The wave of tropical heat which [recently] descended upon the northeast gave way to a lower temperature. People were relieved. However, a new wave has descended. It is the wave of conventions.
The convention is a product “made in America.” Conferences are known everywhere. Conventions, with their large attendance, [a] combination of business and pleasure, politics and amusement, are typical of a great democracy.
“The fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man” – a Jewish idea which has remained an ideal through the centuries – would justify one to believe that brotherhoods, fraternities and orders were an important factor in Jewish life. However, Jewish history has only one record, and that an incomplete one, of the existence of a Jewish fraternal order: the Essenes, a product of Palestinian soil, which left to posterity only an unexplainable name.
The Essenes, as described by Josephus Flavius, were, perhaps, the first fraternity which gathered its membership with caution and held it in a strong common bond of brotherhood, social justice and religious purity. It was, perhaps, also the first effective teacher of hygiene, imposing the duty of cleanliness upon its members. The “sunrise bathers” is the vague expression which they left upon the Jewish mind, giving rise to the movement which preceded the birth of Christianity and precedence to the various Orders of the Bath.
Since then, however, Jewish history represents a “tabula rasa” with regard to fraternities. Perhaps it was due to the environment which prevented such organizations. Perhaps it was due to the common fate which created, as it were, a Jewish fraternity at large. And it was not until the glorious chapter in American Jewry was added to Jewish history that Jewish fraternal orders came into existence.
Perhaps in no other country is the social life of its citizens so colorful as in the United States. The color introduced by the fraternities is particularly radiant against the grey background of the democracy. This is also perhaps one of the motives responsible in this country.
But there were many more and much deeper reasons. Critics of Jewish life have frequently indulged in an accusation, which on the surface might appear true, that when Jews form a community, the first care of the community is to purchase a cemetery. When non-Jews form a settlement, their first care is to create a park. On examination this accusation is only half-truth. Physicians in Jewish districts know better. The Jewish people consider life above everything. “And you who are united in God, you are all alive today” was the commandment of optimism and encouragement which has sounded in Jewish ears since the days of Moses.
But life is not eternal and must be followed by death. The practical Jewish mind cares for both, life and death.
When the wave of immigration to America brought on its crest thousands of newcomers who needed assistance in life and were subject to sickness and death, the fraternity was formed to take care of the sick and the burial of the dead. Numerous orders were in operation. Rituals were composed, by-words created, [and] forms laid down for their increasing membership.
Some of the older fraternities, such as the B’Nai Brith, swiftly abandoned their primate form and ascended to greater heights of social service. Others, with greater individual numbers, underwent a slower process. Large bodies move slowly, but the process is going on with its attending difficulties, obstacles and trying situations.
Observers of Jewish life in America have often given expression to the fact that only a small minority are affiliated with any kind of congregational life, whether it be reform, conservative or orthodox. An observer at the Thirty-Ninth Convention of the Independent Order of B’Nai Abraham, a fraternity with a membership of 135,000, could find a reply to this comment. While the bulk of the membership is apparently of the type which is termed “unaffiliated,” the proceedings of this gathering proved beyond doubt how deeply tradition, and Jewish tradition at that, holds them in its grip.
Not objecting to the new and progressive ideas of widening the scope of the fraternity, and introducing social membership lodges, the convention persistently objected to all attempts of the leaders to do away with the old-fashioned post-mortem assessments and to introduce a modern, scientific system of mutual insurance. With only a $2,000,000 reserve fund and 135,000 members, and with an increasing rate of mortality, the financial situation can be saved by nothing short of a miracle. However, the majority voted for optimism and tradition. “We have existed for thirty-nine years on the post-mortem assessment system; we will continue to do so,” they argued. More than this, adherence to tradition came to the surface when the convention preferred to delay the transaction of business on the agenda to listen to a well-known cantor sing religious songs.
“From dust does man come and to dust doth he return.” There could be no better expression of the spirit of this type of Jewish fraternity in this period of changing values in American Jewish life.
*Note: this essay, it seems, was heavily edited, if not rewritten, by its publisher, and thus barely resembles the author’s other texts.
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