USA > Massachusetts > Suffolk County > Boston > Growth and achievement: Temple Israel, 1854-1954 > Part 6
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With the invention of radio Rabbi Levi's influence carried beyond Boston; beginning in 1924 Sunday serv- ices at Temple Israel were broadcast fortnightly through- out New England. Harry Levi's radio sermons won him a reputation for modernism in religion, and certain of them were selected for publication in two volumes, The Great Adventure (1929) and A Rabbi Speaks (1930). When he retired in 1939, after enjoying the longest tenure in the history of the congregation, Governor Leverett Saltonstall, Mayor Maurice Tobin, and Presi- dent Karl T. Compton of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology expressed the gratitude of an entire com- munity for the good that Temple Israel's pastor had done. That community, not only his congregation,
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mourned the passing of Harry Levi when he died June 13, 1944.
II
Until the woeful decade of the 1930's Harry Levi's thought reflected the happy optimism of the American middle class. He and the members of Temple Israel were members of that middle class. An immigrant's son, Levi had known a career of uninterrupted success, and he approached life with the confidence of those who have risen without excessive pain. His congregants, well-to-do businessmen and professionals, had similar histories of rapid incorporation into the rights, privi- leges, and comforts of American life. Rabbi and con- gregants were therefore predisposed to accept prevailing Reform Jewish thought - that God was kind, that man was good, and that all would turn out for the best. Harry Levi believed in progress, the cardinal principle of the Enlightenment, because he and the members of Temple Israel had known nothing but progress.
He was too sweet-tempered to delight in polemics, yet it was necessary to debate the pessimists who were nos- talgic for "The Good Old Days." The New England of Rabbi Levi's day was particularly fertile in nostalgia. He observed that the persecution of the Jews, the Inquisi- tion, and the Albigensian Crusade were proof that the thirteenth century was not the greatest century, as the
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neo-medievalists contended. And the Salem witch trials were rebuttal to the Anglo-Saxon racists who designated colonial New England as the golden age of America. Contemporary treatment of prisoners and the poor, contemporary freedom for women and children, con- temporary advancement in technology and science, contemporary toleration for dissenting religious groups - these, Harry Levi maintained, demonstrated the su- periority of the present over the past. That the future must be made even better than the present made the rabbi's meliorism militant. And that the Jewish religion had to promote the better future was accepted as the very essence of Judaism.
Nothing, but nothing, shook the rabbi's confidence for some twenty years. He was so convinced of the ab- normality of evil that in the 1920's he dismissed Italian Fascism as aberrant. The racist quotas of the National Origins Plan of 1924 irritated but did not alarm him; characteristically he prophesied that by midcentury there would be no invidious distinctions between old stock and new stock Americans. The Ku Klux Klan was written off as a vestige from the primeval past that would wither away under enlightened opinion. Where- as the immense blood-letting of World War I disillu- sioned a generation, it strengthened Rabbi Levi's confi- dence that thinking man would make the battlefield as obsolete as trial by battle.
Men need only to think right and do good for society
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to go forward, Rabbi Levi urged. And since men were by nature both good and reasonable, it was merely a question of sweeping away the misunderstanding from which all evil flowed. Throughout the rabbi's sermons ran the theme of fostering greater understanding - be- tween businessmen and workers, Jews and Christians, natives and immigrants, Negroes and whites. Because the League of Nations and the World Court were de- signed to promote international understanding, Levi urged that the United States join them. He cheered to the disarmament conferences of the 1920's. The rabbi's faith in good will was such that he hailed the Kellogg- Briand Pact, which outlawed war by international agree- ment, as the most important watershed in the history of diplomacy.
For two decades a New England radio audience lis- tened to Harry Levi preach racial and religious under- standing. When he came to Boston Americans were well on the way to thinking in those racist terms that led to the discriminatory immigration laws of the 1920's and the Fascist demagoguery of the 1930's. The rabbi defended with eloquence and without equivocation the heritage of the melting pot. America, he declared, was neither an Anglo-Saxon, nor a white, nor a Christian, nor a Protestant land. Rather it was a democratic way of life that claimed allegiance from persons of diverse ethnic, religious, and racial groups. People had the right to be different, Harry Levi explained, for variety made
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life interesting. More frequently, however, Temple Is- rael's pastor emphasized the similarities rather than the differences among Americans. Because he believed that all human beings were children of God, he pointed out that Negroes were more alike than different from whites; that Jews and Christians had more in common than not. The thesis of "My Country," one of Rabbi Levi's most eloquent radio sermons, was that "America belongs to those who earn it and to them alone," which meant that each generation must renew the contract with the humanitarian tradition that is America.
