoked by "Communism" were even so much as suspected!

I taught at the Hebrew Union College from 192 2 to 1950, when I reached the age of mandatory retirement. I toiled, day and night, year in and year out, in the hope of enhancing my capabilities. I made mistakes, some of them calamitous. The blackest day of my life was February 24, 1941, when President Morgenstern, having

7 O AMERICAN JEWISH ARCHIVES, APRIL, 1959

summoned me to his office, showed me that, in a questionnairing of students, I had rated execrably. The students had found devastating fault with my way of teaching. Woefully lacerated in spirit, I entered upon the hard task of remedying the situation. Although I was in my sixtieth year, I called each one of my students into private conference and humbly asked him to advise me how I might rectify my shortcomings. I had to forsake all the well-tried methods which had for years brought good results. I had to start over again from the very bottom. It was a gruelling ordeal, but I do not regret my decision. My efforts were not altogether fruitless.

For a considerable period prior to that heartbreaking day, I had received intimations that something was amiss. A daily mim- eographed news sheet, issued for a time by one of the students, commented more than once that I was slipping in student esteem. When the academic year opened in the fall of 1939, I underwent the shock of discovering that not one student had chosen any of my electives. I t was literally sickening; for two weeks I suffered attacks of vertigo. In May, 1940, President Morgenstern had called me aside and cautioned me that, among the students of my one and only required course in social studies, there was complaint that I was presenting old and inconsequential material and that the students demanded more up-to-date information. All of this comported with an annoying inattentiveness by which I had long been plagued in class. But February 24, 1941, marked the climax.

Slowly and laboriously I toiled my way into betterment. And then another blow struck. In 1944 I was deprived of all preparatory courses and of all opportunity to use any longer what I had learnt of those subjects through years of laborious study. The students who chose my electives were few. Those electives, if chosen at all, would not be chosen until the student had accommodated himself to all his other classes. For the first week or two of the school year, I did not know whether I would be teaching more than the one class of four hours a week. When the practice was instituted of putting the entire scope of each course into one term, the possibility arose that, for the second term, I would have no students at all.

"I am encircled by a thickening darkness. That darkness is becoming so dense, its density will crush me." How often did such words invade my mind! Yet that ruination did not occur. It chanced

AUTOBIOGRAPHY 7'

with me as with Elisha at Dothan; the forces in my favor were more numerous than those that were against me. Students did come into my electives. Colleagues, president, and students were consid- erateness personified.

Here again, as so often before and since, my failures forsook people's minds. On February 24, 195 I , exactly ten years after my dCb%cle, I observed to President Emeritus Morgenstern: "Today it is ten years since you divulged to me my lamentable showing on those questionnaires." Dr. Morgenstern could not grasp my reference. I attempted to remind him, but in vain. With a characteristic pun, Dr. Morgenstern joked off my reminiscence. T h e incident which had seared my soul had faded from his recollection. Within recent years, Dr. Morgenstern has expressed regard for me both in public and in private. I t puzzles me how he can do this in the light of what he must know. O n many an occasion, I have enjoyed gracious attentions at the hands of alumni who were students in the dark days of the questionnaire. If those students ever thought of me despicably, they show it no longer.

O n June I 6, I 953, the forty-seventh anniversary of my ordination, I conversed with President Dwight D. Eisenhower in the Presidential office of the White House Annex. I had been invited to join three Christian clergymen in beseeching the President for clemency toward Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, sentenced to be executed on June I 8th. Toward his visitors the President was affable and gracious. His speech was fluent and forceful. I shall not report everything that was said. I limit myself to my own part in the interview.

I remarked: "Mr. President, all of us are dedicated to the interests of America. All of us are solicitous that America shall suffer no harm. Would not America be adequately safeguarded if, instead of death, the penalty of the Rosenbergs would be imprisonment, no matter how long?"

T h e President replied in approximately these words: "According to Federal law, there is no such thing as 'imprisonment no matter how long.' State laws provide for long terms of incarceration. With

Federal law it is otherwise. According to Federal law, the Rosen- bergs would be eligible for parole in fifieen years. Besides, there are times when nothing but death is a deterrent. After our invasion of Europe, the inhabitants of a certain area complained bitterly about the misconduct of some American soldiers. The people had to arm themselves with pitchforks and other makeshift weapons to prevent pillage and rape. All of that stopped after I had two of the male- factors publicly hanged. On one occasion some law-defying soldiers were offered the alternative of imprisonment or of service in the front lines. Every one of them chose imprisonment. There are times when death is the only effective penalty."

