Harry L. Golden, one of our valued correspondents from the South, tells here of the perils of the rabbinate in a no doubt imaginary (but not totally unrepresentative congregation) down Carolina way—and in the telling reveals something of the problems and paradoxes of “mixing,” a matter that seems to bulk large in the consciousness of many a Jew below the Mason-Dixon line, as well as possibly elsewhere on the American scene.
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It had been an ordeal for both Rabbi Geller and Mr. Morris Witcoff, president of Temple Emanu-El, “The Jewish Reform Congregation of Elizabeth, North Carolina.” Thirty-year-old Nathan Geller had occupied this Southern pulpit for two years, coming directly from the Hebrew Union College at Cincinnati, only stopping off at New York to see his parents and marry a young German emigree whose parents had escaped the Nazis in 1939. Now his two-year contract was drawing to a close, and it had been Mr. Witcoff’s painful duty to notify him officially that the trustees would not renew. The rabbi decided to take a long walk before going home.
Well, it had not been entirely unexpected. At the beginning of the second year the trustees had sent him a memorandum clearly indicating that the rabbi had not lived up to their expectations. It included a point-by-point outline of what they felt they had a right to expect of the rabbi in the ensuing year. When he met with the trustees in full session a week before, Rabbi Geller had been aware that to their minds he had not sufficiently mended his ways. “Did I build up a good Sunday school?” he asked them categorically. The answer was, yes, yes, Rabbi, we’re proud of it. “How about my sermons?” Excellent, Rabbi. No one found fault with the sermons. “My conduct in the general community?” Fine, Rabbi, no criticism at all. “Then what’s wrong?”
Mr. Witcoff himself spoke up for the board: “Rabbi, you’re a good scholar, a good teacher, and your work with the children and the adult study group has been very good, but Rabbi, to be perfectly frank with you, what we really need here is a pastor and not a scholar.”
Trustee Bleckman said: “Rabbi, here it is: we just cannot seem to get close to you. You do not mix enough. How many visits have you made to the members since you have been the rabbi here? We urged you last year to visit them regularly. But you never got around to it. You never made the rounds.”
Trustee Rosenbaum interrupted: “Rabbi, out of twenty-two newcomers to Elizabeth since you have been the rabbi, the Conservatives got nineteen and we got three. There’s something definitely wrong. You never seem to get a new member. You just do not mix enough.”
The president of the Sisterhood, June Greenberg, spoke up: “Rabbi, no one finds fault with your teaching or scholarship, but at all our social functions you always arrive late and leave early, and no one seems able to get close to you at all. You just don’t mix with the members enough.”
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And so now Rabbi Geller was. taking a long walk towards the Square. The Square was on the crest of a hill, where the buildings fell back and shrank away from a grove of elms and bricked walls. In the center of the Square was the statue of the Confederate general. From the temple office two miles away he could see the tip of the general’s sword poised skyward. He had measured that walk several times. Usually by the time he reached the base of the monument he had been able to work out an entire sermon. On this walk, however, he was free to take his time and think his own thoughts. It was still several hours before supper time, and there was much to think about.
Pulling up stakes, packing his book, finding a temporary place to live in the North—but actually these were not the problems; not really. Sarah would take care of them all without a hitch; he wouldn’t have to bother with a single detail. He smiled when he thought of his wife Sarah, six years younger than himself, but from the very start “managing director” in full charge of all their financial, household, and personal affairs. He suppressed a grin when he thought of what his friend Herman Gordon had said when he first met Sarah.
Gordon, a local newspaperman, considerably older than the rabbi, had been his good friend during the two years in Elizabeth. In the days of the New Deal Gordon had written many of the editorials for the local daily paper, but the publication had changed its policy in recent years and now he was writing book reviews mostly, contributing to the editorial page only when there was an eclipse of the moon or maybe when a Shakespeare troupe came to town. Gordon’s previous contacts with the rabbis of the congregation— or for that matter with synagogue affairs generally—had never gone much beyond the handshake at the end of the Sabbath services. But as soon as Rabbi and Mrs. Geller had settled themselves in Elizabeth, Mr. Gordon was their very first social visitor. And he minced no words when he opened the door: “I hear a new rabbi has come to town who has a thousand books; I wonder if I may please see the books.” Rabbi Geller and Mr. Gordon had then spent that entire first Sunday in Elizabeth uncrating the books, after which he had stayed for dinner and remained a close friend ever after. Not that his friendship had counted on the positive side of the ledger with the board. At the final meeting Trustee Bergstreet had said, “Rabbi, you’ve spent more time with Herman Gordon than with any other five members of the congregation, and what does Gordon give—the minimum, $75.00 a year.” “And yes,” chimed in Treasurer Shapiro, “he still owes for half of 1951 and hasn’t paid anything on 1952 yet.”
