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  • From Christian Science to Jewish Science: Spiritual Healing and American Jews
  • Michael A. Meyer
From Christian Science to Jewish Science: Spiritual Healing and American Jews. By Ellen M. Umansky. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. 245 pp.

While briefly a rabbinical student in Los Angeles in the late 1950s, I was asked to conduct services for a congregation that had just joined the Union of American Hebrew Congregations (UAHC). It called itself a New Thought synagogue which, I was told, meant that it emphasized the personal value of religious practice. I agreed, but was then informed that certain prayers would be omitted or altered. The services, based on the Union Prayer Book, were to focus on God's love and on those elements of the liturgy that could instill a sense of well-being and peace of mind. Passages that spoke of the fear of God, of sin, and of evil were to be eliminated. I quickly came to the conclusion that this synagogue represented a distortion of Judaism and that I could not in good conscience lead its worship. That New Thought synagogue is one of the Jewish Science phenomena that Ellen Umansky discusses in her interesting book on a movement that has received relatively little attention from scholars, though in the interwar years it possessed considerable attraction.

Like the Ethical Culture movement in the last decades of the nineteenth century, Christian Science a generation later attracted many American Jews dissatisfied with what they regarded as the inadequacies of even a modernized Judaism. But whereas Ethical Culture appealed to Jews who desired an unbridled universalism that was fundamentally humanistic in its theology and focused on social progress, Jews attracted to Jewish Science were looking for something quite different: a faith that spoke to their personal needs, that could bring them serenity, cheer, and hope. They did not find that in most Reform synagogues, where sermons dwelled upon a distant God, who demanded social justice, rather than an indwelling one, whose influence could heal both body and mind. [End Page 260]

Even as Prophetic Judaism was an attempt to show that social justice was inherent in Jewish tradition and did not require resort to the Social Gospel, so did Jewish Science make the case that the fundamental message of Mary Baker Eddy, in a less extreme form that did not deny the reality of sickness and evil entirely, could be established upon a Jewish foundation. Ellen Umansky traces this current within American Judaism from its origins down to the present by looking at its changing organizational structure, but especially by discussing and differentiating the various forms of Jewish Science propagated by its principal leading figures: Rabbi Alfred Geiger Moses, Rabbi Morris Lichtenstein, Rabbi Clifton Harby Levy, and Lichtenstein's remarkable wife, Tehilla.

The pioneer of Jewish Science and inventor of the term was Alfred Geiger Moses, the Reform rabbi of Mobile, Alabama. Himself suffering from physical and mental illness, Moses both attacked Christian Science and propagated a Jewish version that stressed God as healer and the goals of religion as health and happiness. He developed mental exercises that could banish anxiety and bring inner peace. Traveling about the country, Moses's influence came to extend well beyond his southern community, where Christian Science did not exercise the same attractive force that it did in the Northeast.

Morris Lichtenstein also called his program Jewish Science but did not see himself as a successor to Moses. A man of considerable charisma and dominant personality, he struck out on his own, creating a Society of Jewish Science, which was not an integral part of the Reform movement and focused largely on his own teachings. The services that he held on Sunday mornings were more lecture than liturgy and concluded with a "healing meeting." In addition to his own work as a healer, to whom members of the society came individually for treatment, he trained a cadre of "practitioners" to assist him and spread his methods beyond New York, where the society was located. His book, Jewish Science and Health, first published in 1925, became a kind of bible for the society, from which passages were read and interpreted like Scripture. In...

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