USA > Massachusetts > Suffolk County > Boston > Growth and achievement: Temple Israel, 1854-1954 > Part 4
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The rabbi corrected misconceptions of Judaism that
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Solomon Schindler: German Rebel
earlier had led to prejudice. In his popular "Jesus of Nazareth," delivered before Congregationalist and Uni- tarian audiences, he noted that the Romans, not the Jews, had crucified the Nazarene; for neither the method of execution nor the trial was part of ancient Hebrew legal practice. Schindler also broke through the separateness of Orthodoxy to comment on the relation- ship of Christianity to Judaism for the Globe, which asked him to write a piece on the accuracy of a play set in the synagogue of Jesus' day. The rabbi's observa- tions on moot points concerning the origins of Chris- tianity were less significant for their contents than for the fact that a Jewish minister would discuss Jesus in public. No Orthodox rabbi had done so before. Schin- dler showed, by example, that liberal Jews were inter- ested and viewed rationally the religious traditions of their Christian neighbors.
Similarly, Temple Israel's leader hoped to dissipate Jewish misconceptions of Christianity. "We must learn," he preached, "to understand our neighbor ... for at present we do not know him and our ignorance . . . breeds ... prejudice ... against him .... " He in- veighed against the exclusiveness of Orthodox Judaism. The study of comparative religion makes foolish "the notion that one religion only can be the right one." In- deed, "all religions appear like flowers in the garden of humanity." He reminded his people that Christianity was not a homogeneous whole, that forms and theologi-
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cal differences separated various sects, and that the Uni- tarians, because they were returning to the "Jewish conception of God," had more in common with liberal Jews than with orthodox Christians. There was no need to fear that Judaism would die if Jews recognized the validity of Christianity, that the younger Jews would give up their religion for the other. An up-to-date Juda- ism, Schindler asserted, would have the vitality and strength to survive.
Under the influence of the new school of Biblical criticism and the theory of evolution, Solomon Schin- dler rejected the belief in a personal God and the divine origin of the Bible. The concept of the Creator had evolved through several stages: "from a household god into a tribal god, then into a national divinity, finally into the god of the Universe." God was First Cause and Clockmaker. He was not the capricious, jealous Jehovah who had chosen the Hebrews as His special children; nor could He intervene personally on their behalf. "To seek him," Rabbi Schindler said, "will mean to enter into the spirit of His laws, of the justice and wisdom of which the whole universe will be acknowledged to be one grand manifestation." The fact that God did not dictate the Old Testament from on high reduced neither His stature nor the merits of the Holy Book: indeed it reveals, said Schindler, the essential wisdom of the early Hebrews and proves, moreover, the evolu- tionary thesis that each age fashions religious beliefs for its own needs.
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Solomon Schindler: German Rebel
If there was no God who was exclusively interested in Jews, and no infallible book, then there could be no basis for the belief in a Messiah. With the evolutionary hypothesis as his instrument of analysis and history as his laboratory, Rabbi Schindler traced the origin, de- velopment, and frustration of the hope for a Hebrew Savior. He pointed out that the notion originated dur- ing the Babylonian captivity when the Jews yearned for a political-military leader who would throw off their yoke and restore the Hebrew state to the old glory of David's kingdom. Five hundred years later, while under the domination of the Romans, a handful of the Jewish masses regarded Jesus as such a leader, but the bulk of the Palestinians ignored Him. After the introduction of Christianity and the Jewish Diaspora, the original Hebrew concept of a warrior-Messiah evolved into an- other form. In the misery and isolation of the ghettos, and under the influence of the Christian conception of the Savior, Jews developed the idea of a God-sent spiri- tual leader who would gather up the dispersed Hebrews, take them to Zion, and establish a universal order of peace and brotherhood with Jerusalem as the center.
