Author: דורון בר

Jonathan Matt

My father, Hershel Matt ז״ל (1922–87), used to say that he came to the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS)—where he was ordained in 1947—because of Mordecai Kaplan and stayed because of Abraham Joshua Heschel. I came to JTS because of Heschel and discovered Max Kadushin along the way. Since my ordination and aliyah in 1975, not a week passes without my noticing how much Israeli society could benefit from the insights of these two giants of Conservative/Masorti Judaism.

Most of Heschel’s writings have been translated into Hebrew, primarily by Dror Bondi, a lecturer at the Schechter Institutes of Jewish Studies, who has devoted much of his scholarly work to that enterprise and to producing and facilitating scholarship on Heschel. Bondi has also republished Torah min hashamayim baʾaspaqlariyah shel hadorot with chapter introductions and a revised version of volume 3 )based on newly discovered manuscripts(.1 He has been teaching Heschel in many contexts, including online courses offered by the Schechter Institute.

There have been a number of Heschel events in recent years. Three stand out among the most prominent. In December 2014, the Van Leer Institute and Schechter sponsored a three-day conference on Heschel. Speakers included Susannah Heschel, Eli Schweid, Arnold Eisen, Arthur Green, David Golinkin, Alex Even-Chen, Gordon Tucker, Michael Graetz, and Bondi. In June 2022, the World Zionist Organization organized a well-attended “Heschel Conference on Jewish Peoplehood” at the ANU Museum of the Jewish People (formerly beit hatefutsot). President Yizhak Herzog was among the speakers, as were Green, Bondi, and others. And, in December 2022, there were a number of events commemorating Heschel’s fiftieth yahrzeit. There is also an active Facebook group, Avraham Yehoshuʿa Heshel beYisraʾel.

Over fifty years ago, Avraham Holtz spent several summers teaching Kadushin’s writings to the central figures in the Shdemot/Oranim group, including Avraham Shapira. They encouraged Holtz to write Beʿolam hamaḥshavah shel ḥazal, which was published by Sifriat Poalim and JTS in 1978.2 Holtz’s book has been out of print for several years, with no plans to republish it. As far as I know, in Israel there have been no conferences on Kadushin, and there is no Facebook group.

Teaching Heschel and Kadushin in Israel

The study of Heschel and Kadushin is gradually emerging in Israel. For the past six years, I have been a participant and teacher in Maʿagalim, an Upper Galilee study group that includes Orthodox and non-Orthodox Israelis. In Maʿagalim, I taught a session on Heschel, followed by two sessions on Kadushin. The first part of this article is my report on these sessions, through which I discovered potential synergies between Heschel and Kadushin and a modest hope for the future of a healthy Israeli Judaism.

In the first session, I taught selections from The Prophets and from Torah min hashamayim. From the introduction to The Prophets: “By insisting on the absolutely objective and supernatural nature of prophecy, dogmatic theology has disregarded the prophet’s part in the prophetic act. Stressing revelation, it has ignored the response; isolating inspiration, it has lost sight of the human situation.”3 We discussed the connection between Heschel’s take on the prophets and his devotion to social action. Participants who had heard of Heschel had also encountered the iconic photo of Heschel marching in Selma with Martin Luther King., Jr.

From Torah min hashamayim, I taught the section on Shibber et haluḥot: The school of R. Ishmael follows the peshat of Exodus 32:18, with Moses shattering the tablets on his own initiative. R. Akiva contends that God commanded him to do so:

כתוב בתורה: וַיְהִי כַּאֲשֶׁר קָרַב אֶל הַמַּחֲנֶה וַיַּרְא אֶת הָעֵגֶל וּמְחֹלֹת וַיִּחַר אַף מֹשֶׁה וַיַּשְׁלֵךְ מידו [מִיָּדָיו] אֶת הַלֻּחֹת וַיְשַׁבֵּר אֹתָם תַּחַת הָהָר (שמות לב, יט). לפי הברייתא שהזכרנו למעלה, שיבר משה את הלוחות מדעתו. ואילו על פי רבי עקיבא, "לא שיבר משה את הלוחות, אלא שנאמר לו מפי הגבורה…" ⁴

In the Torah is written: “As Moses approached the camp and saw the calf and dances, Moses was angered, threw down the tablets, and shattered them at the foot of the mountain” (Exodus 32:10). According to the baraita that we mentioned above, Moses shattered the tablets on his own initiative. But according to Rabbi Akiva, Moses shattered the tablets only after God told him to do so.

For some of the Orthodox participants in Maʿagalim, Heschel’s emphasis on the extreme pluralism of ḥazal was challenging. But I was encouraged that a well-known rav dati leʾumi who participated enjoyed Heschel’s insights.

My second teaching session was on a follow-up question: מה איחד את חז״לינו, למרות חילוקי הדעות? (“What united the Sages, in spite of their divergent opinions?”) I based my response on Kadushin’s analysis of rabbinic value concepts. Toward the beginning of The Rabbinic Mind, Kadushin explains what he means by “value concepts.”⁵ He contrasts value concepts with “defined concepts” and “scientific concepts.” So far, so good. But he confused me when he contrasted value concepts with what he calls “cognitive concepts,” which he defines as “terms we use in order to describe whatever we perceive through the senses.” But if you Google “cognitive concept,” you come up with something like: “processes that control mental functions, such as communication, learning, classification.” What might be a better term?

Luckily, I came across Heschel’s paragraph on “Descriptive and Indicative Words”:

The human mind is a repository of a variety of ideas, some of which are definite and expressive while others resist definition and remain ineffable. Correspondingly, there are two kinds of words: descriptive words, which stand in a fixed relation to conventional and definite meanings, such as the concrete nouns, chair, table, or the terms of science; and indicative words, which stand in a fluid relation to ineffable meanings and, instead of describing, merely intimate something which we intuit but cannot fully comprehend.⁶

Through Heschel I understood Kadushin: defined, scientific, and “concrete” concepts are descriptive; value concepts are indicative. Holtz’s musagim qognitiviyim became musagim muḥashiyim.

We then proceeded to examine midrashim from Meḥilta, Parashat Beshalaḥ on:

(שמות יג:יז) וַיְהִי בְּשַׁלַּח פַּרְעֹה אֶת הָעָם וְלֹא נָחָם אֱ-לֹהִים דֶּרֶךְ אֶרֶץ פְּלִשְׁתִּים כִּי קָרוֹב הוּא כִּי אָמַר אֱ-לֹהִים פֶּן יִנָּחֵם הָעָם בִּרְאֹתָם מִלְחָמָה וְשָׁבוּ מִצְרָיְמָה.

Then it came to pass, when Pharaoh had let the people go, that God did not lead them by way of the land of the Philistines, although that was near; for God said, “Lest perhaps the people change their minds when they see war, and return to Egypt” (Exodus 13:17).

I based my teaching on Kadushin’s A Conceptual Approach to the Mekilta,7 emphasizing the following elements:

• Examples of rabbinic value concepts.
• Emphatic trends.
• Ḥazal were aware of the difference between peshat and derash.
• A midrash uses an (often minor) stimulus to emphasize one or more value concepts.
• Indeterminacy of belief (emunah bilti mequbaʿat) supports midrashim that diverge from the peshat and from one another.
• Even when ḥazal disagree on halakhah or agadah, they share a common universe of value concepts.

This time, it was the kibbutzniks in Maʿagalim who struggled with a paradigm change. They had grown up on the Tanakh, focused on understanding the plain sense of narratives. Although they had learned aggadah, they judged the validity of a midrash by how close it was to the plain sense. Although some Haredim would probably be troubled by research that draws a dichotomy between peshat and derash, the Orthodox members of Maʿagalim had no problem with Kadushin on this issue.

The Maʿagalim theme for 5783 was yaḥid vetsibur (“individual and community”). Again, I taught Kadushin, this time drawing on one of my favorite Kadushin books, Worship and Ethics.8 We started off with a review of value concepts, learning the first mishnah in Peʾah (which has become part of shaḥarit):

אלו דברים שאדם אוכל פרותיהם בעולם הזה והקרן קימת לעולם הבא...

One of the participants was critical of this mishnah combining into one list interpersonal, bein adam leḥavero value concepts (for example, gemilut ḥasadim, welcoming visitors, visiting the sick) with those bein adam lamaqom (“between humans and God”), such as prayer and learning Torah. But that was exactly Kadushin’s point:

The scope of the moral life, we repeat, cannot be described by a formula, not even by the formula “between a man and his fellow man.” That phrase, or its equivalent, is used by the rabbis in one context and in one context only, and it is not a general designation for ethics or morality. However the statements in which the phrase occurs may differ in expression, the context in those statements is always the same, namely, the sins forgiven and the sins not forgiven by God.9

The “scope of the [Jewish] moral life” is mediated through the value concepts, not through generalizations.

Kadushin has a beautiful section on berakhot as gemilut ḥasadim (“blessings” as “acts of lovingkindness”), 10 which I used to teach the wedding sheva berakhot for my topic “Zug, tsibur, vehaqadosh barukh hu” (“The Couple, the Community, and God”). Kadushin points out that, in the fifth berakhah,

[t]he zibbur as a whole engaged in an act of gemilut ḥasadim when, through the ḥazzan as deputy, it prayed for the bride and groom. “O make these loved companions greatly to rejoice, even as of old Thou didst gladden Thy creature in the Garden of Eden. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, Who makest bridegroom and bride to rejoice.”11

Asking God to gladden the couple is a powerful example of gemilut ḥasadim.

So far, we have encountered several comparisons between the works of Heschel and Kadushin. Next, I would like to consider some more comparisons, with some surprising results.

Academic Rigor with Spiritual Relevance

It was important for both Heschel and Kadushin that their works be judged by academic standards. Because Judaism covers such a long time span, most academic scholars concentrate on (at most) one phase of Jewish history: biblical, rabbinic, medieval, or modern. But, as Samuel Dresner wrote of Heschel, “[h]e contributed major works in fields each of which required their own separate disciplines: Bible, rabbinics, philosophy, Hasidism, theology and ethics, among others.”12 Heschel and Kadushin both faced a number of religious challenges while remaining faithful to the academic context: drawing into their academic writings the reality of God that each experienced, searching for connections among the various stages of Judaism, and enabling moderns to find spiritual insight from our classic sources.

Heschel’s doctorate, Die Prophetie limited its scope to the biblical prophets.13 But the introduction he wrote when it was translated and adapted as The Prophets foreshadows the influence this work had on Heschel’s social activism and on the civil rights movement: “The prophet was an individual who said No to his society, condemning its habits and assumptions, its complacency, waywardness, and syncretism.”14 In Torah min hashamayim, Heschel argued that rabbinic Judaism can be viewed as typified by divergence between the schools of R. Akiva and R. Ishmael. Although his starting point was the rabbinic period, Heschel found this schema useful for organizing later stages in Judaism into these two schools. For example, the rationalism of Maimonides is reminiscent of R. Ishmael and the Zohar and the Hasidism of R. Akiva. Fritz Rothschild wrote of Heschel: “In his writings on religion he combines the yearning for holiness and spirituality of his Hasidic ancestors with the yearning for free inquiry and objective truth of the modern Western scholar.”15

Kadushin’s background was Kaplanian rather than Hasidic.16 But, as Jacob Neusner writes, “Kadushin left Kaplan’s secularism for the sake of his own fidelity to rabbinic Judaism.”17 Kadushin’s “fidelity to rabbinic Judaism” was the sometimes frustrating substructure of both of my classes with him during my years at JTS (1971–75). On several occasions, we students would ask how one might integrate the world of rabbinic value concepts into a modern Judaism. I do not recollect Kadushin’s exact response, but it was probably something like “First make sure that you understand rabbinic Judaism.”

Theodore Steinberg writes that Kadushin’s personal Judaism was firmly rooted in rabbinic Judaism:

On the closing page of Organic Thinking, Kadushin cautiously stated his emerging understanding of the nature of religious change and reinterpretation. Unlike Kaplan, he wrote not of a deliberate, experimental search for modern equivalents of old values—the heart of the Reconstructionist approach—but rather of an intricate, even mysterious process “…whereby the old organic complex is transposed in its entirety to a new level.” In his subsequent books, Kadushin never mentioned the subjects of theological change and modernization, the two central themes of Reconstructionism.

Had Kadushin become a religious conservative? Years later, he reflected on this shift in his thinking, and stated that he had not become a “conservative,” but rather an “unreconstructed partisan of tradition.” His studies convinced him that the classical Judaism of the rabbinic era was neither outmoded nor anachronistic, but, on the contrary, quire durable and perennially relevant.18

All of Kadushin’s works—but especially Worship and Ethics—are great aids to the spiritual life.

From the Tanakh to Modern Judaism

Not only do scholars of Judaism tend to concentrate on one phase of Jewish history, they often seem to feel that it is not valid to mention two different stages in the same breath. It is here that we encounter further common ground between Heschel and Kadushin. Kadushin’s take on midrash, mentioned above, recognizes that connections between biblical peshat and rabbinic derash can be extremely tenuous. The rationale of derash is to emphasize rabbinic value concepts. However, Kadushin argues that “there is no rabbinic concept that does not have its roots in biblical thought.”19 He describes three types of rabbinic concepts, as far as their relationship to the Bible is concerned: First are concepts having conceptual terms that are not to be found in the Bible but are foreshadowed in the Bible. Second, concepts for which the conceptual term is the same as the biblical but with wider, more universal, connotations. And, finally, concepts for which the term appears in the Bible but for which there is no definite connection between the biblical term and the rabbinic term (goy, nes, and tsedakah, for example).

