Called to Controversy

by Ruth Rosen

  But those two did well because they were on their own in those cities, with no other staff to stifle their initiative and creativity, Moishe mused. You can’t put a new patch on an old garment, and you can’t keep on opening up more branches just because people in the existing ones aren’t properly utilizing the new missionaries.

  He quickly braked as the lanes narrowed on the approach to the Golden Gate Bridge. It was still foggy but Moishe could see the halo of lights, forming a graceful outline of the suspension cables. He crossed the bridge and before he knew it, was heading up the steep road to Strawberry Point, where the Seminary nestled on a hill high above the Bay.

  At last the road leveled out into a parking lot. Moishe eased himself out of the rental car to search for signs of campus life, but he’d arrived much earlier than expected; no one was in sight and no buildings seemed open. Spotting a bench under a streetlamp, he sat down, and Bible in hand he began to pray—not about what he would say or do for the chapel—he was all set for that. As he stared out into the darkness he sought God’s direction about the troubling situation in New York.

  Around 7:00 am the pre-dawn darkness began fading to grey, and before long it had melted away before the rising sun. As Moishe continued to pray and watch, he had one of those rare experiences he would never forget. In the darkness, he’d been completely unaware that he was facing the city. Now as the light struck San Francisco, the low lying fog obscured only the bottom half of the city while the skyline remained, so it looked like the city was floating on an enormous cloud. The fog also reflected the bright morning sun, lighting up the buildings like nothing Moishe had ever seen. He gazed in wonder at the gloriously golden city floating before him.

  Had God arranged for him to see this amazing sight as an answer to prayer? After all, Daniel had agreed he could take the post in Northern California if things did not work out in New York. But as awestruck as Moishe felt, he did not want to convert those feelings into a conclusion concerning God’s direction for his life.

  Moishe gave a last lingering look at the city and headed off to meet Francis Dubois, the seminary’s head of missions who was to introduce him as the guest speaker for chapel. After exchanging a few pleasantries, Moishe began to tell the professor some of what he’d been discovering in New York—that many hippies were open to discussing spiritual things and that people who were protesting the war in Vietnam seemed ready to hear about the peace that Jesus could bring. To his surprise, Dr. Dubois nodded his head in agreement. He proceeded to show Dr. Dubois samples of the broadsides. There were now six titles, one of which had been written by a new Jewish believer, Vicky Kress.

  Dr. Dubois looked at the literature with interest and said, “I’m glad to see what you’ve been doing. I’m going to introduce you to some people who’ve been involved in outreach to people immersed in counterculture. You’ll see that what God is doing in New York, he’s also doing here in the Bay Area.”

  That was exciting news for Moishe, and he was glad to meet, among others, Kent Philpot and Paul Bryant. Both confirmed what Dr. Dubois had said.

  After the chapel service, which went well, Moishe was eager to hear more about “the Jesus Revolution” that Paul and Kent had talked about. “You gotta go to Berkeley,” Paul announced. “That’s where things are really radical. These pamphlets of yours would go over great there.”

  “You know any good places to eat in Berkeley?” Scoping out good food was always high on Moishe’s list of priorities.

  “Yeah, sure, there’s tons of places,” Paul assured him. “I’ll come with you and introduce you to some good people and some good food.”

  That’s how Moishe met Jack Sparks of the Christian World Liberation Front (CWLF). Wow, these guys really are radical, Moishe thought as he heard about ministry communes, demonstrations, and more. Nothing I’m doing would seem strange or off the wall to them. He couldn’t help feeling excited at the thought that if he did transfer back to California, there’d be people he could learn from and who could learn from him. Not only that, but Jack introduced him to a couple of Jewish Christians.

  To Moishe, all this was absolutely wonderful. As far as he could see, the “happening” was even greater on the West Coast than it was back East. However, he was distracted from these thoughts by a rumbling in his stomach.

  “Hey, ever hear of Cody’s?” Paul asked.

