The Chosen Wars

by Steven R Weisman

  Meanwhile, changes at Temple Emanu-El in New York were proceeding, in many ways more quickly than those introduced by Wise in Albany. The synagogue maintained separate seating for men and women in the 1840s but installed family pews, a mixed choir, and other innovations in the 1850s. It also abolished the prayer shawl and the second day of most festivals. Later came the installation of an organ, abolition of the sale of honors at the Torah, and use of a hymn book with German hymns. By 1868, a bit late by the standards of some other temples, Emanu-El introduced some English into the service when it moved to its new structure on Forty-Third Street off Fifth Avenue. The temple also established religious schools and drew worshippers from the most prosperous part of society in New York City before the Civil War. Rabbi Merzbacher had compiled a new English prayer book in 1855, Seder Tefilah: The Order of Prayer for Divine Service. Known as the “Merzbacher prayer book,” its pages were arranged to be read from right to left. Though it referred to the resurrection of the dead and the restoration of the Temple, it omitted references to angels, animal sacrifices, and passages from Scripture that referred to revenge and death visited upon the enemies of Israel.

  Another striking change in Temple Emanu-El’s liturgy was the elimination of kol nidre (“all vows”), the Aramaic proclamation annulling vows made before God, which is sung by Jews at the opening of the Day of Atonement service on the eve of Yom Kippur. The prayer, perhaps first introduced to nullify forced conversions or other acts of adherence to another faith, developed an emotional following despite the fact that many authorities had questioned its legal validity. Though understood by those who recite it as an effort to clear one’s conscience and reconcile with God, the prayer had been expunged from many prayer books in Europe out of concern that it might reinforce a Christian prejudice that Jews could not be trusted to keep their promises.

  The prayer book also changed the liturgy from saying that God “resurrects the dead” to one that says God “renews everything.” Merzbacher was a major believer in what he called Enlightenment terminology embracing reason, progress, and truth and said that many parts of the traditional worship service were “thoughtless” and unintelligible, filled with “dogmatic particularism,” and “inappropriate to our present social and political condition.” His prayer book was used only in some congregations. Merzbacher’s successor at Emanu-El, James K. Gutheim, declared that he wanted a Judaism “stripped of ritualistic observances” so that “rational progress” would “chase away the dense clouds of superstition that darken the religious horizon.” He rejected the traditionalist belief that Moses’s encounter with God at Sinai produced the Oral Law with its hundreds of rituals and observances. Instead, he said the “mission from Sinai” was the “spirit of God” calling humanity to a high level of ethical behavior.9 Merzbacher’s prayer book, later amended by his successor, Samuel Adler, never caught on among other Reform-minded Jews, and many Orthodox Jews banished it as heretical.

  For all these changes, it took some time for women to gain status in American synagogues. The irony was that although congregation membership in the United States was frequently restricted to men, it was increasingly the women who made the Torah covers, brought their children to services, taught Sunday school, contributed to fundraising, and served as the mainstays of synagogue attendance. Through female auxiliaries and ladies’ benevolent associations, women took some synagogue activities away from men. In the process, they grew comfortable with their authority and began pressing for equal status, rights, and decision making. Women’s fiction also began appearing in periodicals like the Occident and Jewish Messenger.

  The best-known pioneer for women in mid-century, Rebecca Gratz of Philadelphia, the daughter of a wealthy merchant, was active in civic organizations that were opening up to women. From her involvement in Philadelphia’s Protestant-dominated charities, Gratz went on to establish the Female Hebrew Benevolent Society in 1819—the first Jewish women’s benevolent organization and the first Jewish charity in Philadelphia outside of the synagogue. It was a precursor to the creation of Jewish charitable organizations functioning apart from synagogue control and to women playing a prominent role in it. She later helped to initiate the Jewish Sunday school movement.