Sincerely as I respected the President and ardently as I appre- ciated his exquisite courtesy, I could not but grieve at the gap between his viewpoint and mine. These are the words in which I voiced my sorrow: "Life is fill of problems that baffle our intel- ligence. All of us need the guidance of God. Mr. President, may you have the guidance of God!" The President was touched by that remark. He indicated assent and warm gratitude.

Two days previously, on Sunday afternoon, June 14, 1 95 3, I had stood in front of theWhite House, alongside the mother of Julius Rosenberg and his two children. W e were faced by a shouting, gesticulating throng of reporters, radiomen, and photographers. I was asked to offer a brief prayer. I spoke the following translation of Psalm 79: I I : "Lord, let the groaning of the prisoner come before Thee. In the greatness of Thy power, do Thou deliver those who are doomed to die." On both sides of us paused the dense, but silent, lines of pickets with their placards imploring mercy. The police counted 6,8 3 2 , the largest number ever recorded for such a dem- onstration. Sad and mute, the marchers occupied the blocks not only of the White House, but also of the former State Department Building and of the United States Treasury. Despite a heavy down- pour that morning in New York City, two special trains of fifieen coaches each, filled with those demonstrating for clemency, had lefi Pennsylvania Station. Two extra coaches had to be attached at

AUTOBIOGRAPHY 7 3

Philadelphia to accommodate the crowd. I have been assured that each passenger paid his or her own fare and that there was no 6 t Communist" subvention.

Later that afternoon of June 14th, there was convened, on the vast assembly grounds at Ninth and Constitution Avenues, a meeting for prayer. Although the day was cloudy and so chilly that I wore a heavy overcoat, the crowd was enormous. It was estimated at 10,000. Colored persons as well as white persons, Christians as well as Jews participated. There was impressive singing by the talented and beloved Martha Schlamme.

In the course of my remarks as one of the speakers, I said: "In order to suspect others of espionage, one has to have a streak of espionage in one's own soul. W e who are here assembled crave clemency for the Rosenbergs because we ourselves are so clean of espionage that we cannot accuse others of espionage. W e ourselves are so far from being disloyal that it is incomprehensible to us that others should be disloyal. Precisely because of our devotion to America do we urge a commutation of that sentence."

The following day, June I ~ t h , I spent two hours in the reception room of the United States Senate in order to obtain interviews with Senator John W. Bricker of Ohio and Senator William Langer of North Dakota, chairman of the Judiciary Committee of the Senate. Senator Bricker, though radiantly kind and courteous, expressed himself as averse to leniency for the Rosenbergs. He then hastened to make plain that clemency lay outside of the legislative sphere, in which alone he exercised authority. He deplored his dearth of influence in his attempt to procure an amendment to the Constitution aiming to keep treaties with foreign powers from infringing upon American constitutional guarantees. The interview consisted less in my pleading for the Rosenbergs than in the senator's pleading with me in behalf of his proposed amendment.

Though I did not get to see Senator Langer until two hours after the appointed time, my interview with him lasted barely more than a minute. The senator stated that he was wholeheartedly in favor of clemency and that he needed no persuasion.

Meanwhile I apprehended that untoward experiences were awaiting me at Cincinnati. I had granted interviews to the Washington


correspondents of the Cincinnati newspapers. I anticipated that I was going to find myself aspersed as a raving "Communist," intent upon overthrowing the American government "by force and violence," and scheming to bring America under the domination of Russia. I had the relief of discovering, upon my return, that the newspapers had given a truthful and even a friendly account of my Washington activities. Cincinnati friends, including the president of the Hebrew Union College, commended me for my stand. My wife reported that, during my absence, there had been one scurrilous telephone call, anonymous as usual, but nothing more.

M y remarks at the Rosenberg funeral on June z 1st attracted favorable comments from many parts of the United States and from abroad. Deprecatory comm&cations were exceedingly few, and these came from both extremes, from those who abhorred the Rosenbergs and, at the other extreme, from those who abhorred the officials through whom the Rosenbergs were brought to their death. I spoke as follows:

The eyes of all the world are on this sorrowful gathering. Millions of people are convinced that Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were innocent. Other millions have held that, even if they were guilty, their punishment was excessive. Still other millions believe that the punishment was just.

