Word: schechters
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...message was the traditional yearly summing up and call for repentance. But he put it in modern context and made it unrelievedly apocalyptic. "Our world is coming to an end," Schechter told the congregation. Prejudice, hate and selfishness proliferate, he said. "The city is an ecological disaster." No two people today recall quite the same version of the young rabbi's rambling, extemporaneous sermon, but most recall that he quoted from rock lyrics, waved his arms prophet-style, peppered his talk with "hells" and "damns." Reform Judaism, he said, had lost its ability to adapt: "We've frozen...
Before October was over, Manhattan Lawyer Sidney B. Alexander had prepared a list of complaints against Schechter. Among them: "an unsightly looking mass of hippie-type hair," a "spirit of levity" in the Yom Kippur sermon, and an unseemly harping on the "doomsday theory." The charges were tabled by the temple's trustees, but the malediction lingered...
...Schechter did not back down. He replaced older members of the Sunday school committee with people who had children in the school. To the young he spoke glowingly of Eastern mysticism, even recommended that they go to hear one mystic he admires, Swami Satchitananda. He continued to speak bluntly to his Friday night audiences and, perhaps more fatally, to the trustees...
...develop admirers. One Manhattan surgeon, Dr. Murry Fischer, says that he went to temple more often for Friday services under Rabbi Schechter than he had for 20 years. Mrs. Frederick Block, wife of the congregation's president, says: "He woke everyone up. No one ever slept through his sermons." In the end, though, the critics won out. On the last day of January, the board of trustees voted 14-12 to recommend that the congregation not renew Rabbi Schechter's contract when it was up in June. A meeting of the congregation confirmed the trustees' recommendation...
Floating Congregation. Schechter toyed with the idea of quitting the rabbinate altogether. Then he faced up to the fact that "my thing is Rabbi." In fact, he concedes, though he was ordained eleven years ago, "it's only been about a year that I've been one." For a decade he "played the game," speaking softly and wearing a necktie everywhere. Then "I finally broke loose from the repression of the seminary and the rabbinate and I'm back trying to serve God." Some of his admirers from Temple Shaaray Tefila will follow him into exile, though...