USA > Massachusetts > Suffolk County > Boston > Growth and achievement: Temple Israel, 1854-1954 > Part 5
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The Jews, according to Fleischer, were a religious group, not a nation. Sharing this view with all Reform rabbis of the day, he immediately affiliated his house of worship with the liberal Union of American Hebrew Congregations and adopted the Union Prayer Book - the standard liturgy for Reform synagogues. When,
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Charles Fleischer: Ardent Americanist
early in the twentieth century, Zionist leaders attempted to recruit followers in Boston, Fleischer insisted that Jewish nationalism had died nearly 2,000 years ago; "we Jews in America are not Jews, but Americans in nation- ality." He urged Jews who found Europe intolerable to emigrate to America, not to agitate for either Uganda or Palestine. In the New World "sheer humanism - the progressive application of moral ideals to all phases of human relationship - will ... win their battles and .. . the Jews voice [will] ... mingle with the chorus. . . . "
The "chorus" comprised the diverse groups that had emigrated to these shores. To a Congregationalist men's club, Fleischer, with a footnote to Ralph Waldo Emer- son, lectured that "the strength of a community ... is measured by the .. . variety ... of ... types," and that America should therefore encourage the plurality of immigrant cultures. If, on the other hand, the immi- grants and their descendants became exactly like older Americans, the nation would turn into an "English colony ... an outpost of Anglo-Saxon civilization." As Emerson foresaw, Fleischer continued, the New World, because of its heterogeneous population, would ulti- mately create a society unlike anything from which America's immigrants had come in the Old World. The Jews, too, would "enrich our land with spiritual wealth"; and they had "a worthy reason for their differences . [a] long history. . . . "
The new temple building (1907) embodied Rabbi
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Fleischer's idea that the Jew must retain his identity as religionist so as to contribute to American culture. The style was neither Georgian nor Neo-Classical; the syna- gogue was easily distinguishable from a chaste New England church. Nor was it done in the then contem- porary architecture that drew its model from Roman- esque France and Renaissance Italy. The motif was Middle Eastern, to symbolize "the religion which has come to us from the most ancient time." The central dome stood for the Hebrew belief in a single God, and the seven windows on each side represented the Jewish idea that seven was a perfect number. The wall band purported to represent the phylactery, while the onyx ark, the interior marble, and the two exterior pylons were facsimiles of the originals in Solomon's Temple. Yet the synagogue at Commonwealth Avenue did not only look back. The organ pipes, shaped like trumpets - the symbols of victory - spoke for "the confident world-outlook of the Jewish faith." The inscription, "Dedicated to the Brotherhood of Man. Consecrated to the Fatherhood of God," embodied the humanism and humanitarianism of Boston's Reform Jews.
From the pulpit, Rabbi Fleischer constantly spoke, as had his predecessor, on the need of Judaism to be the religion of humanity. In a Jewish New Year's address in 1899, he noted: "New England's universal seer, Emerson, epitomizes the teaching of history substan- tially thus. 'Teachers of Truth and Ministers of Justice
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may fail, but Truth and Justice never.' This has been the practical faith of Israel. ... " American Judaism, he continued, must be a missionary force to propagate the moral truth that "not only does righteousness exalt a nation, but unrighteousness inevitably causes its down- fall." Again, as he put it in a Succoth sermon, the Jews must "live religion", its ethical precepts, and encourage others to do so.
In practice this meant that Temple Israel must com- bat social evil. From the pulpit, Rabbi Fleischer in- veighed against the imperialists of 1899. Where France had violated its belief in fraternity by persecuting Drey- fus, so America, in coercing Filipinos, "is doomed to fail in its larger mission ... to assure the success of democracy." During the election of 1904, the rabbi, in a sermon delivered on the Day of Atonement, declared that Theodore Roosevelt, who unrighteously glorified war and conquest, would if elected President betray America's principles. Similarly, he attacked the immi- gration restrictionists who, out of base racist motives, would end the great folk migration that had made the nation unique. The Jewish clergyman also preached that advocates of a high tariff rested their case on a false sense of national superiority - unrighteousness.