To those who maintain that the punishment was 'ust, I should like to say a few words. It is an ancient Jewish maxim that itf after a law has been violated, the violator has been punished, the violation is to be regarded as canceled. The defendant ceases to be a defendant. Matters become as if the violation had never occurred. That Jewish maxim is so noble and so worthy that it ought to be adopted by people everywhere. According to that maxim, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg are now innocent - innocent even if judged from the harshest point of view. So much for those who think that the punishment was just.

For the rest of us, this is a day of bitter reverse. We toiled and sacrificed and dared in order to prevent this calamity, but our efforts were in vain. We were defeated. And yet there is a sense in which we were not defeated. We were defeated juridically but we were not defeated spiritually. We succeeded in being true to our finest selves. We succeeded as regards fidelity to our ideals of mercy, justice, and courage. The able attorney, to whom you have just listened, did not win his case. But he triumphed as regards devotion, industry, and resourcefulness.

Tasks still remain. One of them is that of discovering and publishing the truth. The entire truth about this dreadful happening has not yet been re-

AUTOBIOGRAPHY 75

vealed. There are questions which have not been answered. Perhaps when the truth has been discovered, all the world will deem Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to have been guiltless. The truth should be sought and made known.

Another task is that of binding up the wounds - comforting the bereaved, succoring the needy. The dead are beyond our reach. But the living must be solaced and aided.

There is vet another task. and this is the most difficult of all. W e should avoid hatred: rancor, and retaliation. Well worth heeding are those ancient Jewish words: "Thou shalt take no revenge. Thou shalt bear no grudge . . . Thou shalt not hate thy brother in thy heart." Though the judges and the executive rendered a verdict which broke our hearts, we must remember that they did the ri ht* as they understood the right. Our own conception B of the right was, o course, far different from theirs. Still, we should not hate. W e should not be vindictive. Hatred killed Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Vindictiveness destroved this vounn man and woman. W e who achieved

0

a spiritual triumph when we struggled to avert this tragedy - let us not now succumb to spiritual defeat.

Finallv. we who befriended the Rosenberns should show the entire world thit' we are loyal among the loyal in ouFallegiance to America. Let us give our detractors not a scintilla of an excuse for impugning the caliber of our citizenship. Let us make it unmistakably clear that we can not possibly gain by anything through which America is injured. W e gain if America gains. W e lose if America loses. Our citizenship should stand beyond reproach.

These things we must do if we would bring about a brighter day for our America and a happier time for all humanity.

As late as the year 1956, three years after they had been executed, m y concern about the Rosenbergs again landed me in trouble. In an article which began on the front page of a Cincinnati newspaper, I was defamed. Flamboyantly the paper reported that I had been mentioned in a brochure iust issued by the House Committee on Un-American Activities. And, indeed, 1 w a s one of I ,074 individuals who, together with I 34 organizations and twenty-three publications, had been pilloried by that committee, for having, some years before, sought a mitigation of the Rosenbergs' sentence.

Except for an anonymous vituperative letter which came to me by mail, no untoward consequences ensued. W i t h that one exception,

* At this point there occurred, among the listeners, a slight commotion which-it seemed to me-was quickly and firmly repressed by someone in the audience.


all who broached the matter spoke as my friends, sympathizers, and supporters.

How poignantly the incident corroborated my doctrine of ethical relativity! It showed, beyond cavil, how that which to one person signifies altruism, idealism, and consecration can signify to another person obliquity, subversion, and treason. The corollary follows that, no matter who our opponents are and no matter what the issue, no matter how vicious or how exasperating or how unfair they might be, our opponents are as conscientious and sincere about their convictions as we are about ours. That is a truth hard to absorb, but it is inevasible. Scant hope exists for the world until this truth is grasped. Such is my comment upon the stigma to which I was subjected by that congressional publication.

I first heard of Zionism in the summer of 1897. I was a boy visiting relatives at Martinsville, Indiana. I was loitering in the clothing store of one of those relatives, when the daily newspaper arrived from Indianapolis. M y attention was instantly attracted by an article which began on the front page in the column to the extreme right. The article told about a congress held, or to be held, at Basle, Switzerland, for the purpose of bringing about the restora- tion of Palestine as a homeland for the Jews. Here, for the first time, I came across the names of Theodor Herzl and Max Nordau. What attracted me was not so much what the article said as the fact that a Jewish event was being discussed in a general newspaper. In my childhood, Jewish news in an ordinary newspaper was extremely rare.

No further was my attention drawn to Zionism until more than a year later, after I had entered the Hebrew Union College. By that time, Zionism was a topic of strident debate.

