Rabbi Stephen S.
Wise
gave this sermon in late December 1925 and it set off a storm of protests in Jewish
communities. Before you read the
article, it is important for you to be aware of some of the accomplishments of
Rabbi Wise.
● a founder of
the New York Federation of Zionist Societies in 1897
● first
vice-president of the Oregon
State Conference of Charities and Correction in 1902
● appointed
Commissioner of Child Labor for the State of Oregon in 1903
● co-founded the
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)
● founding of American
Jewish Congress (AJCongress) in 1918
● founded the Jewish Institute of Religion, an
educational center in New York City in
1922
● founding president of the World Jewish Congress in
1936 (created to fight Nazism)
● co-chair of
the American Zionist Emergency Council in WWII
● held press
conference in 1942 an announced that the Nazis had a plan for the extermination
of all European Jews, and had already killed 2 million; it didn't make front
page news in America.
Now
back to his sermon. Below are quotes from an article in the January 1, 1926
edition of The Jewish Transcript of the Pacific Northwest.
Stephen S. Wise’s Sermon on Jesus Causes a Storm
What has threatened to revive
theological and dogmatic controversy resulted from metropolitan newspaper
reports of a sermon delivered by Dr. Stephen S. Wise at the Free Synagogue last
Sunday at Carnegie Hall before a large congregation.
The subject of Dr. Wise’s sermon was “A
Jew’s View of Jesus.” In his sermon Dr. Wise reviewed the book of Dr. Joseph
Klausner, Hebrew writer of Jerusalem, entitled Jesus of Nazareth, His Life, Times and Teachings, an historic study
on the life of Jesus on the basis of old Jewish and Talmudic-Hebrew literature,
and is part of series on the development of the Jewish Messianic idea by the
author, was published in Jerusalem in Hebrew in 1922.
Jesus of Nazareth is not a myth as He
has been pictured in Hebrew teachings, but was a man . . . The very foundations
of morality, he asserted, are contained in the unparalleled code of ethics which
comprises the teachings of Jesus.
Because Christendom has renounced Jesus,
in fact, shall we continue to deny Him, now that we, His brother Jews, are free
to face His life and teachings anew? Shall we not say that this Jew is soul of
our soul and the soul of His teaching is Jewish and nothing but Jewish? This
teaching of Jesus the Jew is a phase of the spirit which led the Jew Godward.
Now is the time to throw overboard the doctrine
that the teachings of Jesus are alien to those of the elders.
Jesus was, I accept this despite the
notion I had been led to believe earlier in my life – a notion that Jesus was a
myth and never existed. I tell you, and I will repeat those words to every Jew
in the world if need be, Jesus was, and we must accept this fact at once.
But a question remains to be answered.
Because of Christian dogma or unchristian injustice to the Jew, shall the Jew
never feel free objectively to face and revaluate the teachings of a Galilean
Jew of the first century?
He maintains that the great division
between Judaism and Christianity could have never arisen if the teachings of
Jesus there had not been something fundamentally different and alien from the teachings
of Judaism.
I do not need to be a Christian in order
to recognize the place of Jesus in the great Jewish tradition. Israel gave
Jesus the man and the Jew to humankind. For the most part, Christendom has
denied in deed, though affirming him in name. Is not the hour come, for us, his
fellow Jews, to place Jesus where he belongs – this radiant Jewish teacher in
Palestine of the first century?
I
encourage you to read the entire article by going to the following links. It
begins on page 1, then goes to page 5 and ends on page 8. It is well worth
reading.
Page
1 also contains another article about the controversy.
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Shalom,
Jim Myers
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