Rabbi Outcast: Elmer Berger and American Jewish Anti-Zionism by Jack Ross

Author:Jack Ross [Ross, Jack]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Potomac Books
Published: 2011-06-29T23:00:00+00:00

This cavalier view taken by the Reform leadership, that the ACJ would simply disappear like all other heresies before it, would define their position ever after. Many Reform rabbis would even have the chutzpah, in the name of a movement whose most recent platform had declared the “upbuilding of Palestine” to be its “messianic goal,” to compare the ACJ to the messianic sects of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This was especially ironic since the case could easily be made that the figure in Jewish history to whom Elmer Berger was most comparable was the adversary of Shabtai Tzvi, Jacob Sasportas.91

No fewer than five of the Schools for Judaism would serve as the foundation for new congregations: Lakeside Congregation for Reform Judaism in Highland Park, Illinois; the Congregation for Reform Judaism in White Plains, New York; Temple Sinai in Milwaukee; Temple Micah in Denver; and the Houston Congregation for Reform Judaism in Texas. In White Plains, Samuel Baron ministered to the congregation after leaving Nebraska to work out of the Council’s national office. The congregations in Highland Park and Milwaukee were fortunate enough to find young rabbis sympathetic to the Council to serve their pulpits devotedly: Jay Brickman, who came to Milwaukee from a pulpit on Staten Island, and Richard Singer, who came to Highland Park from a pulpit in West Palm Beach. All of the congregations were able to affiliate with the UAHC with little or no controversy, the Reform leadership having apparently judged, as Lyndon Johnson would memorably put it in another context, that it was better to have them inside the tent pissing out rather than outside pissing in.

The Lakeside Congregation, with Clarence Coleman serving as its president, was easily both the largest and most directly aligned with the Council. Berger even ghosted for the Lakeside Congregation a lengthy statement of principles, which provides an indispensable window into his evolving view of the Jewish religion as he increasingly grew into an iconoclast.92 The statement read in part:

The distinguishing criterion of a living faith is its historic ability to meet, with new forms and emphases, man’s spiritual requirements at any time. The mark of a universal faith is its ability to meet such contemporary spiritual needs in any place. The Old Testament Prophets wrote the most significant pages in the development of Judaism. They first conceived and articulated a religion dependent upon inner, moral strength, rather than upon land, nation or ritual…. In Prophetic Judaism, as well as in the noblest conceptions of the American dream, God is conceived as “indwelling” within man. The most cherished manifestation of Divinity is to be found in the aspiring human spirit, regardless of race, faith or nationality.93

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