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The rabbi was approaching the main crossing, where the avenue begins its upward climb toward the Square four more blocks away. What was it that Gordon had said when he met Sarah that first Sunday? Oh yes: “Rabbi, now that I’ve seen your wife, I advise you to resign and enter law school. A beautiful rebbitzen is suicide with the girls of the congregation. There’s nothing the Sisterhood likes better than to work with a plain-looking rehhitzen, and if she’s very plain, ah, she’s wonderful. What a charming person, and so very, very accommodating. Rabbi, this will never do. Not in a million years.”
The rabbi was halfway up the hill. He could see the forage cap in the left hand of the Confederate general dangling above the stirrup. He tried to dismiss from his mind all thoughts about moving, get down to more important thinking.
What of his future? What of the rabbinate? What, indeed, of the future of Jewish Reform? He remembered the inspiring discussions at Hebrew Union College. And he recalled also that during the first three months of his ministry two families had resigned from the temple. One resigned because the rabbi used “too much Hebrew” in his Friday evening service, and the second because he had refused to conduct the Orthodox “redemption-of-the-first-born” ritual (pidyon ha-hen). Yes, what of the future? Anticipating the decision of the trustees, his application for a new pulpit was already in the hands of the Placement Committee in Cincinnati—but what of that? When he attended the conference of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations earlier in the spring, the gossip was that the Placement Committee already had one hundred and fifty-five requests for new pulpits—nearly 40 per cent of the Reform rabbinate, and only April. By July 1, there was bound to be another fifty or sixty, at least; and during the previous five years there had been fifty-one pulpit changes in the South alone. Gordon had the answer: “Down South here, the temples are everlastingly in search of that one ideal rabbi of their dreams, the white, blue-eyed, blond, tall, Protestant rabbi, and they keep churning and churning the rabbis, trying to find him.”
Geller winced, remembering something. It seems that the president of the Sisterhood had attended that same conference in April and she confided to another Sisterhood delegate that “Rabbi Geller would probably not be returning to Elizabeth next year”; three applications for the pulpit had beaten him home. The rabbi shuddered as he recalled a story almost forgotten. It concerned a brilliant young rabbi with an important pulpit in the Midwest who had been stricken with leukemia. Before his affliction had become known even in his congregation, a number of applications for the pulpit had arrived, on a “when, as, and if” basis—at least so the rumor had it. Mr. Gordon had no illusions as to his influence with the officers and directors of Temple Emanu-EI; nevertheless, he had written a personal letter to each of the trustees asking them to renew the rabbi’s contract. “This fellow actually believes in God,” Gordon had written.
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What of old Rabbi Toback? Rabbi Julius Toback was sixty-three years old and the spiritual head of Temple Beth El in the neighboring town of Kenilworth, South Carolina. Rabbi Geller had discussed his problem with his senior as far back as a year ago, and the elderly rabbi had said: “Geller, you have to make up your mind to one thing. Elizabeth or elsewhere in the South, the pulpits are all the same. Believe me, they are all the same. If you want to stay in the rabbinate you have to accept that fact. There was a time when I had your ideas on what we called at the College, “Classical Reform,” and that’s why I am holding down the pulpit at Kenilworth, South Carolina, with a congregation of twenty-four families.” Rabbi Toback continued with a smile: “And even at that, I’m not so sure of myself. To be quite frank, I am worried. You know I don’t come in under the new Pension Plan, and I am beginning to hear rumblings among my twenty-four families. Some of them want me to take my cap off during services, but I don’t know. I think I may be too old to do anything about it now.” On another occasion Rabbi Toback had speculated that both their problems were part of the bigger problem—that half of each Reform congregation wants no more and no less than a Unitarian service, while the other half, from the “newer element,” wants to cling to rituals and practices with which they became familiar in their youth.
