“In one era and out the other.” It’s a clever title, no? Unfortunately, I did not think it up. It was the title of a book by humorist Sam Levenson. If you never heard of him, it is a sign of your youth. He was a former school teacher who made a career out of writing funny books comparing the world of his youth to the present. He was writing around the year 1960. That date would encompass the world of my youth! I guess many of us, when we pass a certain age, recall (with varying levels of accuracy) how the world has changed.
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The first president I recall as a child was Dwight David Eisenhower. He was a hero of World War II, married to quiet, dowdy Mamie. General Eisenhower was actually offered the opportunity to run as a Democrat or as a Republican. He chose the latter and brought the party to victory after five Democratic election victories from 1933 to 1952. (Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected four times but died three months into his fourth term. Truman took over and was elected to a full term.) This was the early 1950s. The country was tired of the Depression and of war – both World War II and the Korean War – and sought a grandfatherly figure who was acceptable to all. I recall that one of the main complaints about his opponent, Adlai Stevenson, was that he was divorced. ‘If a man can’t control his wife, how can he control the country?” was something I heard as a young kid.
Today, that all seems so quaint. Our current president is on his third marriage and nobody cares one way or the other. And no one would dare say that a man has to “control his wife”! My wife would laugh in my face if I ever uttered such narishkeit (foolishness). Likewise, although Trump and Eisenhower were about the same age when elected, even his many fans in our community would never say that our current president is a “grandfatherly figure who was acceptable to all.”
As to the Jewish world in mid-20th century America, the world I grew up in, everyone was certain that Orthodox Judaism was breathing its last. My Uncle Joe was the “last of the Mohicans.” He was an old-time shomer Shabbos Yid, who davened three times a day and was kosher in and out of his home. Everyone loved him but saw him as someone from a previous generation. I remember that he and Aunt Rose went to a convention of the Orthodox Union in Miami Beach, and he was “elected” a regional vice-president. It was a joke, really. There was hardly any Orthodox presence in the South. We heard that there was a young rabbi named Feldman in Atlanta who was having some success, but, that was it. Our shul, interestingly named “Agudath Israel,” switched from very nominally Orthodox to officially Conservative in the 1950s, as did many other shuls around the country for the sake of “the youth.”
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Let me now skip to the present. I was at a wedding recently and saw some guests who looked as though they were feeling a little out of place. So, being a nice guy, as my mother taught me to be, I spoke to them at the chassan’s tisch. It turned out they were from a Southern community. I mentioned, in passing, that I had heard that in their town there was a vibrant little Orthodox shul and a day school. “Yes, that is so,” one of them said, “but I belong to the Conservative shul. We are larger, but we will be out of business in 30 years.” He was being frank. The Orthodox shul was growing and his was not.
How did this all come about? I want to recall some of my past experiences that may shed light on this amazing turnaround.
A frum chazan in Philadelphia once told me, as a joke, that there was a “befeirishe heter,” an explicit permission, for an Orthodox rabbi to take a Conservative pulpit. I asked him what that was. “It is called heter meah rabbanim, because at least 100 rabbis have done it.” If you were born in the past 30 or 40 years, this may seem ridiculous, but it wasn’t. Throughout the country there were musmachim of Orthodox yeshivos who held positions in shuls that were officially Conservative or were not affiliated but had mixed seating. Today, that would not enter a yeshiva man’s thoughts, but the times were not like today.
What made it change? Let me start with Mr. Litvin in Michigan in the 1950s. His shul was chartered Orthodox and was going downhill. The members, every single one except Mr. Litvin, voted to install mixed seating. He was a stubborn man and took the shul to court. His attorney said that the charter of the synagogue said it must always be Orthodox and Orthodox meant separate seating. The other side said that many Orthodox shuls had mixed seating and the majority rules. Both sides brought expert witnesses. In the end, the judge ruled that Mr. Litvin was right. He won the battle and got the building, but the others all left and built a new shul.
It may have seemed like a Pyrrhic victory, but it wasn’t. This lawsuit changed the way Orthodox Jews felt about mixed seating and they became a lot more determined to preserve the mechitza. Mr. Litvin wrote letters to great rabbis and published their responses in a book entitled The Sanctity of the Synagogue, which helped make it clear that Orthodoxy has standards. This simple baal habayis awakened a dormant Orthodoxy.
