The high crime rate is the result of a corrupt legal system, Rabbi William Margolis charged in his sermon yesterday at Congregation Ohab Zedek, 118 West Ninety-fifth street.
“The courts ol law, which ought to be shrines of honor, are controlled by creatures of politics, selected by simony and intrigue,” he said.
“Knowledge and experience are superfluous. Political fealty is the only test; favoritism is the means; and crime, and the condoning of crime, are the shameful, inevitable ends.
“No judge obligated to a political boss can be expected to administer true justice.”
Rabbi Margolis referred to the Ten Commandments as an effective check on crime in early times.
“Against the reign of the criminal and the gangster,” he said, “I enunciate the law graven upon two tablets of stone. Into the face of evil that leers from every pattern of headlines lurid with their unending saga of a scandal and sin. I would fling the flaming words that thundered from the top of Sinai.”
The speaker said crime is triumphant over order today because of “a tangle of jurisprudence.”
“The present system must be scrapped,” he asserted. “The courts must be taken out of politics. God is righteousness; God is justice. And even as the Commandments proclaim that “Thou shalt have no other Gods,” even so must we demand that our lawmakers be free from bondage to any other deity than the public good.”
SEES CHRISTIAN SCIENCE, JUDAISM INCOMPATIBLE
Judaism and Christian Science are ethically incompatible, Rabbi Milton Steinberg asserted yesterday before the forum of the Park Avenue Synagogue, 50 East Eighty-seventh street.
“Christian Science, denying the objective reality of evil, encourages passivity in the face of human oppression and social injustice,” Dr. Steinberg said. “Judaism, on the other hand, has for one of its major objectives the arousing of the individual to the correction of social evil.”
He discussed critically the theology and system of mental healing of Christian Science and said Christian Science interprets Scripture in a manner inconsistent with Jewish tradition.
The fundamental conflict between Judaism and Christian Science, he contended, lies in the ethical realm.
“Since the days of prophets, Judaism has always insisted that the major function of religion is the correction of personal and social evils.
“It has always regarded both as real and it calls for the best of energies of man in his struggle against them. As a result, the Jewish tradition is in a great measure responsible for such social reform as mankind has attained.
“That attitude is entirely incompatible with that of Christian Science, which denies the reality of evil and encourages the individual to be passive in its presence.”
CITES CULTURAL ASPECT OF PRESENT-DAY CRISIS
Rabbi Leo Jung, in his Saturday sermon at the Jewish Center, 131 West Eighty-sixth street, called upon American Israel to endorse the cultural activities of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee.
Asserting that the position of the Jewish people is more tragic than it has been for the last 1,800 years, Dr. Jung said that too much attention is, nevertheless, bestowed upon the secular aspect of the Jewish crisis.
“The cry for food, for warmth and shelter has come from millions of helpless men and women of our race and must not be ignored,” he declared. “But man cannot live by bread alone.
“Israel overcame the crises of his past because of his spiritual treasures, which alike in periods of terror and tranquility flowed from his great academies.”
Dr. Jung said the “abiding contribution” of Jewry to humanity is ethical monotheism and not commercial smartness or intellectual brilliancy.
“On the Sabbath, which recalls the revelation of Mount Sinai, the spiritual birthday of mankind. I call my people in this country to decide on the Annual Torah Day, on which the Jewish people shall make their contributions toward the survival of Judaism, that the cultural committee of the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee revive its essential work,” he asserted.
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.
