The Human Toch

YESTERDAY Dr. Stephen S. Wise, the unordained but one the less potent, Pope of American Jewry, was sixly years Id. His birthday falls, as you see, on St. Patrick???s Day. Yesterday he listened to a sermon in praise of himself by his favorite rabbidisciple, Louis I. Newman, in Temple Rodeph Sholom. Today, in his own Free Synagogue, he will sten to additional eulogies and take response. A man can be xty years of age only once and ## Wise. Dr. Wise supplied stenographer, as a precaution, suppose, against the possibility misquotation and as a means preserving in full the words ##ken by Stephen Samuel Wise ## even so inauspicious an occaon.

The interview took place in Dr. ise???s private study, but I had the eling that instead of conducting ## interview with a man on the object of how it feels to be sixly I as a privileged listener in an alost empty-synagogue to a ser-on delivered for my exclusive nefit. Every time I sought to ake a personal contact, so to eak, I was met by a tjhunderous Il of oratory. In fact, oratory as constantly intervening be reen myself and Dr. Wise. Every ##ne I tried to break through I it so thoroughly rebuffed that I ## up as bad job the task of talishing an informal contact, lile the Rabbi rolled on and the enographer scribbled and I???I loked a couple of cigarettes.

PROPHET, SENATOR, ACTOR

Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, with-{SPAN}##{/SPAN} being any the less a rabbi, has so in him the qualities of a pained ophet???which is perfectly rabaical???a Senator of the people {SPAN}##{/SPAN}d a tragic actor. If we find mething of the actor in his manrisms, we can find nothing cong in the cause which he has poused in the forty years of his tive career as rabbi, battler for onism, for human rights, for wish rights and against civic rruption. If in our imagination wrap a toga around him, the {SPAN}##{/SPAN}ga at least belongs, it doesn???t {SPAN}##{/SPAN}ke him ridiculous, as it might smaller man. He has the figure {SPAN}##{/SPAN}d the face for it.

He looks and acts, for a man of ##ty, as if he had abounding alth. I do not believe that the right of the troubles of Jewry ##nstantly burden him, for he has ##en known to smile and to make ##ips and even to play with his andchildren. In fact, he is hu##rous enough to have made con##ssion of his own weakness. ???I ##nnot be brief,??? he is reported to ve told an interviewer who reested a brief statement. It seems me that he talks for publication if he had pages of printed mat-## to run around in, as much ace as he has time for a ser-## But even when he doesn???t ## a word, and he has been known listen, he looks as if he were mebody. Which of course he is He has set his mark upon Jewish life in America with such an dividual and unmistakeable im##ess that one fines it hard to ##agine what Jewish life in American and even in the world at large ## have been without him. He ## not only built physical struc##res but he has set afoot social ##vements and given impulses and ##petuses to social progress and ##munal welfare and Jewish feeling. To the non-Jewish world he stands as the symbol of the best in the jewish rabbi; he has stood in thousands of Christian pulpits and stood in them as a credit to his people.

In a man who has achieved so much, a few mannerisms and even the public absence of a sense of humor may be forgiven. Even the man???s egotism is magnificent and only the petty ones on the sidelines, who have done nothing, can do nothing and will do nothing, may give themselves the petty pleasure of caviling at a big man who can afford to have blemishes because they do not disfigure him.

PROPHET MAY BE A BORE

One sometimes wonders how much close scrutiny by contemporary representatives of the press even the prophets of old might have withstood and whether, privately, some of them were not thought to be bores, unable to answer simply a simple question about the weather. But Stephen S. Wise is not a prophet, or a charlatan. He is that individual amalgam known as Rabbi Stephen S. Wise. The proof of his individuality and of his bigness seems to me to consist in the fact that it is possible to argue about him, that he is debatable ground.

Answering a question as to what has been the chiefest satisfaction of his life Rabbi Wise replied that he found it in ???the conseiousness that I have done something in conformity to the vision and in obedience to the spirit of Theodore Herzl, ton move Jews to stand up a little straighter, and to be a little more self-respecting in their own eyes and in the eyes of non-Jews. I am entirely ready to be remembered for that one thing, that I have tied to teach Jews, and I know that I have helped some of my fellow-Jews to hold their heads higher and to think of their heads higher and to think of their Jewishness not as a disgrace to be shirked, or as an affliction to be averted, but as a privilege to be cherished, and as a glory in which to rejoice.???

He tells me that his conscious ness and memory as a Jew go back to the year 1881 when, as a lad of seven, he went with his father, the Rev. Dr. Aaron Wise, head of Temple Rodeph Sholom, to welcome the victims of the Roman-offs and Pobyedonostzev, who were then passing through Castle Garden. ???It is for me the tragedy of tragedies,??? he says, ???to find my life begin in the era of Pobyedonostzev and end in the year of Hitler.??? But the great and satisfying difference to Rabbi Wise consists in the fact that while Jewry in the early ???80s had to take its persecution ???lying down,??? today they can fight back and fight hard.

The most vital thing to Rabbi Wise is the strengthening of Jewish consciousness. He puts is in this way: ???Everthing that contributes to the strengthening of the Jewish consciousness I believe in. Anything that weakens that consciousness, whether it be Re-form, or Orthodoxy or Conservatism, I am opposed to and I cannot help regretting the petty, puny, trivial, needless divisions between Reform and Orthodoxy for which Reform has its full share of responsibility.???

And this is his message to the Jewish people as he stats on the seventh decade of his life:

???We Jews must go on living. Under all circumstances Jews will survive. The question is not whether we will live, but how shall we live. Shall we merely survive or shall we once again, honorably, proudly, creatively and even nobly live. It is not enough to take Jews back to Zion. Zion must come back again into the heart of the Jew. Every Jew ought to be a cell of the Jewish National Home, Hitler cannot destroy us, but faithless, godless, ideal-less Jews can debase and destroy everything that is Jewish.???