Hebrew union college, and other addresses

Preface

In selecting the following Addresses and Discourses to appear in book form, I had two objects in view : The one is to give permanency to those memorable events in the history of the Hebrew Union College, of which it has been vouchsafed to me to be the witness, or participant, beginning with a time wrhen the great founder of the institution, Isaac M. Wise, was still shaping its destinies and down to the period of twelve years or more during which I have served as its President. These addresses may perhaps serve to record these landmarks in the progress of the College and to some extent also in the progress of American Reform Judaism in general. The other object I had in view was to acquaint the general public with the views and aims of Reform Judaism and with the great personalities who, "with their leaders' staves digged the well of living waters" to quench the thirst of the people and their flocks.

Other discourses in this collection may be of interest to the reader as far as they cast some sidelights on various phases of Jewish history and Jewish lore.

The collection closes perhaps not inaptly with a tribute of esteem paid by the writer on behalf of the viii PREFACE

Board of Governors, the Faculty and the student body of the Hebrew Union College to the memory of Dr. Solomon Schechter, the late and much lamented President of our sister-institution, whose recent demise has created a void in the ranks of the scholarly world which cannot easily be filled, and who will ever shine as a star of great magnitude among those who increased the knowledge and enlarged the scope of the Torah.

May this collection contribute its humble part to a fuller understanding of the aims and needs of American Judaism.

DR. K. KOHLER.

Cincinnati, March, 1916.

Contents

1. A Well of Living Waters, Address at the first Col-

lege Graduation, 1883 1

2. The Hebrew Union College Inaugural Address, 1903 11

I

Allow me to quote the words by which you have so aptly and tersely characterized the work before me, and my attitude to the past history of the college: "With Dr. Wise and Dr. Mielziner, of blessed memory, the era of construction has passed, and now the period of development begins." Indeed, Dr. Wise has built well and enduringly, and the institution which he reared stands firmly established upon the broad and solid foundations of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations. What Abba Areka did for Babylonia, Isaac M. Wise did for America, and well may he, like him, be called Rab, "the Master." Imbued with his spirit and zeal have his disciples, well nigh a hundred in number, gone forth all over the land as eloquent preachers and indefatigable workers to win the rising generation for Israel's Only One and impart new life and vigor to American Israel. All this beautiful sowing and planting, this great spiritual harvest, is the unique work of the organizing genius of Dr. Wise, who, with his heart and his ear ever close to the people, and understanding their need, created, with the scanty means at his disposal and a few helpers, the institution which furnished the congregations with rabbis and leaders such as they required and yearned for.

To-day new conditions have risen, and new and higher claims are put upon the college. The old generation, mostly of foreign birth, with a deep religious feeling ingrained from childhood, with fervent religious needs and deeply-rooted religious convictions and customs, is fast dwindling away. A new generation, thoroughly American in education, culture and tastes, sits in the pew waiting for inspiration from the pulpit. It does not want mere oratory which delights and thrills for the moment, but has no lasting effect. It wants the fire from heaven that sets every fibre ablaze with fear of God. It wants power. Whence, then, should come the power to the preacher unless he has drunk deeply at the fount of Jewish knowledge, unless the Beth ha Midrash, the institution of learning, represents, above all, power. "The Torah is nothing if not power, victory-boding strength." Our various Jewish institutions of learning, wherever they may be, lack the essential element of efficiency — they lack power. As long as the Jew's life and thought were centered upon the Talmud, and his entire conduct regulated by the Rabbinic Code, the Shulhan Aruk, the Yeshibah or Rabbinical Academy fulfilled its high purpose by equipping not only the future Rabbi, but every capable son of Israel, with the knowledge of the Rabbinical law and supplying him with intellectual and moral fibre to brave life's struggles and temptations nobly. The Talmud was the citadel of the medieval Jew; behind its ramparts he was safe and strong, fit to cope with every emergency.