In general, “A living bond unites the Bible with rabbinic thought. Even though rabbinic thought possesses its own concepts, it remains in a state of continuous dependence on the Bible.”20 Many of Heschel’s books span more than one period. The Sabbath draws on biblical, rabbinic, and mystical aspects of Judaism to suggest Shabbat as a spiritual cure for modern Jewry and Western civilization in general.21 God in Search of Man builds a philosophy of Judaism on the entire range of Jewish sources. And Torah min hashamayim focuses on the rabbinic period. But, as baʾaspaqlariyah shel hadorot (“as refracted through the generations” 22) implies, Heschel argues that the approaches of Akiva and Ishmael offer an insightful way of categorizing post-rabbinic Judaism as well. Thus, both Heschel and Kadushin have managed to bridge the gaps between periods of Jewish history.

Kadushin and Heschel on Maimonides

There are both similarities and differences between Kadushin and Heschel on Maimonides. Above, I referred to Kadushin’s criticism of Maimonides on the issue of bein adam lamaqom/ bein adam leḥavero. Although Kadushin points out that Maimonides himself qualifies the dichotomy in the Guide, there are many issues on which Kadushin emphasizes how greatly Maimonides and other philosophers diverge from rabbinic Judaism; see, for example, The Rabbinic Mind on the question of anthropomorphism.23

Heschel wrote a very sympathetic biography of Maimonides.24 Yet he points out that “It was not the codifier and ‘guide’ Maimonides but the commentator Rashi who became the shaper, teacher, and educator of his people; it was not the metaphysics of Maimonides but the Cabala and Hasidism that molded the future.”25 In The Prophets, Heschel clearly diverges from Maimonides’s denial of divine pathos, describing the prophetic response as one of sympathy with the divine pathos.26 Rothschild points out that, on this issue, Heschel “has propounded a truly revolutionary doctrine, challenging the whole venerable tradition of Jewish and Christian metaphysical theology from Philo, Maimonides, and Thomas Aquinas to Herman Cohen, Etienne Gilson, and Paul Tillich.”27

Torah min hashamayim is a work of research rather than a book of Heschel’s philosophy. Yet, for one who grew up on Man is not Alone and God in Search of Man, reading Torah min hashamayim involves an ongoing search to discover on which issues Heschel’s personal philosophy of Judaism was closer to Akiva or to Ishmael.28 Similarly—regarding Heschel’s numerous citations of the works of Maimonides, often identifying him with the school of R. Ishmael—it is intriguing to speculate on Heschel’s personal preference.29 A systematic explication of this topic is beyond the scope of this article.

The God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Ḥazal and Ḥasidut

When Blaise Pascal died in Paris in 1662, found sewn into the lining of his coat was a sheet of paper on which was written: “God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of the philosophers and the scholars. I will not forget thy word. Amen.” Such a note in the lining of Heschel’s coat might have read “The God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Ḥazal and Ḥasidut, not of the philosophers and the scholars.” Heschel wrote:

Where an idea is the father of faith, faith must conform to the ideas of the given system. In the Bible the realness of God came first, and the task was how to live in a way compatible with His presence. Man’s coexistence with God determines the course of history.30

There are no proofs for the existence of the God of Abraham. There are only witnesses.31

Although Kadushin did not write a personal philosophy of Judaism, he gave the impression that rabbinic Judaism filled his spiritual needs. He described the nonphilosophical approach to the God of rabbinic Judaism as “normal mysticism.”

There is an experience of God in an act of rabbinic worship. To the individual who says a berakah, God seems so near that he addresses God with the pronoun “Thou,” just as he would address a person facing him. “Thou” is the only word which can express the sense of God’s nearness, yet the feeling of God’s nearness is obviously different from anything the individual may feel when he addresses a fellow human being with the same pronoun…. We have, therefore, called the rabbinic experience of God normal mysticism.32

Heschel and Kadushin seem to be of one mind that experience of God—rather than philosophy—is the essence of Judaism.

Kadushin, Akiva, and Ishmael

Volumes 1 and 2 of Torah min hashamayim were published during Heschel’s lifetime. Those volumes were a pleasure to read, but I felt the lack of a conclusion that put the differences between the schools of Akiva and Ishmael into a conceptual framework. David Feldman expressed this lack in his introduction to Heschel’s posthumously published volume 3:

אלה שהגו בכרכים הראשונים העלו להם ידיעה רחבה בגלגול השיטות—אלא שלא מצאו בזה סיפוק כל צרכם. הם צמאו למשהו יותר קבוע ומכריע, למסקנות יותר מוחלטות של המחבר.³³

Those who studied the first volumes acquired a broad understanding of the two schools—but were left unsatisfied. They were thirsty for something more decisive, for more definitive conclusions of the author.34

But I still felt the lack of a conceptual conclusion after reading that 1990 version of volume 3. In 2021, Bondi published a revised version of volume 3 as part of the republication of the entire set.35 He discovered that significant parts of volume 3 had been omitted, which he restored from Heschel’s manuscripts. But, in spite of Bondi’s restoration (and incisive foreward, chapter introductions, and summaries), I still felt the lack of a top-level conceptual context that would give coherence to each of the two schools.

I then began to reread Torah min hashamayim through the eyes of Kadushin, hoping that perhaps his categories might provide a conceptual context for the differences between the schools of Akiva and Ishmael. So far, I have found only partial success, which I share below. I am not alone in my quest to see Heschel through Kadushin, as attested in a footnote in Shai Held’s Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Call of Transcendence.36

The Otherness of God

In The Rabbinic Mind, Kadushin examines whether Ḥazal were troubled by anthropomorphisms in the Tanakh. “...the Rabbis apparently object to biblical statements about God that appear to limit Him…. ‘And the Lord went before them by day (Exod. 13:21)’—is it possible to say so? Has it not been said: “Do not I fill heaven and earth, saith the Lord” (Jer. 23:24)?”37 Kadushin’s conclusion is:

One of the prime characteristics of normal mysticism is…that God is like none other….”38 But though these passages express the idea of the otherness of God, and hence do cultivate it, they do not stress it. The idea, in these instances, only serves as background, and against that background are stressed God’s love and His justice.39

Throughout all of his works, Kadushin is careful to differentiate between rabbinic conceptual terms (here midat hadin, or God’s quality of justice, and midat raḥamim, or God’s quality of love) and his own terminology, such as the “idea” of the otherness of God.

My sense is that the school of Ishmael could be described as emphasizing the otherness of God to a greater extent than the school of Akiva.40 For example:

'ואהבת את ה׳ א-להיך' (דברים ו, ה). לפי פשוטו של מקרא, אהבת א-להים היא כלות הנפש אל הבורא, דבר שבלב. כנגד זה פירשוה בבית מדרשו של רבי ישמעאל כדרך שפירשו את דבר הדביקות: אהבה היא מידת העושים מעשים טובים…כנגד זה פירש רבי עקיבא את הכתוב כפשוטו, ואמר על עצמו: "רחמתיה בכל לבי…" 41

“Love the Lord your God” (Deuteronomy 6:5). According to the plain sense of the text, love of God is the yearning of one’s soul for the Creator, a matter of the heart. But contrary to this, the school of Rabbi Ishmael explained it as they did the matter of clinging to God: love [of God] is the quality of those who perform good deeds. However, Rabbi Akiva explained the verse according to its plain sense, and said of himself: “I loved Him with all my heart.”

And from Heschel’s introduction to Torah min hashamayim:

זרה היתה למשנתו של רבי ישמעאל דעתו של רבי עקיבא, שהקדוש ברוך הוא משתתף בצערן של הבריות, בצרתם של יהודים ובצרה של האומה. דעה זו אינה הולמת את הכבוד, ועלולה להביא לידי כפירה בגבורותיו של הקדוש ברוך הוא. במשנתו של רבי ישמעאל, מידת הדין וגבורותיו של המקום עיקר, ולא מידת הרחמים.42

Rabbi Akiva’s position—that God shares in human pain, in the suffering of Jews, and in the suffering of the nation—was strange to the approach of Rabbi Ishmael. [According to Ishmael,] such a position does not suit God’s majesty and may lead to denying the powers of the Holy One, blessed be He. According to the approach of Rabbi Ishmael, midat hadin and the powers of the Omnipresent are primary, not midat haraḥamim.

It is tempting to generalize the preceding sentence into a claim that Akiva consistently emphasized midat raḥamim and Ishmael midat hadin. Such a generalization might have indicated that Kadushin’s “value concept” terminology is helpful in differentiating between the two schools.43 However, in Heschel’s chapter on bʾemah vepaḥad (“with fear and tembling”), we learn that the dichotomy is not consistent: בפנים שמחות, בפנים מסבירות לרבי ישמעאל; בפנים זועפות, בפנים הדופות לרבי עקיבא (“A pleasant expression on the face of Rabbi Ishmael; an angry expression on the face of Rabbi Akiva”).44 And again of Ishmael: הוא נטה כלפי חסד (“He tended toward lovingkindness”)45

Miracles

Another similarity between Heschel and Kadushin is the concept of miracles. Kadushin describes two phases of nes. One involves miracles that require a change in sidre Bereshit, and the other involves daily miracles. This second phase “also encompasses unusual happenings to the individual and striking events of importance to the nation, but these, too, are such as do not involve any change in sidre Bereshit.” 46 In Torah min hashamayim, Heschel writes:

דרשותיו של ר׳ עקיבא בדרך הפלגת הנסים לא היו תמיד לרצון בעיני חבריו. "וַתַּעַל הַצְּפַרְדֵּעַ וַתְּכַס אֶת אֶרֶץ מִצְרָיִם" (שמות ח, ב). רבי עקיבא אומר: צפרדע אחת היתה (והיא השריצה) ומלאה את כל ארץ מצרים. אמר לו רבי אלעזר בן עזריה עקיבא, מה לך אצל אגדות? כלה מדברותיך ולך אצל נגעים ואהלות! בעיקר התנגד רבי ישמעאל לדרשותיו אלה של רבי עקיבא.⁴⁷

The midrashim of Rabbi Akiva expanding [biblical] miracles did not always find favor in the eyes of his colleagues. “‘And the frogs [literally: frog] came up and covered the land of Egypt” (Exodus 8:2). Rabbi Akiva said: It was a single frog that spawned and filled the land of Egypt. Elazar the son of Azaria said to him: Akiva, Why are you involved with agadah? Stop speaking; go deal with [impurities related to] skin diseases and tents.” It was mainly Rabbi Ishmael who opposed such midrashim of Rabbi Akiva.

In a footnote to this passage, Heschel cites the pages in The Rabbinic Mind that refer to Kadushin’s description of the “rationalistic tendency” of some of the rabbis regarding the “change in sidre Bereshit” phase of nes, with Kadushin concluding: “The rationalistic tendency is not a dominant one.”48 In God in Search of Man, Heschel also writes of daily miracles:

The profound and perpetual awareness of the wonder of being has become a part of the religious consciousness of the Jew. Three times a day we pray:

We thank Thee…

For Thy miracles which are daily with us,

For Thy continual marvels….

The sense for the “miracles which are daily with us,” the sense for the “continual marvels,” is the source of prayer.49

Communication between Heschel and Kadushin

In April 1939, Heschel received a lifesaving invitation to join the faculty of the Hebrew Union College (HUC) in Cincinnati, and he reached the shores of America and joined the institution in the spring of 1940. Heschel was at HUC for five years before his appointment as Professor of Jewish Ethics and Mysticism at JTS in 1945.50

Kadushin published his first work, The Theology of Seder Eliahu in 1932.51 His following works—Organic Thinking (1938) and The Rabbinic Mind (1952)—were published by JTS.52 However, Kadushin became part of the JTS faculty only in 1960, as Visiting Professor of Ethics and Rabbinic Thought. Kadushin served in this capacity at JTS until his death in 1980.

Kadushin and Heschel corresponded in November 1943 as Kadushin sought to submit his article “Aspects of the Rabbinic Concept of Israel” to the Hebrew Union College Annual (HUCA). Kadushin sent a draft of the article to Heschel, asking him to recommend it for publication in HUCA. In box 3 of the Max Kadushin Papers is Heschel’s cordial response, with comments, and his conclusion: “I should be very glad to recommend your paper to the HUCA.”53 Kadushin’s article appeared in HUCA two years later, even though Kadushin had not implemented Heschel’s comment on Torah and haTorah.54

In Torah min hashamayim, Heschel cites Kadushin’s article. With his exemplary derekh erets, Heschel handles Kadushin’s decision not to implement his 1943 comment as follows: על פי דעתי, "התורה" משמע כל התורה, "תורה" מה שניתן בסיני (“In his opinion, hatorah implies the entire Torah, torah [only] what was given at Sinai”).55 Also intriguing in the 1943 letter is Heschel’s “Some day I hope to have the opportunity of discussing with you the method which you apply in this paper.” The opportunity was certainly there between 1960, when Kadushin joined the JTS faculty and Heschel’s death in 1972. Although I have not yet discovered specific reports of close friendship between Heschel and Kadushin, Michael Graetz writes of the JTS faculty during those years: “There was friendship between all of them…. They lived close to each other, and usually we students would walk them home after Shabbat services (often with an invitation for schnaps or herring, etc.).”56 There is at least one additional cross-reference to Kadushin in Torah min hashamayim.57 In Kadushin’s writings, I have come across two cross-references to works of Heschel.58

The Future of Heschel and Kadushin in Israel

Heschel is Heschel, and most of his major writings are now accessible in Hebrew, with Bondi now preparing a translation of The Prophets. Although it is unlikely that these volumes will become part of high school curricula under the current government, Bondi, Graetz, Green, and others are teaching Heschel to interested adult Israelis. In spite of all that Kadushin has to offer, Holtz’s beʿolam hamaḥshavah shel ḥazal is out of print, with no plans to republish. I would like to translate Worship and Ethics into Hebrew and have begun exploring that option.

