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 AND THE 
 
 A DISCOURSE BEFORE SINAI CONGREGATION, 
 
 DECEMBER 2ND, 1888. 
 
 IE. C3--. 
 
 S. ETTLINIJER, PRINTER. 178 MONROE ST., CHICAGO.
 
 Stack 
 Annex 
 
 SOD 
 
 THE JEW AND THE GREEK, 
 
 A Discourse before Sinai Congregation, 
 
 December 2nd, 1888, 
 IE. GK 
 
 " Out of the mouth of babea and sucklings hast thou ordained strength because of 
 thine enemies, that thou miahlest still the enemy and the boastful threatener. (Psalm 8.) 
 
 The day we celebrate recalls a conflict and a contrast. In bloody battles 
 the conflict culminated and was decided. Syria's power was crushed. 
 Never, thereafter, did she dare invite to the dance of war the hosts of 
 Judea. But the contrast, antedating the Syrian period, continues to this 
 present day. The Jew and the Greek are the two opposite poles. In these 
 two names, crystallizes the antagonism which then whetted the sword of 
 soldiers, and pointed the lances of horsemen, but which, with more peace- 
 ful weapons pitting one type of civilization against another, runs through 
 the centuries. The selection of the psalm, from which the above verse is 
 taken, as expressive of this contrast, may at first sight appear strange. The 
 little Hebrew lay is certainly not one of the hymns which scholars hold to 
 have been composed during the Maccabean period. Nor is it within my 
 
 5007S46
 
 intention to dwell on the legendary story of Hannah and her sons, whose 
 unflinching heroic martrydom is a striking illustration of the text's senti- 
 ment. The psalm gives a description of the beauties of nature, and of 
 man's high position within and above the sweep of created things. His 
 royal prerogative to rule over earth is brought out most forcibly; the 
 thought finds winged tongue that the crowning glory of all creation is he, 
 before whose endowments the stars even fade as tokens of the divine Excel- 
 lency. In its composition, the poem is exceedingly lucid. It moves in 
 plain grooves; its unembellished and unaffected simplicity adds the charm 
 of innocency to the sweet fragrance of the song's melody. This descrip- 
 tion conveys a doctrine and calls for the performance of a duty. I hesitate 
 not to rate the psalm as the most succinct summary of Jewish belief. If 
 asked to give a statement of our creed, I should know of none better than 
 this eighth psalm. The cardinal thought of Judaism, which differentiates 
 it from all other religious systems, is man, created in God's image. The 
 heights of a philosophical monotheism, the chosen few who were nurtured 
 at the breasts of wisdom, among other nations have scaled as well as our 
 prophets. But ethical monotheism, which lifts man into kinship with God, 
 is a higher message than the metaphysical ratiocinations on the "Absolute." 
 This message wells out from Zion; and what it implies, our poem voices. 
 Bound up with it, is man's moraJ life; his moral freedom. Man is not an 
 animal. He is ruler of the brute within and without him. Between him 
 and the animal gapes an impassable chasm. The " babe," the potential 
 man of the future, establishes the truth of a higher principle than is 
 operative in the forms of life which lie beneath even infant man. Ac- 
 customed as we have become to the jargon of the natural sciences, we are 
 in danger,- without feeling it, of no longer understanding the vocabulary of 
 this other estimate of man's relative position. The similarities between man 
 and ape, mind and mud are strongly emphasized, the dissimilarities crowded 
 into a neglected back-ground. The animal struggles for existence; man for 
 moral existence. This distinction is vital. It was sharply drawn by 
 Judaism. What nature produces is not man. Man is the product of a 
 process, which begins where " nature " the term used in the sense of popu- 
 lar materialism ends. Man controls nature, transforms it, triumphs over 
 it, by virtue of that creative spark, which is kindled within him by, and is 
 of one essence, with the Creator. "What is man?" asks our author, in 
 wonder and awe, "because Thou doest mind him! Thou hast made him 
 little less than God !" is the answered definition. To make himself worthy 
 of this station, to stamp upon Earth this divinity, as God has " given his 
 glory to the heavens," and make body and earth a home worthy of a God- 
 like man, this, then, is the object of human life, in the valuation of Judaism. 
 Diametrically opposed to this, is the Greek's notion of the end and aim 
 of human life. It is extremely instructive to compare with our psalm, one 
 kindred in theme, written by a Greek master. 
 
