Word: rabby
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Rabbi Solomon Bernards of the Anti-Defamation League leveled one of the most thoroughgoing criticisms in the Christian Century last month. Bernards questioned the "monolithic undertones of this effort that aims at a completely Christian America." The campaign fostered "triumphalism," he charged, citing one prediction that Christians could convert the entire world within two years. Moreover, mass evangelical efforts inevitably employ "simplistic theology [and] emotional appeals," and tend "to disparage and downgrade other faiths and value systems...
...Another rabbi, however, Henry Siegman of the Synagogue Council of America, warns against taking "the alarmist view" of Key 73. Writing in the current issue of the American Jewish Congress's Congress Bi-Weekly, Siegman doubts "that any significant number of Jews will be won over to Christianity by Key 73. Those few who will convert will do so because we have allowed Jewish life to become so secularized, so emptied of transcendent meaning, that some of our children will turn to Christianity and to other faiths in order to fill a terrible spiritual void...
Siegman goes so far as to suggest that an "intensely Christian environment can in fact make for a more traditional Jewish community"-an argument that provokes an outraged response from Ecumenist Rabbi Marc Tanenbaum in the same magazine. The U.S. has already had just such an intensely Christian environment, Tanenbaum points out, in the days when evangelical Christianity and American nationalism were considered synonymous. In that situation "Jews were second-class citizens, denied the right to vote and hold public office...
...groups involved in Key 73 have decided to avoid the issue altogether. The Richmond, Va., clergy association, for instance, expressly ruled out proselytism of Jews, directing its efforts only to "inactive and unchurched people in the Christian community." Such moves would have been hailed by the late and eminent Rabbi Abraham J. Heschel, who last week got in a posthumous word on the proselytism question through a television interview taped just before his death in December. It was Heschel whose persuasive efforts at the Vatican helped win Roman Catholics away from trying to convert Jews. "If there are some Protestant...
...Hill's prayer was followed by a musical interlude, and another prayer by Rabbi Seymour Siegel. At nine minutes to noon. Spiro Agnew took his oath, followed by another prayer, this one given by the primate of the Orthodox Church in America, to which Agnew once belonged...