But what is the Talmud to the modern Jew that the most precious hours of the student should still be spent on its hair-splitting dialectics, upon that "vast, bottomless sea" out of which only few fortunate divers know how to bring the precious pearls forth to the light of day? It is but blind adherence to traditional custom which accounts for the fact that the theological schools of Breslau, Budapest, and Berlin, not to speak of the more conservative seminaries, lay all possible stress and value upon these barren Halakic subjects, the divine origin and character of which are believed in neither by teacher nor pupil, whereas the essentials of the Jewish faith, the great religious and philosophical problems of the age, Divine Revelation and Authority, Inspiration and Higher Criticism, the relation of science to faith, of comparative religion or of Christianity to Judaism, are timidly shunned as a "Noli MeTangere!"- -"Touch me not." And what is the consequence? The men that have gone forth from these seminaries may possibly have enriched the learned world with a treatise on some obscure Hebrew, Arabic or Samaritan work, and turned out to be fine linguists, perchance, or archaeologists and palaeographers well versed in literature and able to handle manuscripts and palimpsests, but they have missed their vocation. They fail to impart life to the dry bones of Judaism. They lack the power of a great, all-enrapturing, all-vivifying truth. There is nothing of the prophetic spirit in them to make Judaism a power for an age weakened by doubt and chilled by apathy. One of the chief reasons for the sad state of religious life among the Jews of Europe to-day, for the lethargy and dissolution that has taken hold of many Jewish communities in Europe, is that the theological institutions and the preachers have relaxed in religious vigor.

The theological school must be the power-house to supply pulpit and people with the dynamic force of an all-ruling, all-electrifying religious truth. It is not enough that Bible and Talmud, Halakah and Haggadah, Hellenic and Arabic literature, Philosophy and Cabala, History and Literature, Liturgy and Homiletics be taught; they must all be turned into vitalizing sparks of truth. They must all be transformed into spiritual helps and lifts to unfold the inherent power of Judaism in its manifold stages and phases of growth. It is in this light that each teacher, by showing the organic connection, the inner relations between his branch of study and the others, can single out the potencies, the spiritual, moral and intellectual kernel beneath the shell, and so lay bare the deeper impulses and show the higher motives that gave lasting value and zest to each specific study and movement. In other words, the theological curriculum must mean not the registration, but the profound appreciation, of all the religious forces that were at work throughout the various ages and lands, while at the same time our own religious needs and our own religious consciousness should form the object of our foremost solicitude. Take, for instance, the Talmudic marriage and divorce laws, most of which have lost their practical significance for us. There is, as the late Dr. Mielziner has so well shown, an intrinsic ethical force attached to many of them, which we cannot afford to ignore. The same is the case with the fringes and phylacteries, the Zizith and Tefillin, our fathers wore. They, too, present in the Haggadah an ethical valuation of the ceremonials which renders them gems upon the diadem of Judaism, more than most of those who still wear them on their body are aware of.

In very fact, it is as a means of conveying power and spiritual force that certain portions of the Halakah and almost the whole of the Haggadah should be taught, and not for mere mental gymnastics. For thousands of years the treasures of coal lay an inert and seemingly worthless substance in the bowels of the earth, until the scanning eye of genius turned them into sources of power. There is a wealth of spiritual and ethical thought buried in the Midrash and Talmud which must be turned into power, whereas at present it is treated as dead matter. But in like manner do most of the branches of Jewish learning wait for the creative mind that extracts from them the element of power. Let but the human side, the moral sentiment, the deeper life-problem in Jewish history or any of the Rabbinical, philosophical or mystic writings be touched, and the driest subjects become interesting, instructive and fascinating.

Yes, a store-house of spiritual power the theological school must be, and it is foolish and wrong to evade the discussion of vexatious problems of the day. You fail to train men of power for the ministry, if you ignore or simply condemn the Higher Biblical Criticism and Comparative Religion and Law as detrimental to the faith or to reverence for the Bible. To use the expression of Abtalion, "Be on your guard lest the disciples drink of the turbid waters and undergo spiritual death and the name of God be profaned." Never before was the path of the preacher beset with such difficulties, such struggles and doubts as today. Questions which formerly occupied only the mind of the scholar in his study have become the great concern of all thinking people. Each day discloses some long-hidden document in the earth or some startling phenomenon in the sky or the sea that threatens to undermine the very groundwork of faith and calls for a resetting of the Bible and a reconstruction of the whole idea of Revelation and Creation. The issue today is no longer between Reform and Orthodoxy, but between a world with God and a world without God. How, then, can the destinies of homes and communities, the guardianship of souls and the future of humanity be entrusted to men who, in a time when the foundations of morality are shaken and the peace of the world quivers under the fierce contest of ideas, lack power and principle, wavering and oscillating between agnosticism and belief, between Judaism and Unitarianism and a dozen other isms, because, immature in judgment, they have eaten of the unripe fruit of the tree of knowledge only to expose their own nakedness of soul? Rabbinical scholarship alone, however extensive, even inclusive of medieval philosophy, all the lofty thought of a R. Joshua ben Hananiah and

R. Meir, of a Maimuni and Crescas, fails to solve the vital problems for the seeker after truth to-day. He must have learned how to penetrate through the shell to the divine kernel and to view the whole process of growth, the evolution of matter and mind, as divinely designed and predestined, though necessitated by nature and following the laws that rule all things. He must, in other w'ords, like Moses in the house of Pharaoh, receive the nurturing sap of life from the mother, the faith that gave him life, while the surrounding world offers him all the educating influences to render him a child of the age. Only then can he with a clear and firm Jewish convictions and principles be a staff of support to those ready to fall and a power to lead the erring and wayward.