 " Many the forms of life," meditates the chorus in the Antigone of 
 Sophocles. " Wondrous and strange to see."
 
 But nothing than man appears 
 
 More wondrous and more strange. 
 He with the wintry gales 
 Mid waves wild surging round, 
 Wendeth his way across: 
 Earth, of all Gods from ancient days the first, 
 
 Unworn and undecayed, 
 
 Fie. with his ploughs that travel o'er and o'er, 
 Furrowing with horse and mule 
 
 Wears ever year by year. 
 The thoughtless tribe of birds 
 
 The beasts that roam the fields 
 The broods in sea depths born 
 He takes them all in nets 
 
 Knotted in snaring mesh. 
 Man wonderful in skill, 
 And by his subtle arts 
 He holds in sway the beasts, 
 
 That roam the fields or tread the mountain height, 
 And brings the binding yoke 
 Upon the neck of horse with shaggy mane, 
 Or bull on mountain crest 
 Untamable in strength. 
 And speech and thought as swift as wind 
 
 And tempered mood for higher life of states 
 
 These he has learned, and how to flee 
 Now the cold of frost unkind, 
 
 Now darts of storm and shower. 
 Man all providing. Unprovided, he 
 
 Meeteth no chance, the coming day may bring. 
 
 Only from Hades still 
 He fails to find escape, 
 
 Though skill of art may teach him how to flee 
 Prom depths of fell disease incurable. 
 
 None will read this portraiture of man's powers without being stirred. 
 And yet it lacks a certain something; an aroma which the simpler move- 
 ment of the Hebrew bard exhales. As literary productions, both stand 
 high, and it is difficult to decide to which the palm belongs. Both are 
 typical of the world from which they spring: The Jew God-fntoxicated, 
 and therefore free from the dread of the end; the Greek, admiring the 
 greatness of man, and yet never rid of the thought that Hades will claim 
 him. For no Greek could ask and answer: 
 
 " Who made you glorious as the gates of heaven 
 
 Beneath the keen full moon? 
 
 God! let the torrents, like a shout of nations, 
 Answer! and let the ice-plains echo, God!"
 
 To such a conception of nature's message the Greek mind could not 
 wing its searching flight; the relations of man to the universe remained an 
 unread riddle. The ethics taught by the greatest of Greece's sons go no 
 further than to inculcate the duty, somehow or other, to follow the har- 
 mony of the outward things in the sphere of the spiritual. The beautiful 
 is also the good ; to an appreciation of the golden harmony, the serene 
 calm of the deep blue sky, the mellow tints of the landscape of its home; 
 the Greek mind had indeed risen. The inner life was to be a faithful copy 
 of the beauty which is Greece's dower from heaven. Want of order is sin; 
 excess in any direction excites the wrath of the Gods. The plot of the 
 most stirring tragedies is strung to these ideas. Insolenco is the stepping 
 stone to destruction; punishment and retribution follow also a law of eternal 
 order. Prom generation to generation the curse runs its course: the 
 " black spirit of evil" dementing anew its predestined victims. The state 
 is for the earlier Greeks, order incarnate, the " Ethos " custom, the eternal 
 moral law. The Sophists act, indeed, as a solvent upon this rigid inflexible 
 mass of ideas, but beyond dissolving the old security of life and creed into 
 shifting individual assumptions equally true and equally false, they cannot 
 push. Their successors teach that knowledge and goodness are identical: 
 with a pointed utilitarian conception of goodness to still further weaken 
 what of truth their teachings hold. It is true, Socrates gives in dying, 
 the death-blow to his own theory; displaying in his last hours a spirit 
 which is the very opposite of utilitarian or revengeful; but his disciple 
 reverts to his theories, and where he amplifies them, he never throws off 
 the influence of the fundamentally Greek conception. A natural order of 
 virtues, founded in the appetites and the qualifications of the human 
 soul, is the richest fruitage which Plato culls from the tree of his idealism. 
 Aristotle, however much we owe to his sober observation, and his psy- 
 chology, in substance returns to the ethics of prudence and moderation. 
 
