The Sentinel, v.077 no. 03, 1930

              DR. JULIAN MORGANSTERN
By P. W. WILSON
If a man is to achieve his maximum, he must
be unimpeded by misgivings and his doubts
must be subordinated to his duties.
It is true that Dr. Julian Morganstern-cheerful,
courteous and confident-faces the for-midable
task of presiding over the Hebrew
Union College at Cincinnati, with all the wider
responsibilities that accompany this strategic
position. He is a man who knows where he
stands. For what he believes, he can give a rea-son.
By hard thinking, he has become an in-carnation
of certitude.
Of Judaism, he is entirely confident. Disin-tegration?
Absorption by an environing cul-ture?
He will not hear of it. His observation
is that no such thing is happening. On the con-trary,
the mind of Jewry-so he holds has never
been more alert, nor has its mission ever been
more definitely before its eyes. Incisive and ex-plicit,
he challenges contradiction.
The Hebrew Union College is itself summoned
as witness. It is the main purpose of the College
to train rabbis and its enrollment is 120 stu-dents.
But it might be much larger. Quality
not quantity has been the objective, and out of
70 students applying this year for admission,
only 26 were accepted. In recruiting the Rab-binate,
there is thus an abundance of material
from which to select the best. Reform Judaism
is immune from that danger of a shortage of
clergy which troubles some other communions.
The College is extending its influence; and in
two directions. First, there is the Summer
School. Secondly, there is the School in New
York where will. be found no fewer than 365
students who are preparing to serve the syna-gogue
as religious school teachers. President
Morgenstern hopes that similar schools will be
established in time in other cities-for instance,
Philadelphia, Boston, Baltimore and Chicago-where
there are strong Jewish communities. The
management would be local. But he suggests
that the supervision and counsel of the Hebrew
Union College might be welcomed as helpful and
as leaving to the fixing of a high standard for
the preparation of religious school teachers for
Reform Judaism.
"We need," says he, "a fully instructed rab-binate.
But by itself, such a rabbinate is not
enough. In the endeavor to maintain a con-scious
and united Jewry, the laity must co-oper-ate.
In our synagogues, we devote from two
to three hours a week to educating our young
people in the principles and the history of Juda-ism.
For these classes, we should provide
teachers who, though many of them are volun-tary,
can all teach with full authority."
I suggested that, in Christian Sunday Schools,
one hour is usually held to be sufficient for such
instruction.
"That," said Dr. Morganstern, with a smile,
"is because Dogmatic Christianity demands
*only belief and faith. But Judaism, on the other
hand, demands knowledge as the foundations
of belief and faith and knowledge has to be
won by effort. Indeed, the two or three hours
that we side aside for the purpose in our Re-formed
synagogues, are not adequate. We ought
to arrange for at least one other session in the
mid-week. If we have not obtained it as yet,
the reason is that religion has rivals. There
are the demands of society. There are also the
claims of the secular school. But we shall get
there in time. Our people will come to see the
importance of building their religious beliefs
and practice on a thorough foundation of Jew-ish
knowledge."
To President Morganstern, knowledge is thus
among the supreme factors in religion. Yet he
is more careful on that account to distinguish
between what, in his view, ought to be known
and what it is useless for man to try to find out.
In the words of Tennyson, he holds that the
knowledge worth having is "of things we see."
IIe believes firmly in a future life. But he in-sists
that this hereafter is veiled from our eyes
by a curtain that we cannot draw aside. Over
eternity, we may exercise our imaginations. But
we cannot hope to arrive at certainties.
Hence, Dr. Morganstern, frankly avoiding
beatific visions, concentrates his mind on life as
a present and immediate opportunity. "It is
the world around us," he declares, "''that God
has created to be our domicile. This planet
where he has placed us, is the permanent home
of the human race. We should so spend our
days on earth as to make it a little bit happier
and more beautiful as a home for those who
come after us. This is the purpose for which
our lives were given to us as a trust. Let us be
true to that trust and our life in the beyond
will take care of itself."
To Dr. Morganstern, seeing life in the long
perspective of history, says religion is an activ-ity,
to be described as social in its ultimate pur-poses.
The individual dies but the race goes on.