The belief in a Hebrew Savior, said Schindler, died with Jewish emancipation following the American and French revolutions - and properly so, he thought. Ideas to him were like biological organisms: he believed with Darwin that only the fittest survived; and in a free, democratic country like America the hope for a Messiah
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could hardly compete with the ideal of assimilation. In the United States the Hebrews had freedom of religion and speech, enjoyed the ballot, could aspire to political office, and enjoyed equal privileges of citizenship. Why then return to Palestine, an insignificant, poverty-stricken land on the Mediterranean? The Messianic hope, more- over, was out of step with nineteenth century concep- tions of representative government. The Savior, after organizing the trek to Palestine, would no doubt wish to rule Zion by himself; and no rational democrat - Jew or Christian - could accept such a government. Finally, the wish to set up Jerusalem as the world capi- tal, with Judaism in the driver's seat, was in conflict with the basic idea, propagated by the study of compara- tive religion, that all religions were equally valid. If American Jews insisted on yearning for a future religious uniformity let them note that: "The religion of the future will be neither specifically Jewish nor Christian nor Mohammedan. It will be an entirely new system, in which the immortal parts of all the present religions will be represented, but at the same time so equally balanced that none will dare to claim superiority."
For the ancient hope of a personal Savior unfit to survive in the competitive world of ideas, Rabbi Schin- dler substituted the nineteenth century concept of scien- tific and mechanical progress. Jesus of Nazareth and Bar Kockba, Solomon Molcho, David Reubeni, and Sabbatai Svi (sixteenth and seventeenth century pre-
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Solomon Schindler: German Rebel
tender-Messiahs), had not improved the world; they grew out of the misery of their times and left their societies in exactly the same condition that they found them. But the scientists, the inventors, the scholars - they were "the real saviors of humanity." They broke down class distinctions, made possible representative government, and improved the standard of living. Above all, their "rails and electric wires have tied humanity into one large community, and through their agency all human beings have learned to regard one another as brethren, and to share the joys and woes of their fellow beings from pole to pole."
Rabbi Schindler's rejection of the Messianic concep- tion derived not only from his intellectual convictions but from his desire to Americanize Judaism. Although an internationalist in his socialist beliefs, he wished to sever all ties between the American Jews and their place of origin - remote and near. He believed that so long as Jews desired a return to Palestine, they would be dis- trusted as foreigners lacking in patriotism. Similarly, he had little patience with the Orthodox Jews of the North End, who did not understand the "spirit of American- ism" and who wished to perpetuate "European tradi- tions and customs." Insisting that a "man cannot have two countries at the same time," he asserted that the Jew "will never be a good American citizen who always dreams of a return to the country from which he came, and who delights only in the customs and usages of the fatherland."
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If Judaism did not rest on the literal interpretation of the Bible, the belief in the Messiah, the Saturday Sab- bath, the Orthodox ritual, and the faith in a personal God with the Jews as His chosen people, what was it then? In his Dissolving Views in the History of Judaism, Rabbi Schindler pointed out that the Jewish faith had gone through a process of evolution, changing its form in response to the pressures of the environment from its very inception: Moses, Isaiah, Maimonides, Mendels- sohn, Wise - all had put their stamp on the faith. But always there remained a changeless core, for Judaism, according to Schindler, had ever been "the religion of humanity."
In the far-off future, Rabbi Schindler foresaw a recon- ciliation of Christianity and Judaism, when racial prej- udice and the belief in the divinity - and in the case of the Unitarians, the uniqueness - of Jesus would be no more. For the present, however, American Hebrews had to adapt their faith to the rational, tolerant, pro- gressive milieu; break down parochial barriers dividing co-religionists of diverse European backgrounds; become Americans by nationality and Jews by religion; accept the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man; and work for the ever upward progress of mankind "on the ladder of civilization." This was essentially the creed of the Pittsburgh Platform, the declaration drawn up by sixteen Reform rabbis in 1885. Schindler endorsed their principles, but he came to his conclusions inde- pendently, and significantly, at the same time.
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Solomon Schindler: German Rebel
III
Behind Rabbi Schindler's efforts lay the thought that his kind of Judaism would win respect from liberal Christians. He was not disappointed. As he anticipated, orthodox Christians and Jews alike inveighed against him for rejecting the conception of a personal Messiah. But from Harvard's Divinity School came "praise to the Reform for the vigor with which it is carrying on its work, for its intellectual clearness and its ethical ac- tivity." Boston's Transcript noted with pleasure that the Jews, in turning their backs on Palestine, were "as American as any of us can be."