Once Gordon had said, “Rabbi Geller, if I am to keep you as a friend here, you’ll have to sell those thousand books and learn how to be a good master of ceremonies at the Sisterhood Brisket Supper.” In a more serious vein, Gordon had continued: “Rabbi Toback here will bear me out, he’s been all over the South.” Rabbi Toback made a face. “Don’t rub it in. I’ve had nine pulpits all my life, which isn’t really so bad, that’s seven years to a pulpit.” “Except for one thing,” Gordon said. “You became a rabbi when you were thirty years old, so it’s an average of three and a half years a pulpit, not seven years.” In any case, Mr. Gordon was right that night: “I’d like to tell you two rabbinical scholars something: I believe that the rabbi on the American scene has all but lost his traditional function. Today, entire American Jewry revolves around two pivots, combating anti-Semitism and fund-raising.”
With that Gordon looked at Rabbi Geller and they both began to laugh. Rabbi Toback had held up his hand, “All right, all right, enough is enough, it’s not funny any more.” Gordon and Rabbi Geller both knew the story—it was a kind of wry joke at the expense of the old man. It seems that some months before at a big fund-raising dinner in Elizabeth, the committee had asked Rabbi Geller to give the invocation; and to lend more tone to the affair they decided to ask a second rabbi to give the benediction at the close of the proceedings, for which purpose they had invited Rabbi Toback from across the line in South Carolina. After Rabbi Geller’s invocation came the dinner, and the program. The regional fund-raising director had decided that every “giver” of $1,000 and over should be entitled to “say a few words.” In addition nine officers and committee chairmen were on the dais, all of whom were called upon during the course of the evening. Old Rabbi Toback had sat through all this heroically, for five long hours. When, alas, his moment finally did come, the old gentleman was perforce in the men’s room far away at the other end of the social hall, and “Dinty” Witcoff had been forced to call upon Rabbi Geller to give the closing prayer, too.
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Rabbi geller read the inscription under the Rebel general:
DEDICATED TO THE MEN OF ELIZABETH WHO ANSWERED THE CALL OF DUTY, AND VALIANTLY LAID DOWN THEIR LIVES FOR GOD AND THEIR BELOVED SOUTH.
He stopped to refresh himself at the water fountain. Dusk was beginning to settle and the general looked more majestic than ever hovering above the church spires of the Southern town. From here Rabbi Geller had watched his first parade in Elizabeth nearly two years before. It was the day after his first board meeting as rabbi of the congregation. He had had no part in the proceedings, and it was apparent from the discussion that the subject had been aired before. Trustee Geiger had asked for a vote on a motion which had been tabled two years earlier. The secretary read the original motion: Resolved that the rabbi of this congregation, Temple Emanu-El of Elizabeth, North Carolina, wear suitable ritualistic headgear during all religious services. “1 move we refer it back to the Ritual Committee,” said Trustee Josephson. But, interposed Trustee Geiger, the Ritual Committee had had the matter for two years without any action.
“Dinty” Witcoff, the president, then took over for what was clearly the majority opinion: “There we go again,” he said. “If the rabbi’ wears a hat, what’s the difference between us and the Conservative temple? We have an organ, they have an organ; we confirm the girls, they confirm the girls; now if the rabbi wears a hat, what’s the difference, we’ll practically be the same, and so why two temples, two budgets, and two rabbis?” This argument ended the discussion for another year at least. When Gordon heard of Witcoff’s speech, he said that he was in complete accord, except that the president of the congregation had been guilty of a slight omission: two temples also means two presidents.
What made Rabbi Geller think of the argument about hats now was that he was standing on the same spot under the Confederate general from which he had seen that first parade in Elizabeth. Oh yes, it was early in September and the local citizens were observing General Stonewall Jackson Day, and it had been a colorful parade. Rabbi Geller remembered it well now. How could he forget? For in the second contingent of marchers, the leading figure up front was “Dinty” Witcoff, so vehement against “hats” the day before, but wearing a big red fez with gold tassels dangling down, and beating a drum.
