BM 560 .L3 1895 c.2 Lazarus, Josephine, 1846 1910. The spirit of Judaism THE SPIRIT OF JUDAISM. THE SPIRIT OF JUDAISM. BY JOSEPHINE LAZARUS. NEW YORK: DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY. 1895. Copyright, 1895, By Dodd, Mead and Co. John Wilson and Son, Cambridge, U.S.A. CONTENTS. Page The Jewish Question 7 The Outlook of Judaism 28 Judaism, Old and New 70 The Claim of Judaism 101 The Task of Judaism 133 Epilogue 192 THE SPIRIT OF JUDAISM. THE JEWISH QUESTION. 'T^O approach the Jewish question is ■^ to be confronted with every great question of the day, — social, pohtical, financial, humanitarian, national, and religious. Each phase should be treated by an expert and specialist, for in each lies a deep, urgent, practical problem which requires the wisest and most skilled handling ; but, however discussed or dealt with, there is one point of view which should never be lost sight of, — namely, the point of view of humanity. All other 8 THE JEWISH QUESTION. standpoints must be merged or held in abeyance. First and foremost, we must be human if we would raise our voice on so human a theme, involving the lives and destinies of so many unhappy human beings. It is a sorry spectacle that the world presents at the end of our emancipated nineteenth century, — hundreds and thou- sands of our fellow-creatures, men, women, and innocent children, driven from their homes, helpless, destitute, and distracted, flying where ? whither ? No one knows, for in turn each nation threatens to shut them out as outcasts and pariahs. Who, then, are these alien wretches, with speech unlike our own, with ways and customs peculiar to themselves ; and what is their crime ? we ask. There are those who will tell us that they are usu- rers, eating the flesh and grinding the faces of the poor ; others will say that THE JEWISH QUESTION-. 9 they are traitors, plotting against tlieir sovereign rulers; others will call them enemies of the Christ ; and again others will lay at their door nameless cruel charges of ignorant fanaticism. Their crime is legion, and yet one word sums it up, — they are Jews. " Hep ! Hep ! " It is an old battle-cry, old as Christendom, but it rings to-day fresh from the nations. Russia leads with brute violence, sweep- ing them from the soil ; Germany fol- lows with lofty phrases, pulpit and paper warfare; even liberal France takes the alarm ; and occasionally a small British voice pipes in the chorus, '' Christians, beware ! The Jew is richer, is sharper than you. Look to your interest and your purse. Royalty is at his feet, the stock exchange belongs to him, and the press is his organ." But in justice to humanity let us hasten to add that there is another side. 10 THE JEWISH QUESTION. In all the countries we have named, Russia perhaps alone excepted, all earnest and right-minded Christians, no less than Jews, are aghast at the sinister revela- tions, and are doing what they can to stem the current and to enter their pro- test against so barbarous a reaction. But this new outbreak of hatred and antago- nism, after centuries of progress and en- lightenment, is a phenomenon so startling that it calls for examination more search- ing, and deeper comprehension, than it generally receives. Whether the tragic history of the Jews redounds more to their glory and mar- tyrdom than to the honour of the Chris- tians, is not the point which will throw any special light upon the subject just now ; but both Jews and Christians alike — whoever studies with impartiality the annals of the past — must be struck with the ever-recurring features, the mask, of THE JEWISH QUESTION. 11 this Ugly monster of persecution, grown so familiar through the ages. History seems to move backward or in a circle ; here are the same grievances as in the days of the CaBsars, the same jealous mis- trust and animosity, the same cruel and exaggerated retribution. The classic writers of pagan antiquity are full of the most scornful and contemptuous references. A fair-minded writer of to- day ^ says of the Jew : — " Even his virtues are of the unsym- pathetic sort. Temperate, uniformly chaste and industrious, a faithful hus- band and marvellously good father, a peaceful and law-abiding citizen in what- ever country he may be, yet no one wants him as a settler; and the mis- eries of the Russian Jew had to mount up in the scale until they suggested the 1 Harold Frederic, iu the " Times" of October 12, 1891. 12 THE JEWISH QUESTION. horrors of the Spanish Inquisition before the world really took much interest." To seek for the origin and explanation of so radical an incompatibility would be wellnigh a hopeless task ; but much more useful and important would be to draw what lesson we could for the future, which would help toward the solution, however distant, of so complicated and grievous a problem. Of all the schemes of colonisation, the one that appeals most to the imagination is the return to Palestine. On the spot where they once were a great nation, and amid surroundings that seem better suited to their traditions and highest destiny than our Western conditions, they might again put forth some great spiritual idea, some new blossoming of the genius which is surely theirs. But the object of the present study is not to offer any sugges- tion or panacea, but rather, if possible, THE JEWISH QUESTION. 13 to lift the subject upon a broader plane ; to rise for the moment above the human drama of strife and suffering which is being enacted, into the region of pure ideas and principles, — for it is here that the warfare of Israel is truly accom- plished, — and to discover, if we may, the spiritual facts and forces that are at play, the ultimate result to which they point, and the working of divine and eternal truth through so much human error and sacrifice. And in endeavouring to do this, it is to the Jews rather than to the Christians that we would address ourselves, — to the advanced and liberated Jews of Europe and America ; for it is with them that a great responsibility rests, and a great opportunity. Thoroughly aroused to the material exio-encies of the situa- tion, collectively and individually giving their best energies, spending their money 14 THE JEWISH QUESTION. like water, the reproach can never be brought against the Jew that he has failed to respond to the cry of his brother in distress, or that prosperity has made him forget the endless adversity of his race. But in providing a home for his hapless comrade, in crowding him into the overcrowded ranks of the toiling masses, and initiating him into the fierce struggle of modern selfishness, has he done all his duty? Or even in holding out the hand of religious fellowship, and helping him to the full and free exercise of the immemorial customs and tradi- tions of his race, is the free, untram- melled Israelite doing the best and the highest that his advantages and oppor- tunities can suggest for this belated new- comer, who emerges, as it were, out of the Middle Ages into the bright light of a new day, and the broad rushing stream of Western ideas ? And in order to THE JEWISH QUESTION. 15 answer these questions, we must en- deavour, if possible, clearly to under- stand the true status of the Jew in modern civilisation : the moral and material con- ditions under which he is allowed to advance ; the ideals and aims which he sets for himself, — in other words, the true import and content of modern Ju- daism under its most favourable circum- stances and environment. Broadly speaking, we come upon three classes of Jews in the community, some- times sharply defined, and again merging into one another. First, there is the remnant of orthodox Jews, mostly of Spanish and Portuguese descent, but with greatly enlarged contin- gent now of Russian and Polish immigra- tion, who cling without shadow of turning to the primeval faith, strictly observing the rigid form of the Sabbath, the whole dietary regime, every text of the law, 16 THE JEWISH QUESTION, every feast and every fast that commem- orates a religious or a national event. If we go into the most modern of their synagogues we shall find it exactly as in the ancient days, — the entrance always facing the east ; the reader's desk in the middle, with its tall candlesticks ; the perpetual lamp burning before the taber- nacle where the scrolls of the law are contained, wrapped in their silken mantles and overtopped with their silvery tinkling bells; the men and women seated apart, — the women in their upper gallery, the men with covered head, and over their shoulders the white and blue- bordered silken scarfs, with fringes knotted according to custom to represent the Hebrew characters of the law ; the service entirely in Hebrew, chanted by the reader with response by the congre- gation, and occasionally a chorus of male voices. No need to question these vener- THE JEWISH QUESTION. 17 able believers. Their faith is as old as Moses, and their code, the one he formu- lated four thousand years ago, elaborated into a system more complete than any- thing that has ever been devised, a subtle interweaving of precept and practice so that every action of the life is regulated according to some Levitical command, and every command is externalised into some outward fact and observance. In the eyes of such conformists Judaism is a sacred trust, at once national, religious, and ancestral, to be handed down intact from generation to generation ; and the Jews are a special, consecrated race, favoured and chosen of God to be the bearers of his Word unto men. Breaking away from this extreme for- malism, with its excessive and difficult minutice, w^e find the second class, — the reform Jews, who constitute an always increasing body, being constantly re- 18 THE JEWISH QUESTION. cruited from the orthodox ranks. Still following the traditions, observing the seventh day as the Sabbath, the solemn fast, and all the great holidays, they have generally emancipated themselves from much of the ceremonial law, especially the dietary restrictions, and the whole code and practice of life have more scope and freedom. In the synagogue — or temple, as they prefer to call it — the service is still for the most part in Hebrew ; but there is an organ and choir, and men and ^vomen , sit together, the men with uncovered heads. Here again the principles are not difficult to define, although somewhat less stable and con- sistent, and opening the way to the tliird class, which reveals elements more com- plex and anomalous, and horizons in- finitely larger but more vague. And in regard to this third class we cannot do better than freely quote from the THE JEWISH QUESTION. 19 pages of the " Revue des Deux Mondes" ^ by Leroy Beaulieu, whose masterly and comprehensive survey of the whole subject has nowhere been equalled. Re- jecting, he says, as effete and outworn, the legal and ritualistic tradition, the Jews of this class fasten upon the race tradition, the Messianic hope, and belief in the destiny of Israel again to give a religion to the world, " but this time a religion without inconvenient customs or unreasonable dogma, without miracles or any mysteries." In this case, how- ever, so radical and complete is the sep- aration from their orthodox co-religionists that the very corner-stone of the one becom.es the stumbling-block in the eyes of the others, the obstacle which in all ages has prevented Judaism from arriv- ing at its legitimate and universal su- premacy. "Break your chains," say 1 For February 15, May 1, and July 15, 1891. 20 THE JEWISH QUESTION. these disciples of progress. " Proclaim the Unity of God, the sanctity of the moral law ; and you have a faith at once human and divine, both large and simple enough to satisfy all mankind." A beautiful dream, says Leroy Beaulieu, and entirely characteristic of the race. But will it truly satisfy any one, — above all, their brethren the Jews themselves, who look upon their very existence as con- ditioned upon precisely the things they are asked to give up ? Without rites, without doo-ma and formal cult, can thev have a religion at all ? he asks ; can they have Judaism, at all events ? What remains when all outward form and semblance has departed from that which was built and buttressed upon outward form ? What substance, what essence, is left of the Judaic idea, save an abstract and far-away deism, or a humanitarianism more delusive still, leading down the banal slidino:-scale of unbelief ? THE JEWISH QUESTION. 21 Sucli a question is fully justified when we see foremost among the ranks of agnosticism, scepticism, and materialism so large a preponderance of Jews that this too is brought in reproach against them. For there is no more noteworthy and singular fact in the whole history of this singular people than the constant and uniform recurrence of the two oppo- site types, — the extremes of idealism and materialism, — which the race presents. While their whole existence and survival are based upon a spiritual idea, there is no people whose kingdom is so absolutely of this world, and who are so prone, so apt, so eager, to take advantage of all its opportunities. In the face of all these contradictions, where, then, shall we find the rallying- point, where the real unity, the central sun which shall illumine not Judaism alone, but all mankind ? Not for an 22 THE JEWISH QUESTION. instant do we doubt that each of the sects we have described has vitality enough to survive for long years to come ; but it can survive only as a sect, with all the limitations and disabilities that the name involves. And the world is breaking free from these narrow lines. Everywhere there are signs of a spiritual awakening and expansion which every religion must meet and fulfil, or be found wanting. Even science leads now to the portals of " The Unknown God." Chris- tianity is undergoing a profound modi- fication, and a divine spark still lingers in Judaism. But in order to kindle this into a flame, a deeper current is needed, a more glow- ing impulse, and that quickening breath of the spirit which does not seem to animate modern Jewish life and thought. It is not enough to rehearse the glories of the past, nor to point to names, dis- THE JEWISH QUESTION. 23 tinguished though they be in the world of to-day. The need of Israel in the present and its true greatness in the past consist in spiritual leadership. Above tlie inert mass, the dull crowd of Phari- sees and Scribes dwelling within the life- less body of the Law, have arisen the divinely gifted men, the prophets and seers of the world, who saw God and spoke face to face with him. From Abraham to St. Paul they were men who threw off the idolatries and superstitions of the times, the bondage of the letter, and proclaimed the inner, not the outer, law, — the spirit, not the form. For they knew the Presence ; '^ the burden of the valley of vision " lay upon them. And this is the lack with the Judaism of our day, — the inward living voice, the heaven-sent message. Loyal to the word, to the faith and God of their fathers Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, they have 24 THE JEWISH QUESTION. nailed the Law upon the door-posts, and bound it as a sign upon the brow and hands, and fringed their garments with it. More than this, they have kept the Commandments, and preserved themselves a pure and moral race. But even as a man may bestow all his goods to feed the poor, and give his body to be burned, and yet may not have charity, so a man may keep the Law and the Command- ments and give his body to be burned, and yet not have religion. '^Who is blind but my servant; or deaf as my messenger that I sent ? Who is blind as he that is perfect, and blind as the Lord's servant? "Seeing many things, but thou ob- servest not ; opening the ears, but he heareth not." For religion is not alone a doing, but a being, a quality of soul, a motive power and principle. It is the hidden force which THE JEWISH QUESTION. 25 binds the seen to the unseen, the finite to the infinite, the human to the divine; which solves and fuses the whole nature of man, lifting him beyond the bounda- ries of time and space, the illusions of matter and sense, into the realm of true and imperishable being. To enter this realm it is not necessary to pass away from earth, but simply to be freed from earthly considerations and limitations, to rise above earthly prizes and rewards, and to come into spiritual possession; for this is the kingdom of heaven, al- though we may be still upon earth, we may suffer, and even fall into sin. But, dwelling in darkness and in the shadow of death, we may yet see light and life. Deep in the heart of Judaism is en- shrined a sacred, an immortal word, — duty, — which makes of man a moral being, and links him to the moral source of the universe. Deep in the heart of 26 THE JEWISH QUESTION. Christianity is enshrined a sacred and immortal word, — love, — which makes of man a spiritual being, and links him to the divine source of all life. Human- ity needs both these words in order to become the perfect creation it was meant to be. The one gives the conscience, the other the hearty of mankind ; the one is the masculine, the other the feminine, element of the world. Judaism gives the Ten Commandments, and Christianity the Beatitudes ; but only the two to- gether can yield the perfect ideal, — the love that is simply the highest duty, and duty that is lost in love. And in order to come into this closer, higher union, into the faith which makes humanity whole, and not a thing of parts, and the truth which makes men free, fixed and formal codes must disappear; the outer framework of history and theology must fall away, and spirit be left free to THE JEWISH QUESTION, 27 seek Spirit. Then, and then only, will life have its whole meaning, as part of a larger life whose beginning and end are hidden from mortal vision. Eeligion will have its full sway, and yet there will be none who persecute and none who are persecuted ; " for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea." January, 1892. ^THE OUTLOOK OF JUDAISM. nPHE nineteenth century has had its surprises. The position of the Jew to-day is one of these, both for the Jew himself and for most enhghtened Chris- tians. There were certain facts we thought forever laid at rest, certain conditions and contingencies that could never confront us again, certain war-cries that could not be raised. In this last decade of our civilisation, however, we have been rudely awakened from our false dream of security — it may be to a higher calling and destiny than we had yet foreseen. I do not wish to emphasise the painful facts by dwelling on them, or even point- ing them out. We are all aware of THE OUTLOOK OF JUDAISM. 29 tliem, and whenever Jews and Chris- tians can come together on equal terms, ignoring difference and opposition and injury, it is well that they should do so. At the same time we must not shut our eyes, nor, like the ostrich, bury our head in the sand. The situation, which is so grave a one, must be bravely and hon- estly faced, the crisis met, the problem frankly stated in all its bearings, so that the whole truth may be brought to light, if possible. We are a little apt to look on one side only of the shield, especially when our sense of justice and humanity is stung, and the cry of the oppressed and persecuted — our brothers — rings in our ears. As we all know, the effect of persecu- tion is to strengthen solidarity. The Jew who never was a Jew before be- comes one when the vital spot is touched, " the Jew " is thrust upon 30 THE OUTLOOK OF JUDAISM, him, whether he would or not, and made an msult and reproach. When we are attacked as Jews we do not strike back angrily, but we coil up in our shell of Judaism and intrench our- selves more strongly than before. Thrown back constantly upon itself, Judaism thus remains to a great extent a separate factor, an isolated and uncom- bined element in modern culture. The Jews themselves, both from natural habit and force of circumstance, have been ac- customed to dwell along their own lines of thought and life, absorbed in their own point of view, almost to the exclu- sion of outside opinion. Indeed, it is this power of concentration in their own pursuits that insures their success in most things they set out to do. They have been content for the most part to guard the truth they hold, rather than spread it or even thoroughly weigh it in THE OUTLOOK OF JUDAISM, 31 the scale along with other truth in the world. In spite of individual excep- tions, of outward affiliation, and the iden- tification of external interests and occu- pation, the Jews as a body have not generally made an integral part of the community in which they live. The life flows side by side, but does not mingle at its source ; and they are forced to take refuge in their historic past and familiar race-traditions from an alien world which does not wholly accept or under- stand them, and where they are not quite at home. At the same time, amid favourable sur- roundings and easy circumstance, many of us had ceased to take it very deeply or seriously that we were Jews. We had grown to look upon it merely as an accident of birth, for which we were not called upon to make any sacrifice, and which in our ordinary life and daily 32 THE OUTLOOK OF JUDAISM. transactions with our fellow-men we tried to ignore, so as to make ourselves as much as possible like our neighbours, neither better nor w^orse than the people around us. But wdth a painful shock we are suddenly made aware of it as a det- riment, and we shrink at once back into ourselves, hurt in our most sensitive point, our pride wounded to the quick, our most sacred feelings, as we believe, outraged and trampled upon. But our very attitude proves that something is wrong with us. Persecu- tion does not touch us ; we do not feel it when we have an idea large enough and close enough to our hearts to sus- tain and console us. The martyrs of old did not feel the fires of the stake, the arrows that pierced their flesh. The Jews of the olden time danced to their death with praise and song and joyful shouts of Hallelujah. They were will- THE OUTLOOK OF JUDAISM. 