  “Is it a restaurant?” Moishe replied hopefully.

  “No, it’s a bookstore,” Paul laughed. “C’mon I’ll show you.”

  Moishe had never seen such a huge bookstore, except perhaps the big Brentanos in Manhattan. Everyone seemed to be wearing blue jeans and either tie-dyed tee shirts or sweatshirts with anti-war slogans. Some sat on the floor reading. Moishe was still in his speaker’s attire, tie and all. A few looked at him with curiosity but most ignored him.

  “What’s that smell?”

  “Oh, you mean the patchouli oil? Yeah, a lot of people wear it to mask the smell of pot” Paul said nonchalantly.

  Cody’s had a place for posting bills, and Moishe found it interesting to peruse the different rallies and demonstrations that were taking place. There were also numerous posters for saving trees, saving various animals and of course, a myriad of ads for concerts, free and otherwise.

  “Cody’s is kind of a hub for the Berkeley community,” Paul explained, as they left the store.

  Moishe was fascinated by the whole Berkeley scene. There were street vendors everywhere. He picked out a couple of pairs of dangly earrings for his wife and older daughter, and a beaded headband for the younger one. “Okay, I’m hungry,” he told Paul as he stuffed the small paper bag containing the gifts into one of his pockets. “What’s to eat around here?”

  “C’mon, the campus is right over there.”

  “What about a restaurant?” Moishe pressed.

  “Cheaper to eat by the campus. C’mon. It’s good.”

  Paul pointed to a row of sidewalk vendors selling shwarma, falafel, kebabs as well as hot dogs, hamburgers and pretzels. Moishe aquiessed, and pronounced the food, “Not bad.”

  “Oops, got a little on your tie there,” Paul pointed out. Moishe wiped his tie with a napkin but a trace of the shwarma juice remained. That was why he favored the cheap polyester ties to the fancy silk ones.

  “Yeah, here too,” Paul gestured to the side of his mouth. Moishe liked the fact that Paul wasn’t afraid to mention these things. He looked around at his colorful surroundings; in fact, there was a great deal to like about the place and the people.

  That night as Moishe prepared for bed, he couldn’t help wondering if all that had transpired that day was a confirmation of what he sensed God might have been revealing through that amazing sunrise.

  Yet he felt torn. He was preparing to begin training a new class of missionary candidates. He couldn’t abandon them. But neither could he ignore the problems that were plaguing him back East or the opportunities that seemed so ripe in California. I’m not going to decide anything tonight, he thought sleepily. We’ ll see what happens when I get back.

  Whether or not the trip to California confirmed Moishe’s future, it certainly confirmed his conviction that outreach to hippies ought to be a primary focus of Jewish evangelism in New York—and that the organizational skills and methods of the antiwar organizers were an effective way to communicate.

  Moishe observed, “They could take five hundred mimeographed sheets and hand them out in the morning, and at noon have five thousand people gathered in a given place. I studied the way they communicated and it was not fancy, it was not slick. They spoke in slogans.”

  The name “Jews for Jesus” began as a slogan during Moishe’s time with the ABMJ in New York, and he did not originate it. In a 2009 letter to some friends, Heidi and Scott, Moishe explained how it came about in the late 1960s:

  I was finding out a lot of exciting things. One young lady came to one of our meetings. She was twenty-three years old. Her name was Alice [the afore-mentioned broadside wri
ter, who changed her name to Vicky, short for Victorious]. Miriam Sleichter (formerly Mary Anne Sleichter, now Miriam Nadler) actually led her to Christ. Alice had zeal! I was worried that that zeal was going to get us into trouble.

  At any rate, in those days, I traveled a lot. . . . When I returned one Monday, I prepared for my Bible study on Tuesday. But, that particular Tuesday, there were several new people . . . and they explained that they came because of our advertisement in the Village Voice. I knew that I hadn’t advertised in the Village Voice. Afterwards, I asked what happened. Alice, with a big, beamy smile, said, “I paid for that myself!”