Schindler particularly delighted in the praise of the Unitarians, whom he admired for doing to Christianity what he was doing to Judaism. The Index Association published his sermons in pamphlet form and wished for "a few thousand dollars" to print "a large edition in handsome style. .. . " The Channing Club, rejoicing that Reform Judaism and Unitarianism had "few, if any . . theological differences," announced that the "liberal Jew and the liberal Christian ... meet today on com- mon ground. .. . " In the preface to Messianic Expec- tations, Minot J. Savage hailed the rabbi's ideas as a sign of the age that the "Christian's ceasing to be a Christian, and the Jew's ceasing to be a Jew."
Such success as a theologian ultimately led to failure as a rabbi. It is doubtful that Solomon Schindler's as-
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pirations were ever identical to those of his congregants. The latter wished to retain their Jewish identity; Schin- dler wished to destroy it. For him Reform, in Chris- tianity as well as Judaism, was a first step toward a non- sectarian religion that would include the highest ethics in the Jewish-Christian tradition. He had been too fast in adopting Sunday services; and they were quickly dropped. He outraged his congregation early in the 1890's when he preached intermarriage between liberal Jews and liberal Christians. Twenty-five years after his arrival in Boston, Solomon Schindler was a confessed socialist and agnostic.
To congregants who had won economic success through hard work and self-reliance, Rabbi Schindler preached the state socialism and economic equality of Edward Bellamy. It was Schindler's hope that Bellamy's blueprint, if applied to America, would obliterate dif- ferences in class, race, and religion. Temple Israel's Jews, who had embraced Reform as a means to preserve Judaism in America, also heard their rabbi consign the Bible to the museum. In Schindler's Young West, a novel of the future, the hero turns to a science teacher when troubled by the mysteries of life and death, and is told that the first cause is unknown, that the concep- tion of a personal God grew out of the insecurity of predatory capitalism, and that the belief in a hereafter can neither be affirmed nor denied. In place of sectarian worship, the rabbi proposed to substitute a secular and universal religion of humanity.
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Solomon Schindler: German Rebel
Solomon Schindler, the rabbi's son who never wanted to be a rabbi, clearly had ceased to be a Jew. In Sep- tember, 1893, he and his congregants agreed to part, he to continue in free thought and socialism but later to return to Orthodoxy, they to hold fast to humanist Ju- daism.
IV
Solomon Schindler was, in his religious beliefs, fiercely American. As the leader of an immigrant church whose adherents felt that their individual futures were linked to the future of their adopted country, the rabbi labored to make Judaism conform, in spirit and form, to the dominant liberal faith in Boston - Unitarian- ism. There is nothing in Schindler's writings, or in the individual backgrounds of the members of his congre- gation, to suggest that Reform Judaism was a German importation. On the contrary, it was indigenous to this country, a product, on the one hand, of the desire to Americanize the ancient Hebrew creed, and on the other, of the contemporary science that was shattering traditional modes of thought in Western civilization.
Temple Israel's first Reform minister failed as a rabbi because he never overcame his ambivalence toward Ju- daism and his own Jewishness. Solomon Schindler, in Germany as well as in America, was a marginal man; and the rebellion that had begun in Silesia against an-
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cestral religion, family, and state ended in Boston. There, placed in the position of bridging differences be- tween Jews and non-Jews, he ultimately identified him- self with the latter, especially with radical intellectuals who, like him, were at war with the status quo. The challenge before Charles Fleischer, Schindler's successor, was clear - to maintain a balance between modernism and an ancient faith.
Charles Fleischer
CHAPTER FIVE
Charles Fleischer: Ardent Americanist
I
WI hen Charles Fleischer arrived in Boston to assume rabbinical duties at Temple Israel, the Rev- erend Dr. Edward Everett Hale, who incarnated the lib- eral spirit of the city, welcomed him at the railroad sta- tion with the following words: "Now, my son, you, too are one of the preachers of New England." These words reveal the respect which Solomon Schindler had won for the Reform synagogue and the faith of Boston's pro- gressive Yankee clergymen in Judaism to contribute to the evolving civilization of America. Throughout his tenure at Temple Israel, from 1894 through 1911, and as head of the non-sectarian Sunday Commons, from 1912 to 1918, Charles Fleischer spoke to Bostonians, both Jews and non-Jews, who gravitated toward the new, the strange, the experimental. In 1905, a news- paperman wrote that there was "no man in Boston . . with a greater following among the young intellectuals."