From teaching Heschel and Kadushin in Israel, I know that the insights of both can be helpful to Israelis searching for a Judaism that is both intellectually honest and spiritually inspiring. It is important that both become more influential in Israeli society. Are there signs of hope? Are there things we can do to encourage the process? Although Masorti has much in common with Israeli Reform, Israelis with a dati leʾumi background seem to connect more easily with Masorti scholarship than with Reform. As Heschel and Kadushin were both on the JTS faculty, our continuing support of Schechter and Masorti congregations is certainly a part of the process. The upcoming Rabbinical Assembly convention in Israel will certainly contribute to the process.

The Israeli world has changed drastically since I wrote my first draft of this article in the summer of 2023. On October 8, my wife Noa and I drove out of our (Lebanese-border) Kibbutz Malkiya, warned that what happened on the Gaza border could also happen up north. We are now at Kibbutz Kramim in the eastern Negev, a relatively safe area. What brought us to Kramim was the combination of a government-funded stay at their country lodging with wanting to help Noa’s daughter and her family, who live there. We are also developing friendships with refugees from the Gaza envelope to whom Kramim has opened its doors and its hearts. Although Kramim is not a kibbuts dati, it has an active beit knesset. It is a value-laden and pluralistic kibbutz, with members of all ʿedot and levels of observance. Israelis like those at Kramim give me further hope for the future of Israeli Judaism.

Jonathan Matt was ordained at JTS in 1975, and made Aliyah that summer. At times of peace, he and his wife Noa live at Kibbutz Malkiya, on the Lebanese border.

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Chaya Rowen Baker

I was asked to write this letter about one month into the war but was also asked to write as close as possible to publication, so that the letter would be timely. Rabbi Joe Prouser, editor of this esteemed journal, wisely knew that Israel in February would be different from Israel in November.

While there still are many similarities, looking back on the last four months feels like reflecting on four years. It’s hard to recall life before October 7, and thinking about everything that has happened since makes me emotionally dizzy. We have gone from sheer horror and intense fear to unsurmountable grief and constant anxiety, to anger and disappointment, to despair and searching for hope, to appreciation of what we have and survivor guilt. With all that and more, we are trying to live. We need to go to work, make dinner, do the laundry and walk the dog—normal things…when life is anything but normal and everything is clouded by sadness and worry for our loved ones.

It’s hard to describe the emotional effort necessary to encompass the dissonance between these opposing states of being. It takes a huge effort just to get out of bed each morning and live, when “living” has become such a taxing experience: listening with dread to the radio on the way to work, hearing the list of soldiers who fell the day before to see if you know any of them, breathing a sigh of relief when the anchor has finished the list because you don’t know any of them but then feeling awful to be relieved while for other families the world has ended, fighting traffic and suddenly realizing that the person who cut in ahead of you might be in a hurry to see a loved one in hospital or a mother rushing to work, having left late because she is single parenting while her husband is in the army, or one of the ninety thousand displaced Israelis still living as refugees—some after losing loved ones to brutal murder or to captivity or to severe trauma—strangers in their temporary city and not knowing how to navigate life, then arriving at work and needing to function normally with mundane tasks and demands. At the end of such a work day you return home to care for your scared and worried children, who—despite your best efforts—have inevitably been exposed to human behavior which no one at any age should ever imagine possible. If you are lucky, your whole family is waiting for you at home. If not, you return to a family having to function without a father or a mother or a grown sibling because they are away at war, and even if everyone is home you might be enjoying one another’s company on borrowed time. My husband, who returned home two months ago after two months of miluim (military reserve duty), has been drafted for another six weeks, scheduled to begin two weeks hence. Not a moment of joy goes by in our family without a dark cloud looming over us as a ticking clock.

The sense of profound sadness and intense dread in which we are all wallowing has yielded a change in how we speak to one another. It has become pretty much taboo to greet one another with any phrase using the word “good”: morning, evening, afternoon, week, month. The greeting Shabbat Shalom is widely used and said intentionally, and the common greeting for ending a conversation has become besorot tovot (we should hear good news). If you make the mistake of asking someone any version of mah shlomkha (“How are you?”) the answer will seldom be the standard “fine” or “great” or even “OK.” Even though normally both the question and the answer are mere pleasantries, at this point in Israel if you ask Mah nishma? (“How’s it going?”) you will likely receive the person’s explanation of how they came to develop the answer they give.

Because we are most definitely not OK.

How are we?

Agility, Solidarity, and “Showing Up”

On the morning of October 7, after a few minutes in our bomb shelter, my family and I were preparing to leave for synagogue when the president of the congregation knocked on our door. She had come to confer whether we should hold services that morning.

“Of course,” I said immediately. “There is a bomb shelter at the synagogue. We will restrain the Simḥat Torah celebrations but this is exactly the time to pray and be together.”

“I’m not sure you know how bad it is,” she replied. “Terrorists are driving around the town of Sderot, and twenty people have been killed.”

Twenty people murdered in a terrorist attack! The number brought back memories of suicide bombings. Indeed, it was horrid. We went to synagogue, where a small crowd gathered. Some congregants who normally wouldn’t had brought their cellphones. There was fear and trepidation in everyone’s eyes, yet it was comforting to be together. I announced that we were going to shorten the hakafot (the festive dancing around the room with the Torah) and sing one mellow song of peace, comfort, or prayer for deliverance for each hakafah. We ended up singing song after song in this manner.

Sirens disturbed our prayers again and again. The entire country was under attack. After running downstairs to the bomb shelter three times, we decided just to stay there and complete our prayers in the bomb shelter. We felt safe in the bomb shelter. Little did we know that the real danger was not one from which a bomb shelter could save you—that from that day on none of us would ever feel fully safe even in our locked home.

We carried down the Torah and all its paraphernalia. We sang and marched sadly around in a circular embrace, and it was surreal and powerful and awful. We wept as we prayed for Israel, for the safety of our soldiers, and for peace. As the news came in through those with relatives in southern Israel, every word in the service became ever so fraught with meaning: ʿOzi vezimrat Yah vayehi li liyshua (“Strength of spirit and God’s song shall be my salvation”), Min hameitsar qarati Yah (“In my distress I call out to God”), and Ana Adonai hoshia naʾ (“Please, God, save us!”)

Those long hours witnessed some of Israel’s most courageous battles, fought not only by soldiers on duty but also by armed civilians, off-duty police personnel, and soldiers on leave or reservists. They surged, unprompted, barefoot and in their undergarments, to the battlefield—a battlefield of homes and kibbutz paths and a music festival (!). Women’s combat units fiercely repelled the barbaric enemy, saving hundreds of lives in the foe’s murderous and torturous path. In minutes, units mobilized to protect the breached border and literally to reconquer entire Israeli villages, blood-drenched home by home, amidst the heavy stench of burnt flesh and climbing over dismembered bodies, some of them booby-trapped.

I will never cease being in awe of the bravery and dedication that leads a person to run toward fire. Not for love of death but for love of life.

By evening that day, we were shocked to learn that the number of people murdered was likely going to exceed the number of soldiers killed in the Second Lebanese War—121. That sounded unreal. How oblivious we were.

The horrific details of the attack—its scope and viciousness—took time to unfold. We cast doubt on the rumor of a couple dozen civilians having been abducted from their homes into Gaza—how could that be true? In reality the figure was over 240! As the days passed, reports came in of many hundreds more murdered—entire families, elderly who could not hold the saferoom door handle shut, parents slaughtered in front of their children…and bodies that remained unidentified weeks later, despite forensic teams working full force around the clock, because they were so disfigured.

Funerals with no bodies, because the bodies had been taken to Gaza; temporary burials; shiva on the heel of shiva; staggering evidence of sexual violence…. As the proportions of this atrocity were revealed, I found it hard to fathom the blindly unchanging attitude of our critics. How could those who condoned the attack on October 7 itself not adjust their response in the slightest, in the light of what had become known by October 14? Do information and reality really carry so little weight in molding opinion?

A refreshing agility of thought is surfacing in Israel. We have lost faith in constants; while terrible and disconcerting, this is also humbling. We all know in theory that reality can change in a moment, but for us in Israel radical and instantaneous change has become part of our daily routine. As a result, many of us are reconsidering truths and cultural norms, rearranging priorities, as our values take on new proportions and perspectives. Israelis are finding renewed appreciation of one another, bringing to the fore values of devotion, dedication, selflessness, and mutual support. Classical political “Right” and “Left” are wavering. While obviously not all change is desirable, I find this reexamination of paradigms to be inspiring and liberating.

The biblical verb for changing one’s mind stems from the same root as the word nehama (“comfort, consolation”), as in Genesis 6:7: ki nihamti ki asitim (“for I regret that I made them”). The rabbinic verb for reconsidering is nimlakh, from the same root as melekh (“king”). Our heritage conveys the important message that flexibility of thought and ability to change paradigms are divine traits, charged with connotations of leadership and consolation.

Toward the end of that dreadful Shabbat, my husband (47) received a call. At that point we were answering the phone, which we normally wouldn’t on Shabbat, anxious to hear that our daughter, who serves in a combat unit on the Egyptian border, was okay, and dreading the ring because it might mean otherwise.

He answered the phone, and on the line was a recording demanding that he depart immediately for his unit’s base in the North. He is an infantry soldier, who has continued to volunteer for miluim since his official discharge at age forty.

Our children broke down in tears, knowing only a fraction of the horrors that had occurred that day and of the war that lay ahead. With sobbing and fearful children and a wife lying—as it turns out—to herself and to them that it would only be for a few days until things calmed down, my husband packed his army equipment and drove off.

Later that night my daughter called to say they were being deployed to the Gaza envelope to guard the kibbutzim there and to search for terrorists who were still at large. From that moment on I stopped breathing.

With a husband serving on the Lebanese border, still under attack since October 8, and a daughter serving on the Gazan border, I needed to worry about the safety of my three children with me at home. We live in a neighborhood of Jerusalem that borders on two hostile East Jerusalem neighborhoods, home to several known Hamas terrorists. The police do not enter these villages without army accompaniment. For the first few weeks we heard shooting from the villages every night. Six days into the war our neighborhood went into lockdown because of information about shooting near our home. My nighttime routine included locking the porch doors with the small latch that separates us from the outside, and pulling down the blinds (we have no bars), thinking this might give us another ten to twenty seconds to find a place to hide when terrorists come to our porch with guns. I did not let my children sleep in rooms in the side of the house facing the other direction because they have no blinds, so a rifle could be inserted directly into the room through the bars. Such were the considerations and calculations of mothers in Israel every night: How do I protect my family while alone, afraid, and the only weapon at my disposal is my common sense?

One late, sleepless night I wrote to the listserv of women rabbis around the world about how we were doing. At 2 a.m. I described how my type-A personality had me convinced that if I was awake and aware I could protect my soldiers with my thoughts, and therefore I could not go to sleep and leave them unprotected. The outpouring of support that ensued still brings me to tears. A dear colleague wrote lovingly, from a distant time zone, “You can go to sleep, Chaya. I am awake, I will take the night shift.”

As others followed suit I found myself sobbing. I realized that we are a people who cannot be defeated; a people who makes sure there is always someone awake to protect the fold. Perhaps this is another way of reading the verse Hineih lo yanum velo yishan Shomer Yisrael (“Behold, the Keeper of Israel shall not sleep nor slumber,” Psalm 121:4).

The level of stress and distress in Israel is overwhelming. So many families are missing loved ones; 136 abductees hang between life and death; scores of thousands of children are scarred for life, some having to cope without the embrace, guidance, and protection of parents; thousands of men and women will never heal from the smells and sights they encountered as victims, relief forces, or forensic specialists; hundreds of thousands of Israelis for the next six or seven decades will carry wounds, some of them visible, others not. The list of pain and damage goes on and on.

Everyone is hurting. So, who will help whom? And yet…somehow there is an outpouring of initiative, kindness, compassion, and resilience among Israelis and from Jewish communities around the world, offering all sorts of assistance to families of victims and abductees, to evacuees, to soldiers and their families, to the families of fallen or wounded soldiers…you name the need, someone has created a situation room to help. People have opened their homes and given of their time, money, and talents with immeasurable generosity. This is a glimpse of the Israel we once knew, of the sense of peoplehood we recall sharing with diaspora Jewry—and it is refreshing and centering.

