In a special anniversary broadcast last night over Station WEVD, two associates of Rabbi Stephen S. Wise eulogized his career in religious and civic life. The speakers were Rabbi Louis I. Newman, of Temple Rodeph Sholom, and Rabbi Sidney E. Goldstein, associate rabbi of the Free Synagogue.
Declaring that Dr. Wise has given a new grandeur to the title of rabbi, Dr. Newman continued, “He has demonstrated the scope of influence within the command of the Jewish minister. He is statesman and tribune of his people, ever mindful by a process of uncanny intuition of the deep-seated wishes and welfare of the Jewish masses. Dr. Wise has been a prophet in more than one sense. He has been a fore-seer and a foreteller, predicting the victory of ideas and movements long before the general public had come to appreciate their merits.”
SPIRIT OF THE FIGHT
In his address Dr. Goldstein surveyed his years of association with Rabbi Wise. “The thing that moves me most,” he declared, “is not the sound and excitement of the battle but the spirit of the fight. He has defeated many enemies and he has defended many causes; his course is at times darkened by tragedy and at other times illumined by triumphant victory. The thing, however, that is most impressive is not the outward glamor of power, prestige and position, but the inward glory of genuine achievement.
“Let us not misunderstand the meaning of Dr. Wise’s leadership,” he concluded. “He is deeply interested in political life, but he is not a leader in politics, He is greatly concerned over the evils of our economic organization, but he is not a leader in economics. He is gravely exercised because of the failures and futilities of our system of jurisprudence, but he is not a leader in the law. His leadership outruns all these enterprises, for he knows that not the codes and not economies and not political science, but the ideals of ethics constitute the organic law of our social life. Dr. Wise has chosen to be not the priest and protector of the old order that is filled with weakness and wickedness and woe. but the prophet and protagonist of a new order that is to be air and just and strong.”
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