With the son of William Lloyd Garrison, Rabbi Fleischer appeared before the General Court of Massa- chusetts to argue for the abolition of capital punish- ment, which he called a "barbarous institution." He
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joined Edwin D. Mead and Thomas Wentworth Hig- ginson, fellow Bostonians, in the crusade for the equal rights of women; "we have no right", he wrote "to dis- criminate between the sexes"; "Democracy should talk no more about sex than it does sect." In a still prudish day, he championed planned parenthood, and the idea that "people must be properly mated from the point of view of eugenics before they are allowed to enter matrimony." On this last question, Rabbi Fleischer, like the scientists of the day, believed in heredity, which contradicted his basic faith that the American melting pot would transform its human ingredients into a higher form. "For parents," he noted, "to pass on poor phy- sique, low intelligence, ugly prejudices, or other vicious or weak ethical standards ... is to be guilty of an assault . . against which the race must ... defend itself." .
The chief problems for Rabbi Fleischer and fellow reformers were those that derived from rapid urbaniza- tion and industrialization. He perceived that America would one day be a nation of cities, and that it had no traditions for an urban civilization, save one: that as a nation in the making America had always created tradi- tions when required. He urged the planning of cities, such as was being done in Europe, so that each urban center would "develop an organic unity and individual- ity. ... " At Temple Israel, he defied the label-mongers by declaring his attachment to municipal socialism, whose principle he said, had been validated by the pub-
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lie school system and the fire and police departments. When, by 1908, Theodore Roosevelt captured the pub- lic imagination by flaying "bad" corporations, Rabbi Fleischer forgave the bully of San Juan Hill and hailed him as a modern Isaiah; "It is just as much a holy work for Mr. Roosevelt to say Thou shalt not to malefactors of great wealth as for any prophet ... in Palestine." Similarly, he praised Charles Evans Hughes for exposing the malpractices of New York's insurance companies, and cheered to the muekraking of wicked St. Louis.
Believing that "Nothing human is foreign to me," and that a "congregation can be ... worth while only if it concerns itself with the whole range of human re- lations," Rabbi Fleischer made Temple Israel into a civic forum. To the synagogue he brought fellow re- formers as guest lecturers: Thomas Wentworth Higgin- son and Edwin D. Mead, Charles H. Dole and Charles Ames, Julia Ward Howe and Alice Stone Blackwell, Robert A. Woods and Meyer Bloomfield. These liberals were variously known as advocates of world peace, mu- nicipal socialism, city planning, settlement houses, equal rights for women, free thought. Rabbi Fleischer had made good on his objective to "have the genius of the Jew reborn for service for this new day. . . . [to] dream the democratic dream."
Until 1907, the Jewish elergyman and his congrega- tion differed from liberal Unitarians and Congregation- alists in only two respects: they neither worshipped on
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Sunday nor accepted Jesus as part of their heritage. Those two differences were removed after the consecra- tion of the new temple building in 1907. In that year Sunday services were adopted; and one year later, Rabbi Fleischer, speaking from his pulpit during the Christmas week, preached that while Jews could not regard Jesus as the miraculously begotten son of God, they must embrace Jesus as the greatest of all Jewish prophets. Jesus had understood God's message that the human race was one, that we must all love one another. "Jews and Christians", Fleischer observed, "will be reconciled and reunited, largely through Jesus, in love of God and service by man."
Shortly thereafter the rabbi agreed to exchange pul- pits with the Reverend Dr. George A. Gordon of the Old South Congregational Church and the Reverend Dr. Thomas Van Ness of the Second Church. That Fleischer and Van Ness should exchange pulpits was no surprise, for the latter was a Unitarian. Dr. Gordon, however, was a Congregationalist and, while champion- ing Progressive Orthodoxy, was the leading Trinitarian Christian in Boston. To his orthodox critics, George A. Gordon retorted, in a way made possible by Fleischer's acceptance of Jesus, that: "Jesus was a Jew, the sover- eign Jew, and gave himself in life and death for his peo- ple. I infer from this fact that he would not be displeased by an act of respect done to his people by a minister of the gospel." When Fleischer addressed Dr. Gordon's
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congregation, he did so, as he put it, as a "fellow-Jew of Jesus" to emphasize the latter's "supreme injunctions to love God and to love man . . . the sublimated spiritual commonsense of mankind."
III
Preaching from pulpits once occupied by Cotton Mather and Ralph Waldo Emerson, lecturing success- fully throughout New England, and spending more time with non-Jews than with Jews, Charles Fleischer wished to terminate his contract with Temple Israel in 1908. He stayed on only when given carte blanche. Even earlier though, Rabbi Fleischer had been expressing ideas, but away from the pulpit, that showed him to be outside Judaism.