 Characteristic for all these thinkers, with the exception of Socrates, as 
 it is for the Greek, is their scorn of labor. Labor is the ransom which 
 nature exacts for its subjugation to the will of man. Not knowing that 
 man is destined to rule, by virtue of labor, the purpose of life could but be 
 sought to lie elsewhere. The Greek ideal was sure to lead to disappoint- 
 ment. Life was not beauty. Evil was real. Death came, and before death 
 old age ! No wonder, that after Plato and Aristotle, pleasure was constituted 
 life's goal, and that the Stoics and Epicureans soon were the sole exponents 
 of Greek practical philosophy. No wonder that what little ethical posses- 
 sions the Greek carrried to Asia was insufficient to save him from moral 
 bankruptcy, when exposed to the temptation of the fierce Asiatic 
 temperament. If we pause to study the course of the respective develop- 
 ments of the Greek and Jewish ideas and ideals under Asiatic influences, 
 the difference of the two becomes most patent again. Judaism developed 
 out of and in opposition to the Asiatic nature religions. It triumphed over 
 them. Greece had scarcely come in contact with the hotter breath of Asia 
 when she succumbed. What had been joy at home, had changed to revel,
 
 here. Wild Dyonysiac orgies, attended with frightful debauches, replaced 
 the stately and beautiful processions of the home festivities. A glance at the 
 literature of the Asiatic Greece, suffices to show to what depths it had sunk. 
 Greece, never having risen to the saving ethics of man's kingship, could 
 not save what little of moral humanity she had when exposed to the con- 
 tamination of these ethics which had never veiled the thought of nature's 
 divinity, and never hesitated to prostitute man in the service of nature. 
 From that hot furnace of vice and degradation, the prophets had, centuries 
 ago, snatched and saved Israel. Into that furnace, Greece in Asia had 
 fallen. The Maccabean struggle was for the preservation of Israel's 
 treasure, the doctrine sung by our psalm. Against it the assailant's blow 
 was directed. At stake was this religion of morality, and therefore the 
 day which brings to us the memory of the valiant fight, is certainly quick 
 with inspiration for us, which ill we can spare. Those who see in the Mac- 
 cabean uprising merely a political, a national movement, have not sounded 
 the depths of the issues, then trembling in the balance for the world. With 
 national memories we have, indeed, but little sympathy; we are no longer a 
 nation, that we should dwell on the life and experiences of national heroes. 
 Our hopes center not in a return to Palestine. What interest could we have 
 in reviving to-day yet the recollections of a political independence regained, 
 but to be lost, and not lamented and regretted by us? Such is the plausible 
 argumentation of many among us. Though I would not lay stress on the 
 il national " as distinguished from the " religious " motive in the Maccabean 
 contest, still, in this connection, let me say that the stand taken for 
 " national " independence involved a true principle. So strongly national 
 as the European Greek was, so weakly cosmopolitan had become 'his 
 Asiatic Epigone. The book of Esther reflecting the conditions of the times, 
 under discussion, as w r ell as the books of the Maccabees, show that to sweep 
 away all traces of home individualism and make all parts of the realm 
 uniform was the dream of the king's counselors. Faithfulness to one's 
 own national customs was characterized as misanthropy? treason to the 
 cause of humanity. In rising against the compulsion and coercion of the 
 denationalized Greek, the '* national " Jew did battle for a right inherent in 
 our manhood. The fact that national themes are worked into the grander 
 symphony of the universally human, the rescue from impending annihila- 
 tion of the best and purest philosophy of human life, does, when rightly 
 weighed, enhance its overwhelming impressiveness. We would not miss 
 this day, in the cycle of our synagogal celebrations; all the less, since to 
 him who will but open his eyes, will unfold, in the very history of the festival, 
 the cardinal ideas of Judaism as set to melody by our poet; as saved for the 
 world by the Asiatic Jew from the insolence of the Asiatic Greek. 
 
 Criticism is correct when it urges that all of our festivals originally 
 rooted in a thought-world foreign to ours. There can be no question that 
 this festival, long before the Maccabean era, was celebrated by many 
 
 *.Diodorus Siculus, Kcloga, 34, 1, quoted by Graetz, Mschf t. 86, p. 486.
 
