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 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE 
 
 AND OTHER ADDRESSES 
 
 DR. KAUFMAN KOHLER 
 PRESIDENT, HEBREW UNION COLLEGE
 
 V/ lCcc
 
 HEBREW UNION 
 COLLEGE 
 
 AND 
 
 OTHER ADDRESSES 
 
 BY 
 DR. KAUFMAN KOHLER 
 
 PRESIDENT, HEBREW UNION COLLEGE 
 
 CINCINNATI 
 
 ARK PUBLISHING CO. 
 1916
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1916, 
 
 BY 
 ARK PUBLISHING CO.
 
 Stack 
 Annex 
 
 TO 
 
 MY ALL-BELOVED WIFE 
 
 MY FAITHFUL HELPMATE IN ALL MY 
 ACTIVITIES AND ASPIRATIONS 
 
 IN LOVING DEVOTION
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 In selecting the following Addresses and Dis- 
 courses to appear in book form, I had two objects in 
 view : The one is to give permanency to those memor- 
 able events in the history of the Hebrew Union Col- 
 lege, of which it has been vouchsafed to me to be 
 the witness, or participant, beginning with a time 
 w r hen the great founder of the institution, Isaac M. 
 Wise, was still shaping its destinies and down to the 
 period of twelve years or more during which I have 
 served as its President. These addresses may per- 
 haps serve to record these landmarks in the progress 
 of the College and to some extent also in the progress 
 of American Reform Judaism in general. The other 
 object I had in view was to acquaint the general 
 public with the views and aims of Reform Judaism 
 and with the great personalities who, "with their 
 leaders' staves digged the well of living waters" to 
 quench the thirst of the people and their flocks. 
 
 Other discourses in this collection may be of 
 interest to the reader as far as they cast some side- 
 lights on various phases of Jewish history and Jewish 
 lore. 
 
 The collection closes perhaps not inaptly with a 
 tribute of esteem paid by the writer on behalf of the
 
 viii PREFACE 
 
 Board of Governors, the Faculty and the student 
 body of the Hebrew Union College to the memory of 
 Dr. Solomon Schechter, the late and much lamented 
 President of our sister-institution, whose recent 
 demise has created a void in the ranks of the scho- 
 larly world which cannot easily be filled, and who will 
 ever shine as a star of great magnitude among those 
 who increased the knowledge and enlarged the scope 
 of the Torah. 
 
 May this collection contribute its humble part 
 to a fuller understanding of the aims and needs of 
 American Judaism. 
 
 DR. K. KOHLER. 
 Cincinnati, March, 1916.
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 1. A Well of Living Waters, Address at the first Col- 
 
 lege Graduation, 1883 1 
 
 2. The Hebrew Union College Inaugural Address, 1903 11 
 
 3. Address at the Corner-Stone Laying of the new He- 
 
 brew Union College Buildings, 1911 31 
 
 4. Dedication Address at the new College Building, 1913 39 
 
 5. Isaac M. Wise, Founder's Day Address, 1912 . . 51 
 
 6. Moses Mielziner, at the First Anniversary of His 
 
 Death, 1904 59 
 
 7. David Einhorn and Samuel Adler, Centennary Address, 
 
 1909 67 
 
 8. Samuel Hirsch, Memorial Address, 1889 .... 75 
 
 9. Abraham Geiger, Centennary Address, 1910 ... 83 
 
 10. "The Peace Mission of Judaism," Address at the 
 
 Opening of the College, 1914 99 
 
 11. Priest, Prophet and Preacher, Sunday Discourse, 1888 109 
 
 12. Dedication of the new Temple Beth El, New York, 
 
 1891 123 
 
 13. Dedication of the new Temple Sinai, Chicago, 1912 133 
 
 14. The Ethical Basis of Judaism, 1886 143 
 
 15. Israel's Mission in the World, 1915 161 
 
 16. The Bible in the Light of Modern Research, Sunday 
 Lecture, 1887 173 
 
 17. The Wandering Jew, 1888 185 
 
 18. American Judaism, 1911 195 
 
 19. Moses and Jesus, 1892 215 
 
 20. The Historical Development of Jewish Charity, 1890 229 
 
 21. The Miracles of the Bible, 1890 . . . . . .253 
 
 22. The New Translation of the Bible, 1914 . . . .267 
 
 23. Woman's Influence on Judaism, 1906 273 
 
 24. Origin and Function of Ceremonies in Judaism, 1907 297 
 
 25. Solomon Schechter, 1915 323
 
 1. 
 
 A WELL OF LIVING WATERS.* 
 
 THIS IS indeed a most glorious Sabbath for 
 you, one that must needs fill your hearts with 
 joy and pride, for you see your fondest hopes realized, 
 a ten years' arduous and mighty work, the long-cher- 
 ished plan of our energetic and enthusiastic friend, 
 the noble, untiring efforts of a few eminently generous- 
 hearted and whole-souled devotees to the Jewish 
 cause, crowned with the most brilliant success. I 
 hail the opportunity offered of expressing my deep 
 and sincere recognition and admiration of what you 
 have achieved. As I recall the many difficulties you 
 had to cope with, the many drawbacks and obstacles 
 you had to overcome, the fears and apprehensions you 
 had to dispel, I can not but say: The Lord is with 
 thee, thou mighty man of valor! Behold, the Union 
 of American Hebrew Congregations, opposed from 
 all sides, is an established fact, a power working for 
 the good of Israel. The College, its bright jewel, at 
 first looked at with sneers and skepticism, has stood 
 the test. It has gone through its critical teething 
 period. It stands there as an ornament of American 
 Judaism, a foundation of hope for the future, a 
 testimony of religious zeal and devotion, by its 
 
 *Sermon preached at the Plum Street Temple on the Sabbath 
 previous to the first Graduation Exercises at the Hebrew 
 Union College, July, 1883.
 
 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 intrinsic value and usefulness outshining any other 
 institution of liberal-hearted American Israel! And 
 I feel confident that it will become the focus of 
 American learning, heart and center of American 
 Judaism. Subject and text of my discourse are 
 suggested by to-day's Sabbath lesson, which reads: 
 The Israelites arrived at the well, that is the well 
 of which God spoke to Moses: "Gather the people 
 together, and I will give them water." Then Israel 
 sang the song: "Rise up, O well! Sing ye unto it! 
 The well the princes dug, the nobles of the people 
 dug it with their staves, with the lawgiver's staff." 
 Literally taken, this is a genuine Bedouin song, 
 an exultation over the discovery of water, so precious 
 a boon for the exhausted caravan on the parched 
 desert soil. Still, to us the Bible is no mere collection 
 of Oriental poetry. It is our treasury of inspiration 
 in accord with our own joys and needs. Its tunes 
 correspond to the throbbings of our heart. It is 
 the book we consult on all the living issues of the 
 age. And hearken! Has the old desert song become 
 faint? I hear the melodious strains still vibrating 
 in our ears: "Rise up, O well, dug by our princes 
 some three thousand years ago! Sing ye unto the 
 well of living waters that rushed forth, bright and 
 pure, from Sinai's rock at the touch of Moses, the 
 lawgiver's staff!" Thank God, the well has not been 
 dried up, but, in unabated forces, re-echoes the divine 
 call: "Oh, ye thirsty, go for the water!" Like 
 Miriam's well in the legend, it has followed us on 
 our march through the lands and ages. It has 
 accompanied us across the sea. Not Israel's flock
 
 A WELL OF LIVING WATER 
 
 only, but the entire civilized world has rallied around 
 it to draw life and vigor, comfort and inspiration, 
 freedom and truth from its cheering heavenly fluid. 
 But we have remained faithful keepers and guardians 
 of the perennial fount. And now an exclamation of 
 joy goes throughout the camp of American Israel: 
 "We have found water for the young flock.". We 
 need not fear for the future. Planted on the living 
 waters of knowledge of God, American Judaism is 
 sure to flourish. 
 