33 ing to die for that which was their life and more than their life to them. But the martyrdom of the present day is a strange and novel one, almost a sordid one, that has no grace or glory about it, and of which we are not proud. We have not chosen, and perhaps would not choose it. Many of us scarcely know the cause for which we suffer, and therefore we feel every pang, every cut of the lash. For our own sake, then, and still more perhaps for those who come after us and to whom we bequeath our Judaism, it behooves us to find out just what it means to us, and what it holds for us to live by. In other words, what is the content and significance of modern Judaism in the world to-day, not only for us personally as Jews, but for the world at large ? What power has it as a spiritual influence ? And as such, w^hat is its share or part in the 3 34 THE OUTLOOK OF JUDAISM. large life of humanity, in the broad cur- rent and movement of the time ? What actuality has it, and what possible un- foldment in the future? And as we shall very soon discover, it is much easier to ask these questions than to answer them. Indeed, no sooner have we put them than we are at once con- fronted with every phase of sentiment, every shade and variety of opinion. We sweep the whole gamut of modern rest- less thought, of shifting beliefs and un- belief, from the depths of superstition, as well as of scepticism and material- ism, to the cold heights of agnosticism ; from the most rigid and uncompromising formalism, or a sincere piety, to a human- itarianism so broad that it has almost eliminated God, or a deism so vast and distant that it has almost eliminated humanity. Nothing is more curious than this THE OUTLOOK OF JUDAISM. 35 range and diversity of conviction from a centre of unity ; for the Jewish idea survives through every contradiction, as the race, the type, persists through every modification of climate and lo- cality, and every varying nationality. Clear and distinct, we can trace it through history ; and as the present can best be read by the light of the past, I should like briefly to review the ideas on which our existence is based and our identity sustained. What an endless perspective ! Age after age unrolls, nations appear and disappear, and still we follow and find them. Back to the very morning of time, before the primal mists had lifted from the w^orld, while yet there were giants in the earth, and the sons of God minp;led with the daug-hters of men, we come upon their dim and mythical be- ginnings, — a tribe of wanderers in 36 THE OUTLOOK OF JUDAISM. Eastern lands^ roaming beside the water- ways, feeding their flocks upon the hill- sides, leading their camels across the lonely desert wastes, and pitching their tents beneath the high star-studded skies; from the first a people much alone with their own souls and Nature, brought to face the Infinite, self-centred, brooding, and conscious of a something, they knew not what, — a Power not themselves, — that led their steps and walked and talked with men. Already in those earliest days great types loom up among them, — the patri- archal leaders, large, tribal, composite figures rather than actual persons, and yet touched with human traits and per- sonality, moving about in pastoral and domestic scenes; men already, in their own crude way, pre-occnpied of God and His dealings with themselves and w^ith the world. THE OUTLOOK OF JUDAISM. 37 Upon a background of myth, and yet in a sense how bold, how clear stands Moses, the man of God, who saw the world aflame with Deity, — the burning bush, the flaming mountain-top, the fiery cloud, — leading his people from captiv- ity, and who heard pronounced the divine and everlasting name, the unpronounce- able, the ineffable I Am ! In Moses, above all, whether we look upon him as semi-historic or a purely symbolic figure, the genius of the Hebrew race is typified, the fundamental note of Judaism is struck, — the Word that rings forever after through the ages, which is the Law spoken by God Himself, with trumpet sound, midst thunderings and lightning from heaven. Whatever of true or false, of fact or legend, hangs about it, we have in the Mosaic conception the moral ideal of the Hebrews, a code divinely sanctioned and 38 THE OUTLOOK OF JUDAISM. ordained; the absolute imperative of duty, a transcendent law laid upon man, which he must perforce obey in order that he may live. '' Thou shalt," " Thou shalt not," hedges him round on every side, — now as moral obligation, and again as ceremonial or legal ordinance, — and becomes the bul- wark of the faith through centuries of greatness, centuries of darkness and hu- miliation. Armed with this Word, as with the sword of the Most High, they go forth to conquer and overspread the land. Jehovah is always there, behind the scenes, the Deus ex Machina, their own special god, who has chosen them for his own special people, guiding and prompting them. It is always his right hand that doeth valiantly and is exalted when Israel triumphs, for he cares only for Israel. It is he who smites great kings, Israel's enemies, and slays them, for his mercy endureth forever, and who THE OUTLOOK OF JUDAISM. 39 gives their land for an heritage to his people. Amid a cloud of wars, Jehovah's sacred wars, with shadowy hosts and chieftains, the scattered clans unite, the kingdom forms, and we have the dawn of history. Jerusalem is founded, at once a strong- hold and a sanctuary, and the temple built. The national and religious life grow as one growth, knitting themselves together and mutually strengthening and upholding one another. Then the splen- dours of Solomon's reign, the palace with royal state, and, above all, the ever-grow- ing magnificence of the temple service, with more and more sumptuous rites and costly offerings, the priesthood, and all the paraphernalia of worship. But the true greatness of Israel was never to consist in outward greatness, nor in the materialising of any of its ideas, either in the religious or the secu- 40 THE OUTLOOK OF JUDAISM. lar life, but wholly in the inner impulse and activity, the spiritual impetus which was now shaping itself into prophetism. And here we strike the second chord, that other source and spring of Israel's life, which still yields living waters. In Hebrew prophecy we have no crumbling monument of perishable stone, the silent witness of a past that is dead and gone, but the quickening breath of the spirit itself, the words that live and burn, the something that is still alive and life- giving, because it holds the soul of a people, the spirit that cannot die. It is difficult for us to realise at what an early date this great movement had its rise ; already a thousand years before Christ we have the episode of Nathan before David, pointing the parable and laying his moral judgment upon the king himself, — '^' Thou art the man." And again, enveloped in legendary clouds, THE OUTLOOK OF JUDAISM. 41 the apocalyptic figure of Elijah, and the grand prophetic drama with its splendid accessories and scenery, — the whirlwind and the earthquake, and the still, small voice. I have said that the true glory of Israel did not consist in any external and material embodying; and yet in a sense this was the stimulus and exciting cause, for it was in reaction against it that the Prophets uttered their ringing words and passionate appeal. Theirs was the clearer vision that pierced below the surface and penetrated to the hidden meaning, the moral and spiritual inter- pretation of the Law, in contrast w^ith its outer sense. Thus their splendid outbursts : — '^ I hate, T despise your feast days. . . . Though ye offer me your burnt offerings and your meat offerings, I will not accept them. . . . Take thou away 42 THE OUTLOOK OF JUDAISM. from me the noise of tliy songs, for I will not hear the melody of thy viols. But let judgment run down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream." Throughout their history we find that the Jews as a nation have been the " God- intoxicated " race, intent upon the prob- lem of understanding Him and His ways with them, His rulings of their destiny. With this idea, whether in a high form or a low, in spiritual or material fashion, their whole existence has been identified. But it is the Prophets above all in whom it has been concentrated and embodied in its greatest intensity. For them but one motive-power existed, but one source and goal of action. In their ardent souls, as in a burning glass, the thought of Deity was centred, — a fire that con- sumed them, a shining light for men. To each one individually came the call, the message, the direct revelation from on hig:h. THE OUTLOOK OF JUDAISM. 43 IIow lovely the word of Jeremiah : " Then said I, Ah ! Lord God, behold I cannot speak, for I am a child. But the Lord said unto me, Say not I am a child ; for thou shalt go to all that I shall send thee, and whatsoever I command thee thou shalt speak." And again the vision of Isaiah : " Woe is me, for I am undone ; because I am a man of unclean lips, . . . for mine eyes have seen the King, the Lord of Hosts." Then flew the seraph with the live coal from off the altar and laid it upon the prophet's lips, making him pure to speak. "Also I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, Whom shall I send and who will go for us? Then said I, Here am I, send me." Li the Hebrew writings we trace not so much the development of a people as of an idea, that constantly grows in strengtli and purity. The petty, tribal 44 THE OUTLOOK OF JUDAISM. god, cruel and partisan, like the gods around him. becomes the universal and eternal God, who fills all time and space, all heaven and earth, and beside whom no other power exists. Throughout nature His will is law. His fiat goes forth, and the stars obey Him in their course, the wind and waves. " Fire and hail, snow and vapours, stormy wind ful- filling His word." " The lightnings do His bidding and say ' Here we are ' when He commands them." But not alone in the physical realm, still more is He the moral ruler of the universe; and here we come upon the core of the Hebrew conception, its true grandeur and originality, upon which the whole stress was laid, — namely, that it is only in the moral sphere, only as a moral being, that man can enter into relation with his Maker and the Maker of the universe, and come to any under- THE OUTLOOK OF JUDAISM. 45 standing of Him. " Canst thou by searcliino; find out God ? Canst thou find out the Ahnighty unto perfection ? It is as high as heaven : what canst thou do ? Deeper than hell : what canst thou know ? " Not through the finite, limited intel- lect, nor any outward sense-perception, but only through the inner moral sense, do these earnest teachers bid us seek God, who reveals Himself in the law which is at once human and divine, the voice of duty and of conscience, ani- mating the soul of man. Like the stars, he, too, can obey ; and then his righteous- ness will shine forth as the noonday sun, his going forth will be like the dawn. It is this breath of the divine that vita- lises the pages of the Hebrew prophets and their moral precepts. It is the blending of the two ideals, the complete and abso- lute identification of the moral and relio;- 46 THE OUTLOOK OF JUDAISM. ious life, so that each can be interpreted in terms of the other; the moral life saturated and fed, sustained and sanc- tified by the divine, the religious life merely a divinely ordained morahty, — this it is that constitutes the essence of their teachings, the unity and grand simplicity of their ideal. The link was never broken between the human and divine, between conduct and its motive, religion and morality, nor obscured by any cloudy abstractions of theology or metaphysics. Their God was a God whom the people could understand,— no mystic figure relegated to the skies, but a very present power working uj^on earth ; a personality very clear and dis- tinct, — very human, one might almost say, who mingled in human affairs, whose word was swift and sure, and whose path so plain to follow "that wayfaring men, though fools, should not THE OUTLOOK OF JUDAISM. 47 err therein." What He required was no impossible ideal^ but simply to do justice, to love mercy, and walk humbly before him. What He promised was : " Seek ye Me, and ye shall live." How can one fail to be impressed by the heroic mould of these austere, impas- sioned souls, and by the richness of the soil that g;ave them birth at a time when spiritual thought had scarcely dawned upon the world ! The Prophets were tlie " high lights " of Judaism ; but the light failed, the voices ceased, and prophetism died out. Was it only on account of the people's shortcomings, or was there not also inherent defect in itself ? In spite of its broad ethical and social basis, its seeming universality, it never became the religion of the masses, because in reality it is the religion of the few, the elect and chosen of God, who know and feel the beauty of His holiness. It did not 48 THE OUTLOOK OF JUDAISM, hold, it could not touch the wayward and unrepentant ; its motive and appeal were not close, not searching enough to reach the unreached depths, the inmost core of living, and set free hidden springs. The Prophets were always de- nouncing, always protesting and in- veighing against wickedness. Like rifts in the storm-cloud are the glimpses of tenderness and compassion, the promises, the vision of a God who will not always chide, whose anger will not last forever. But what the people needed was something more penetrating and per- suasive, or else something more con- genial to their actual development at the time, — namely, some concrete and sensuous form in which Deity could be brought into life. Therefore the code was devised, or rather it evolved and grew like a natural growth out of the conditions and constitution of Judaism. THE OUTLOOK OF JUDAISM. 49 The Torah was literally the body of the Law, in which the spirit was encased as in a mummy shroud. It was the most subtle and elaborate scheme, the most inQ:enious mechanism ever contrived to weave together the human and divine into a method and polity of life that should be wholly sacramental, and so pe- culiarly adapted to the requirements and circumstances of the people for whom it was intended that, from this time forth, it made their destiny, and in a singular and fateful way preserved them, while it arrested their development. In order that Israel should survive, should continue to exist at all in the midst of the ruins that were falling around it and the darkness upon which it was entering, it was necessary that this close, internal organisation, this mesh and network of law and practice, of regulated usage covering the most 4 50 THE OUTLOOK OF JUDAISM. insignificant acts of life, knitting them together as with nerve and sinew, and invuhierable to any catastrophe from without, should take the place of all ex- ternal prop and form of unity. The whole outer framework of life fell awa}^ The kingdom perished, the temple fell, the people scattered. They ceased to be a nation, they ceased to be a church ; and yet, indissolubly bound by these in- visible chains, as fine as silk, as strong as iron, they presented an impenetrable front to the outside world, they became more intensely national, more exclusive and sectarian, more concentrated in their individuality than they had ever been before. The Talmud came to re- inforce the Pentateuch, and rabbinism intensified Judaism, which thereby lost its power to expand, its claim to be- come a universal religion, and remained the prerogative of a peculiar people. THE OUTLOOK OF JUDAISM. 51 With fire and sword the Christian era dawned for Israel. Jerusalem was be- sieged, the temple fired, the holy Mount in flames, and a million people perished, — a fitting prelude to the long tragedy that has not ended yet, the martyrdom of eighteen centuries : death in every form, by flood, by fire, and with every torture that could be conceived, leaving a track of blood through history ; the crucified of the nations ; strangers and wanderers in every age and every land, calling no man friend and no spot home ; withal, the ignominy of the Ghetto, a living death. Dark, pitiable, ignoble destiny ! Magnificent, heroic, unconquer- able destiny, luminous with self-sacrifice, unwritten heroism, devotion to an ideal, a cause believed in, and a name held sacred ! But destiny still unsolved, mar- tyrdom not yet swallowed up in victory. In our modern, rushing days life 52 THE OUTLOOK OF JUDAISM. changes with such swiftness that it is difficult even to follow its rapid move- ment. During the last hundred years Judaism has undergone more modifica- tion than during the previous thousand years. The French Revolution sounded a note of freedom so loud, so clamorous, that it pierced the Ghetto walls and found its way to the imprisoned souls. The gates were thrown open, the light streamed in from outside, and the Jew entered the modern world. As if by enchantment, the spell which had bound him hand and foot, body and soul, was broken, and his mind and spirit, re- leased from thrall, sprang into re-birth and vigour. Eager for life in every form and in every direction, with unused, pent-up vitality, he pressed to the front, and crowded the avenues where life was most crowded, thought and action. most stimulated. And in order to this move- THE OUTLOOK OF JUDAISM. 53 ment, naturally and of necessity, he be- gan to disengage himself from the toils in which he was involved, to miwind himself, so to speak, from fold after fold of outworn and outlandish custom and usages not alone irksome, but even intolerable, and incompatible with any but an immured and cloistered life. Casting off the outer shell or skeleton, which, like the bony covering of the tortoise, serves as armour at the same time that it impedes all movement and progress as well as inner growth, Juda- ism thought to revert to its original type, — the pure and simple monotheism of the early days, the simple creed that right is might, the simple law of justice among men. Divested of its spiritual mechanism, absolutely without myth or dogma of any kind, save the all-embracing unity of God, taxing so little the credulity of 54 THE OUTLOOK OF JUDAISM. men, no religion seemed so fitted to withstand the storm and stress of modern thought, the doubt and scepticism of a critical and scientific age that has played such havoc with time-honoured creeds. And having rid himself, as he proudly believed, of his own superstitions, natu- rally the Jew had no inclination to adopt what he looked upon as the superstitions of others. He was still as much as ever the Jew, as far as ever removed from the Christian standpoint and outlook, the Christian philosophy and solution of life. Broad and tolerant as either side might consider itself, there was a fundamental disagreement and opposition, almost a different make-up, a different calibre and attitude of soul, fostered by centuries of mutual alienation and distrust. To be a Jew was still something special, something inherent, that did not depend upon any ex- ternal conformity or non-conformity, any THE OUTLOOK OF JUDAISM. 55 peculiar mode of life. The tremendous background of the past, of traditions and associations so entirely apart from those of the people among whom they dwelt, threw them into strong relief. They were a marked race always, upon whom an indelible stamp was set ; a nation that cohered not as a political unit, but as a single family, through ties the most sacred, the most vital and intimate, of parent to child, of brother and sister, bound still more closely together through a common fate of suffering. And yet they were everywhere living among Christians, making part of Christian communities, and mixing freely among them for all the business of life, all material and temporal ends. Thus the spiritual and secular life, which had been absolutely one with the Jew, grew apart in his own sphere, as well as in his intercourse with the Chris- 66 THE OUTLOOK OF JUDAISM. tians ; the divorce was complete between religion and the daily life. In his in- most consciousness, deep down below the surface, he might be still a Jew, but for the rest he would be a Gentile. The Gentile world allured him, and the false gods whom the nations around him worshipped, — success, power, the pride of life and of the intellect. He threw himself full tilt into the arena where the clash was loudest, the press thickest, the struggle keenest to compete and out- strip one another, which we moderns call life. All his faculties were sharpened to it, and in his eagerness he forgot his proper birthright. He drifted away from his spiritual bearings, and lost sight of spiritual horizons. He, the man of the past, became essentially the man of to-day, with interest centred on the present, the actual; with intellect set free to grapple with the problems of the THE OUTLOOK OF JUDAISM. 