By his own admission, Charles Fleischer's "patron saint" was Ralph Waldo Emerson. The rabbi's library (kept intact by his wife in New York) reveals that he read and re-read the works of the Concord philosopher, heavily annotating them. In Fleischer's dog-eared copy of Emerson's Nature, the following is underlined: "Why should we not also enjoy an original relation to the universe?" It is not known just when the rabbi read Nature, but as early as 1896, at Greenacre, he had writ- ten:
Take this message to heart: All, - of God is a part.
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Again at Greenacre, he seemed to write like a "trans- parent eyeball":
Omnipresence! Omnipresence! Manifest Thyself in me! Omnipresence! Omnipresence! Manifest Thyself in me!
Fleischer then not only rejected the Orthodox God, but also Solomon Schindler's concept of God as Clockmaker and First Cause. To his congregation, when his view of the Divine Being was made known, he was thought to be either a Pantheist or a Transcendentalist.
Disapproving the God of his fathers, Fleischer, by 1902, also intimated that there was a religion other than Judaism to which he was devoted. He chose to disclose his opinion in the Arena, the outspoken advocate of newness. "We of America," Fleischer echoed Whitman and Emerson, "are ... the 'peculiar people' consecrated to that ... 'mission' of realizing Democracy which is potentially a universal spiritual principle, aye, a re- ligion. .. . " He "would have men like Washington, Samuel Adams, Jefferson, Lincoln . John Brown ( ... the spiritual soldiers of democracy) ... placed lit- erally in a calendar of saints; ... to be reverenced by our future Americans as apostles of our Republic." Faith in these democratic demigods would give the nation's diverse immigrant stocks a single heritage that would smelt them down into a single people - the Americans.
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The Arena article, as well as another one the follow- ing year, did not go beyond saying that the school must teach democracy. In 1905, however, Rabbi Fleischer asserted that the synagogues and churches were out- moded, and that a new church must preach the demo- cratic faith. Save for the Roman Catholics, most peo- ple, he declared, were dissatisfied with their denomina- tions, as evidenced by the falling off of attendance. The church and the synagogue were becoming "feminized," and the unethical practices of disreputable businessmen revealed that religion in America was one thing on Sunday and another on Monday. We need, Fleischer wrote, a religion that will talk less of God and more of good, a new prophet like "Jesus, Isaiah ... who will talk ... about the sort of man that the individual must be in himself and in his social relations. .. . " The sanc- tion for ethics must rest on man's reason to appreciate democracy, not his fear that God punishes immoral con- duct. Fleischer's conclusion, borrowed from Emerson, was that America, forging a new people out of its many ethnic groups, would create the new faith; and that, as greater intercourse developed among nations, the Ameri- can creed would spread throughout the world, perfect- ing human society.
After 1908, when Fleischer knew that he would not long remain in Judaism, he expressed his advanced views more often, and from the pulpit as well as outside it. He declared to his congregation that already Jews were
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of mixed blood, and that they must further intermarry with the other peoples of America to build the "new na- tion ... to emerge from the melting pot." "Obviously", Fleischer concluded, "such fusion means annihilation of identity." At a Union Thanksgiving Service at the Second Church, where his congregation had joined Dr. Van Ness' for the occasion, he declared that, while it was a sign of a larger fraternal spirit for "liberal Jews and Unitarians [to] come together," a "formal union" of all progressive religionists would be more in keeping with the democratic creed of permanently abolishing parochial barriers.
When in 1909, President Eliot of Harvard published his views on the need for a new religion similar to Fleischer's (in a letter to Fleischer, Eliot acknowledged the kinship), Temple Israel's rabbi defended the Har- vard scholar against his orthodox critics. "I assent", he stated, "to Dr. Eliot's ... creed which reverences truth, . . . science, ... the individual, ... social service," and rejects traditional theology. Similarly, at the Theodore Parker Centenary (1910) Fleischer announced his de- sire to "promote the cause of free religion to which he [Parker] was consecrated;" Judaism and Christianity, Mohammedanism and Buddhism - all chapters in the history of religion - must be effaced for the "free and natural religion" of democracy.
