Rabbi Adler's Last Article
The Rabbi: 1966
\
/'
/—
RABBI MORRIS ADLER
pathos. He suffers a score of
alienations and must daily battle
for his faith and hope. For he is
isolated at the very center of the
community he "leads" and serves
as the spokesman of a group-
tradition at a time when the group
has become all but traditionless.
The rabbi is the heir and
teacher of the longest continuous
history and tradition in the West-
ern world. From early childhood
he has trained to look at life from
the vantage point of a millennial
history. In his father's home, he
had become rooted in a faith and
background, and its symbols, in-
stitutions and rhythms are deeply
intertwined with his personal atti-
tudes and beliefs. History-oriented
and tradition-centered he now sees
himself a stranger in a land not
his.
For ours is an age of a receding
if not disappearing past, in which
yesterday quickly joins antiquity
in the mounting heap of the obso-
lescent. Daily are we witness to
the proliferation of discontinuities
and the escaltation of transitori-
ness. Modern man is "isolated" in
time since change, vast, constant
and relentless, cuts the ground of
the past from under his feet and
allows him but the immediate mo-
ment in which to move about. Life
no longer proceeds from precedent
but rather from the novel to the
unprecedented.
It is small wonder that he ap-
pears to himself as standing at a
crossroad of uncertainty and am-
biguity, without a clear conception
of his function and baffled as to
direction. He does not define him-
self either as prophet or priest,
philosopher or mystic, communal
leader or administrator. He may
be something of each, and the re-
sult is a blurred portrait that is
not easily recognizable, and that
except for the designation "rabbi"
bears little similarity to that of his
predecessors. How easy it is to
pick upon the weakness he be-
trays, the inner contradictions he
unites within him, the corrosions
his profession has suffered.
/-
He provides a ready target
for those who delight in making
ironic thrusts at the vulgarities
of the organized life over which
he presumably presides in their
desire to exculpate themselves
from their non-involvement in
matters Jewish. He has attained
a high degree of conspicuous-
ness, a condition which invites
critics to heap upon him the
guilt for the shallowness, shrill-
ness and showiness of so much
of communal activity. (There
may be a psychological basis to
the need or desire to level criti-
cism at the rabbi.) Yet he is
more victim than culprit, more
the object than the shaper of
the forces of Jewish collective
endeavor. The real power in the
community rests in other hands,
while his own influence is more
apparent than vital. The Jewish
community itself is in the vortex
of powerful circumstances that
have their origin and locus out-
side of it.
But it is not to defend him that
leads one to speak of the rabbi,
current vintage—though obviously
one should appraise his position
and work in proper perspective.
Understanding should be prior to
judgment. What claims our atten-
tion here is an aspect that goes
unnoticed in the novels in which
he is a character— chief of sub-
sidiary — and in the essays which
treat their readers to a philosophi-
cal ar sociological analysis of the
rabbi on the American Jewish
scene. It is an aspect that lies
hidden beneath the surface of his
prominence and success and
seems to be denied by the adula-
tion accorded him and the com-
fortable livelihood granted him.
His is essentially a life of
Jewish tradition defines the
rabbi as a layman, yet to his
parishioners he is a clergyman
and pastor and he has not yet
grown comfortably into the new
role that has been thrust upon
him. A teacher of a tradition,
he is now in the service of an
institution; an interpreter of a
history, he has in fact become
the executive of an agency. By
calling and temperament a stu-
dent, he has been turned into
an official, a steward, a member
of a staff. Interested in ideas
and disciplined to study in pri-
vacy, the logic of surrounding
circumstances has led him to
serve as an apostle of affability
and conviviality. He knows and
is known by more people than
any other leader in the com-
munity (save the political boss)
and yet at the heart of him
there is an ungureness of self
in the midst of the crowd. Often
a consciousness of apartness
grips him, for which he quickly
compensates with simulated ex-
uberance. He is a frequent guest
A Happy New Year To All Our
Friends and Customers
Detroit
Birmingham
328 N. Woodward
it,
t tS•
342 2440
-
Complete Cantonese Varieties
.•
CHARLOTTE'S KNIT SHOP
CITY SMOKED FISH CO.
- THE DUPLEX SHOPPE
MAU-RENE INC.