57 hour, and solve them by its own unaided light. Liberal, progressive, humanita- rian he might become, but always along human lines ; the link was gone with any larger, more satisfying, and compre- hensive life. Religion had detached itself from life, not only in its trivial every-day concerns, but in its highest aims and aspirations. The something that the Hebrew prophets had, that made their moral teaching vital and luminous, was lacking, — the larger vision reaching out to the unseen, the abiding sense of an eternal will and purpose underlying hu- man transient schemes, an eternal pres- ence, transfusing all of life as with a hidden flame, so that love of country, love of right, love of man, were not alone human things, but also divine, because they were embraced and focussed in a single living unity, that was the love of God. How different now the cold, 58 THE OUTLOOK OF JUDAISM. abstract^ and passive unity, the only article of their faith now left to them, that had no hold whatever, no touch with life at any point, no kindling power ! In what of positive and vital did their Judaism consist ? Were they not rather Jews by negation, by opposition, non- Christians, first and foremost ? And here was just the handle, just the griev- ance, for their enemies to seize upon. Every charge would fit. Behold the Jew ! Behold one not ourselves, who would be one of us ! Our masters, even, who would wrest our prizes from us, whose keen wits and clever fingers have somehow touched the inner springs that rule our world to-day and set its wheels in motion ! Every cry could shape itself against them, every class could take alarm, and every prejudice go loose. And hence the Proteus form of anti-Semitism. THE OUTLOOK OF JUDAISM. 59 Wherever the social conditions are most unstable, tlie equilibriuni most threatened and easily disturbed, in barbarous Russia, liberal France, and philosophic Germany, the problem is most acute ; but there is no country now, civilised or uncivilised, where some echo of it has not reached ; even in our own free-breathing America, some wave has come to die upon our shores. And in view of such a situation, with such contingencies within us and with- out, how are we equipped, how are we prepared as Jews, to meet it and be true to our highest, largest destiny? What answer have we for ourselves and for the world in this, the trial hour of our faith, the crucial test of Judaism? Each one of us must look into our own hearts and see what Judaism stands for in that inner shrine ; what it holds that satisfies our deepest need, consoles and 60 THE OUTLOOK OF JUDAISM. fortifies us, compensates for every sacri- fice, every liumiliation we may be called upon to endure, so that we can count it a glory, not a shame, to suffer. Will national or personal loyalty suffice for this when our personality is not touched, our nationality is merged ? Will pride of family or race take away the sting, the stigma ? Lo, we have turned the shield, and persecution becomes our opportunity. '' Those that were in darkness, upon them the light hath shined." What is the meaning of this exodus from Russia, from Poland, these long, black lines like funeral lines, crossing the frontiers or crushed within the pale, these " despised and rejected of men," emerg- ing from their Ghettos, scarcely able to bear the light of day? Many of them will never see the Promised Land ; and for those who do, cruel will be the suffering before they enter, long and difficult will THE OUTLOOK OF JUDAISM. 61 be the task and process of assimilation and regeneration. But for us, who stand upon the shore, in the full blessed light of freedom, and watch at last the ending of that weary pilgrimage through the centuries, how great the responsibility, how great the occasion, if only we can rise to it ! Let us not think our duty ended when we have taken in the wan- derers, given them food and shelter, and initiated them into the sharp daily struggle to exist, upon which we are all embarked ; nor yet guarding their ex- clusiveness, when we leave them to their narrow rites and limiting observance, until, breaking free from these, they find themselves, like their emancipated breth- ren elsewhere, adrift on a blank sea of indifference and materialism. If Judaism would be anything in the world to-day, it must be a spiritual force. Only then can it be true to its special 62 THE OUTLOOK OF JUDAISM. mission, the spirit, not the letter of its truth. And as we have seen, it does not remain a spiritual force, when, holding itself aloof, it only shares the worldly life of those around it, and is brought only in contact with worldly influences. Away, then, with all the Ghettos ! and with spiritual isolation in every form, and let the " spirit blow where it listeth." The Jew must chans-e his attitude before the world, and come into spiritual fellow- ship with those around him. We must cross the Rubicon, the blank page that separates tlie Old Testament from the New, and read with fresh eyes, fresh hearts, the life and teachings of tlie one whom the world calls Master. We shall not thereby leave our own soil. John, Paul, Jesus himself, — we can claim them all for our own. We do not want '^ missions " to convert us ; we cannot become Presbyterians, Episcopalians, THE OUTLOOK OF JUDAISM. 63 members of any dividing sect " teaching for doctrines the opinions of men." Christians as well as Jews need the larger imity that shall embrace them all, the unity of spirit, not of doctrine. Mankind at large may not be ready for a universal religion; but let the Jews, with their prophetic instinct, their deep, spirit- ual insight, set the example and give the ideal. The Jewish idea, broaden it as we may, straiten it as we may, does not contain all the truth. Neither the Law nor the Prophets, the ceremonial nor the moral code, covers the whole of that mysterious experience we call life, and that still greater mystery that in our ignorance we call death. But the Law fulfilled, which is Love, as '- Christ the Jew" taught and lived it, — love as the very essence of all life, human as well as divine, — brings a radiant presence that transfigures life and death, 64 THE OUTLOOK OF JUDAISM. a new conception and explanation of our destiny. But the world has not yet fathomed the secret of its redemption, and ^^ salva- tion may yet again be of the Jews." Once again, by a supreme act of self-sacrifice, by voluntarily laying down that which they held to be their life, and which through all these darkened years they had guarded as their most sacred trust and treasure, can the Jews become the Messiah of the nations, lighting the fires that have been allowed to go out, and holding up the torch for all mankind. But this can only be by absorption and assimilation of the spiritual wealth of the world, not by denial and exclusion. I should like to quote in this connection a few passages from the Hibbert Lectures of Claude Montefiore, a masterly exposi- tion of Judaism. He says : — "It is only now that this amazing THE OUTLOOK OF JUDAISM. Q^ idealisation of the law is slowly break- ing down, when the Pentateuch is being estimated at its actual historic worth, and subjected to the scalpel of a criticism which disintegrates its unity and be- reaves it of its supernatural glamour, that Judaism will, I think, gradually begin to feel the want of a dominant and consistent doctrine, adequate and comprehensive, soul-satisfying and ra- tional, which can set forth and illumi- nate in its entire compass the relation of the individual to society and to God. I am myself inclined to believe that, from the words attributed in the Gospels to Jesus, important elements toward the formation of such a congruous body of doctrine could well be chosen out, — elements which would harmonise, de- velop, and bring together the highest religious teaching in the Old Testament and the early rabbinical literature, and 5 66 THE OUTLOOK OF JUDAISM. which a prophetic though not a legal Judaism, with full consistency and much advantage^ might adopt and cherish as its own. . . . Some of the sayings as- cribed to Jesus have sunk too deep into the human heart — or shall I say into the spiritual consciousness of civilised mankind ? — to make it probable that any religion which ignores or omits them will exercise a considerable influ- ence outside its own borders." The times are full of signs. On every side there is a call, a challenge, a.nd awa- kening. Out of the heart of our materi- alistic civilisation has come the cry of the spirit hungering for its food, " the bread without money and without price," the bread which money cannot buy, and " thirsting for the living waters, which if a man drink he shall not thirst again." What the world needs to-day, — not alone the Jews, who have borne the yoke, but THE OUTLOOK OF JUDAISM. 67 the Christians, who bear Christ's name and persecute, and who have built up a civilisation so entirely at variance with the principles he taught, — what we all need, Gentiles and Jews alike, is not so much "2i new body of doctrine," which Mr. Montefiore suggests, but a new spirit put into life, which will re-fashion it upon a nobler plan and consecrate it anew to higher purpose and ideals. Science has done its work, clearing away the dead wood of ignorance and superstition, en- larging the vision and opening out the path. It is for religion now to fill with spirit and with life the facts that know- ledge gives us, to breathe a living soul into the universe. "Eeturn unto me, and I will return unto you, saith the Lord of Hosts." ^^ All we, like sheep, have gone astray." Chris- tians and Jews alike have turned from the true path, worshipping upon the high 68 THE OUTLOOK OF JUDAISM. places and under every green tree, falling down before idols of gold and silver, and making graven images of every earthly and every heavenly thing. Thus have we builded a kingdom wholly of the earth, solid and stately to the eye of sense, but hollow and honey- combed with falsehood, and whose foun- dations are so insecure that they tremble at every earthly shock, every attempt at readjustment ; and we half expect to see the brilliant pageant crumble before our sight, and disappear like the unsubstan- tial fabric of a dream. Christians and Jews alike, " Have we not all one Father; hath not one God created us?" Remember to what you are called, you who claim belief in a liv- ing God who is a Spirit, and who therefore must be "worshipped in spirit and in truth," — not with vain forms and mean- ingless service, nor yet in the world's glit- THE OUTLOOK OF JUDAISM. 69 tering shapes, the work of men's hands or brains ; but in the ever-growing, ever- deepening love and knowledge of His truth, and its showing forth to men. Once more let the Holy Spirit descend and dwell among you in your life to-day, as it did upon your holy men, your prophets of the olden times, lighting the world, as it did for them, with that radi- ance of the skies. And so make known the faith that is in you; "for by their fruits ye shall know them." September, 1893. JUDAISM, OLD AND NEW. ^ " 117 PUK si muove." The world moves, ^-^ and there is ever a new dawn breaking for those whose eyes are turned toward the light. A few years ago the life of the Jew was a sealed book to most of his contemporaries. Here and there a solitary figure, an excep- tional character in real life or in fiction, stood out in bold and exaggerated relief, generally unrelated or falsely related to its surroundings, and therefore convey- ing but little idea of the truth. To-day we have almost a new Jewish literature of our own, springing up in our midst, dealing not with foreign con- ditions and circumstance, but with the JUDAISM, OLD AND NEW. 71 facts as they are here and now among us ; depicting not the historic Jew of the past, the ideal and impossible Jew of the imagination, but the real and actual Jew of the present, the modern Jew whose name is Legion — no less than ever, per- haps, an enigmatic figure, as he moves everywhere among his fellow-men, in the crowd and yet not quite of it ; or as he stands apart, wrapped in strange guise and custom, and speaking a language which the world of to-day does not un- derstand. He who runs may read, and, indeed, there is no excuse, no escape for the modern Jew of even the most ordi- nary stamp and culture. He must know the status of his people, the problems that beset them ; and if he does, he can- not fail to bring whatever heart or brain he has to try to understand and solve them. For surely no people are confronted 72 JUDAISM, OLD AND NEW. by SO singular a destiny, past, present, and to come. Never was there a situa- tion so complicated, with elements so diverse and contradictory, to be fused, reconciled, and assimilated : not one nation, but every nation, and generally the outcast and rejected of that nation ; aliens wherever they tread, wherever they seek to find a home, even among their own race, since there is no strong hand to guide and gather them in, no true leadership, no adequate idea to rally round, no single goal or purpose to bind and knit together. In " The Children of the Ghetto, The Grandchildren of the Ghetto," Mr. Zang- will tells the story for us with dramatic force and realism. Sweeping, as he does, the whole field of vision, the social scale from bottom upward, he gives, as it were, an epitome of Jewish life and history ; so that it is to his vivid pages, JUDAISM, OLD AND NEW. 73 almost rather than to life itself, that we would turn for the bird's-eye view in which no detail is lost, the broad sur- vey of his subject, the bold, free hand- ling, and yet the human sympathy and insight. With master hand he throws the flash-lisrht and illuminates the canvas for us, — a great tableau vivant, a moving panorama, crowded with figures of every age and clime, and touched with every shade of colour, light and darkness. The patriarch of hoary, long-forgotten days, the mediaeval shapes, still muffled and draped with the past, are there ; the bourgeois and the Philistine of to-day, the idealist, the sad-eyed, and the hope- ful dreamer, the visionary whose ardent gaze is fastened on a vision among the clouds, or wanders and is lost in far-away horizons that escape and elude him. It is the whole drama of Israel that is always repeating itself, for the reason 74 JUDAISM, OLD AND NEW. that the past as well as the present is an actuality; the old types survive and are reproduced, while new ones are being born. Thus the strange contrasts and juxtapositions, the anomalies, we might almost say, the fatality of Judaism. For the outer life is but the reflection of the inner ; here also tlie same chaos reigns, the same lack of unity and coherence, the perpetual clash and conflict always to be renewed, until, if ever, we reach an idea large enough to reconcile the old and new, the present with the past. - As Mr. Zangwill paints it (and he paints it truly), Judaism seems but a tragic masquerade, a kaleidoscope of shift- ing, many-coloured views. His characters are swayed back and forth : now carried forward by a wave of aspiration and progress, and again swept backward by a still stronger tide that they cannot resist. We are wanderino: in the wilder- JUDAISM, OLD AND NEW. 75 ness again ; here and there a mirage, a dream of the past, a dream of the future, as of light breaking through the clouds, but the darkness gathers and settles again. We close the book with a deep sense of tragedy and unrest, of lives blighted and bewildered, tossed upon a sea of doubts and perplexities, of un- solved destiny ; and we ask ourselves : Is this, then, the last word of our Judaism ? Is it a failure, a mistake, a '^ misfortune," as Heine puts it; "a forlorn hope, an impossibility," as Mr. Zangwill's heroine, Esther Ansell, mournfully concludes ? — and she knew whereof she spoke. Must it hang henceforth on two horns of a dilemma, unable to save, unable to lose itself ; or else, moving in a circle, must it endlessly revolve upon itself ? But before even attempting to give an answer to these questions, let us glance at some other books before us. 76 JUDAISM, OLD AND NEW. In " Joseph Zalmonah," Edward King deals with the social and economic prob- lem, the horrors of the sweating system, the overstocked labour market, and the special phases connected with the influx of Russian and Polish immigration, — in a word, the " bondage " of the wretched exiles in the land of promise, which they find to their cost " is not a land of per- formance." Step by step he traces the course of the hapless refugee back to Russia, escaping from the Pale, and flee- ing in the dark winter night across the bridge into Germany ; the emigrant ship arriving in New York ; the little crowd of exiles on the lower deck, standing with uncovered head, outstretched arms, and glistening eyes to greet the Statue of Liberty, " the mighty symbol of freedom and refuge from tyranny ; " the dreams, the hopes, and tlien, alas ! the cruel deceptions, the bitter reality, '' the sick- JUDAISM, OLD AND NEW. 77 ening search for work, the wretched lodg- ings, the repulsive food, the failure to find anything to do ; " " Misery Market," where the last treasure disappears, — the gold watch, the fur coat and cap, — and, finally, the sweaters' hell, where the grinding wheel of Sisyphus eternally re- volves, and the wretched toiler faints and drops by the way. I would not here rehearse the ghastly scenes, the pitiful details, but refer the reader to Mr. King's graphic pages if he would study this woful aspect of our modern civilisation. Throughout the book the author has skilfully contrived to keep the local colour and traits, the peculiar stamp of Orientalism ; and he opens for us so curious a bit of New York life, something so altogether unique and unexpected, that it is difficult for us to realise unless we have alread}^ made ourselves familiar with it. His descrip- 78 JUDAISM, OLD AND NEW, tions are drawn from the life, within a stone's throw of our own homes, in the heart of our own city ; and yet they seem as far removed as the East is from the ^Yest, as foreign and absolutely un-Ameri- can as anything that could be met with, the world over. It is all a sort of '^ jar- gon " of sights and sounds and colours, — the Hebrew signs and letters on the houses, the motley crowd, the motley wares spread everywhere upon the side- walk, the market, the theatre, — all making a nondescript medley and conglo- merate, as though an unknown stratum of the earth had come to obtrude and superimpose itself upon the surface. Again we feel like crying out : " How long, Lord, how long ? " But we know that in a twinkling, before a generation shall have passed away, in less than a twelvemonth indeed, the children of these outcasts have been taught to speak JUDAISM, OLD AND NEW. 79 English and prepared for the public schools. The American flag has been explained to them, and, like a prayer, each morning they have offered their allegiance. And we realise that for some of these at least new ideas are being born, new conditions are being created, that will sweep away the old landmarks more effectually than flood or fire, or time or space. Quite a different note, and yet no less deep and true a one, is struck in the modest, unpretending little volume, al- most child-like in its simplicity, "Other Things Being Equal," by Emma Wolf. We have here the problem that is left when all other problems are solved, all other differences and obstacles have been set aside. It is the final, ultimate step — shall we say the solution? The Jew and the Christian meet on absolutely equal terms. On neither side is any dis- 80 JUDAISM, OLD AND NEW. parity recognised. Mentally, morally, socially, the man and the woman are equally matched. ^'Religiously they hold the same broad love for God and man." Shall they intermarry? And now, out of its last stronghold, arises the ghost of the past, — not a stern, piti- less, and forbidding figure, but a gentle, dear, and good old man, a most loving and beloved father, who, with broken heart and broken voice, tells his daughter : " No, my child, I cannot consent, and yet I shall not withhold. I do most solemnly and seriously object, . . . but trust me, dear, it is through no lack of love for you. Do not consider me ; forget, if you will, all I have said. . . . The door is open ; you can pass through without my hand." The charm and