The desire to dissipate prejudice by minimizing dif- ferences was reflected in Harry Levi's conception of re- ligion as ethics. In this respect he continued the idea of Schindler and Fleischer before they broke with Ju- daism. Characteristically, when invited to speak at the Community Church on "My Religion", he de- scribed not the uniqueness of Judaism but the essential and universal principle of all religions "'to do justice and love mercy.'" In "The Rising Tide of Liberalism," a radio sermon, the rabbi rejoiced in Jews and Protes- tants coming together for fellowship and religious serv- ice; here was proof that the common link of seeking brotherhood through the one God was more important than different conceptions as to the nature of the God- head and modes of worship. Similarly, the rabbi was heartened by the knowledge that Dr. S. Parkes Cadman, Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick, and Dr. Stephen S. Wise,
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who propounded non-denominational but theist human- ism, were "the three most popular preachers on the air in America. ... " In the desire to prove that persons of all faiths were like unto one another, Rabbi Levi in- sisted that "the Jew is simply an average human being", no better, no worse, no different from others.
The sermons of Temple Israel's rabbi on private mor- ality also contained the common principles that bind men together. Unlike his predecessors, Rabbi Levi often discoursed on purely personal matters. It was typical of Charles Fleischer to lecture on the metaphysics of Emerson, and equally typical for Harry Levi to preach on Emerson's essay on friendship. Speaking to a radio audience that comprised persons of different faiths and ancestries, Harry Levi gave homely advice on the home and hobbies, business and the professions, on the "art of living together." And whenever he invoked the name of God, he made sure that he would not offend sectarian sensibilities.
The good life was grounded in the old values. Tem- ple Israel's rabbi deplored the excessive pursuit of money. Men must learn to use leisure wisely by taking up hob- bies, such as hunting, fishing, or stamp collecting. Men and women must also value friendship, without which living could never be sweet. Above all, there was the home, and Levi urged greater love and understanding between husband and wife and between parents and children. The home must be a place in which to live,
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and not a place at which only to sleep and eat. It was the rabbi's hope that the home would be stocked with good books, and that families would observe the re- ligious holidays that brought out the spiritual in man. Harry Levi summed up the trinity of private morality when he asked his audience to renew faith in "holy homes, conjugal fidelity, marital morality."
Temple Israel's rabbi was in his personal life a con- ventional and simple man who shared the values of the New England middle class. Whether he spoke on hob- bies or the home, friendship or the family, he praised simplicity: the simplicity of clothing, the simplicity of recreation, the simplicity of house furnishings. Doubt- less he directed his message toward his own congregants who, as new members of the middle class, might profit from advice on how to live the gracious life. Yet, save for the fact that he was called rabbi, Harry Levi could be taken for a Yankee Protestant clergyman: in New England simplicity was almost a fetish. Nor was the rabbi different from the average middle class person in his objection to the iconoclasts of the 1920's who ridi- culed bourgeois mores and who championed free love and trial marriage, flaming youth and the hip flask. Harry Levi believed that
The men on earth build houses, halls, and chambers, roofs and domes -
But the women of the earth - God knows! - the women build the homes.
The Synagogue - "a church like other churches."
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A dissenter in his social views, Temple Israel's pastor was a conservative in defense of private morality against those who looked to Scott Fitzgerald, H. L. Mencken, and Greenwich Village.
