Too often, the typical “interfaith” meeting or conference, for all its good intentions, is no more than a drearily formal bow to a lifeless “unity.” Joseph H. Gumbiner here records a refreshingly different experience—one that indicates the possibility of a real and stimulating give-and-take between religious groups.

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My invitation to spend a week at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington, came as an emergency request from the Jewish Chautauqua Society. I was very tired and this sounded like the ideal vacation. A trifle cold up there for a Southern Californian, but in a snug hotel room with a plain telephone minus the rabbinical attachment that makes it explode into frantic peals of noise all through the day and night, I could withstand the weather. In one or two set speeches a day I could tell the students about the truths of Judaism and what nice people the Jews are. It added up to a well-earned rest. No question about it: I must respond to the call of duty and the JCS. I waved goodbye to my wife, clutched the brief case with the stock lectures, boarded the plane.

We put down in Walla Walla just ahead of what looked like an impending light flurry of snow. I received a message to call Mr. Sheldon, Dean of Men, and repaired to the Marcus Whitman Hotel to start my rest.

The room had all the necessary equipment, a good bed, and a telephone that was not ringing. Gingerly I approached that instrument and called the Dean. He was happy to learn of my arrival, urged me to get a good night’s rest, and to come to his home at about eleven-thirty the next morning. He would then tell me about the Campus Conference on Religion, we would have Sunday dinner, and at three o’clock there would be a retreat for the guest speakers and the student members of the campus committees in charge of the conference. How right I’d been!—In these smaller towns people still know how to live. With a sigh of contentment I prepared for about ten hours of sleep, a superb breakfast, a leisurely stroll to the Dean’s home.

I awoke late and at peace with the world. True, the flurry of snow looked like a blizzard; it had already blanketed the city and gave no sign of abating, and I could hear the wind howling around the comer of the hotel. But the snow seemed rather fun, after two years of the sunshine and orange juice of California. Right cheerfully I began shaving.

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Then it happened. The phone rang harshly. Wiping the lather from around my lips I found myself talking to a very agitated Dean. It seemed that the reverend visitor from Minneapolis, scheduled to deliver the sermon at the morning service of the First Congregational Church, was still somewhere in Idaho in a train stalled by the storm. Could I hurry over to the church by eleven and speak in his place? Yes, I supposed I could. Relieved, the Dean hung up. It was ten-thirty. I rushed back to the wash basin, took up my razor, and almost cut my chin off.

Somehow I staunched the flow of blood, dressed, ate breakfast, and in lieu of the unavailable taxi, ran several blocks through the snow to the church. On the way I tried to piece together an opus I had once delivered on “Youth in the Synagogue”; there had been a text from the fourth or fifth Psalm. . . . I arrived looking like a snow man.

The minister of the church was very happy to see me. It seemed that he had been looking forward to this occasion for weeks as an opportunity to sit in a regular pew with his wife. He lent me a robe with a zipper, told me the sermon would be broadcast, pointed out the side of the pulpit where I was to sit, and scurried off. I was just in time to fall in line at the end of the procession that was already moving down the center aisle of the large church, singing a hymn.

Summoning what dignity I had left, I found the proper seat on the pulpit in front of a congregation of several hundred. My problems were not over. Where was I to speak from? The sermon was to be broadcast. The students conducting the service were down in front but there was no microphone there. High up above my side of the pulpit I could see a Gothic-type lectern. Was that the proper place? I hardly wanted to dash across the wide pulpit during the service to ask one of the young people. During a hymn I craned my neck far around and, happily, saw a wire coming from the side of the lectern. Was it attached to a lamp or a mike? My introduction came. I ascended the steps of the lectern, tripping on the reverend’s robe. It was a mike. I remembered the text, giving it in the holy tongue to the edification of the congregation, and tied the whole together in precisely the thirty minutes allotted by the broadcasting company.

Following the service I was taken to the Dean’s house. Dean Sheldon is a quiet man, portly and pleasant. He is a serious student of religion, liberal in his theology, but cognizant of other trends. Greeting me warmly, he introduced me to the other members of the “team” as they arrived. There was an older man of Irish origin who had a stock of neat formulas for students to remember: “Christianity is a faith to follow, a cult to confirm, a creed to confess, a communion to cultivate.” I am not sure the students appreciated the pat phrases. The man for whom I had substituted at the church arrived later in the day. He was a preacher of talent, with a friendly disposition, and well equipped with apt illustrations and witticisms above the usual pulpit level. There was a teacher of sociology interested in religion as a kind of expression making for personal integration and social adjustment. Rounding out the visiting speakers were two young men, one a teacher of church history and religious education, and the other a professor of philosophy and religion.