  Women also aspired to positions of leadership in synagogues and in these outside organizations, and rebelled against the traditional requirement that they go through a ritual bath in a mikveh seven days after menstruating. Some but not all synagogues built mikvehs, and some were built independently for the whole Jewish community. Debates flared over the appropriateness of women bathing in such circumstances, a fact causing some chagrin in a country where such matters were not considered acceptable as a publicly discussed subject.

  Yet even these reformers adhered to traditions to retain their Jewish identity. They festooned their buildings with the Star of David (which appears to date from the seventeenth century as a popular symbol to compete with the Christian cross) and depictions of the tablets of the Ten Commandments. The tablet was an image originally created to depict a medieval notebook—two slabs of wood with rounded tops, hinged together to protect the wax surfaces on which words could be inscribed. Sometimes, as in the Plum Street Synagogue, these images appeared alongside or near stained-glass windows evoking the décor of churches. The Star of David eventually became ubiquitous on books, tombstones, and other objects of religious significance. There were of course the prayers at the center of these objects: principally the Shema, “Hear O Israel,” from Deuteronomy, recited as a daily reminder of Jewish belief in one God and inscribed in mezuzahs on the doorposts of synagogues and Jewish homes. In another tradition, some Reform congregations continued to employ a non-Jew to light candles or ovens on the Sabbath, functioning as a figure sometimes called the “Shabbos goy.” Prominent New York Reform Jews such as Jacob Schiff refrained from working on the Sabbath. Diaries of other Jews in this period recalled keeping the Sabbath as well. The Jewish press reported that major businesses around the country shuttered on Saturdays, although some businesses opened on Saturday afternoons. Even those who worked kept to other customs on the Sabbath, such as the ritual blessing of children, blessings over wine and bread, and saying Grace or reciting appropriate Psalms. In a striking continuation of this pattern, Jews did tend to close their stores for the High Holidays. Some Jewish congregations that had introduced mixed seating during the year reverted to separating the sexes during Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Many synagogues baked matzo and shipped it to other parts of the country during Passover.

  Yet fealty to Judaism was far short of universal. A census in 1850 had calculated that only 35 percent of America’s Jews could be accommodated by the number of synagogues then in existence. As many as half of America’s Jews are believed to have been unaffiliated in the middle of the nineteenth century, and Jewish leaders were beginning to deplore their disaffection or indifference. A separate study in 1870 found that a third of Jews in the United States were still hewing to religious traditions, another third were in varying degrees of Reform congregating, and another third neglected Judaism except for the High Holidays.

  What seemed to be happening was that as long as their leaders and rabbis kept up the traditions, Jews felt they did not have to do so themselves. Toward the end of the century, at least some of the nonbelievers furtherbroke away and became active in their hostility to religion. Some took up socialism and free thinking, including holding dinner parties on Yom Kippur in deliberate violation of the rules of fasting. These challenges grew bolder with the arrival of Jews from Eastern Europe and Russia after the 1880s.

  Still there is little doubt that the post–Civil War period gave Jews a sense of triumph in their adopted land. The Christian church at the time was itself divided into an array of branches, so Jews could more easily see themselves as part of a rich variety of different religious branches while sharing common roots in the Hebrew Bible. Judaism in America thus evolved into a kind of cafeteria approach in which Jews could select different choices
emphasizing everything from deep faith in God to those doubting that God intervened in the daily existence of the world.10

  The “Judaism as marketplace” fit in with a new spirit of freedom. Jews felt they did not need to explain to others why they chose some practices over others. Instead they sought to adopt those parts of Judaism that fit in with their lifestyles and self-definitions as Americans, even as they were determined to keep their Jewish identities. The records kept by synagogues and communities show that Jews across the country wanted to support their places of worship, be buried in Jewish cemeteries, and have their boys circumcised—even if it meant summoning mohels to travel hundreds of miles to carry out the practice. There were some cases of the Jewish press containing advertisements for mohels—sometimes expressing the hope that a mohel could come to a community and also function as a kosher butcher!11 (Psalm 149:6 was often cited as biblical proof that these two professions went together.)

