(See Cover)
Wrapped in his long-fringed, white prayer shawl, and dressed in a white linen robe, Rabbi Finkelstein stood on the dais; looking to the East, with his back to the congregation, he faced the Ark of the Covenant. On the lectern before him lay the great scrolls of the Torah, the book of the law of Moses. Rabbi Finkelstein's clenched right hand beat upon his breast in the traditional gesture of sorrow. Clear and strong, in the twang and guttural of the Hebrew chant, his voice rose:
"Elohenu velohe abotenu — Our God and, God of our fathers, let our prayer come before thee; hide not thyself from our supplication, for we are not arrogant and stiff-necked, that we should say before thee, O Lord our God and God of our fathers, we are righteous and have not sinned; but verily, we have sinned."
Thus in Manhattan, and in almost every other corner of the world, one day this week, as they have for thousands of years, Jews prayed to the God of their fathers. It was the most dreadful and solemn day of the solemn and dreadful Jewish Year—Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. During the ten-day period of penitence beginning with Rosh Hashanah, tradition teaches, each man's deeds are judged in heaven, to be punished or rewarded in the year ahead.
It is for this that Jews call the ten days the Yamin Noraim—the Days of Fear. But when the trumpet call of the ram's-horn shofar has split the air for the last time on Yom Kippur, the mood traditionally changes to one of joy and hope. The New Year has indeed begun.
For Rabbi Louis Finkelstein, teacher of future rabbis at Manhattan's Jewish Theological Seminary and leader of perhaps the most influential school of Jewish theology in the U.S. today, the shofar will herald the most stirring joy and hope of a lifetime. For he believes—and on abundant evidence—that U.S. Jews are returning to their synagogues and temples as never before.
The old, half-deserted synagogues are filling up again, new congregations are forming, new synagogues are being built. Young married couples are sending their children to religious schools to learn the fundamentals of their faith—then forming study groups so that they will know what their children are talking about. The word that such young Americans use, over & over again, when they are asked what they are looking for, is "heritage."
"When I was a seminary student 40 years ago," says Finkelstein, "it seemed so clear to us that our faith could not survive here that we even wondered for what purpose in the Divine Economy the Jews had been brought to the New World." The ghetto and the pogrom had annealed Judaism in the hearts of countless generations of Jews, almost since the great dispersion. But in the freedom and prosperity of the Melting Pot, that branded faith seemed to be fading out. Says Finkelstein:
"Then came a tragedy which none of us had foreseen. The great First Century Rabbi Eliezer once said: 'The Messiah will never come until the Jewish people repent.' When they asked him, 'What if the Jews do not repent?' he answered: 'The Lord will raise up a king worse than Haman* to smite them, and then they will repent.' This is just what happened. Hitler was something we never thought possible.