 Consider for a few moments with me, what lent 
 Judaism its matchless strength, its invulnerable 
 vitality? By what magic spell did the small shepherd- 
 people successfully battle with the great nations of 
 heathendom, storm their walls and fortresses, and 
 force them all to surrender their gods, their religious 
 and philosophical structures to Israel's great Lord 
 of hosts? It was all the work of that wondrous well 
 of the Torah. Paganism rendered life a barren desert, 
 offering no living water for the thirsty soul, no com- 
 forting and refreshing word of cheer from above to 
 all the sighs and' cries of man's longing and craving 
 spirit. It displayed but wild fancies, forms of a weird 
 imagination to mock him, Fata Morgana to lure 
 him into ruin and despair. Heathenism was a sys- 
 tem of illusions under hierarchical rule, keeping the 
 masses in bondage and darkness. To inquire and to 
 know was to give it a death-blow. Before the dawn 
 of reason its specters fled. At the approach of 
 philosophy it faded away. 
 
 Judaism, on the contrary, kindled the lamp of 
 reason and knowledge, long hid in man. Jewish
 
 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 revelation swung the windows of Heaven wide open 
 to throw light on man's path. Instead of mysteries 
 it offered instruction, instead of a blind faith, living 
 words of truth. In place of fear of a blind, passionate 
 will, or of an iron, relentless fate, it planted love for 
 and confidence in a God of truth and righteousness. 
 It engaged the thinking faculties of man, telling him: 
 Follow your reason, and you can not help finding 
 God on the top of the ladder. In nature's beauty and 
 order behold the hem of the garment of His glory. 
 Unlock all its secrets, and you will ever more admire 
 the wondrous ways and proof of His ever-working 
 loom. Gaze at the mighty procession of ages, at the 
 majestic pageant of centuries and epochs, and you 
 hear His commanding voice marshalling all the 
 forces behind the scene. Within your bosom, heaving 
 with gladness or sadness at the soft whispers or awful 
 thunders within, you feel His touch; in sunshine and 
 storm of destiny, in the triumphs or defeats of history 
 you recognize His countenance smiling or frowning 
 upon the works of men. You are not forsaken nor 
 forlorn. God, however high and lofty, is ever near 
 you. All your toils are means of triumph, all your 
 struggles pathways to victory. The world is built 
 on the fiery wheels of God's chariot of justice. It 
 is ever moving, ever progressing. You need not 
 wait and crave for a world beyond the grave. Right 
 here on earth you are, as His child and co-laborer, 
 bidden to build a kingdom of truth and righteousness, 
 and the end is not reached until the earth is full of 
 knowledge of God, as the waters cover the sea. This 
 is Judaism. And does this not harmoniously chime 
 in with all human progress and civilization? Does
 
 A WELL OF LIVING WATER 
 
 this not exactly accord with all the lofty ideals of 
 men, with the noble endeavor of the ages, with the 
 higher aims and goals of every science and art? 
 Knowledge, therefore, ever was the powerful ally 
 and friend of Judaism, "Speak to wisdom, thou art 
 my sister," was its watchword. Indeed, wisdom 
 spread its bright wings over the cradle of Moses in 
 Egypt and over King Solomon's Temple resplendent 
 with the beauty of Phoenician art. It unveiled its 
 secret to high-soaring Isaiah, and enlightened the 
 Jewish exiles in Babylon. Open the pages of the 
 Bible, and you discover everywhere the imprints of 
 hoary Babylonian lore. Read Talmud and Midrash, 
 and you hear the echo of Grecian philosophy and 
 science. Look at the wealthy merchant-city of Alex- 
 andria. How nobly do the Jews there strive for a 
 harmonious blending of Greek thought with the 
 Sinaic truth! Or go still further down in Jewish 
 history. What a brilliancy of light radiates from the 
 industrious fellowship of Arabic and Jewish scholars! 
 Its bright rays illumined the dreary night of the 
 Middle Ages, and helped to kindle the first sparks 
 of our much-boasted modern enlightenment and 
 culture. Everywhere the Jews were the banner- 
 bearers of civilization, the pioneers of knowledge. 
 And why? Because light was the vital element of 
 Judaism, learning its great propelling power. Like 
 a true sage, Israel gathered knowledge from every 
 source in order to brighten up the mental horizon 
 and reflect new splendor on God's throne. And this 
 constant influx of new ideas, this intermingling with 
 many streams of knowledge prevented the waters of 
 the Sinai rock from becoming a stagnant pool, a
 
 6 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 petrified creed. Judaism remained an ever-living 
 fountain of truth, fresh and clear like a crystal spring. 
 Christianity sacrificed the truth, subordinating reason 
 in order to win the hearts of the masses. Judaism 
 never compromised, never surrendered, proudly 
 saying with Abraham in the Haggadah: "Though 
 the whole world be on the other side, I, having God 
 and truth with me, am in the majority, and shall 
 win the battle." What harm can free investigation 
 and criticism do us? Let those be alarmed whose 
 belief is like a broken cistern which holds no water. 
 Let those fear who persist in drinking the stale and 
 putrid water from the wornout buckets used when 
 far away from refreshing springs. Earnest search 
 after truth and goodness can only lead farther up 
 to the great Fountain-head of all wisdom, to the 
 Sublime Intellect. Many a problem during our age 
 has been anticipated by our old Jewish thinkers, 
 and where no difficulties and doubts have sprung up, 
 we can afford to meet them fairly and squarely. 
 The foundation of our faith will never give way. 
 As long as man yearns for the truth, the well of 
 Sinai will refresh his soul in the wilderness. Revela- 
 tion is an ever running stream, never to be exhausted. 
 Each age, each student has a share in it. Our age 
 thirsts for fresh and clear water from the perennial 
 well of humanity. Why not pour it out freely from 
 Sinai's rock? Why not open wide the floodgates of 
 knowledge, so that people will espouse our cause, 
 and drink with delight from the fount of salvation 
 and truth? Says God: "Gather the whole people 
 together, and I will give them water."
 
 A WELL OF LIVING WATER 
 
 Yes, all people; not the priests merely. No 
 distinction between priest and layman, except that 
 the one be teacher and the other the learner. Like 
 air and water, truth belongs to all. All were called 
 to stand at the foot of Sinai and listen to the word of 
 God. Common instruction is the only check to 
 bigotry and fanaticism. Ignorance is a disgrace 
 among Jews. Next to love of God comes the com- 
 mandment to teach the children. Each parent is 
 to be a teacher in his household; each Jew a mis- 
 sionary of truth a priest of humanity. The first 
 Jew Aristotle, the greatest of the Greek sages, saw 
 and spoke to made such an impression upon him 
 that he took the Jews as a class of philosophers. A 
 people of thinkers, they were called by Hegel, the 
 German philosopher, who was anything but fond of 
 them. Constant training of the mind, continued 
 cultivation of knowledge, rendered them, indeed, the 
 world's intellectual aristocracy. To it their financial 
 success, their material prosperity, their important 
 position in the world's commerce is due. Still, we 
 have not gone through the fiery furnace of trial and 
 suffering in order to be rulers of the money market, 
 accumulators of wealth, but to be a light to the 
 nations, disseminators of spiritual treasures all over 
 the earth. Seats of knowledge, institutions of learn- 
 ing, are our mines of riches, our reservoirs of power. 
 They are our armories and strongholds, our standards 
 of victory, our watchfires in the camp. Wherever the 
 lamp of the Torah was burning, Judaism felt safe. 
 A seat of learning in Jamnia was all Jochanan ben 
 Sakkai asked for, when Titus' soldiers threw the
 
 8 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 firebrand into the Temple. And when, under Chris- 
 tian emperors, Palestine no longer offered a shelter 
 to her own children, Babylonia's flourishing academies 
 became shining stars of hope. No sooner did the 
 East show signs of exhaustion, than the schools in 
 the West turned out to be light-houses to storm-tossed 
 Israel. With juster pride than the king, Israel may 
 boast: "Within my kingdom the sun never sets." 
 And it was always the highest ambition and privilege 
 of Jewish wealth to patronize study and help promul- 
 gate knowledge. 
 