pathos of the book, as well as its originality, consist in the fact that it is love, and always love, that con- JUDAISM, OLD AND NEW. 81 quers every time. The author has taken for her motto : '' And now abideth faith, hope, and love, these three : but the great- est of these is love." Ruth Levice gives up her lover, not from a sense of duty, but because she loves her father better than herself, or than her lover, who had become part of herself. She writes to Dr. Kemp : — '' Only / am causing this separation ; no one else could or would. Do not blame my father ; if he were to see me writing thus he would beg me to desist ; he would think I am sacrificing my hap- piness for him. ... I am no Jephthah's daughter; he wants no sacrifice, and I make none. Duty, the hardest word to learn, is not leading me. . . . Let me say it now — I could never be happy with you." Her father's arguments have not con- vinced her. She stands just where she 6 82 JUDAISM, OLD AND NEW, stood before, high above all prejudice and narrowness of view ; but no convictions of her own, no dream of happiness, can outweigh the knowledge of her father's broken life, the picture of his stooping form as he turns from her, bent as beneath the burden of the past. Bravely and resolutely she takes up her life, doing nothing by halves, determined at any cost to make her father happy. But the struggle tells, and the eyes of love cannot be deceived. Her father realises the sacrifice that has been made and the motive for it, all the love and anguish of the struggle ; and with the knowledge comes a higher vision, a deeper and larger perception than he had had before. He, too, rises out of self, out of views that were personal and perhaps peculiar, and trusts the larger love that now is guiding him. He acknowledges his mistake. He says : — JUDAISM, OLD AND NEW. 83 " I stood convicted. I was in the posi- tion of a blind fool who, with a beautiful picture before him, fastens his critical, condemning gaze upon a rusting nail in the wall behind, a nail even now loosened, and which in another generation will be displaced." As the blue sky arches over all alike, he argues, high and low, rich and poor, great and small, so does the all-encom- passing love of God — the same God — hold all of us alike, Jew and Chris- tian, believer and unbeliever. Differences of belief, like all other differences, are human, not divine — matters of human opinion. In God's sight, God's love, all are one, all are His children, and there- fore brothers. What are we, who in our erring human judgment should try to put asunder those whom God hath truly joined together in soul and spirit, so that no human circumstance or difference has 84 JUDAISM, OLD AND NEW. power to part them ? And with this con- viction, Mr. Levice gives his daughter to the man she loves. It is impossible in a brief review to give an idea of the rare tenderness and pathos with which the subject is treated, even in its minor details and characters. There is a hint, a touch of something so unusual in the book that we are tempted to exclaim : " Ah, yes, but it is not true to life ! '' And neither is it ; but that is because life, as we most of us live it, is not true to itself, its best self, its highest possibilities and ideals, the faith, the hope, the love that we were meant to live by. And it is just here that the little vol- ume gives the keynote of what one would like to say. After all, what is the vital question to-day, as it has always been, through all time and all vicissitudes, with which we Jews have to deal ? Is it not JUDAISM, OLD AND NEW. 85 now as it has ever been, — how to keep the Faith? Throughout the centuries, what endless martyrdom, what countless sacrifices for this ! And now that the martyrdom, has ceased, that the clouds seem to lift, and we advance from slavery into freedom, from darkness into light, the question, so far from growing clearer, becomes an increasingly difficult one. We stand upon the threshold of we know not what, — unable to go backward, not daring to go forward. The future beckons us on with promise of wider, freer life, unchecked growth and scope, broad, unhampered human and spiritual fellowship. The past holds us with invin- cible weight. " Deny me, and you deny yourself," it says; "your very life, all that makes you what you are." The blood of martyrs seems to cry to us : " Would you be faithless, then, to us, and have we died in vain ? " SQ JUDAISM, OLD AND NEW. And whence come these questionings, this doubt and division of soul ? Surely from lack of faith and vision, rather than from true loyalty and conviction. Not in vain will be that martyrdom when it has taught us to be faithful as those martyrs were, and when we have, as they had, a faith of our own to be true to ; when we are ready to trust and follow it wherever it may lead, to deny self and offer up life for its sake. But we have lost the faith, not merely in the narrow, liis- toric sense, not alone in allegiance to the past, in outward conformity to ex- ternal rites and inherited usage, but as an inward, quickening power, a source of our spiritual life and action, a vision of something that makes life holy, beau- tiful, and blessed, whatever martyrdom we may be called upon to endure, what- ever sacrifice we may be called upon to make. JUDAISM, OLD AND NEW. 87 And when we read it aright, the story of our people means, above all else, this faith, a perfect trust and confidence in the leading and purpose of the Most High, whatever that leading and purpose may be, and whether or not we understand it. " Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him." Did Abraham hesitate when God bade him leave his Mesopotamian home and go, ^^he knew not whither," to found a new home, a new nation ? Did Moses heed the murmurs and discontent of those who would have returned to bondage in Egypt rather than be led through the wilderness ? Whether or not we have the prophetic vision, whether or not we see and under- stand the promise beyond, we can be faithful still, now that we find ourselves on the verge of a larger deliverance than ever before. They are the faithless who would lag behind. 88 JUDAISM, OLD AND NEW, " New occasions teach new duties ; Time makes ancient good uncouth. They must upward still and onward Who would keep abreast of truth. Lo ! before us gleam the camp fires I We, ourselves, must pilgrims be, Nor attempt the Future's portal. With the Past's blood-rusted key.'* It is the task of Judaism to be up and doing, alert and ready to receive, not pas- sively accepting what has been handed down, nor yet watching the smoulder- ing fires of a lingering sacrifice. Let us take our Judaism fearlessly out into the world, to be put to any test, but, above all, freely to be used, not in its own ser- vice, but in the service of the God in whom it believes, the universal Father of all, and, therefore, in the world's highest service. And in order to do this, first and foremost we must be rid of self, of this intense pre-occupation to survive in any form, as race or creed or nation, this JUDAISM, OLD AND NEW. 89 desperate struggle to exist in name, if nothing else. For herein lies our whole problem, our whole temptation, — not in the world around us, but in ourselves. What would we think of the soldier who offered to serve his country, but who would only go into battle on condition that his own life should be saved ? " Ah, but," I hear you exclaim, '' that is a very different thing. We too would be willing to sacrifice our life ; but we are not willing to sacrifice our principles, our deepest convictions, which are dearer to us than life." And I do not hesitate to answer (at least to those who have passed out of the dark ages of superstition and useless, orthodox formalism), you are not called upon to sacrifice your deepest prin- ciples and convictions ; on the contrary, you are summoned to be true to them by casting down the barriers tliat pre- vent their fullest exercise and freedom 90 JUDAISM, OLD AND NEW. in the widest relation with your fellow- men. Search well your own heart, and perhaps you will find that, once placing yourself in this attitude, throwing off the heavy weight of the past, this dead self that clings to you, you will be born again, into your larger heritage; you will no longer be conscious of difference and separation ; you will be one with your brother, the liberal Christian who has likewise come out of the narrowness of his creeds and doctrine into the same freedom as you have, — the glorious free- dom of the sons of God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob : yes, but the God of the living, not of the dead. Creeds are everywhere falling and being disinteorrated. losing; their hard-and-fast consistency in order that the truth that has been encased in them shall be set free, the light of the spirit shall shine out like a star. Christianity as a sect JUDAISM, OLD AND NEW. 91 or creed has no compelling force for Judcaism. The Inquisition could not make Christians of us, nor can all the mild but zealous efforts of the Presbyteri- ans ever make a single honest convert. That which alone has power supremely to attract is the divine-human life, of which the type has been given to the world by a Jew. And by the divine- human life I mean the life which through every human experience keeps sight and touch of the divine, — a life lived always in conscious relation with infinite and eternal things, in personal union and communion with a Being that compre- hends and transcends our own, and there- fore a life of sublime trust and assurance, of loving obedience, and of immortal promise and hope. And the secret of that life, the truth which it reads into the world, through every contradiction and obstruction of human circumstance, 92 JUDAISM, OLD AND NEW, every manifestation of Imman weakness, human sorrow and sin, is the trutli of love, — of an infinite and eternal Love transcending human imperfections, a di- vine Heart that reveals itself in answer- ing; love to our human heart and human needs. And is not such a life of the very essence of Judaism, you ask ? And I answer: It may be, but not while you limit and circumscribe your Judaism as you do, making of it a fetich, a history and tradition instead of an active, living principle, a visible embodiment of the truth ; not while you draw about your- selves the lines of a peculiar and chosen people that isolate you and forbid you from entering into the closest human ties with the people around you; not while you imprison yourselves in the past, as in a Ghetto from whence you refuse to emerge ; or, mounting upon JUDAISM, OLD AND NEW. 93 your watch-towers, as the Mohammedan does upon his, proclaim from everlasting to everlasting the unity of your God. Come down from your watch-towers, come out of your Ghettos, and bear wit- ness to that unity in the world to-day, not as an abstract, metaphysical truth, but in spirit and in deed. But again you will protest: ^^ Surely we Jews, of all people, are in the world to-day, pressing everywhere to the front, or midmost in the thick of the struggle. See how we crowd the universities, fill the high places, and carry off the honours, following, leading everywhere among the great Powers that be. What other nation, crushed as we have been for centuries under the iron weight of Christendom, persecuted, down-trodden, and oppressed, and even yet under the shadow of our dungeon walls, could so rebound, so spring into life ready-armed for every emergency ? " 94 JUDAISM, OLD AND NEW. Ah, then, is this all the Ghetto could teach us, — to fight the world's fight, to win in the world's race ? Can we find no deeper purpose, no higher leading, no holier consecration in that martyrdom ? Have we not kept alive and burning all these tragic years the perpetual lamp ? Have we not guarded like a jewel in the dark, or, still more, like a precious seed buried in the earth, the sacred trust and treasure of the spiritual life, that should shine out now before all men, should burst into splendid flower and fruit as soon as it comes into the light of day ? And does it so shine out ? Has our Judaism, whether orthodox or liberal, blossomed so before the world ? Are we the leaders of the religious and spiritual thought of the day ? In so far as we take part in it, are we not chiefly concerned with our own sur- vival, our continued existence as a dis- JUDAISM, OLD AND NEW. 95 tinct element and factor? On the one hand, do we not clutch desperately the dry husks that we hold in our grasp, of external rites and devitalised formulas, calling them bread for hungry souls ; or else letting these go and casting them aside, do we not see our Judaism scat- tered to the winds, so that no man knows how to gather it ? Let us not be deceived. We cannot save our Judaism in any narrow, in any broad sense even, unless we lose it, by' merging and adding to it that which will make it no longer Judaism, because it is something that the whole world claims, and therefore cannot be the exclusive prerogative of Judaism, — in other words, by entering into the larger, spiritual life which makes no conditions, no restrictions necessary ; draws no boundary lines, no arbitrary and external distinctions of race and creed ; sets up no barriers between 96 JUDAISM, OLD AND NEW. man and man, between man and God; but reaches out in perfect freedom, per- fect oneness with man, to perfect one- ness with God. But, once again, you will say : " Is it not more often the Christians who draw the line and set up the barriers; who despise and persecute, so that in self-defence we draw back upon ourselves ; who, when we hold out our hand, refuse to take it ? " That may be ; and yet I think we can do better than make these our guide. Moreover, we shall always find that for this there are special and local causes, varying in nature and in- tensity, according to our own particular condition and the condition of the coun- try in which we dwell, but not neces- sarily radical and inherent in the people around us, unless we make them so, by insisting upon them in ourselves. We must not forget the uncompromising JUDAISM, OLD AND NEW. 97 attitude which, for centuries long, the Jew and the Christian have held in re- gard to one another, and which cannot at once be done away with on either side. We have stood too long in mutual dis- trust and hostility ; our own race-features have become too strongly emphasised. We are largely foreigners to the people among whom we live, and even those of us who are acclimatised still bear traces of our foreign origin. Under these circumstances we cannot expect to come at once into complete understanding and accord. We can never expect it, if, while apparently freely mixing at the surface, we remain apart at the core, covertly trying to keep our own peculiarities and aloofness. We must cultivate and grow into perfect free- dom and fellowship, — slowly and labori- ously, perhaps, for the task is a difficult one, requiring infinite patience and for- 98 JUDAISM, OLD AND NEW. bearance, infinite tact and tenderness among ourselves as well as in our deal- ings with the Christians. Our own people must be gently raised and lifted, helped according to their individual needs, spiri- tual as well as material, and according to their capacity to receive, not knowing perhaps the goal to which they tend. But those of us who have caught sight of the goal must never lose it from view, but must walk on, according to our faith and vision of the larger hope and promise, the complete deliverance, which is as essentially the Jewish as it is the Chris- tian ideal, because it meatus the absolute unity, not alone the unity of God with Himself, one God as opposed to many gods, — a purely intellectual or mathe- matical axiom, — but the unity of God with us, a vitalising principle, a union as of life with its source, of parent with child ; a universal love that folds us round JUDAISM, OLD AND NEW. 99 with rest and tenderness, making our human relations spiritual, our spiritual relations almost human in that sense of warmth and closeness that is so often lacking. We can still repeat our creed : " Hear, Israel, — and hear all the world besides, — the Lord our God, the Lord is one," — one with us, with all of us, Jews and Christians alike. For w^e have taken into it an element that shall so deepen and enlarge it as forever to redeem it from self and every form of selfishness, all possibility of narrowness and sectarianism. No long;er shut tin q; itself in, nor shutting any out, on the contrary, it will welcome all with, ^^ Come unto me, whatever sect, whatever race, whatever creed, for in my larger love, my larger faith, all sects, all creeds are one." Each of us has our special part, our special work to do, which we cannot 100 JUDAISM, OLD AND NEW. shirk, even if we would, for it is forced upon us. To the most indifferent of us it must mean something for our good or ill, our weal or woe, that we are born Jews, into just these conditions in which we find ourselves, to work through them, if we can, into still higher conditions. We all stand at different points along the line, with some above us, some be- low, to help and to be helped. Judaism is to each of us a personal factor, an in- dividual problem, as well as a large race- question, to be solved individually as well as collectively, — a problem as old as the world, which will be older yet before it is solved. But if we see any light, we need not despair. We can believe, we can hope and trust, and, above all, we can serve. " For now abideth faith, hope, and love, these three ; but the greatest of these is love." Fehruanj, 1894. • THE CLAIM OF JUDAISM. nrHAT history repeats itself is a truism with which we are all familiar; that we must read history backward is a fact of which we are again and again reminded in dealing with the Jewish question and trying to throw any light upon the problem. We open the second volume of Graetz's History and read as follows : — " The wider view which had been gained into the various relations of life, the advance out of the narrow circle of tradition and inherited customs, produced schism and separation amongst the Ju- dseans. . . . Thus, there arose a division among the pious" (viz., the Pharisees and 102 THE CLAIM OF JUDAISM, Saddiicees). " The Pharisees can only be called a party figuratively and by way of distinction, ... for the mass of the nation was inclined to Phariseeism, and it was only in the national leaders that its peculiarities became marked. ... As expounders of the law, the Pharisees formed the learned body of the nation. Their opinions were framed, their actions governed by one cardinal principle, — the necessity of preserving Judaism. The individual and the state were to be ruled alike by the laws and customs of their fathers. . . . From this, the Phari- sees' view of life, the rival opinion of the Sadducees diverged. . . . This party of the Sadducees, so sharply opposed to the Pharisees, . . . was composed of the Ju- dcean aristocracy . . . who had acquired wealth and authority at home, or who had returned from foreign embassies, all having gained, from closer intercourse THE CLAIM OF JUDAISM. 103 with the outer workl and other lands, freer thought and more worldly views. The national interests of the Judcean com- munity were placed by the Sadducees above the Law. ... As experienced men of the world they felt that . . . man must not allow himself to be kept back by religious scruples from forming politi- cal alliances, . . . although by so doing he must inevitably infringe some of the injunctions of his religion." Making exception of certain political aspects, or rather substituting financial and mercantile interests in place of na- tional considerations, we have the Jewish situation as it stands to-day, a picture of our modern Jewish society. We seem to be reading a page of contemporaneous Jewish history. In reality, we are read- ing of events that transpired and of a state of things that existed one hundred and thirty-five years before Christ. For 104 THE CLAIM OF JUDAISM. US Jews time has stood still. The pen- dulum has swayed backward and forward, but the dial hands have not moved. Two thousand years have rolled by, with their endless change upon change ; the storm of modern life has swept over us ; we are living in a new world, in the midst of undreamed-of circumstance and condi- tions, — and we are still disputing in the synagogues, debating along precisely the old lines, the old points of law, of orthodox and unorthodox, the technicalities of usage and belief, the sine qua non of survival. In a word, we are still Pharisees and Sadducees, rival sects, intent upon our own salvation, and divided among our- selves : those of us who would keep the Law to the letter in order to survive, and those of us who would break it and still survive, — the worldly-wdse in our own generation, who would relax and infringe for worldly purpose and convenience. THE CLAIM OF JUDAISM. 