Word: rabby
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...grateful to be informed by Mr. H. Epstein (Crimson, October 4th) that at least one of the followers of Rabbi Ben-Zion Gold's new militant Jewish thrust at Harvard isn't really all that militant after all--or so he thinks. Mr. Epstein doesn't even consider religious behavior as part of a larger matrix of concerns called "ethnic." He is, of course, quite mistaken, though in his error is a measure of his low-profile approach to the new Jewish militancy--an approach with which I have sympathy. Yet Mr. Epstein remains somewhat in error. I have several...
First, I have no doubt whatever that Rabbi Ben-Zion Gold meant his sermon on September 14th as the inaugural event for a militant Jewish (ethnic) thrust within the Harvard community. He even extended this image of his sermon in a subsequent comment to The Crimson (September 27), remarking that he (and I might add other Jewish militants around the country) rejected the progressive doctrine on the Jewish question promulgated by the French Revolution--namely, "Everything to Jews as individuals...Nothing to Jews as people...
Secondly, Mr. Epstein shares Rabbi Ben-Zion Gold's confusion about the limits of ethnic participation in a democratic society. The pluralist model for managing ethnic interactions permits both exclusivity and inclusivity in subcultural practices or endeavors, while simultaneously cultivating an open-ended universalism or cosmopolitanism as a style (value) for national institutions. At the extreme of exclusivism is the Amish model: total rejection of and isolation from modern society, cosmopolitanism and all. This is difficult to attain but if you work at it, as the great Amish people of my home state of Pennsylvania have, you can achieve much...
...then, within the framework of both the spirit and practice of this delicately calibrated model of American pluralism that I reject Rabbi Ben-Zion Gold's militant Jewish thrust in the Harvard community. And though I sympathize with Mr. Epstein's low-profile approach to Jewish militancy, I reject it equally...
...addition the book, edited by Rabbi Chaim Stern of Chappaqua, N.Y., drops "thee" and "thou" in addressing the Deity (only "you" is now used) and downplays expressions like "our fathers," which are now deemed to be sexist. It also incorporates the words of moderns like Alfred North Whitehead and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel and these lines from William Blake: "It is an easy thing to laugh at wrathful elements,/ To hear the dog howl at the wintry door, the ox in the slaughter house moan;/ To see a god on every wind & a blessing on every blast...