The climax came dramatically in 1911, when Sol- omon Schindler, Rabbi Emeritus, who had started the
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revolution at Temple Israel in the 1870's, appeared be- fore his congregation to preach "Mistakes I Have Made". Reconverted in old age to the faith of his fathers, the one-time radical hoped to start a reaction that would place Judaism in a position similar to that which it had occupied before the advent of Reform. My chief mistake, Schindler exclaimed, was to try to make "the Jew like the Gentile." That failed; "the Jew will never succumb ... to the melting pot." American Jews must form their own communities, as the God of the He- brews commanded. They must also return to old forms, accept a uniform creed, pay less attention to reason and more to emotion. Parker, Spencer, Huxley, Wallace, Darwin, Ingersoll - these men, Schindler lamented, had betrayed him into believing that the Jews should give up their peoplehood for universalism.
Shortly thereafter Charles Fleischer, who was now ready to resign his pulpit, answered Schindler in a ser- mon, "Some Seeming Mistakes Which I Have Gladly Made". The younger man, unlike his older predecessor, did not wish to make the Jew like the Gentile; he hoped to fuse all Americans into a new people. Schindler, he remarked, was narrowminded to care more for Jews than to foster "the union of the human family on an increasingly inclusive basis." Further, if Jews would not mix their blood with other Americans, then logically they ought to be Zionists. As for setting up separate communities, that was reactionary, as well as foolhardy.
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"Having moved out of the Ghetto, there ought to be no return." Defiantly, Charles Fleischer concluded: "I have gladly made the seeming mistake of encouraging assimi- lation. ... "
Temple Israel chose neither the reaction of Schindler nor the radicalism of Fleischer. When, in 1911, the latter's contract terminated, they engaged Rabbi Harry Levi, a moderate, whose views were those of the Fleischer of 1900 - those of Reform Judaism. In taking leave of his congregation, Charles Fleischer declared that he was. giving up the husk of Judaism for the core of free re- ligion: for a Transcendental God, science, progress, and the love that "draws man to man" and "rises above and beyond the barriers of nation, creed or color." There- after he would worship Man, whose boundless goodness would create a society as yet undreamt "by the most visionary ... of utopians." After seventeen years in the Jewish pulpit, during half of which time he led the dual existence of saying one thing to Jewish audiences and another to non-Jews, Charles Fleischer was relieved to proclaim: "I am henceforth beyond ... sectarianism. At last, the world is mine, and I am the world's."
IV
In his twenty-ninth year Charles Fleischer told a Bos- ton audience in Parker Memorial Hall: "I thank God that I have not been born an American, so that I might
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have a chance to achieve my Americanism." An immi- grant, he discovered the historic meaning of the land of his adoption in the philosophy of American liberal- ism. Ralph Waldo Emerson in particular instructed him in the idea that the New World was really new, and that Americans, as individuals and as a people, must consecrate themselves to arrange society so as to assure every person a measure of human dignity. As a rabbi, Fleischer therefore formulized for a recent immi- grant group and its descendants the values America lived by.
Charles Fleischer failed in the end as a rabbi because, like Schindler, he was a marginal man who lost his mar- ginality. In explaining Judaism to Christians and in splicing Judaism with Transcendentalism, he ultimately identified with the liberal Protestant tradition of New England. The Jewish ambassador of good will to Chris- tendom left the group he represented to join the group to which he had been sent. Alike Solomon Schindler and Charles Fleischer were unable to stabilize the re- ligious revolution that had begun in Temple Israel in 1874. It remained for Rabbi Harry Levi to fasten the humanism of Judaism to Jewish moorings.
CHAPTER SIX
Harry Levi: Jewish Pastor
I
Present day members of Temple Israel who were congregants of Rabbi Levi revere his memory. He was endowed with a high intelligence, but more than that, with a deep spirituality. His signal contribution to Reform Judaism was to present Judaism in its emo- tional side and not entirely as a matter of reason. Unlike his marginal, rebelling, European-born predecessors, Rabbi Levi was a native American who felt altogether at home in both the Jewish and American environ- ments. He had no compulsion to change the substance of Reform Jewish thought. Rather he accepted what already had been wrought and became a model pastor.
