The Chosen Wars

by Steven R Weisman

  Pittsburgh was a logical choice for the reformers’ parley. As a banking and steel industry city, it was a center of Jewish prosperity and upward mobility in the 1880s, and home to three thousand Jews and eight congregations. The largest and most prosperous was Rodef Shalom, which embraced reforms advocated by Wise in the 1860s, prompting a revolt from Orthodox members who bolted and established the rival Tree of Life Synagogue in 1864.

  A shadowy influence on Kohler’s conduct at the conference in Pittsburgh was the memory of his charismatic but stern and doctrinaire father-in-law, David Einhorn, who had died six years earlier. Rabbi Wise’s extraordinary prominence as an organizer could not be denied. But Einhorn, though departed, was the guiding spirit in Pittsburgh. “Einhorn was the father of American Reform, its theology and practice, its ideology and thrust,” writes W. Gunther Plaut, a leading historian of the movement, noting that it was Einhorn and Samuel Adler of Emanu-El, Felix’s father, who had formed a direct line of continuity from the Reform discussions in Germany to the delegates in Pittsburgh.2

  Many years after Pittsburgh, Kohler paid tribute to his father-in-law as a member of “the Jewish legion of immortals” and a man of “tragic earnestness” who crossed swords with Wise on fundamental matters but nonetheless joined him in the pantheon of the religion’s modernizers. Kohler compared Einhorn to the patriarch Abraham as a breaker of idols, and a lonely and persecuted wanderer who sought fearlessly to serve God. Recalling Einhorn’s ouster from congregations in Europe and his escape from Baltimore to Philadelphia when his life was in danger because of his opposition to slavery, Kohler said his father-in-law’s “continuous martyrdom” in the cause of his religious beliefs made him an exemplar of the German maxim “First Unity and then Liberty,” except that for the combustible tempered Einhorn, it was “First Truth and then Peace.”3

  Yet Wise’s presence could also not be denied in Pittsburgh. His outsized personality and record of establishing Jewish institutions guaranteed that he would be more famous than his rivals, whereas Einhorn had never commanded more followers than Wise and was perpetually handicapped by his insistence on speaking in dense German sentences. Wise was gregarious, self-important, voluble, and self-indulgent. Einhorn had been scholarly and serious, if occasionally vituperative. Wise could not help but be beloved and disdained, yet people were attracted to him in spite of his outsized personality. Yet Einhorn’s fierce and uncompromising approach rather than Wise’s flexible pragmatism would win the day at Pittsburgh and indeed in the cause of Reform Judaism as it reached its apex of influence at the end of the nineteenth century.4

  Einhorn’s spirit runs everywhere through his son-in-law’s opening speech at the conference, where he laid out ten principles for the Jews in attendance. “We cannot afford to stand condemned as law-breakers, to be branded as frivolous and as rebels and traitors because we transgress these laws and principle,” Kohler declared. Rather, he said, the conferees were soldiers in the war against Jewish assimilation and indifference. He urged them “to unite on a platform. . . . broad, comprehensive, enlightened, and liberal enough to impress and with all hearts, and also firm and positive enough to dispel suspicion and reproach of agnostic tendencies, or of discontinuing the historical thread of the past.”5

  Kohler’s address made clear the challenge of saving a younger generation growing “more estranged from our sacred heritage” every day and the urgent need to adopt a new code rather than simply reject the old rules. His first principle called for unity around a platform that would exclude only the most “radical” views and embrace modern research in science, comparative religion, ethnology, biblical criticism, and other developments that force modern men and women to reassess their religious beliefs. Yet it was not enough for Jews to strip away every tradition and simply embrace the Ten Commandments as the sole governing doctrine of Judaism. Rather, Jews had to find their way through a reinterpretation of all the related customs and laws of their heritage.