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Like Solomon Schindler, Charles Fleischer was an im- migrant who hoped to emancipate himself and Judaism from old forms by embracing the American concept that religion must participate in the amelioration of society. Again like Schindler, his times were conducive to such a desire. The years 1894-1918 differed from the years 1874-1893 only in degree; Fleischer's age was even more receptive than that of Schindler's to rethinking tra- ditional values and institutions. John Dewey and Charles Beard, Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt, Theodore Dreiser and Upton Sinclair, John Haynes Holmes and Stephen S. Wise - these men symbolize how Americans transformed their conceptions of man, society, and God. These men and their many co-work- ers and followers differed from one another, yet they all shared the hope that the life of the mind and the spirit ought to make society and men better. They em- phasized action over contemplation, empirical observa- tion over deductive dogma, evolutionary growth over the maintenance of the status quo. Fleischer's age was the age when the rebels triumphed, when non-conformist ministers, scholars, and statesmen basked in the high noon of reform.
Early in the twentieth century Temple Israel's rabbi joined the ranks of the rebels. By temperament he had always been one of them. As a youth, he outraged his superiors at Hebrew Union College by flirting with the agnostic ideas of Robert Ingersoll. Called before the
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Charles Fleischer: Ardent Americanist
president, he retorted: "I am not a follower of Ingersoll, but I do think for myself." In Boston he continued to think for himself, championing what was new. He put Sunday services on a permanent basis at his synagogue, inaugurated the practice of exchanging pulpits with both Unitarian and Trinitarian Christians, and fused Juda- ism with the Transcendentalism of Theodore Parker and Ralph Waldo Emerson. He was the first Boston rabbi to invite social reformers to speak from his pulpit, such as Alice Stone Blackwell, the feminist. The first Jewish poet of the city, he composed verse for the sum- mer colony of liberal intellectuals at Greenacre, New Hampshire, and was honored with the presidency of the literary and Beacon Hillish Browning Society. He was also the first Boston clergyman to go up in a balloon. Charles Fleischer loved novelty almost for its own sake; his motto was that men should "always [show] dissatis- faction with things as they are. . . . '
Endowed with extreme good looks, Temple Israel's rabbi made rebellion romantically attractive. A bachelor throughout his tenure at the synagogue (he married only in 1919), he was considered one of the handsom- est unattached men in Boston. Evangeline Adams has described him as the "Beau Brummel of the Back Bay," while one newspaperman was struck with his resem- blance to Andrea del Sarto, the Renaissance painter. Fleischer's good friend, John Singer Sargent, as well as his wife, believed that he looked like Edgar Allan Poe.
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This impression Sargent recorded in a black and white portrait of Fleischer - arched eyebrows, dark eyes, black hair, luxuriant mustache, thin nose. The over-all effect is one of sensitivity, and Fleischer's ever present black- silk "artist's tie" heightened that effect. Yet there was nothing delicate about the man. He was of average height and sturdy build, and went off with John Sar- gent to climb mountains in Alaska.
His voice, his contemporaries report, was that of a poet, clear, lyrical, sweet; and he often expressed his thoughts in the language of Browning and Byron, Whit- man and Emerson, whom he read prodigiously. His bachelor apartment went with his manner. Somewhat bohemian, it contained flowers, the art of half a dozen nations (including a frieze of Orpheus and Eurydice), and books that spilled out from the shelves to the floor, tables, and chairs. For companionship he kept two pets, "a King Charles Spaniel, which announces all guests and sees them to the portal when they leave, and a Swiss canary, whose jubilant carolling is smothered in his throat by an admonition from his master when the talk is too weighty a character for such an accom- paniment." Temple Israel's rabbi also sang well.
Admired in 1905 as "one of the most intellectual and radical Jews in America," Charles Fleischer achieved success from humble origins. Born in Breslau, Ger- many, December 23, 1871, he emigrated nine years later to America with his widowed mother and three brothers.
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They settled on New York's East Side. Charles, the in- tellectual of the family, earned an A.B. at C.C.N.Y. (1888), went on to Cincinnati for a Degree of Rabbi at Hebrew Union College and a Litt. B. at the University of Cincinnati, both of which he attained in 1893, and served Rabbi Berkowitz of Philadelphia as an assistant until called to Boston in 1894. Given his talents in music, art, scholarship, and oratory, he soon became a "Boston institution".
