To the Editor:
Since Dr. Gaster was good enough to include the Reconstructionist Prayerbook among those he criticized in Commentary (April 1954), I feel constrained to take issue with him with reference to the proper approach to the traditional prayers. He is correct in stating that my colleagues (Mordecai M. Kaplan, Eugene Kohn, and the late Milton Steinberg) and I were “aiming at . . . modification of such traditional concepts as, for example, the election of Israel, the restoration to Zion, the coming of the Messiah, and the resurrection of the dead. . . .” But Dr. Gaster contends that such modifications were unnecessary since the original texts of the prayers touching upon these themes “happen to have been designed expressly to receive their meanings from the emotions, passions, and aspirations of those who repeat them.”
Dr. Gaster errs on two counts: he assumes that the prayer texts, as they appear in the traditional siddwr, expressed merely general ideas rather than precise doctrines; and he assumes that, in our own day, all Jews are prepared to accept the particular “emotions, passions, and aspirations” which are his.
With regard to resurrection. The traditional prayerbook contains the thirteen articles of the Creed, by Maimonides. The thirteenth reads: “I believe with perfect faith that there will be a resurrection of the dead at the time when it shall please the Creator, blessed be His Name. . . .” The second benediction of each and every Amidah reads: “Thou sustainest the living with loving kindness, quickenest the dead with great mercy. . . . Blessed art thou, O Lord who quickenest the dead.”
Professor George Foot Moore, in his Judaism (vol. II, p. 379), writes: “The primary eschatalogical doctrine of Judaism is the resurrection, the revivification of the dead. . . .” The Mishnah (Sanhedrin) explicitly states: “Whoever says that the revivification of the dead is not proved from the Torah shall have no portion in the World to Come.” As the Talmud adds, “He denied the resurrection of the dead, accordingly he shall have no part in the (resurrection of the dead. . . .” Louis Finkelstein, in The Pharisees (vol. I, p. 158), writes: “The Pharisees would not permit anyone denying it [resurrection] to recite public prayers in the synagogues, and to make certain of correct belief, they inserted at the beginning of their main service, an avowal of it.”
In view of these data, how can Dr. Gaster assert that t’hiyath ha-methim meant “keeping alive of the dead,” “the eternity rather than the transience of life,” that “earthly existence is part of a larger, infinite continuity, so that death is neither absolute nor final, but amounts to a recession of the immediate into the continuous; in this sense, indeed, only a moment and not a being, can die”? Does he not realize that he is himself changing completely the doctrine’s original meaning? . . .
With regard to the Messiah. “What may be called,” says Moore, “the classic form of the expectation of a golden age for the nation pictured it as the reign of a wise and good king of the royal line of Judah who in this age was commonly called the Anointed One (Messiah).” If, as Dr. Gaster contends, the Messiah is “but the personified epitome of a future Golden Age,” why should Jews have clung so steadfastly to the belief that Jesus was not the true Messiah? Why did numerous individuals arise, claiming to be the Messiah and leading thousands of their followers to quixotic adventures to reclaim the Holy Land? Why, every week in the synagogue, do Jews affirm, in the concluding prayers after the Haftorah: “Gladden us, O Lord, with Elijah the prophet, thy servant, and with the kingdom of the house of David, thine anointed. Soon may he come and rejoice our hearts. Suffer not a stranger to sit upon his throne, nor let others any longer inherit his glory; for by thy holy name thou didst swear unto him, that his light should not be quenched for ever”? Why did Maimonides make the following the twelfth of his Articles: “I believe with a perfect faith in the coming of the Messiah, and though he tarry I will wait daily for his coming”? . . .
Obviously, the Messiah for Jews meant a real person, sent by God to redeem them from Exile. And Dr. Gaster’s interpretation notwithstanding, there are many thousands of Jews for whom the Messiah still means this. It seemed to us that those of us who believe that this concept should be modified ought to indicate that belief by a corresponding modification of the text.
On the other hand, we who prepared the Reconstructionist Prayerbook believe that we have not been guilty of the charge that we proceeded “from the assumption (either overtly or tacitly implied) that a prayerbook must be exclusively contemporary.” We have retained the broad framework of the tradition, and to a great degree the language of tradition (even some of the “exotic archaism”). Whatever has lent itself to interpretation, we have retained. Where interpretation was inadequate, modification was introduced. . . .
(Rabbi) Ira Eisenstein
Chicago, Illinois
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