“An America Without Rabbis”

In 1854 a thirty-five year old German-born rabbi decided to leave Albany, New York and make a new life for himself out on the frontier.  He had been in Albany for eight years, four years each at two different congregations.  He had begun his tenure at Beth El in 1846, and soon thereafter began to introduce some moderate reforms in the worship service.  He created a mixed choir, he included German and English hymns, and he did away with the sale of aliyot.  None of these was terribly radical, especially when compared to some of the changes already made in German Reform congregations.  By 1850 a sizeable portion of the congregation was unhappy with the rabbi’s reforms, and that year a fight broke out on Rosh Hashanah (on the bimah) between the president of the congregation and the rabbi.  After the sheriff calmed things down, the rabbi and his followers created a new congregation – Reform from its inception.  (The two congregations merged later in the 19^th century, evidence of how much Reform had caught on.  Beth Emeth is Reform today).

But in 1854 Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise, decided to go to what was then the largest city west of the Alleghenies -- Cincinnati, Ohio.  He became the rabbi of Bene Yeshurun Congregation (now called Isaac M. Wise Temple, or Plum Street Temple), and remained in that position until his death in 1900.  What else Wise did during his forty-six years in Cincinnati is most remarkable.  He did nothing short of making history.

I mentioned that Wise was originally from Germany.  That was where Reform Judaism early in the 19^th century, a response to the desire of German Jews to remain Jewish but to acculturate to German society.  Conservative Judaism and Modern Orthodoxy began after Reform, as responses to the same issue.

So Wise did not create Reform Judaism, neither in Germany nor in the United States.  Reform Judaism had existed since before Wise’s birth.  What Wise did was to create the institutions of American Reform Judaism that have lasted until today, and have been copied by every other branch of Judaism.

Wise’s greatest dream and ambition was to create a school for training modern rabbis.  In the middle of the 19^th century there was really only one school in the world that did such a thing, combining secular knowledge and the study of Jewish texts and traditions.  That was the Jewish Theological Seminary in Breslau.  Before that time, in the world of traditional Judaism, rabbis were privately ordained, having spent much of their lives in the yeshiva studying Talmud.  In the modern world, a rabbi was expected not only to be able to make decisions based on Jewish law, but to be a teacher, a leader, a pastor and an orator.  The Jewish Theological Seminary in Breslau, and later the Hochschule fur die Wissenschaft des Judenthuums, were German institutions that trained Conservative and Reform rabbis who also held doctorates from German universities.  These institutions were both destroyed by the Nazis, and HUC rescued scholars and rabbinical students from almost certain death – among these were W. Gunther Plaut and Abraham Joshua Heschel.

But back to the 19^th century…  The need for a rabbinical school in the United States was what Isaac Mayer Wise hoped to address in coming to Cincinnati in 1846.  When he came to the United States originally, there was only one ordained rabbi in the country.  (The good old days!)  An America without rabbis just would not do.

American Judaism needed a school to train rabbis who would be in touch with American Jews.  American Reform Jews at that time were mainly German immigrants trying to acculturate to America.  Yeshiva-trained rabbis who were more concerned with the kashruth of their chickens than with their deeper religious lives, these were not the rabbis that these new Americans wanted or needed.  Wise surmised, correctly I think, that American Judaism would be improved if there were locally-trained religious leaders who were both secularly well-educated and knowledgeable in things Jewish.  It is for this reason that even today admission to HUC requires at least a bachelor’s degree from an accredited institution.  We want our graduates to know more than just Judaism.

But how was Wise to create such a school, a place that could create American rabbis?  At that point, there was no such thing as an American rabbi. Wise raised money in Cincinnati and in 1855 founded Zion College.  It closed two years later, having produced no rabbis.  Over the next several years Wise cultivated relationships with Reform Jews and congregations throughout the South and Midwest, and in 1873 called together a “Union of American Hebrew Congregations” to meet in Cleveland.  This new UAHC’s mission would be to raise the funds necessary to create the school of Wise’s dreams.  Two years later, in 1875, his dream came true.

But who could have imagined from those first few students in the fall of 1875 what the Hebrew Union College would become?  Over the next one-hundred and twenty-five (or six) years, your institution of higher learning in Reform Judaism has far surpassed the expectations of its founders.

Begun in Cincinnati with poor children (many of them orphans) as students, today HUC has four campuses on two continents.  We have grown from being solely a rabbinical school to become a cantorial school, a school for the training of Jewish educators and communal professionals, and a graduate school that is consistently ranked in the top ten in the fields of study that are our faculty’s areas of expertise (Bible, Ancient Near East, Theology, Rabbinic Literature and History).

At its creation, HUC had two full time faculty members.  Today there are sixty, as well as an equal number of part-time instructors.  The first ordination class was four young men, this year we will ordain forty-five, more than half of them women  (this is more than the major Conservative and Orthodox seminaries ordain, and we have a smaller budget, even with four campuses).  We have museums, the American Jewish Archives, the Centers for the Study of Ethics, the Center for Holocaust and Humanity Education.  We have libraries and research facilities that are unparalleled in North America.  We offer programs for youths and adults throughout the year, including training courses for Para-Rabbinics in the summer.  And we are adding on-line courses to our curriculum.

