An Address by DR. MAURICE N.
EISENDRATH of Holy Blossom Temple
Thursday, February 23rd,
1956.
CHAIRMAN: First Vice President, Mr. Donald H. Jupp.
Gentlemen, please remain standing after Grace is said so that I may
ask you to sing the first verse of the National Anthem and afterwards drink a
toast to Her Majesty the Queen.
Before we go on the air I would like to introduce to you the
distinguished guests at the Head Table who have gathered to honor the Speaker.
Will each guest rise briefly when his name is called but no applause please
from members until all the guests have been introduced.
MR. JUPP: Distinguished guests and members of the Empire Club of
Canada. We are singularly honored today to welcome as our Speaker a man with an
international reputation for service, learning and leadershipDr. Maurice
Eisendrath. Toronto is proud of the fact that part of that reputation was
earned here in the 14 year period from 1929 until 1943 when Rabbi Eisendrath
served at Holy Blossom Temple. He was born in Chicago in 1902, received his
Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Cincinnati in 1925, was ordained
as Rabbi at the Hebrew Union College in 1926, took up his duties at Virginia
Street Temple in Charleston West Virginia and moved to Toronto in 1929. While
in Canada he was active in social reform and was instrumental in founding the
Canadian Conference of Christians and Jews, serving as Co-Chairman throughout
his Canadian ministry.
For many years he served as National Chairman of Public Relations
for the United Jewish Community of Canada. Our radio audience today will be
particularly interested to know that he established the "Forum of the Air", the
first radio program of its kind in Canada. He is the author of a book "The
Never-Failing Stream", published in 1939 and numerous monographs and articles
on religion.
From Holy Bloossom Temple he was called in 1943 to the office of
President of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, with headquarters in
New York City and in 1945 the honorary degree of Doctor of Divinity was
conferred on him by the Hebrew Union College for his outstanding contributions
to the rabbinate. In 1952 the Union, an organization founded in 1873 and which
today represents 500 congregations in the United States, Canada, Latin America
and Hawaii, made him President for Life. In addition he is a member of a
formidable number of Boards and Committees of Jewish and non-sectarian
organizations. The broad scope of his experience is indicated by the fact that
he was one of the official American Jewish representatives to the Peace
Conference in Paris after the war and also served as consultant at the San
Francisco conference that wrote the charter of the United Nations.
It is clear that the Empire Club could not hear from a more eminent
authority during Brotherhood Week. Canadians enjoying vast lands and resources
on the North American continent may well echo the fervent words of the poet
Katharine Lee Bates:
"The Price of Brotherhood" is the title chosen by Rabbi Eisendrath
for his address to us today – Dr. Maurice N. Eisendrath.
DR. EISENDRATH: Although some glib songster from Tin Pan Alley has
superficially chanted that "the best things in life are free," a far earlier,
profounder, and more realistic commentator upon life and its deeper meaning
assured us that only "by the sweat of his brow shall man eat bread;" that all
things, in short, must be bought and paid for; or, as the writer of the Book of
Ecclesiastes might have said, "For everything on earth there is a price, and
there is nothing free under the sun."
Though this may sound somewhat cynical; and though, admittedly,
there are many things, even among the best and most coveted: such as love and
friendship, motherhood, and faith that are "without money and without price,"
in that they are not purchasable in the coin of the realm; still, in all
honesty, we have become accustomed, since man’s earliest days, to recognize
that while "the lily of the field may toil not nor spin," the sons of man are
required to labor, even from dawn till dusk, to provide themselves with their
daily bread.
To be sure, there were those who ravaged the earth and seized for
themselves the possessions of their neighbors. But very early in man’s destiny
such pillage and plunder were condemned and punished even by death itself.
"Thou shalt not steal" rang out the unequivocal prohibition against
appropriating by force or by stealth the property of another. Slowly,
painfully, man worked out a system of crude and primitive barter whereby so
many hours of toil expended on, let us say, a stone axe was equivalent to a
certain number of hours spent on the creation of an aesthetically moulded vase.
