by Guest Minister Rev. Leah Hart-Landsberg

A sermon given July 13, 2008

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

Good morning.  An acquaintance recently asked about my astrological sign.  I told her I was a Leo-Virgo, that my birthday was on the cusp.  Oh, she said, interested.  Which one are you more of?  I said I guessed I felt like both, equally, but I wondered later if I should have just picked one.  Was it being fussy to insist on both?

That same week, I spent time with a much younger friend, who announced that he was going to be a truck driver and an astronaut when he grew up.  And I almost told him that he’d have to pick one or the other, as if he couldn’t even just want to be both. 

I grew up Unitarian Universalist and Jewish in a family that was and is both.  But sometimes I’ve felt like I have to pick, that it couldn’t possibly work to be both a Jew and a UU.

There’s tension in Unitarian Universalism about people who are both Unitarian Universalist and Jewish.  Of course, discomfort about multiple identities isn’t unique to Unitarian Universalism.  It reflects the tension in our culture about what it means when people occupy those both/and places, those in between spaces.  There can be a very real fear that if certain people get encouraged or tolerated for embracing one aspect of who they are, it’ll get out of hand and take over the identity of everyone else.

Recently a UU I know said to me: “It’s ok to have a Jewish background but expecting us to honor your holidays is forcing your way of life onto everyone else.”  Maybe you’ve heard someone say something like that.  I think I’ve said things like it, to people I care about, out of surprise with being confronted with some thing or concept for which I wasn’t prepared to make room.  Maybe you’ve done that too.

By their very presence, people in in between places, the spaces on the margins, challenge cultural norms!  When gay people want the whole community to care about the Pride march, questions arise.  Not everyone is gay—how will those who are heterosexual feel and respond?  Is it an opportunity for learning and growing, a chance to embrace something wonderful or is something being stolen, forced upon the majority?

Jews in Unitarian Universalism are sometimes treated as outsiders, as if they might be trying to complicate or co-opt our religion and take it away from those who really belong. 

I have a story for you, about a Jew on the margins of Unitarianism.  Rabbi Solomon Hirsch Sonneschein (that means ‘sunshine’ in German) lived from 1839 to 1908. Originally from Hungry, he’d lived in Austria, Germany, Croatia, and Czechoslovakia and then came to the US in the 1860s, during the early days of the Reform Judaism movement.  His life gives us one example of how Unitarianism and Judaism have overlapped.

Unitarians and Reform Jews emerged in this country from very different social settings. Unitarians were US natives, generally, with more class and economic and ethnic privilege.  Their movement (our movement) evolved from Christianity.  In contrast, the American Jewish Reformers tended to be immigrants from central Europe, especially Germany, or the children of these immigrants.

Yet Reformers and Unitarians both wrestled with the same religious dilemma.  Here’s what they were trying to figure out: How can religious liberalism be reconciled with religious tradition?  How can tradition be redefined so it can accommodate and encourage theological innovation?  These are not such distant questions, even today.

Both movements also had a similar eschatology, which is to say, similar ideas about what happens at the end, like after death.  For Unitarians and Reformers, God was not going to wipe clean the world with a fiery apocalypse.  Heaven and Hell mattered less than an ethical life, well lived in the here and now.

Recognizing these theological alliances, some Reform rabbis and Unitarian ministers started pulpit and bimah exchanges. Some clergy and their congregations set up subscription exchanges too, so they could read each other’s newspapers and publications. As the religions began to notice how much they had in common, some Jews and Unitarians began calling for the marriage of their two movements.

Rabbi Sonneschein was an important contributor to this scene.  In 1869, while serving a St. Louis synagogue, he wrote and delivered a series of lectures called Reform Judaism and the Unitarian Church, in which he had a fairly easy time naming the conceptual similarities between the two religions.  For example, both movements believed in the oneness, the unity, of God.  No disagreement there.

What he outlined as the points of disharmony were mostly about social and cultural differences.  He talked about the preference for the Christian or the Jewish name and pragmatic ritual differentiations.  People show up at worship and expect different things to happen.  Would liturgy be in Hebrew?  Would communion, which was standard in Unitarian worship at the time, happen?  How would that get handled?  Still, he insisted, Reform Judaism and Unitarianism were running parallel histories.  Each was fighting for tolerance, freedom and the religion of humanity.  Religious tendencies varied “only in the shading.”

Now, before this sounds too hunky dory, let me hasten to say that Sonneschein wasn’t uncritical of the idea of a closer relationship between these two religions.  He expressed grave concerns about unity.  Who, he wanted to know, would be the founding father (we might say ‘parent’) of a combined religion, Moses or Jesus?  Would Saturday or Sunday prevail as the day of rest?  Christian oppression against Jews still flourished.  If the faiths became one, who would secure the rights of persecuted Jews across the globe?  Although deeply committed to religious universalism, Sonneschein couldn’t abandon his group identity, wouldn’t turn away from the task of Jewish self-preservation.  Religious unity, he concluded, was therefore still but a dream.

So, then, the task at hand was for Reform Jews and Unitarians to fulfill what he called their “inner missions.”  Reformers must disseminate the teachings of progress and reason to orthodox Jews.  Unitarians must take similar truths to Baptists, Presbyterians and Lutherans.

Not all this talk about joint “inner missions” was well-received.  Sonneschein’s approval of Unitarian ideas was controversial, in his congregation and within the Reform movement.  Personal tensions were brewing as well.  Sonneschein was an alcoholic, in a mutually miserable and unfaithful marriage.  His congregation watched this and worried.