Sanctifying Life

We are still in the thick of a difficult war. At this moment 136 abductees are still being kept hostage in Gaza. Even now, four months into the war, Hamas continues to fire missiles at civilian populations in Israel. Its military power has been diminished but not annihilated. Israeli evacuees still cannot return safely to their homes. Our soldiers are fighting a battle unprecedented in its complexity, because the enemy does not distinguish between civilians and soldiers—neither among us (every male over eighteen is a potential soldier, and all civilians are a fair target) nor among their own people. They disguise themselves as, are embedded in, and hide behind civilian populations. The IDF aims to fight only against military combatants, not civilians, but sometimes it is hard to tell the difference, especially when our soldiers find a weapon stash under a baby’s crib, or when missiles are launched from within a school or a hospital.

The IDF strives to hold itself to a high moral standard and to condemn any wanton malice—a difficult task when faced with such criminal warfare. I have heard firsthand from soldiers who wrote letters of apology on the walls of ruined Gazan homes, although unfortunately there are those who fall short of that standard. In what seems to be a redefining moment in the IDF ethos, its challenging mission is to save Israeli lives while upholding its commitment to morality of the highest standard, inspired by the sanctity of life.

Sanctifying life means recognizing the value of Palestinian lives, too; acknowledging them as parents, as siblings and spouses, as home owners, as people who need stability, security, and faith in the good, just like anyone else. Gazan families are suffering terribly, too, many of them also displaced from their homes, in mourning, and afraid. It is hard for some of us—even for peace activists—to summon such compassion at this point in the war. It is also hard for us, knowing that the lives of our relatives serving in the war are put at greater risk for the sake of protecting Hamas’s human shield. That, too, is a part of how we are. Some Israelis are capable of such magnanimity. Others are still very much inside their shells, too fraught with pain to think about others’ well-being right now.

In this entangled reality we look at our young soldiers, perhaps our children and grandchildren, in awe at their stamina, determination, and dedication—traits we were not sure this young, comfortable generation necessarily had. We pray for their safety, but we are also proud of their readiness to put their lives on the line to protect our nation, and we encourage them to do so.

Parents face a terrible conflict. No parent in their right mind would knowingly encourage their child to put their life at risk, but moments like these with existential ramifications also make you think about how “life” is not only breath and pulse, but also direction and inner strength and purpose.

On one of my many dark, late nights I made the mistake of engaging in a Facebook correspondence with an October 7 denier. After a long futile exchange, she ended with “Free Palestine,” and I replied with ʿAm Yisraʾel ḥai (“the People of Israel lives”). I am proud that in juxtaposition to the genocidal call to rid Israel of its Jewish inhabitants, the Israeli “slogan” for this war is an expression of peoplehood and life—death only when necessary to serve the value of life, and life in spite of death.

The sentiment “We love death as you love life” has been expressed by terrorists such as Mohammad Sidique Khan and Osama bin Laden and is quoted proudly by members and supporters of Hamas. Its champions assume that since Islamic terrorists are eager to die they are untouchable by the Western world, whereas Westerners are weakened by their love of life, because at war they have everything to lose.

Israelis have a strange combination of loving life but also being willing to die for it. It is an approach deeply rooted in Jewish heritage: Life is to be protected at all cost, even at the price of transgressing all of the mitsvot; all but the prohibitions of murder, incest, or idol worship—representing extreme harm to others, or to our spiritual identity. We do not aspire to martyrdom, but we are willing to endure it if our spiritual existence is threatened: our loved ones, our people, and our right to live freely as Jews.

Dying for life is a paradox, and for that very reason it holds a strength and depth of meaning and purpose that neither component alone can provide. That is why we will prevail.

ʿAm Yisraʾel ḥai.

Rabbi Chaya Rowen Baker is Dean of the Schechter Rabbinical Seminary (SRS) in Jerusalem. Ordained by SRS in 2007, Rabbi Rowen Baker served as the rabbi of Kehillat Ramot Zion in French Hill, Jerusalem, for sixteen years and headed practical rabbinics training at SRS for seven years. Rabbi Rowen Baker was the first Masorti rabbi—and the first female rabbi—ever to be invited to teach Torah at Beit Hanasi, the Israeli President’s residence.

Ismar Schorsch

Since stepping down as chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary in 2006, I have lived much of my life in reverse, seeking to understand the nature of my roots. On each visit back to Esslingen (where my mother was born) and Hanover (where my fathr served as rabbi from 1927 to 1938), I was asked to speak, and each time I chose to explore an aspect of my father’s rabbinate associated with the place. To my surprise, although written separately, the individual pieces added up to a memorable portrait of a rabbi whose deep faith was wrapped in integrity and hard work. Despite the infrequent overlaps, I offer it as if, in retrospect, inspired by a singular vision of the whole. To complete the portrait, I added over the past summer a chapter on my father’s twenty-four-year rabbinic career in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, for which I could serve as a primary source. Sometimes our most precious treasure lies buried in our own heirlooms.

— October 13, 2023, Erev Shabbat Bereshit 5784

My Father and the Great War

I wish to express my admiration to Esslingen for its bold and enlightened decision to turn the one hundredthh anniversary of World War I into an ongoing teaching experience for the entire community. At this point, after more than three years of commemoration, instruction, and reflection, I need not rehearse for you the destructive chain reaction set off by the world’s first global conflict, rightly called the Great War because it spanned and wrecked the twentieth century. Yet this was a war that was hardly inevitable. In 1931, when Kathé Kollwitz dedicated a memorial to her son Peter, who had been killed in battle on October 30, 1914, she surely spoke for millions when she declared: “there is in our lives a wound that will never heal.” Two years earlier, in 1929, Erwin Piscator, the brilliant founder of political theater, who in 1963 would produce in Berlin the explosive drama The Deputy (Der Stellvertreter) by Rolf Hochhuth, wrote in his book, Das politische Theater:

I reckon time from August 4, 1914. From that day the barometer began to climb: 13 million dead; 11 million crippled; 50 million soldiers who marched; 6 billion guns; 50 billion cubic meters of gas. What is “personal growth” in the face of that? No one can develop “personally” here. Something else develops him. The war arose before the 20-year old. Destiny. It made every other teacher superfluous.

The most poignant war poem I know was written by Wilfred Owen, destined to die at twenty-five as a British infantryman in 1918, one week before the armistice of November 11. Called “The Parable of the Old Man and the Young,” it resonates so deeply because it transforms and magnifies a well-known biblical tale into a nightmare without end. God tests Abraham’s faith by instructing him to offer his one and only beloved son as a sacrifice. But, in Owen’s bitter poem, Abraham ignores God’s last-minute intervention:

When lo! An angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him.
Behold, A ram, caught in a thicket by its horns;
Offer the ram of Pride instead of him.
But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.

What stirs me in this lament is that Owen turns the biblical tale on its head. Meant to instruct Abraham that God is no longer to be worshipped by the sacrifice of what we most cherish—our children—the tale is read to prove the very opposite. In the Great War, parents slaughtered their children to false gods on a scale beyond numbers. Although masters of science and technology, European nations were led by moral midgets. Sacrificing our children was still a valid path to national glory and salvation.

In the final line, however, Owen’s voice shifts from outrage to compassion. Casualty statistics are comprised of identifiable human beings, born of loving parents, raised in caring communities, and prizing their own individual names. We are incapable of mourning the loss of an aggregate of individuals, only of single human beings created in the image of God.

My father, Emil Schorsch, was such a distinctive individual, a product of Esslingen forever altered by his experience as a Frontkämpfer, a veteran of the Western front in the final year of Germany’s defeat. He came to Esslingen at the age of seven to take up residence in the Wilhelmspflege, the Jewish boarding school named after the king of Württemberg, which was headed by my grandfather Theodor Rothschild. His two older brothers, Joseph and Hugo, had preceded him. The family lived in the small Baden village of Hüngheim where my father, born in 1899, had attended a Catholic Volksschule for the first few years of his education. It was in that rural setting that he developed a lifelong love for nature, at the cost of being handicapped by a lack of educational options.

When my father arrived at the Wilhelmspflege in 1906, there were about thirty-five youngsters in its school, divided into a lower and upper class, the latter of which was taught by my grandfather. The children no longer wore uniforms and enjoyed a good deal of freedom, although required to take responsibility for a specific daily household chore. Teachers, staff, and children ate together as an extended family, while the Jewish calendar and ritual governed their daily and weekly lives.

My grandfather Theodor, like my father, was a rural Jew. Born in 1876 in Buttenhausen, a village in the eastern part of Württemberg with a substantial Jewish population, Theodor had graduated from the Esslingen teachers’ seminary (Protestant) in 1896. That year he came to teach at the Wilhelmspflege and four years later married Anna, the daughter of the Hausvater Leopold Stern, who unfortunately died suddenly in 1899. By 1901, Theodor was selected to succeed him as Hausvater and would remain at the helm until August 1939, when the Wihelmspflege was shut down by the Nazi regime. It was Theodor who presided over the two-year construction of the Wilhelmspflege’s stately new building atop a prominent hill near the landmark Esslingen castle, which was dedicated on November 11, 1913 in the presence of the king of Württemberg and a host of official dignitaries. On the land surrounding the building Theodor introduced a component of farming to teach his fledglings to work with their hands as well as their minds.

Theodor was a robust outdoorsman with an impressive command of the Latin names of all the trees and plants that grew in southwest Germany. He was also a sensitive and inspiring educator who would counsel his teachers when confronted by the misbehavior of an unruly child to focus on the turmoil in his personal life rather than on the disruption caused by his behavior. Above all, he was devoted to the children in his care and refused to apply for a visa to the United States prior to the Reichspogromnacht, in order to forestall the threatened closure of the Wilhelmspflege by the Nazis should he do so.

Theodor soon became a surrogate father to Emil. In 1913, when he finished the eighth and final year of the Volksschule in the Wilhelmspflege, Theodor advised him to apply to the Lehrerseminar in Esslingen to become a teacher. My father heeded the advice. Out of the 235 applicants that year, my father was one of the thirty who were accepted. During the next few years, he was the only Jewish student out of a student body of two hundred. But the seminary minimized the friction caused by Saturday classes. At 9:00 in the morning my father was excused until 10:30 to attend religious services in the local synagogue. He did not write on Saturdays, and, if an exam fell on that day, he would stand next to the instructor to give him the answer to write down. In addition to the curriculum of the seminary, my father was required to take twelve hours a week of Hebrew grammar, Bible, Jewish history, Mishnah, and halakhah in order to eventually pass the state exam for a Jewish teacher’s license. Not surprisingly, his instructor for Hebrew grammar, Bible, and Jewish history was my grandfather. At the seminary, my father excelled at mathematics and music.

In the summer of 1917, the war finally halted his studies. Having turned eighteen in January, he was drafted into the infantry as a reservist but was soon transferred to a field artillery unit that served directly behind the front line. By June 1918 his unit was shipped to the western front. My father’s assignment was to lay the phone lines connecting the artillery to the infantry, a precarious job that carried with it the prospect of a quick promotion. That prospect, though, saved his life, because the son of a general soon displaced him only to be killed on his first time out. Until then his unit had not lost a man.

In the final months of the war his unit beat a steady but orderly retreat along the Aisne River deep inside France, south of Soissons. Before the start of the armistice on November 11, a final air raid subjected his unit to one last drubbing. With no place to hide, my father sat out in the open with his head buried between his knees, awaiting what looked like his inexorable end. The trauma of the moment left him with an insight that would shape his philosophy of life. Imagination should enable us to live our lives from the end. As our candle flickers, what will our life’s decisions amount to—a source of meaning and satisfaction or of self-incrimination and regret? On that forsaken battlefield, my father found a measure of skill at music and mathematics to be insufficient to give his life a sense of ultimate purpose. Our final reckoning in the face of death ought to be the compass for mastering life.

My father credited his commanding officer for maintaining the discipline of his troops during the four-hundred-kilometer march back to Marburg and long cherished his personal good wishes to him when their paths parted. In commenting on his life in Germany in later years, my father tended to recall the spontaneous acts of humanity of ordinary Germans toward Jews rather than symptoms of the systemic antisemitism that intensified as the war effort faltered and Weimar replaced the Second Reich.

Thus in my father’s occasional recollections there is no trace of the infamous survey of Jewish soldiers initiated by the Prussian war ministry in October 1916, ostensibly to lay to rest the ever louder denunciation that Jews were evading military service. The ministry’s unilateral decision signaled the end of the emperor’s celebrated declaration of reconciliation as Germany went to war: “I know no parties any longer; I know only Germans.” And indeed many barriers fell that defined the second-class citizenship of Germany’s Jews. Now, for the first time since their emancipation in 1869, Jews became army officers and entered the upper echelons of the government’s bureaucracy. Worse than the hurt and fury aroused among Jews by the intent to do the survey was the inexcusable refusal by the war ministry to ever publish its results, which would have laid the unwarranted charge to rest. In the wake of the bitter acrimony that would swirl around the issue after the war, my father’s military service slipped into a contested statistic, one of ten young Jewish men from Esslingen to have served in the army.