  Because of all these developments, Wise could probably be forgiven for declaring that rigidly traditional Judaism was in retreat if not outright defeat. Yes, nearly every urban Jewish community in the mid-nineteenth century had at least one traditional congregation. Their existence was important historically, because these communities were positioned to welcome the Eastern European Jews who migrated in such large numbers toward the end of the century. But the handful of Orthodox congregations in post–Civil War America appear to have had little impact on the Jewish community and even on Jewish consciousness. A commentator observed in the 1870s that “the meager residues of Orthodoxy which one still finds in this land are insignificant.”12

  Wise took pride in this phenomenon, declaring in 1866 that perhaps only 50 congregations out of 300 in the United States adhered to “what used to be called orthodoxy.” He said he was proud of the innovations that included men and women singing together in choirs and sitting together in the synagogue; organs; sermons and hymns in English; and abandonment of prayers for the Messiah, resurrection of the dead, and returning to Palestine to carry out animal sacrifices at the Temple in Jerusalem. 13 “Everywhere the temples of Israel, the monuments of progressive Judaism, as though touched by a magic wand, rise in proud magnificence, and proclaim with a thundering voice, we are right, and you are wrong,” he declared, insisting that the few traditionalist synagogues left in America were “harmless remnants of bygone days.” He asserted that Orthodoxy was withering away, and that the goal was within reach of uniting Judaism in America under one roof. Within fifty years, he predicted, Judaism would be seen as a universal heritage of the American people based on Jewish teachings enshrining the principles of God, justice, virtuous behavior, and perfecting humanity. These goals, he confidently declared, would be seen as the shared legacy of Jews and Christians alike.14

  But first Wise would have to forge unity among Jews themselves, a task that proved more difficult than he acknowledged.

  Eleven

  REFORMISTS AND RADICALS

  The success achieved by rabbis and Jewish leaders in establishing an American Judaism persuaded Wise to try to institutionalize his goal of Jewish unity, including the general adoption of his prayer book Minhag America. The Israelite, his weekly newspaper that was a rival to the Occident in Philadelphia and the Asmonean in New York, gave him a platform for his agenda. He grandly compared himself to nothing less than Isaiah as the avatar of modern Judaism, citing the passage as applying to himself: “And I heard the voice of the Lord saying: whom shall I send and who shall go for us? And I said: behold here I am, send me.”1

  Another opportunity for working toward these goals emerged as Wise and other Jewish leaders laid plans for the next big conclave of Jewish rabbinical leaders. It was to be in Philadelphia in 1869 and was convened by Samuel Adler of Temple Emanu-El in New York, the German-born scholar who had succeeded Merzbacher a few years earlier. Only a dozen like-minded reformers seemed to be invited, and they conferred at the private home of Samuel Hirsch, a former chief rabbi of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg who had moved to Congregation Keneseth Israel in Philadelphia a few years earlier. Both Adler and Hirsch had previously attended reform-minded European rabbinical conferences, where they probably got the idea of organizing similar meetings in America. The Philadelphia group met in November for four days, with Wise showing up on the second day. On the whole, the conference went smoothly, though there were disagreements under the surface over the direction of reform. Wise did clash with his nemesis, David Einhorn, on a few key matters.

  But this Philadelphia conference achieved consensus on the important matter of opposing prayers calling for the restoration of the Jewish state in the Holy Land. The conferees also discarded the principle that the destruction of the ancient Temple in Jerusalem was the product of God’s wrath over the sins of the Jewish people. This idea of God’s retribution, implicit in the Hebrew Bible prophets inveighing against the sins of the Jews and no doubt written by authors seeking to explain the destruction, had been a theme of Jewish teachings throughout history.