Temple Israel's third Reform rabbi believed that Jews were a religious and not an ethnic group, and that the Jewish religion must promote the progress of the human race. These were precisely the ideas of Solomon Schin- dler, the Temple's pioneer in theology, indeed the prevail-
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Harry Levi
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Harry Levi: Jewish Pastor
ing ideas of Reform Judaism. Yet Rabbi Levi was some- thing of a pioneer, too. He broke ground in the field of human relations; for the first time Boston's Reform synagogue had a pastor of the flock rather than the creator of an intellectual system. And this is exactly what Rabbi Levi's congregants wanted - a truly spirit- ual leader who would enrich the personality of every individual whom he touched. Harry Levi succeeded where Solomon Schindler and Charles Fleischer failed because he was by temperament - not by accident - a rabbi.
He was eminently suited for the role of pastor. He spoke persuasively without sacrificing dignity, and his sermons were models in simplicity, clarity, and euphony. Solomon Schindler and Charles Fleischer lectured; Harry Levi preached. Contemporaries report unani- mously that Rabbi Levi was compassionate. Equally important, he had the rare talent of understanding the personal problems of his congregants, to whom he com- municated his own optimism that reason could solve nearly all problems. He was in his serenity a source of strength. Unlike his predecessors, who were respected for their intellectuality, Harry Levi was loved for his moral wisdom, evenness of personality, and sweetness of character. Joshua Loth Liebman called him a "saint".
The rabbi was a man of convictions who also knew the value of tact such that he was able to persuade without antagonizing. He did not, like Fleischer and
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Schindler, shock or startle or develop the desire to be different from his congregants. Harry Levi was close to the norm even in physical appearance - of average height and build, bespectacled, dignificd and restrained - again differing from the intense-looking, bearded Schindler and the almost excessively handsome Fleischer. Temple Israel's rabbi was like most native, middle-class, American men. He was different, however, in the de- gree of his insight into personal problems, his pulpit eloquence, and his ability and devotion to share himself.
Solomon Schindler and Charles Fleischer displayed none of the administrative talent that has come to characterize the modern rabbinate, but their successor was an imaginative and hard-working executive. Harry Levi served as spiritual leader of a vigorous Sisterhood and Brotherhood. He built up and administered four religious schools that ultimately had a student body of eleven hundred Jewish youngsters. He organized the Little Theater Group to present plays on the theme of religious toleration. Similarly, he sponsored the Juniors, a club of young people that invited Protestants, Catho- lics, and Jews to discuss the means of inter-denomina- tional understanding. In 1928, the present Meeting House was constructed to house the numerous activities that Harry Levi had added to the life of Temple Israel. Despite the time-consuming duties of supervising a large and expanding religious plant, the rabbi was always available to the members of his congregation who
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The Meeting House
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Harry Levi: Jewish Pastor
wanted advice on their careers, their marriage, their family difficulties. Rabbi Levi was a comforter and a counsellor who gave priority to the every day needs of his people rather than to the personal excitement of creating a new theology.
Clearly, Harry Levi made a distinguished career for himself in the rabbinate, indeed he already had distin- guished himself in that career when he assumed his Bos- ton post. In 1911, he was a mature thirty-six, not a boy as Charles Fleischer had been in 1894; and he had none of Solomon Schindler's ambivalence toward Judaism and the pulpit. From his earliest years in Cincinnati, where he was born August 7, 1875, Harry Levi wanted to be a rabbi, a desire that his Polish-born elders shared. Precocious, he enrolled at Hebrew College at thirteen and at the University of Cincinnati at seventeen to pur- sue concurrently degrees in divinity and the arts. He was graduated from both institutions at the age of twenty-one. Immediately thereafter he accepted a pul- pit in Wheeling, West Virginia, where he remained fourteen years until called to Boston. His most signifi- cant literary work during that time was a study of the Jew in English literature. More important, he was seasoned by experience such as to move easily into his Boston role.
Temple Israel, as the foremost synagogue in New England, expected its minister to join the liberal Protes- tant clergymen who gave intellectual and moral leader-
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ship to the community. The congregation also intended that its rabbi serve as an emissary of good will to non- Jews. Harry Levi carried off both functions so well that by the 1920's he was regarded as one of America's most prominent ministers. Liberals of all denominations, rec- ognizing in him a force for good, invited him to write for the journals and to speak at meetings. The Twen- tieth Century Club quickly enrolled him in its member- ship; the Community Church and Ford Hall Forum welcomed him to their rostrums. Levi was active in philanthropic work, such as the Massachusetts Anti- Tuberculosis Society, of which he was director. He crossed denominational lines to lecture at the progres- sive divinity schools of Harvard and Boston University.
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