Chancellor to Chancellor

Of all the stories about Park Avenue Synagogue’s relationship with the Jewish Theological Seminary, my favorite occurred in 1945 during the tenure of my predecessor twice-removed Rabbi Milton Steinberg, z”l. The then-president of the Seminary, Louis Finkelstein, understood JTS and, for that matter, Judaism as whole to have a universal mission: to be, in his words, “a civilizing influence on the modern world.” (Michael B. Greenbaum, “The Finkelstein Era” in Tradition Renewed: A History of The Jewish Theological Seminary of America, ed. Jack Wertheimer, v1, p. 176) Grand as Finkelstein’s vision was, it also meant that his views on Zionism were lukewarm at best. Despite his love for the Jewish people and even spiritual Zionism, Finkelstein could never quite square the circle of a Jewish nation-state. Having come of age during the Great War, he bristled against nationalisms of all kind; as the head of the leading Jewish educational institution of America, his bets were on Jewish life in the diaspora, not Palestine; as a human rights advocate, he would only support a Jewish state that conferred equal status to Christians and Muslims; not to mention that Finkelstein’s fundraising base was dependent on Arthur Hayes Sulzberger and Lewis Strauss – two anti-Zionist JTS board members. Thus, despite the sentiment of most American Jews, the rabbinical leadership of the Conservative movement, and the student body of the Seminary itself, Finkelstein stayed firm in his non-Zionism, going so far as to deny the request of the class of 1945 to sing Hatikvah at their commencement.

Park Avenue Synagogue’s Rabbi Steinberg, an ardent Zionist who was then at the height of his national profile, would have none of it. He labeled the actions of Finkelstein’s non-Zionist associates “‘an expression of the most dejudaized and detraditionalized elements in American Jewish life’ that fed into the hands of the anti-Zionist.” (Naomi W. Cohen, “‘Diaspora plus Palestine, Religion plus Nationalism’: The Seminary and Zionism, 1902–1948” in Tradition Renewed, v.2, p. 156) Publicly and privately, Steinberg railed against Finkelstein’s unenthusiastic support for a Jewish state, stating “I want Dr. Finkelstein . . . to stop pussyfooting on Zionism.” (p. 162) In 1945, Steinberg, together with Rabbi Solomon Goldman, prepared a long list of grievances against Finkelstein, with Finkelstein’s non-Zionism implicit in his list of complaints. So aggrieved was Steinberg in 1945 that he did the unthinkable, cancelling the annual Park Avenue Synagogue appeal for JTS and, lest there be any doubt, giving three public sermons questioning Finkelstein’s power while lashing out at the JTS board as men “who are anti-traditionalist, anti-Zionist, even assimilationist” and “flagrantly out of harmony with everything the Seminary represents.” (p. 162). By 1948, with the establishment of the State of Israel, any lingering non-Zionism on Finkelstein’s part had become a moot point: by 1952, Finkelstein was awarding an honorary doctorate to Prime Minister Ben Gurion. Looking back though, the Steinberg/Finkelstein, PAS/JTS exchange on Zionism serves as fascinating snapshot of profound transformations in American Jewish life. 

Happy Seminary Shabbat! It is exactly seventy-five years since that dramatic exchange and not even COVID-19 can stop us from our annual Shabbat publicly affirming the Park Avenue Synagogue bond to JTS, where I was trained, where so many of our clergy and educators were trained, the institution to which we all owe so much. Last night we heard from Chancellor Arnold Eisen; tomorrow morning our community will be in Zoom dialogue with Chancellor Eisen on the future of synagogue life; and later this week, you will receive a link in our weekly email asking you to continue your support of JTS.  

But this year is not just any year for JTS and PAS. This year is significant because next week will bring not only the ordination of our cantorial intern, Arielle Green, but also the final commencement under Chancellor Eisen, who is retiring on June 30 after fourteen years of leadership. I have no idea who the next chancellor will be. The announcement, I imagine, will come after graduation by way of a plume of white smoke. This morning, in honor of the Chancellor and in honor of the Seminary, I invite you to take a stroll through history with me, the Seminary, and its leadership, a history which you will come to realize is altogether relevant for our present moment and shared future.

Our story begins with the founding of the Seminary in 1886, a time when Reform German Jewish leaders held sway over American Jewry and the masses of Eastern European Jews had just begun to arrive. In July of 1883, the Reform Movement celebrated the ordination of its graduating class with a meal that included clams, crabs, frog legs, and ice cream, a meal that – whether due to intent or oversight – signaled Reform’s disdain for traditional Jewish observance. The “Treifah Banquet” combined with the movement’s Pittsburgh platform, which boldly rejected Mosaic law, catalyzed a group of traditionalists to break away and create the Jewish Theological Seminary under its first leader, Rabbi Sabato Morais – a more traditional or conservative response to Reform. The arrival of millions of Eastern European Jews only intensified the case statement for a training ground for a modern, American, and traditional rabbinate. 