Reform Judaism, especially, must be felt to be a power, the faith of manhood. It is calumny to say that the desire for assimilation or for a taste of forbidden meat created the Reform movement. The Reform pioneers, Geiger and Holdheim, Einhorn, Samuel Hirsch and Dr. Wise, were men of power, of principle, who brooked no compromise and never yielded. They had the courage of their conviction and throughout life displayed consistency and steadfastness of purpose. It is Romanticism that wants picturesqueness; that renders Judaism and Synagog a museum of antiquities, preserving the forms of the past fossilized while the spirit has fled long ago. Such conservatism fails to engender power, because it lacks conviction; it only creates hypocrites, men that halt between the two sides. Legend tells that Abraham, who broke the idols of his father courageously, braved the fire of Nimrod's furnace and was saved by the power of his faith in God. whereas Haran who wavered, not knowing whether to bow to the idol of Nimrod or to worship Abraham's Only One, went into the fire and was consumed. An age of distraction and discrepancies like ours requires the power of a positive conviction and intensity of faith. Reform Judaism stands for a religion of power which alone saves man when in doubt and trial. Reform Judaism broke the shackles of ceremonialism and legalism, because, following the lead of the prophets, it declared Judaism to be not a system of laws and statutes, but the law of truth and righteousness. And it is this championship of truth and righteousness which alone made the Jew the mightiest power in the world. The whole history of the Jew in dark and in bright ages, the very life of the prophets and martyrs, of the sages and the saints in Israel was an exhibition of valor and heroic strength.

So is the attitude of the true reform Jew today — of the Jew who reclaims the entire so-called Christian civilization for Judaism, and does not plan a retreat before the foe by way of East Africa or of Asia — that of power, power of the spirit that will not yield to number and to physical might. Reform Judaism is hated and feared most by the anti-Semite, because it is aggressive. It refuses to simply take the defensive. It wants to assert its power; neither shall it rest, until the whole history of the world will have been reconstructed on the principle of evolution, which beholds in Christianity as well as in Islamism offshoots of a world-conquering Judaism.

II

But here I have already touched upon the second point which I wish to emphasize as another of the chief aims of a Jewish institution of learning. One of the ever-reiterated maxims of the Rabbis is, "Light —that is the law." The charge which is ever brought forth anew against Judaism by the followers of St. Paul is that it is harsh, unrelenting law and its main characteristic is legalism or ritualism. This charge is untrue. To the Jew at all times his Torah was "learning," a matter of reason and knowledge. Just as the Jewish seers of old appealed constantly to reason and common sense in order to establish God's throne in the heart of the universe and the heart of man, so did the sages of the Talmud and the philosophers of the middle ages accentuate ever anew the reasonableness of the Jewish faith. As Miriam stood on the banks of the Nile watching the babe Moses in the floating willow basket, so does wisdom, so does knowledge ever stand in sisterly love and solicitude watching and fostering the progress of the Jewish faith — is a beautiful remark of the Midrash. Hence, religion to the Jew never was blind faith upon the acceptance of which follows heavenly reward, but it is the light of God allied to the intellect, as is the moon that shines at night a corollary of the bright orb of day. The greatest Rabbinical authorities, therefore, were accordingly bold, independent seekers after truth. Never could mysticism in Jewish circles entirely obscure reason in its free and unimpeded sway. And as the first rationalists and Bible critics were Jews, so did none hail the new era of reason and enlightenment with greater delight than the son of Israel. How singular, then, that the Jew has gone out with the lamp of knowledge and the torch of research to light up every field except his own. How little does the average Jew to-day know of his own literature; how scant is his knowledge regarding the Book of Books which he handed forth as a compass to man on his wanderings over the wide globe!

