'973.7L63 Hertz, Emanuel |GHUUat Abraham Lincoln cop»3 of the synagogue ♦ The tribute LINCOLN ROOM UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS LIBRARY ABRAHAM LINCOLN THE TRIBUTE OF THE SYNAGOGUE EMANUEL HERTZ '■■■:■ Delivered over WEAV , February p, 1927, under the auspices of the United Synagogue of America Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2012 with funding from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign http://archive.org/details/abrahamlincolntrOOhert , /rfi^t^ N Cojb, 3 ABRAHAM LINCOLN: THE TRIBUTE OF THE SYNAGOGUE By EMANUEL HERTZ HAT the righteous men of other nations are fraternally received by onr sages, has never been more genuinely exem- plified than in the case of Abraham Lincoln. Among the leaders of the Jewish people from the very beginning, he found many of his staunchest supporters. Among them he found unselfish advisors — men who wished him well, because of the reverence they had for him. Few, if any, worried him with selfish requests. None were to be found among them who added to his burdens, either by unsought- for advice or by violent criticism — and he suffered from a plethora of both. All showed an abiding faith in his sincerity, in his patience, in his wisdom — and not one doubted that the Union was safe in his hands. The Rabbis were among the first to respond to his call for the help of the pulpit — in those days an all-powerful instrument for molding public opinion — and by reason of such help the Jewish people in the North did their full share in the struggle for maintaining the Union. At the bidding of the Rabbi the soldiers came to the assistance of the superman who was about to duplicate the miracle performed thousands of years ago by Moses who had fought a similar life and death struggle with the Pharaoh of his time. Small as was the Jewish population in those days it was almost unanimously behind the President : banker, merchant, tradesman, teacher, preacher — all were ready, and when the call of the President came they answered : "hinayni" — we are ready. This is not the time nor the place to call the roll of all who partici- pated in the many-sided activities of the war — Simon Wolf, a sort of lay preacher did that in part some years ago. When the assassin did his cowardly and monstrous deed the Rabbis, like all the other spiritual leaders of the American people, recognized that a prince among men had indeed fallen on that day of universal tears. And it is interesting indeed, to note the heights of eloquence attained by the entire chorus of divines throughout the houses of worship in the land — in their lamen- tations for the dead President — the preachers of a people whose portion had ever been sorrow, felt even a keener pain in the abnormal and untimely passing away of Abraham Lincoln. Then it appeared how great was the number of representative Jews with whom he had com- muned, how many of them he had consulted, and what is more, how many of them had been impressed into the service of freeing the oppressed, by the simple, but eloquent words of this great leader of the 787421 common people. He was proud of his kinship with them by his life inspired by the Bible — their book. He was happy that he was classed by them with their own lawgiver, whose trials and tribulations he dupli- cated on this continent — the newest, even as did his prototype Moses in the oldest land on the oldest of continents. Amidst the universal mourning and the flood of eulogy and agon- izing prayer these notes were clearly discernible. The saintly Sabato Morais — the friend of Mazzini's, Italy's Lincoln ; Isaac M. Wise, teacher, preacher, organizer of Reform Judaism, a Jewish leader of national renown ; the erudite Szold ; the learned Leeser ; the scholarly Felsenthal ; the fiery and fearless orator-preacher, David Einhorn, and a host of others, all pre-eminent in their calling — and there were giants in those days in the Jewish ministry — by word and pen easily equalled the best that was said by the preachers of other denominations in that hour which tried men's souls as they had not been tried by four years of shot and shell. It was a time when in his agony man, like Job, was tempted to question, if not quarrel with his Maker — for the ordinary man could not comprehend the need for this fiendish deed — for this universally beloved sacrifice; every heart stood still for the moment; and the Rabbi of his day, looking back and recalling the equally puzzling agony of his people — for well nigh two thousand years, equally inex- plicable — repeated almost the last words of the martyred President nftNn pi TH2 Boruch Dayon Hoemes — or as Lincoln has it: "The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether." The Rabbis of those days set a high standard for the Lincoln eulogy — a standard that proved difficult to approach, if not to equal. And yet there are quite a number among the latter day Rabbis who easily rank with the efforts of those founders and protagonists of the Synagogue in America. That incomparable orator and preacher, Emil G. Hirsch, and Stephen S. Wise, whose name is a household word in America, and three brilliant sermons by the late Rabbi J. Leonard Levy and a series of lecture-sermons by Rabbi Joseph Krauskopf, easily duplicate the effort of their sires of the period at the conclusion of the Civil War. But then this younger generation had the advantage of the distance, of the per- spective which comes with years — the advantage of seeing the collected works of Lincoln and the opinions of an entire world about the great Emancipator. Ideas became clarified, slander was for the most part eliminated, passion of the sections has almost completely disappeared, and there remains only the great figure of the simple American — "The First American" — who was called to the helm of the Ship of State when it had well nigh foundered on the rock of secession — at a time when the best thought of an entire section had declared the Union dissolved — split upon the rock of Slavery. These latter day Rabbis have dwelt upon well nigh every phase of the character of Abraham Lincoln, and have answered so many mooted questions about him that it would be but simple justice to collect all these sermons and addresses in answer to those who still carp and cavil about things which these Rabbis have solved and demonstrated. Was Lincoln religious? — a question which troubles so many — read Leonard Levy's sermon on Lincoln's religion. Was Lincoln "a religion in our land''? read Stephen Wise's address *" Lincoln, Alan and American." Was Lincoln the greatest of leaders? — read llirsch's address at the Chicago Lincoln Centennial Celebration. Was he "Chosen of God" read Krauskopf's brilliant addresses delivered in successive years at Keneseth Israel. Was Lincoln a mystic force, read Professor Schechter's classical paper delivered at the Jewish Theo- logical Seminary in 1909. Whoever else has not understood him — and there are some to this day who speak of "Mister Lincoln, the frontier lawyer"; whoever else has misinterpreted him — and there are those who dilate upon the "Real Lincoln"; whoever else has slandered him — and there are those of both sexes who continue to blaspheme ; whoever else has attempted to whittle away his greatness — and there are the biographers of contemporary statesmen who simply cannot do justice to their particular hero unless they belittle and carve away part of the deeds and desserts of Lincoln ; his nobility of soul, his love of father and mother as emphasized by Rabbi Szold, his tenderness of heart to the child, his heart throbs for the distracted mother of the young soldier about to be shot to appease the military Moloch called discipline — have been appreciated and under- stood and have been clad in glorious words — by the Rabbis of the last sixty years — to their innumerable hearers in the Synagogues of America. And so these sayings of the Rabbis might well be collected and supplemented from year to year as the permanent tribute of the Syna- gogue then and now, and at all time to come to the deeds, the aspirations, the accomplishments of one of its honored members — ordained and inducted into its hallowed walls by the teachers in Israel of today — a> have the greatest friends and leaders of the race, through the ages, been received by the Sages and spiritual leaders of Israel from the days of Socrates, of Plato and of Aristotle, to the present day, as is cryStalized by the dictum of our sages: *&" (Tosefta Sanhedrin, xii, 2 and b. Sanhedrin, 105a cf. also Midrash Tehilim, ix, 15 ed. Buber p. 90.) or as Maimonides has it : Kin D^y^ p^n en 1 ? en rtiyn mow H^on (Moses Maimonides, Yad Hachazakah, Hilchot Melakim. viii. 11.) The names of the worthy of Jew and non-Jew alike, are to be found on the resplendent Heavenly roster of immortality. ABRAHAM LINCOLN. THE TRIBUTE OF SYNAOOGU 3 0112 031819474