After a decade and a half, recognizing the need for inspired leadership, JTS recruited the Romanian-born Solomon Schechter, the greatest English-speaking scholar of his day, made famous through his work on the Cairo Genizah. The combination of Schechter’s vast rabbinic learning, secular training, and traditional orientation made him the perfect man for the time. Schechter’s seminary was not only a bulwark against Reform, but an institution meant to train rabbis who could serve the Americanizing children of immigrants. As Schechter himself once quipped, for a rabbi to be successful in America, he must be able to speak baseball. Schechter never sought to create a new denomination. He had a broad vision of American Jewry, a shared middle ground: what he called Catholic Israel. Nevertheless, by the time Schechter died in 1915, he had not only assembled a world-class faculty of Jewish scholars, he had seeded the organizations – the United Synagogue, the Rabbinical Assembly – that would become the arms of what we now know as the Conservative Movement.

Cyrus Adler, the man who led the Seminary from Schechter’s death until 1940, was as significant for what he was not as for what he was. He was not a rabbi; he was not a Jewish scholar; he was not a movement ideologue; and he was not, by all accounts, terribly charismatic. A bit like the biblical Isaac sandwiched between his visionary father Abraham and his tribe-producing son Jacob, Adler is often remembered as the guy between Schechter and Finkelstein. But like the biblical Isaac, Adler was the leader without whom JTS would have never survived: in the words of Mordecai Waxman, “a civil servant par excellence of American Jewish life.” Adler led multiple institutions, edited numerous publications, and sat on the boards of every major Jewish organization. Remember, every legacy American Jewish organization you know – AJC, JDC, ADL, USCJ – was founded during these years. Adler brought them together and put JTS at the center. He also, probably most significantly, led JTS during the First World War, the financial crisis, and the depression, maintaining financial stability. For all of Schechter’s gifts, an administrator he was not. Under Adler’s watch, the Teacher’s Institute was established, JTS graduates seeded Jewish communities nationwide, and JTS defined the “Position of the Seminary” between Reform and Orthodoxy. (Ira Robinson, “Cyrus Adler: President of the Jewish Theological Seminary 1915–1940” in Tradition Renewed, v.1, pp. 122–131.)

Adler’s successor, Louis Finkelstein, achieved national prominence beyond that of any other JTS chancellor. Throughout its history and to this day, JTS has squirmed on the question of whether it is the denominational fountainhead of the Conservative Movement or an institution in service to all of American Jewry. In Finkelstein’s mind the work of JTS was decidedly the latter: a center of teaching, research, and mass education. (Greenbaum, Tradition Renewed, p. 174). Camp Ramah, the Jewish Museum and the west coast University of Judaism were all established during Finkelstein’s tenure, as JTS strove to be the institution of higher Jewish learning in America and the representative of American Jewry. Finkelstein created the Eternal Light radio and television programs aimed to explain not just Judaism, but religion itself to America. Finkelstein was on the cover of Time magazine. Finkelstein created the Institute for Religious & Social Studies, and the Lehmann Institute of Ethics, convened the Conference on Science, Philosophy and Religion, and so much more – all efforts to transcend boundaries of faith, denomination, and academic discipline. Finkelstein’s efforts did not come without criticism – think of his aforementioned non-Zionism and his cool relationship with the Rabbinical Assembly; it was said that he had warmer relationships with non-Jews than with Conservative rabbis. And an Adler Finkelstein was not: For all his manifold gifts, Finkelstein’s administrative shortcomings left JTS under profound financial distress.

The tenure of Finkelstein’s successor, Gerson Cohen, was cut short for reasons of poor health. Cohen was a historian of first rank and, in my estimation, the most elegant expositor of all JTS chancellors. An academic at heart, Cohen deepened the community of Seminary scholarship, establishing doctoral programs and a graduate school now named in honor of our own Gershon Kekst of blessed memory. Cohen created relationships with Columbia, Bank Street, Union Theological Seminary, and Princeton to name but a few. With the guidance and support of then PAS president Arthur Bienenstock, Cohen built the JTS library complex. In contrast to his predecessor, Cohen’s Zionism was unflinching. He advocated on behalf of Masorti, the Conservative movement in Israel, and set in motion the requirement for every rabbinical student to study in Jerusalem for a year. Of all of Cohen’s achievements, he is perhaps remembered most as the chancellor under whose tenure women were first ordained rabbis, a decision for which he and our own Rabbi Judah Nadich, a member of the JTS board, advocated. (Paula E. Hyman, “The Unfinished Symphony: The Gerson Cohen Years,” in Renewed Tradition, v.1, pp. 233–268)