The interpretation and elucidation of the Biblical writings in the light of modern research has all been left to Christian workers. The Jew for whom the term Amhaarez ("Ignoramus") was the most humiliating opprobrium in olden times, has lost all interest in his Torah, has forgotten how to read his own sacred signs. And while our age has produced Jewish scholars and investigators of the first rank in every branch of learning and literature, those that have contributed essentially to the understanding of the teachings of Judaism, or written standard works on Jewish life and Jewish thought outside of the Talmudic sphere, are scarcely to be found in our own camp. Worse than this, the whole field of Hellenistic writings and the immense number of Apocryphal books which cast a flood of light upon the pre-Christian centuries of Jewish history have been altogether neglected by the Jewish student, and the consequence is that the whole point of view from which Jewish history and literature have been written by Jewish authors is narrow, onesided and often altogether false. Neither the Talmud nor the New Testament are fully understood by most of them. On the other hand, non-

Jews have translated for us large portions of our Rabbinic, all of our Hellenistic and Apocryphal literature and composed for us whatever there exists of systematic works on Jewish theology and ethics, on Jewish life and Jewish thought. And now, pray, read the classical, the standard works on universal history, or the history of the nations, the races, the various epochs of human culture and civilization; go through the libraries of the world to learn what has been done by and for humanity all these hundreds and thousands of years — it all bears the imprint of Christian thought and sentiment; it is all written from the point of view of the New Testament, and rarely with anything like fairness for the slandered, persecuted and outlawed Jew, all claiming the greatness and glory of a new life and light for the star that rose over Bethlehem, and denying to the Jew the merit of having prepared the soil and fertilized the atmosphere with the seeds that yielded all the rich harvest for Christendom. And yet, what is the whole New Testament, the entire work of the Church during the first four centuries of its existence but Jewish teaching and practice transferred to pagan soil and appropriated by the disciples of the Nazarene who never claimed to be anything but a Jew, a believer in the confession "Shema Yisrael!" That very broadness and universality and love, the preaching of a Church Universal which is claimed for Jesus and Paul, his visionary herald and hierophant, was Jewish, the blossom and fruit of Alexandrian Judaism, long before the Church had risen to continue what the Jew had begun and to reap what the Jew had sown.

We have moved all along in the narrow circle of Rabbinic literature and failed to see what the Jew in his love for God and humanity had done in days gone by. We have altogether too long walked in the valley and neglected to look around to see all the beauty and grandeur on the heights designed and prepared by Israel in other times. It is high time that we reclaim what is our own. The Jew has at all times been the true cosmopolitan, the banner-bearer of the light of a truth for all peoples. He blended Greek culture and Jewish thought; he harmonized Hellenic philosophy with Hebrew faith; he stood as mediator between Aryan and Semite, working for true unity of the human race, for the unity of God, the Father of all men. And he alone, amid the raging warfare between races and sects, nations, classes and creeds, is destined to interlink the world by his universalism, by his cosmopolitan religion and his broad conception of God and man. Let me in this connection, quote the words of an English writer, Frances Power Cobbe, penned twenty-five years ago at the very time when George Eliot wrote her ' Daniel Deronda" to become the godfather of Zionism: ''Let Reformed Judaism relight the old golden candle-stick and set it aloft and it will give light unto all which are in the house, not only of Israel, but of humanity. A glorious picture may in God's providence await such purified, emancipated Judaism." . . . "In the present disintegration of all religious opinion," she writes in the preface of her book, The Scientific Spirit of the Age, "Judaism may yet become a progressive faith and solve the great problem of combining a theology consonant to modern philosophy with a worship hallowed by the sacred associations of the remotest past."

Out, then, of the valley beneath, where we have too long, by a fault not of our own, groped in darkness, to the sunlit heights of our prophetic mission! This must be the watchword of the modern Jew. And where else but in America, the land of freedom, and among people eager to listen reverently and fairly to every message of truth, may the Jewish theological school be expected to become a light-house to illumine the path of all seekers after truth. In the light of the first verse of Genesis, as commented upon by the Midrash, the whole process of the world's evolution appears as the unfolding of the spirit of God, and the story of the Wandering Jew, the Messiah of the nations, receives a new meaning under the searchlight of the all-penetrating lamp of knowled ge — evolution.

O ye sons and daughters of Israel, blessed with wealth! What an abundance of beneficence could you pour out upon generations unborn, what a powerful incentive to research, to the elucidation of Jewish history and thought, could you hold out to the student if you would, as is so generously done for other creeds, endow chairs or create lectureships in connection with the Hebrew Union College, for Bible and Assyriology, for Old and New Testament research, for Hellenistic and Cabalistic, Arabic and Karaite literature, for Jewish theology and comparative religion, to make our work here broad, comprehensive, world-uplifting and world-enlightening. Our college thus equipped would become an armory like "David's tower with its thousand bucklers and shields of mighty men built for defense," an impregnable fortress of Judaism and a challenge to Anti-Semitism in high or low stations — a true laboratory of Jewish thought, an authoritative power to reconstruct the history of the world and reclaim for the Jew his rights and his titles as factor of civilization.