Krass Rejects Holmes’ Idea Christ’s Name Be Inscribed on Walls of Synagogues

“The modern Jew does not reject Jesus because the church monopolizes him, as Dr. Holmes ssays, but because our ancestors found no place for him in our tradition.”

This was the statement made by Dr. Nathan Krass, rabbi of Temple Emanu-El, in a sermon delivered on Sunday which was in answer to a sermon delivered on November 16th by Rev. John Haynes Holmes, pastor of the Community Church, in which Mr. Holmes had discussed the question, “If I Were a Jew.” Rabbi Krass insisted that Mr. Holmes, as a Gentile, was incapable of comprehending the “inner feeling” of the Jewish race, and criticized Mr. Holmes’ suggestion that Christ’s name be inscribed on the walls of the Jewish synagogue as the “greatest of Israel’s prophets.”

“How can a Jew be loyal to his tradition and be a Jewish Christian and a Christian Jew?” said Rabbi Krass. “Dr. Holmes does not understand the psychology of the Jewish religion. It is not a religion of men, but for men. The Jewish tradition consists of the ineluctable conception of God which no struggle in Israel’s history, no conflict with idolatry, could ever change. We do not put the name upon our walls of Moses, or Isaiah, or Jeremiah, because we are not interested in the prophet, but in what he said. We do not celebrate men, from a religious point of view. The central figure in our religion is God.

“The great psychological fallacy which lies in thinking oneself into somebody else is the reason why John Haynes Holmes can never hope to understand what it means to be a Jew. To be a Jew means to have an inner experience, not merely the outward recognition that the inner experience is there. To know Judaism by reading a Jewish book no more makes one a Jew than my reading the New Testament made me a Christian.”