 It has now devolved on American Israel to create 
 a focus of learning. German Judaism, the pioneer 
 of reform and progress, the nursery of modern 
 thought and learning, is apparently on the decline. 
 The men to courageously uphold the flag of world- 
 conquering, enlightened and progressive Judaism 
 are daily growing less in number and strength. It 
 is your opportunity, American Israelites, to bring 
 about a soul-stirring revival like that of brilliant 
 Spain. Unshackled by blind belief in authority, un- 
 trammeled by fear and prejudice, on freedom's holy 
 soil, at the cradle of a new humanity, in a land which 
 in every respect tends to create a larger type of 
 manhood, you can render the Jewish religion a foun- 
 tain of truth, of inspiration and hope to rally and 
 refresh all the flocks of mankind. Which religion 
 corresponds so closely to the broad, liberal and 
 philanthropic aspirations and sympathies of the 
 American heart, to the vigorous, practical grasp 
 of the American mind as Israel's pure monotheism, 
 which has its deep roots in the remotest past, and
 
 A WELL OF LIVING WATER 
 
 holds forth its bright and glorious promises for the 
 distant future of mankind? And what but Jewish 
 scholarship possesses the key to unlock the treasures 
 of the Bible and of all religious and philosophical 
 systems built on it? Knowledge only renders man 
 truly free and independent ; knowledge only, a thorough 
 acquaintance with our priceless world-wide literature; 
 an extensive study of our unparalleled history in- 
 spires us with a love and enthusiasm for our time- 
 honored faith and for our lofty mission for humanity, 
 whose thorn-crowned martyr-priest Israel has been 
 for all these centuries, and whose triumphant Messiah 
 he is to be. 
 
 A Jewish University, therefore, uniting and 
 representing the best Jewish wisdom and scholarship, 
 disseminating knowledge, sending out faithful and 
 earnest propagators of truth, brave champions of 
 faith and enlightenment, true missionaries of Judaism, 
 forms the supporting pillar and the crowning pinnacle 
 of American Judaism. It is our safeguard and source 
 of strength. In it all our material success and social 
 prosperity must culminate. And where on this 
 blessed continent is there a city like this as broad 
 in its social views, where a community in which 
 such sweet harmony exists among various sects, 
 where Jewish temples and Catholic, Methodist and 
 Unitarian churches so fraternally grasp each other's 
 hand to let people feel that they all walk under one 
 paternal roof, beneath the broad canopy of heaven? 
 Well, then, the beginning has nobly been made. 
 The waters of Jewish knowledge are freely and 
 lavishly offered. It is no longer a well of strife and
 
 10 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 jealousy, a well of animosity and contention. It 
 is a well of harmony and peace, around which the 
 shepherds rally amicably with their flocks. Well 
 sing ye unto it: Spring up, O well, and spread 
 blessing near and far. Let princes and people, all 
 the noble-souled and liberal-hearted assist in digging 
 and maintaining it. May it realize all our hopes 
 and fair visions! May it lead Jewish America from 
 a state of barrenness to intellectual riches, to a true 
 appreciation of God's gift, to the bright Pisgah height 
 of humanity, so that Cincinnati will be blessed by 
 all Jewish communities of America as a mother city 
 in Israel, and all lands will join America in singing 
 the great song of thanksgiving to God. 
 Amen!
 
 2. 
 
 INAUGURAL ADDRESS. 
 
 WHAT A JEWISH INSTITUTION OF LEARNING 
 SHOULD BE. 
 
 "T\yTAY your strength and your power to accom- 
 i.'M. plish good ever increase." In this form in 
 which the Jew of old used to utter his thanks, let me 
 express to you, gentlemen of the Board of Governors, 
 my grateful appreciation of the signal honors shown 
 to me in this solemn hour, the proudest moment of 
 my life, and of the kind words expressive of your 
 regard and your confidence addressed to me while 
 placing the Hebrew Union College, the object of 
 your highest pride and solicitude, into my charge. 
 I am fully conscious of the arduous task, the great 
 duties and responsibilities which devolve upon me, 
 and all the laudations I receive fill my soul only with 
 all the greater humility and awe in view of my untried 
 powers in this new field of work. But it is the desire 
 of working out, with what of experience and knowl- 
 edge God has granted me, the highest destinies of 
 the college, that prompted me to give up a thirty- 
 four years' service in the ministry and follow your 
 call to the presidency. It is no small matter, I know, 
 to be successor to Isaac M. Wise, the founder 
 of this college, whose powerful personality achieved 
 
 *Delivered at the Hebrew Union College, Sunday, October 
 18, 1903.
 
 12 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 wondrous success where many other great leaders 
 failed. Nor indeed do I flatter myself that I possess 
 the qualities that made him the leader of leaders 
 and the master-builder in American Israel. In one 
 thing, however, I dare say I am not behind my 
 illustrious predecessor, and that is in ardent love and 
 zeal for Israel's sacred treasure, the Torah. Ever 
 since I sat, a young pious lad, at the feet of my sainted 
 teachers, Rabbi Samuel Bondi, in Mainz, of Jacob 
 Ettlinger, in Altona, and Samson Raphael Hirsch, 
 in Frankfort-on-the-Main, and others, it was my 
 highest ambition and aim to lift up the standard of 
 the Law and disseminate its truths; and while under 
 the influence of more extensive study and inde- 
 pendent research, my views have since undergone a 
 mighty change, the well-spring of my love and 
 enthusiasm has not dried up, and with unspeakable 
 joy and thanksgiving to God do I hail this hour as 
 the realization of my holiest dream. But, with the 
 Psalmist, I exclaim: "Not unto us, O Lord, not 
 unto us, but unto Thy name belongeth the glory!" 
 It is the diadem of the Torah, the crown of Jewish 
 learning, that I long to see again placed upon the 
 brow of modern Israel. "The Torah is thy life and 
 the length of thy days." The Torah, the fount of 
 light and joy, the comfort and mainstay of the Jew 
 in darkest time and amid direst distress, must again 
 occupy the central place in our hearts and homes and 
 be rendered the life-center of the Jewish community. 
 With the Torah as the rallying point of the race, 
 the Jew is unconquerable and irresistible; without it 
 he is bound to go down and be lost, whether in free 
 America or under Turkish or British suzerainty.
 
 13 
 
 The Torah establishes his claim as the God-chosen 
 servant of humanity; his material success only pro- 
 vokes jealousy and hatred, notwithstanding all his 
 philanthropic endeavors. To the promotion and 
 propagation of the Torah, to the sending forth of the 
 Testimony, the message of Israel's God sealed upon 
 the lips of disciples, I shall, under God's guidance, 
 consecrate my life and my labors for the rest of my 
 days. But what is the Torah which Israel is commis- 
 sioned to teach and to propagate? And what should 
 a Seat of Jewish Learning be to the Jewish community 
 and to the world at large? These are, I think, the 
 two pivoted questions which I , as one who is expected 
 to mould the character and destiny of a large body of 
 American Israel, ought to answer today. 
 