During my stay in Cambridge, England, I became well-acquainted with Theodor Herzl's son, Hans, now long deceased after a brief, unhappy career. I have, once or twice, paid dues to Zionist organizations and have, upon solicitation, contributed my shekel to Zionist financing. Once I even presided at a Zionist gathering because no

AUTOBIOGRAPHY 77

one else believed to be competent was available. But this was always done out of good will toward my Zionistic friends. I myself never professed allegiance. I am emotionally disinclined to do so. I have argued that Zionism is a species of politics, while my Jewish work lies, not in the field of politics, but in the domain of religion.

A word about my membership in the American Council for Judaism seems in order here. The Council is antagonistic to Zionism, but its avowed purposes are more than that of fighting Zionism. The Council purports to cultivate Judaism as a religion. I joined the Council in the belief that it was to be an attempt at restoring the classical type of American Reform. In my early days as a rabbi, there prevailed a sloughing off of European features in Judaism and the introduction of uniquely American features. The people whom I served did not countenance robe-wearing in the pulpit or skullcaps or prayer shawls. There was in the temple on Friday nights no lighting of candles and no chanting over a goblet of wine. Nor, at the end of the fall holidays, was there a synagogal procession headed by persons carrying the [Torah] scrolls. Nor did Hebrew figure, as much as it does today, either in the liturgy or in the singing. Among my life's most salutary influences have been some of the exquisite English hymns which I used to hear at our Jewish services. I have no dislike for people who incline toward traditionalism, but I am not one of those who enjoy the traditionalistic forms.

The type of person attracted to the American Council for Judaism is, on the whole, the fully Americanized type such as I served while I was in the pulpit. Still, when I discovered that the American Council for Judaism stressed religious objectives less than it did its anti-Zionism, I might, like all the other rabbis, with exceedingly few exceptions, have withdrawn from the organization. But, by that time, the Council was under fire, and I do not forsake my friends when they are in trouble. Even allowing that the wish is proverbially father to the thought, I think I now perceive in the Council some changes in the direction of my desire.

The stigma to which the American Council for Judaism is today subject virtually duplicates the opprobrium which, in its early years, attached to Zionism. At the Hebrew Union College I heard Zionism execrated. President Kohler7s invectives against Zionism were


clamorous. Though unintentional, his mispronunciation of the z in L < Zionism," as though it were an s, only intensified the manifestation of his scorn. While it has been denied that Zionism had anything to do with their resignations, Zionism was the persuasion of all the professors who remained for but a brief period at the College during the first decade of the present century.

The Central Conference of American Rabbis was, in those days, violently hostile to the Zionist movement. Professing Zionism was something that few of its members dared. "If you like Palestine, why don't you go and live there?" was the familiar anti-Zionistic argument. One of the professors at the Hebrew Union College remarked derisively: "A Jewish state means that, instead of being hanged by a gentile hangman, you will be hanged by a Jewish hangman." Today the tables are turned. Among the rabbis today, the Zionists are in the overwhelming majority. Now it is not when one espouses Zionism, but when one attacks Zionism, that one risks rebuke.

The hostility between the American Council for Judaism and its opponents is to be deplored. That hostility appears to be less pronounced abroad, even in the State of Israel, than it is in the United States. Lessing J. Rosenwald, outstanding leader in the Council, has been hospitably entertained by the Israeli government. H e has been shown generous courtesies by Premier David Ben Gurion. Is it too much to hope that the differences between the American Council for Judaism and its opponents may some day get to be discussed with composure and amenity? Throughout history, antagonistic movements have arrived at rapprochenzent. Need the controversy between Zionists and anti-Zionists deviate from that pattern? No party, no movement, no sect remains unchanged. "Times change and we change with them." Given two wooden boards, the joiner applies chisel and saw, not to one of them, but to both, and thus, by changing both, he makes them fit together. Such a craftsman is history. Would that the acrimony between the American Council for Judaism and its detractors might soon be allayed! If I wielded any influence in the American Council for Judaism, I would use it to that end.

Toward the State of Israel, the American Council for Judaism

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is friendly. From the Council's Philanthropic Fund, some Israeli benevolences have been receiving contributions. The Council merely contends that Israel is the nation of the Israelis and not of Jews all the world over. It maintains that Israel would derive great advantage . if the philosophy of the Council were generally accepted. The Council surmises that the chief obstacle to peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors is the notion that Israel is the country, not only of the Israelis, but of all Jews everywhere. It is held that the Arabs would readily come to terms with Israel alone, but that it is an entirely different matter ifthe Arabs have to cope with world Jewry.