Upon his return to Esslingen my father resumed his studies at the Lehrerseminar to receive his teaching certification in 1919. Thereafter he taught for eleven months in two different Jewish schools. But the war experience had pushed him to consider the rabbinate for a career, and, on August 19, 1920, he wrote to Professor Markus Brann at the Jewish Theological Seminary in Breslau inquiring what he needed to do to qualify for admission. Breslau had opened in 1854 as the first German modern rabbinical seminary. As a haven for critical Jewish scholarship, Breslau required of its applicants the vaunted Abitur diploma of a Gymnasium, and of its graduates in addition to ordination from Breslau a doctorate from a German university. For my father the Abitur with its heavy dosage of Latin and Greek constituted a formidable barrier. At the Lehrerseminar he had studied neither. Brann responded immediately, in part, I suspect, because few young German Jews were applying in the turmoil of the postwar years. An age of rampant secularization also diminished interest in religion. His message, however, offered little consolation: “In truth even today no one can become a well-educated theologian [i.e., rabbi], if he does not have a thorough grounding in Latin and Greek.”

But my father was not to be deterred. The hurdles he had to overcome to switch educational tracks, in a society structurally not amenable to switching, attested the depth of his determination to become a rabbi. A deeply religious personality, he believed that surviving the chaos of war destined him to join the forces of those committed to preventing its recurrence. For two years he withdrew to the solitude of the home of his aunt and uncle in Lehrensteinsfeld in Baden to strive to achieve the equivalence of seven years of Greek and nine years of Latin. By March 22, 1924 he had secured a document from the department of higher education in Stuttgart certifying his accomplishment in both languages. In those same years he began his doctoral studies in Tübingen, which he completed in 1925 with a dissertation on The Teachability of Religion (Die Lehrbarkeit der Religion) published in 1929.

In 1928 my father was ordained by the Breslau seminary and to this day I have the large handwritten Hebrew ordination document on parchment signed by Professor Michael Guttman, the seminary’s official ordaining authority, hanging in my office. In a graduating class of three that year, my father was the only student from Germany. While at the seminary he took additional courses at the University of Breslau, among them two years of Arabic, a Semitic language still de rigueur for students entering the rabbinate. In his retirement he could still proudly recite for me by heart the opening lines of the first sura of the Quran. In short, a fine memory, a prodigious ability to concentrate, and an iron will combined to help my father scale an intellectual mountain in turbulent weather.

In 1927, already a year before he graduated from Breslau, my father received an invitation from the Jewish community in Hanover to become its junior rabbi (Ortsrabbiner). With some 5500 Jews, Hanover was one of the larger Jewish communities in Germany. Its senior rabbi (Landesrabbiner), Samuel Freund, had also studied at Breslau. Adding to its attractiveness was the fact that relatives of my father owned a plywood factory nearby and were active members of the community. Both his brothers worked for the firm. Decisive for him, however, was the absence of an organ in the grand sanctuary of its Romanesque synagogue. My father had learned to play the organ in the Lehrerseminar and felt strongly that it Christianized the synagogue service. The presence of an organ in the synagogue in Munich prompted him to turn down its invitation to him just prior to accepting Hanover. By the twentieth century the organ had become the most prominent ritual demarcation between Reform and Conservative synagogues in Germany and the United States. In 1935 my father had an opportunity to return to Württemberg when the Jewish community of Stuttgart invited him to fill its pulpit. My mother, the older daughter of Theodor, very much wanted him to accept the offer. As the status of Jews in Germany deteriorated, she desperately wanted to be nearer my grandfather. My father tried to oblige her and asked Stuttgart to remove the organ. But the community refused to accommodate his wishes.

My father and mother married in December 1926. My father did not want to come to Hanover alone. In truth, they never left Esslingen. They would come down from Hanover for vacations, and as my sister, born in 1929, grew older she would take the train to Stuttgart alone, armed with a sign hung around her neck indicating her destination. After the Wilhemspflege was plundered in broad daylight on November 10, 1938 and shuttered that summer, Theodor finally did apply at the American consulate in Stuttgart for a United States visa, but by then the waiting list was long and his number distressingly high. With the meager resources available to them, my parents and aunt and uncle (Bertel was Fanny’s younger sister) did their utmost to expedite his flight. In the correspondence between them up to December 7, 1941, which survives, one can follow the tortuous decline of his number. But he never came close to being granted a visa and died on July 10, 1944 in Theresienstadt. I still feel the pall that settled over our house in Pottstown when the news of his death arrived.

Not long after my father settled in Hanover he wrote a valuable description of the rural Judaism of Baden-Württemberg in which he grew up and published it in the leading intellectual journal of Weimar Jewry. His voice was that of an informed and engaged observer trying to capture a type of Judaism fast disappearing. Germany’s Jews had for a century been in the forefront of the steady migration from the country to the city. Although a eulogy of sorts, the essay is not overly sentimental. The rural Judaism he cherished is intimate, sincere, and utterly natural. It is without pretense and affectation and conspicuously lacks intellectual superstructure or theological justification. In a world saturated with nature, God is a felt reality, a commanding presence to whom one connects through ritual. Observance springs from a sense of obligation and is enacted simply and comfortably.

There is no doubt an undertone of criticism in this depiction of rural Judaism. The positive implied animosity toward an unstated negative. My father bristled quietly at the sterility and artistry of the cathedral synagogue in which he officiated, symbolized by his clerical robe and the Zylinderhut (“stovepipe”) of the male worshippers. A gifted cantor and decorous service accentuated the dimension of performance but minimized the power of personal prayer. Genuine piety was beyond the reach of part-time, self-conscious Jews.

Thus, on the joyous festival of Simchat Torah he did not linger in the synagogue. The festival celebrates boisterously the completion of the annual Torah reading cycle in the synagogue, even as it launches immediately into the beginning of a new cycle. Having performed his official duties, my father chose to visit the Stieblach (“prayer conventicles”) of the eastern European Jews in Hanover. By war’s end their number had risen to about 1300. He yearned to taste the authenticity and exuberance of their celebration of the festival. Intuitively he sensed the affinity between their expressive piety and the unstaged simplicity of the Judaism of his youth. Neither suffered from a surfeit of choreography.

Although members of the Jewish community by law, the Jews from Eastern Europe were not deemed fully equal because they lacked German citizenship. Accordingly, they were unwelcome in the formal services of the synagogue’s main sanctuary, a policy that remained lamentably in force until 1937, when their numbers were needed to constitute the quorum for a public worship service, or minyan. The immigrants tended to be Orthodox, lived in their own neighborhoods, closed their shops on Saturdays, and prayed in one of their three small Stieblach run by them. Clearly the discomfort of Hanover’s German Jews in the face of their less assimilated coreligionists mirrored the longstanding hostility in German society toward immigrants from the east, intensified by the war, but it also bespoke the anxiety of an insecure minority group in fear of having its own emancipation thrown into jeopardy. Nevertheless, it bears saying that such overt internal discrimination was atypical of German Jewish communal life at the time.

There was little my father could do to alter the institutionalized prejudice in Hanover. Power lay in the hands of a lay board on which the rabbis did not sit. But his actions betrayed a steadfast critical stance. For a decade he enjoyed the loyal and competent secretarial service of a woman who had come from Eastern Europe. Still bolder, he had been invited to Hanover to reconnect its children with the synagogue. Toward that end, not long after his arrival, he set about to create a model community for the young (eine Jugendgemeinde) with just fifteen boys as founding members. Its main initial activity was to meet on Saturday afternoons for a Minḥah service led by students trained by him, which he always opened with a lesson based on the week’s Torah portion. Attendance soon grew to thirty-five and then shot up with the decision to include girls. At the services, the girls sat behind the boys. By the celebration of their first Simchat Torah service, some six hundred children and adolescents filled the room. In due time, with better accommodations, some 150 boys and girls attended Saturday services regularly. Entirely self-governing, the Jugendgemeinde quickly supplemented its religious agenda by subdividing into smaller groups for social and athletic activities. By 1932, there were eleven such groups each led by an adult volunteer. The community maintained its cohesion by always praying together on Saturday afternoons.

My father made a sustained effort to include the children of Eastern European parents. The message he delivered incessantly was that Judaism is a religion without religious, partisan, or ethnic divisions. In a tribute to him on his birthday, on January 12, 1935, his young congregants gave heartening evidence that they had internalized his message: “You, Herr Doktor, gave us values that give us for life a firm, enduring stance, that we honor Jews as Jews, that we belong together as Jews…and have no need of internal turmoil.”

The leitmotif of this portrait of my father has been the extent to which his life was shaped by his early years in Esslingen. Many aspects of his life in America after March 1940 continued to highlight that indebtedness, not least the love, support, and companionship from his childhood sweetheart from Esslingen, my mother. During his twenty-four years as rabbi of Congregation Mercy and Truth in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, my father also served for twenty-one of them as the civilian Jewish chaplain at the army hospital in Valley Forge. It was the second largest military hospital on the East Coast, and, in 1943, he was invited to become its only Jewish chaplain on a part-time basis. On Wednesdays he would walk its endlessly long halls to visit its wounded Jewish patients and return on Thursday evenings with a few women volunteers from Pottstown to conduct a Maʿariv service, deliver a sermon, and conclude with a collation of kosher corn beef sandwiches. On occasion I would tag along on Thursday evenings. I had a weakness for cold cuts.

No part of my father’s rabbinate was more deeply satisfying than his work at Valley Forge, because he, above all, was a genuine Seelsorger, the wonderful German word for a clergyman, a caretaker of human souls. His young congregants were the human wreckage of war, the spiritually broken and physically injured in desperate need of comfort, wisdom, and meaning. His own precarious war experience had surely given him insight into their pitiful plight. The senseless horrors of World War I had persuaded him to enter the rabbinate, not to thwart the onset of the next one but to minister to its victims and alleviate their suffering. His rock-solid faith, his love of Judaism, his unpretentious practice, and his well-stocked mind endowed him with the humanity to help fellow Jews and Christians in need.

When my wife and I settled in Riverdale, New York after my own two-year stint in the army as a chaplain, I happened upon a Jewish internist who had served at Valley Forge as an army doctor. His first words to me as we began to exchange pleasantries related to me how impressed he was with the sermons of my father that he heard there during his tour of duty. Again, as so often, I had become the beneficiary of the life lived by my father.

In one of his autobiographical fragments, my father recalls how as a twelve-year-old at the Wilhelmspflege he slipped into its empty prayer room on a Saturday afternoon. Inside he proceeded to take out a sefer Torah (the Hebrew scroll of parchment on which the Torah is handwritten) from the wooden ark that contained it and walk around the bimah (the table on which it is read) many times, imploring God to reveal Himself to him. In retrospect, the rabbinate became his calling, and his subsequent life of good deeds amply attests that God had answered his prayer.

Religion under Assault

The decision of the city of Hanover to honor the memory of my father by affixing his name to one of its parks fills me with feelings of deep gratitude. Permit me to grace this nook of real estate with a tincture of his spirit.

On January 8, 1937, the board of the Jewish community of Hanover sent my father a letter of deep appreciation for ten years of unstinting service. The tribute spelled out his enormous impact on the conduct of Jewish education. For the young he had revised and reordered the religious instruction they received in the cities’ schools, created separate services conducted by them on Saturday afternoons and recreational activities during the week, and even acquired a stand-alone youth center in which to hang out. For the adults he set up a Lehrhaus for courses in Hebrew and Judaica and later for preparation for emigration and, above all, preached weekly in the grand Oppler synagogue. The board saluted my father’s acute awareness that he needed to counter the indifference of parents to Judaism if he wanted to register any success with their children. It also singled out his determined efforts to fully integrate the children of German-Jewish parents with those of Eastern European parents in his manifold activities for the young. And, finally, the board thanked my father for the welcome funds that he had regularly secured from his relatives to implement his sundry programs.

In responding to the board’s effusive praise, my father distinguished between a calling for which one can prepare and a contractual obligation that works as an inner command to which one must give evidence of being called. “I have always striven to think of my work as a holy office for which I must give account and reckoning before God and Judaism.” In brief, the Gemeinde’s words of tribute, encouragement, and assurance of continued employment bespoke its confidence that their young rabbi in his first pulpit had the competence, maturity, and faith to handle and endure tempestuous times.

Emil Schorsch had taken an arduous path to the rabbinate. As a rural Jew from southwestern Germany raised in a Jewish orphanage in Esslingen, he was a graduate not of a Gymnasium but of a teachers’ seminary. An exposure to near-certain death as a rank non-officer in a German artillery unit in 1918 prompted him to opt for a career in the rabbinate. Facing death, he took no comfort in his expertise in mathematics. After the war he returned to Esslingen to finish its renowned Lehrerseminar and began teaching in a Jewish elementary school. But to gain admission to the modern rabbinical school of Breslau, founded in 1854, was no easy matter. He needed to achieve the equivalence of a vaunted Abitur with its seven years of Greek and nine years of Latin. Two years of solitary study eventually secured for him the certification from the Württemberg ministry of education and entrance into Breslau, the oldest modern rabbinical school in Germany, in 1922.

By 1927, in his final year in Breslau, he already had an invitation in hand from Hanover as its Ortsrabbiner (“city rabbi”) under the supervision of Samuel Freund, its Landrabbiner (“state rabbi”), also a graduate of Breslau, who had originally come to Hanover in 1907. The handwritten Hebrew ordination on parchment dated 1928 with the wax seal of the Breslau seminary attached still hangs in my office at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. In addition to his intensive rabbinical studies, my father had earned a doctorate in Tübingen on the topic of Die Lehrbarkeit der Religion (To What Extent Can Religion Be Taught?) plus two years of Arabic at the University of Breslau.