 6 
 
 nations and many clans and tribes, as the winter festivals of the sun's new 
 birth. Very early in his career, man, unconsciously, felt what the sciences 
 to-day clearly teach, that his life and the beauty of earth, and the fertility 
 of soil and sod depended on the rays of the sun; that the fiery orb in the 
 heavens was the loom on which the web of life was spun. But it seemed to 
 the untutored mind of the infant man as though that beneficent power 
 above was assailed by envious demons. The shadows of the night contested 
 daily the supremacy of light, and winter with its terror wrenched strength 
 year after year from the king of life. Yes, for some weeks in midwinter, it- 
 seemed as though the powers of darkness would triumph. The heart of 
 man must have been heavy when witnessing helplessly that drama in the 
 heavens. As the sun's rays grew less powerful, thoughts of his own impend- 
 ing death could not but crowd upon him. But at the very crisis a new hope 
 comes to him, the contest comes to a standstill, the veil of doubt is lifted, 
 the sun returns, its old glories reappear, the demons of darkness are put to 
 flight, a new light is born. Hence, in almost all forms of religion, the 25th 
 day of the midwinter month, was set apart as a joyful festival in honor of 
 the rekindling of a new light, the welcome bringer of a new lease and 
 promise of life. While we know that down to the least details of the 
 Maccabean rebellion, the accounts that have come to us are substantially 
 correct, we cannot claim that the choice of the 25th day of Kislev is histor- 
 ical. The books of the Maccabees themselves tell us that on the 25th day 
 of that month was the great festival of the Syrian Zeus. * The day thus 
 is a legacy of Ante-Jewish religions. But consider what Judaism has made 
 of this festival as of all other nature festivals! The thoiight that runs 
 through the festivities of the heathens is that man stands under the 
 control of the powers of nature. While borrowing from the antecedent 
 religions the form and the day of the festivals, Judaism gave them a 
 radically different bearing. Not man under nature, but man the ruler of 
 nature, is the burden of Judaism's festal songs. This proud consciousness 
 comes to us whenever tbe festal seasons visit us, if we but understand the 
 message delivered to us. Symbols of this kind are not superfluous. The 
 age of symbolism is not yet past; no religion can spare its suggestive 
 language. 
 
 The bearing of the Jewish festal symbols is still more clearly brought 
 out when we contrast them with the Christian symbolism as formulated in 
 the Christian cycle. Like Judaism, Christianity has adopted the form and 
 the time of the antecedent heathen celebrations, but it has made of them 
 the stations of a personal life. One man alone was born as the light, one 
 man alone occupied a high station as conqueror of nature and of death. 
 Christianity thus pictures the possibilities of human freedom from the 
 chains of nature, but sadly it announces that that freedom was forfeited in 
 the beginning of time by the folly of the first man; to a few worthy men 
 selected from all those that are under the curse of sin, perhaps after this 
 
 $ 
 * I Mace. 1, 59. Comp with I Mace. 4, 54.
 
 life is over, will be restored the crown of kingship. Judaism affirms in its 
 festal symbols that not one man alone carried the light, that not one man 
 alone is king, but that all men, all humanity is ruler little less than the 
 gods, as our psalm expresses it. Thus, by contrast with heathen and w T ith 
 Christian symbolism, our festivals are the very incarnations of Jewish 
 doctrine. Can we spare their yearly visit? 
 
 It has, in all seriousness, been proposed of late to celebrate Christmas 
 and our festival on the 25th day of December, on the plea that as both had 
 originally the same character, and as the day is independent of the supposed 
 historical occurrence, it were well to obliterate old lines of distinctions. 
 None of us here can be charged with a desire to maintain barriers that ought 
 to disappear. And still I doubt whether there be many' among us that 
 approve of the proposition. Christmas calls up too many sad memories for 
 the Jew. The night which sang the song of peace and good will to men, 
 was too often made a night of bitter tears for the Nazarene's race-kindred, 
 while the priest at the altar intonated the matins, his flock was busy mas- 
 sacring innocent Jews. It is not fanaticism that refuses to make of the day 
 of such martyrdom a day of joy. Christmas and Chanuka alike have 
 become sacred to innocent childhood. Out of the mouth of babes, on these 
 days, sounds the glory of the Highest. Should not the symbols of the 
 occasion be free from the association with the Christological interpretation 
 of the verse that the babe that conquered the enemy was born that night in 
 Bethlehem? 
 