  At the core of Jewish belief, he argued in his second principle, was broadening access to Judaism, perhaps through Sunday services, and to “awaken and foster the spirit of mutual help and elevation” on social and economic justice. In a striking conciliatory gesture despite his clear difference with Felix Adler and his Ethical Culture Society, Kohler praised those he had denounced as heretics for at least pursuing beneficial social goals. “Why should not each Jewish congregation have the material and moral welfare of the poor within its reach entrusted to its care also, so that religion becomes with each member an active training for the practice of love?” Kohler asked. Echoing Adler, he criticized the “aristocratic” structures of congregations handing out privileges to its wealthiest members and called on congregations to elevate the status of women to full and equal membership.

  A third precept in Kohler’s address called for a proliferation of Jewish publications and other means to disseminate the Jewish message. A fourth called for expanded religious education, including Hebrew. Related to these education issues, Kohler’s fifth “commandment” was to upgrade, shorten, refine, and impose a basic uniformity on religious services themselves. Sixth, moving to a more controversial subject, Kohler called for elimination of the reading of passages that might be offensive to contemporary audiences, including the curses in Leviticus calling for terror, disease, death, barrenness, and defeat at the hands of Israel’s enemies should Israel forsake God’s laws.

  To justify this remarkably censorious approach, Kohler noted that censorship of Scripture was hardly new—the rabbis of old had long discriminated “between offensive and other passages of the Bible,” he said, presumably also referring to passages that seemed to condone rape and killing of enemies. In a seventh tenet, Kohler said that other “impure and offensive chapters” could be eliminated at least for children. These included Lot’s offering his two virgin daughters to be raped by intruders rather than letting them have sex with two male guests (who in reality were angels) who had come to his house. He cited other cruelties visited on Israel’s foes “which ought not to be mentioned before the youth or before a mixed assembly.” (The point of the story about Lot is interpreted by many scholars to be that Lot was prepared to go to any length in order not to violate the laws of hospitality. But the passage suggests a more offensive interpretation for many others: that the heterosexual rape of one’s virgin daughters is preferable to the homosexual rape of one’s male guests.)

  On the other hand, in his eighth principle, Kohler renewed a commitment to teaching the Bible and all of Jewish literature. In the ninth principle, Kohler called for Jews to relate more positively to Gentiles, especially Christians, who he said had shown greater tolerance toward Jews. It was also time, he insisted, for Jews to recognize Christians as fellow worshippers of the same God and not as pagans—and that Christians should be welcomed as converts, without subjecting men to the “barbarous cruelty” of circumcision, which he called “a national remnant of savage African life” that had no bearing to Jewish identity. Nor should a child of intermarriage be considered any less a Jew. “I can no longer accept the fanciful and twisted syllogisms of Talmudic law as binding for us,” he declare. “I prefer good, sound, common-sense logic to Pilpulistic [i.e., obscurantist] lore and I think, if anywhere, here we ought to have the courage to emancipate ourselves from the thralldom of Rabbinical legality.” Finally, in the tenth section, Kohler addressed the need to revive Judaism in the home by celebrating the Sabbath, Passover Seder, Hanukkah, and other rituals and holidays while modernizing them.

  Upon concluding his presentation, the assembly approved a motion that his principles be adopted as the basis for its forthcoming deliberations. They whittled his ten points down to eight before adopting the platform. First, the platform explicitly disavowed the quasi atheism of Adler’s Ethical Culture Society by recognizing that Judaism, while having “an attempt to grasp the Infinite” in common with all religion, “presents the highest conception of the God-idea.” Here the platform dared to tread on new lin
guistic ground by explaining that the “idea” of God—reflected in Scripture in the context of ancient times—nonetheless remains “the central religious truth for the human race.” Second, the platform declared the Bible to be “the record of the consecration of the Jewish people to its mission as the priest of the one God” and “the most potent instrument of religious and moral instruction.” Science, history, and literary research “are not antagonistic to the doctrines of Judaism,” it said, and the stories of the Bible, including its recounting of miracles, are “primitive” constructs and need not be taken literally.