I am not sufficiently acquainted with the price index of those ancient days to
know just how accurate my analogy may be, but this much I do know – there never
has been a time – except, perhaps, among certain tiny communes such as the
Essenes, recently popularized by the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls – when
mankind has not invariably based his life and living upon the inexorable
proposition that, "for everything there is a price." Except again perhaps on
our $64,000 and $100,000 giveaways; except on the whirring slot machines at Las
Vegas or on the rise and fall of values on the Stock Exchange, few of us – even
the most thrifty merchants among us-expect to get something for nothing. In
fact, we are suspicious of anything and everything obtainable "without money
and without price."
How strange then – and utterly paradoxical – that, whereas there is
not a single business or professional man, such as those who constitute by far
the majority of our gathering today, who would for a moment challenge this
fundamental axiom of our society that it is fit and proper for our commodities
and services to carry their appropriate price-tags; that though we dub as
communistic and subversive of our complex and delicately adjusted free
enterprise any suggestion that men shall be rewarded without adequate toil, or
that we can build our business enterprises without the sweat of our brows or
without long hours of labor – how strange, I repeat, that when it comes to the
acquisition of such cherished goals as justice and peace and brotherhood, then
by some peculiar, fantastic illogic we actually do believe – or, at any rate,
we act as though we did implicity and without question believe – that these
sublime and coveted objectives can be easily attained "without price," without
effort, without sacrifice, without pain, without "blood, sweat and tears." If
we do but mouth our protestations of brotherly love; if we do but worship on a
single day in the week the Prince of Peace; if we profess in our confessions of
faith or mechanically mumble our noble prayers that the "time may not be
distant" when "swords will be beaten into ploughshares and spears into pruning
hooks," we become smugly satisfied that we have expended our full complement of
effort for brotherhood and peace.
But the price of Brotherhood – or Peace – is far steeper than the
mere words of our mouths.
Too many of us are brothers by such words of mouth only. We – that
is, many of us – go to our respective churches and synagogues and pour forth
our praises and our prayers-ostensibly at least-to the "Lord of all creation,"
"the Father of all mankind," who hath made of one flesh and one blood all the
creatures of the earth, in Whose sight there is-and can be-no distinction
between "Scythian, Greek, or Jew," to the Lord not merely of the Canadians, the
British, the French, or the Americans, but even of the Germans and the Russians
and the Chinese Reds as well, and then we behave as though His domain ended at
our own respective frontiers.
Not yet are we prepared to subject the concerns and interests of our
sovereign states to the well-being of all, to the Will and Way of the Moral
Law. And so, although we have laboriously builded a United Nations, we are
guided therein more by the law of expediency than by the price we must pay for
brotherhood. Thus, when myriads of natives in South Africa, whose skins have
been rendered somewhat darker than our own by the Will of God Himself, appealed
to the conscience of the world for succor and for salvation from the grim and
relentless Apartheid policy of South Africa, not a single so-called democratic
nation of the world – except tiny Israel – rallied to their support. Again,
with regard to Israel, instead of harkening to the poignant appeal of the
newest democracy in the comity of nations for protection against the murderous
attacks of her marauding neighbors, instead of fortifying these sons of freedom
in the new-old Holy Land, we flirt with and flatter by a flow of explosive arms
those scions of fascism and feudalism throughout the Middle East.
