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THE  CANADIAN  JEWISH  REVIEW
SEPTEMBER 30, 1949
CANADIAN JEWISH REVIEW
An Impartial Medium for the Dissemination of Jewish-Jtfews and Views
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George W. Cohen, Publisher
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I wholly disapprove of what you say and will defend to the death your right to say it. � Voltaire to Helvetius.
SEPTEMBER 30, 1949
VOL. XXXI, No. 53
Commentaries
By Dr. Hurry J. Stern, Rabbi
Sin And World Atonement
"Our Father, our King, we have sinned before Thee"
For thousands of years man has been discussing the question of sin. Theological history records some of the bitterest of debates dealing with the subject. Philosophers of past ages were perplexed by this phenomenon, and psychologists of our own day are still grappling with the problem of sin, its origin and the means of obtaining forgiveness.
What is sin? Originally sin was not a term involving ethical standards, the relations between man and God. Initially, sin meant the violation of the will of God; and where the Diety did not have ethical attributes, there need not have been a 'question of right and wrong. Thus, for example, in the early stages of the Book of Genesis the traditional story tells of Adam and Eve having sinned. What was their sin? They certainly did not harm anyone. They ate of the tree of knowledge, breaking the prohibition ordered by the Diety; and hence they were guilty of disobeying the will of God and therein they sinned.
At a later time in the history of Judaism when the ritual came to play an important and dramatic role in worship, Bin meant a violation of ritual codes. Failure to offer the instituted sacrifices, failure to observe the details of ritual, constituted sin, for God was comprehended as the God of ritualism.
This conception of God as the creator of ritual, and the thought that ceremonies are of divine origin, are still held by some who consider a person religious just because he observes the details of ritual. Of course, in this light we can appreciate the Haftorah reading for Yom Kippur where in the prophet Isaiah cries out: "Is such the fast that I have chosen? Is it to bow down his head as a bullrush and to spread sackcloth and ashes under him? Wilt thou call this a fast, and an acceptable day to the Lord? Is not this the fast that I have chosen? To loose the fetters of wickedness to undo the bonds of the yoke? Is it not to deal thy bread to the hungry, and that thou bring the poor that are cast out, to thy house? When thou seest the naked, that thou cover him, and that thou hide not thyself from thine own flesh?"
Ritual, itself, serves a purpose, but, says the prophet, ritual is important, but the ethical life is a life of justice, compassion and love. Thus the prophets of Israel revolutionized the conception of sin when they advanced the "God concept." God wants to be holy in conduct, since God Himself is the God of holiness and justice. Thus sin became a term applied not to ritual, but to infractions of the moral law which the prophets proclaimed as constituting the will of God.
Thus the Biblical literature reveals the various strata of thought, indicating the evolutionary growth of theological thinking in Israel. As Israel grew in ethical stature, it in turn redefined the "God idea."
Now, while we recognize that today there are ethical codes in existence, and that the violation of these are termed sinful, these do not give us the complete answer to the question of defining the term "sin." Surely the ethical code regulates: "Thou shalt not kill". Yet, behold, how in war, the state orders the soldier to do this very thing to the enemy. And only this week a group of clergy has endorsed euthanasia, mercy killing, something which seems to be in conflict with one of the Ten Commandments.
Sin in our day may still be defined as an offense against the will of God, the God within us. If in terms of modern science we conceive of life as a process of growth, sin is anything that spells faithlessness to one's highest nature. Old sages of Israel have spoken of a battle within man beween evil and good inclinations. Out of this war within one's soul, man cjtows in character when the Yetzer Ha-Tov triumphs, and the evil impulses are subdued and conquered. Hence sin may be defined as the sum of any mans failure to live the highest and noblest life that is possible in his relationship with himself, his fellow man and God.
Who in the light of this definition can claim on Yom Kippur that he is without sin? "Chotonu"! We have all sinned. Who has not missed reaching the highest goals in life? While most of us are not guilty of sins of commission, we are guilty of sins of omission. We have failed to grasp the opportunities for doing kindness; blessed with talent, we have refused to utilize these for the benefit of society. It is not enough to avoid; one must engage actively in doing good. It is the self-sacrificed man who does not acknowledge the shred of inadequacy that is incapable of moral growth. On Yom Kippur day the growing soul is certainly disturbed by "divine discontent."