 I. 
 
 Allow me to quote the words by which you have 
 so aptly and tersely characterized the work before 
 me, and my attitude to the past history of the college: 
 "With Dr. Wise and Dr. Mielziner, of blessed memory, 
 the era of construction has passed, and now the period 
 of development begins." Indeed, Dr. Wise has built 
 well and enduringly, and the institution which he 
 reared stands firmly established upon the broad and 
 solid foundations of the Union of American Hebrew 
 Congregations. What Abba Areka did for Baby- 
 lonia, Isaac M. Wise did for America, and well may 
 he, like him, be called Rab, "the Master." Imbued 
 with his spirit and zeal have his disciples, well nigh 
 a hundred in number, gone forth all over the land as 
 eloquent preachers and indefatigable workers to 
 win the rising generation for Israel's Only One and
 
 14 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 impart new life and vigor to American Israel. All 
 this beautiful sowing and planting, this great spirit- 
 ual harvest, is the unique work of the organizing 
 genius of Dr. Wise, who, with his heart and his ear 
 ever close to the people, and understanding their 
 need, created, with the scanty means at his disposal 
 and a few helpers, the institution which furnished the 
 congregations with rabbis and leaders such as they 
 required and yearned for. 
 
 To-day new conditions have risen, and new and 
 higher claims are put upon the college. The old 
 generation, mostly of foreign birth, with a deep 
 religious feeling ingrained from childhood, with 
 fervent religious needs and deeply-rooted religious 
 convictions and customs, is fast dwindling away. 
 A new generation, thoroughly American in educa- 
 tion, culture and tastes, sits in the pew waiting for 
 inspiration from the pulpit. It does not want mere 
 oratory which delights and thrills for the moment, 
 but has no lasting effect. It wants the fire from 
 heaven that sets every fibre ablaze with fear of God. 
 It wants power. Whence, then, should come the 
 power to the preacher unless he has drunk deeply 
 at the fount of Jewish knowledge, unless the Beth 
 ha Midrash, the institution of learning, represents, 
 above all, power. "The Torah is nothing if not 
 power, victory-boding strength." Our various Jewish 
 institutions of learning, wherever they may be, lack 
 the essential element of efficiency they lack power. 
 As long as the Jew's life and thought were centered 
 upon the Talmud, and his entire conduct regulated 
 by the Rabbinic Code, the Shulhan Aruk, the Yeshi- 
 bah or Rabbinical Academy fulfilled its high purpose
 
 A JEWISH INSTITUTION OF LEARNING 15 
 
 by equipping not only the future Rabbi, but every 
 capable son of Israel, with the knowledge of the 
 Rabbinical law and supplying him with intellectual 
 and moral fibre to brave life's struggles and tempta- 
 tions nobly. The Talmud was the citadel of the 
 medieval Jew; behind its ramparts he was safe and 
 strong, fit to cope with every emergency. But what 
 is the Talmud to the modern Jew that the most 
 precious hours of the student should still be spent 
 on its hair-splitting dialectics, upon that "vast, 
 bottomless sea" out of which only few fortunate 
 divers know how to bring the precious pearls forth 
 to the light of day? It is but blind adherence to tra- 
 ditional custom which accounts for the fact that the 
 theological schools of Breslau, Budapest, and Ber- 
 lin, not to speak of the more conservative seminaries, 
 lay all possible stress and value upon these barren 
 Halakic subjects, the divine origin and character of 
 which are believed in neither by teacher nor pupil, 
 whereas the essentials of the Jewish faith, the great 
 religious and philosophical problems of the age, 
 Divine Revelation and Authority, Inspiration and 
 Higher Criticism, the relation of science to faith, 
 of comparative religion or of Christianity to Judaism, 
 are timidly shunned as a "Noli MeTangere!"- -"Touch 
 me not." And what is the consequence? The men 
 that have gone forth from these seminaries may 
 possibly have enriched the learned world with a 
 treatise on some obscure Hebrew, Arabic or Samaritan 
 work, and turned out to be fine linguists, perchance, 
 or archaeologists and palaeographers well versed in 
 literature and able to handle manuscripts and palimp- 
 sests, but they have missed their vocation. They
 
 16 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 fail to impart life to the dry bones of Judaism. They 
 lack the power of a great, all-enrapturing, all-vivifying 
 truth. There is nothing of the prophetic spirit in 
 them to make Judaism a power for an age weakened 
 by doubt and chilled by apathy. One of the chief 
 reasons for the sad state of religious life among the 
 Jews of Europe to-day, for the lethargy and dissolu- 
 tion that has taken hold of many Jewish communities 
 in Europe, is that the theological institutions and the 
 preachers have relaxed in religious vigor. 
 
 The theological school must be the power-house 
 to supply pulpit and people with the dynamic force of 
 an all-ruling, all-electrifying religious truth. It is not 
 enough that Bible and Talmud, Halakah and Hag- 
 gadah, Hellenic and Arabic literature, Philosophy and 
 Cabala, History and Literature, Liturgy and Homi- 
 letics be taught; they must all be turned into vitalizing 
 sparks of truth. They must all be transformed into 
 spiritual helps and lifts to unfold the inherent power 
 of Judaism in its manifold stages and phases of growth. 
 It is in this light that each teacher, by showing the 
 organic connection, the inner relations between his 
 branch of study and the others, can single out the 
 potencies, the spiritual, moral and intellectual kernel 
 beneath the shell, and so lay bare the deeper impulses 
 and show the higher motives that gave lasting value 
 and zest to each specific study and movement. In 
 other words, the theological curriculum must mean 
 not the registration, but the profound appreciation, of 
 all the religious forces that were at work throughout 
 the various ages and lands, while at the same time 
 our own religious needs and our own religious con- 
 sciousness should form the object of our foremost
 
 A JEWISH INSTITUTION OF LEARNING 17 
 
 solicitude. Take, for instance, the Talmudic mar- 
 riage and divorce laws, most of which have lost their 
 practical significance for us. There is, as the late 
 Dr. Mielziner has so well shown, an intrinsic ethical 
 force attached to many of them, which we cannot 
 afford to ignore. The same is the case with the 
 fringes and phylacteries, the Zizith and Tefillin, our 
 fathers wore. They, too, present in the Haggadah 
 an ethical valuation of the ceremonials which renders 
 them gems upon the diadem of Judaism, more than 
 most of those who still wear them on their body are 
 aware of. 
 
 In very fact, it is as a means of conveying power 
 and spiritual force that certain portions of the 
 Halakah and almost the whole of the Haggadah 
 should be taught, and not for mere mental gymnastics. 
 For thousands of years the treasures of coal lay an 
 inert and seemingly worthless substance in the bowels 
 of the earth, until the scanning eye of genius turned 
 them into sources of power. There is a wealth of 
 spiritual and ethical thought buried in the Midrash 
 and Talmud which must be turned into power, 
 whereas at present it is treated as dead matter. 
 But in like manner do most of the branches of Jewish 
 learning wait for the creative mind that extracts 
 from them the element of power. Let but the human 
 side, the moral sentiment, the deeper life-problem in 
 Jewish history or any of the Rabbinical, philosophical 
 or mystic writings be touched, and the driest subjects 
 become interesting, instructive and fascinating. 
 