,
MR. AND MRS. MAX RICHMAN AND FAMILY
, 11•1111111111111k
SAMUEL BROS. CAFETERIA
Happy New Year To All
Our Customers and Friends
WEISS KOSHER
POULTRY MARKET
Eastern Market
xt*-,F****4<--vuv-**-*****Jowo-**-****-*4c-v-y-)wf-vpi-***4****.v-4L*4
Best Wishes For A Happy New Year
to Our Friends and Patrons
THE FABULOUS
STAR BAKERY
of Bedspreads"
19323 Livernois
it• • t t
Edward and Louis Yee
12832 W. Seven Mile Rd. near Meyers
He sees himself shipwrecked on
Best Wishes for a Joyous New Year
an uninhabited island, far from
to All Our Friends and Patrons
centers of life and movement. He
sadly concludes that he is a mem-
ber of the world's loneliest profes-
sion. He is modern and advanced,
13128 West Seven Mile Rd.
UN 4-0957
but the background he brings to
Call for Appointment
his modernity 'stands in the way
of his full integration into con-
temporary life. He is liber'al and
recognizes not only the inevit-
ability but the desirability and
value of change even within the
tradtiion which he represents. He
Best Wishes for a Happy New Year
recognizes an irrefutable truth in
the words of Whitehead, "The art
of free society consists first in the
maintenance of the symbolic code
and secondly in the fearlessness
of revision . . . Those societies
which cannot combine reverence
to their symbols with freedom of
revision must ultimately decay."
Yet he is restrained by the inhibit-
A Happy New Year To All Our
ing apprehension that the stabili-
Friends and Customers
ties needed to absorb the changes
(Whitehead's "symbolic code") are
lacking in Jewish life, and change
that is not made in a frame of
reference of the continuing be-
22102 Coolidge
comes dissolution rather than re-
Oak Park, Michigan
vision. He responds to a devout-
ness to which he cannot give full
expression at the services of
which he is the officiant. Com-
pelled by the convention of our
A Happy and Healthy New Year
times governing the clergy to
make many public addresses, he
worries constantly whether the
fluency and felicity he has de-
veloped are not the enemies of
his thought and reflection.
Detroit, Michigan
While religion is respected, it is
not invoked. Though he is hon- rirtnnsinnctrins-istrinsinsrb'
ored as a "man of God," he is not
taken seriously. He has become a
symbol on a par with other sym-
Wishing All My Customers and Friends
bols—the Art, Torah, menorah,
altar—and like them revered at a
A Very Happy and Healthy New Year
distance but not profaned by in-
volvement in daily life and crucial
decisions. (He wryly muses that
the traditional reference to the
enkindled lights of Hanuka re-
Ruth Ross
flects, ironically, the contemporary
attitude, "One is not permitted to
make use of them, but only to be-
hold them.")
A Happy and Healthy New Year
The rabbi recognizes that what
his generation needs, perhaps above
all else, is a rationale, a reasoned
exposition of Judaism that would
hot only serve as its intellectual
COUTURIER FASH IONS
justification but would also natur-
alize it in the larger universe of
17592 Wyoming
M in a Ave.
UN 3-7477
discourse and thought in which
educated modern Jews move. But
he is too fragmented, too diffused,
WASUUWISULSLUZSLULP
to attempt such a synthesis and
Wishing All Our Friends and Relatives
the age too greatly in flux to per-
mit such a structure. He is per-
A Very Happy, Healthy and Joyous New Year
force a dealer in fragments, fugi-
tive texts, disperate insights. The
context to enclose them seems to
28770 Brooks Lane
have dissolved. Unity and whole-
Southfield, Mich.
ness are neither in him nor in his
teaching.
In the rabbi are concentrated
the frustrations, ambivalenceS,
confusions and uncertainties which
bedevil the modern Jew, intensi-
A Happy New Year To All Our
fied by his greater rootedness in
Friends and Customers
Judaism and magnified by the rep-
resentative nature of his position.
13523 W. 7 Mile Rd.
864-8565
BEN PUPKO'S
"House
LOTUS GARDENS
MAGDA HAIR FASHIONS
hallowed.
7
New Year Greetings
at testimonial dinners, recep-
tions and the multiple bizarre
festivities which clog the calen-
dar of American Jewish life, and
yet in the brief moments when
he is not "socializing" he finds
himself agonizing over the ques-
tion, "What am I doing here?"
(Editor's Note: Early this year,
Rabbi Morris Adler wrote "The
Rabbi: 1966" for the spring 1966
issue of Jewish Heritage, the lit-
erary quarterly of Bnai Brith's
adult Jewish education depart-
meat. It was the last article writ-
ten by Rabbi Adler, chairman of
Bnai Brith's Commission on Adult
Jewish Education, b e f or e his
death.)
* * *
-Upon no one else in the Jewish
community have the hammer blows
of change and mutation fallen as
forcefully as upon the American
rabbi (excepted are those who live
in the few communities of refuge
from modern life to be found in
Brooklyn and Long Island — the
Mea Shearim of our continent).
None has been more exposed to
the "acids of modernity" than he;
none as storm-tossed by the mul-
tiple revolutions that have worked
such havoc with the inherited and
Friday, September 16, 1966-43
THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS
* 13505 W. 7 Mile at Hartwell
UN 4-6600
* New Orleans Mall
EL 7-1291
* 10 Mi. at Greenfield
:***********************************************it