Yom Kippur summons us to seek "at-one-ment" with our higher self, with our fellow man and with God. Yom Kippur asks for a clear heart and renewed spirit in order that we attain forgiveness. Thus, the first step in the process of atonement is the consciousness of sin. But the mere knowledge of our sin must be followed by reparation. Make good the evil we have wrought; last, but not least, there must be born within us a sense of shame, since man is the only creature who can be conscious of error.
The peace of the world is now being threatened because of the lack of consciousness of sin on the part of all nations, victor and vanquished alike. Let not victor nations claim self-righteousness! World atonement is now essential if we are to redeem society. Resolute must be our determinaion to build a social order based on moral foundations.
We Jews who have been sinned against so much by a cruel world, hope as we stand in our houses of prayer before our celestial judge, and somehow believe, that side by side with us as we offer our accounting to the Almighty, there are standing
(Continued from Page One) partner in most of her husband's political and philanthropic undertakings, but during his terms as Secretary of the Treasury she was publicly credited .with stimulating the arts projects sponsored by the Treasury Department and with encouraging American artists in many other ways.
She had long been one of the most intimate friends of Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt, and during the Roosevelt's twelve-year occupancy of the White House Mrs. Morgenthau was confidante and travelling companion on many of Mrs. Roosevelt's journeys to hospitals, Works Progress Administration projects and resettlement communities throughout the United States; and she was a volunteer helper and stand-in of Mrs. Roosevelt during the letter's service as assistant director of the Office of Civilian Defense in 1941 and 1942.
At White House functions Mrs. Morgenthau sometimes assisted the President's wife, and at the annual stunt night of the "gridiron widows," Mrs. Morgenthau usually wrote some of the skits and appeared in them with Mrs. Roosevelt. The two women often rode horseback in Washington's parks and attended farm groups meetings together.
When King George VI and Queen Elizabeth of Great Britain visited Hyde Park on June 11, 1939, Mrs. Morgenthau was one of four seated at the King's table during the famous hotdog picnic, while her husband sat at Queen Elizabeth's table. The picnic strawberries were a gift from the Morgenthau gardens.
More than a thousand persons attended funeral services at Temple Emanu-El, 1 East Sixty-fifth Street. The chief eulogy was delivered by Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt. Dressed in deep black, Mrs. Roosevelt spoke from the pulpit, stressing not only the sorrow of all Mrs. Morgenthau's friends, but also the sense of gratitude all should feel for "a life beautifully and usefully lived."
"My deepest sympathy goes to '.er family," Mrs. Roosevelt said, "but I hope they will feel with me today a sense of gratitude that we have had her as long as we did, and that her influence will continue throughout our lives. We should have a sense of triumph that human beings can pass through this life and leave a challenge to better doing for all of us."
Noting also Mrs. Morgenthau's willingness to help those who came to her for assistance, Mrs. Roosevelt continued: "We will miss her day by day, more and more, for there are not many people who lived their lives as she lived hers and who gave real love unstinting-ly. She gave of her worldly goods with generosity, but what she gave without stint was herself and her own affections and love, and that is what those of us who loved her are grateful for today."
Mrs. Roosevelt entered the temple with the two rabbis who conducted the service, the Rev. Dr. Julius Mark, senior rabbi, and the Rev Dr. Samuel H. Goldenson, rabbi emeritus.
The service opened with "0 Lord in Mercy Lead Us", by Sibelius, sung by the full choir. Dr. Mark then read from the nineteenth psalm and the twenty-third psalm. He included a selection from Devotion No. 17, by John Donne, em-bodying the phrase '"for whom the bell tolls." Dr. Goldenson delivered the final eulogy, praising Mrs. Morgenthau's wide humanitarian, artistic and social interests. He characterized Mrs. Morgenthau as a rarely gifted and blessedly endowed woman" and paid tribute to a "unique life" both "in its significance and in exceptional usefulness."