John Griffin of the Boston Post ascribed to Rabbi Levi a genius for selling Judaism to Christians. One- third of the people who attended Sunday services at Temple Israel were non-Jews, and the rabbi reached an even larger audience over the air. Clearly, by the 1920's his pastorate had leaped over denominational walls to become a powerful force for religious toleration. His congregation, rejoicing in this achievement, wrote a life-term contract for Harry Levi in 1930, and also awarded him a prize for serving as "ambassador of good will to Christendom." Similarly, Hebrew Union College, his alma mater, conferred on him an honorary doctorate for improving relations between Jews and Christians in New England. The nature of Rabbi Levi's influence can be read in a letter written to him by one of the radio audience. For years this person had believed that a "synagogue was an unapproachable place where some sort of mysterious rites were practiced." Listening to Temple Israel's rabbi changed all of that: the synagogue turned out to be "just a church like other churches. .. . "
If the thought of Harry Levi and the liturgy of Tem- ple Israel made Judaism just another church, then wherein lay the Jewishness of Reform Judaism? And what was the difference between the faith of Harry Levi
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and that of non-theist, non-church-going humanists? More than once the pastor thought it necessary to ex- plain why he was a theist, a supporter of institutional religion, and a Jew.
Harry Levi believed in God on faith. To faith he added the argument of design; only the existence of a rational, merciful, and just God could explain the order of nature, consciousness, intelligence, and human prog- ress. Again, he had faith in the existence of a hereafter, but also reasoned that a rational God would not create man so as to destroy him after one moment in the eter- nity of time. A theist, Levi defended the church and the synagogue as institutions to propound God's highest moral truths. Finally, the rabbi explained that he was a Jew because he had been born into and reared in the Jewish faith. And there was no need to go elsewhere. As others satisfied their spiritual needs in the Protestant and Catholic communions, so he found in Judaism what he needed. He loved Judaism for its simplicity, rationalism, and lofty ethics. It was Harry Levi's su- preme faith that American Judaism together with Amer- ican Protestantism and American Catholicism would lead "to the establishment of the Kingdom of God on Earth."
We can well imagine the feelings of this man of in- tense good will when the world took a turn for the worst in the 1930's. Central to Rabbi Levi's thought was the axiom that men were inherently decent and rational.
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But the Depression, American anti-Semitism, German National Socialism, and World War II revealed a capa- city for indecency and irrationality that not even the most dismal pessimists had forseen. What could men of good will say about a war that was supposed never to come; about mass poverty that turned back progress; about pathological racial hatred that defied reason? To some it semed as if the generous hopes of the Enlight- enment were vain dreams.
Rabbi Harry Levi, for the first time, faltered in his optimism. American Jew-baiters and German Nazis par- ticularly made him think that the Age of Reason had run its course and become the age of unreason against the Jews. Whereas in the 1920's he had insisted that Jews were simply "average", in the 1930's and 1940's he taunted anti-Jewish demagogues with the reputation of Albert Einstein. Once he had emphasized the similari- ties between Jews and Christians, now he implored Jews to perpetuate their uniqueness. To a confirmation class in 1934 he remarked that anti-Semitism was unremov- able and that young Jews must be prepared to live in a world that did not want them. In the middle of the Depression decade, the pastor of Temple Israel, who all his life had preached the perfectionist strain of the En- lightenment and the Messianic hope of Judaism, con- fessed: "What tomorrow may bring forth, no one can tell."
-
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III
In Harry Levi Temple Israel finally found the rabbi it had hoped to find in 1874 and again in 1894. He was an American in birth, speech, idiom, and outlook. He was and remained a Jew. Between rabbi and congre- gants there always existed personal and ideological rap- port. The congregation wanted its minister to be pastor, preacher, and teacher of the synagogue as well as Jew- ish representative to Christendom. Harry Levi acquitted himself brilliantly in these manifold responsibilities.
Unlike his predecessors Rabbi Levi remained faithful to the idea that Judaism and humanism were compat- ible. He did not make a new synthesis of the two but showed by example that the ethics of Judaism were coeval with the values of democracy. His radio pulpit in particular stood for the idea that America feeds on the good will of all men of whatever origin, indeed that it is a measure of strength for the nation to achieve moral unity in a heterogeneous population. The strains of a heterogeneous society are such that they challenge the ethical ingenuity of free men. Temple Israel's pas- tor, according to testimony from the Governor of the Commonwealth down to the student of the confirma- tion class, confronted those strains with the ingenuity of a free and Jewish American.