In 1925, the Jewish community (Gemeinde) of Hanover numbered 5,521 Jews, of whom 1311 were immigrants from Eastern Europe. While all were members of the Gemeinde by law and paid taxes for the maintenance of its communal structure, only those who enjoyed German citizenship could vote, which meant that those from Eastern Europe, most of whom lacked citizenship, were denied the right to vote. Women received the right to vote and run for office in Gemeinde elections in 1930, but the Ostjuden in Hanover did not until 1937, partly because by then their attendance at services in the Oppler synagogue had become urgent with increasing emigration. My father observed in his memoir that on the Shabbat that coincided with the sudden massive expulsion of Polish Jews from Germany (October 29, 1938), the Oppler synagogue was nearly empty.

Generally, the Eastern Jews of Hanover lived in the poorer neighborhoods of the city, closed their stores on Friday afternoon at 3:00 for Shabbat and prayed in one of their own small Stieblach (Bethӓuser). They also maintained separate religious schools for their children, religious judges for their internal disputes, and slaughterers for kosher meat. Notwithstanding their insularity and far slower pace of assimilation, my father recalled that the Ostjuden mixed more freely and intimately with their Christian neighbors than did their German-Jewish coreligionists. In 1931 the centralized welfare budget of the Gemeinde approximated some 200,000 Reichsmarks, with some 60 percent of it going to the Jews from Eastern Europe. Yet, despite its deep internal fissures, the Jewish community of Hanover with an annual budget of 350,000 Reichsmarks remained organizationally a viable Einheitsgemeinde (i.e., a united Jewish community).

Several local features drew my father to Hanover. First, the religious services in its stunning freestanding Romanesque synagogue designed by Edwin Oppler, its Jewish architect, were conducted without benefit of an organ or German prayers. The stentorian tenor of its celebrated cantor, Israel Alter, filled the dome-covered sanctuary with an authentic blend of traditional and contemporary music. Twice my father turned down invitations to come to Stuttgart, which was but a few kilometers from Esslingen, my mother’s birthplace and the orphanage run by her well-known father, Theodor Rothschild, because the synagogue had an organ, the hallmark of radical religious Reform.

But my father also had close relatives in Hanover, who owned the largest plywood factory in Germany in Wiedenbruck, Westphalia. His older brother Joseph was its bureau chief, and when my parents came to Hanover they took an apartment in the building where Joseph and his family resided. In July 1933, when my father traveled to Palestine to determine how best to prepare young Jews to live there, the trip was paid for by his relatives. Similarly, they funded the renovation of the old abandoned synagogue of the Gemeinde to turn it into an attractive youth center (Jugendheim) and refuge. These special gifts, repeated annually with contributions to the Gemeinde’s welfare and maintenance budgets, gave my father a cherished sense that he was not a mere employee of the Gemeinde.

Of the many duties my father was expected to fulfill upon his arrival, none was as demanding as preaching in the Oppler synagogue. To those who sat behind one of the fancy pillars that held up the lofty dome, his sermons were barely audible. With strenuous effort, he soon acquired the forensic power and self-confidence to turn his words into a balm of comfort and meaning. On the last Yom Kippur in the Oppler synagogue, on October 4–5, 1938, the printed schedule still has my father preaching three times. When we were about to leave after his release from Buchenwald, the board, in its testimonial letter of December 6, 1938, singled out his exceptional preaching.

In particular we must mention the impact and effectiveness of his sermons on all the members of the Gemeinde. His sermons were marked by his ability to transmit to his audience gems of the tradition clothed in modern garb. In the best and worst of times they truly offered edification to all those still yearning for it. The words which emanated from the depth of his heart penetrated the hearts of all, even those but mildly open for religious meaning.

Indeed, many came to hear. According to the recollections of my father, some one hundred men usually attended on Friday evenings to welcome the onset of Shabbat. Women customarily stayed at home for this service. On Shabbat morning attendance rose to about five hundred worshippers, with women seated in the galleries. For holiday services that number tripled to about 1500. For the High Holy Days of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, the synagogue typically filled to overflowing, which required that admission tickets be withheld from the Ostjuden, who were not yet full members. Irrespective of the service, men came attired in a Zylinderhut (“stovepipe”) to underline the formality of the worship. Although services always abounded with dignity and decorum, the excessive emphasis on performance tended to minimize congregational participation and displays of exuberance.

Fanny Dessau frequented the services at which my father preached. She lived in Hanover with her sister and mother. Often his sermons caught hold of Fanny’s artistic imagination, and she would return home to execute a visual representation of the text, thought, or ritual that my father had embedded in his sermon. The expressiveness of Fanny’s images, their muted crayon colors and bold Hebrew lettering touched my father deeply, and he treasured the more than fifty drawings that Fanny gave him over the few years of their mutual admiration. Obviously upon request, Fanny designed the bookplate for his personal library and the cover of his small notepad that he had kept to record what he saw and thought on his trip to Palestine in July 1933. I would like to think that Fanny’s creativity and loyalty had everything to do with the skill, substance, and authenticity of my father’s spoken words. Tragically, Fanny was deported, along with her sister and mother, by the Nazis to Riga on December 15, 1941, never to return.

As a trained teacher, Emil Schorsch was ideally suited to tackle the badly hobbled Jewish educational system for the children of the Gemeinde. Energetically, he organized twenty-eight different classes for some 640 children in the city’s lower and upper schools, set about revising the curriculum, convened meetings for the Jewish teachers of the entire province of Hanover, and gave annual reports to the adults of the Gemeinde. He was not only a gifted teacher who could enthrall children of all ages with the telling of a good story but also a highly efficient administrator.

But formal education had its shortcomings. The attendance of many children was spotty, and others skipped classes entirely. Then, too, the gap between what was taught in school and what was experienced at home was growing ever wider. Secularism was steadily eviscerating the religious content of many a Jewish home.

To counter these drawbacks, Emil Schorsch seized upon a novel initiative of informal Jewish education. In 1927, he invited some fifteen young boys to meet him for a Minḥah religious service on a Saturday afternoon. In Germany, Saturday mornings were still the domain of public education. This was to be a service conducted entirely by them. Their number tripled quickly with the inclusion of girls, who sat behind the boys during the service. By the festival of Simchat Torah (“the joy of Torah”) in the fall, when the annual public reading of the Torah was completed and immediately begun anew, the number of children in the Oppler synagogue had leap-frogged to six hundred.

To be sure, youth movements of all sorts proliferated in Weimar Germany, and Emil Schorsch’s Jugendgemeinde (“youth congregation”) soon adopted many of their distinctive features. The children were divided into small groups by gender, each with their own adult leader, with my father at first leading one group and my mother another. The groups were free to plan their activities independently. But at the core of the Jugendgemeinde was a religious heartbeat. Every Saturday afternoon all participating children came together for a religious service, often begun with a talk by my father about the Torah reading of the week but then led by the children for the rest of the worship. The goal was clearly to teach them synagogue skills. Annually on the three pilgrimage festivals of Passover, Shavuot, and Sukkot (concluding with Simchat Torah), the children would join the adult services in the Oppler synagogue. In 1936, despite the steady emigration, some four hundred adults and six hundred children assembled in the Oppler synagogue to celebrate Simchat Torah.

The intent of the Jugendgemeinde was to provide children a lived experience of Judaism to make up minimally for what was missing at home and to ready them for an adult appreciation of the synagogue. But it also quietly pursued a social agenda. From the beginning my father was determined to surmount the divide between the children of German and Eastern European parents. The Jugendgemeinde welcomed children of all backgrounds, often benefitting from the better synagogue skills of the latter group. To help him administer this project, my father selected a woman from Eastern Europe, and, when she unfortunately died in the first year, he recruited her sister, Bertha Schul, who stayed with him till 1937.

But mixing the backgrounds was more complicated than simply putting the children into proximity with each other. As Bertha was to learn, different standards of etiquette got in the way. As a group leader, Bertha had chosen to use the informal personal pronouns to increase the camaraderie of the group. To her dismay, she soon discovered that the young girls from German homes were utterly unaccustomed to addressing an adult with the pronoun “Du.”

I, too, tasted of the gratitude engendered by my father’s disruptive agenda. When I came to Jerusalem in July 1967 after the Six Day War for research on my doctoral dissertation, I had arranged to stay at a small pension called Greta Ascher. The owner greeted me personally at the door when I arrived and immediately asked me if I was the son of Rabbi Emil Schorsch. When I acknowledged the fact somewhat perplexed, she embraced me because my father had dared to include her in his Jugendgemeinde. Sadly, at the time I was in the dark as to the full meaning of her social redemption.

To bring along the parents on the religious journey of their children, my father founded in 1927 a Lehrhaus (an institute for adult education) funded at first by his relatives. Modeled after what Franz Rosenzweig and Marin Buber had created in Frankfurt am Main in 1919, it was designed to promote textual, collaborative, and nonacademic learning. I cherish the annotated copies of Rosenzweig’s Der Stern der Erlösung and Max Picard’s Die Flucht Vor Gott (Fleeing in the face of God) that my father taught more than once therein. In 1931, he gave a lengthy lecture on the subject “Hat die Religion in heutiger Zeit noch einen Sinn?” (“Does religion in our day still have any meaning?”), in which he vigorously rejected Freud’s denigration of religion as an illusion. And in 1936–37 he was still scheduled to teach Talmud, Picard, and what he called a course on “Lebendige Geschichte” (“Living History”).

In addition, my father, a lover of books, was from the outset assigned responsibility for the renowned synagogue library of Hanover with its large collection of Judaica and Hebraica. I suspect that its destruction on Kristallnacht pained him even more deeply than the desecration of the Oppler synagogue.

In retrospect, then, in hiring young Emil Schorsch in 1927, the Hanover Gemeinde gained the leadership of an exceptionally well-rounded rabbi fully dedicated to the religious essence of his profession. Despite the unfathomable turbulence of the period, his inner life was not preoccupied with either antisemitism or Zionism. When it came time to flee, he did not seek to go to Palestine, although his admiration of the Zionist accomplishments under the British mandate pervaded the notes on his trip in 1933. But neither the secular Zionists nor the ultra-Orthodox were receptive to the service of a Conservative rabbi. In a 1934 Hanukkah sermon, rich in text and ideas, he chided the Zionists in Palestine for their strident secularism. Thus, four years later his destination would be the United States, where he could be a rabbi. He did not fear the impediment of a new language. To enter Breslau, he had mastered Greek and Latin.

For my father it was religion that mattered most. He never forgot his decision to become a rabbi in the face of death, and all his life, from his doctoral dissertation in Tübingen to his reflections on his years in Hanover written in retirement, he grappled with the viability of religion in a rampantly secular age. His faith had been forged by the rural Judaism in which he had been nurtured. In a 1930 essay published in a leading German-Jewish intellectual journal, he graphically depicted the piety of that rapidly disappearing Judaism on the basis of deep personal experience and not academic research. He highlighted its intimacy, its proximity to nature, and its pervasive sense of duty. The family was the seedbed for its transmission unencumbered by the artifice of pathos and extensive book learning. Between the lines one could sense that the stress on decorum, performance, and aesthetics in Hanover may have been but a fig leaf for a faith in absentia. At the end of services in the Oppler synagogue on Simchat Torah, my father hurried to one of the Stieblach to taste the genuine joy of having completed yet another reading of the annual Torah cycle.

Wherever fate might place him, he was prepared to serve God to the fullest. Expulsion neither lessened his sense of duty nor caused him to fixate on what was lost. His gaze was forward. World War I and its wrenching aftermath had taught him just how imperiled were the fundaments of civilization. To his lasting credit, he worked with the same idealism and intensity in Pottstown, Pennsylvania as in Hanover, Germany. For what he ultimately cared about was not the religious accoutrements that came with power and prestige but the inner purity of his faith.

A Voice out of the Whirlwind

My indebtedness to the city of Hanover runs deep. After the passage of eighty-five years the city has seen fit to fulfill its original promise to honor the memory of my beloved father, its last Ortsrabbiner, by attaching his name in perpetuity to a charming public park. In preparing my remarks for this occasion, I thought of reflecting on his role as a Seelsorger, a pastor invited to nurture the souls of his flock. What was the content and power of the sermons that he delivered in the cathedral sanctuary of the grand Oppler synagogue during his tumultuous eleven-year tenure? To what extent were they a screen for the events that wrecked the lives of his congregants as well as his own, especially after 1933? The thoroughness of his preparation enables me to do just that. For behind each sermon lay a carefully typewritten manuscript dated and aligned to the Hebrew scriptural reading of the day.

The manuscript does not imply that he read from a text. Growing up by my father’s side, I know that he valued speaking freely, never letting a written text get between him and his congregation. To communicate effectively, he was determined to make eye contact, and that meant being unhindered. Diligent preparation enabled him not only to gather and arrange his thoughts in an orderly manner, but also to commit them to memory in unencumbered language. At the age of twenty-eight, in his first full-time pulpit, and having grown up in the intimate rural synagogues of southern Germany, my father had to master the voice projection, physical gestures, and oratorical style dictated by the grandeur of the space and the number of worshipers. But in time he did and left us a sermonic legacy forged in a harsh crucible.