Miss Frances Bible, of the Metropolitan Opera Company, a pro-teg� of Mrs. Moreenthau, sang "0 Rest In The Lord" by Mendelssohn and Schumann's "Du Bist Wie Eine Blume." The recessional was "In Thee Have I Trusted." bv Handel and was followed by Mendelssohn's Funeral March.
Burial, which was private, was in Mount Pleasant Cemeterv PleasantvilJe. N.Y
N. Y. FEDERATION
(Continued from Page One) Board of Guardians, and the Pleas-antville Cottage School, an agency that serves younester3 for broken homes, conducted by the Jewish Child Care Association. Both schools are located in Westchester County.
Mr. Samuel said the Home for Aged and Infirm Hebrews is now erecting a new six-story extension in the Bronx, and that the present building at 121 West 105th Street would undergo modernization and repair.
Experimental projects in care of the aged will be started soon by the Federation. A series of "boarding homes" will be developed for old persons adverse to living in Institutions, Louis I. Dublin, rice-president and statistician of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Com-pany, reported.
Reflections In "Days Of Awe"
By Rabbi Norman N. Shapiro, University Avenue Synagogue, Toronto
This year wc can really recite "Shehecheyonu", the traditional Jewish blessing of thankfulness to God for enabling us to celebrate the first anniversary of Israel's Declaration of Independence, the admission of Israel into the United Nations, the cessation of hostilities and the forerunners of Arab-Jewish peace.
We are still faced with a great number of complex problems but we realize that we must close an old chapter in a book only to begin a new one. Our challenges are of a happier nature now as we have an advantage of being the irresistible force that met an immoveable object, and wonder of wonders, moved it! Israel is faced with housing shortages, psychological difficulties of D. P. arrivals, reconversion from war to peacetime economies, the spectre of post-
The demonstration will need $90,-000 for capital expenditure and $20,000 a year for maintenance, he added. But if the experiment succeeded, he explained, it would provide a wholesomt family environment for more persons over 65 "and at rather limited cost."
Another project will bring housekeeping services home to the aged to allow them to live in their own quarters, Mr. Dublin said. A corps of qualified housekeepers, assisted by trained case workers, will be recruited to help elderly individuals and families. This experiment will need $45,000 to start and $10,000 a year to be maintained.
The program also calls for modernization, repair and improvement of the sixteen existing Federation camps for city children, and the purchase of land to contain six new camps.
Mr. Samuel said the four-year-study bore in mind the needs of the changing areas of New York and the shifting populations, and asserted that the "successful achievement of the building fund program will be our generation's solid and lasting contribution to the community services of the city, both for today and for tomorrow!"
Mr. Samuel is the senior partner of Ralph E. Samuel and Company, a brokerage house. He served from 1945 to 1948 as chairman of the Building Fund Committee, resigning that post when elected to the Federation presidency. He is serving his second term as president.
WAS FAMOUS
(Continued from Page One)
tried his new methods at the Winter Garden. In the following years, they presented numerous actors and comedians who were to become nationally famous.
From the beginning of the 1930's, burlesque shows began to run into difficulties, with an ever-tighter restriction by the municipal government, and in 1939 they were banished. The Minsky brothers turned to other interests.
Along with his ventures in burlesque, Mr. Minsky had been interested in other theatrical enterprises, including musical comedies, such as "Strut Miss Lizzie" in 1925, and a musical comedv at the Park Music Hall, later called the International Theater, in 1924 and 1925.
Surviving are his wife, Mrs. Mol-lie Minsky; the brothers Herbert and Morton: a son, Harold; a daughter, Mrs. Sylvia Elkman; and two sisters, Mrs. Rose Radin and Mrs. Isabel Mendelsohn.
NEW AMERICANS
(Continued from Page One) passengers were cleared in alphabetical order, but with such speed that all except one man left the field before sunset.
The one exception was Kalman Lesser. 24 years old. en route to live with a brother-in-law at 434 Sack man Street, Brooklyn. He was ordered to Ellis Island for examination for tuberculosis. A member of the Jewish group, he pleaded with airport officials to be allowed to remain at the field until Monday, saying that he had not travelled on the Sabbath since he was released from a German concentration camp at the end of the war.
After he had been assured, however, that his trip to Ellis Island would be speeded, and that religious services would be held there, he agreed to the journey.