When Rabbi Levi retired in 1939 it was no longer a question of whether Judaism and humanism were com-
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plementary but whether humanist Judaism was tailored for the modern world. Joshua Loth Liebman, his suc- cessor, thought that it was. However, he called for new insights into the human psyche. He was representative of an era in the belief that the key to human nature was psychiatry - the science of the irrational mind.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Joshua Loth Liebman: Religio-Psychiatric Thinker
I
R abbis Solomon Schindler, Charles Flei- scher, and Harry Levi grew up in a century that Alfred Russell Wallace designated The Wonderful Century, but Rabbi Joshua Loth Liebman came to maturity in an age that W. H. Auden called The Age of Anxiety. That age is a key to his thought. Two Depression Presidents agreed that what Americans had most to fear was fear of fear. America's leading theologian preached that life was tragic in its irony. A once rational class of intellectuals delighted in the reality of Kafkaian unreality. Thinkers reflected a world of depression suc- ceeded by war, nightmarish headlines that screamed at- tention to the breadline and Buchenwald, Coughlin and the Cominform, the atomic explosions at Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Jews even more than before hoped for good will, while men everywhere looked for understanding of massive disorders. The character of the times explains
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Solari
Joshua Loth Liebman
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Joshua Loth Liebman: Thinker
why nearly a million copies were sold of a book that was entitled Peace of Mind, and why that book was written.
Joshua Liebman's life embodied the antitheses of an era. High promise was terminated by unexpected death; singular achievement was countered by inner turmoil. His childhood was scarred by the divorce of his parents, and marred by the discomfiture of a prodigy who did not fit with older contemporaries. His adolescence was unusually stormy, for Joshua Liebman was troubled by the question, " 'Where is God?' " at - of all places - Hebrew Union College. He came to God after intense and prolonged introspection. At thirty-one, to satisfy his "wrestling spirit," which must comprehend the na- ture of man, Rabbi Liebman underwent psychoanalysis. In fine, Peace of Mind was both and at once a symptom of a disordered society and the autobiography of a once suffering soul.
That Western Civilization was disordered was pain- fully clear to Jews. The good will that had been built up since the Enlightenment seemed to have disappeared almost at once. By the early 1940's it was known that European Jewry had perished and that American Jewry was seriously menaced. Thirty years after Charles Fleischer agreed to exchange pulpits with Christian ministers Father Coughlin's Christian Front was mak- ing frightening progress in Boston. On what should have been a joyous occasion, the ninetieth anniversary
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of Temple Israel, Joshua Liebman observed: "The Jew- ish soul is ... bombed with the shrapnel of hatred and hostility." The President of Temple Israel, although a successful businessman and the father of two naval officers and a Vassar student, warned: "We Jews, all of us, wherever we live, whatever our affiliations, whether we belong to the synagogue or not, face a hostile world that affects our destiny, our security, and we must face it together."
Temple Israel's Jews reverted to ancestral traditions so as to strengthen group identity and close ranks against those who rejected them. Anti-Zionism had been cen- tral to Reform Judaism, but with the coming of Lieb- man the congregation supported the establishment of the Jewish state of Israel; and upon his death a forest of trees was planted in his name in the new state. Whereas Schindler and Fleischer had dispensed with the Hebrew Sabbath as a tribal vestige, Liebman and his congrega- tion reinstated Friday evening worship; henceforth Tem- ple Israel went to synagogue and not to church. Finally, the Bar Mitzvah came back, in addition to confirmation. Each of these measures repudiated the crucial doctrine of the Pittsburgh platform that Jews were only a re- ligious group, like Baptists or Unitarians. Jews were now a people as well as a religious group.
United to face a common peril, Jews desired even more than heretofore good public relations with non- Jews. And frightened, leaders proposed measures which
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an earlier and more secure generation never conceived. Joshua Liebman, for example, demanded in 1944 that the Boston Jewish Community Council publicly de- nounce Jewish black marketeers and dishonest war profi- teers. The Council, he declared, would " be derelict in its duty if it confines itself to the negative task of combatting anti-Semitism without assuming the positive responsibil- ity of seeking to discover the practices in Jewry which in- tensify anti-Semitism. ... " Critics to the proposal re- sponded that American courts, not Jewish vigilantes, must punish law breakers.