105 while still keeping sacred and intact the distinction and prerogative of race. We have not changed our point of view in any direction ; our destiny has not enlarged, our spiritual horizon has not widened. The banner that we hold aloft is " Self " : self-defence, self-preservation are our watchwords always. \Ye beat the air, we fight with ghosts and shadows ; and behind us Judaism looms up, stony and unmoved, a great monument of the past, a Sphynx half-buried in the desert sand of arid rites and customs, hoary and ma- jestic with age, but dumb, enigmatic, with sealed eyes and lips that have no answer for our present urgent need, our problem of to-day. But the hour has struck. The Sphynx must give her secret to the world, for the world is waiting, the world demands a solution. From within and from without, the 106 THE CLAIM OF JUDAISM. question is pressing upon us. Literature is flooded with it. Tlie Christians, even more than the Jews, are forcing us to define and declare our position, to make it clear just where we stand and what we stand for, — not only among ourselves as Jews, but in relation to the world at large, to the Christians themselves, the outside community in which we dwell, of which we form a part, of which we never truly form a part. On the one side, we have anti-Semitism in one form or an- other, whether covert and disguised, or else open, pronounced, and aggressive, and breaking out where we had not expected ; on the part of the Jews, we have defence, apology, recrimination, but, above all, justification, — justification without end, insistence and reiteration of their own peculiar claim and service, their plea for recognition and for justice that is denied them. It may well be that the THE CLAIM OF JUDAISM. 107 attitude of the Christian is even more blameworthy than our own, but with this we are not for the moment concerned. For any one who has at heart the true dignity of the race, the real grandeur of their achievement, it is our own point of view that is of far graver import. In view of the situation, is it not time that the strife of sects should cease, and party warfare have an end, in order that we may come to some better understand- ing among ourselves, some deeper reason for the faith that is in us, some larger answer, some truth more vital and more sacred to ourselves and to humanity than whether or not we keep the Mosaic Law, whether or not we merge as one people with the people around us, — a truth larger and deeper than sect or race, bind- ing: together even as one sect and race all who may hold it in common, God's chosen people everywhere ? Failing this, 108 THE CLAIM OF JUDAISM. are we doomed perpetually to revolve in the small and narrow circle of our own race-questions, our own peculiar interests, inevitably shut out by our own restric- tions and limitations from that freedom and equality of intercourse that alone can insure harmony and good-will among men ? Everywhere is the anomaly of our situation made apparent to us ; again and again we are obliged to face it. And the secret of that anomaly lies, not in the people around us, as we so often suppose, but in ourselves, deep below any surface-difference or opposition, in the very heart of Judaism itself. Let us first consider the claim as put forth by its leaders and exponents, which may thus be formulated. Judaism, in its ultimate destiny, in its essence and its spirit, is a universal re- ligion, — the religion of humanity when humanity shall have grown to its full THE CLAIM OF JUDAISM. 109 stature, the religion of the world when the world shall be capable of grasping and realising its lofty ideals. Judaism in its actuality, in its very constitution, as we know it to-day, as we have known it through all time, in its spirit and its form, is the religion of particularism, the religion of a peculiar people, chosen and set apart ; a peculiar code especially devised with the sole end and aim of separation as the very basis and condition of existence. And in order that this particular may become the universal, what are we bid- den to do ? To intrench ourselves in the particular ; to remain the peculiar people, the peculiar sect, if we would not incur the guilt of moral cowardice and suicide, the penalty of moral death. In order to teach our universal truth, our lofty ideals to the world, we must remain aloof from the world except for 110 THE CLAIM OF JUDAISM. purposes that have no bearing upon tliis universal truth ; we must carefully guard our sacred idea from intrusion or even contact with other sacred ideas ; v/e must read no sacred books but our own ; we must preach unity, and we must practise the most rigid exclusion, the most uncompromising separation the world has ever known. There shall be no marrying nor giving in marriage, either of the human or the spiritual. Soul shall not meet soul, life shall not be added unto life, because we are shut off from the soul-life of the communit}^ in which we dwell. We are one in the body, so to speak, — that is to say, for temporal purpose and convenience, — but in spirit we are wide asunder. And I ask. Can such a union ever prove blessed, or beautiful, or happy ? Must it not always be subject to the jars and friction to which we so constantly see THE CLAIM OF JUDAISM. HI ourselves exposed, to hopeless contradic- tion and misunderstanding? If, as we claim, we have the world's truth in our keeping, shall we therefore keep it for ourselves ? Were it not larger, wiser, grander to give it to the world at the cost of any personal sacrifice to ourselves ; to make the great renunciation, to die to self, to the particular, as people, race, or individual, in order that we may live to tlie universal, the larger life and ideal, the deeper purpose of humanity ; to lose our life if thereby we might save it, by setting free the truth that is our life, and making known as never before the Unity of God, the universal Father, and the common brotherhood of man ? But it is just here that the fallacy lies, the paradox, that is deeper than any ques- tion of expediency, of whether or not we are comfortable among the nations, and amid our surroundings and ch'cum- 112 THE CLAIM OF JUDAISM. stance. It lies in our belief, our clinging to the idea that Judaism is the universal religion, that it ever can or will adapt it- self to the needs of men of every race, men who have not inherited it in the blood. Our mistake lies in supposing that it, and it alone, contains the whole truth, the absolute truth, and nothing but the truth, the salvation of all mankind ; that before it, was no truth, and that since, no new truth has come into the world, no new sacred principle or method of life, and, therefore, nothing shall be added thereto nor taken therefrom ; that in the matter of spiritual or religious truth we Jews have everything to teach and nothing to learn, because Judaism holds the essence of all that is good in the world; that whatever in Christianity is not Judaism is paganism ; that whatever Jesus taught that Hillel had not taught before him is nought, and worse than nought; that THE CLAIM OF JUDAISM. 113 finally, in the Mosaic code and the moral law, the reign of justice upon earth, is contained all the spiritual un- foldment, the sacred revealing, all the help and leading that we need. But we forget that even in Biblical times, when Judaism shone out in its greatest splendour, its moral supremacy among the nations, it made no such claim as this of perfection ; it was always a prophetic religion, a religion of promise that pointed somewhere, somehow to a fulfilment, a deliverance, a mysterious coming — of a person, a kingdom — that should complete and establish it upon earth. Already in those far distant days there was a lack felt, there was a link wanting, a something that should bind men close to God, a way of holiness, a path whereby to approach, whereby to bring Him near " that sitteth upon the circle of the earth, and the inhabitants 114 THE CLAIM OF JUDAISM. thereof are as grasshoppers." Hence the ceremonial code, with all its mechanical contrivance to wrap God's presence round the trivial, common things of daily life, literally to nail Him on the doorposts, to bind Him as frontlets upon brow and arms, and knit Him upon the fringes of the garments. And hence, above all, the moral code, making known the terms and the conditions of man's relation with his Maker. But even then men already dimly felt that the moral law does not suffice, does not necessarily bring us close to God. On the contrary, it may estrange us from Him by raising that terrible con- sciousness of sin, of the wide gap between the human and the divine, between our poor righteousness and His perfection, not to be bridged over by any effort on our part. Or, again, it may arouse that false self- righteousness and spiritual pride, THE CLAIM OF JUDAISM. 115 SO sure of itself, so confident in its own strength and sight, which is even further removed from God than weali human sinning. And so David, the man who sinned, was the man near God's heart, and, according to Isaiah, " Who is blind as he that is perfect, and blind as the Lord's servant ? " For there is a deeper, truer vision yet to be attained that brings to light the hidden, secret things of God's love and wisdom, rather than man's imperfect judgment, his paltry verdict of righteous and unrighteous ; there is a more spirit- ual perception than that revealed by the moral law, for it comes from a more in- timate sense of dependence, a closer com- munion, nay, an absolute oneness of spirit with Spirit, which cannot be severed by any weakness or error of the flesh. But we Jews are not willhiii; thus to transcend the Law and the Prophets, to 116 THE CLAIM OF JUDAISM. accept the absolute and unconditioned unity of God with all His creatures. We still cling to our separateness in the inner as well as the outer lif e^ trying in vain to make ourselves one with Him through outward rule and practice, through works, not faith ; in what we do, rather than what we are. And so it happens almost of necessity that when the framework of the rabbini- cal law falls away, for the most part we are left without God in our lives. We lose the sense of divine things even in the crude, realistic, and anthropomorphic way in which we once possessed it, — the touch of the spirit, — and, therefore, our spiritual life becomes barren and ex- hausted. We remain an ethical people, but we cease to be a religious people. Once a year perhaps, on the occasion of a great and solemn festival, we give up our business and wander to the syna- THE CLAIM OF JUDAISM. Ill gogue, listen to the chants and the sacred intoning that carry us back among the dead, into the dim vista of the past, and go home satisfied that we are still Jews at heart, in sentiment and association, thankful that we are not as other men, but that we can so easily leave supersti- tion behind us, and content to have no other link with our people and with God. I have said that the present situation was analogous with the past. In a sense this is true, and in a sense the position of the modern Jew is different from any- thing that has gone before ; for the condi- tions of modern society are so entirely different. Everything is so fluent, plas- tic, and changing from moment to mo- ment ; everything goes at so quick a pace, circulates so widely, freely, and rap- idly. Thought is so active and alert, life is at such high pressure and such close pressure everywhere, that the Jew, even 118 THE CLAIM OF JUDAISM. more than others, keen and sensitive to these influences, is caught up and whirled along in the great stream of physical forces. He finds more and more difficulty in conforming to the exigencies of his re- ligion, so that only an ever-diminishing number are willing to make the sacrifices imposed upon them. But he drifts with the tide, enjoying to the full, the play and freedom of long unused activities, the stimulus and excitement of the struQ:g:le, until a stern voice recalls him to hnnself . In the midst of the great, rushing, inex- orable present that will not wait, but hurries him along, rises the great, fixed, inexorable past that bids him halt : ^^ Thus far, and no farther. Thou canst not if thou wouldst be free. Look back! four thousand years ! over the ruins of empire, the tombs of nations, the rise and fall of false faiths and perishable gods. There never was a time when THE CLAIM OF JUDAISM. 119 Israel did not exist. Shall Israel cease to exist witli thee ? " A solemn call, and we Jews must feel it so. We cannot make the choice lightly, or for any slight or worldly cause. Above all, we cannot drift, we cannot shirk our destiny. We must meet and face it, whatever it bring, whatever it take away. But let us be sure we hear the voice aright. Let us listen, not to the voice of tradition and authority, of human circumstance and history, of human glory and survival, not to the call of the Scribes and the Pharisees, but to the voice of the Prophets, the men of vision who pro- claimed the eternal, the everlasting Idea, yet to be attained, yet to be ful- filled, where others saw only the imper- fect human fulfilment. Let us not be deceived. It is not enough merely to survive. The test of an ideal, its true vitality, consists not in 120 THE CLAIM OF JUDAISM. survival, but in its power of growth. It must not only have roots, but it must be free to rise and expand out of the dark earth in which it has been protected and encased, into the universal sunshine and air. It must not fear to crumble into dust, like some dead thing at a touch from outside. On the contrary, it must be ex- posed to all the winds of heaven and the tempests that shake the earth, all adverse and benign influence, using all for pur- poses and material of growth, steadily rising and spreading always, reaching out mighty, outstretching arms and generous branch after branch, where all men may come and find shelter and repose. Let us not be deceived. The Jewish idea sur- vives, but only on condition that it shall not so expand, that it shall not rise into freedom and light ; only on condition that it shall remain fixed and stationary, pro- longing its existence by artificial and THE CLAIM OF JUDAISM. 121 external means, rather than by process of inner and organic growth. And what, then, is this Jewish ideal for which we must live or die, in contra- distinction to the Christian ideal ? The Jewish ideal, we are told by those who would draw the distinction, is jus- tice. The Christian ideal is love. The Jewish ideal places the emphasis on the life, the practice, the Law fulfilled as law, as duty, as morality enforced from on high. "Thus saith the Lord." The Christian places it on faith, on the Law fulfilled as love, which gives the impulse, the motive, and the power whereby to fulfil the Law, and therefore the life of the moral deed. Is there then radical opposition and antagonism between the two ? Does the one exclude the other ? I think it does, unless we are willing to believe that the greater includes the less, the whole in- 122 THE CLAIM OF JUDAISM. eludes the part, reconciles and completes it. Only through love is the true moral life attained, the moral law fulfilled^ ex- plained, and justified, touched and quick- ened into a passionate holiness, instead of a soulless code of external obligation and conformity. Love is religion, the binding force of the universe, — that which binds man close to man, which binds man close to God. Only to the eye of love that pierces the very heart of things and searches the inward part and reins, can justice ever be revealed. And this then is the crucial test, the kernel of difference. We may do away with rabbinism, we may strip away husk after husk of outward distinction, all artificial barriers and enactments of sepa- ration, every badge and label that di- vides the Jew from the rest of the world; but here, and here alone, hidden in the depths of the siDiritual life, is the truth THE CLAIM OF JUDAISM. 123 that shall set us free and make us one with our fellows, because it makes all men truly brothers, children of one lov- ing Father, and all alike sharers of the divine life. " For there is no difference between the Jew and the Greek ; for the same Lord over all is rich unto those who call upon Him." How little the world has yet realised or even understood this ideal, how far removed is the kingdom of peace on earth and good-will to men, no people better than the Jews can testify, — " in stripes and in imprisonments, in wan- derings by land and sea, in cold and darkness, hunger and thirst, patience and long-suffering." For that very rea- son are we, the Jews, above all others, the ones to hasten its coming, to give our life, our soul, to further, not to hin- der it ; to make it a reality, not a mockery, an actuality as well as an ideal. Then, 124 THE CLAIM OF JUDAISM. and then only, " will death be swallowed up in victory ; and the Lord God will wipe away tears from oft' all faces ; and the rebuke of His people shall He take away from olf all the earth : for the Lord hath spoken it." '' But we are born," you say, " into a race and religion." Yes, but we must be born again into larger and higher conditions than this race and this reli- gion permit, into more spiritual rela- tions, not only with our fellow-beings, but with God ; into a more vitalised and liberating faith. We must be born again, not of the flesh, but of the spirit, which apprehends God, which recognises and reveals Him in close and tender rela- tion, personally and individually, to each and all of us. And this is the Messiah, the Counsellor and inward messenger that brings peace to the soul, — not a man, a God, but the spirit that abides THE CLAIM OF JUDAISM. 125 with all men and makes God manifest according to our capacity to receive and apprehend Him. Whether or not this spirit has ever incarnated itself in its human and ideal perfection in any being that has walked the earth, any actual or historic personage, or whether it will ever so incarnate itself, is the point where Jews and Christians divide. But whatever theology may have done to distort and pervert, whatever modifi- cation and foreign admixture may have crept in, in passing through so many minds, so many families and races of men, the Messianic idea is no less essen- iX tial to Judaism than to Christianity. Without it Judaism is maimed, imper- fect, and can never hope to carry salva- tion to the Gentiles and publish peace to all the world. We hear little of it now among the Jews ; but we cannot let it go as we have done from our spiritual con- 126 THE CLAIM OF JUDAISM. sciousness without spiritual loss. We cannot let it lapse, as we have clone, or be lost in some vague millennial dream of temporal welfare and prosperity; for it has grown to be a personal gift and pos- session of mankind, a psychological fact, a vital necessity of man's inmost being. Once having conceived this ultimate re- demption, nothing short of a divinely-per- fected humanity can content us, — man rising to God, God stooping to man, the human and divine so merged that each is recognised in and of the other, a spiritual presence everywhere. There is no idol- atry in this when rightly understood. On the contrary, it does away with idol- atry ; for it places no concrete image, no visible form, between God and His crea- tures, but draws each man m his own spirit, in his own likeness, up to God, accordino; as God has fashioned him. The work of the intellect is sino-ular. THE CLAIM OF JUDAISM. 127 Men have intuitively apprehended the great spiritual truths. Then comes the intellect, weighing and measuring and casting everything into its own mould, shaping and adapting the truths of God to suit men's limited comprehension; and so we have dogma, hard and unyielding, almost quenching the spirit and the truth. Then when the intellect has out- grown its own limitations, and when the world is ready for a purer form of the spirit, a clearer expression of the truth, this self-same intellect turns and rends what it had created, destroys what it had so elaborately built up. But the spirit shines out undimmed, more lumi- nous than ever. Thus the idea of God has undergone many idolatrous phases. The idea of the Messiah must pass through the same process of purification and evolution. The problem of Judaism is more diffi- 128 THE CLAIM OF JUDAISM. cult than that of any other religion. We are constantly being recruited, as it were, from below. The tide of immigration pours into us its troubled waters, — the ignorant, the superstitious, the outcast, the outlandish of the nations, the slaves of centuries of bondage. To feed, to clothe, to shelter them, to give them bodily com- forts, is a task taxing our utmost strength. To feed them spiritually is a task almost beyond our strength. For a while they may be satisfied to practise their religion, to shut themselves off from other men ; but who can doubt that, breathing the air of freedom, scenting the battle from afar, like so many others, they will cast off the chains that oppress them and fling themselves into the fray, the mad rush and struggle for material things that leaves neither time nor room for other pre-occupations ? Says Mr. Zangwill, — "Russia and America are the two THE CLAIM OF JUDAISM. 