Huff Post
In 1955, after years of intensive seminary study and service in various Orthodox Jewish congregations in New England, I began to feel the need for a broader education and a wider range of experience. Up to this point, my entire religious education had taken place within the Jewish world, and it was beginning to feel somewhat narrow. I also had a sense that I could be doing more with my life, and so, with the permission of my rebbe, I enrolled in Boston University to study pastoral psychology and the psychology of religion. But of greater importance for my later life was my meeting with the Rev. Howard Thurman, who was then Dean of Marsh Chapel at the University.
At the time, I was living in New Bedford, Mass., which was then a two-hour drive from Boston. And since it was winter, I had to be on my way under a dark sky, too early to say the morning prayers. So I would leave at 5 o’clock in the morning in order to arrive there at 7, leaving me an hour to pray and have a bit of breakfast before my first class at 8.
Once I was there, the problem was to find a suitable place for a Jew to pray. The Hillel student organization building was still closed at that hour; the only building open that early was the chapel, but this presented a dilemma. The main chapel upstairs was full of statues of Jesus and the Evangelists. As an Orthodox Jew, I simply wasn’t comfortable praying there.