 Yes, a store-house of spiritual power the theo- 
 logical school must be, and it is foolish and wrong to 
 evade the discussion of vexatious problems of the
 
 18 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 day. You fail to train men of power for the ministry, 
 if you ignore or simply condemn the Higher Biblical 
 Criticism and Comparative Religion and Law as 
 detrimental to the faith or to reverence for the Bible. 
 To use the expression of Abtalion, "Be on your guard 
 lest the disciples drink of the turbid waters and under- 
 go spiritual death and the name of God be pro- 
 faned." Never before was the path of the preacher 
 beset with such difficulties, such struggles and doubts 
 as today. Questions which formerly occupied only 
 the mind of the scholar in his study have become the 
 great concern of all thinking people. Each day dis- 
 closes some long-hidden document in the earth or 
 some startling phenomenon in the sky or the sea that 
 threatens to undermine the very groundwork of faith 
 and calls for a resetting of the Bible and a reconstruc- 
 tion of the whole idea of Revelation and Creation. 
 The issue today is no longer between Reform and 
 Orthodoxy, but between a world with God and a 
 world without God. How, then, can the destinies 
 of homes and communities, the guardianship of 
 souls and the future of humanity be entrusted to 
 men who, in a time when the foundations of morality 
 are shaken and the peace of the world quivers under 
 the fierce contest of ideas, lack power and principle, 
 wavering and oscillating between agnosticism and 
 belief, between Judaism and Unitarianism and a 
 dozen other isms, because, immature in judgment, 
 they have eaten of the unripe fruit of the tree of 
 knowledge only to expose their own nakedness of 
 soul? Rabbinical scholarship alone, however ex- 
 tensive, even inclusive of medieval philosophy, all 
 the lofty thought of a R. Joshua ben Hananiah and
 
 A JEWISH INSTITUTION OF LEARNING 19 
 
 R. Meir, of a Maimuni and Crescas, fails to solve 
 the vital problems for the seeker after truth to-day. 
 He must have learned how to penetrate through the 
 shell to the divine kernel and to view the whole pro- 
 cess of growth, the evolution of matter and mind, as 
 divinely designed and predestined, though necessi- 
 tated by nature and following the laws that rule 
 all things. He must, in other w'ords, like Moses in 
 the house of Pharaoh, receive the nurturing sap of 
 life from the mother, the faith that gave him life, 
 while the surrounding world offers him all the edu- 
 cating influences to render him a child of the age. 
 Only then can he with a clear and firm Jewish con- 
 victions and principles be a staff of support to those 
 ready to fall and a power to lead the erring and way- 
 ward. 
 
 Reform Judaism, especially, must be felt to be a 
 power, the faith of manhood. It is calumny to say 
 that the desire for assimilation or for a taste of for- 
 bidden meat created the Reform movement. The 
 Reform pioneers, Geiger and Holdheim, Einhorn, 
 Samuel Hirsch and Dr. Wise, were men of power, 
 of principle, who brooked no compromise and never 
 yielded. They had the courage of their conviction 
 and throughout life displayed consistency and stead- 
 fastness of purpose. It is Romanticism that wants 
 picturesqueness; that renders Judaism and Synagog 
 a museum of antiquities, preserving the forms of the 
 past fossilized while the spirit has fled long ago. 
 Such conservatism fails to engender power, because 
 it lacks conviction; it only creates hypocrites, men 
 that halt between the two sides. Legend tells that 
 Abraham, who broke the idols of his father courag-
 
 20 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 eously, braved the fire of Nimrod's furnace and was 
 saved by the power of his faith in God. whereas Haran 
 who wavered, not knowing whether to bow to the 
 idol of Nimrod or to worship Abraham's Only One, 
 went into the fire and was consumed. An age of 
 distraction and discrepancies like ours requires the 
 power of a positive conviction and intensity of faith. 
 Reform Judaism stands for a religion of power which 
 alone saves man when in doubt and trial. Reform 
 Judaism broke the shackles of ceremonialism and 
 legalism, because, following the lead of the prophets, 
 it declared Judaism to be not a system of laws and 
 statutes, but the law of truth and righteousness. 
 And it is this championship of truth and righteous- 
 ness which alone made the Jew the mightiest power 
 in the world. The whole history of the Jew in dark 
 and in bright ages, the very life of the prophets and 
 martyrs, of the sages and the saints in Israel was an 
 exhibition of valor and heroic strength. 
 
 So is the attitude of the true reform Jew today 
 of the Jew who reclaims the entire so-called Christian 
 civilization for Judaism, and does not plan a retreat 
 before the foe by way of East Africa or of Asia that 
 of power, power of the spirit that will not yield to 
 number and to physical might. Reform Judaism 
 is hated and feared most by the anti-Semite, because 
 it is aggressive. It refuses to simply take the de- 
 fensive. It wants to assert its power; neither shall it 
 rest, until the whole history of the world will have 
 been reconstructed on the principle of evolution, 
 which beholds in Christianity as well as in Islamism 
 offshoots of a world-conquering Judaism.
 
 A JEWISH INSTITUTION OF LEARNING 21 
 
 II. 
 
 But here I have already touched upon the second 
 point which I wish to emphasize as another of the 
 chief aims of a Jewish institution of learning. One of 
 the ever-reiterated maxims of the Rabbis is, "Light 
 that is the law." The charge which is ever brought 
 forth anew against Judaism by the followers of St. 
 Paul is that it is harsh, unrelenting law and its main 
 characteristic is legalism or ritualism. This charge 
 is untrue. To the Jew at all times his Torah was 
 "learning," a matter of reason and knowledge. Just 
 as the Jewish seers of old appealed constantly to 
 reason and common sense in order to establish God's 
 throne in the heart of the universe and the heart of 
 man, so did the sages of the Talmud and the philoso- 
 phers of the middle ages accentuate ever anew the 
 reasonableness of the Jewish faith. As Miriam stood 
 on the banks of the Nile watching the babe Moses 
 in the floating willow basket, so does wisdom, so 
 does knowledge ever stand in sisterly love and 
 solicitude watching and fostering the progress of the 
 Jewish faith is a beautiful remark of the Midrash. 
 Hence, religion to the Jew never was blind faith 
 upon the acceptance of which follows heavenly 
 reward, but it is the light of God allied to the intellect, 
 as is the moon that shines at night a corollary of the 
 bright orb of day. The greatest Rabbinical author- 
 ities, therefore, were accordingly bold, independent 
 seekers after truth. Never could mysticism in Jewish 
 circles entirely obscure reason in its free and un- 
 impeded sway. And as the first rationalists and Bible 
 critics were Jews, so did none hail the new era of
 
 22 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 reason and enlightenment with greater delight than 
 the son of Israel. How singular, then, that the Jew 
 has gone out with the lamp of knowledge and the 
 torch of research to light up every field except his 
 own. How little does the average Jew to-day know of 
 his own literature; how scant is his knowledge re- 
 garding the Book of Books which he handed forth 
 as a compass to man on his wanderings over the wide 
 globe! 
 
