Visions of Reform: Congregation Emanu-El and the Jews of San Francisco, 1849-1999 (review)

This book is, in the words of its author, "an updated, revised, and much expanded version" (p. xiii) of his Architects of Reform, published in 1980. In the 1990s, Rosenbaum was again commissioned by Congregation Emanu-El to write an "institutional biography" for the purpose of commemorating the synagogue's 1999 sesquicentennial, and decided to revisit his previous work on this topic.

Visions of Reform is structured into eleven chapters, each of which, beginning with chapter two, is built around the figure of a key spiritual leader (nine rabbis and one cantor) in the life of Emanu-El at ten different periods in its history. Rosenbaum utilizes a narrative, almost journalistic, approach to the story of this dynamic congregation. The book reads largely as a chronicle of important events in the synagogue's life rather than as an interpretation of its place in the religious landscape of San Francisco (in particular) or the Reform movement (in general). The resulting work is eminently accessible to the non-academic reader, but its folksy style comes at the expense of illuminating the broader context within which Emanu-El developed into the institution it has become. While the narrative is gripping, the exhaustive amount of detail it provides concerning nearly every person and event renders the text at times repetitive, distracting, even excruciating.

The author's decision to build the narrative around important spiritual leaders in the congregation's history has other consequences. Some recent works--Hollace Weiner's Jewish Stars in Texas: Rabbis and Their Work (1999) springs immediately to mind--have used this approach successfully. However, because Visions of Reform is intended to tell the history of a single congregation, Rosenbaum lacked the freedom that Weiner had in selecting the Texas rabbis she discussed. Instead Rosenbaum's focus on Emanu-El's rabbis and cantors hampers somewhat his telling of the history of the congregation, rather than illuminating its broader significance for the development of American Judaism. Its spiritual leaders are fully fleshed, but its congregants fall flat by comparison.

The reader thus comes to see Emanu-El largely through the eyes of a handful of its clergy, to the diminution of important lay leaders and ordinary congregants who shaped Emanu-El's mission and selected its spiritual leadership over the course of the past century and a half. When, for example, Rosenbaum recounts Rabbi Robert Kirschner's surprise at the level of deference with which he was greeted by synagogue members in 1981, the reader has little context for appreciating the difference between the reverential attitude of Emanu-El's congregants toward their rabbis and the more dismissive attitude found in many other congregations, where rabbis are regarded as little more than hired servants. Nor do we see what gestures of esteem for the rabbi implied for the overall atmosphere among congregants at Emanu-El. Similarly, while a number of occasions of interfaith and inter-synagogue cooperation (notably those which took place during the respective tenure of rabbis Alvin Fine in the 1950s and Robert Kirschner in the 1980s) are mentioned, the book neglects to place these events into the context of the liberal social programs fostered by Reform Judaism. Instead, Rosenbaum appears to imply that, but for the force of the rabbi's personality, these incidents might never have taken place. Also emblematic of this approach is Rosenbaum's detailed discussion of Rabbi Kirschner's personal failings, which culminated in a series of adulterous affairs with, among others, members of his congregation. While the temptation to focus attention on this recent episode must have been irresistible, given the availability of the sources, its salacious details detract somewhat from the historical significance of Emanu-El's first 150 years as a Reform congregation. In Rosenbaum's account, the story of Emanu-El appears primarily one of [End...