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It was almost dark now, and the rabbi had hardly noticed that the dozen or more shouting and scampering children had suddenly disappeared. He refreshed himself again at the water fountain and sat down on a bench overlooking the main thoroughfare with its brilliantly lighted movie houses, stores, and Coca-Cola signs. It was a charming city; big enough to support a symphony orchestra and small enough to have an almost provincial friendliness. Strange, What a respected position the rabbi occupies among Fundamentalist Protestants. Strange, too, about the South itself. As a high school boy in Brooklyn, if he ever thought of the South at all, it was usually in terms of a big white fellow standing over a terrified Negro, holding a whip in one hand and a mint julep in the other. Rabbi Geller smiled and shook his head as he recalled that here in Elizabeth, North Carolina, among Scotch Presbyterians and orthodox Baptists, he had met some of the kindest people in the world.
And this brought Rabbi Geller to review in his mind the never-ending effort of Jewish middle-class life in the South to become one with the “population mass” surrounding it. He recalled the recent discussion he had had with Rabbi Toback and Herman Gordon on the subject. Toback, with his nine Southern pulpits over a thirty-year period, had paradoxical footnotes to contribute. For one thing, he pointed out that the few Jewish “non-conformists” in the South such as the union organizer, the public welfare worker, or the member of the Urban League, were sources of great anxiety to the Jewish community at large, who feared the “Gentile reaction.” Yet somehow these very same Jewish odd-fish seem to have more contacts and friends within the white Protestant society than do the main body of Jews, for all their desperate effort to reflect the habits and the prejudices of the majority. Gordon contributed his footnote. True, the “troublemaker” got himself known chiefly by appearing before a city council, for instance, with a “protest” of some kind; or perhaps delivering a speech at a trade union council; or attending an unsegregated meeting or concert; or maybe writing a “letter to the editor,” maybe even protesting against the teaching of the Protestant religion in the free public schools. However, while such activities and public opinions scarcely endear him to the great mass of the majority, they do identify him with the daily life of the general community.
Besides, he gathers more than one Gentile ally in the process, which, paradoxically, the main body of “conforming” Jews never acquire. The Southern white Protestant arches his back at the fellow from the North who throws a brick over the wall and runs away; but if he sticks around, that same fellow becomes part—the accepted, dissident part— and the attitude toward him changes completely; while the main Jewish community, which remains wholly segregated from the Gentile community after sundown each day, remain outsiders. By that same token, the main Jewish community’s desire to mix seems to express itself chiefly in a man’s ambition to join the Gentile country club, qr his wife’s to join the Gentile book or garden club. When these attempts fail, he gives up, aggrieved, and seeks consolation in a more intensified “Jewish work,” throwing himself completely into the work and activities of the temple, reducing in the process the actual religious service to only one, and a minor one, of its activities. The ensuing scramble for koved and “honors,” and the piling of one activity upon another, leads, of course, to an even greater self-absorption and exclusion. And, in turn, this isolation tends to add to the suspicion and fear of anti-Semitism so pervasive in the entire region.
This, at any rate, was how the matter looked to Mr. Gordon.
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Rabbi Geller nodded assent at this point: “Yes, one thing shocked me, when I came South, the almost unbelievably intense fear of anti-Semitism.”
“Of course, you are not wrong,” said Rabbi Toback. “And how strange that this terrible fear of anti-Semitism exists at a moment when anti-Semitism as a political weapon is at its weakest.”
“Rabbi Toback as usual is the philosopher,” said Gordon. “Today, it would probably be political suicide for a candidate in the most remote rural village of the South to be branded an anti-Semite; yet ‘combating anti-Semitism’ is the day-by-day and hour-by-hour concern of the middle-class Southern Jews. They fear the Jewish CIO official; they fear the Jew who interests himself in Negro causes; if a Jewish intellectual settles among them they watch his every move, and fear his every public statement; they even send delegations to the several national Jewish organizations asking them please not to submit ‘friend-of-the-court’ petitions in the Negro segregation cases before the United States Supreme Court; they jump at shadows, and at every chalk mark on the sidewalk; and they also keep themselves informed of the hour-by-hour itinerary of Gerald L. K. Smith. Sometimes I wonder how it is possible for successful businessmen with ordinary honorable records, and large inventories and wealth, and fine homes, and after two world wars in which they and their sons participated, to really fear that all of that can be swept away by some letter to the editor, a speech, or a pamphlet.”