129 strongholds of the race, and Russia is pouring her streams into America, where they will be made free men and free thinkers. It is in America, then, that the last great battle of Judaism will be fought out ; amid the temples of the New \Yorld it will make its last struggle to survive." The strength of the Jewish life lies, I am told, " in the great body of sound, normal, commonplace lives which go to make up the strength or the weakness (?) of the life of every community." But let us look a little more closely into this same body of " normal, commonplace lives." Shall we not find here, as else- where, a lurking discontent, a sense of personal grievance and disadvantage, and at the same time a galled and sensitive pride that chafes under their Judaism ? And, one hardly dares whisper it, shall we not also find even here anti-Semi- 9 130 THE CLAIM OF JUDAISM. tism cropping out against any class less qualified, less modernised than their own ? But even if such a sound body of commonplace lives existed, I do not think they would fitly represent Judaism, un- less Judaism is content to remain a com- monplace and insignificant element in modern civilisation. On the contrary, I think there will only be strength in Israel when there shall arise great lead- ers, lifted above just this sordid common- placeness, this official and banded Phil- istinism ; men of daring thought and action, in touch with their people through sympathy and appreciation, but in touch also with the larger spiritual and reli- gious movement of their times ; men who feel acutely the need, and the heavy weight of their responsibility, — who are not afraid to pluck religion out of the temples and synagogues where it has THE CLAIM OF JUDAISM. 131 slumbered, out of the dead forms and effete rites, and carry it into the heart of life, to set free the God so long im- prisoned in the ark of the covenant, and make Him a living presence in the world ; men who have renounced the visible temporal church in order to enter the Church Universal, the church invisible that is not of time or space, where the saints and seers of all time, the "illumined" of all sects, all creeds, and all races have ever worshipped and will worship through the ages. They only are the saviours of the people who, recognising the tremendous signifi- cance of the past, recognise also the tre- mendous significance of the present ; who are alive and awake to the call, the message of the hour, ready for joyful sacrifice and fulfihnent, knowing the time has come when Israel shall take her place among the nations, her war- 132 THE CLAIM OF JUDAISM. fare accomplished, triumphant, crowned with the spiritual crown of sacrifice, the sign and promise of a kingdom that is not of the earth. Mmj, 1894. THE TASK OF JUDAISM. T ONG ago has our nineteenth century ^^^ been branded as an age of unbelief and materialism, of vanished faith and ideals, of religious indifference or positive revolt. In reality it has been a period of intense religious ferment and upheaval, of moral and spiritual conflict, of religious growth and evolution. It has been a time to try men's souls, to test and strain to the utmost the faith that was in them ; for it has seemed that the powers of light as well as of darkness, the dictates of reason, of science, and of conscience, conspired to force man to surrender, to deny his high- est right and privilege, to make him the tool, the victim of blind chance or blind 134 THE TASK OF JUDAISM. necessity, of laws so fixed and inexorable as forever to chain him to matter and hopelessly bind the wings of his spirit. Happily that time has passed, or is pass- ing y and there is no more significant fact than the changed attitude of the world's thought to-day on these great topics. Like the light slowly creeping over the mountain tops, God is coming back into His world. His name appears again where it had been banished. Men are no longer afraid of that highest concep- tion of their intellect and heart, that su- preme postulate of their reason, the sole cause and end of their being. But it is a changed conception that they hold, and one that no longer fits in with the old theologies, the established creeds and worship, the limitations of doc- trine and sect. Within the churches to some extent, but still more outside of the churches, a new current has set in, — a THE TASK OF JUDAISM. 135 breaking free from dogma and prescribed form ; a broadening and expansion of the religious life that shows a new force at work, — a force that men had tried to imprison within fixed and narrow articles of faith (so-called), but that can no more be imprisoned than the wind can be im- prisoned, " which bloweth, like the spirit, where it listeth." It is not that a new religion has come into the world, but that religion is being born from a lower to a higher plane, — out of the realm of ma- terial forms, the systems men have built around it, the body with which it has been clothed, into the realm of spirit, a purely inner kingdom, where alone man meets God, and God meets man. According to the freedom with which any religion expands to this ideal, without losing its content and identity ; according to the richness and the fulness of the spiritual life, the closeness of union and 136 THE TASK OF JUDAISM. communion so attained, — will be the measure and the scope of that religion as a factor and a working-power in the world's spiritual progress. To this tri- bunal now comes every sect of Christen- dom and every form of Judaism. We Jews are apt to think that we are not broken up into sects like other reli- gions; that, in spite of external and in- tellectual difference, a Jew is a Jew the world over, bound by some ineradicable bond that no force of circumstance or environment has the power or the right to break. In reality, we are broken up into almost as many sects as units. Each man is a law unto himself, — that is to say, he is an expounder and interpreter of the law according to his own wisdom. The division of " orthodox " and '' re- form " suffices to cover the whole range of Judaism, the whole field of religious activity and debate, embracing opinions THE TASK OF JUDAISM. 137 the most diverse and contradictory, and types the most opposite that can be con- ceived. At one extreme we have medi- aevalism, the still unburied ghost, wrapped round with all the mummery of the past, — dead form, dead rites, dead letter, — that haunts the Ghetto and bids us be- ware how we step beyond those sacred walls. At the other extreme we have nineteenth century progress and reform, the liberal and enlightened rabbi, who tells us, — " Assuredly, if you will, we are ready to give up our peculiar traits and customs, if these offend; to abolish religious or ceremonial rites which the spirit of the age cannot approve ; to abandon fringes and phylacteries. Nay, more, indeed, we have already done so, and have consigned them to the lumber-room of the past, in order to make room for the decrees of modern a3stheticism." 138 THE TASK OF JUDAISM. And this accomplished, let me ask, What have you given in their place ? What have you now to give that will take the place of so much that was vital and integral to the faith as your fathers and forefathers conceived it^ and as many still conceive it, — the vast system of rules and regulations that has been so la- boriously and so conscientiously built up, on which all the spiritual energies, the practical piety and devotion of your peo- ple, have been expended for untold gene- rations; the method of their holiness, by which, however crudely, they brought God into their lives, in personal, concrete, and direct relation, — the very life of Judaism in the sense that it permeates the whole scheme and process of dailj^ living ? To take all this away, to set all this aside, and put nothing in its place, is to leave a gap which the ordinary mind, the average religious consciousness of THE TASK OF JUDAISM. 139 men, cannot possibly supply. What have you now to give, what have you now to teach, to offset the world* s teachings and the world's gifts ? Look around you. See the defection everywhere, the indifference, the neglect and lack of interest in things spiritual and religious, the widespread and ever-grow- ing unbelief and secularism. From all sides sounds a cry of warning and alarm. In Germany, we are told, "ninety-five per cent of the Jewish youth is atheistic, and at best utterly indifferent. The other five per cent are divided between orthodoxy and reform." In England, says a reverend doctor, " it is a critical time for Judaism. The synagogues become less and less fre- quented. In vain they are made splendid and luxurious ; in vain the organ lends its solemn, awe-inspiring strains, — . . . the synagogues are less and less fre- quented." Says another authority, " Our 140 THE TASK OF JUDAISM. people are spiritually starved ; " and from Jewish mothers comes the plaint, — '' What shall we teach our children ? Is there any reason why we should grow up and raise our little ones without re- ligion? . . . For we are raising them without religion. I repeat, we are raising up, here in our midst, and in the midst of other congregations, a generation with- out religion. Oh, yes, we have our Sun- day-schools. You send your children there, but for what? To learn ancient history and the rudiments of a dead language. Do you call that religion? . . . Religion means far more than the repetition of a series of kings or judges, or a list of tribes, with perhaps the abil- ity stumblingly to read through a given number of Hebrew prayers with their translations. . . . All the knowledge of an ancient history and of a dead lan- guage will never hold one child loyal THE TASK OF JUDAISM. 141 to the faith of his fathers. . . . Whose the fault, and where does the responsi- biUty lie ? It matters not. . . . But rather what is the remedy ? " And from opposite camps we hear the old, old cry, — " Orthodoxy " on the one side, and on the other " Reform ; " neither seeing the pitfalls of the other, neither seeing that it is just on these rocks that we have split and gone to pieces. The props have been removed, the strongholds deserted, that had long been guarded at such fearful cost ; and Judaism has been left defenceless to battle with the world alone, and open to the enemy. ^^Nay, not so fast," you will protest; " Judaism does not stand, does not fall, with orthodoxy or reform. Judaism is founded on a rock, — the rock of the moral law, firm as the foundations of the earth, that cannot be moved. All else may pass, all forms, all shows, but 142 THE TASK OF JUDAISM. this remains. Judaism in its essence is so simple, so sublime a thing: not a complex ecclesiasticism, not a doctrinal or dogmatic creed, not a theory or ab- stract speculation, but a religion of life, the moral life itself, the moral law or- dained by God, — ' To do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God/ " A simple code, no doubt; and yet how does it come that throughout our history, in tragic and in prosperous times, in order to bring it even dimly to the apprehension of our people, to make it valid as a working principle, — "a religion of life," as you say, — it has always been found necessary to supple- ment it with the ceremonial code, which, with all its intricacy and its ramifica- tions, has been more easily and more lovingly followed? In vain did the Prophets exhort and denounce : in their THE TASK OF JUDAISM. 143 days, as in ours, we have always been able and willing to bring our sacrifice and burnt-offering. The sacrifice of the heart we have not yet learned how to bring. The Law, even in its most literal, most technical shape, has been our con- solation and delight ; upon it have we meditated day and night. And not with- out reason, for it has had its roots deep down in the very constitution of our Judaism ; it has been our link and medi- ator with the divine, our religion, inas- much as it bound us to one another and bound us to God at the same time that it effectually separated us from the rest of mankind. Can we wonder, then, that this being withdrawn, the Law having lost its hold and stringency, its unifying and sanctifying power, the people should scatter and fall apart, should waver and grow confused in their allegiance, and that the house should be divided against itself ? 144 THE TASK OF JUDAISM. And the cause of this does not lie merely m the removal of outward re- straint and compulsion, but still more in the lack of inward compulsion and harmony, the need of an inner motive and incentive that should give sanctity and consecration to life. Not merely that we should set aside intellectual dif- ference, and unite among ourselves upon some common ground, some point of law or doctrine, some common rule of life even, but that in the very heart of life there should be unity and peace. And for this we must look deeper than the cere- monial, deeper even than the moral law, — in which it was never intended that we should find ultimate rest, because it is not the end of our being, the fulfilment and satisfaction of our spiritual nature, the rock on which we can finally repose. The mistake we make lies in pinning our faith to any law, even the most sub- THE TASK OF JUDAISM. 145 lime. The Lcaw has been our strength, — it Ims also been our stumbling- block, our fetich and graven image at times. In it we have put all our trust. "It is not God's truth, it is not God's law, — it is God that is the salvation of the world." The moral law may be a more spiritual rendering than the ceremonial of our relation to God ; but it does not give us the whole truth of that relation, the last word of holiness, which means oneness with the Divine, any more than it gives us the whole content of our human relations. The moral law does not of necessity lead us to God, although it may lead us to the heights of human and heroic endeavour : whether it also lead us " beyond," into conscious relation with something or some one that is above and beyond the human, is largely a matter of our own special needs and temperament. 10 146 THE TASK OF JUDAISM. The essence of a faith^ then, lies not alone in its moral efficacy, but in the spirit and freedom of its obedience, and its free access to God ; in the instant recognition of a divine impulse, a divine Presence in the soul, which the moral law does not necessarily evoke, but from which the moral law necessarily flows as a loving trust and obedience. " Climb the moral heights within," you say, -'rise to the moral truth, and thou too shalt receive from God the tablets of His law." Nay, but rather let it be " according to your faith," — that is, according to your inward vision, your sense of this Pres- ence, your power to discern the hidden truth, the deepest meaning of life, the eternal reality beneath the appearance, which we call God ; above all, according to your power to trust this vision of God in your life, and in all life, through what- ever cloud, whatever hindrance of tem- THE TASK OF JUDAISM. 147 perament or circumstance, will be the measure of your strength to rise and reach those shining heights. Religion does not begin and end with the moral law, but includes it in its larger, deeper scope. " Though I were perfect, yet would I not know my own soul," says Job. Religion, in its fullest sense — namely, service, loving service to God and man — is not satisfied with justice and with duty, grand and commanding though these ideals may be. " There is a word over all, beautiful as the sky," fall- ing like the rain and the sunshine on the just and the unjust. We may climb the moral heights perforce, we may tread the lofty summits of duty ; " we may do justice and love mercy : " " we may be- stow our goods to feed the poor, and give our body to be burned, — but if we have not charity [a love and insight rather divine than human] it profiteth nothing." 148 THE TASK OF JUDAISM. ^'But society cannot be founded on love/' says the exponent of Judaism, who insists " that it is just here where Christianity errs, and proves itself so inferior to Judaism, so inadequate in its conception and scheme of life, — a re- ligion for children and undeveloped na- tions, not for mature and thinking men." "Justice," he tells us, "is definite, and love indefinite. Justice each can claim from each and all ; love none can claim from any. That which justice bids be done is predicable and verifiable as a mathematical problem ; justice is indeed a form of applied mathematics. That which love bids be done is not predicable and is not verifiable, it is always an un- known quantity. It is quite obvious, therefore, that justice can and that love cannot furnish a basis for legislation, for the regulation of human affairs." Apart from the astounding claim that THE TASK OF JUDAISM. 1^9 justice is or could ever be made an exact science, "a form of applied mathema- tics," — could ever be so accurately weighed and measured in the human understanding as to furnish an infallible basis, an infallible standard and guide for human affairs, — how is it possible to conceive of a living, breathing human society, a group of erring, aspiring human beings, as a mathematical problem, a group of mathematical units requiring mathematical test and treatment ? If such were the perfect society, then better the most imperfect that has yet been evolved. But without stopping to consider so extraordinary a statement, I would only call to mind a simple fact. The root of society is the family. Is the family founded on justice, — or, in this case, does not justice freely flow from love ? And is the family therefore less stable, or rather more so, than society, because 150 THE TASK OF JUDAISM. its basis is more organic, more deeply rooted in the very constitution of tilings ? The primitive man, the savage, recog- nises no tie beyond self, — no larger rela- tion, no love but self-love. Out of this evolves family love, with its sacred ties, its tender and holy association. Out of this evolves the State, with its complex relations, its almost infinite promise and scope. Far, far distant are we yet from this larger ideal of human progress and growth, — of love, or even of justice, in this largest of human relations. And yet justice belongs to the more rudimen- tary plane and type of society. It is the preparation for love, — the claim that can be enforced, prior to the claim that does not need to be enforced. Justice is not done away with by love, but is simply deepened and enriched, — taking deeper root, lifting itself into higher and more aspiring growth. THE TASK OF JUDAISM. 151 Finally, in regard to our relation with a Supreme Being, the same critic tells us: "From man to God there can be love, and this love is the very essence of religion ; but from God to man there cannot be love, because love expresses a human emotion, having in it an ele- ment of yearning and a desire for pos- session, —and to ascribe love to God is an anthropopathism, just as the ascrip- tion to God of hands or eyes is an anthropomorphism." . And in the first place, it seems to me that even in its human aspect love has something more of the divine than is here attributed to it. But setting this aside, if there cannot be love from God to man, still less can there be justice on either side. " How should a man be just with God ? " and "In God's sight can no man living be justified." Moreover, a God with a conscience, a moral sense, is as " anthro- 152 THE TASK OF JUDAISM. popathic" as a God with a heart or an emotional sense. The moral is no less a purely human attribute and measurement. Whatever we know or predicate of God transcends our moralities just as much as it transcends our emotions, — even as the heavens are high above the earth. But even that dread word, anthropo- morphism, has lost some of its terrors these last few years. Even scientists are beginning to acknowledge that a God of humanity must have something in com- mon with humanity ; otherwise loe could not love Him. And this love '' is the very essence of religion," you say. Surely God were less, not more, than human if He could not love us, His children, whom He has created in His own image and likeness, whom He pities even as a father pities his children. And I think we should often find in the life and religious experience of many people that this love THE TASK OF JUDAISM. 153 — or rather the awakening into it, the growing knowledge and consciousness of it — had been the very beginning of the spiritual life, the leading out from dark- ness into light. ^^'Say to your friend, your child, ^God loves you;' say it in every language of yours, in every ver- nacular of his, which you can command." So teaches Phillips Brooks, and I think there is inspiration in the words. But these are themes that do not ad- mit of argument or proof on any side, and must rather come before the judg- ment seat of each individual soul. Let us return then to the main point, the living, practical issue. Our people are crying for bread and we are giving them a stone. I wish to point out the fact that there are two aspects of the problem before us, the crisis we have come upon, — the one in our outer, external life, in our unsolved 154 THE TASK OF JUDAISM. and unsatisfactory relations with the people around us; the other and far deeper one, it seems to nie, in ourselves, in our inner life, in those deeper prin- ciples and convictions in which we had thought ourselves forever grounded and fixed. And I cannot help feeling that the solution of the one depends primarily upon the other ; the solution of both de- pends primarily upon ourselves. From within as well as from without we are confronted with new conditions, grave needs which we seem in no wise pre- pared to meet : from within rather than from without must come the answers, the guiding light to a new and larger destiny. Whatever may have been true of the past, the key of the situation lies now in our hands. But it cannot be by the old methods and formulae, the old stereotyped answers, that we can hope to unravel it. Both THE TASK OF JUDAISM. 