  A third provision declared that the full panoply of Talmudic teachings under the heading of interpreting “Mosaic legislation” should be seen as “training the Jewish people” for their mission but that contemporary Jews need be bound only by “its moral laws.” Jews should embrace only those ceremonies that “elevate and sanctify our lives” while rejecting those “not adapted to the views and habits of modern civilization.” More specifically, in the fourth precept, the platform asserted that rabbinical laws regulating diet, priestly purity, and dress were “entirely foreign to our present mental and spiritual state.” Observing such rules “is apt rather to obstruct than to further modern spiritual elevation.”

  On the issue of praying for a messiah and a return to Palestine, the platform marked the culmination of many decades of thinking by reimagining and replacing these concepts with a yearning for a “great Messianic hope” for a just and peaceful world. Judaism, the platform made clear, is a religion—not a national identity: “We consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community, and therefore expect neither a return to Palestine, nor a sacrificial worship under the sons of Aaron, nor the restoration of any of the laws concerning the Jewish state.” Judaism, moreover, in the sixth plank of the platform, is deemed “a progressive religion, ever striving to be in accord with the postulates of reason.” But in a concession to those uneasy about entirely rejecting the national identity of Judaism, the platform proclaimed “the utmost necessity of preserving the historical identity with our great past.” In an ecumenical gesture that was also a plea for acceptance, it declared Christianity and Islam to be “daughter religions of Judaism,” and that their mission of spreading “monotheistic and moral truth” was appreciated by Jews.

  As for bodily resurrection of the dead, and the concepts of Gehenna and Eden (Hell and Paradise) as places of punishment or reward after death, the platform was clear. These ideas were to be rejected in favor of the doctrine “that the soul is immortal, grounding the belief on the divine nature of human spirit, which forever finds bliss in righteousness and misery in wickedness.” Finally, in the eighth plank of the platform was a social justice section bearing the influence of Kohler’s brother-in-law, Rabbi Emil Hirsch, that was destined to become a central tenet of Reform Judaism. Reminiscent also of the teachings of Felix Adler, this plank declared that “the spirit of the Mosaic legislation” sought “to regulate the relations between rich and poor,” and thus it was the duty of Jews “to participate in the great task of modern times, to solve, on the basis of justice and righteousness, the problems presented by the contrasts and evils of the present organization of society.”6

  At a little more than six hundred words in length, the Pittsburgh Platform reflected the most ambitious attempt in modern Jewish history to embrace the goal of social progress among all citizens, while seeking to reconcile Judaism with science, history, modern interpretations of text, and practical realities of the contemporary world. Breaking dramatically with a vast legacy of law, tradition, and history, the platform capped decades of incremental and fitful moves by American Jewish leaders. It essentially signaled the transformation of the campaign to create an “American” Judaism, as advocated by Wise, into a campaign to create a more particular form of what was officially becoming known as Reform Judaism. It is for these reasons that Pittsburgh is known as the foundation of the “classical” phase of Reform Judaism—with its renunciation of traditional doctrines, practices, and “peoplehood”—that flourished into the first decades of the twentieth century. The platform also edged Judaism into increasing alignment with the influential social gospel of Protestantism, Catholicism and—most important—the leanings of many secularized Jews in America toward the belief that religious faith must be fulfilled by pursuing religiously inspired social justice.

  In 1985, on the one hundredth anniversary of the platform, a leading synagogue in Pittsburgh assembled a group of Jewish historians and scholars to take stock of the platform’s context, antecedents, and significance in a volume of essays. “It is clear . . . that the Pittsburgh Conference owed everything to its German predecessor of a generation before,” noted the historian Gunther Plaut. But many other historians have maintained that the platform was quintessentially American, not German, and that it was excessively “triumphalist” in consigning traditions to obsolescence. Certainly, it was filled with optimism about the Jewish role in achieving redemption for humanity, and it abandoned once and for all the rote rituals of ancient Judaism, which it felt had prevented Jews from fulfilling their historic role as a chosen or elect people to achieve justice and virtue for individuals and for society as a whole. But the question was left hanging, whether the platform was an arrogant overreaching for Jews, by asserting that the Hebrew Bible, and especially the prophets, had a distinctive if not unique role in spreading ethics and virtuous behavior to the rest of the world. In retrospect, the platform was bound to be followed by revisionism as Jews came to grips with the difficulty of reconciling their unique role based on Scripture with the fact that Judaism was perhaps like other religions in the world and should not stand accused of a sense of superiority.7