''Christianity,'' he suggests, ''lays stress on per-sonal
salvation. But Judaism emphasizes social
salvation, the betterment of mankind. Our reli-gion
is not based on creeds nor expressed in cere-monies.
It is to be defined rather as a way of
life-a way of living our lives, here and now,
as God has meant that life should be lived here
-the unfolding of life in worship, in art, in
science, in commerce, in citizenship and, indeed,
in all that makes life worth living."
So far from contemplating a disappearance of
Judaism as a movement in the upward progress
of mankind, Dr. Morganstern is of opinion that
Judaism is drawing the world to itself. "I do
not suggest," says he, "That Christians and
Hindus and Mohammedans are eager to be-come
Jews; nor do we expect that. Indeed, ours
is not a proselytizing religion. But what I do
notice is an increasing and a general tendency
to adopt a distinctively Jewish point of view of
life, to abandon those extreme ritualistic prac-tices
and ecclesiastical dialectics to which the
world is gradually ceasing to attach importance
and to accept a Jewish estimate of what is really
essential to life and to the well being and prog-ress
of society. In modern Christianity these
tendencies are very evident and they suggest
that, in the future, we shall see a more intimate
co-operation between men and women of good-will,
regardless of whatever faith they may sub-scribe.
In arriving at a correct way of life, we
shall draw nearer to one another."
President Morganstern sees unmistakable
signs that India and China are likewise mov-ing,
even though unconsciously, in the direction
of the Judaic ideal. Islam, he thinks, is at pres-ent
less open to Jewish ideas, but even modern
Islam is by no means unaffected by present day
tendencies in religion.
In Judaism, Dr. Morganstern discerns, there-fore,
a historic evolution and an age-long des-tiny.
It is, as he conceives it, a destiny, always
in process of fulfilment, yet never completely
fulfilled. It is a destiny, subject to historic
evolution, past, present and future. Also, this
destiny, so far from ending at the foundation
of the Christian Era, persisted without inter-ruption'
into the middle ages and continues to
this day.
He is thus a liberal yet a conservative. On
the one hand, his theory of life is bound up
with progress. On the other hand, he holds that
progress is itself a continuation of the past into
the present along definite lines which history
has marked out. Ile insists, therefore, that the
progressive Jew must be steeped in Jewish tra-dition.
Hie must be, as it were, initiated into
the drama of which he is himself a part. I asked
Dr. Morganstern whether he did not find a diffi-culty
in meeting modern scientific criticism. of
the Bible.
"No difficulty at all," he retorted. "At the
Hebrew Union College, we accept unreservedly
the results of criticism and have ourselves even
made some contribution to those results. The
Scriptures are not a book but a literature. They
are a national literature. It is a literature, pro-duced
over a period of a thousand years, and it
is only a part of a larger literature, most of
which has been lost. The Scriptures were not
dictated by God to a stenographer; they were,
however, none the less, inspired; but the inspira-tion
of the Scriptures presupposes a correspond-ing
inspiration in the people through whom the
Scriptures came into being."
"The Scriptures are not at all objective his-tory.
They are, as German scholars say, ten-dentious.
They were written with a purpose,
and we need, there, to determine that purpose,
interpret these writings accordingly and thus to
reconstruct the life of which they are the ex-pression.
We have to ask ourselves what real-ities
were behind the Scriptures, and this en-quiry
is itself a difficult and responsible task of
science-this is Biblical Science."
A man who has taken the trouble to make up
his own mind, is always the man who helps
others to make up their minds also. In Dr. Mor-ganstern,
it is manifest that Reform Judaism
can be as sure of itself as Orthodox Judaism
has been in the past. It is not creed, it is not
ceremony that he rejects. Rather it is compro-mise.
He respects the rights of others. But he
has no intention whatever of surrendering his
own.
Not all Jews will accept his definition of what
is essential to Judaism. Not all non-Jews will
accept his estimate of what is essential to life.
Between what we may call the divinities and the
humanities, there will ever be an action and an
interaction, ebbing and flowing like the tides.
Dr. Morganstern is, frankly, among the human-ists,
and assuredly no humanist has ever been
more persuasive.
(Copyrighted, 1930, J. T. A., Inc.)