As his popularity increased, Unitarians, progressive Congregationalists, non-Jewish ladies' clubs, and reform groups of one sort or another sought him out as a lec- turer. He delivered a paper at the Theodore Parker Centenary; contributed to the Arena; joined the liberal Twentieth Century Club; wrote a column for Hearst's Boston American; and lectured throughout New Eng- land on democracy, education, and the relations of Jews and Gentiles. In time his associates and friends in- cluded President Eliot of Harvard, Robert A. Woods of South End House, Edwin D. Mead of the New Eng- land Magazine, as well as numbers of Unitarian clergy- men. When after 1906 Temple Israel adopted, on his urging, Sunday services, he preached to an audience that regularly numbered nearly as many non-Jews as Jews.
Here was the rub. The non-Jews who admired the rabbi were liberal Yankees who, like Fleischer, embraced the traditions of the New England Renaissance. Thus,
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Benjamin Orange Flower, editor of the Arena, com- plimented the Jewish minister in the best way he thought possible by placing him among the "young scholars ... coming to the front and taking up the work once so gloriously carried forward by Lowell, Channing, Parker, Emerson, Whittier, and Phillips." Flower meant that Temple Israel's pastor was more interested in so- ciology than theology, more devoted to unifying the human race than perpetuating ethnic and religious di- visions. Could Fleischer believe himself to be heir of New England's great progressive Protestants and remain a Jew? How long he struggled over his two heritages is not clear, but by 1908 he made it known that he pre- ferred Emerson to Moses; and in 1911 he left Temple Israel and Judaism to found the Sunday Commons, a non-sectarian religion to promote the amelioration of society and the fusion of America's diverse stocks into a new people - Boston's first community church.
In 1919 he married Mabel R. Leslie, a gifted and in- tellectual Vermonter of Scotch descent and Presbyterian upbringing who shared his views. The Reverend Dr. Charles Cummings, the successor of Edward Everett Hale, performed the marriage ceremony, which Fleischer invented so that "the bridegroom verbally recognizes the full equality of his bride." After the Sunday Commons failed to survive the 1914-1918 war and the reaction that followed it, the Fleischers left Boston in 1922 for New York, she to practice law, and he to do editorial
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Charles Fleischer: Ardent Americanist
work for William Randolph Hearst's Journal American. Charles Fleischer died July 2, 1942, surrounded in death, as in life, by friends who had rejected the parochialism of race and religion. Dr. John Haynes Holmes of the Community Church of New York officiated at his funeral, delivering a eulogy that lasted for more than an hour. Charles Fleischer was cremated, and his remains were placed in a non-sectarian cemetery, as he had re- quested before death.
II
Charles Fleischer had been installed in the pulpit of Temple Israel to preserve the Jewish identity of his con- gregation. Solomon Schindler, after successfully insti- tuting a number of reforms (English prayer book, organ, choir, family pew, male worship without hats), had outraged his congregants when he sanctioned intermar- riage with liberal Christians. He also failed to convert them to the socialism of Edward Bellamy, which he em- braced as a means to create a society free of class, race, and religious differences. The Temple's congregation comprised second generation American Jews who were merchants of one sort or another and who aspired to the rational religion of Unitarianism. They did not want to revolutionize society; they wanted to belong to it. They accepted humanism and humanitarianism, but they would not convert the synagogue into a commu-
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nity church or a society for ethical culture. While aspiring to friendly relations with their Christian neigh- bors, they also desircd the fellowship of Jews, as Jews. In short, they would melt, had melted the frozen form of Orthodoxy, but they would not be melted down into the universal man who proclaimed his loyalty to all mankind and refused allegiance to his immediate ethnic and religious group.
All this Rabbi Fleischer understood, and for a dozen years or so he did not, from the pulpit, go beyond the limits of Reform Judaism or the Unitarianism upon which it had been modelled. Like other liberal clergy- men, he accepted Charles Darwin and the Social Gos- pel, urged the progressive improvement of society. With Whitman and Emerson he spoke of the mission of America to democratize the world, and also of their faith in all of America's immigrant groups to contri- bute to the New World culture that was in the making. A cultural pluralist before the term was coined, the rabbi of Temple Israel preached that his people could be Americans and Jews at the same time, provided they were humanists and humanitarians.
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