At first, he shared the pulpit with Rabbi Samuel Freund, Hanover’s Landesrabbiner who had come in 1907. His presence provided my father with an admirable and sympathetic mentor and lightened his preaching load to no more than two times a month. On September 25, 1938, coinciding with the eve of the Jewish new year holiday, a much reduced and deeply grateful Jewish community commemorated his retirement after forty-nine years of unstinting service. My father delivered the laudatio in commensurate words of appreciation. Despite his many official duties, Rabbi Freund, no longer well, was above all a religious leader of unshakeable faith. His observance of Jewish practice never wavered in the face of internal erosion or external hostility. Like my father, he believed the institution of the synagogue to be absolutely vital, and the daily minyan (its worship service) akin to the altar in Jerusalem’s ancient temple, whose fire was never allowed to go out.

Thus, in the final month and a half before Kristallnacht, my father preached a total of fourteen times, in part because of Rabbi Freund’s retirement, and in part because of the many holidays that crowd the Jewish fall calendar. Each one of those sermons engendered a well-rounded, integrated text borne aloft by a singular idea and suitable vocabulary. The external intensity did not alter the unhurried pace of conception and formulation. The last sermon he delivered, on November 5, 1938, coincided with Lekh Lekha, the Torah portion in which God instructs Abraham to leave his homeland: “Go forth from your native land and from your father’s house to the land that I will show you.” My father called this “die Sidra der Auswanderung” (“the portion of emigration”). He acknowledged and enumerated the hardships that awaited going into exile but concluded with a symbol of hope:

Die Kerne der Früchte sind grössten Theile bitter, aber aus ihnen entfaltet sich ein lebendiger, blühender Fruchtbaum. So ist es auch mit dem Geschick der Ortsveränder. Seien wir überzeugt, dass das mit verbundene Leid letzten Endes die Blüte eines neues Glück aus sich herausfalten wird. — The seeds’ fruit are largely bitter but eventually give rise to a flourishing and productive fruit tree. Thus it also is with the fate of a wanderer in exile. We are convinced that the pain that accompanies the final end will once again yield the good fortune of many blossoms.

Little could anyone anticipate the brutal eruption of hatred about to occur. Less than one month later the Schorsch family arrived by plane in England to light that evening the second candle of the Hanukkah festival. And ten years later, unbeknownst to me, I would celebrate my bar mitzvah in Pottstown, Pennsylvania on the Sabbath of Lekh Lekha, coinciding with the very Torah portion that marked the end of my father’s German rabbinate. The discovery of that thrilling linkage I owe to Hanover’s respect for my father, which prompted me to examine his final words of comfort from the pulpit.

The format of my father’s sermons did not change over time. From the beginning he strove to derive meaning and wisdom from the Torah portion of the week. He often opened with a line of the text or even a single word that seemed to stand out. Hebrew punctuated his exposition. The events of the day did not call for description or lamentation. An ancient rabbinic comment (a midrash) or telling image of his own creation would be invoked to give the text expansion and resonance. For him the words of Scripture were not to be taken literally but as an indicator (ein Fingerzeichen) of deeper meaning or larger ideas. Thus, when on October 22, 1938 the annual cycle of the weekly Torah reading returned to Bereshit (the beginning of Genesis), he dared to make sense of the endless repetition. The ritual is to be understood in a circular rather than a linear fashion. Like the rings of a tree, the Torah constantly enriches the Jewish soul with new insight and experience. Tree-like, we grow from the inside out, in all directions simultaneously. New growth fortifies us gradually to withstand all kinds of inclement weather.

My father was not a romantic intent on touching the human soul but a rationalist of deep faith. His heroes were men like Ibn Gabirol, Pascal, and Kant, who reached out through reason to an ever-present and ubiquitous God. If we could only learn to pray again, we would find God readily accessible. Hence, in the early years of his rabbinate in Hanover, his primary mission was to persuade a secular and highly assimilated Jewish community of the beauty, power, and meaningfulness of traditional Jewish thought and practice. What did change with the rise of the Nazis to power was the intensity of his sermon. Grim circumstances suddenly ladened every one of his words with existential weight. To instruct was now to generate the willpower, faith, and language to make it through the next day. God could not be recovered without community and worship, while discipline and consistency remained the soil for a spiritual life. In short, it was the tone of his preaching rather than its format that underwent change.

What strikes me in the study of my father’s sermons is the remarkable authenticity and maturity of his faith. His well-rounded words ring with conviction, a product of deep thought and sustained practice. Religion as a domain of human expression fascinated him, with Judaism his lived specialty. The clarity of his ideas, the richness of their articulation, and the urgency of his delivery amounted to an undeterred sense of calling, embodying for his distressed flock a riveting example of a true Seelsorger.

But the religious pathos of those sermons did not convey the depth of his inner disquiet. The tragedy of 1933 had not shattered the basic secularity of German Jews. On September 2, 1936, with Rosh Hashanah fast approaching, he recorded for himself his sense of futility. As long as Jews have money, they will pursue sports like bridge and tennis as an ersatz religion. Indeed, Shabbat was perfect for tennis tournaments, for which a Jewish community like Berlin would occasionally fund the prizes. Few Jews attended synagogue anymore or manifested a sense of religious obligation. Shabbat observance and dietary restrictions were long gone. Jews seemed to fear only the heavy hand of the law, public opinion, and impoverishment. The faith in “the angel who rescues me from all evil” was no longer operative, nor was the piety of our ancestors.

Lamentably, the status of the rabbi had been eviscerated. Religious policy was the function of a board of knowledgeless laymen. Salary, pension, and titles were designed to offset the rabbis’ loss of authority. As he wrote these bitter words, my father surely must have recalled the woeful fact that, in his 1928 graduating class of three students from Breslau, only one was from Germany. Two days later my father reiterated his dark thoughts to Theodor Rothschild, his beloved father-in-law and mentor, in an uninhibited letter, concluding that “I have never felt so strongly that genuine teshuvah [“repentance”] is the only salvation.”

In short, my father’s rabbinic role was torn between compassion and contempt. His fervent words of Torah from the pulpit failed to alleviate or alter the plight of his flock. Like a biblical prophet, though, he refused to let despair bring him to abandon his mission. He would stay at his post until expelled by the furor of the Nazis.

An Unbroken Vow

The Schorsch family of four left Germany by plane on December 18, 1938, which coincided with the first day of Hanukkah. That year we lit the first candle of our hanukkiyah in Germany and the second in England, making the festival of Hanukkah for us ever after a celebration of personal redemption. We fled by plane because the ship on which we were booked was unexpectedly delayed. My parents, exceedingly apprehensive, spent the money they could not take with them out of Germany on plane tickets. Relatives in London had secured for us visas to England from its chief rabbi, Joseph H. Hertz, who had been given authority to rescue rabbis from Germany. Years later I would quip that the first rabbi to be ordained by the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York in 1894 was destined to rescue the child who had just turned three and would eventually become the institution’s sixth chancellor in 1986.

It was those visas that my mother bravely took to the Gestapo to secure the release of my father from Buchenwald, where he had been taken along with some 250 other notables of Hanover on the night the Nazis torched hundreds of synagogues across Germany. Among their number was the renowned free-standing Romanesque synagogue of Hanover dedicated in 1870. Arrested in the early morning as he was prepared to attend daily services, my father saw the ruins of that grand edifice only upon his release ten tortured days later, which the Gestapo conditioned on his immediate departure from Germany and on his consent not to reveal to anyone what he had witnessed and experienced in Buchenwald.

The entry into England was similarly on the condition that we not stay, and that my father not work while there. To be sure, our intention had always been to move to the United States. My father had two sisters already living there, as did my mother whose sister and her husband had left Germany in 1937. The two large containers of belongings that we were still allowed to take with us were sent directly to New York. But my father put the compulsory respite to good use. During the four months that we lived with family in London, he attended an interpreters’ school for English. And for the ten months we spent on the southern shore in Bexhil by the Sea, I’m sure he worked diligently to improve his skills. For, by the time we arrived in New York in March 1940, my father felt confident enough in English to seek a rabbinic post with an American congregation. To master a new language at age forty in such a short time was truly a mean feat. No doubt his solid knowledge of Latin and Greek helped him to unravel English vocabulary. A photograph of my father seated at his desk in our home in 1950 that appeared in a front page story on him in the local daily newspaper prominently displayed an English dictionary lying at his fingertips. The choice may have been serendipitous, but it resonates with symbolism. The dictionary had become his primary tool for speaking publicly and publishing professionally in a language acquired in midlife.

By August 1, 1940 my father had been installed as the rabbi of Congregation Mercy and Truth in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, in the southeastern corner of the state, not far from Philadelphia. Upon our arrival in New York he had immediately turned to the placement commission of the Rabbinical Assembly and identified himself as a Conservative graduate of the Jewish Theological Seminary in Breslau (today Wroclaw, Poland), founded in 1854 as the first modern rabbinical school and the model for the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, which was founded in 1886. Composed in 1940 of fewer than one hundred families who largely hailed from Russia and Hungary, the congregation had been originally chartered in 1892. In 1940 it enjoyed the services of a learned and qualified cantor, who also served as its kosher slaughterer and proudly sported a handsome basilica-like synagogue near the center of town, which was finished in 1925. In short, my father had chosen to start his career in the American rabbinate in a distinctly non-German synagogue infinitely smaller in scale than Hanover.

Remarkably, the choice was utterly bereft of lament. My father concentrated his energy entirely in the present and on the tasks ahead. European history had sadly embittered the relationship between German Jews and their less fortunate coreligionists further east, and that lugubrious legacy impeded the acceptance by some congregants of their new rabbi. But setbacks never triggered remorse. I lived in my parents’ home for some fifteen years and witnessed many a heated exchange between them on matters pertaining to congregational affairs, in which they were equally invested, yet I never detected a note of self-pity over what had been left behind in Hanover. Testimony to that resolve was the absence of spoken German in our household. By the time we came to Pottstown they spoke English as best they could. I have no memory of switching languages, and it was surely fractured German that I sputtered for the first three years of my life.

Incontrovertibly, it was the cumbersome furniture from Germany that darkened the décor of our home, but the language that reverberated therein was English. And twice daily an American newspaper landed at our doorstep, the Pottstown Mercury in the morning and the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin in the late afternoon. The motivation to master English, though, ran even deeper than hatred for Germany. It also sprang from the realization that to transmit Judaism one had to command the language of the locals.

In Pottstown, my father was a full-service rabbi without benefit of staff, ministering to young and old, sick and healthy, those grieving and those celebrating, Jews and Christians. As in Hanover, he attended services morning and evening because he firmly believed that the daily minyan symbolized the lived sanctity of the synagogue. Without it, the edifice stood bereft of God’s presence. To salvage the minutes waiting for a minyan, my father always had in hand a sacred text to study. Given his multiple duties, he never wasted a pausal interval.

Shabbat had its special demands. In the winter, we welcomed Shabbat in prayer twice, first with a service at the proper time just a few minutes before sunset and then at 8:00 p.m. for a late Friday evening service for those who could not attend on Shabbat morning because of economic pressures. In between, my father and I would dash home for a delicious but hurried Shabbat meal. The late evening services were more formal and musical, often with a choir trained by my father and an occasional guest speaker. In general, though, my father delivered the sermon, as he did again Shabbat morning at the more traditional service at which the full Torah portion was always read from a handwritten scroll. The two sermons were never identical because the religious needs of those in attendance diverged.

The Friday evening sermon was clearly the pièce de résistance of the week, utterly different from the constricted sermons in Hanover that rarely strayed from an exposition of the weekly Torah portion. In Pottstown, his carefully prepared talks, typed in advanced but delivered freely, burst with religious conviction and intellectual creativity. His point of departure was usually a topic of global interest and existential significance. For example, in the early months of 1943, he discoursed on such conundrums as “A Fire which Does Not Consume,” “Is Misfortune a Penalty?” “Creative Silence,” “Rather Dead than Slave,” “Is Civilization Declining?” and “It’s the Small Things that Count.” After a lucid but brief analysis of the issue that troubled him, he would deftly reformulate it in Jewish terms with a striking verse or character or episode from the Bible or rabbinic literature. For added impact, he did not hesitate to marshal illustrations from current events. The unfolding nightmare of the Nazi extermination of European Jewry intruded again and again. He celebrated the meeting of President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill in Casablanca in January 1943 for their demand that Germany must surrender unconditionally and called in his own words for the world to match that declaration with a moral Casablanca. For it had been the incontrovertible erosion of religion, he believed, that had paved the way for the nihilism of the Nazis. The week before, he had waxed eloquent on the subject of creative silence as the only medium in which God’s voice might become audible. Cities inundate us with noise. Among the most devout humans are farmers and astronomers who often detect God’s presence in their lonely contact with the natural world. But, ultimately, my father acknowledged that God’s existence could not be proven in words. It had to be experienced.

What made my father’s often demanding sermons more readily accessible were telling anecdotes and illustrations. A keen eye feasted on his classical higher education in Germany and his voracious consumption of American literature. Let one gem stand for many:

Some years ago, a Dutch Professor was ascending one of the steep mountains of Switzerland, with the assistance of a guide. Having arrived at the top the Professor stepped to the jagged summit, stood there in erect posture with outstretched arms and admired the grandiose panorama. The wind was roaring around him and would have swept him from the precipice, when he suddenly heard the voice of the guide: “Professor, go down on your knees. Here you are safe only on your knees.”