Public relations with Christendom took the tradi- tional form of the active ambassadorship. Rabbi Lieb- man, willing, energetic, eloquent, tireless, and scholarly, was endowed with the talents required for the office. He led services and preached at the chapels of Harvard, Smith, Wellesley, and other colleges. He was given visiting faculty rank at Boston University and Andover- Newton Theological School. The chief executive of the Commonwealth appointed the rabbi to head the Gov- ernor's Committee on Racial and Religious Understand- ing for Massachusetts. Liebman was also active on the Committee of Army and Navy Religious Activities. Meanwhile his fortnightly broadcasts from Temple Is- rael reached, like those of Harry Levi, an audience of Christians as well as Jews. Their success led to a na- tional hookup.
In 1946, Peace of Mind appeared. Reissued in paper
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bound edition, translated into fourteen languages, and reviewed and discussed in all sorts of circles, the book had a phenomenal reception. It made the best seller lists in three weeks, and sold, before Liebman's death in 1948, more than 700,000 copies. Reader's Digest con- densed it, while two other media of mass communica- tion, Ladies' Home Journal and Look, interviewed the rabbi and his family and gave long resumés of his ideas. Temple Israel's rabbi became at once a national, indeed an international, figure with considerable prestige to promote religious and racial understanding. The impact of his book was such that Temple Emanu-El of New York, the Canterbury of American Reform Judaism, of- fered Liebman a contract at whatever salary he would request. When the rabbi refused it to stay in Boston, Governor Bradford expressed with Temple Israel joyful surprise. In 1947, two years before his five year contract had run out, Joshua Loth Liebman was given life tenure.
The successful radio preacher and best-selling author achieved the renown that a brilliant and precocious youth had promised. Joshua Liebman was born in Ham- ilton, Ohio, 1907, of a long line of rabbis. Nineteen years later he was teaching Greek philosophy at the Uni- versity of Cincinnati, his alma mater. He studied at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he became a Zionist, and took a doctorate in Hebrew Literature at Hebrew Union College. July 5, 1928, he married Fan Loth, his first cousin, who was to be an inseparable com-
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panion and intellectual co-worker in a supremely happy marriage. Only twenty-seven, he succeeded to the pulpit of Chicago's oldest Reform congregation, Temple K.A.M., which included some of the city's wealthiest and most prominent Jews. The rabbi distinguished himself in pulpit eloquence and pastoral care, lectured at the University of Chicago, and played a leading part in the civic life of the city. When Rabbi Harry Levi stepped down in 1939, Joshua Liebman's reputation was such that he was recommended unanimously for Temple Israel's post by the most distinguished members of Hebrew Union College.
While in Chicago he came to understand that it was not enough to remind people not to worry; one must remove the roots of anxiety. Already familiar with phi- losophy and literature - he read voraciously in Hegel as well as Saadia, Kant as well as Maimonides - he plunged into the study of psychiatry. This he mastered by the early 1940's so as to tell the public what the pro- fessional psychiatrists had obscured in technical lan- guage. And Liebman had a passion to tell it, for he was determined that others should profit where he had suf- fered. He said: "No religious leader can be of help to men and women who has not himself tasted of the bit- ter cup of rejection, agnosticism, uncertainty."
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II
Joshua Liebman wrote that Peace of Mind contained at least a partial "answer to the problem of evil." Al- though concerned with an ancient problem in theol- ogy, Liebman held fast to the humanist and Reform Jewish presupposition that the purpose of religion is not preparation for the life hereafter but "the achievement of the good life" here. Liebman was, moreover, in the tradition of Solomon Schindler in the desire to adjust Judaism to modern science. He remarked: "religion, which already has made its peace with Copernicus and Darwin, will have to make peace with Freud." The name of Temple Israel's fourth Reform rabbi was, and is today, associated with the idea that together religion and psychiatry would teach men how to attain "inner equilibrium ... against confusion and disaster" - peace of mind.
Sigmund Freud rediscovered the evil and at once horrifying human passions that the Greek and Eliza- bethan tragedians had accepted as a matter of course. His rediscovery shocked the sensibilities of the Victo- rian and Edwardian worlds; and for at least a quarter century his influence was confined to a handful of mcdi- cal doctors and Greenwich Village and Left Bank writers. By the 1930's and 1940's, however, it was clear that the "veritable hell" described by Freud existed outside the clinic. Liebman, throughout his life a meliorist, hailed
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