 The law of attraction operates in matters of this kind; the larger 
 impression drowns the lesser. Would it not be a pity to place in the shadow 
 such noble figure as Judah Maccabee? Judaism not merely announces a 
 doctrine of life; it insists that a life such as its teachings presuppose, is 
 within the reach of all. And hence, in its festal recollections, the Syna- 
 gogue always sets before us a personal illustration of the life. Undimmed 
 by associations of another kind, shines to-day upon us the justly earned 
 fame of Judah. Nature has so constituted man that in the fundamental 
 depth of his nature he worships the hero. Far from being the remnant of 
 doggish servility, this hero-worship is the outpouring of the human soul's 
 self-consciousness. It is the tribute paid by the human soul to another soul, 
 the mirror of its own self, the emblem of what powers slumber unawakened 
 in its own undercurrents. 
 
 As the German poet has it: 
 
 ' 4 Inwendig lernt kein Mensch sein Innerstes 
 Erkennen denn er misst nach eignem Mass 
 Sich bald zu klein und leider oft zu gross, 
 Der Mensch erkennt sich nur im Menschen, nur 
 Das Leben lehret jedem was er sei." 
 
 It is, therefore, not a matter of indifference to what hero the tribute of 
 admiration is offered. Man learning to know himself only in another man 
 is 'dependent on his teacher. Popular legends throw a bold light on the
 
 8 
 
 characters of nations. The legend is always poetry: and it is the poet's to 
 read the hidden lines of the soul. The legends which have grown around 
 the names recalled by the festal cycle of the synagogue, indeed tingle with 
 the strongest poetry. Whether using historical material or spinning their 
 biographies with lighter threads of fancied fable, the associations that 
 cluster around our holidays are sacred to the best the human soul calls its 
 own. The heroes that come to us on the wings of festal song, are not 
 shadowy idealisations, characters sweet and tender, gentle and noble, but 
 which hold no relation with the realities of stern life: impossibilities as 
 long as man is a denizen of the sublunar sphere. Our great men are of 
 flesh and bone; they are not above the things of life, but within them. They 
 have hearts attuned to love, but not void of the sterner emotions. They are 
 men who are not dead to the fire of noble indignation; to the holy wrath 
 of righteousness. They are, indeed, linked to the life of a nation, but they 
 express nevertheless the universally human. Many are the bright stars 
 glowing in the gallaxy of fame, arching the heavens of other nations. To 
 me, I cannot escape the impression, it seems these carry much more of the 
 purely local, the temporal in their constitution, than do the great names of 
 biblical literature. And consider how naturally, and therefore how skill- 
 fully these biographies are constructed! In every case the hero is associated 
 with his opposite. On the background of a baser character rises to greater 
 clearness the gold of virtue. Who thinks of Moses without feeling that the 
 picture w*hich he carries of Is< ael's lawgiver is all the more sharply printed 
 upon his mind because the Pharaoh of Exodus is its foil? Fiery Elija and 
 cold Ahab? Our Judah is also confronted by his moral antipode. He the 
 type of the true Jew; the king, the most striking pattern of the Asiatic 
 Greek. 
 
 We know enough of the character of Antioch to make good the aver- 
 ment that, such as he was, he was the typical product of Asiatic Hellenism. 
 Proud and without self-respect, spendthrift and miser, gracious, and cold, 
 brave and cowardly, he was a bundle of contradictions, which are natural 
 enough in one that never learned the duty of self control; on the contrary, 
 whose philosophy of conduct was nature- worship gone to seed. Not having 
 found it himself, he could not presuppose in others a self. He despised all 
 men. A cynic, if ever there was one, he thought that every man had his 
 price and was ready to sell himself to the highest bidder. Having no con- 
 victions himself, he did not look for any in other men. And the sum and 
 substance of this life of whim, caprice and untutored fancy and uncon- 
 trolled impulses, could not but be a despotism of fiendish fanatical 
 cruelty. Ah! rightly was his name changed to Epimanes. A mad craven 
 was he; afraid of the lurking dagger of the everywhere suspected assassin, 
 and still more afraid of himself. Turn now to Judah! What distinguishes 
 him above his peers in generalship, is not his patriotism, not his valor, not 
 his skill in organizing and marshalling his scant resources. These qualifi- 
 cations are not rare among the military leaders of the race. Others beside 
 him have wrenched victorv from the verv teeth of defeat. His crown of
 