It is a little tricky for me to speak about Ismar Schorsch, the sixth JTS chancellor. He was my chancellor: I studied under him, and, truth be told, I am so very fond of him that it is difficult to be objective. A scholar of first rank who continues to publish to this day, Chancellor Schorsch, together with Park Avenue Synagogue’s Gershon Kekst, led JTS for some twenty years through a time of heady expansion, turning JTS into a full-fledged university in its finances, faculty, student body, and otherwise. Schorsch founded and funded the Davidson Graduate School of Jewish Education. Schorsch sought to expand the mission of JTS well beyond Manhattan, expanding JTS’s footprint in Israel and, as the Iron Curtain fell, creating Project Judaica, a Moscow-based program aimed at cultivating Russian Jewish leadership. In my mind, Schorsch represents the ideal of the scholar-mensch: a human being of profound depth and abiding kindness, pushing his students, myself included, to think deeply, passionately, and rigorously for ourselves and for the benefit of the Jewish communities we serve.

If it is difficult to assess Schorsch, then it is all the more awkward to speak about Chancellor Eisen before his tenure even concludes. What you should know is that aside from being a great scholar and a heck of a good guy, before becoming chancellor, Eisen published a book called The Jew Within, in which he explored the rise of “the sovereign self,” a post-modern turn to a Jewish identity that prizes individualism and personal autonomy. Unlike Schechter, who had to educate immigrant Jews about America, or Finkelstein, who sought to explain Judaism to non-Jews, Eisen understood the task of JTS to be to train leaders to serve an American Jewry in search of personal meaning, for whom denominational lines matter less in an age of disintermediation, iPhones, and Amazon. It is not surprising that under Eisen’s tenure, the JTS budget shifted from its graduate schools to its professional schools, including the establishment of a center for clinical pastoral education, a center for spiritual arts, and a center for ethics and justice. Eisen is leaving not just with a new building built, but with his fingerprints all over an institution aimed at developing leaders capable of serving the evolving spiritual needs of what Eisen calls the “vital Jewish center.”

If, as Emerson once wrote, “Every great institution is the lengthened shadow of a single man,” then in the case of JTS, it is an institution that can be understood in relation to the seven men (and they have all been men) who have led it. From the immigrant experience to the process of acculturation to the establishment of Israel to postwar suburbanization and upward mobility, to the age of the sovereign self, each leader has reflected and responded to the spirit of his age. It is not all neat and tidy, and I have omitted a lot, including the cantorial school, the library, the lay leaders, and of course the wider ecosystem of Jewish seminaries in America and Israel in which JTS functions. If nothing else though, it is useful and intriguing to track the chapters of the American Jewish experience through the chancellors of JTS.

Which begs the question: If every chancellor is a reflection of a particular chapter of American Jewish history, then what can we expect for the next chapter? Sometimes, social transformations can be seen only retrospectively through the eyes of history, and sometimes – as with the fifty-year jubilee intervals described in this week’s Torah reading – they are marked by the passage of time. Right now, a social transformation is kicking down our front door as we are living through the unanticipated and unwelcome game changer of a global pandemic that I believe will upend everything, a subset of “everything” being American Jewry. How communities are created and sustained, how education takes shape, how identity itself is formed – all is being accelerated; every assumption is up for grabs in a jubilee we didn’t want or ask for, in which the past is not at all an indicator of the future. 

And . . . there is about to be a new chancellor. A chancellor who will have to guide JTS through this midbar, this wilderness that he or she presumably did not even know about when applying for the job. A chancellor who, like every chancellor, will have to train rabbis, cantors, educators and scholars capable of leading an American Jewry and America in desperate need of moral leadership. An American Jewry that is transforming tradition in real time, as evidenced by the livestream you are watching. An American Jewry in search of the theological language capable of voicing the searching questions of our age. In all the tumult, I take comfort in the knowledge that these tasks of leadership development, theological inquiry, and balancing tradition and change are the very efforts, the bread and butter, that has guided JTS since its inception.

All of which brings us back to where we began. No matter the chapter of JTS history, the membership of Park Avenue Synagogue has always been at its side. When JTS needed to be pushed – on Zionism, on feminism – we have pushed as an ally, Her Majesty’s loyal opposition, if you will. Our rabbis and lay leadership have been JTS board leadership and chairmen: Gershon Kekst, of blessed memory, and the present chairman, PAS past chairman Allen Levine. On occasion we have used the power of the purse as a stick, but far more frequently we have been the ones to seed initiatives, fund scholarships, and, when needed, build buildings. In every chapter, under every chancellor, the abiding support of our community for JTS has been the constant because we at PAS know that the rabbis, cantors, educators, and scholars of JTS serve not just the future of our synagogue, but the future of American Jewry. In all the unknowns of the present, I am so very excited to think about this time next year, when the new chancellor of JTS visits Park Avenue Synagogue and we welcome him or her warmly, the PAS-JTS bond closer than ever. Hazak, hazak v’nit’hazek. Let us be strong, be strong and let us be strengthened.