 The interpretation and elucidation of the Biblical 
 writings in the light of modern research has all been 
 left to Christian workers. The Jew for whom the 
 term Amhaarez ("Ignoramus") was the most humil- 
 iating opprobrium in olden times, has lost all interest 
 in his Torah, has forgotten how to read his own sacred 
 signs. And while our age has produced Jewish schol- 
 ars and investigators of the first rank in every branch 
 of learning and literature, those that have contributed 
 essentially to the understanding of the teachings of 
 Judaism, or written standard works on Jewish life 
 and Jewish thought outside of the Talmudic sphere, 
 are scarcely to be found in our own camp. Worse 
 than this, the whole field of Hellenistic writings and 
 the immense number of Apocryphal books which 
 cast a flood of light upon the pre-Christian centuries 
 of Jewish history have been altogether neglected 
 by the Jewish student, and the consequence is that the 
 whole point of view from which Jewish history and 
 literature have been written by Jewish authors is 
 narrow, onesided and often altogether false. Neither 
 the Talmud nor the New Testament are fully under- 
 stood by most of them. On the other hand, non-
 
 A JEWISH INSTITUTION OF LEARNING 23 
 
 Jews have translated for us large portions of our 
 Rabbinic, all of our Hellenistic and Apocryphal 
 literature and composed for us whatever there exists 
 of systematic works on Jewish theology and ethics, 
 on Jewish life and Jewish thought. And now, pray, 
 read the classical, the standard works on universal 
 history, or the history of the nations, the races, the 
 various epochs of human culture and civilization; 
 go through the libraries of the world to learn what has 
 been done by and for humanity all these hundreds 
 and thousands of years it all bears the imprint of 
 Christian thought and sentiment; it is all written 
 from the point of view of the New Testament, and 
 rarely with anything like fairness for the slandered, 
 persecuted and outlawed Jew, all claiming the great- 
 ness and glory of a new life and light for the star 
 that rose over Bethlehem, and denying to the Jew 
 the merit of having prepared the soil and fertilized 
 the atmosphere with the seeds that yielded all the 
 rich harvest for Christendom. And yet, what is the 
 whole New Testament, the entire work of the Church 
 during the first four centuries of its existence but 
 Jewish teaching and practice transferred to pagan 
 soil and appropriated by the disciples of the Nazarene 
 who never claimed to be anything but a Jew, a believer 
 in the confession "Shema Yisrael!" That very broad- 
 ness and universality and love, the preaching of a 
 Church Universal which is claimed for Jesus and 
 Paul, his visionary herald and hierophant, was Jew- 
 ish, the blossom and fruit of Alexandrian Judaism, 
 long before the Church had risen to continue what 
 the Jew had begun and to reap what the Jew had 
 sown.
 
 24 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 We have moved all along in the narrow circle of 
 Rabbinic literature and failed to see what the Jew 
 in his love for God and humanity had done in days 
 gone by. We have altogether too long walked in the 
 valley and neglected to look around to see all the 
 beauty and grandeur on the heights designed and pre- 
 pared by Israel in other times. It is high time that 
 we reclaim what is our own. The Jew has at all times 
 been the true cosmopolitan, the banner-bearer of 
 the light of a truth for all peoples. He blended Greek 
 culture and Jewish thought; he harmonized Hellenic 
 philosophy with Hebrew faith; he stood as mediator 
 between Aryan and Semite, working for true unity 
 of the human race, for the unity of God, the Father 
 of all men. And he alone, amid the raging warfare 
 between races and sects, nations, classes and creeds, 
 is destined to interlink the world by his universalism, 
 by his cosmopolitan religion and his broad conception 
 of God and man. Let me in this connection, quote 
 the words of an English writer, Frances Power 
 Cobbe, penned twenty-five years ago at the very 
 time when George Eliot wrote her ' Daniel Deronda" 
 to become the godfather of Zionism: ''Let Reformed 
 Judaism relight the old golden candle-stick and set 
 it aloft and it will give light unto all which are in the 
 house, not only of Israel, but of humanity. A glorious 
 picture may in God's providence await such purified, 
 emancipated Judaism." . . . "In the present dis- 
 integration of all religious opinion," she writes in 
 the preface of her book, The Scientific Spirit of the 
 Age, "Judaism may yet become a progressive faith 
 and solve the great problem of combining a theology 
 consonant to modern philosophy with a worship
 
 A JEWISH INSTITUTION OF LEARNING 25 
 
 hallowed by the sacred associations of the remotest 
 past." 
 
 Out, then, of the valley beneath, where we have 
 too long, by a fault not of our own, groped in dark- 
 ness, to the sunlit heights of our prophetic mission! 
 This must be the watchword of the modern Jew. 
 And where else but in America, the land of freedom, 
 and among people eager to listen reverently and 
 fairly to every message of truth, may the Jewish 
 theological school be expected to become a light- 
 house to illumine the path of all seekers after truth. 
 In the light of the first verse of Genesis, as commented 
 upon by the Midrash, the whole process of the world's 
 evolution appears as the unfolding of the spirit of 
 God, and the story of the Wandering Jew, the 
 Messiah of the nations, receives a new meaning under 
 the searchlight of the all-penetrating lamp of knowl- 
 ed ge evolution. 
 
 O ye sons and daughters of Israel, blessed with 
 wealth! What an abundance of beneficence could 
 you pour out upon generations unborn, what a power- 
 ful incentive to research, to the elucidation of Jewish 
 history and thought, could you hold out to the stu- 
 dent if you would, as is so generously done for other 
 creeds, endow chairs or create lectureships in con- 
 nection with the Hebrew Union College, for Bible 
 and Assyriology, for Old and New Testament re- 
 search, for Hellenistic and Cabalistic, Arabic and 
 Karaite literature, for Jewish theology and com- 
 parative religion, to make our work here broad, 
 comprehensive, world-uplifting and world-enlighten- 
 ing. Our college thus equipped would become an 
 armory like "David's tower with its thousand
 
 26 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 bucklers and shields of mighty men built for defense," 
 an impregnable fortress of Judaism and a challenge 
 to Anti-Semitism in high or low stations a true 
 laboratory of Jewish thought, an authoritative power 
 to reconstruct the history of the world and reclaim 
 for the Jew his rights and his titles as factor of 
 civilization. 
 
 III. 
 
 And yet a college for the training of Rabbis 
 stands for something higher still. Greater than all 
 knowledge and wisdom is life itself, with its thousand 
 duties and opportunities. A college that does not 
 prepare its disciples for the great issues, the stern 
 realities of life, by inculcating virtue and ennobling 
 that which is best in man, sentiment, fails of its 
 purpose, whatever it may do for the mind. For the 
 orthodox Jew who observes all the commandments 
 of the law, of which he counts as many prohibitions 
 as the year has days and as many mandates as the 
 body has members, the whole of life was holy, sancti- 
 fied by observances that crowned him with the diadem 
 of priesthood. For the Reform Jew, life is no less 
 hoi} 7 because it is vocal with duty, and God is in every 
 joy and grief, in every trial and temptation, to prove 
 his character and manhood. Ought, then, he who is 
 to bring the divine message of comfort and blessing 
 to hearts and homes in affliction and happiness, ought 
 the young aspirant to the ministry not learn in due 
 time to unfold these deeper powers of the soul with 
 which he is to perform his holy task as priest and 
 shepherd of his flock in order to enable him to offer 
 healing and tonic of the spirit to those that are in
 
 A JEWISH INSTITUTION OF LEARNING 27 
 
 trouble and woe? There must be a religious atmos- 
 phere about a Jewish seat of learning which gives 
 warmth to the heart and wings to the emotional nature 
 of man. The spirit of piety and reverence must 
 pervade the whole mode of teaching. What was 
 dear and sacred to the fathers must still be treated 
 with tender regard and reverence by us, however 
 obsolete and superstitious the practice or the belief. 
 The broken pieces of the old tablets of the Law were 
 deposited in the holy ark alongside of the new, the 
 Rabbis tell us. Our young reformers too often labor 
 under the great shortcoming that they were not 
 brought up in an atmosphere of religious life which 
 derived sanctity from its many rites and ceremonies, 
 and so they are callous, inclined to a rationalism which 
 chills the heart and blunts the finer tendrils of the 
 soul. Over against the cold intellectualism which 
 tends to undermine reverence for authority, faith 
 and the longing for God in prayer, so natural to every 
 child-like soul, we must institute regular religious 
 exercises, devotional readings and other modes of 
 spiritual uplifting. The future Jewish minister must 
 learn how to wing the soul up to God in prayer. 
 The picture of Jonah, the prophet of God, who lies 
 asleep in his corner, while all the rest kneel in prayer, 
 each before his God, in the storm that sweeps over 
 the sea, is not a very flattering one to the Jew of 
 to-day. 
 