Today Reform Judaism has grown to be the largest movement in American Judaism.  We have centers of population across the world, including Israel.  Our home is still in Cincinnati, where the low cost-of-living and emphasis on scholarship makes it possible for rabbinical students and graduate students to spend the time necessary to learn and grow.  It also helps that our Klau Library in Cincinnati is the second largest Judaica library in the world, second only to the Jewish National and University Library in Jerusalem.  As well, out of Cincinnati we serve more than sixty small congregations throughout the South and Midwest through our student rabbi program.  In New York, where the Jewish Institute of Religion was founded in 1922, the merged HUC-JIR serves the Northeast.  And we have had a presence in Los Angeles since the early 1950’s (Rabbi Block and I began our training in Los Angeles, and my wife’s degrees are from that campus).  And since 1963 we have had a campus in Jerusalem, where all rabbinical, cantorial and education students spend their first year of study.  Our campus in Jerusalem, where I celebrated Shabbat just a few weeks ago, is the center for Progressive Judaism in Israel.  If you are in Israel, you must visit!

You might also argue that today there are different types of Reform Judaism, depending on the region of the country.  I was raised in a Classical Reform congregation and I can tell you that my first year in the rabbinical program at HUC in Jerusalem was a bit shocking!  I was unaccustomed to most of the traditions, and it took several years to become comfortable in a more ritualistic setting.  In Cincinnati, where I work, we seek to train learned Reform rabbis who can serve the totality of the Jewish people, with sensitivities to different regional flavors.  One of my responsibilities at the College-Institute is to oversee the program that places rabbinical students in small congregations throughout the region.   I remind students not to run roughshod over a congregation’s customs, while at the same time learning from the wide variety of Reform practices that they encounter in Israel, in Cincinnati, and in their student pulpits.

HUC-JIR trains leaders who must be in touch with the people they lead, and be of real service to those whom they touch.  Towards this goal we prepare our students to know and to do.  Our curriculum is anchored in both professional development and classical Jewish studies.

This congregation has been served by many distinguished alumni of HUC-JIR:

Rabbis Sidney Tedesche, Ephraim Frisch, David Jacobson and Samuel M. Stahl have all served as senior rabbi.

Rabbis William Sajowitz, Jonathan Brown, Bruce Block, Leslie Freund, Morley Feinstein, Mark Goodman, Barry Block and B. Allison Bergman have served as interim, assistant or associate rabbis.

Rabbinical Interns: Melanie Aron and David Komerofsky.

Cantor Scott Colbert, a graduate of the School of Sacred Music, was cantor here.

And the following graduates of the Schools of Education in New York and Los Angeles have been or remain part of Beth El:  Martin Hoenig, Roberta Louis Goodman, Madelyn Mishkin Katz, Deena Bloomstone, Renee Rubin and Avram Mandell.

A number of people who grew up in this congregation have gone on to study at HUC-JIR: Rabbis Barton Lee, Larry Malinger, Eugene Levy, Robert Goodman, Peter Haas and Education/Communal Service graduate Rachel Stern Komerofsky.  In-laws of Temple members: Jonathan Roos, Darcy DuBois Crystal, Larry Jackofsky, Holly Cohn and David Komerofsky.

Isaac Mayer Wise’s Hebrew Union College has only become what it is because it has had the support of Reform congregations, Reform Jews, and Reform rabbis.  In 1889 Wise created the Central Conference of American Rabbis as a professional organization for Reform rabbis, alumni of his school.  The three institutions that Wise created, the Union, the College and the Conference work together to keep Reform active and vital.

How far we have come since 1875.  How much we have accomplished in creating, sustaining and expanding a Reform Movement.   We have been the vanguard in including women to full participation in religious and academic life.  We have led the way by casting our net wide and welcoming non-Jewish relatives of Jews into our congregations.  We in the Reform Movement, and at HUC-JIR, have broken down barriers that still exist in other movements of Judaism.  But there is more to be done.  There are generations of Jews to be served, new leaders to be nurtured.  For our Movement, and our College-Institute to remain strong, we need students.  We need men and women who are as committed to the vision of American Judaism as was Isaac Mayer Wise.  We need men and women who share the dream of a vibrant and meaningful future for Reform Judaism, and who want to share that with others.  Rabbis, cantors, educators, communal service professionals, scholars – the students and alumni of the Hebrew Union College – Jewish Institute of Religion seek to keep alive and expand the dreams of Isaac Mayer Wise.

Once upon a time there was an America without rabbis.  No more.  With a shortage of clergy in all faiths, we now have an American without enough rabbis!  Our strategic plan for recruitment will address this problem, and within a few years there will no longer be a shortage of rabbis.  There will be enough rabbis and cantors and trained Jewish professionals to serve our growing movement, and do so with integrity and authenticity.

Our Movement is what it is because those before us built it, now it is our turn to build, so that this rich legacy will be there for us to pass along as well.  A century and a quarter after its creation, we can take pride in how Wise took an America without rabbis and made it something else.  We can look forward to a future filled with promise and possibility.

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