And as it is with regard to our unwillingness and failure to pay the
price of brotherhood in our relationships among the nations on the political
front, so in too many instances, are we likewise unprepared to comply with the
inescapable cost of fellowship in the economic sphere. No amount of
philanthropy or diplomatic good-will, no Point Four programs or Marshall Plans
will speedily enough reduce the disparity between an average per-capita annual
wage in the United States – and not much less in this Dominion, I suppose – of
$1700 and a bare $27 – not per week or per month but per year, in China;
between the social whirl characteristic of a good part of this North American
Continent in which millions, yea billions, are squandered with the nonchalance
of pennies in an arcade, and the quagmire of destitution and suffering and
premature death in which the multitudes of the world still helplessly and
hopelessly sink. For it is an unassailable fact, as Trygvie Lie, until recently
the Secretary-General of the United Nations, has pointed out, that "most humans
on earth are hungry most of the time." As a price must be paid to spare the
world the ravages and the destruction threatened by atomic annihilation, so
there is a price which each of us is called upon to pay in order that the
rising rancour of the impoverished multitudes of the earth shall not tear our
social fabric to shreds in bloody revolution.
Despite all the flaws in the Marxian interpretation of history,
there is one rallying cry which is capturing the imagination and idealism of
the youth of many lands and which challenges – as they have never been
challenged before – the sincerity and genuine idealism of our democracies and
our faith. And that cry is the word of Karl Marx who contended that
"Philosophers have explained the world, but our business is to change it." And
it is this lure "to change the world" which is winning the vast numbers of the
Communist cause, while our stubborn insistence upon maintaining too much of the
status quo is providing fuel for the incendiary fires of the Reds. Back some
years ago a Chinese girl, condemned to death for revolutionary activity, said
to her sorrowing family, "Do not weep for me. I am dying for a cause. You will
go on living – for what?" Our forbears who came to this North American
continent in order, as they phrased it, to establish in this New World the
ancient commonwealth as Moses had envisaged it, to build a just and equitable
society to supplant the rigid caste systems of the Old World they had eagerly
left behind-they knew what they were living and dying for: they were determined
to rear a society that would provide a new birth of freedom for all. But every
time such a ghastly, grisly misdeed as the murder of an Emmet Till, or the
sadistic stoning of a Negro college girl, occurs in my own country and goes
unpunished, or a splendidly conceived FEPC provision such as you have so
happily and justly enacted in this Dominion and Province, goes unenforced, as I
understand is the case in a certain municipality not so far distant from us
today – we prove ourselves unwilling and unready to pay that price by which
alone we can build that brotherhood on earth which it is our common destiny to
rear. But, whereas most of us are unwilling to pay this price of brotherhood,
it is astounding – and most paradoxical – how steep and staggering a price we
seemingly are content to pay for the lack of such brotherhood which we
complacently tolerate in this so-called "best of all possible worlds."
I wonder how many of us have actually grasped the reality of the
colossal sums we are presently spending because we have not yet sought and
found the formula for establishing that kind of brotherhood whereby "each man
might sit ‘neath his own vine and fig tree, there being none to make him
afraid." The figures for your own land, which I do not have available, must be
similarly impressive. As for the United States, we appropriated last year
thirtyfour billion dollars for defense. Does anyone among us really know what
that means? Well, for one thing, it means four million dollars spent every hour
– day and night – for armaments which will lead us eventually to our
destruction – or, if we are spared that catastrophe, then at least to their own
obsolescence.
Let me give you just a few graphic illustrations of the price we
presently pay for that which postpones rather than pursues the world-wide
brotherhood we cherish.
For every 30 million dollars which one navy destroyer costs, we
could construct 60 desperately-needed schools at a half million dollars
apiece.
Every 200 million dollars required for a single new aircraft
carrier, which will be antiquated in but a few years, or blown to splinters by
a single bomb, is equal to 8 times the annual cost of the entire Technical
Assistance program of the U.N., which, if but supported with similar sums,
might make war and revolution appear to the vast multitudes of earth both
superfluous and obsolete, might make an anachronism of Marx’s taunting appeal.
"You have nothing to lose but your chains."
Every $7,000 required merely to fuel, service, and put in the air
for 7 hours a single bomber would provide a four-year college education for the
average boy or girl.