  In the place of the traditional view of God punishing the Jews for their sinful and wayward conduct, the conference endorsed the teaching that the Temple’s destruction and the Jews’ dispersal was part of a divine plan “for the realization of their high-priestly mission, to lead the nations to the true knowledge and worship of G-d.” At one level, this revisionist theme of punishment leading to a blessed outcome reflected a longstanding belief in the redemptive power of religious devotion overcoming sin and destruction, a powerful theme in Scripture since ancient times. This theme also has echoes in the Catholic teachings of St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, and most majestically in John Milton’s Paradise Lost, in which the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden—the “original sin”—is interpreted theologically as a “happy fall” (felix culpa) because it leads to eventual redemption for humankind following the teachings of Jesus Christ (Paradise Regained). But for the Jews of Philadelphia to explicitly revise the concept of being punished for ancient sins, and to embrace a new “high-priestly mission” in the world vouchsafed by God, marked a significant redefinition of their role, now woven into a larger sense of national purpose that had been a part of American history and culture as well. Jews were thus aligning themselves increasingly with the ethos of America—the “city upon on a hill”—and consciously assigning themselves the role of delivering the ethical message at the heart of the Hebrew Bible and the center of the American spirit.

  The rabbis in Philadelphia, echoing the trend sought to make explicit their commitment to jettison prayers for the Messiah, the resurrection of the dead, and the restoration of ancient rites of the Temple. The Philadelphia attendees declared further that prayer in Jewish services should be in an intelligible language to reduce the alienation among younger Jews.

  The Philadelphia conference proved a landmark in the Jewish effort to distance itself from identity as a “nation” or “people,” as well as from Jewish traditional practices. In doing so, it effectively fulfilled the legacy of the principles enunciated in 1824 in Charleston, South Carolina, that “this country is our Palestine, this city our Jerusalem, this House of God our Temple.”2

  Some other steps by the delegates in Philadelphia illustrated evolving attitudes toward the condition of women and families. In weddings, the Philadelphia rabbis slightly elevated women’s status by calling for the bride to give a ring to her husband and utter the same vow in Hebrew as he did. The rabbis declared their opposition to polygamy, which was then practiced by Mormons in America and some Jews (as well as Muslims) in parts of the Middle East. Also disavowed were extramarital relations and marriage restrictions between Jews from priestly lineage and other Jews. They accepted civil divorce and discarded the use of the get, the divorce document by a husband to his wife in order to effectuate their divorce. Substituting civil divorce for the religious ritual did concern some of the rabbis, who felt that divorce was altogether too easy in some states. They insisted on retaining the right of rabbis to refuse officiating i
n a second marriage if they felt the civil divorce was too flimsy to observe.

  Wise and Einhorn clashed over what proved to be the most contentious disagreement at the 1869 Philadelphia conference—circumcision, a sensitive matter theologically, racially, and of course physically. Both rabbis agreed that the son of a Jewish mother was a Jew, whether circumcised or not, a principle that remains universally accepted in Judaism. But Wise went further, believing that Judaism was more of a universal religion and asserting that a Jewish convert need not be circumcised. That was too far for Einhorn, who generally opposed efforts to convert non-Jews. Einhorn argued (no doubt correctly) that the circumcision requirement—if the person was already circumcised, it was carried out by a ritual cutting and drawing of blood—would deter conversions, which was his objective. His argument carried the day, and requiring circumcision for conversions was retained. Einhorn’s uncompromising view about circumcision demonstrated that even for a reform-minded Jew, the religion of sense of Judaism as a distinct people with a tribal legacy should not be entirely obliterated.3

  Philadelphia marked another milestone in the tactical calculations of Isaac Mayer Wise. His participation signaled a willingness to join the vanguard of reform, even radical reform, if the ultimate objective of unity was attained. But as soon as the Philadelphia parley concluded, it came under attack by tradition-minded rabbis. Nervous that Philadelphia had gone too far, Wise later backtracked, complaining that the manifesto from that conclave was excessively negative and “Einhornian”—a case of “innovations for the sake of innovation, and reform for the sake of reform.” The Philadelphia manifesto, he said, was not binding, an assertion that only served to arouse the suspicions of liberal reformers.4