 glory is his unbounded faith in the goodness of human nature. If ever 
 man had cause to despair of men, it was he. Treason everywhere, and des- 
 pair in the hearts of the few loyal Jews. But far from hugging blaunch 
 despondency to his bosom, he rushes to the fray, daring and doing; and 
 whelming the lukewarm along in the warm whirl of his staunch enthusi- 
 asm. And still more than for what he did, he is to be admired for what he 
 refused to do. What position did not Syria promise to a man of his mili- 
 tary genius? Had he been of one mind with the king, or even only like 
 the " Jews for revenue," who had outbid each other for the priesthood, his 
 choice would have been a different one. His own land promised him noth- 
 ing. No army to rise to honor and wealth, perhaps the rebel's death, the 
 martyr's honored grave. He chose as the Jew choses and his very choice 
 was a victory over the Asiatic Greek! Should we not watch jealously over 
 the memory of such a name? Should our children not learn from that 
 example what makes the true hero? That an energetic life in behalf of 
 the highest treasures of man, and not a patient passion-death, is the ideal 
 of life. 
 
 This is the peculiarity of our holidays: their symbols speak the dialect 
 of the past, but their thought is fresh and leads directly into the busy con- 
 trasts of the living anxious present. So does this day not merely recall the 
 past, but it points out also where the battle lies of our day. Hellenist and 
 Jew are contending forces now yet. Who are the spiritual heirs of the greek- 
 lings among the Jews? I am almost sure that in many a so-called orthodox 
 pulpit to-day we were likened to them. Those who have drawn the compari- 
 son, have not yet learned to distinguish between the essentials and the super- 
 ficial accidentals. We, it is true, fail to observe many of the old national 
 customs; so did the Hellenists. But there the similarity ends. "Duo si 
 faciunt idem, non est idem /" Our motive is radically different. They wished 
 to hide their Judaism; we have no such intention. We claim that to-day to 
 mark the difference these outward signs are not necessary. History repeats 
 itself, but not in the sense that our orthodox brethren profess to believe. 
 Have they not also changed methods? Palestine is under foreign domin- 
 ion, why do they to-day not organize a movement to wrench the holy 
 land from the unspeakable Turk? Ah! their dreams of restoration are not 
 of the sword, their Maccabees fight with other weapons. The circumstan- 
 ces of history change and the conditions and weapons under which and 
 with which the old cont ests are to be decided anew. We return to the po- 
 sition of the old prophets. Their antagonism to the foreigner was pointed 
 to the foreigner's views as far as they marked an irreconcilable antagon- 
 ism to Judaism. Asiatic Greece and Judaism is such an impassable gulf. 
 The Hellenists of the Maccabean period had forgotten this. As shown be- 
 fore, the Greek mind then had lost nearly all of its virility. The Stoic 
 ideal of passionless and ambitionless resignation, the creed which writes 
 life down a failure, controlled the chosen few; the masses were steeped in 
 degenerated Epicureanism. However far from sensual materialism the 
 founder whose name the system bears may have been; now the designa
 
 10 
 
 tion, as used in the Hebrew of the time, stands for ethical materialism. 
 Greek culture then was materialism run riot. No wonder that Greek and 
 Jew then were an inexhorable alternative. But are we ethical materialists? 
 You adopt the Christian customs as your prototypes did those of the 
 Greeks. So runs the invective of our conservative brethren. We strive, 
 indeed, to make of Judaism a living factor in the world of modern thought 
 and activity, in keeping with its spiritual mission. The modern world we 
 seek is not Christian. If the orthodox pulpit mistakes occidentalism for 
 Christian, it does yoeman's service in behalf, not of Judaism but of < 'Itrix- 
 tianity. Modern culture in its basic elements is closely akin to the creed 
 of Judaism as laid down in my text. The mediaeval civilization icas Chris- 
 tian. There the thought of the "other world" swayed the minds of men. 
 Then private and public life; society and the state, were of the ethics of 
 resignation. Then as a natural consequence "of the corruption of the 
 flesh," the things temporal were under the control of the church. With 
 the reformation, a new movement begins, away from the specifically Chris- 
 tian ethics of resignation toward the elements which Judaism had given as 
 a dower to her daughter. It is not I, a Jew, who would advance this claim. 
 Ziegler, in his history of ethics, John St. Mill, in his writings, Eiken, in his 
 work, " Mittelalterliche Weltanschauung," and others of non-Jewish birth, 
 bring out this point most saliently. No! Modern civilization is not Chris- 
 tian in the dogmatic, i. e. anti-Jewish sense of the term. 
 
