Rabbi Soul Teplitz, president of the Rabbinical Assembly, told some 500 fellow rabbis at the first business session today of the Assembly’s 79th four-day annual convention that they must understand what youth was searching for in turning to the cults and urged them to “descend from the mountaintop” and begin to cater to the needs of the young which he called “legitimate.”
Teplitz declared that in the 30 years since the end of World War II, “rabbis have been so caught up in the enterprise of establishing congregations, building outward structures and creating infrastructures that we have overlooked the human being in the process.” In the midst of a great deal of commotion, “we have lost the emotion,” he declared. Proyerbooks, he said, cannot provide the spirit, nor sermons the soul, nor educational curricula the breath in the youthful quest for “intimate spintuality.” He noted that “Our people, young and old, in this mercurial world have to feel that there is someone who cares for them, not as members or as contributors, but as persons.”
In speaking of the cults, and citing the Jonestown, Guyana tragedy as an example, Teplitz said that young people in the 1960s turned to drugs for escape, and “now this need to retreat from society’s stresses finds its fulfillment through identification with a cult.” The estimate is that there are about 1,500 major and minor religious cults in the U.S. with a total membership of about three million, he said.
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.