 But greater than piety and prayer is sincerity, 
 uprightness before God and man. As the ark of the 
 covenant was inlaid with gold from within and with- 
 out, so, the Rabbis say, should every Jewish scholar 
 or teacher be of pure gold, from within and without,
 
 28 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 free from all hypocrisy, from time-serving or man- 
 pleasing. Men of character and of courage of opin- 
 ion, of steadfastness and sincerity of purpose, do we 
 need as leaders and banner-bearers of truth, men 
 whose souls burn with the fire of a holy conviction, 
 so that as "the elect ones of the sons of Israel," they 
 can only be glorified but not consumed by the fire 
 of God, because there is but the pure gold of principle 
 and no dross in their soul. Yes, the Hebrew Union 
 College should not only be a seat of learning but a 
 schoolhouse for religious, social and civic virtue; it 
 must give us not merely wise and intelligent leaders 
 who understand the requirements of the time and 
 supply the needs of the congregation, but men of 
 unbending strength of character and truthfulness, 
 God-fearing men who hate sin and show their inner 
 calling by true self-denial, as well as by dignity and 
 comity. 
 
 And yet one feature, hitherto greatly neglected, 
 I must not fail to mention. Judaism does not, like 
 the Hebrew, "read only backward." It looks for- 
 ward to the future and wants to take a firm grasp 
 of the life that now is in the light of its great mission. 
 All the knowledge the future Rabbi acquires must be 
 subordinate to the higher task of practical communal 
 service which he is expected to assume. He must 
 obtain an insight into social science in order to 
 be an efficient worker for the common good in this 
 complex life of ours. Justice is to Judaism more 
 than love; its work for the poor and needy must be 
 done on the principle of righteousness, not charity. 
 The study of sociology and the science of charity 
 are as indispensable equipments for him who is to
 
 A JEWISH INSTITUTION OF LEARNING 29 
 
 be the spiritual leader of a congregation, as are peda- 
 gogics and psychology and homiletics to him who is 
 to conduct a Sabbath-school and occupy a pulpit. 
 Yet here, too, a culture of soul and the fostering 
 of large sympathies condition true success. And all 
 of one piece the golden luminary of Jewish learning 
 and life must be. 
 
 Need I state that in order to accomplish all this, 
 nay, to pursue these aims, something more is required 
 than the few hours allotted to the student of the 
 college who is at the same time obliged to pursue 
 his course of studies at the university? Under the 
 present conditions, progress of the college is simply 
 excluded. A thorough change of the system is 
 peremptory. "Out of the valley to the heights of a 
 higher mission" must be the watchword of the 
 administration of the Hebrew Union College. 
 
 It is of no great consequence, under the present 
 conditions, how many young men shall each year 
 go forth from this institution, or in how many years 
 they may be fitted out for their holy vocation. One 
 single man of power, with a lofty conception of his 
 calling, one single individual with the prophet's 
 fire in his soul and a live coal from God's empyrean 
 upon his lips, one to whom the ministry is not a 
 "crown for his own aggrandizement nor an axe to 
 dig with," but the highest mission of life, because he 
 has a message from the Lord of Hosts to bring to his 
 people and his time, is worth more than a dozen 
 graduates who simply wait for an incumbency to 
 furnish them bread. Oh, that the hunger for the 
 word of God, the craving of the spirit may be felt 
 by all who attend, by all who love and support the
 
 30 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 college. Oh, that especially you, people of Cincin- 
 nati, loyal to your tradition, would create and foster 
 a religious atmosphere around the college, endow it 
 generously and give us the best of your sons to lend 
 prestige to the ministry! 
 
 I rejoice to think that American Israel has two 
 institutions of learning which hold forth the promise 
 of imparting to Judaism new power, new light and 
 new life: the Seminary in New York, new and full 
 of promise, under the leadership of the powerful 
 personality of Schechter and enjoying the support of 
 princes in Israel, princes in philanthropy as well as 
 in wealth and influence; and ours, a democratic 
 and therefore truly American institution appealing 
 to all Israelites of the land for aid and counting upon 
 the active support and co-operation of all the rabbis 
 and scholars who champion progress and reform as 
 well as learning. It glories in its tradition and record, 
 and I confidently rely upon the tried and tested ser- 
 vices of my associates of the faculty to help me in 
 bringing the Hebrew Union College up to the highest 
 requirements and the highest standard of efficiency. 
 
 Oh, that all the progressive Jews of this wide land 
 may unite to make the sanctuary of the Torah, up- 
 held by the shekalim contributed by each and every 
 Israelite, a center from which life and light, warmth and 
 power flow throughout the whole body of American 
 Israel, uniting and fortifying Judaism, and illumining 
 and conquering the world. 
 
 And may the grace of the Lord our God be upon 
 us, and establish Thou the work of our hands upon 
 us; yea, the work of our hands establish Thou it! 
 Amen.
 
 3. 
 
 A DAY OF PRECIOUS MEMORIES AND 
 BRIGHT HOPES.* 
 
 I CONGRATULATE you each and all upon witness- 
 ing this day which marks a new era in the history 
 of our blessed institution and, under God's guidance, 
 in the history of Progressive American Judaism. In 
 the words of Isaiah (xxviii. 16), I heard the Lord 
 God speak to us: "Behold, I lay in Zion for a foun- 
 dation a tried stone, a precious corner-stone of sure 
 foundation; he who hath faith shall not be in haste." 
 A double message this auspicious event has for us: 
 Precious memories and bright hopes. 
 
 An exquisite story is told in the Midrash of King 
 Solomon : When he had finished his gorgeous Temple 
 on Mount Zion and solemnly dedicated it to the 
 service of the Most High, the mighty gates would 
 not open nor would the fire from heaven descend to 
 kindle the sacrifices upon the altar, until he had sent 
 up to the heavenly throne the petition voiced in the 
 122d Psalm: "O Lord, for my father David's sake 
 let me, Thine anointed, not be put to shame! For 
 the sake of him who gave no sleep to his eyes nor 
 slumber to his eyelids until he had found the place 
 worthy to be the dwelling place of Thy majesty, let 
 
 *Address at the laying of the corner stone of the new Hebrew 
 Union College Buildings, at Cincinnati, Ohio, April 25, 
 1911.
 