  Was I grateful? No! I was angry at her. I said, “You could have gotten me in trouble. What does the ad say?” She showed it to me: “We are a group of Jews for Jesus, and would like to invite you to come and study the Bible with us,” and [it] gave the details. Well, there was nothing wrong with the ad, but it was in the Village Voice, which was known as alternative media. The Village Voice, where they could publish dirty words and discuss subjects that wouldn’t be discussed in the New York Times or Tribune, etc.

  Well, I grumbled and mumbled, but nobody [in the mission] really complained. A couple of more [new people] dropped in the following week, and so on.

  It got me wondering, and it occurred to me that the people who were communicating best were using slogans. But, “We are Jews for Jesus” was just too long, so I cut it down to “Jews for Jesus.”

  Actually, when Moishe first saw the phrase “Jews for Jesus” he didn’t especially like it. However, he soon realized its value; it communicated a big message quickly and easily. People remembered it and responded to it. Moishe intensified his efforts to reach the counterculture, trying as he did so to get others excited about the possibilities.

  Avi Brickner recalled,

  [Moishe] invited me to accompany him to Greenwich Village late one Saturday night (actually staying there until early morning) to view the people on the street and to listen to him as he tried to communicate with them in the parlance of the street. Though I didn’t really “get the message” then, I later came to see that Moishe was seeking to communicate to me, in the most effective and impacting way possible, the changes taking place in the society that called for a change in the way the good news was to be effectively communicated.

  Moishe wanted to bring Daniel Fuchs in on his ideas, but could not rely on him for encouragement to move forward in the direction he wanted to go. He always received affirmation from Daniel in the more conventional work that he did. But it remained a stretch for Daniel to affirm some of the less conventional means that Moishe was using to communicate the gospel.

  Daniel thought the first broadside seemed silly and would embarrass the mission and its donors. Ironically, later, when Moishe had written several broadsides and brought them to a meeting of the FCTJ, a number of members thought the tracts were brilliant and congratulated Daniel on the work that Moishe was doing. One can imagine how awkward that might have been because Daniel still did not feel comfortable with that style of literature.

  Yet, despite his discomfort, Daniel made efforts to see what Moishe saw. When Paul Bryant accepted Moishe’s invitation to come to New York, he had Moishe, the trainees, and some staff members demonstrating in front of porn theaters in Times Square. Moishe asked Daniel if he would join them. “It’s not a protest, so much as it is an attestation of Christ and his love, versus what these guys are selling,” he explained to his boss. And Daniel did come to one of those demonstrations.

  Moishe remembered: “He came. He carried a placard for a couple of minutes, and then handed it back, and said, ‘I think I’ll just pray.’ He stood there and prayed silently, but he saw the action. My life was becoming so radicalized at that point that he no longer understood me. Nor did I understand myself.” Moishe considered Daniel Fuchs his mentor and one of his best friends and was unhappy that the tensions and distance between them continued to grow.

  When Moishe was floundering in LA, Daniel’s leadership style had given him exactly what he needed. Daniel had taught him a great deal, but since that time, he’d also learned a great deal from many others. And the more Moishe learned, the more he felt what was lacking.

  For example, toward late 1969 he heard a management lecture that stressed the importance of balancing responsibility with authority and accountability. No sooner had Moishe heard that than he saw how it applied to his situation, as he later explained:

  In 1967 I was charged with reinvigorating the mission but I had no real authority. And I might say that that’s one reason why, when Jews for Jesus got going, I always tried to balance those three things in every assignment that I gave, so that each person would have enough authority to manage the responsibility. And the more authority that I gave them, the more accountable they were to me.

  So, I found that I couldn’t change anything and what was worse, I was training missionaries and sending them to branches that were not prepared to have assistance. All these things that I was teaching them to do, how to visit Jewish people, how to start a children’s work, how to do outdoor preaching, were counting for nothing in most of the branches.

