Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Preface
- Contents
- Note on Editorial Practice
- Note on Transliteration
- Introduction: Modern Jewish Preaching
- Part I The Wars of the Napoleonic Era
- Part II The Wars of the Mid-Nineteenth Century
- Part III The Wars of the Late Nineteenth Century
- Part IV The First World War
- Part V The Second World War
- Part VI Wars of the Later Twentieth Century
- Part VII Responses to 9/11
- Source Acknowledgements
- Bibliography
- Index of Passages Cited
- General Index
25 - Maurice N. Eisendrath, ‘Blackout: How Long, O Lord, How Long?’, 21 September 1941, Toronto
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Preface
- Contents
- Note on Editorial Practice
- Note on Transliteration
- Introduction: Modern Jewish Preaching
- Part I The Wars of the Napoleonic Era
- Part II The Wars of the Mid-Nineteenth Century
- Part III The Wars of the Late Nineteenth Century
- Part IV The First World War
- Part V The Second World War
- Part VI Wars of the Later Twentieth Century
- Part VII Responses to 9/11
- Source Acknowledgements
- Bibliography
- Index of Passages Cited
- General Index
Summary
MAURICE NATHAN EISENDRATH served as President of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations from 1943 until shortly before his death in 1973. Before this, he was a congregational rabbi, briefly in West Virginia and then, for fourteen years beginning in 1943, at the Holy Blossom Temple of Toronto, the flagship congregation of Reform Judaism in Canada.
Born in 1902, Eisendrath grew up under the influence of Rabbi Felix A. Levy of Temple Emanuel on the north side of Chicago, and it may have been this example that made him decide at age 16 to study for the rabbinate. Levy himself, however, was a scholarly type (he earned a doctorate at the University of Chicago studying with the great Egyptologist James H. Breasted) who did not generally preach on currently controversial topics. He was indeed rather critical of the claims of some contemporary Reform rabbis to be the successors of the prophets and the spokesmen of ‘prophetic Judaism’. This was, how ever, precisely the mould of Eisendrath's own rabbinate, and in this he was perhaps influenced by the more charismatic Chicago preacher Emil G. Hirsch. The sermon reproduced below illustrates the fearless and forthright style, with its strong condemnations both of Canadian society and of Jewish behaviour, that would characterize Eisendrath's entire career.
Characteristic of the young liberal rabbis of this generation was a commitment to pacifism. Soon after coming to Toronto, Eisendrath became the president of the local chapter of the Fellowship of Reconciliation and in 1931 he attended its World Assembly in Holland. His passionate convictions are expressed in the following passage from a 1931 sermon:
Yes, still through the misled imagination of the masses march the militarists bearing the mendacious banners, ‘for home and fatherland’. But those banners lie. The war system has no right to bear such slogans; the war system is not the defender of any home or fatherland; the war system is the most flagrant enemy of every fatherland and every home and some few of us who are not ashamed to call ourselves pacifists would seek to snatch those banners from the hands which so long and so undeservedly have carried them and to put them where they belong—in the hands of the peacemakers whom alone the prophets and Jesus called ‘blessed’.
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- Information
- Jewish Preaching in Times of War, 1800–2001 , pp. 419 - 440Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2012