The flight, made on a Seaboard and Western Airline chartered plane, was of the "compassionate airlift" varietv. the passenger list being restricted to children, expectant mothers, and their husbands. Twenty-nine children were aboard, sixteen of them orphans.
Br-�es and station wagons furnished by the United Service for Aawricani and the Hebrew la^iiffTaJit Aid Society took the arrrrak from the field. The flight began at Munich-
war inflation and the necessity for a rigorous austerity program. All of these accentuated by the precarious armistice add up to the vexing problems with which Israel must cope.
In contrast to former years, we have much for which to be thankful. Our faith in God has sustained us in all crises both past and present and will continue to do so in the future.
This Holy Day season we recall once more the story of Job, the Bible's classical example of the "Trial of Adversity." The Talmud tells us how the Elders of Israel read selections to the High- Priest from the Book of Job in order to prepare him for the solemnity of this judgment period. Job had lead a blameless and upright life but when he was afflicted and tested by God, his suffering become so unbearable1 that even suicide was suggested as a way out of his misery. However, he rejected this avenue of escape with his immortal retort, "Shall we receive only good at the hand of God, and not evil?" Job, the prototype of blameless affliction, possessed an abiding faith in his Maker, which faith, even though taxed heavily at times, was finally rewarded by complete reconciliation with God and restoration to happiness.
Our Rabbinic masters in commenting on these "Days of Awe," by which the High Holy Days are known, were quick to point out that reconciliation with God alone was not enough. There was an additional aspect to these High Holy Days, the necessity of man's reconciliation with man. In the words of the Talmud, Yom Kippur does not atone cases of wrong-doing among people until one conciliates his fellow-man. And so we must do now. We must make universal peace before we can have peace with God.
-.- in a philosophical essay, Pearl S. Buck presents her timely credo of life. At the base of this noted author's outlook is the proposition that the "will" is the crux of life. Everyone possesses "will" and to a large extent, people are what they want most to be. The utilization of one's mind will decide the degree of change that the will must undergo.
Substitute the word discipline for "will" and you have a fundamental religious maxim. The very etymology of the word "religion" indicates its derivation from the Latin "re-ligio," meaning to bind-back. At the core of religion is the need to restrain and discipline our lives. One of the pithy statements in the "Pirke Abouth," "The Ethics of the Fathers," forcefully punctuates the stress on discipline when it says, "Who is the strong one, he who subdues his evil inclination".
It seems more than mere coincidence that this and other select Sayings of the Fathers are read chapter by chapter in the summer months preceding the High Holy Days. They serve to prepare and adapt the Jew mentally and philosophically for the challenging searching of men's souls, which the High Holy Day period is designed to bring in its wake.
By illustration: During the daytime, the view from a window is clear to an observer who stands beside it. But as darkness descends and the lights within the room are snapped on, the observer sees only his own image reflected in the pane of glass. This is a picturesque reproduction of what happens in
STOPS HEADACHE
Even for double the price you can't buy anytkitig better than
nations of the earth striving for MaVone>me�t" and praying that God forgive: "Our Father, our King, we have sinned before
Thee".
real life. So much of man's tragedy in our own day and age is mirrored in this window-pane analr ogy. Living in the relative secur-ity of Canada many of us fail to discern the grim lot and misfortunes of people in other parts of the world. People can only see their own images in the window-pane. There is however a method of penetrating this obscurity. By cupping the hands about the temples and the eyes and pressing closely to the window some of this self-centered light is blocked out at night. One is then enabled to see everything on the other side.
This is religion's ringing universal challenge. This is life's discipline. As one author put it, a philosophy of life is to the mind what habit of health is to the body. We must not only have the strength but\the "will" to pursue our directives. Perhaps during the coming yea\ on the second anniversary of Israel's Declaration of Independence we shall see the be'glm^iqgs of another golden age as witnesstiTV by  Isaiah when  throughout thi world  "swords   are  beaten  into plough-shares, spears into pruning-hooks", and men shall no longer learn to fight.
May this High Holy Day period be the auspicious fore-runner of a sane and just world. May \\e soon witness an era devoid of con flict and marked instead by peace, � f prosperity, and contentment for Israel and all of mankind.
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