“I am surprised that you do not know the answer,” said Rabbi Toback. “It is all quite understandable. The Jew in the South is, so to speak, among the unemployed and unemployable, as far as the general community is concerned. There are no clerks, salesgirls, mechanics, civil servants, or white-collar workers among us. Even in a comparatively large city like Elizabeth, you, Gordon, and Rabbi Geller here, are the only two Jews in town who are not self-employed, and the same is essentially true of the entire South. We form a self-enclosed proprietary class, in short—a middle class. And you know, of course, that fear is the great middle-class disease, and in this respect the Jews are no different from the Gentiles. The Gentile middle class, too, experiences constant, gnawing fear: ‘government controls,’ ‘labor unions,’ ‘Negroes,’ ‘taxes,’ ‘Roosevelt,’ ‘Truman,’ and others, which they substitute from time to time. No wonder that the fear which the Jew experiences is more pronounced, since as a member of the middle class and a Jew, he feels himself thus doubly exposed.
“Compare my own youth down on the Lower East Side of New York. I experienced and witnessed poverty which would make our Negro sharecroppers look like members of the station-wagon set by comparison; yet I doubt whether I have ever really known the security that I enjoyed down on Cherry Street as a boy and a young man. Eric Hoffer said it: the ghetto was a fortress as much as a prison. Today in the South our people, though they enjoy great prosperity and—as we have agreed—anti-Semitism as an active threat is at its lowest ebb—well, they seem to feel the need of the ghetto. But, unhappily, it doesn’t work, not on the present terrain; the self-imposed segregation from their opposite numbers in the Gentile middle class contributes only to aggravating fear.”
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“Let me philosophize a bit myself,” Gordon had said. “I remember my mother used to be terribly worried when things were going good for us. Why, she almost shook with fright, for fear something would happen to spoil it”
“Yes,” said Rabbi Toback, “it’s not too much different from the Negro. I cannot begin to describe to you the difference, socially and economically, between the Negro today and the Negro I found here thirty years ago. Yet at this very best moment of his life in the South, he has doubled his efforts in the courts of the land to achieve still further gains. My friends, in Egypt the Promised Land is a nebulous thing. It is on Mount Nebo that you really begin to move heaven and earth to reach your goal.”
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It was getting dark and Rabbi Geller roused himself from his thoughts. Sarah would be waiting and wondering. He decided to take a taxi home, but first he’d walk down the hill to Liggett’s to phone her, so she wouldn’t worry. As to his question, “What of the rabbinate?” he could see the fear of anti-Semitism, on the one hand, and intensified Jewish activities and growing isolation, on the other, and between them the rabbinate taking on a character different from any he had ever dreamed of, “mixing with the members,” fearing and fighting anti-Semitism.
Rabbi Toback had sent him a few excerpts from a sermon he had delivered the previous Friday evening at Kenilworth: “I came back to that very thing we discussed at your house several weeks ago,” the elderly rabbi wrote. “I told my congregation that the Gentile is neither fascinated by, nor interested in, what Horace Kallen has called ‘the amateur Gentile’; that basically the Gentile feels more at ease when confronted with a definite asserted value, whether it be ‘rabbi,’ ‘CIO,’ ‘Roman Catholic,’ or anything else. Even though he may be hostile, he would rather have ten recognizable values than one ambiguity. To him an ambiguity is an enigma which he has neither the time nor the inclination to examine thoroughly. I summed up the sermon with my favorite statement: ‘For us, there is only one possible road to complete relaxation as happy members of this society; either you become a self-respecting Jew, standing unafraid for what you are and what you stand for—or you become a Christian.’”
Sarah wanted the rabbi to wait in front of Liggett’s, she would pick him up. She said that a telegram had come for him and perhaps he might want to answer it while they were downtown. What was in the telegram? Sarah said that it was from the Placement Committee in Cincinnati. They wanted to know whether the rabbi would be interested—the pulpit at Kenilworth, South Carolina, had opened up.
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