At Temple Emmanu-El: 'Abdu'l-Bahá in San Francisco

Temple Emmanu-El in San Francisco was, in 1912, one of the most prominent Reform Jewish congregations in the western United States. On the eighteenth of October — Saturday morning — the congregation’s rabbi welcomed an unprecedented visitor to the pulpit: ‘Abdu’l-Bahá.

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The Master had been welcomed in synagogues earlier in the journey, most memorably at the Eighth Street Temple in Washington in November. But every such occasion was new. The relations between the Jewish and Christian worlds were still, in 1912, freighted with nineteen centuries of misunderstanding, and a Persian Bahá’í speaking in a synagogue about Christ was something the congregation had not experienced.

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He took up His subject directly.

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> The purpose of all the divine religions is the establishment of > the bonds of love and fellowship among men, and the heavenly > phenomena of the revealed Word of God are intended to be a > source of knowledge and illumination to humanity.

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He moved through the great Manifestations — Moses, Christ, Muḥammad, Bahá’u’lláh — naming them as a single line of teachers sent each in turn for the same end. Their methods varied with the needs of their century. Their substance did not. Each had addressed *the establishment of the bonds of love and fellowship.* Each had asked of His followers a moral life that took its direction from the love of God.

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He encouraged the congregation to investigate not only their inherited tradition but the underlying spiritual realities to which the tradition pointed — the principle, especially, of the *kinship of all human beings.* He did not ask them to leave the synagogue. He asked them to enlarge what they had carried from it.

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The address ended with the warmth that marked all His public appearances on the journey. He was thanked, with formal courtesy, by the rabbi. He was greeted afterward, with less formal warmth, by the children of the congregation. He went out into the morning light of California having, for one Saturday at least, made the sentence on the synagogue door — *Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one* — open out, in the company present, into a single sentence about the unity of the whole human family.

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