Not to be left unmentioned is my participation, during recent years, in undertakings conducted by the National Federation of Temple Youth. I have served as one of the teachers despite my age, which separated me from my pupils by two generations. The arrangements favored a kind of teaching unencumbered by grades, records, reports, prizes, assignments, penalties, required home work, required readings, or any other adventitious factors. I dealt with young people who were eager to learn. I had to concern myself with their quest for knowledge and not with anything else.

Particularly satisfying were the contacts outside of the routine classes. It was good to sit, of a summer's day, on the conclave campus, conversing with the few or the many who might chance to gather around. The pattern was that of complete informality. Throughout my career, formality has been a hinderance and informality a godsend. Both in the pulpit and in the pew, I have been present at routine services which were blighted, not only by poor attendance, but, in addition, by defects which rendered the service hardly worth any attendance at all. Too often are routine services not only uninspiring; they can be boring and, at times, actually irritating. Rarely have such frustrations soured discussions which I have held with people informally assembled. From worry on the score of attendance, such informal conversational teaching is free. And when the others present enter into the conversation, one can gauge what is in their minds. One can speak to their minds and

avoid speaking about matters in which one's listeners have no interest.

The object of religious education can be that of helping individuals, especially the young. The contrasting position defines the object of religious education as that of "perpetuating Judaism" or, more crudely, that of assuring future support for the synagogue. Religious education can be something different. Religious education can be a ministering unto souls. Its purpose can be that of aiding people, particularly youth, in solving their basic problems. Judaism need not be an end. Judaism can be a means to an end. Our prime concern need not be: how can people serve Judaism? Our concern could be: how can Judaism serve people?

What is the Weltanschauung that has emerged from these varied happenings? That Weltanschauung is this:

I stand unequivocally committed to scientific method and to the scientific spirit. Any belief at variance with scientific findings should be discarded. The difference between the unverified and the scientifically verified should be punctiliously recognized.

Alongside of our scientific interests, there exist also ethical interests and esthetical interests. These become articulated as ideals and values. That domain of ideals and values is the sphere of religion. Values include the beautiful whether in nature, in art, or in human conduct. Among the varied meanings of the word "God," the meaning which relates the word to those ideals and values is the meaning to adopt.

It can be our ideal to banish from our souls the craving to outstrip, outshine, and outrival others and the craving for people's praise, applause, and admiration. W e can put in place of those cravings the eagerness to help people, to cooperate with people, and to advance the worthy interests of people. The resultant frame of mind has been called "the experiencing of the Divine." That sense of the word "Divine" is the sense to be accepted.

It can be our ideal to forswear vindictiveness and to guard against the rationalizations by which vindictiveness comes masked. Forms

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of vindictiveness are scorn, anger, hatred, rancor, censoriousness, denunciation, penalization, war. The disguising rationalizations usually consist of arguments about justice, about the moral improve- ment of people, about the protection of society, about national defense, and-not rarely-about "standing up for one's rights."

Especially prone to retaliation is that sense of self-importance which we call the Ego. Bitterly is any assault upon one's Ego resented. From the affronted Ego issue the animosities attending political and theological controversy. Another reaction of the affronted Ego is prejudice. The failure of people to imitate us or to resemble us can be felt as a mortifying insinuation that we are not worth imitating or resembling.

As to religious ritual, whatever may be the rituals that we like or that we dislike, other people's rituals should be respected. T o disdain people's rituals is to disdain those people themselves.

T o these convictions can be added what has already been said about ethical relativity, about reckoning with our opponents, and about the goals of religious education.

Some or all of these ideals may have found expression in the Bible, in the Talmud, and in other Jewish literature. Such literary occurrence, however, is not indispensable. Those ideals would possess cogency even if they were not formulated in any sacred book, yes, even if they were opposed in such a book. I t is not the writings that give worth to the ideals. It is the ideals that give worth to the writings.

And here this autobiography must close. What a strange diversity one and the same life can embrace! The baby whose attention was attracted by the figure on the box of buttons is identical with the grandfather who, heartened by many an advantage, yet chastened by many a reverse, is writing these words for publication. The small boy delighting in naughty escapades is identical with the college professor anguish-stricken over the unfavorable estimate of his students. How incredible! Yet every day the incredible becomes actual. A life beyond the grave is incredible. Yet why may not that incredible also become actual? This astounding amalgam of exhilarating experiences and harassing experiences-who knows in what reaches of eternity its consummate explanation may emerge?

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