The personal and political came to a head in 1886 when he arrived to preside at a funeral. He became furious when he saw the mirrors covered—a very common ritual of mourning he and other more radical Reformers regarded as empty and backward, although it was and remains very common practice.  He also showed up late and drunk.  After the funeral, in the living room of the grieving family, a fistfight erupted between the rabbi and one of his congregants.  The president of the board broke it up.  When all was said and done, Sonneschein offered his resignation and it was accepted.

The first thing he did, even before most of the community knew he’d left the synagogue, was travel to Boston.  He preached at the Rev. Edward Everett Hale’s South Congregational Society, which was a Unitarian church, and attended some secret negotiation meetings with leaders of the American Unitarian Association. (This is long before the Unitarians and the Universalists joined together in 1961.)  At this time, in 1886, Unitarian leadership included Rev. Hale as well as the Reverends Minot Savage and Grindall Reynolds.

What a huge risk this must have been for Sonneschein!  I wonder if he was nervous, scared.  I also can’t help wondering if maybe he was understandably attracted to the prestige of noble, moneyed, respected, historic East Coast Unitarianism.  Judaism just doesn’t have that same legacy—especially not at that time in this country.

But regardless of that, it is clear Sonneschein felt very sweetly towards Unitarianism.  He cared deeply about our free intellectual tradition.  He mourned that religious leadership in his own tradition had grown “too narrow” and he desired a platform from which his ideas about how to make the world a better place would be supported and encouraged.

He felt at home with Unitarians.  Sonneschein was close friends with the Rev. William G. Eliot, pastor of St. Louis’ Unitarian Church of the Messiah.  This Eliot was the father of the Rev. Thomas Lamb Eliot, who was the first minister to serve this Portland congregation.  Sonneschein preached at the elder Eliot’s St. Louis church sometimes, and in nearby cities, he occasionally led Sunday services when regular clergy were away.

Ultimately, Unitarian leadership did not encourage Rabbi Sonneschein to formally apply for a Unitarian pulpit and so he did not.  When Rev. Hale had raised the issue of baptism, for example, Rabbi Sonneschein rejected the possibility of his performing such a ritual. This may or may not have had anything to do with any discomfort with Christian practice, since he opposed most religious ritual, even including circumcision.

Nevertheless, it was a point of disagreement.  Frankly, it’s hard to say what influenced Hale, Savage and Reynolds in their decision-making.  From the Unitarian Universalist perspective, not much, if anything, has been written about this.

Jewish scholarship has been slightly more interested.  Scholar Dr. Benny Kraut researches the relationships between Reform Judaism and liberal Protestantism in the US and has written about Sonneschein.  My words today are based on his work.  Kraut believes that if Rabbi Sonneschein had been offered a Unitarian church, he’d have taken it.

I’m struck profoundly by all of this.  It’s not a question of what would have happened if our movement had had a Unitarian rabbi, although that’s certainly something to think about, isn’t it?  Rather, I’m struck by what it means that Unitarian Universalism doesn’t seem to find this interesting and important.

Kraut’s interest in Sonneschein is about what it means to American Jewish religious history and what it tells us about the early Reform movement.  For our purposes here, I wonder what this story means for and to and about Unitarian Universalism.  Jews and Unitarians shared deep conversations at pivotal points in their histories.  Judaism and Unitarian Universalism have intersected powerfully and thoughtfully in this country.  To know this enhances our knowledge and experience of Unitarian Universalism and of the people who are at home in it.

There’s a reason UUs like to talk so much about the important people associated with our history.  Clara Barton, organizer of the American Red Cross was a Universalist, I tell people sometimes.  I just learned that Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone, considered himself a Unitarian Agnostic and I immediately brainstormed ways to slip this fact into a conversation (or sermon).  When we can point at the real, actual people who came before us, we become legitimate.  This act of naming helps us, the people of the now, to make sense of who we are because it gives us a connection to the ones who helped shape us and our movement.

Our Jewish and Unitarian history has left a legacy.  We get to figure out what that legacy is.  We can participate in naming it, legitimizing it.  Some of this legacy is embodied- by people who are among us now.  People who hold multiple identities, which I think all of us do in our own unique ways, want and need to know of others like them, like us.

I don’t know what multiple identities many of you have—maybe they’re about being on an astrological cusp or maybe they’re more secret.  But I hope that somehow, somewhere, you are helped to feel at home in who you are, that you are encouraged to make meaning that can hold all of who you are.

Sonneschein’s career was not a tidy one—and that’s okay.  Nor was his imprint on Unitarianism clean and contained.  Our religious past is inspiring and, therefore, dense.  It raises questions.  What does it mean that Sonneschein was almost a Unitarian rabbi? Why cling to the Jewish or Christian name?  Does Unitarian Universalism still have Christian privilege?  These conversations are controversial, messy.  They’re ways to stretch and grow in our own identities as UUs, as people who care about making our world bigger and stronger for all of us.

To engage so deeply is to offer a blessing of staggering generosity, one that is both a proclamation and an affirmation.  Let us affirm Unitarian Universalism’s tremendous capacity to hold so many precious people from so many precious backgrounds.  There is enough room for all of us.  May it always be so.

PRAYER

Spirit of Life, Source of that which is precious and powerful,

This morning we have gathered together in search of wholeness,

Hoping for a glimpse of that which welcomes us,

claims all of us, bends us towards compassion.

We ask that we might be able to meet ourselves and the wide world, ready to transform and be transformed.

In this spirit we have gathered.

In this spirit we pray.

Amen. 

BENEDICTION

As we leave this place, may you be seen and known as both whole and holy. Go forth, fully human. Go forth, in love.

Copyright 2008, Leah Hart Landsberg. All rights reserved.