Preached in City Pulpits

The capacity of the Jew “to dramatize himself and every experience in his life, together with his martyr complex” was described yesterday as being responsible for his racial suffering through the centuries by Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, speaking on “Must the Jew Suffer—and Why.”

Dr. Wise said:

“The Jewish view of life is a tragic view. But the Jew meets fate in the spirit of protest, seeking ever and ever to change it. We cannot escape our historic fate. So let us bear it with dignity, courage and nobleness.”

He asserted that “the sensitivity of the Hebrew is the reaction to memories of many years of torment and poignant suffering.” This sensitiveness is the “signature,” not the cause, of suffering, he said. “The torch-bearing Jew must needs be the sufferer. It is the one who takes a stand counter to the world who must feel that sense of apartness and loneliness which is the lot of the Jew.”

“The greatest thing in life is the ability to forgive as well as forget,” declared Rabbi Samuel H. Goldenson in his weekly sermon Saturday morning at the Temple Emanu-El, Sixty-fifth street and Fifth avenue.

“There is in reality no forgiveness if it is not accompanied by the willingness to forget,” the rabbi said. “Most people feel that they forgive when they say, ‘Well, I’ll forgive but I don’t think I shall ever forget.’ That is not forgiveness. You are being reluctant about opening your heart. What use is forgiveness if your heart is locked?” Another asset, he said, was a generous heart. “It is not easy to be generous when we must make a sacrifice.” he added.

THE EASIER DIVORCE

“The divorce laws of New York State should have been liberalized by the Legislature even though the Ross amendments did not go far enough,” Rabbi Louis I. Newman held in his sermon yesterday morning at Temple Rodeph Sholom, 7 West Eighty-third street.

“Religion should interpose no obstacles in the path of the improvement of marriage and divorce codes, except when extremist measures are intended which affront the best sensibilities of society,” Rabbi Newman said.

“Merely because divorce laws are liberalized does not mean that men and women will rush to the courts to avail themselves of them. Most marriages are happy, and even if there is friction between husband and wife, they are usually held together by the common desire to preserve the home intact until the children are grown. The law cannot keep marriages happy, or dissolve unhappy unions.

“Happiness is achieved by the two parties to the marriage in their relationship to each other, and divorce merely puts its official seal upon the dissolution of a marriage which spiritually has already been destroyed.”

HITS NORDIC MYTH

The Nordic myth which is being utilized as the cornerstone for building the Nazi state is so hopelessly false that only the most credulous can believe it, Rabbi Israe Goldstein asserted in his week-end sermon at Congregation B’nai Jeshurun, Eighty-eighth street west of Broadway.

“The leaders themselves must know better,” Rabbi Goldstein maintained. “They are foisting this myth upon their people because it serves as a two-fold instrument. In the first place they can by the race myth raise the national ego to a boiling point, so as to make ready for ‘the day’ of battle.

“Its more immediate utilitarian value is the displacement from industry, commerce and government service of hundreds of thousands of Jews and the replacement of them by ‘Aryans’ —so much easier a solution to the unemployment problem of the ‘Aryans’ than to create additional jobs by improving actual conditions.

“It seems hardly possible that statehood founded on such a lie can go on. The empires whose example of brutality and mendacity Nazi Germany is now emulating and even surpassing, have crumbled. The stronger the Third Reich seems to be, the nearer it is to the day of reckoning.”

TRUTH CRUSHES SLANDER

That calumny is doomed in the presence of honest opinion was the contention of Rabbi Joseph Zeitlin of Temple Ansche Chesed, West End avenue at 100th street, in his week-end sermon.

“In Rabbinical literature, the leper was believed to be smitten with his malady because he was guilty of speaking ‘slander,’ ” Rabbi Zeitlin declared. “There is a very significant thought in associating what is physically abhorring to what was ethically abhoring. Untold unhappiness can be brought to man because of his tendency to defame his neighbor.

“The recent occurrence in Washington in which attempts were made to besmirch the sacred reputation of our beloved president and his aides came to no avail because falsehood has no leg to stand on.”

RABBI WILLIAM F. ROSEN-BLUM. Temple Israel, 210 West Ninety-first street—“There are three reasons why the New Testament has no real place in the study and service of the modern synagogue as well as the old synagogue. The long record of Jewish persecution and pogroms in the attempt to convert the Jew to the religion of Jesus, the revival of such persecution in our own day, forms a barrier to alliance between Old and New Testaments within the covers of the synagogue Bible. However many beautiful passages about love and peace there may be in the New Testament, the memory of outrages in the name of its doctrine is too recent and too vivid to clothe such passages with meaning in the synagogue.

“We cannot teach New Testament to our children before giving them our own Bible. We can study it in adult classes. The truth is however, that if Christianity would treat the Jew with genuine love and consideration for several centuries, the New Testament would become another of the many sifrel chitzonim, outside books, which the synagogue does not use or recommend but which Jewish scholars would peruse. It could never become a Book of Reverence, it could become a Book of Reference!”