 Modern civilization is not the child of a philosophy of resignation. It 
 is not born of the spirit of other-worldliness. It is the outgrowth of a 
 sentiment that this earth is to be transformed into an Eden. Civilization 
 is the conquest of nature. It is the practical application of the doctrines 
 preached by our psalm. Never was man more absolute king of the things 
 of earth as he is to-day. I repeat modern culture has many elements, yea 
 its fundamental character is, in harmony with the fundamental principles 
 of Judaism. We are striving to realize in the modern world the principles 
 of Judaism, and therefore willingly throw down the barriers that separate 
 us from the world at large, in order to become a living factor among the 
 upbuilders. We are not traitors to Judaism, nay we but fulfill the very 
 essence of Judaism. Not the reformed Jew is the Hellenist of modern 
 time, nor is it he who has deeply drunk of the thought-life, and is imbued with 
 the energy and ideals of modern man. The ethical materialist is the spir- 
 itual successor to-day of the old Epicureans. With materialism as a phil- 
 osophy of life, Judaism has indeed no kinship; to the contrary, it is its own 
 sworn enemy. Materialism is the acknowledgment that the animal in man 
 is the ruling factor of human character. Materialism makes selfishness the 
 pivot of life. Judaism, and reformed Judaism perhaps more strenuously 
 than what is called orthodox Judaism, lays stress on the duty to make the 
 spiritual in man, the divine in man, the king over heart and the guide of 
 hand. Not selfishness, but self-development is the cardinal precept of our 
 ethics. The individual man belongs to society at large, the individual life 
 must be rounded out through the co-operation with all other individual
 
 11 
 
 lives. According to Judaism thus the individual is not lost in the mass as 
 modern materialism would have us believe, but the mass is composed of 
 single souls, each one of whom has the duty to strive after perfection. 
 But those single souls are bound together by one common purpose. The 
 individual man is incompetent to rule over earth and to subdue it. It is 
 only through co-operation that this ideal is approximately made true; and 
 therefore, Judaism to-day teaches, and the reformed synagogue to-day voices 
 it, that all that individual man has or holds, he has and holds in trust for all 
 humanity. One God certainly may be translated into the phrase: 
 One Humanity; and thus, Judaism holds the key to the riddles 
 and problems that burden modern man. Social conflicts and social 
 distrusts would all be stilled were it known, yea were it practically applied 
 that " Out of the mouth of babes thou hast announced glory." Judaism 
 is not a philosophy of the strong; it is a philosophy of the weak. That 
 the weak and the poor are not forsaken of God; that the strong should 
 help the weak, that the rich should assist the poor, that the wise must live 
 for the foolish; this is the thought that modern materialism knows not, 
 that old materialism, Hellenism, knew not. It is a thought that Heathenism 
 was ignorant of, and its full import Christianity even has failed to grasp. 
 It is a thought, the redeeming influence of which our world needs, and the 
 reformed Jew has taken upon himself the duty, with the enthusiasm of a 
 Judah Maccabee, with the devotion such as the Asmoneans had, to do battle 
 for this thought, to realize it with his own life and through his own life to 
 make it felt with the world at large. No, we are not Hellenists. We 
 understand the meaning of this festal season. We know that it, by its very 
 history and the contrasts which this history opens to our view, teaches the 
 very life doctrine of Judaism. We prize the heroism of the great and good 
 men that offered their life willingly on the altar of principle, and we would 
 emulate their example. Not less are we Jews, but more Jews when we feel 
 the sympathy which the true and sturdy life around us holds with our 
 doctrines. Modern culture is not the culture of Greece of old. We dena- 
 tionalize Judaism, but we are actuated by motives that are as far removed 
 from the views of the old Hellenists as is the east separated from the west. 
 Yea, the spirit of the old Maccabees is within us, and we, not merely with 
 the lips, but pratically, would say, singing the song of this hour, " Out of 
 the mouth of babes and sucklings thou hast established glory." For such 
 is the belief not of the Greek, but of the Jew! "
 
 UNIV. OF CALIF. LIBRARY, LOS ANGELES
 
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