Cultural Minorities Are Beneficial to Country, Jewish-christian Forum Told

(Jewish Daily Bulletin)

The beneficial influence of the existence of cultural minorities was a topic of discussion at the Church-Synagogue Forum held here last week.

A round table discussion followed the address of Rabbi Louis I. Mischkind of Wilmington, Delaware, on the subject “Racial and Religious Minorities.

In his address Rabbi Mischkind said:

“That Roman Catholics, in States which Protestants dominate, or French speaking Canadians in an English speaking majority, or Jews in a predominant non-Jewish environment, ought to be urged by every effort, peaceable of course, to change either their religion or their language or their culture and become indistinguishable from the rest, seems to be the tendency of what is popularly called Americanization. That is probably the tendency in all national States. The country view holds that all these differences and divergencies, the very existence of minorities, is not merely inevitable but is of incalculable benefit to the majority among which it exists. It is unnecessary to enter into a long historical disquisition upon the origins and development of civilization to indicate that it is a product of all groups, races, religions and linguistic elements; it is more to the point to recall that no development in any field of human relations is possible without the clash and differences-not necessarily violent-between and among the various components of the whole.

“From the viewpoint of the minority, there are two horns to its dilemma. Will it be persecuted in order to survive? Or will it risk existence by being tolerated? The first has been the most often thrust upon and into minorities throughout history. The second, until recent times, (excepting of course the policies of Cyrus, Alexander and some of the Roman Emperors) has rarely been offered. It is yet to be seen whether minority groups can withstand the blanidshments of a complacent majority and whether it is within the driving force of such minorities to keep them alive in an acquiescent environment that is at the same time attractive, not least because of its acquiescence. On the other hand, it remains to be seen, how long such a majority will continue to smile indulgently upon a minority that persists in in maintaining its personality, difference and peculiarity. What will be needed will be a common basis upon which both majority and minority may build together. This basis must in turn rest upon the conviction that a diverse world, even if this diversity is next-door, is the only condition for a live world. That the genius of man is exhibited not so much in his toleration of the like but in his understanding or at least his feeling with the unlike.”

Calling on Jew and Christian to fight together against the social evils of modern civilization, Rabbi Ephraim Frisch, in his address on “The Common Tasks and Resources of Judaism and Christianity,” which was the outstanding feature of the Jewish Sabbath Eve service held in the Community Church and attended by all the delegates, declared:

“The wise have long since come to the conclusion that the association and comingling of peoples of diverse faiths, nativities and experience, is not only natural but fruitful. It is these very differences which lend zest and enrichment to work and social converse.

“If there is one thing civilization is constantly in danger of, it is standardization, uniformity, so crushing of the spirit, in these days of mass production and mass activity. Our America should consider itself blessed in being in its origin and growth a composite civilization.

“There is so much that Christians and Jews have together in common; there are so many major tasks that are challenging all sincere religionists, that it is foolish, yes criminal, for the two groups to permit their natural, historic differences of belief, interpretation, organization and methods, to stand in the way of joint endeavor. The humanitarian problems, ever on the increase with the growing complications of the social order, cry out to both alike for solution. Shall considerations of sectarianism, be it the sectarianism of the subsidiary groups within each camp, weaken the force they can jointly bring to bear on the task of eradicating the ills associated with poverty, misfortune and disease? There are the still more urgent and more stupendous problems which have arisen in the train of the ruthless but irresistible march of industry and which the religious forces must cope with if they are not to prove recreant to their essential mission of bringing light and justice and love to the world. Shall we, because we have different traditions and different ways of serving the individual, fail to present a united front in attacking the common enemy?

“Jew and Christian have one precious common possession, one matchless source of strength to draw upon for battling with the problems of society. I refer to the all-embracing, all-on-folding nature of the first and basic principle of their ethics. Their conception of the kinship and equality of the human family is not subject to the vicissitudes of varying moods and contending interests. Their doctrines of the Brotherhood of Man cannot be engulfed by the tidal waves of passions, just because it is rooted in the conviction which even the exacting tests of modern science and thought have left unimpaired in its essence. With it as the unifying ideal we can level all inequalities and rectify all injustices. Holding fast to it, we resist as unstable and unworthy all narrow and selfish classifications, old and new, of human beings into rigid categories, however skillfully disguised they may be in the liveries of science or culture or patriotism. All talk of superior and inferior protoplasm becomes idle chatter: all pretensions of aristocracies predetermined by nature lose their point.

“It is because organized religion has contented itself with the carrying out of but a fragmentary portion of its own program, that it has failed. It has been satisfied with emphasizing personal virtue and happiness and even in that field has often fallen short in its vision and in the character of its spokesmen. On the whole, it may be said that the world has been very patient with organized religion and has kept on hoping that it would reorder its house and start anew with the freshness and the glow, the authority and the daring that characterized its creative periods when the great prophets of Judaism and Christianity blazed new paths for humanity. If even at this late hour organized religion will come forward to lead, it will be welcomed and acclaimed. Indeed in the present emergency of civilization, when every conceivable, secular instrumentality, political, educational and social, has been urged to come forward and lead the way and has failed to win the confidence of men, there is new opportunity for religion, the oldest of human institutions, numerically still the strongest, and the one the most closely associated with the high quests of mankind, to stand forth as the supreme agency under whose banner people will gather in rest numbers to usher in the longed-for era of personal and social righteousness.”