The Dean was a good host. With a touch of irony, he told me he had read my article in COMMENTARY last year. Remembering what I had written of the caliber of interfaith occasions, my appetite somewhat slackened. But the Dean meant to cause me no discomfiture. He sketched briefly the program that was in store for us during the week. I for one refused to take it too seriously. Impossible to believe that there would be students to eat breakfast with at seven o’clock each morning. Which professors would invite what visitors to teach their classes? How many students would throng the planned seminars? I thought the intensive program the Dean outlined just a hopeful academic fiction.

After dinner we met the students and received our specific assignments—and right there my vacation began to crumble. I had a host, a very genial young man from Seattle. My “host” had a girl friend. My host told me, quietly but firmly, that he would see to it that I reached every class, seminar, counseling appointment, luncheon, dinner, and special event on time. His girl friend would help him. And thus it was to be. Fearful that I would get lost in the labyrinth of the Whitman campus, my host or his girl friend met me after every class or seminar and escorted me to the next session. The maximum interval was usually five minutes. My bodyguards saw that I got there in time.

Sunday night, after a large reception for all the guest speakers, I stumbled back over the ice to my hotel, warned that breakfast was at the far end of the campus and started promptly at seven.

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Next morning I arose, as I was to do all that week of interfaith understanding, at six. That morning I managed to get a cab to the campus—no one else in Walla Walla was insane enough to brave the snow drifts at so early an hour. Never imagine that the breakfasts were formalities, spent in idle pleasantries and words of tribute for the fine work we had done the day before. On the contrary. Each morning thirty or forty students attended. They included the “roving reporters,” whose task it was to circulate among the student body the day before and then meet with us the next morning so as to point out what we had done wrong, how we had sidestepped issues, what changes the students wanted made for the new day. We listened meekly. Each morning, I left the table for my eight o’clock hour of instruction properly chastened and with the firm resolve to do better.

Yes, the hours of instruction had materialized; there was no dearth of classroom invitations from the faculty. I found myself teaching seven very diverse hours during my stay at Whitman: two in synagogue music, two in educational psychology, one each in religion, sociology, and political science. What the instructor wanted in each case was the Jewish background and experience with respect to the topic assigned. The students in each class showed keen interest, asked searching questions, engaged in long discussion which made the hours pass very quickly.

Synagogue music raised a problem. I was highly unprepared, being neither a musician nor a musicologist. Guided by my host I found my way to the college library, consulted the Universal Jewish Encyclopedia, and even found I. Z. Idelsohn’s book, Jewish Music—part of a prominently displayed exhibit of Judaica, most of which had been presented to the library by the JCS. I noted that it had been borrowed several times before, presumably by individuals not in the category of visiting lecturers in a jam. With charming girl students of musical theory and composition at the piano, we soon filled the class room with the ahavah rabbah and other traditional modes.

In the educational psychology classes I led discussions on the problem of religion in the public schools and its relation to the American principle of the separation of church and state. Many of the future school teachers were amazed to hear that such a problem existed. Coming largely from the rural areas of the Northwest, they had just assumed that the schools, like the country itself, were Christian in a rather vague, generalized way. After all, there was little at Whitman itself to suggest any more complex pattern of American life. Only two out of nine hundred students were introduced to me as Jewish. (This was no indication of an unfriendly admission policy: the Dean suggested that I recommend Jewish students of qualified background as applicants for admission.)

In the course on religion I dealt with source readings in Judaism. The sociology hour was concerned with Judaism and racial theories. The political science students wanted to know about the internal political orientation of the state of Israel, and were intensely interested in the philosophy and status of the political parties that make up the Knesset.