  Among the most controversial aspects of the Pittsburgh legacy was the way it defined the meaning of the “covenant” between Jews and God, the significance of the fact that Jews would continue living in exile and the redefinition of the Jewish distinction as a “chosen” people. In holding that Judaism reflects the “highest conception of the God idea” and that Judaism has “preserved and defended” this idea throughout history, the platform asserted that Jews undertook this obligation not simply because of history or because of their own virtue as a people, but because their covenant with God transformed them into a priestly people. “We are the heirs to a message, and we are vested with a mission to proclaim that message,” Rabbi Samuel E. Karff of Congregation Beth Israel in Houston, and a former president of the Central Conference of American Rabbis, wrote in the platform’s anniversary volume. Talmudic sages, Karff argued, assumed that for Jews to observe all 613 commandments at the root of the Talmud (by an ancient reckoning, the total number of positive and negative commandments in the written Torah) was their way of bearing witness to God. The Pittsburgh Platform, in contrast, saw the mission as one of a higher and more general moral purpose in the broader world of disparate religious beliefs and social welfare challenges. The platform effectively defined Jews as the custodians, not the sole proprietors, of universally applicable ethical rules.

  Recognizing that centuries of suffering had brought Jews to America to survive and thrive as full citizens, the authors of the platform demonstrated the readiness of American Jews to redefine the nature of their expulsion from the holy land in antiquity—to effectively rewrite their history. The platform rejected more explicitly than ever the idea that Jews were expelled from the land of Israel because of their sins. Citing certain Talmudic rulings that the Diaspora obliged Jews to bring truth to the world, Reform Jews developed the idea that Jews must achieve God’s purpose by “living and working in and with the world,” as Kohler enunciated it.

  Intertwined with that belief was the important and revolutionary idea that Israel was not a nation but a religious community that did not expect to return to Palestine or to sacrificing animals at the Temple, especially after the dawn of the twentieth century and certainly after World War II. “History has discredited Pittsburgh’s attitude toward Zionism,�
� wrote Karff, “but its attitude toward Diaspora remains abidingly valid.” Zionism and the establishment of Israel as a Jewish state, need not negate the mission of Jews in the Diaspora, in other words, Karff argued. Jews may carry out their priestly mission wherever they live, including in Zion. Equally important, the platform was revolutionary in embracing Christianity and Islam as heirs to the same origins in Abraham’s faith.8

  The Pittsburgh Platform enjoyed wide dissemination throughout America and Europe and was endorsed by various groups of rabbis who were not present at its creation. Wise reprinted the platform text in his American Israelite periodical, welcoming the prospect of healing his breach with radical followers of Einhorn. A new periodical called the Jewish Reformer was started by Rabbi Hirsch of Chicago, Einhorn’s other son-in-law, who was instrumental in developing its social justice provision, and Adolph Moses, of Louisville, with three portraits on its masthead: Moses Mendelssohn, the great Enlightenment thinker who paved the way for reformist ideas in the eighteenth century; Abraham Geiger, a founder of German Reform; and David Einhorn.

  The Pittsburgh Platform also speeded the movement to institute educational, cultural, and family programs at synagogues, elevate the role of women, and refocus attention on some ceremonies that had fallen away, notably Hanukkah and Sukkot, the harvest holiday following the opening of the autumnal new year. American Jews grew somewhat more comfortable calling themselves “Jews” or at least Jewish Americans, rather than using the adjective Hebrew or Israelite. The practice of calling rabbis minister or “the Reverend” took much longer to fade away.

  But Pittsburgh also marked the final abandonment of Wise’s earlier idea of one Judaism for all. Felix Adler of Ethical Culture condemned what he called its “race pride,” still arguing that Judaism could not reform and still call itself Judaism. Conservatives thoroughly rejected its tenets, and some members of Wise’s Union of American Hebrew Congregations withdrew from his organization, just as Wise had earlier feared.