For my father, some six months after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that graphic vignette summed up the human predicament at the dawn of the atomic age. Could religion still temper our lust for power and domination?

Emil Schorsch also mentored the adults in his community in other ways. Committed to hospitalization in one of Pottstown’s two hospitals, one could count on one or more visits by the rabbi. My father would always be displeased if family failed to notify him of a member’s illness. If called upon, he would readily officiate at the funeral, at the local funeral home certified to handle end of life Jewish rituals. Like his sermons, his eulogies were carefully prepared not only because he knew his congregants intimately, but also because he regarded the rapt attention of those present as offering a rare moment in the face of death to touch on Judaism’s most profound thoughts and tender practices. His collected eulogies preserved much of the raw data for the history of a typical small-town Jewish community.

The pastoral care of my father’s rabbinate grew with trust in his expertise. At the university he had studied psychology extensively, and in this country he was taken by its more pragmatic orientation. He enjoyed entertaining guests in our home with his arresting ability to read hands and handwriting. The structure of one’s hands would often yield insights into character and disposition. The young couples whom he married he would always counsel in several sessions. The austere synagogue building in Pottstown did not lend itself to an inviting rabbinic study, and the individuals who sought his help would often meet with him in our living room with its large desk, elegant sideboard, and tall bookcases. My father gave of himself willingly and often provided succor to couples whose marital lives were beginning to unravel or to parents with unruly children or souls tormented by life. It was an era when counsel that arose from deep faith could still make a difference.

Prior to his decision in World War I to enter the rabbinate, Emil Schorsch had studied to be a teacher like his future father-in-law in Esslingen, who ran the Jewish orphanage in which he spent his formative years. Later, at the university in Tübingen, he even wrote his Ph.D. dissertation on the pedagogical principles and techniques by which one could make religion accessible to young and old. Hence my father neither feared nor shunned the teaching of children. When we arrived in Pottstown in 1940, its small synagogue had a Hebrew school of only seven children. By 1950 the number had increased dramatically to eighty-eight by dint of sustained effort. It was an afternoon school that met four days a week plus Sunday mornings, although each child attended only two afternoons and Sunday mornings. Children were especially encouraged to come to services Saturday morning. My father administered the school, taught the more advanced classes, and conducted the Sunday assemblies for all the children enrolled together. He also conscientiously prepared youngsters for their bar or bat mitzvah, often writing their synagogue address for them, always on the Torah portion, as he did mine in 1948. In short, his English was good enough to handle their slang, coarse humor, and instances of disrespect. What held their attention was his mastery of the art of storytelling, whether from the Bible, Jewish history, or current events. The charts he composed on large sheets of white paper to reuse highlighted the order of the material to be covered and assembled the place-names and dramatis personae on whom the story turned. Above all, the consistent study of Hebrew was intended to facilitate their entry into the language of the Torah and the siddur (the Hebrew prayerbook). The practice of Judaism required literacy.

The trouble with this ambitious curriculum was finding the faculty to teach it. Being small, Pottstown lacked suitable personnel other than the cantor and, being also fairly isolated, could not rely on teachers to commute from elsewhere. With Sunday school largely devoted to biblical material in English, volunteers could be uncovered locally. It was family that filled the remaining gap. My mother, a trained and gifted teacher, taught introductory Hebrew to young children in their first year of Hebrew school. Her ebullience, musicality, and love of children would render that year for many an experience they would long cherish. By high school I, too, was drafted, although, as an adolescent in love with sports, I must admit that my heart lay elsewhere. In the spring of my senior year in college, still living at home, I finally rebelled to go out for the Ursinus tennis team. An absence of talent allowed me to attain the number-three spot on the team. The rank, however, concealed the insurmountable gap that separated me from numbers one and two. Nevertheless, the panache earned me the opportunity to serve as tennis counselor at the seminary’s Poconos Ramah for my last three summers at camp.

My father’s conception of the rabbinate always reached beyond the pulpit. To remain connected with his post–bar and bat mitzvah students, he created a youth group affiliated with the dynamic national organization United Synagogue Youth (USY), whose regional conferences and annual national conventions brought youngsters together from all over the country. If the unstated intent was to help adolescents meet a potential Jewish spouse, the investment paid off handsomely for his son. For it was within the framework of USY that I first met Sally Jane Korn from Norristown, some twenty-five miles east of Pottstown, who in 1960 after college would become my wife and soulmate for more than sixty-three years. To lead the youth group, my father was usually able to find a local young person to rise to the challenge.

At least once a month my father would compose a congregational bulletin to reach the many members who rarely set foot in a weekly synagogue service. Whether in Hanover or Pottstown, his lifelong adversary was the multiple forces of secularization. Modernity had triggered an ever-growing estrangement from religion. Accordingly, every issue of the bulletin, in addition to announcements of synagogue events and news about family members, would carry a pithy word of Torah. For Emil Schorsch, for whom Judaism was a living reality, no opportunity would be missed to convey its meaningfulness. And, to facilitate that agenda, he had the precious ability of treating large subjects in few words and striking images. Once back from the printer, the task of folding and stuffing the bulletins for mailing fell unhappily on the sullen shoulders of his daughter and son.

My father had the wisdom to remain in Pottstown despite the modest size. As an immigrant rabbi in middle age, his chances of advancing to a larger pulpit were indisputably slim. Stability had its rewards for his children and for him. Above all, a functioning synagogue that minimally nourished his inner life gave him the chance to fulfill his calling as a rabbi. In 1943, the United States Army opened a vast new military hospital at Valley Forge (actually Phoenixville, Pennsylvania) and invited my father to become its civilian Jewish chaplain. He would carry out these onerous but gratifying duties till his retirement from Pottstown in 1964. In retrospect, he would call the hospital his introduction to American Judaism. On a far deeper level, the wreckage of war that arrived at the hospital was in desperate need of genuine pastoral care. Twice a week my father would journey to Phoenixville, on Wednesday morning for a day of visiting wounded GIs individually and on Thursday evening for a religious service for them and Jewish medical personnel on staff. For the services, the large wooden chapel was always divested of its Christian symbols. While my father traveled alone for years by train on Wednesdays (before we acquired a car), on Thursdays a small troupe of women from the congregation accompanied him and my mother, always bringing cold cut sandwiches and sodas for the collation that followed the services. On occasion I would tag along for the cold cuts.

In truth, the soldiers came to hear my father’s sermons. Given the gravity of their situation, they thirsted for thoughts that would stir their minds, for words of Torah that would hearten their faith and sparks of faith that would relieve their depression. On Wednesdays he would sometimes relate how traumatized were the patients he tried to touch in the mental wards or how immobilized were the young men in need of prosthetic limbs and months of rehabilitation. His own frightening experiences as an eighteen-year-old in World War I, his deep knowledge of psychology, and his resolute faith in God had equipped him at least partially for the intensity of this degree of pastoral care. In 1964, returning from two years of military service in the army as a Jewish chaplain, I settled in Riverdale in the Bronx with my wife and young son and unwittingly selected as our family practitioner an internist who had served as a physician during my father’s tenure at Valley Forge, and who waxed eloquent about his unforgettable sermons. There is no doubt in my mind that Valley Forge profoundly deepened my father’s rabbinic experience and confirmed the wisdom of his decision to stay in Pottstown. In the trenches few could afford the luxury of secularism.

One other duty Emil Schorsch assumed with conviction was representing Judaism to the Christian community. The irrationality and destructiveness of Nazism weighed heavily on his mind. Brotherhood week coinciding with George Washington’s birthday temporarily came to dominate the winter calendar. Clergymen often spoke at our late Friday evening services to commemorate the event, and my father would reciprocate on a Sunday morning at their church services. Ideally suited, he had a deep understanding of religion, a firm command of Judaism, and an unimpeded manner of speaking. The Hebrew Bible was part of his native vocabulary. In small towns like Pottstown, where it was not unusual to see three or four churches on the corners of a single street crossing, the architecture bespoke the comity of brotherhood. As the only rabbi in town, my father spoke when asked in lodges and schools, as well as churches. One year he even delivered the brotherhood address at the Hill School, Pottstown’s prestigious private boys’ school, to which a few local Jewish boys were gradually being admitted as day students.

This year, on September 7, I received an unexpected email from the son of a Jewish student who had been in attendance the day my father spoke. He wrote:

My father attended the Hill School in Pottstown, PA, graduating in 1954. Many times my father told the story of the visiting rabbi who gave a homily from our altar at the Episcopalian church on campus. Probably 1953. The message was that many students would require a step of faith to believe there was a creator. It might even require a leap or a long jump. There might be additional steps, leaps, leading them on a journey. The journey might lead to “there is a God!” The message resonated with my father at that age, and he can still talk about it to this day, aged 88, with Alzheimer’s dementia. The message supported, no, propelled my father in his wonderful life journey, his work, raising a family, spiritual endeavors, fundraising and charitable work, and more.

In amazement I offer this serendipitous gift as singular testimony of the prowess of my father’s preaching. He long believed that, if his words could connect with but one attentive congregant, his taxing preparations would not have been in vain. The honesty, intensity, and fertility of his faith in a secular age, I believe, moved many others to give Judaism a second chance.

By the time I began attending Ursinus College in the fall of 1953, I had a good smattering of knowledge about some of the Protestant denominations in Pottstown, like the Seventh Day Adventists. Ursinus was a liberal arts school affiliated with the Christian Reformed Church and still had a daily chapel requirement from which I was, ironically, exempted as a day student commuting from home.

Nourishing that far-flung and demanding range of activity was my father’s rich inner life. His personal copies of the Hebrew Bible and the Horeb edition of the Mishnah are filled with underlined passages and marginalia. He would end each day before retiring seated at his desk reciting a nugget of Torah in memory of an ancestor, friend, or teacher whose life had impacted his own. His well-stocked library of classical Hebrew texts that made it to America provided him with a sacred silo in which to endure his perilous journey. Not infrequently my father and I meet on the pages of one of his books even now in my library. His voluminous papers teem with notes on ideas and topics with which he grappled, and which would often appear later in a sermon, article, or essay. Sadly, his papers are also the repository of essays that did not make it into print. But one that did on the magnificent poetic prayer Adon Olam (Lord Eternal) is a stirring testament to the vibrancy of his religious thought. In the learned and creative hand of my father, the poet confronts and resolves the daunting tension between our objective knowledge of God and our subjective experience of a personal redeemer. In truth, I believe the key to my father’s rabbinical effectiveness was the power of his lived faith and the ceaselessness of his robust intellectual ferment.

But I cannot bring my father’s story to a close without a crucial addendum. As much as we tried to assimilate outwardly to America, we could not sever our ties to Germany inwardly. Nor did the acquisition of citizenship obliterate the past. We were acutely aware that we had left behind my beloved grandfather, my mother’s father and my father’s father-in-law. An admired Jewish educator in the state of Württemberg, he was the long-time director of a Jewish orphanage in Esslingen founded in 1831 and grandly enhanced in 1913 with a stately building and a good deal of farmland. By then it had become mainly a boarding school in which Jewish children lived by the Jewish calendar and ritual; learned Hebrew, Torah, and German subjects; and worked with their hands as well as their minds. My father came as a small child, gravitated to my grandfather as a surrogate father figure, and attended the same superb Protestant teachers’ seminary in Esslingen as had Theodor Rothschild, his dear director and mentor. Once the Nazis came to power in 1933, Theodor steadfastly refused to apply for an American visa, for fear that, should the Nazis discover his perfidy, they would close his school and disperse his children. Notwithstanding, Nazi vandals ransacked the premises and battered its teachers and children on Reichspogromnacht in 1938. Theodor trudged with faculty and students to Stuttgart on foot. For six months the Nazis allowed them to return to Esslingen and then confiscated the entire facility.

Until Pearl Harbor, letters could still be sent between Germany and America, and Theodor’s carefully self-censored letters depicted the rapid deterioration of the mobility and living space allotted to him and his wife in Stuttgart. Each letter ended with the brave words “Console yourselves, we are doing okay” (Tröstet Euch, uns geht es gut). My parents and aunt and uncle left no stone unturned to secure some form of departure for Theodor and his third wife from Germany, to no avail. Finally, on August 22, 1942 they were sent to Theresienstadt, where he died on July 10, 1944. The day that news reached Pottstown, the Schorsch household fell into prolonged mourning, which I vividly remember. With such visceral ties to Germany we truthfully lived in two worlds, one securely focused on a present filled with hope, and one silently transfixed on a past darkened with trepidation.

It is the biblical prophet Jeremiah who comes to mind if I try to encapsulate the rabbinate of my father. He kept the vow he took in the final chaotic days of World War I to become a rabbi. No matter what obstacles loomed in his path toward ordination or awaited him in his arduous career, he was determined to serve his Maker, wherever he might be sent. Neither scale nor hardship kept him from heeding the words once uttered to Jeremiah:

Do not say, “I am still a boy,”
But go wherever I send you.
And speak whatever I command you.
Have no fear of them,
For I am with you to deliver you.

My father’s unbroken vow was planted in the purity of that faith.

Ismar Schorsch is the Rabbi Herman Abramovitz Distinguished Service Professor of Jewish History and Chancellor Emeritus of the Jewish Theological Seminary.