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Lunch and dinner each day were provided by the various fraternities, sororities, and college dining halls. After each meal there was a bull session during which the college “skeptics” loosed their heavy ammunition against the emissaries of religion. During the afternoons three seminars had been planned to run concurrently, with visiting leaders shifting about among them on a daily schedule. One was to deal with theological problems of belief, one with religion in relation to politics and economics, and one with organized religion and society. The first two proved to be of much wider appeal and the third was dropped. The two that survived, however, could hardly be called seminars, since each afternoon as many as one hundred students turned up to overcrowd the largest classrooms. The discussions were lengthy, pointed, and vivacious; the students kept us alert and working hard for at least two hours. Add to this some kind of special event on campus each night (not to speak of four unrelated long-lost friends who located me through the newspaper publicity and drove over for visits at the hotel late at night)—my “vacation” soon became about the hardest period of constant labor in my experience. Through ice and snow, and later the slush of a thaw, I trotted from the infirmary (where they sprayed my failing throat) to the classrooms to the library to the fraternity houses to the dormitories to the hotel in town. There I collapsed for four or five hours of sleep and started the whole round over again. I ended the week feeling like a sponge from which the last drop had been squeezed.

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Nor was this all. Saving the best for last, the student committee, evidently fearful lest the visitors fall into evil habits of idleness, arranged for thirty-minute periods of “personal consultation.” This meant that any student could see any religious visitor he desired by making an appointment during the latter’s “free” time. This ambitious little plan was widely publicized, and a desk was set up in the center of the administration building to facilitate appointments. The first day nothing happened. Then we began to get acquainted with the students through the classes, seminars, meals, bull sessions, and special events. Appointments began to pile up. I myself had fourteen of these personal consultations, all of them, of course, with non-Jewish students. Fortunately the college had assigned me a very pleasant conference room. It had a comfortable couch and I was usually able to sleep approximately five minutes between appointments. Some of my colleagues were less fortunate. They had to sleep in hard arm chairs.

One of the first personal interviews was with an Armenian student. He wanted to know what constituted a Jew. After we had talked a while we realized that both his people and mine lacked racial distinctiveness, possessed their own religious tradition, and stemmed from a national center whence they had been dispersed—and that neither the Jews nor the Armenians are as queer as they might appear in this customary world of facile human cataloguing.

A girl came in whose home was on a farm in central Washington. This was her first time away from home. She explained that she lived with a family in town, with whom she had been happy—until she had returned to the house the day before full of the news that there was a visiting rabbi on campus at Whitman. To her surprise, the family had reacted with the strongest prejudice, maintaining that no Jews, and certainly no rabbis, should be allowed at the college. The girl had become emotionally upset, almost physically ill, and had to leave the family dinner table, though she hoped the family hadn’t understood why. “What can I do,” she asked me, “to fight this terrible prejudice called anti-Semitism?” She had never seen a Jew before coming to Whitman, and this was her first experience with prejudice. I tried to help her regain her composure. I explained that in her present state of mind she could do nothing to help. I urged her to read and study all the facets of this social disease. I promised materials about Judaism and the Jewish people (which I dispatched soon after returning home). She vowed to acquire the knowledge and the force to help fight anti-Semitism whenever she encountered it. If my young friend holds to her purpose there will be a strong citadel of democracy somewhere in central Washington.

A boy came in who had grown up in a farming community in Idaho. He was a Mormon with the fine features and clear complexion so often seen among his coreligionists. He, too, had never been away from home, and his matriculation at the nondenominational college in far-away Walla Walla, instead of the Mormon college in nearby Utah which his family had urged him to attend, created a stir. But he had insisted on a change of scene. How far he had come in his thinking his first question made evident: “Rabbi, you seem to tell the students the truth as you see it. Can I really believe in the doctrines of the Mormon religion?” I was deeply moved by this Mormon boy’s confidence, and I explained to him that, being no expert on Mormon doctrine, I could offer no authoritative opinion in that field. I then asked him what he meant by “belief’ and received the answer I expected, belief in the sense of knowledge arrived at by scientific methods of inquiry. Explaining the difference between the relative knowledge of science (which seems so absolute), the approximate conclusions of reason (which appear so precise), and the subjective truths intuited and held by faith (the eternal truths of religion by which men live), I could then point out that while the doctrines of his church might not be amenable to a scientific or purely rational approach, they most certainly could be held in faith. I added that this was precisely the case in Judaism, the oldest religious tradition in the Western world. In spite of its respect for reason and experience, venerable Judaism, just like recently born Mormonism, also rested ultimately on faith, not on empirical investigation or rational demonstration. The student thanked me, saying that it was a great relief to learn that even so ancient a religion as Judaism rested in the end on faith. If that were true, he saw no reason for denying the doctrines of his church. We parted on that note.