155 "orthodoxy" and ^'reform" have alike proved their inadequacy. The new wine cannot be put into old bottles, else the bottles break. Still more foolhardy and presumptuous were it, however, to at- tempt to give a panacea for all the ills our people are heir to ; to find an instant and definite solution, a complete settle- ment, of all our doubts and difficulties that should at once cover all the facts and appeal to all intelligences. There can only be gradual growth and emanci- pation according to our lights, our oppor- tunities, and understanding; gradual adjustment and adaptation to our new environment, whether temporal or spir- itual, — a long, difficult, and laborious process. But it must be a growth from within of greater freedom and light, not a gift from without. And if ever in the distant future we can hope to see the so-called Jewish ques- 156 THE TASK OF JUDAISM. tion settled, it is we ourselves, and not the people around us, who must settle it. It is we ourselves who must lay it at rest by living in larger questions than those of race or sect or narrow creed, in larger rehgious sympathies and toleration, in the larger sjnrit of our faith in a universal Father, rather than in the restrictions and bondage of the letter that would con- fine it exclusively to our peculiar Jewish dispensation. In a word, it must be a change of heart and spirit, of inner mo- tive and attitude, rather than of circum- stance. Circumstances have changed and are changing all the time around us, and yet, in a sense, we diO not change. The Jew remains the Jew, separated by alien traditions, by almost invincible antago- nisms, from the people with whom he dwells in close daily living and contact. However much, however little we base it on, whether as race or religion, the primal THE TASK OF JUDAISM. 157 fact with US remains our Judaism, our survival as Jews, distinct from the people around us, — a survival, a distinction always to be insisted upon, not as a large, all-embracing spiritual idea and fellowship that welcomes other expres- sion of the truth besides its own, but, on the contrary, as a principle that under some form, some pretext or another, always isolates and excludes. It were idle to attribute solely to others, and therefore to resent with such bitter heart-burning, that very aloofness which is the basis of our own existence. It is we who draw the lines and make the terms and conditions, who call out to the people around us : " Thus far and no farther ! We will buy with you, we will sell with you, we will give and take ; but bone of our bone, flesh of our flesh, spirit of our spirit, shall you not be. For we are a holy and consecrated race. 158 THE TASK OF JUDAISM. unto whom, and unto whom alone, God's truth has been conveyed m order that we may hand it down intact to our chil- dren and our children's children after them." A logical position, if you will; but then we must abide by it, and be will- ing to take the consequences. We must be content with our isolation and exclu- sion, our little corner of Palestine, our Jerusalem old or new, the Ghettos of our own making. We must remain Hebrews among Hebrews, a peculiar race, a pe- culiar sect, whose very existence betokens separation, whose only claim can be for recognition as such a sect and race, — for toleration, not for perfectly free and equal acceptance by people of alien birth and belief. Presupposhig narrowness, we naturally find narrowness ; we invite it and we meet it again and again, gener- ally of a more malignant type than our THE TASK OF JUDAISM. 159 own, in others more ignorant than our- selves, or more endowed with social and worldly advantage. But we can hardly expect that even the most well-disposed of those outside our faith should not make their own reservations and exclu- sions, and draw their own conclusions. We can hardly expect that they should regard as universal a religion that re- quires so many safeguards and precau- tions in order to secure its continuance, or that the world should be edified by ideals that necessarily move in so small a compass. " Not ours the fault ! '' you exclaim. " The Jew is ready. The Jew hopes and prays for the time when his religion as distinguished from others shall no longer be. The Jew is ready, and has been for some time, to plunge into the ocean of hu- manity. But the world is not ready ; the time is not ripe. The ocean of humanity 160 THE TASK OF JUDAISM. does not as yet invite us to its invigorat- ing waves. The poisoned arrows of hate are still abroad, still seeking the Jew as a target. The fault is not ours. The Jew cannot say when the time shall be for him to disappear. The world at large has to fix the hour." And it is just exactly here where you are wrong. It is for the Jew to sound the note of his own freedom, when he is ready for it, to claim it, rather than wait for the world to fix the hour, for the world to give it to him. It is for the Jew himself to throw off the chains that bind him, whether of his own or the world's making ; to break down the barriers, the walls of defiance or defence, behind which he has so long been forced to shelter him- self ; and to stand free among free men, '' with the glorious liberty of the sons of God, of those who are led by the spirit of God, and for whom the whole creation THE TASK OF JUDAISM. 161 waits." If the Jew is ready for this and does not do it, then his own words con- demn him. The world cannot hinder, the world cannot bring it about. And, in the face of anti-Semitism, I believe that the world will recognise it when the Jew actually is free. Anti-Semitism cannot make, cannot keep us Jews, any more than it can make Christians of us, if we have no better reason for being either the one or the other. That were a low view of Judaism. Like a dark cloud upon the horizon, anti- Semitism still lingers in lands where darkness lingers. In America, in such shadowy form as it appears, it disappears again like a cloud when we ignore it, when we have learned to live far and away above and beyond it, in the peace and freedom of large and liberated ideas. We bear a charmed life ; the slings and arrows of hate pass us by unharmed, because they no longer touch us. We 11 162 THE TASK OF JUDAISM. are not traitors, we are not cowards who desert our less fortunate brethren, the oppressed and persecuted of our race. On the contrary, " if we would lift them, we must stand on higher ground than they," and the best and most loyal service we can do them, is to lead them gently but firmly where they too may be finally beyond the range of persecution and hate. Here in America we stand on such a vantage ground, we survey so wide a field, — the whole stretch of our civili- sation as it were, conditions so various, opportunities so vast, — that here if any- where the problem must resolve itself. By almost imperceptible and insensible grada- tions, the East seems to merge and be lost in the West, the old seems to melt in the new, and Israel to disappear in the vast ocean of humanity. Like the gathering of the waters they come on every side, — from the dark ages THE TASK OF JUDAISM. 1G3 one might almost say, the benighted hinds where no ray of freedom has ever reached. We do not say to these bewildered and belated wanderers from other climes and times : " Keep your jargon and your un- couth ways and customs. Insist upon being Russians, Poles, Roumanians, for on no account must you lose your nation- ality and identity." On the contrary, we bid them welcome only on condition that they shall lose it, that they shall become Americans as we are ; we teach them what it means to be free, and in a generation their children are free-born Americans. And so too with our Jewish nationality. We cannot expect to become citizens of the world while we remain citizens of Judaea, bound by local ties, local preju- dice and interests ; so long as we insist upon perpetuating a race-tie that sepa- rates us from the people around us. But there is still a deeper question in- 164 THE TASK OF JUDAISM. volved, which in reality includes the other two. Politically, socially, we may be free, or we may become so in time through the gradual process of emancipa- tion and amalgamation, conditioned to a certain degree, upon the political and so- cial status of the nation among whom we happen to dwell. But there is another freedom into which we can only enter through our own initiative, our own effort or aspiration, and at such time and in such degree as we may be ready for it. Few of us may suspect, perhaps, and still fewer be willing to acknowledge, the lack among us of spiritual and religious free- dom, — of that freedom of the soul, of the spirit " which bloweth where it list- eth," and which leaves us free to go forth beyond our own borders, to seek, to find, to share the spiritual life, wherever and however it may meet us. Pent up so long in our Jewries, we do THE TASK OF JUDAISM. 1G5 not realise how exclusive, how concen- trated, how intensely Jewish our thought, our whole point of view has become. Whoever has transcended it has of ne- cessity been ostracised. Witness Spi- noza, Maimonides even, " who is cursed as a heretic and perverter of the Law." We do not realise how completely we have been shut out from the larger spiritual life of the world around us, from all spiri- tual contact and intercourse with any but our little band of so-called co-religionists ; how limited in consequence are our sym- pathies in this direction, and how ham- pered our judgment. We may know somewhat of the history of the Christian Church, its errors, its follies, and its crimes, especially in dealing with our- selves ; we may know somewhat of Chris- tian Doctrine, the teachings and opinions of men ; but of that inner life of the world whose course and whose shaping are due 166 THE TASK OF JUDAISM. to Christian thought and influence, — that is to say, to the life and spirit of Christ, — we know very little, nor are we willing to acquiesce in what little we do know. We are still largely under the impression that religiously, as compared with our- selves, the nations around us are sunk in darkness. However liberal-minded we may hold ourselves to be, however emancipated, however indifferent to the forms of our own faith, our glory and our pride still lie in the fact that we are not Chris- tians, but outside of the pale as much as ever, and as firmly persuaded that no good can come out of Nazareth. In our heart of hearts we know very well that not for an instant do we tolerate Chris- tianity, or look upon it other than as an aberration, a perversion of Judaism, " a degrading form of error," of superstition, of idolatry and man-worship. The very THE TASK OF JUDAISM. 167 name of Christ is a sacrilege in our eyes, a standing menace and reproach, a viola- tion of our sacred principle of monothe- ism, at which our Jewish sensibilities spring to arms or shrink within them- selves, chilled and repelled. But why should we, and we alone, be conscious of this moral shock, when even within doc- trinal limits we see how wide a field, how large a latitude, is possible, — as evi- denced by the number and diversity of Christian sects, ranging from High-Church Episcopalian to Unitarianism ; above all, when we remember how commanding a place this conception in some form or other, this personality, has taken in the civilisation of which we form a part, in tiie almost universal religious conscious- ness of men among whom we desire to dwell? We think others narrow, or less en- lightened than ourselves, who are not 168 THE TASK OF JUDAISM. willing or able to receive our doctrine, our version of the truth, our conception of the Deity, our ideas of the world's moral and social regeneration; and yet whatever we may do in secular matters, in religious and spiritual matters we do not allow a ray of light to penetrate from outside. We do not even conceive or acknowledge that there can be any light, any vision but our own, — so firmly have we believed what our fathers have told us from the beginning ; so confident, so secure are we that the truth we hold about God is all the truth that men have ever known, all that they can ever know, all they need to know, and that therefore our mission consists in guard- ing this truth unsullied from the world until the world is worthy to receive it. The question I would ask now is : Are we justified in this belief ; and does the spiritual condition of our people bear THE TASK OF JUDAISM. 169 witness to it, either to the people around us or among ourselves ? Where are our spiritual teachers? What are our con- tributions to the spiritual thought of the Avorld ? Open our " religious " books, our Jewish magazines and periodicals, — what shall we find but arid, technical, legal discussion — exegetical treatises, learned disquisitions perhaps, on some obscure point of law or doctrine, the root of some Hebrew word, the source of some far-away tradition, — purely sectarian questions, that could only concern us as a narrow local sect, and could have no uni- versal significance or application, no pos- sible relation, to the world at large, — Jewish topics for a Jewish audience? Is this all that we can lay claim to, all that we can aspire to, — we, who hold God's truth in the hollow of our hand ? Not a breath of the sph^it anywhere, not a hint of the spiritual life truly so-called. 170 THE TASK OF JUDAISM. Cramped within our narrow borders^ we are stifled for lack of air to breathe, for lack of room to grow, for lack of life, spiritual life, — the life w^hich is more than food or raiment, more than deeds or creeds, which comes down to us from above, and is the free gift of God to those who are free to receive and there- fore free to give. It is not enough, as we have seen, to lop off excrescences, to rub away the dust and mould of centuries, the Ghetto accumulation of effete rites and customs, so long as our spirit is not free to rise above Jewish horizons and boundary lines, to see that in God's boundless universe all truth, all spirit are one, alike for the Jew and the Christian who live in the spirit and the truth. It is not enough to humanise, to liberalise, to " moralise," or secularise our religion. What we need is to spiritualise it by making our relation THE TASK OF JUJ)A1SM. 171 with God, and thence our relation with men, a more vital and therefore a more spiritual one than can be based on law in any form. Law is of the natural order, and love is of the spiritual order ; hence law can never be the fundamental rela- tion which binds us to one another as spiritual beings, and to God as spirit. Law can only be the tutelage through which we must pass to higher freedom, — that freedom of the spirit which is life, spiritual life, because it lives in the spirit, not the letter of man's obedience, in the motive rather than the deed, and which is therefore love in the highest, — " the unknown quantity," if you will, because it puts that touch of the Lifinite into life and gives the heaiity of holiness, "the light that never was on sea or land," and yet " the master-light of all our seeing ; " which cannot be predicated, which can- not be verified, because it transcends hu- 172 THE TASK OF JUDAISM. man logic and proof; which cannot be bound, which cannot be claimed nor con- ditioned, but must always remain a free gift, freely given and freely received, — the perfect love which casts out fear, " the peace which passes understanding." Is this Christianity ? Is it Judaism ? What does it matter? Side by side, shoulder to shoulder, stand the Christian and the Jew, their task precisely the same, their destiny strangely bound together ; no longer separated even by arbitrary and external distinctions, still less by any real distinction, and yet divided as ever in heart and spirit and allegiance, unable or unwilling to recognise each other as brothers in the deepest sense, children of the same spiritual Father, heirs of the true faith which by its largeness, its power to satisfy the deepest spiritual needs of men, shall overcome the world. One of the most spiritually-minded of THE TASK OF JUDAISM. 173 our New England women, whose life and letters have just been published, writes thus to a Jew : " I have always had the idea that Jew and Christian were really one ; only they did not understand each other." And, again, Claude Montefiore in a recent article says : " The doctrine of Jesus may be regarded as pure Chris- tianity or pure Judaism. Either way contains a truth." Whence comes, then, this tragic misunderstanding, this gulf of separation that the ages have not been able to bridge over? " I come not to send peace on earth, but a sword." The words ring down through the centuries. It is Christ the Jew, Christ the Christian, who has set at variance the Christian with the Jew, " the parent with the child, the brother with the brother." Nor will the sword be laid aside until Christian and Jew alike, until all mankind, come to a better 174 THE TASK OF JUDAISM. understanding of the truth of love he taught; the life of love he lived, the way of love he showed, by which all men, without respect of persons or condition — not alone the prophet and the saint, the holy men of Israel, the elect of the world, but the sinner and the outcast and the lost sheep, the least of His little ones — should come nigh the Father. "Ah, but," you exclaim, "for well- nigh two thousand years this religion of love has been taught, has been preached from how many pulpits, in how many lands, and what has come of it ? Cor- ruption in high places and in low; a society built on selfishness, whose very pillars are greed ; a ruinous competition which drives the weak ones to the wall, and poverty stalking grim and gaunt among us, unloving and unloved. Church after church rears its heaven-pointed spire, its golden cross, aloft among the THE TASK OF JUDAISM. 175 dwellings of the rich, while the poor live huddled together in wretched tenements not fit for dumb beasts of burden. Here in our own city a leading church has just openly avowed itself a *' moneyed corporation ' whose first interest was 'business' interest, pledged to secure the greatest amount of revenue possible for the building of its churches and the spread of its faith. Said a labour leader who recently visited New York, ' You have too many churches here,' for it is churches such as these that widen the breach between the rich and the poor, that make the ir religion, not the religion of the masses. If this be the religion of love, we will have none of it. Let the Christian better live up to his ideal ; let him give the example, and perhaps we will follow; let him prove by his deeds of charity and love the superiority of his faith over ours, and then, mayhap, 176 THE TASK OF JUDAISM. we will be convinced, — or rather, no, we shall not need to be convinced, for his faith will then be as ours. When men have ceased to persecute and hate, then justice will be established upon the earth, and all men will be brothers." But, no, I say unto you, not so. It is we who may give the example ; we who may lead, not wait to follow. It is we who may teach the religion of love as it has never yet been taught, who may practise and spread it, — we who have proved ourselves capable of living and of dying for an ideal. Here is our great mission, our opportunity as a spiri- tual people scattered among the nations, in whose breast smoulders the sacred fire, in whose veins courses the blood of prophet and of priest. Shall we be content with petty points of law, with paltry measuring of anise and cummin, and, gathering our skirts of holiness THE TASK OF JUDAISM. Ill about us, go our way undefiled, in con- scious pride of rectitude ? Has God no larger purpose, no higher destiny in store for us, His chosen people whom He has so miraculously preserved, whom He has led through the wilderness into the 'promised land, out of captivity into freedom ? No longer let it be, to the nations around us : " Stand back, for ye are less holy than we are," but rather once again as before, from one of our race : " Come unto me, for I am meek and lowly of heart. Come learn of me, for I will teach you to know God, — not in pillar of cloud and fire, in awful might and majesty, but in gentle ministry of love, as from father to son, from parent to little child, from loving friend to friend. I will make incarnate in myself this power and will to love, and thus reveal the Father to His children in loving unity of spirit and likeness, — the human 12 178 THE TASK OF JUDAISM, even as one with the divine. And for this I offer myself — in sacrifice ? No ; but rather in consummation, in conse- cration, of the whole life, the whole being, to do the Father's will and so make known His doctrine." ^^The world is not ready," you say? In a sense, the world is never ready ; and yet the truth comes to be known, the truth must be taught, though its teachers die in the teaching. But I believe that the world is waiting even now for this truth to be put into life, for this heavenly message of love, for the messenger that comes in the name of the Lord, that brings good tidings of good, that publisheth peace and salvation, — peace on earth to all men of God's will. For the world has awakened to its needs. The thousand schemes for social reform prove that many a man is ready and willing to sell all he has and give to the poor, if only he knew THE TASK OF JUDAISM. 