Christina Eksted

Dr. Bronner

About two million bottles of the pungent stuff are sold each year throughout the country, mostly from the shelves of health food stores. But the name on the white-on-blue label, “Dr. Bronner's Peppermint 18-in-1 Pure Castile Soap,“ is practically lost, crammed between the words of Dr. Bronner's eclectic, mind-numbing treatise:

African shepherd, inspired by God's blazing Star. Halley's Comet, to train God's Children from Birth, pledged allegiance to the Kingdom of God's eternal Law, the only Supreme Power, uniting God’s spaceship Earth! All swallows train-evolve perfect pilots, united by love fulltruth, God’s Law, brave! None untrained by ‘A true hate, parasite-blackmail-welfare-slave! So we don't descend down from perfect Adam and Eves divided untrained Beasts. Marxist slave! We ascend up working-united-loving-armed-brave! Trained by God’s Law, Life. Rabbi Hillel asked Jesus 13 questions: Without correct answer, none survive! No, not Socialism's ½ true hate! Fulltruth Social Action, 10 times more radical, eternally uniting One-God-State: the Essene Moral ABC of the Free, hard work, good food, fulltruth. God’s Law, Free Speech. Free Press, love, song. Ideal profitsharing Social Action, uniting Kibutz. mankind. All-One/God State! (all sic)

Esquire magazine dubbed it Dr. Bronner's Magic Soap, noting, “It tickles your crotch"

At the top of a road which winds through avocado orchards three miles south of Escondido, a sign points to a sprawling ranch house:

All-One-Faith-In-One-God-State, Rabbi E.H. Bronner, SMMC, DD.

A woman mowing the lawn led us to the foot of a wooden staircase behind the house.

“Bronner! Some people to see you," she called up to the sunporch on the roof, explaining to us, “Sometimes he sunbathes up there — you know what I mean.”

Bronner

Bronner, who lives in sunny semi-retirement and composes rambling essays, labels for his soap, and lengthy political telegrams on his bank of six Dictaphones, was clad in a bathing suit and was putting his frame through his daily exercise ritual. He greeted us with a warm smile, his alabaster teeth gleaming a testimony to his Calcium Lemonettes and soap (which can be used as a dentifrace as well as for shampoo, or pest spray, or for a shave, massage, body rub or car wash).

Opaque eyeglasses perforated with a grid of tiny holes declare his blindness — a result, he says, of “22 shock treatments suffered in a Marxist concentration camp."

But this statement, like many others, must be taken with a grain of Dr. Bronner’s Balanced-Mineral-Salt: the shock treatments were administered in a mental hospital in Illinois in 1946.

Born the son of a Jewish soapmaker in pre-Hitler Germany, Bronner immigrated to the United States in 1929. His parents remained behind and were exterminated in the Nazi pogroms. In 1944, his first wife committed suicide. At her grave, Bronner saw a vision of 13 disheveled women that inspired him to become God’s servant.

Theologians undoubtedly blanche at Bronner's jumbled religious history, in which a 12-year old Jesus enters manhood under the teaching of the great Jewish rabbi Hillel. Bronner's credo revolves around 13 questions he says Hillel asked Jesus:

“If I am not for me, who will be? But if I am only for me, who am I? If not now, when?"

These are the basic principles of what Bronner calls the Essene Moral ABC of the Free, a panacea for social, political, and spiritual ills. Bronner has just completed a year-long labor to produce a letter-perfect interpretation of the expanded version of the ABC. He plans to buy newspaper space all over the country to get his message out.

Bronner

“Irrefutably, by not teaching the Moral ABC of the Free the real Rabbi Hillel taught Jesus, we fake rabbis for 2,000 years betray Arab, Israel, all mankind today," he said in a rumbling German accent, lapsing into a verbatim recitation from the new treatise.

“For example, the absolute innocent nine-year-old Karl Marx, like all Jewish boys, heard fake rabbis mumble only half true prayers. Ashamed, betrayed, misled, Marx wrote in 1844 ‘One World Without Jews' to hate-tax-enslave-murder every God-loving Jew, every hard worker. All but three percent drones, parasites who by half-true hate, socialism, treason, Watergate, disintegrate, smear, slander, betray, divide America, England, Israel, all mankind tonight! Tonight!"

Slicing the air with expansive gestures, Bronner warmed to his prose, now shouting,

“As Mao wrote after 66 million Marxist murders of unarmed slaves. ‘Marx’s socialist-communism is cowdung. Its power is the gun.’ Holy man! Barbarism! Slavery! What an apology we fake rabbis owe all Israel, all mankind for not teaching the Essene Moral ABC Hillel did teach Jesus to enter manhood like Mark Spitz — brave, free, trained for life!"

A call on one of the two nearby telephones interrupted the crescendo. It was a $500 order from an alternative food distribution network in Berkeley. Bronner said he gives them a substantial discount and keeps his wholesale prices as low as possible to spread the profits around.

“Sharing full work, full truth, full profit, that's social action and it’s ten times more radical than socialism," he said. “They can sell Mao’s red book at a fifty percent profit or they can sell my soap at a sixty percent profit.”

In addition to the order, the person on the line had a question about an ingredient listed on the label of Bronner’s “Cheezon Corn" chips sodium citrate.

“It’s just salt — sodium chloride — and citric acid, it won’t hurt you." he assured the caller. It's in the cheese we use, just a very little bit of it in there."

Upon hanging up, he placed a call to Laura Scudders where the chips are made according to his specifications.

“I wrote to you about this before, but you haven't done it yet," he said. “In the Cheezon Corn, the sodium citrate. There is very little of it in there and the Food and Drug does not require that it be listed on the label. I don't want it on the label. Take it off."

Several of Bronner's products are now made for his label by other companies, but the soap is made in a Los Angeles factory under the direction of his son, Jim.

“In 1944 it looked like all soap would be passé." Bronner remarked. “Detergents were the new thing and everybody thought they were ten times better than soap. Nobody knew detergents spoiled the water, that they didn’t kill bacteria.

“I thought if the soap industry faded out, my soap would be the last of the Mohicans. But today when the detergent industry is fading out, it is the first and foremost."

Bronner said Lever Brothers has approached him with an offer to buy his franchise — a move he contemplates these days.

“But I will insist that the message on the bottle remain constructive because if you clean the body, what good does it do you if you don't clean the mind? If you use my soap and you read the label, you not only clean your body, you clean your mind, soul, spirit. All one! All one! All one!"

(Reprinted from the San Diego Edition. Subscriptions may be obtained by writing P.O. Box 3634, San Diego, CA 92103)