Another boy came who seemed a bit out of place at Whitman. He had come from a large Eastern city and his early playmates and his closest friend had all been Jews. Tomorrow he was to be initiated into a fraternity. “What should I do,” he asked me, “about joining an organization the constitution of which would bar my best friend because he is a Jew?” After some talk, it transpired that he had a deep sense of guilt because in childhood he had been a member of neighborhood gangs which tormented Jewish boys. Now the initiation, so close at hand, seemed like a direct betrayal of his friend in the East. He could not decide whether to refuse affiliation with the fraternity or to join and work from within against anti-Semitism. Feeling a certain instability in him, I advised him to go through with it and then to use whatever influence he could to strengthen the growing anti-discrimination movement in fraternities and sororities. I do not envy this boy the tension between the feelings of guilt rooted in his childhood and his growing ethical sensitivity.

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What made this visit to Whitman different from the interfaith work I had engaged in for many years? Heretofore such occasions had seemed meaningless, on the intellectual and emotional level of a gospel meeting when the tabernacle is three-fourths empty, tasteless, almost laughable both to myself and the intelligent students. The Whitman experience indicated that first of all one must have a large, interested student group as a nucleus, and the strong affirmative support of the university administration. At Whitman we had thirty or forty keenly involved students, and the Dean and faculty had put every resource of the college (except money) behind them. Perhaps the fact that it was a small college helped, too—indeed my faith in the small college as by far the best place for undergraduate study was confirmed over and over again during the week. (Of course, there is no Jewish life on a campus numbering only two recognized Jews. But Jewish activity can exist if there are fifty Jewish students, and there might easily be that many at Whitman.) As a small institution of higher learning, Marcus Whitman College has the spirit, the color, the feeling of a true social nexus, a community—all that seems missing from our enormous, impersonal factories of education. I began to understand why so many of our leaders in all fields are men and women who grew up in rural areas and small towns.

During an evaluation hour at the closing seminar, one girl said: “Although the conference was concerned primarily with religion, I believe it has had a great effect in decreasing anti-Semitic feeling on the campus. Many of us had never known any Jewish people well. The rabbi’s presence here has made a big difference in our attitude.” I replied that while I was naturally happy to hear such sentiments expressed, I was not too sanguine about eliminating prejudice through enlightenment. The deeply prejudiced person, unhappily, needs his hatred badly and hugs it to him in spite of the conscious knowledge that it is groundless and unworthy. The same girl spoke up again: “But I wasn’t talking about psychotics, just about the average people who have been exposed to prejudice and haven’t quite made up their minds.” Here I believe we have the practical heart of the problem. We need not teach those who are already emancipated. We cannot teach the lunatic fringe. But in between lies the vast majority of the American people. Surely under proper circumstances they are amenable to enlightenment

It also occurred to me that the positive approach of the Jewish Chautauqua Society is all too little known to the Jewish community of the United States. This poorly financed project of the National Federation of Temple Brotherhoods makes possible visits like the one I have described in more than four hundred American college campuses and many church summer training camps each year.

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At Whitman, as at every other campus and camp where I have carried on this work, students asked a favorite question: “How does one become a Jew?” It is our custom to assume that this question is merely a request for factual information, and we give a formal answer descriptive of the traditional Jewish conversion procedure. In so doing I think we may be missing the point completely. I have come to believe that in many cases the question is actually asked in dead earnest, not academically or in the search for mere knowledge. It deserves a better answer than a quotation from the “Rabbi’s Manual.”

How does one become a Jew? By birth? By Bar Mitzvah or confirmation? By singing “Hatikvah” or signing a check to the UJA? By being born in the state of Israel? I do not mean to belittle these events or acts, merely to point out the simple fact that through them no man ever became a Jew in the deepest sense. How then? One becomes a Jew only through personal commitment, by faith in which a man stakes his life on the truth of that revelation of God called Judaism. Very well then, if this is so, why must this faith be limited to those born into Jewish families or of so-called Jewish blood?

I do not know the answer to this problem, but this I think I know with reasonable certainty: if liberal Judaism were to embark on even a modest missionary activity, many fine, high-minded young people of non-Jewish birth would come to the Jewish faith. They are prepared now to accept the Jewish aspects of Christianity. They resist and deny the pagan elements which have been mixed (not blended) with the fundamental Jewish revelation. They accept Jesus the Jew while they reject Christ the Christian. They hear one speak of the universal faith and ethic of Judaism and they ask: “How does one become a Jew?” By this they mean: “How can I enter this kingdom?” When shall we have the vision and courage to hand them the key?

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