179 how best to help his neighbour. But the Church is not ready ; the Church is not willing to give up anything to which it clings, of the goods of this world or an- other, its temporal or its spiritual power, — and so the Church has lost its influ- ence, for men see the hollowness of its claim. The world is no longer deceived by false gods and false doctrines, by a false worship of Mammon that calls it- self Christianity. Nor yet will it turn to a Judaism stamped with narrowness. Not even the Judaism which the Prophets preached, but that which they prophesied, when " sorrow and sighing sliall flee away," and "the earth shall be filled with the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea," is that which shall unite the Jewish and the Christian ideal ; and what God has thus joined together in deepest spiritual union, let no man keep asunder. 180 THE TASK OF JUDAISM. But, practically, what shall we do? I am asked indignantly : " Shall we abandon Judaism ? If so, what are we to substitute for it ? Shall we join the ranks of the atheists, or seek refuge in the dominant Church? There is no other alternative. And, if not, then where shall we find our fellowship under existing conditions ? ... To give up Ju- daism now, to merge with the world at large spiritually at this time would be an act of wanton self-destruction, a sacri- rifice great and heavy, unnecessarily brought and unable to secure the result expected, — would be like leaping into deep water, unable to swim, and without cause courting destruction and death." " Shall we abandon Judaism ? " When you ask this question, you seem to forget how many of us have virtually aban- doned it in any sense that could be called a religion. To how many has it become THE TASK OF JUDAISM. 181 little more than a form or a name, a reminiscence, a sentiment and associa- tion, a custom which we cherish because our fathers cherished it before us ; a sort of ancestor-worship which we accept or reject because we are too lazy or too in- different to examine for ourselves and see whether religion could be anything more or anything different, — so that it ceases to be a matter of much conse- quence to ourselves, and still less to the world at large, whether such a Judaism be abandoned or not. It is true we have not joined the dominant Church ; but, as we have seen, the ranks of the atheists, and, above all, of agnosticism, have been largely recruited from among us. On the other hand, Judaism is too grand and too sacred a heritage, and becomes of too vital an import when it is a ques- tion of how w^e shall transmit it to our children, to be allowed thus to go by de- 182 THE TASK OF JUDAISM. fault, to drift aimlessly into the shallows of indifferentism and unbelief, instead of deepening and broadening with the world's deeper spiritual currents, enrich- ing and at the same time enriched thereby. Shall we be afraid of deep waters, — we, God's chosen ones, for whom the seas have divided, over whom again and again the waves and the bil- lows have passed ? It is no sacrifice, no surrender we are called upon to make, but a coming to our own, a claiming of the kingdom which is ours for the tak- ing, for the asking, for the seeking, where none is first, none last, but all are one in equal love and kinship, — a spiritual kingdom which is no far-away dream of the skies, no far-away dream of the earth, but here and now, in the heart and soul and mind of man ; the kingdom that is within us, every one of us who has the courage and faith THE TASK OF JUDAISM. 183 to rise cabove our material surroundings and conditions, the world of time and space, beyond the things of sense, the things of earth, where heaven comes in sight. "As dying, and behold we live; as having nothing, and yet pos- sessing all things." But I must frankly confess that I have no ready-made creed, no ready-made church, no cut-and-dried formula of practice and belief to offer. The Chris- tian Church, the Christian doctrine, holds no more for us than Judaism. The best Christianity of to-day is, for the most part, outside the churches and entirely outside of doctrine. Christianity is not, as we falsely suppose, a doctrine, — the doctrine of the Trinity, the Vicarious Sacrifice and Atonement, — although it is usually represented to us as such. Like Judaism, it is a life consecrated to God through loving service to man. 184 THE TASK OF JUDAISM. Where two or three are gathered together in the name of this God who is Spirit, — and who must be worshipped in spirit and in truth, not in form, in the graven image of the letter; not in outward ser- vice, but in the inner life of holiness and peace, — shall we find our fellowship, whether we be Jews or Gentiles. And it is this fellowship that we must claim if we would have any part in building up the religion of the future, the ^^relig"^ ion of humanity," as it is called. Wh^t this religion may be, who can tell, who can foresee ? AVith what forms it may be clothed, with what rites and symbols, what of old truth or of new it may em- body, we cannot know. But of one thing we may be certain : there can be no true religion, there can be no true humanity, without this basis of fellowship. For the rest we must be content to wait, to trust, to hope, with so vast a hope before us. THE TASK OF JUDAISM. 185 SO great a goal to be attained, so sure a light upon our path. And living thus in larger ideals, I cannot help believing that our lesser ills will fall away, our outer relations will adjust themselves in propor- tion as we come to a clearer understand- ing of ourselves. For each one of us the problem is an individual one, both as regards our outward circumstance and our inner convictions and experience ; but according as we best solve it unto ourselves, so shall we best solve it unto others. Rooted deep in our Judaism is a great moral force to sway the world, — the power which makes for righteousness, the Law which is like a seed buried in the dark earth. But the seed is not quickened except it die. Oh, for the quickening touch, the breath of the spirit that shall kindle with new life — God's life — this fiery seed, this immortal spark 186 THE TASK OF JUDAISM. of the soul, the knowledge of good and evil, the hunger and thirst after righteous- ness ! Like the strong and mighty wind that sweeps over the earth, driving dead things before it ; like the sudden sunshine that bursts the clouds and floods the air, scattering radiance so that the depths are kindled, the heights shine, the mighty sea laughs and leaps like a child at play, and each tiny bird- throat swells with its note of praise and rapture, each tender flower- bell rings out its fragrant carol for life, dear life. The whole world is alive and aflame with a light and glory not its own. All creation is a prean, a song of life tri- umphant, life universal, because " God is in His heavens, God is in His world." Ah, so shall the heart of man rejoice when God has entered to fill and bless it with His holy presence ! " Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things THE TASK OF JUDAISM. 187 which God hath prepared for them that love Him." More tender than tenderest flower of earth is the flower of heaven, — love ; more radiant than the sunlight, mightier than the mighty wind or the sea, is the great heart of man fashioned in God's own image, to know and be known of Him, gifted with God's great gift of loving, the divine passion to know and to do His will. As the tiny dewdrop reflects the sun, so does the heart of man reflect the great central sun, the glowing soul of the universe, the life and light of the world. Without this, all were dust and ashes, crumbling before our eyes, vanishing like an insubstantial dream ; our human lives were transient, perish- able things, our joys a mockery, our grief, despair. '^ The grass withereth, the flower fadeth, but the word of God (which is Love) endureth forever." " Whether there be prophecies, they shall 188 THE TASK OF JUDAISM. fail : whether there be tongues, they shall cease : whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away. Charity never faileth." What we need is God in our hearts, in our life, — God with us in our midst, on our common earth, in our poor, dis- tracted human lives. ^^For this mortal must put on immortality, this corrupt- ible must put on incorruption." Not when we put on our grave-clothes and go down among the dead where none praise the Lord, but even now while we are §till clothed in the flesh, wrapped round with human seeming and believing, must the spirit be free to burst its bonds and return unto God who gave it. When the veil of sense, the veil of self, is lifted, then is the heart made pure to see God ; then only do we enter the spiritual life where the hidden things are revealed, the secret things of God made manifest, the deep, mysterious meanings of life un- THE TASK OF JUDAISM. 189 rolled. Sorrow and joy become as one in that beatific vision, and " heaven a daily reality of earth." But think not that we inherit spiritual life because we are born into an inherited faith, an ancestral and traditional re- ligion ; because we preach a Unity or Trinity. Our life may be just as bare and unfruitful, our preaching just as un- profitable. God is not handed down to us in the sense that we hold Him in our hand firmly grasped and secure, ours only and theirs who believe as we do about Him, — in the sense that we have not to search for Him with all our heart and all our soul and all our mind, if haply we may find Him. On the con- trary. He only comes to us out of a great heart-hunger and need, an infinite lonorin«: that will not be stilled, and that nothing else, nothing less, can satisfy or fill, — a deep experience of life, of human 190 THE TASK OF JUDAISM. joy and sorrow, that brings with it the knowledge that because we have Him not we die, and that in Him alone we truly live. Such knowledge is life eter- nal, a knowing which is a being with God that rests the soul and lifts it above mortal conditions. For this came we into the world, for this do we leave the world in order that we may know eternal life, — life ever more abundant; rest, deep rest after weariness; joy beyond pain, love stronger than death, —the joy of which Jesus spoke when he had drained the cup of sorrow to the dreo-s • the peace that comes of perfect trust, perfect faith, perfect oneness with the Father. "Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you ; not as the world giveth. ... In the world ye shall have tribulation ; but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world." Teach us thus to know God, teachers THE TASK OF JUDAISM. 191 of Israel who starve us on dry liiisks and formulas! It is for this we have been preserved; it is for this we are now scattered as the winds of heaven that nothing; can hold or bind. Make us to drink of living waters, to love and be loved of Him who is the living God, — the God of the living and not of the dead, the loving Father of all. Take away the re- proach of our people. '^ Wherefore should the heathen say, where is now their God ? But our God is in the heavens ; He hath done whatsoever He hath pleased." He hath bound and He can loose. Our God is in the earth, let all the world rejoice. " Let everything that hath breath praise the Lord." " So shall we not die but live, and declare the works of the Lord." March, 1895. EPILOGUE. /^F these essays, now for the first time collected and published in book form, the first appeared in the "Century Magazine" of January, 1892 ; the second, " The Outlook of Judaism," was written for the World's Parliament of Religions, and read before the Parlia- ment in Chicago, September 16th, 1893. The others were published successively in the "Jewish Messenger," during the following eighteen months, and were, to some extent, answers to Jewish critics and exponents who dissented from my views. In offering them now to a larger public, I feel that an added word of ex- planation is necessary. EPILOGUE. 193 Hitherto I have addressed myself al- most entirely to a Jewish public. It will be seen, I think, that I have told the truth as I have seen it, sparing and concealing nothing, making no apology, no justification, for my people, no appeal to any but themselves. For I have wished especially to lay stress upon the fact, that upon the Jews themselves rests the chief responsibility of their position, the throw- ing off of disabilities, the working out of their high destiny. Whatever the atti- tude of the Christians, however unjust, however unhuman, however un-Christian it may appear to us, all the more the Jew has it in his power to rise superior to it, to prove himself master and con- queror of his fate, when once he realises that redress lies within himself, that free- dom and salvation are in his own hands. But this is not to say that there is no other side to the question, no other help 13 194 EPILOGUE. to its solution ; that the Christians on their part have not a responsibility still more grave, — the responsibility of a wrong done instead of a wrong suffered, and therefore a duty still more plain, a redress still more urgent. Leroy Beau- lieu says, '^ Hatred of the Jews is inspired not by Christian sentiment, but b}^ anti- Christian instincts." In other words, anti-Semitism is anti-Christianity. Who- ever takes it up is false to the very prin- ciples he would uphold, denies the very truth he would proclaim, and for the lack of which he persecutes the Jew. Not in the name of Judaism, but in the name of Christianity dishonoured and defaced, not the Jews therefore, but those who truly call tliem selves Chris- tians, should protest against anti-Semi- tism. " There are in the world to-day seven or eight million Jews dispersed amon.o; four or five hundred million Chris- EPILOGUE. 195 tians or Moslems. We are apt to imag- ine," Leroy Beaulieu goes on to say, " that the great majority of the Jews of the world, or at least of Europe, are in possession of civil liberty and equality. This is a mistake. The Israelites who enjoy civic rights are still in a minority. The greater number of the descendants of Abraham are still subjected to restric- tive laws. It may be true that this is mainly due to the fact that Russia alone contains more than half the Jews of the globe ; " but it is also true that even in the most enlightened countries the Jew is under some sort of ban, whether moral or social, subject to some law of ex- ception or exclusion, some disadvantage, some estrangement from his Christian neighbour. Now, again, whatever the attitude of the Jews, whether or not their disabili- ties are inherent in themselves, I hold 196 EPILOGUE. that this fact alone is a blot on Chris- tianity, a failure on the part of a religion claiming to be the religion of equality and fraternity, and standing, as Chris- tianity does to Judaism, in the relation of a religion to its parent religion, the religion which has given it birth, and to which the world owes so vast a debt as it does to Judaism. Dean Milman, the eminent historian of the Jews, says : " The religious obligations of mankind to the Jews it is impossible to appreciate in all their fulness." And another Chris- tian authority. Professor D. G. Lyon, of Harvard University, in his address be- fore the World's Parliament of Religions, in enumerating these obligations makes so striking a statement that he seems to cover almost the whole field of civilisa- tion : " What has the Jew given us ?" he asks. " He has given us the Bible, the Old as well as the New Testament, which. EPILOGUE. 107 with the exception of one or possibly two of its books, was written by men of Jewish birtli. . . . Along with the Sacred Writ- ings have come to the race through the Jews, certain great doctrines — Monothe- isnij — God's moral government of the ^orld, — His fatherhood, the brotherhood of man, and the great types of humanity, Abraham, Moses, Jeremiah, Paul. Jesus himself was a Jew ; and Christianity then, the religion which bears His name, is it also a Jewish institution ? It has elements which are not Jewish ; it has passed into the keeping of those who are not Jews ; but its earliest advocates and disciples, no less than its founder, were Jews. The first churches were Jewish. The chief ordinances of the church, the service, the prayers, still bear the stamp of their Jewish origin ; and the Christian chari- ties are but the embodiment of the Golden Rule as uttered by a Jew. . . . LsraeFs 198 EPILOGUE. mission is peace, morality, and religion ; or, better still, Israel's mission is peace through morality and religion. This, the nation's lesson to the world; this, the spirit of the greatest characters in Israel's history. To live in the same spirit; in a word, to become like the foremost of all Israelites, — this is the highest that any man has yet ventured to hope.'' There is a saying of the Rabbis, " AYe men judge nations and classes too often only by the bad examples they produce ; God judges them by their best and noblest types." If Israel be so judged then, it were to make him the type and pattern of humanity. But I do not ask this. I do not ask you thus to judge my people. Take us at our worst, as outcast and de- spised and rejected of men, — unto such above all comes the Christ, and so only can you prove your Christianity. ^' He EPILOGUE. 199 that saitli lie is in the light and hateth his brother, is in darkness even until now." " He that loveth his brother abideth in the light, and there is none occasion of stumbling in him." Come to us not with fire and sword, with tor- ture of the Inquisition, as you have come to us in the past ; not with chapter and book and doctrine and text, as some are ready to come to us now, not with the letter, but the spirit — with love in your heart ; love that redeems and transforms and transfigures, that takes away the sins of the world, blessing him that gives and him that takes ; the love that is not in word, neither in tongue, but in deed and in truth. " For hereby do we know that ye are of the truth." 1. " Day long I brooded upon the Passion of Israel. 2. I saw him bound to the wheel, 200 EPILOGUE. nailed to the cross, cut off by the sword, burned at the stake, tossed into the seas. 3. And always the patient, resolute martyr face arose in silent rebuke and defiance. 4. A Prophet with four eyes; wide- gazed the orbs of the spirit above the sleeping eyelids of the senses. 5. A Poet, who plucked from his bosom the quivering heart and fashioned it into a lyre. 6. A placid-browed Sage, uplifted from earth in celestial meditation. 7. These I saw, with princes and people in their train; the monumental dead, and the standard-bearers of the future. 8. And suddenly I heard a burst of mocking laughter ; and turning, I beheld the shuffling gait, the ignominious feat- ures, the sordid mask of the son of the Ghetto." EPILOGUE. 201 Turn again, daughter of Israel, my sister, and behold with divinely awakened eyes the son of man, the man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. " Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me." Who has ever spoken words so tender and close, so fulfilled of the brotherhood of man ? " And I, if I be lifted, will draw all men up unto me." Be ye then uplifted, ye who would uplift. Ye who come in his name and yet deny him, with Christ on your lips but with hatred and scorn in your heart, behold the suffering child of God, your brother; behold our divine humanity crushed beneath the burden of the flesh, the sins and sorrows of the world ! Ye who would bear witness to his spirit and his truth, to the Christ that is within you, look with the eyes of Christ, the heart of Christ ; pierce with illumined 202 EPILOGUE. vision the hollow mask ; let the warm rays, the gentle touch of love, fall upon the dull clod of clay, and awake the sleeping soul, the higher, the divine self that slumbers in every child of earth, every one of God's creatures, — the Christ that is to be, when all men know them- selves as he knew, one with the Father and one with his fellow-man, March, 1895. THE END. DATE DUE v*^^^ - ' 1 ; . , v( ^/V' - ■ "■" GAYLORD PRINTED IN US A.