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Correspondence

July 30, 1952

Letter to Ms. London about NBC Sermon on Elul and Repentance (1952)

Rosh Hashanah
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Speech

Pre-Yom Kippur Message to be delivered over WMAS (1955)

Beginning at sundown tonight, and for more than 25 hours thereafter, Jews all over the world will flock to their synagogues to ask forgiveness of G‑d on this holiest day of the year. Forgiveness implies, of course, that a sin was committed. And, indeed, we shall recite the Vidui – the list of some 50 sins to which we confess – a total of 8 times. For 8 times, all told, we shall, in full consciousness and awareness, admit that we have erred. For us moderns that will be, as it is every year, quite a disturbing experience. For we have learned to conform to the tempo of our society in which the words of Protagoras and Swinburne hold sway: “Man is the measure of all things.” G‑d has been replaced by Man as the hub of the universe. Religion has become an extension of psychological therapy. Convenience has been raised to a sacrament. And the only sin recognized is the failure to “adjust.” Yom Kippur thus stands in direct contradiction to this basis of our daily living. Not only can we sin, but we do sin. We approach our G‑d in humility and selflessness, and proclaim that it is we who are faulty – we and not G‑d, not Torah, not Religion, not the Synagogue. G‑d has not abandoned us; we have abandoned Him. Yom Kippur thus acts as a check on us – as a brake, lest we run away with ourselves and seriously begin to imagine ourselves as Divinities who can do no wrong. Think about it this way: the one time we Americans are glad – even eager – to recognize G‑d is when we point to Him as the source of our tragedies. There is an automobile accident. We complain: Why did G‑d do it? There is a flood. We ask: Why did G‑d do it? There is sickness. We murmur: Why did G‑d do it? But when it comes to our successes, we tend to forget Him. Polio was vanquished by American science. Economic prosperity is the achievement of our business wizardry. Jet propulsion is the product of American know-how. The projected man-made satellite will be the creation of our genius. And this way of thinking rev…
Yom Kippur

Synagogue Sermon

A Plea for Proper Pride (1955)

Every generation has its own special vices. Every people has its cardinal sin; sometimes cruelty and sometimes immorality, sometimes idolatry and sometimes intolerance. Ask any of today’s teachers of religion what, in their opinion, is the greatest sin of our generation, and they will unhesitatingly tell you: Pride. Preachers of all faiths regularly attack our pride in our technological progress. Moralists berate us for our pride in our scientific accomplishments. And recently theologians have been scolding modern man for what they call “the pride of the intellect.”There is, of course, a kernel of truth in all this. We are foolish if we think that building better machines makes us better men or that constructing greater cyclotrons makes us greater human beings. Yet, it seems to me, they miss the point. For while all this pride is sinful, it does not constitute the special, characteristic sin of our generation, the generation of Americans and especially American Jews we represent. I prefer to think that our great crime, our cardinal sin, has been, quite the contrary, not enough pride. We have too much pride in things, in possessions, in techniques. But we have a crying lack of proper pride – a lack of pride in ourselves, a lack of appreciation of the human beings we are, with the infinite capacities for good with which we are endowed. The tragedy of our age is not our foolish pride, but an unwholesome humility which makes us forget that we were created in the tzelem Elokim, in the Image of G-d. It is this lack of self-appreciation and proper pride which accounts for the mediocrity of the spirit, for the religious shallowness, for the amorality of our day. It is our accursed inferiority feeling that breeds our inferiority. We have so convinced ourselves of our lack of worth, our incapacity for greatness, that we no longer strive for it.One of the greatest sociologists of our time, Prof. David Reisman, has noted the same unfortunate tendency in his own students, colle…
Rosh Hashanah

Correspondence

Letter about R. Lamm's Thoughts on Religious Radio Programming (1953)

How dare you, you poisonous Jew, attack Bishop Sheen, the most respected Christian "minsiter" in the US? Why don,t you attack the Rosenbergs, the Greenglasses, the Fuchs, the Golds, and the Jewish traitors? Your accursed tribe have a monopoly on traitorism, and the day is fast approaching when the American people as every other nation on our earth has done will drive you out. Murder Incorporated was only a prelude to Traitors Incorporated.
Torah & Technology