One More Time

For the Band

Okay, here is just one more opinion no one asked for. Somebody help me! I can’t help myself! as Junior Wells sang on “Snatch It Back.” Sometimes I gotta just say it and be done with it. It’s an ailment from my childhood, perhaps. Or, as Edgar Bronfman once said, “He can’t not be honest.”

So.

The other synagogue center in Brownstone Brooklyn was Union Temple of Brooklyn. Built in 1929 at 17 Eastern Parkway, it is dramatically poised in a kind of civic architectural conversation with Grand Army Plaza and its memorial to the Union effort in the Civil War, the Brooklyn Public Library, and the Brooklyn Museum, with its own gold coast of grand apartments anchoring Olmsted and Vaux’s canopied boulevard of beauty.

Union Temple was formed as the result of a merger between Kehilat Kodesh Beth Elohim and Temple Israel, German Jewish synagogues from Williamsburg which were founded in the late 1840s and 1860s respectively.

In 1929 Union Temple had intended to build a large sanctuary in the lot that is now the Richard Meier Building but the market crash scuttled those plans. It’s strange to realize that the market delayed the construction of CBE’s Temple House and Union Temple’s sanctuary. But not when you realize that years later, when Union Temple was living almost entirely in CBE’s shadow — Park Slope had taken precedence over Prospect Heights as the new gold coast of gentrifying Brooklyn in the 1990s — the UT leadership sold its parking lot (the ersatz sanctuary never built) for a steal! to the developers who built the Richard Meier. The UT leaders had been taken to the cleaners on the parking lot and the rest is history.

Gentrification spread to Prospect Heights, Crown Heights, Bedford-Stuyvesant and now, New York City faces one of its most dire affordable housing crises since, well, 1929. To read the paper, to listen to the news, to be aware is to understand that the fundamental needs of New York City’s citizens (which yes, including homeless citizens) and asylum seeking refugees are not being met.

The City, one of the great expressions of independent journalism in NYC, has been tirelessly reporting on the housing crisis. When I read the headline “New York City Had 88,830 Vacant Rent Stabilized Apartments Last Year,” it brought home to me in new ways the idea that we actually have enough resources to deal with our society’s basic needs. So why do we lack the leadership, creativity, and shared purpose in getting it done? Why do we pull the blinds over our eyes and pretend not to see the implicit reality that self-interest and personal gain often trump civic virtue, not to mention radical generosity?

Warehousing empty apartments while human neighbors live in the street is a moral outrage that we somehow manage to sweep under the rug of callous indifference. The fight over rent control is not exclusively a New York thing. It is a reality in every city across the country. To read local news is to understand that. Gentrification may be an economic engine and cultural driver for some; but for others it is a wasteland.

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Like the cemetery plots that have gone unsold at CBE, the Union Temple House represents yet another missed opportunity. And for a community which elects leaders who fight for affordable housing at the city, state level and national level anyway, try this: use the Union Temple House for a community-based affordable housing structure, offering shelter, housing, and community services for New Yorkers who need it. The Brooklyn Public Library pivoted into a major hub of community services for Brooklyn, making it one of the most innovative and relevant organizations in the city. Why not do the same with the Union Temple House? Its real estate value alone is a huge upside; its location is beyond desirable; and its embedded moral structure (as distinct from its creaky bones and construction challenges) are solid, ancient and true.

For at least fifty years, the leaders of CBE and Union Temple danced around the idea of a merger. It was only when Union Temple was on its last gasps and could no longer sustain its operation that merger finally occurred in March 2021. But should the goal be for the building to serve as the Prospect Heights hub of the CBE campus? Is a larger footprint what the times call for?

Be kind to the stranger. Love thy neighbor as thyself. Know before Whom you stand. Do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God. Here is an opportunity for the now merged entity of CBE and Union Temple to pivot and make a statement: our buildings matter only in so far as the values they reflect. Should the Union Temple House be used to counter with liberal Judaism the force of Chabad further down Eastern Parkway, as some say? Chabad offers religion’s most potent elixir for its Eastern Parkway Fortress — a fervent messianism. Surely CBE is not aiming to be a liberal counterforce. That would be a drastic misreading of the moment.

Is the younger, burgeoning Jewish community of Prospect Heights in need of large spaces for their spiritual seeking or are there more innovative ways to meet Jews where they’re at and let go of the proverbial Edifice Complex of Jewish institutions. The oft-used phrase from Isaiah of Reform synagogues in the United States — “My house shall be a house of prayer for all peoples” — affords a way of thinking differently about how this structure can and should be used.

There is another option as well. Sell the building outright. Make up for the debacle over how the Richard Meier developers pulled a fast one on Union Temple when it flipped a parking lot into lucrative private residences and finally monetized the exclusive address of 17 Eastern Parkway. Sell at market rate and then invest those dollars in Jewish values for the neighborhood and for the city. Just as the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS) the venerated Jewish organization that responded to the crisis of a century of Jewish refugees has pivoted and recast itself as caring for all refugees, perhaps the Union Temple House affords a similar opportunity.

In Pirke Avot, it teaches: “Rabbi Meir used to say: Do not look at the flask but at what is in it; there may be a new flask that is full of old wine and an old flask that does not even have new wine in it.”

CBE is already a beautiful, thriving, creative, politically active, historic community. What would it mean to use one of its footprints to reify Jewish values not for the particular but for the universal?

Those young, unaffiliated, hard-to-reach Jews that the Pew Study says are fading fast from view might love an idea like this.

In our daily prayers, we thank God for “making us free, giving sight to the blind, clothing the naked, releasing the bound, raising the downtrodden, giving strength to the weak.”

That’s old wine that needs no building to pray in.

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To my dear Brooklyn Friends: Thus ends my two-entry Substack nudge of CBE. I love you all. I just needed to get these ideas out there. I can’t not be honest.

Shabbat Shalom