Such are the price-tags on just a few of our satanic instruments of
death in terms of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all. In such
human equations the grand total of thirty-four billion dollars is even more
staggeringly unbelievable. Those $34 billions – and a comparative figure in
Canada would no doubt be similarly revealing – would purchase:
For technical assistance to the undeveloped peoples to put them on
their feet and become self-supporting and free 10
All this, and there would still be $12 billion left for reducing the
heavy burden of taxation and increasing purchasing power.
This is the price we are paying for what we regard as defense and
national security. But are we actually less anxiety-ridden than before we build
our Maginot line of atomic hydrogen bombs? Is it not possible to find another
way-risky no doubt-but who ever said that the price of brotherhood did not
involve risk from the day the cave-man first laid down his club and decided to
submit his conflicts to juridical procedures? Is it not possible to find a way
to some manner of universal disarmament, of effective inspection and control,
that will leave in the hands of nations only such weapons as may still be
necessary for maintaining international order so that the incomprehensibly
immense sums now being poured into defense might indeed revolutionize the world
and provide the price of brotherhood?
Now while you might readliy retort that this costly and imminently
catastrophic race is not of our own making; that Barkis is willin’; that the
democracies are more than prepared to abandon it the moment the Soviet will
come to terms, what about the similarly staggering sums we are squandering as a
consequence of our unbrotherly behavior on the domestic scene?
Have you-good sound business and professional men that you
undoubtedly are – paused to ponder how much it really does cost us to begrudge
the price of brotherhood right here at home?
It is on our domestic balance sheets of business that our prejudices
are showing vast deficits. It was no "do-gooder" minister or "good-willing"
rabbi, but the highly respected statistician and pollster, Mr. Elmo Roper, who
recently pointed out, in a searching and scientifically documented pamphlet,
that the United States is wasting thirty billion dollars a year in manpower,
morale, and productivity; that ten dollars out of every seventy-five dollar
paycheck are washed down the drain in the phony luxury of indulging prejudice.
Again, I do not know what the comparable figures may be for Canada, but I do
know that wherever a firm exists that does not hire on merit and on merit
alone; that wherever a ceiling is placed upon the kind of position a man or a
woman can attain because God’s sun may have shaded his skin a bit more darkly
than our own; or because he is descended from the people who gave birth to him
whom some call-if I may use the same phrase with a different connotation –
"God’s own – and only Son;" or because he may have come from some different
land of origin; wherever there is such discrimination and lack of brotherhood,
not only, as Mr. Roper puts it, "is that firm guilty of injustice" – and of
this we shall have more to say later-but of "woeful extravagance as well."
What Mr. Roper has in mind has to do largely with the decreased
efficiency and productivity that result when victims of discrimination worry
more about acts of prejudice than about the job to be done. What he has in mind
is the shortsightedness of searching frantically for foreign markets – with all
its dangers of potential war – and neglecting the additional 12 billion
purchasing power of fifteen million Negroes in the United States alone if all,
instead of just some, were employed at their highest skills.
He recalls, likewise, how long our victory was delayed in World Wars
I and II, and how many lives were uselessly lost, because our industrial output
was reduced by discrimination. What he has in mind, further, is the filching
from our democratic world of so much of the potentialities of minority groups
who could move into high-paying vocations where there are manpower shortages –
medicine, chemistry, engineering, and the like – if merit and merit alone were
our criterion. Who knows how much sooner a Salk vaccine might have been
discovered! Who knows how many of your own children and those of your dear ones
and friends might have been spared the ravages of the grim scourge of infantile
paralysis if ten, twenty, fifty years ago certain medical schools had not said
"Not wanted" to some brilliant young student who just might have preceded Salk
by a full half century had he not been refused admission because he was a Jew,
a Negro, an alien! Who knows today what secrets of increased productivity of
the soil, what new plastics and synthetics, might have been created by some Jew
or Negro or Catholic or Foreigner to bring increased food and clothing and
shelter to the ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill housed of the world – ever the
seed-bed of revolution and war – if we were not tragically willing still to pay
this high price of unbrotherly behavior.