  Each branch had a different structure; each one had a different emphasis. Some had a good work, but it was based on the leader’s personality and how he or she chose to do things. And when some of the older ones retired, often the work they had built fell apart.

  Since his boss expected Moishe to revolutionize the mission, why did Moishe believe that Daniel didn’t prepare the existing missionaries to do anything differently? Moishe explained,

  Daniel didn’t understand revolutionary ways. I believe he thought I would come in, and they [existing staff] would be so taken with me that they would immediately want to follow me and do what I suggested. But Daniel had a mistaken idea of leadership and what leadership could do.

  Whatever Daniel set his hand to, he did well. But he didn’t recognize that not everybody is equally competent at everything that they do. So, in a sense, the mission developed a “one size fits all” attitude, rather than looking to carefully match people in places where their strengths would balance the weaknesses of others, and vice versa. The places the people got sent had little to do with either the situation or the individual’s level of competence.

  I strongly suggested to [Daniel] that the new missionaries who were Jewish Christians might do well in branches where the head of the branch was a Gentile Christian and they needed a Jewish Christian testimony. He thought that was a wonderful idea. But when it came to balancing things the other way [deploying Gentile missionaries where there was already a strong Jewish testimony], I could not convince him. It was up to me to make deployments, but I had to get his approval. . . .’

  [And] Daniel had resigned himself to working around the preferences of some of the senior staff.

  These details have not been included for the sake of airing old grievances or critiquing a good man with whom Moishe had long since been reconciled. They are included because understanding Moishe’s frustrations over these matters is foundational to understanding many of the principles and policies he insisted upon later as the executive director of Jews for Jesus. They explain some of his attitudes and actions when he faced similar situations and decisions that Dr. Fuchs had faced.

  Moishe voiced some other things that troubled him during his New York years:

  I had this ideal that every ministry should help every other ministry. And to a degree, that was happening through the Fellowship of Christian Testimonies to the Jews. Ruth Wardell, who was in charge of the ABMJ’s Long Island work, was very much involved at her own expense, and she was the first one to suggest that I get involved [with the FCTJ]. But in general, the attitude of most of the established missionaries seemed to be that . . . we were the largest, we had each other, and we didn’t need the others. And nobody openly criticized anything. We had the best literature, we had the best this, we had the best that . . . I wasn’t always so sure that we had the best of everything.
But not only that, I felt that if we did have the best of anything, then we had something to give to the others.

  In addition he said:

  There were many things I did not realize when I was in Los Angeles. When I went back to New York, I saw that instead of the administration working to uphold missionaries, the missionaries were treated [by some of the headquarters staff] as an unwanted appendage.

  I began to see my team [candidates and missionaries] as being separate from the administrative team. In my team [particularly the missionaries who worked out of the Manhattan branch] I had people who, like myself, were willing to work all night. We did what we did, not because it was duty, but because it was fun, and we liked to see things develop. The administrative team arrived on time and left on time.

  Moishe did not recall making his complaints or concerns a matter of discourse within the mission: “I’ve always expressed myself in hyperbole—too often saying, ‘always’ or ‘never.’ But, for the most part, anyone could have seen that I was very supportive of the ABMJ.” Yet there was at least one person who was not so certain of Moishe’s support. And his suspicion finally convinced Moishe that he could not succeed in New York. That person was his mentor, friend, and boss—Daniel Fuchs. This came as a painful shock to Moishe, as did the manner in which he learned of it.

  Because he often worked long hours, Moishe frequently ate at his desk. He also made a big batch of chili at least once a year, and there were always leftovers. One day he decided to share some of that chili with a few coworkers, including a man named Bob. Moishe recalled,

  I seldom drink alcoholic beverages, but with chili, I usually drink a beer. I had bought myself a can of beer and shared the chili with Bob and others but I found out later on that he had gone and told Daniel Fuchs that I had brought beer into the building. I don’t remember if I got beer for anybody else—I tend to think not, but I might have. But there was no rule that you couldn’t drink and most people drank wine occasionally.