BOOKS—NEW AND OLD
Judge May's Life of Isaac Mayer Wise
ISAAC MAYER WISE, THE FOUNDER OF AMERICAN JUDAISM, a biography by Max B. May, Judge of the Court of Common Pleas, Hamilton County, Ohio. Illustrated, G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York and London, The Knickerbocker Press, 1916, 415 pages.
The present volume is a successful attempt to portray the life of one of the greatest American Jews of the last century. It is more than a biography of an individual, for the life-story of Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise is the story of the better part of a century of Jewish life and achievement in the United States. It were idle to make comparisons between present-day Jewish problems and those that faced the rather small Jewish community in America in whose midst Rabbi Wise labored, or to say that had the great reformer lived in our own day with its many tragedies and few comforts he would have failed where he succeeded half a century ago. Hypotheses are of no value where historical facts are concerned, and the fact is that Isaac Mayer Wise, coming here at a time when leaders of the right sort were few and Judaism in America was in a chaotic state—there being, to use the words of the Hebrew poet Gordon, "neither a people, nor a community, but a mere herd"—applied himself to the task of setting the Jewish house in order. In this he was remarkably successful, for starting out as a modest if very ambitious young rabbi, with limited means and little encouragement, he lived to see the little hut he erected transformed into a beautiful mansion and himself acclaimed as the greatest Jewish religious leader in America in his day. It is not unlikely that he even "builded better than he knew," but that was his good fortune of which the American Jewish community of today is the legatee and beneficiary. For, be we orthodox or reform, none will gainsay that American Jewry of today is the better or the happier for the work and achievement of Rabbi Wise.
Wise is spoken of as the "Nestor" or "Founder" of American Judaism, an appellation not untrue when we remember that in its new western environment
Conducted byBERNARD G. RICHARDS
Judaism cannot well help differing from its European model. Wise's greatness does not lie in the mere fact that he was among the first to institute reforms in the synagogue. The reform movement is not an American but a German creation antedating Wise's coming to America. His importance lies rather in the recognition on his part that American Judaism must
early adapt itself to the new environment if it is to exist at all. He seized upon the opportunity which was his of welding and shaping an "American Israel," an Israel which, while clinging to the bond of sympathy and fellowship with Israel abroad, nevertheless gave itself to the working out of the problems arising out of the purely American conditions. The reforms in the synagogue were among these problems since, in the opinion of Dr. Wise, the synagogue was to be the main factor in the making of this American Israel whose hopes and ideals it was to mirror and inspire.
It should at the same time be remembered that, judged by the standard of reform in our day, which is largely a chaotic process of individualistic vagaries on the part of the rabbis, Wise was a truly conservative rabbi. It is characteristic of the conservatism with which he started upon his career as a reformer that very early in his rabbinate and while yet minister to the congregation at Albany
which was his first American post, he should state that his reforms were always in conformity with the "Din" (page 82). Who of the reform rabbis of our day knows of the "Dinim," or knowing them ever considers them in any of their innovations? It was Wise who inaugurated the late Friday evening service in the temple in order, as Judge May states, "to attract his congregation to the temple in the days when strict observance of the Sabbath was waning, and thus prevent the introduction of Sunday services" (p. 170). To this very day, Cincinnati, the city where Wise lived for almost half a century, is among the more conservative of the Reform Jewish communities in America, due to the teaching and inspiration of the great rabbi. It is unfair to blame Wise for the extreme radicalism and irresponsible leadership of many of his disciples in the American pulpit of our day.