It was in Nazi Germany that the price of prejudice found its
ultimate reductio ad absurdon – its reduction to absurdity – and to horror and
barbarism as well. Those whom the gods would destroy they first make mad – and
prejudiced too. They drive them crazy through their paranoid fear of the
stranger within their gates. Surely we ought to have learned from the bestial
butchers of Berlin that bigotry does not pay; that to banish from one’s borders
or to burn in gas ovens and asphyxiation chambers millions of the children of
God because of their so-called race and alleged alien descent is to rob one’s
own land, one’s own generation, and posterity itself, of some of the highest
skills and most blessed gifts which God has bestowed on men regardless of race,
creed, or national origin. And yet, while we shudder and recoil in horror from
such brutality and sadism; while admittedly we have made comparative giant
strides toward brotherhood in many areas, nevertheless "by gentleman’s
agreement" we still exclude vast multitudes from the full and equal opportunity
which genuine brotherhood would demand. We still may be dooming to agonizing
years of pain and premature death from cancer our own loved ones because we do
not accept exclusively on merit, all men as men "for a’ that." We still may
lose the cold war – or the hot – because of indispensible skills which in a
college in Alabama or a village in Ontario we spurn. As a well-known editorial
writer correctly phrased it: "The demonstrations against a Negro girl in
Alabama are a gift to the Kremlin of a ceremonial sword which may one day split
the West into fragments. We have handed the Communist conspiracy a weapon to
divide the world."
And so we continue to pay and pay and pay, not only, as I have
already indicated, in decreased efficiency and productivity in our respective
businesses and industries, not only in the crippling of potential scientific
advance, not only in advertising – as no amount of Marshall Aid or Point Four
benefactions can dispel – our failure to spell out our democratic preachment in
tangible brotherly affection for all – but there is an additional price still
that we pay within our own communities.
Have you any idea of what you as a taxpayer are paying for your
tenements and slums largely caused by greed and/or discriminatory practices in
housing and industry? In one study, made recently in Cleveland, Ohio, it was
found that municipal taxes on real-estate in one such slum area totalled
$225,000, whereas public and private social services including relief, health
services, handling juvenile offenders, incessant fire-fighting amid tinder-box
tenements – all of which are always higher in such blighted areas – came to
$1,360,000 – a ratio, a loss, of six to one.
Nor is the psychological price less costly. The Committee on the
Hygiene of Housing in the U.S.A. has pointed out that more damage is done to
children by a sense of chronic inferiority due to the consciousness of living
in sub-standard dwellings, attending sub-standard schools, being restricted to
sub-standard jobs, than by all the defective plumbing which tenements may
contain.
Communists are not born – at least on this side of the Iron Curtain;
they are bred, bred in hate and a lust for vengeance against the bigotry and
greed that belie the brotherhood of man. Here also, prejudice does not pay.
Such is the price we pay for the lack of brotherhood. It is, as Eric
Johnston, former President of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, dubbed it, "a
fool’s economy indeed!" Is it not time that wise – and even
economy-minded-leaders of our states and cities, of our provinces and
communities, of our industries and trades, came to the inescapable conclusion
that even as we hear constantly iterated over the Radio and TV that "crime does
not pay," so is the failure of fellowship likewise a costly, a prohibitive
extravagance.
But you know as well as I that, as a rabbi, as a religious teacher,
as the descendent of a people that has never counted the costs in mere monetary
terms, that has faced exile and persecution, the torture chamber and the wrack,
the inquisition and crusades, just because it would not purchase fellowship,
would not buy good-will, at just any cost but preferred to pursue God’s will at
any price-you know as well as I that I would not rest my case on mere dollars
and cents nor would I insult you by appealing exclusively to whatever mercenary
instincts you may possess. You too are moved by principles and ideals such as
once prompted lowly fisherman, shepherds, and artisans to follow a lowly
Galilean carpenter and lay down their lives for a friend. You, too, have
fathered sons who have laid their lives upon the altar of their dreams.
