Silver Linings Prayer Book: The Legacy of Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver
One of the greatest rabbis in American history advocated for hope in dark times
Editor’s Note: Thank you to our wonderful friends at the Columbus Jewish Historical Society for granting us access to the archives of our namesake The Hillel Scroll. With the help of our friends at CJHS, we present to you “Moments that Matter” revisiting the fascinating history of the Ohio State Jewish community.
In these uncertain times, Rabbi Silver’s character and insights offer sorely needed wisdom.
Dark times lay ahead for the Jewish people, predicted a tall man with a firm yet benevolent gaze in a speech at Ohio State’s University Chapel in January 1938. No one yet knew how dark, but the man’s clarion voice, inflected with the rhythms of Talmudic debate, conveyed the gravity of the situation. A writer for The Hillel Scroll reported:
Speaking before the Monday night assembly, which was a near capacity crowd… Rabbi Silver said, “Today there is a great and bitter struggle in the world between that which is represented by the totalitarian states and the right [to liberty] represented by religion.”
Imagine a rabbi with the polished quality of a Noa Tishby and the bearing and statesmanship of a Naftali Bennett and you start to grasp the phenomenon that was Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver (1893–1963). A tireless advocate on behalf of the Jewish people, some believe that without him the State of Israel might never have been established. In these uncertain times, Rabbi Silver’s character and insights, honed through the direst years of modern Jewish history, yield sorely needed wisdom. His visit to Ohio State almost 80 years ago, as reported in The Hillel Scroll, offers a chance to revisit his enduring message of hope.
Rabbi Silver was a figure of world-historic importance, who spent most of his life in Ohio. In Cleveland, where he served as head rabbi of one of the nation’s largest Reform temples, people still revere his memory. My wife’s grandfather, whose wedding he conducted 60 years ago, remembers that:
He urged us to light the Shabbos candles. To be as observant as possible. For the ceremony, he put on a coat with tails. He was tall, well-spoken. He was an impressive figure. Highly respected. And rightly so.
When he wasn’t leading the community from his pulpit on Ansel Avenue, Rabbi Silver participated as a sought-after speaker in the great debates of his time. Invited to speak before United Nations assemblies, rallies at Madison Square Garden, and Zionist congresses the world over, he thundered against bigotry and hate and flashed fire on behalf of Jewish nationhood. Given this demand for appearances, his congregants got as used to his absence as his presence.
As he strode into University Chapel, a campus space that no longer exists, Rabbi Silver must have been relieved that for once his travels had taken him only two hours from the booming industrial metropolis he called home. Columbus was a smaller, quieter city then, a fraction of Cleveland’s size. It wasn’t a given that it would be a stop on the itinerary of someone so notable.
Ohio State Hillel, with its distinguished leadership, was surely a draw. Joining Rabbi Silver on the panel for Religion in Life Week were Rabbis Lee Levinger and Harry Kaplan, the first and second directors of OSU Hillel. It would be hard to match the international stature of Rabbi Silver, but Rabbis Levinger and Kaplan were men of serious learning and distinction. Together, they put Ohio State Hillel on the map, turning it into a leading institution of the Hillel movement. The meeting-of-the-minds between these three Ohio rabbis alone warranted a trip down.
Nothing, however, could have occupied their conversation as much as the fate of European Jewry and the future of Jewish life in the Land of Israel. “Man has turned back to the worship of malevolent deities,” Rabbi Silver told the packed University Chapel, then the largest auditorium on campus. Summing up the double-threat of Nazism and Communism, he warned of efforts “to re-enslave the human mind.” As usual, Jews stood in the way of such efforts. In the Eastern reaches of the Nazi empire, the consequences for that resistance were about to be unleashed.
Is it an exaggeration to draw a parallel between then and now? If Kristallnacht, the largest assault on Jewish life in living memory, served as a prelude to the Holocaust, does October 7th, the deadliest attack on Jews since the 1940s, augur a coming civilizational battle? It’s hard to say as yet, but the times feel plenty dark.
Like the Hebrew prophets, Jews must believe in a future, in a world redeemed.
Dark times call for light. In 1954, weighing his years in the spiritual wilderness against the unprecedented victories that followed, Rabbi Silver wrote:
Man cannot wait and should not wait to do the things which need to be done until he sees the road clearly ahead. Sometimes he must act on faith, even when he does not know what lies ahead. Sometimes he must move forward through mist and fog…. Men cannot see beyond the horizon of their own times. What lies ahead, no one knows. But Judaism constantly admonished man not to despair of the future.
Despair is easy. It’s the natural state of a mind that finds the future worrying and inscrutable. But Jews aren’t permitted that despondency. Like the prophets, Jews must believe in a future, in a world redeemed, which seems improbable, if not impossible, amid the violent unfolding of history.
Light the Shabbos candles, Rabbi Silver advised. He didn’t tell my wife’s grandparents to become activists or lobby Congress or endow a chair in Jewish studies. He urged them to light candles, a small gesture. Through that gesture a whole world arose, one in which children and grandchildren grew up to watch the flames dance in the dusk, the light reflected in their eyes and in the eyes their parents turned to look at them. It was a gesture of belief that two pinpricks of light against the falling dark could matter, despite wars, recessions, and the troubles of life.
Sometimes the only certainty you have is that nothing is certain. Rabbi Silver tells us—as he told the Buckeyes who flocked to hear him on a cold January day more than 80 years ago—that the essence of Judaism is the faith, nevertheless, that what you do next matters. Even if it’s just lighting a pair of candles on Friday night.