Tag Archives: Judaism

2004

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Ball team with The Rev. Sara Irwin (front left), The Rev. Bill Blaine Wallace (back row, orange shirt) & Emmanuelites*

June 4. Boston Globe reported that The Rev. Dr. Willliam Blaine-Wallace had performed same-sex marriages despite The Rt. Rev. Thomas Shaw‘s proscription of such in the wake of a Massachusetts Supreme Court ruling in May, which had made them legal.

June 20. Boston Globe quoted Bill Blaine-Wallace, who supported the Rev. I. Carter Heyward in her retirement from out diocese saying,  “I want the wider community to know that a straight priest and mainstream parish are participating in constructive disobedience.”

July. Our vestry endorsed our rector’s disobedience with a statement, “Support for Same-Sex Marriage”.

Summer. Emmanuel fielded a team* for an interfaith wiffle-ball match on the Boston Common with First Church (Unitarian Universalist). Behind them are Polish freedom fighters in a sculpture called The Partisans, which has since been moved to the intersection of Congress & D Streets.

Rabbi Howard A. Berman

Bill Blaine-Wallace invited the nascent congregation Boston Jewish Spirit to hold its services as guests at Emmanuel.  Rabbi Howard A. Berman became Rabbi in Residence.  The first meetings of what would later become Central Reform Temple were held in our library.

*If you know any missing members of this line-up, please advise us:  archivist@EmmanuelBoston.org.

  • Back row from the left:  Margo Risk (seated), ??, Donald Langbein, Jimmy Tirrell (straw hat), ??, Bill Blaine-Wallace, Marianne Iauco & Mary Blocher
  • Front row:  Sara Irwin, Kelly Reed, Hugh Doherty?, Victoria Blaine-Wallace & David York.

1997

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The Rev. William Blaine-Wallace met Rabbi Howard A. Berman and began working together as the struggle for marriage equality began to unfold in Massachusetts.

Stephen Babcock welcomed congregants to our sanctuary for more than twenty years.

Having arrived in our parish in the early 1970s, Stephen Babcock served on our vestry for two years under the Rev. William Blaine Wallace.  Then following The Rev. Hugh Weaver’s suggestion, he began to serve as usher and welcome congregants on Sundays.  His ministry that was to last more than two decades until the Covid pandemic put an end to it.  Standing outside what we now call the Babcock Doors in all seasons, he greeted each parishioner by name and helped newcomers find their way. His smile and kindliness be remembered by all who have been privileged to know him.

1988

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  • June.  Organist Michael Beattie joined Emmanuel Music for rehearsals in our Music Room of Peter Sellars‘ version of Mozart’s opera Le Nozze di Figaro, which played that summer in the PepsiCo Theater in Purchase NY.  Craig Smith conducted; Frank Kelley sang the part of Basilio; Jayne West, the Countess; and Susan Larson, Cherubino.
  • In her “Peace Pentecost” sermon at our Cathedral Church of St. Paul, poet Denise Levertov (1923-97) emphasized the connection between contemplation and action:  “If we neglect our inner lives, we destroy the sources of fruitful outer action.

    Thanks to U. of California Press for this image.

    But if we do not act, our inner lives become mere monuments to egotism.” At Emmanuel she founded a Peace Group to foster the links between spiritual thought and action among her fellow parishioners.

Earlier in the decade she had been attracted to Emmanuel by our social-justice activities, beautiful music and liturgy, and rector Al Kershaw, who counseled her.  “He assured her that doubt was part of spiritual growth and the darkness she encountered might increase her sense of dependence and lead her to God,” says her biographer Dana Greene citing Denise’s diary entry for June 13, 1988.

Denise’s father, Paul Philip Levertoff (1878–1954), born in Belarus, an early proponent of Messianic Judaism, took holy orders in the Anglican Church and preached wearing an alb with a tallit and kippa.

The Rev. Paul Philip Levertoff

In 1922 he become director of what is now the London Diocesan Council for Work among the Jews and edited its quarterly journal, The Church and the Jews. He was a prolific writer on theological subjects in Hebrew, German, and English and translated into English the Midrash Sifre on Numbers (1926) and the Zohar  (1933).

See also:

  1. Dana Greene.  Denise Levertov:  A Poet’s Life.  Urbana IL:  U. of Illinois Press, 2012.
  2. Denise Levertov.  Making Peace.  Breathing the Water.  NY:  New Directions, 1987.
  3. Donna Hollenberg.  A Poet’s Revolution: The Life of Denise Levertov. Berkeley: U of California Press, 2013.
  4. Paul A. Lacey and Anne Dewey, eds.  The Collected Poems of Denise Levertov.  NY: New Directions, 2013.
  5. Paul Philip Levertoff. Love and the Messianic Age.
  6. Timeline: 1994