I have attempted to prove – and I believe I have – that bigotry does
not pay-even in the crassest material terms – but I must add, before I
conclude, that, even if this were not the case, you and I – insofar as we are
Christians and Jews-are under orders to love our neighbors as ourselves –
whether it pays or not. That it does pay – is all to the good. Although
so-called hard-headed, realistic business men, with their feet solidly on the
ground – "and all that", – may designate some of us as starry-eyed and
oh-so-impractical visionaries and idealists, the ideal and the practical are
really one. Nothing in this world can really be practcial – on a long term
basis – unless it is likewise ideal. The truths we learned in our religious
schools or at our mother’s knees are not only morally right but expedient as
well.
So why not, my friends, pay the price of brotherhood not only
because it is uneconomical and dangerously explosive in this revolutionary age
to persist in our unbrotherly behavior, but because we have been mandated by
prophet and seer, by Jesus and the rabbis of the past so to do. Why not end
every vestige of segregation, not merely because the Supreme Court of the
United States or your own FEP and FAP legislation declares it illegal, but
because long centuries ago, the Ten Commandments of the Jew, and the Sermon on
the Mount sacred to the Christian, proclaimed it immoral!
Then shall we discover that the price of brotherhood is not nearly
so costly or so illusory as the price we have been headlessly paying for the
lack thereof. Then will we begin to tear down our expensive fences which have
for too long divided us and build far less costly bridges which shall
ultimately unite us.
Fences and bridges – what interesting, what contrasting concepts and
words! In this day when the subject of semantics has become so popular even for
parlor discussion (Quote here the story of "coming too near, going too
far")-perhaps we might spend just a moment or two in conclusion in searching
out the significance of these two pregnant words! Bridges and fences. Fences,
or walls, do indeed serve an important purpose in life. They have their
irrefutable value. They give us shelter, security, and privacy – in a world
which otherwise would indeed be "too much with us." They carve for us out of
unbounded space too vast for us to master, a smaller area which we can subdue
to our needs. Imagine a world, particularly our own, with its streaming,
screeching brakes, its whirling, whirring wheels, its strident sirens, its
thronging throughways, its tireless telephones, its blaring, blatant radio and
TV-without some walls occasionally at least to ‘fence us in, "to bring us
momentary solitude, to enable us, if only for a brief second or two, to hear
the gentle voices of children, the tender whispers of love, the still small
voice of God Himself. Yes, walls enclose us in a manageable world; they give us
a sense of at-homeness which is good for our souls; they define, beyond
peradventure of doubt, what is ours and what is another’s. Or, as Robert Frost
phrased it, "Good fences make good neighbors."
But there are other walls – which are not similarly beneficial.
Prejudice and group hatreds are forbidding and foreboding walls which men build
around themselves not merely to fence themselves in but to fence others out.
Fences of social snobbery and alleged racial superiority! Our generation
unhappily has witnessed the erection of far too many of these walls of
separation between man and his brotherman. Whenever and wherever there have
been want and hunger, discontent and unrest, racial and religious bigots have
swarmed out of their holes to sow the dragon-seeds of division, discord, and
dissension. Sometimes even good and respectable people build such walls about
themselves and their presumably select sets: walls of social exclusiveness and
economic caste behind which they smugly and snugly hug to their bosoms the
delusion that they are somehow better than the common run of humanity. How
pathetic, how poignant is their short-lived pretense! For we know that, in the
sight of God, there are no Brahmins and no pariahs or untouchables-only
children of dust, who, in their brief careers on earth, may find a measure of
happiness by helping one another in goodness and sharing. From the four corners
of the earth God took the dust wherewith to create man so that none could boast
that his ancestors were better than another’s, wrote the rabbis of old. "Of one
blood hath He created all peoples of t
