Gettysburg And The Jews

It is a bittersweet coincidence – that the fiftieth yahrzeit of President John F. Kennedy and the one hundred fiftieth anniversary of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address should occur during the same week.

In many ways, of course, President Lincoln and President Kennedy are soldered together in our memories. That both were assassinated has become part of our national mythology, even our martyrology. Indeed, other presidents have been assassinated, but no one speaks, nowadays, of the murders of William McKinley and James Garfield (except that we have somehow memorized that the latter was shot by a “disappointed office seeker”). The deaths of Lincoln and Kennedy, being ideological in nature (or, so we believe; the jury, literally, is still out on Oswald's motivation for shooting JFK) have placed them both within a unique setting in our collective imagination.

The parallels are famous and even quirky: both were assassinated on Fridays; Lincoln’s secretary was named Kennedy and Kennedy’s secretary was named Lincoln; both assassins were themselves killed before they could be brought to trial; both were succeeded by men named Johnson.

And both were outstanding orators whose words live on beyond them, in ways that few presidents can truly claim.

Which brings us to a rabbi, Sabato Morais, whose name has been forgotten by many American Jews, though certainly not by our scholars – and who might actually have been more influential than we might have once thought.

To be accurate, Sabato Morais was technically not a rabbi; he was what was known in the nineteenth century as a “minister-hazzan.” He was actually the founder of the Jewish Theological Seminary. Born in Italy in 1823, he started his career as the assistant hazzan at the venerable Bevis Marks Synagogue in London, and in 1851 became the hazzan at the equally venerable Mikveh Israel in Philadelphia. He had a broad concern for the Jews, whether Sephardi or Ashkenazi, and was absolutely pivotal to every philanthropic concern in Philadelphia.

In his book Jewish Preaching in Times of War,