Then there was Torah Umesorah and its visionary founder, “Mr.” Shraga Feival Mendlowitz. Torah Umeshorah’s Dr. Joseph Kaminetzky and his team of men traveled the country starting day schools wherever possible against much opposition. It would take many pages to tell their stories. Another book could be written about NCSY, which inspired hundreds of kids, including a certain boy from Montgomery, Alabama, to go to yeshiva. You see, the Orthodox rabbi in our Conservative shul, Rabbi Aaron Borow, took me to New York in his car with his family and took me directly to one of the first NCSY National Conventions in 1961. It made a profound impression on me.
Many years later, when I was an educator in Vancouver, British Columbia, our principal Pinky Bak’s father came to visit. In talking about kashrus in Baltimore, Rabbi Benjamin Bak said something that really explains a lot. He said, “We tried with kulos (leniencies) and it didn’t work, so now, maybe with chumros (strictness) we will succeed.” He was talking about kosher restaurants in Baltimore in the early 1970s. Another way of expressing this is that people were looking for genuine meaning in life, not for an easy way out. Torah Judaism fed the neshama in a way that watered-down palliatives did not.
At the same time, there was an interesting mixture in the yeshivos. To oversimplify, you had Lithuanian roshei yeshiva teaching “Hungarian” bachurim – that is, children of Holocaust survivors – with a sprinkling of American bachurim, many of whom were baalei teshuva. The frum community of Baltimore was tiny compared to today. Most of the Orthodox shuls had microphones, and the “frum shuls,” like Shearith Israel and the shtieblach of the survivors, did not number very many families. Many of the students in Bais Yaakov and TA did not come from shomer Shabbos homes, although many were influenced by the schools and went on to build faithful homes in Israel.
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Today, we have come a long way. The frum community is at least 20 times larger, if not more, than what it was even 25 years ago. New shuls, new schools, new neighborhoods, many restaurants, and a plethora of learning opportunities on all levels describe our lovely city. Though we have grown exponentially, we have remained a kehila, a unified community, far more than many others, and we work hard to maintain that achdus (unity).
My wife Feigi and her classmates recently had a 50th anniversary reunion of their Bais Yaakov of Baltimore class. The entire class was comprised of 22 girls. Two, unfortunately, have passed away. The other 20 were all contacted and reconnected via What’s App. Mrs. Faith Taragin Shabat gathered articles from the women all over the world that told what they have been doing the last 50 years. Half of the class came to our home, and the ones in Israel joined by Skype. You can imagine how many children, grandchildren, and even great grandchildren have come from this one little class.
Speaking of achdus, let me now return to the general situation. I am not going to talk politics. This is a free country and you can be wrong if you so wish! But I want to explore why we have grown so divided in this country. When I was a boy, we all watched Walter Cronkite every night on TV to find out what happened in the world. I never knew his personal political affiliation, and we trusted that he was giving us the truth. Everyone got the Sunday paper, and it was also pretty fair minded.
Today, much of what we learn about events comes from media that has a bias, one way or the other. On rare occasions, when I actually watch cable TV in a hotel or someplace, I see that the news on Fox and the news on MSNBC seem to be describing different planets.
And that is not the only change. Fifty years ago, there was a consensus of what constituted proper behavior and what was “normal.” Today, everything is in flux. This is reflected in the Orthodox world as well. On the one hand, the reaction to the breakdown in public morality of the general society has led to an understandable backlash in our community. Practices that were once acceptable are today viewed by some as too permissive. And example is the increasingly common practice of not publishing pictures of females in magazines and newspapers, which was totally unheard of in my day.
On the other hand, there is an equal and opposite reaction that I have seen firsthand. Many American Jews are more attuned to what is considered appropriate in 21st century non-Jewish circles and are urging greater public roles for females, an arena that was once reserved for men.
It isn’t my place to make value judgments, and this is not the place to argue one side or the other. Let me just say that the battles today are not about having a microphone in a shul but are, in some ways, even harder to navigate.
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Looking back on many decades, I am very thankful to Hashem that He sent good people on my path, who guided me to Torah and mitzvos and led me to live the life I have lived. As I sit at the Shabbos table, especially now in the summer, when many of my children are here from Israel and elsewhere, there is one pasuk that keeps recurring in my mind. “Banecha keshshesilei zaisim sovev lashulchanecha – Your children are like olive shoots surrounding your table.” When I see my adult children, their spouses, and our grandchildren, bli anyin hara, I see how far we have come as a family and as a klal Yisrael. Within our family and within our community, there are many opinions, many philosophies, and yet, we all must love each other and stick together. My children all have absorbed