 32 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 Thy glory now appear to us!" So must we, while 
 laying the corner-stones to the new college buildings, 
 recall in grateful remembrance and reverential appre- 
 ciation the years of heroic struggling and striving, 
 the persistent aim, the lofty ambition and the tri- 
 umphant achievement of the deathless master, 
 Isaac Mayer Wise, and all the great things he and 
 his illustrious compeers, the great Reform pioneers, 
 and all his co-workers did for the promotion of the 
 Jewish faith and Jewish learning, and particularly 
 all that he accomplished for the training of efficient 
 and zealous teachers and leaders for American Israel 
 in those halls of learning hallowed by the memory 
 of his precious life work. And as we today anticipate 
 in gladsome strains the approaching day that tells 
 us to "enlarge the place of the Torah's tent and 
 stretch forth the curtains of the seat of learning 
 that it may spread to the right and to the left," the 
 longed-for moment that bids us exchange the 
 narrow quarters of the old building for these spacious 
 grounds on the city's heights kissed by the early sun, 
 where we may imbibe new health and new light from 
 the purer air and the expanded horizon, and the 
 thrill of creation's joy from field and forest round 
 about, does not the echo of the ancient song come 
 to us saying: All Beer Enu lah, "Rise up, O well 
 of living waters, sing unto it!" the well which Isaac 
 Mayer Wise hath digged with his staff of leadership 
 and the nobles of the people, the princes of learning 
 at his side! Rise up from Mattanah to Nahaliel 
 and from Nahaliel to Bamoth from the valley to 
 the sun-lit heights, from the lowland to the hilltop
 
 PRECIOUS MEMORIES AND BRIGHT HOPES 33 
 
 that overlooks the wide land, so as to quench the 
 thirst of the thousands of truth-seeking men near 
 and far and render the Torah, the gift of Israel's genius, 
 the inheritance of the nations round about! 
 
 Yes, upwards and onwards, O American Israel! 
 On the path which thy Reform pioneers, the regener- 
 ators of the faith, have mapped out for thee! Up- 
 ward and onward with the banner of light and of 
 religious progress towards Israel's great goal on 
 humanity's Zion and towards the realization of 
 America's highest ideals! 
 
 Thanks to the generosity and princely munificence 
 of our friends, we are today laying the corner-stones 
 of the two magnificent structures that are to stand 
 forth as monuments to Israel's accumulated wisdom 
 and to Judaism's everlasting faith, two sanctuaries 
 of the Torah, the Library and the Schoolhouse of 
 the Hebrew Union College, reminding us of the 
 two shrines carried before the Israelites in the wilder- 
 ness, the one containing the bones of Joseph, symbol 
 of loyalty to the past, the other holding the tablets 
 of the Law, symbol of the faith in the ever-living God. 
 Loyalty to our great past and a wide outlook into 
 the future! This be our watchword. 
 
 Loyalty to the pastl This is the thought suggested 
 by the corner-stone laying ceremony, as we deposit 
 the precious records of the past beneath the struc- 
 ture. Oh, how precious are the records of the life 
 of the Jew! How full of grandeur, how unique the 
 history and the literature of the Jewish people! 
 Yet what invested them with such all-surpassing 
 interest and charm? Wherein consists the special
 
 34 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 value, the singular greatness attached to the sayings 
 and teachings of Israel's seers and singers and sages 
 and masters, to the tales and traditions of its good 
 and wise men and women hoarded up in its written 
 volumes or in the memories of the people? Why 
 do we treasure them more highly than all the price- 
 less crown jewels of the world? Why feed our minds 
 on them, enrich our souls? Why do they inspire 
 our lives more than other human products? There 
 is but one answer to this: Religion is the life of the 
 Jew. Religion and religion alone preserved and kept 
 the Jew alive all through the ages and the lands. 
 The Torah, not mere Law but Learning and serious 
 search for truth, became his fount of life and light 
 and of continuous rejuvenation. Not the Jewish 
 People, which relapsed again and again all through 
 the centuries into idolatrous and superstitious prac- 
 tices and beliefs, constitutes the soul and essence of 
 Judaism, but the God on high who redeemed it ever 
 anew, forcing it, as it were, into His service as witness 
 and herald of His glory; the God of Abraham, the 
 first world-missionary; the God who spoke out of 
 the fire of Sinai to Moses and made Isaiah and 
 Jonah preachers to the wide world long before Church 
 and Mosque arose; the God of truth for the glorifi- 
 cation of whose name myriads of Jews like unto 
 Akiba offered up their life-blood, and to the power 
 and higher knowledge of whose nature thousands 
 like unto Maimonides and Gabirol gave their brain 
 and their strength; the God of humanity whose 
 covenant is to bind the nations and the races into 
 one bond of brotherhood. This is the corner-stone
 
 and pinnacle of Judaism. This is the precious 
 corner-stone upon which we build the College and 
 the future of American Israel. 
 
 Yet, as this God of ours rose before the ever- 
 advancing spirit of seer and sage to ever loftier 
 heights of vision, as Israel's religious truth ever 
 progressed with the mental and spiritual development 
 of the people under the influence of the various 
 civilizations it came in touch with, and through 
 assimilation of the best ideas and highest ideals of 
 each phase of universal culture it participated in, 
 so shall we call all the knowledge of our day, the 
 results of every new research, the splendor and beauty 
 of every new thought and world-view into our service 
 to clarify, to deepen and to enrich our ancient faith 
 to render it, as Scripture says, "our wisdom and our 
 understanding in the eyes of the nations," never 
 resting until Judaism has attained the topmost 
 summit of philosophy and culture, and is recognized 
 by all as the loftiest of truths. 
 
 We need not be afraid of historical and critical 
 inquiry which casts its search-light upon Bible and 
 Talmud, upon every law and ceremony, upon every 
 custom and conception of bygone ages, upon the 
 whole process of development of religious and social 
 life within and without the sphere of Jew and Judaism. 
 Deep down in the past the corner-stone of Judaism is 
 laid by the Bible which begins not with the first 
 Jew, but with the first God-seeking man, and so does 
 Judaism's outlook extend to the furthermost ends of 
 the earth, to the highest goal of humanity. This 
 civilization of ours is not Christian, as the Jewish
 
 36 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 nationalist in common with the church maintains. 
 It is flesh of our flesh, bone of our bone and spirit 
 of our spirit. It is built on Sinai's rock, fertilized 
 by our martyr's blood, fructified by our thinker's 
 brain, nay, centered upon Israel's monotheistic 
 truth, whatever of pagan folly and medieval bar- 
 barism may still cluster around it. Though the Jew 
 wore, and still wears, the martyr's crown of thorns, 
 he marched as conqueror through the lands, holding 
 the lamp of reason, the torch of science in his hand to 
 become the preceptor, the liberator, the humanizer 
 of Christendom. And his day of triumph is ap- 
 proaching. His sublime yet simple faith is fast con- 
 quering a reluctant world. Never before did pro- 
 gressive Judaism have such glorious opportunities, 
 such mighty possibilities as it has to-day. The very 
 soul of modern thought, the idea of evolution leads 
 unerringly to the establishment of Israel's truth in 
 the heart of the thinking world. The cry for right- 
 eousness and justice that comes from all parts of so- 
 ciety to-day, in opposition to the unequal and un- 
 stable principle of love, points to the ultimate victory 
 of prophetic Judaism. Occidental civilization is 
 coming more and more towards our mode of thinking, 
 towards the belief in Israel's God of truth and right- 
 eousness. And should we now leave our post, sur- 
 render our mission as priests and heralds of human- 
 ity's God to withdraw into a world of our own, nar- 
 rowed in by views of medievalism, shunning the 
 free and untrammelled contact with Occidental 
 culture which alone gave freedom to man and dignity 
 to woman?
 
 PRECIOUS MEMORIES AND BRIGHT HOPES 37 
 
 Forward or Backward? A living faith or deaden- 
 ing formalism? Sincerity of conviction or intellectual 
 dishonesty in our synagogal worship and in our 
 theological studies? This has again become the issue 
 to-day, and we of the Reform wing are in no fear as 
 to the outcome. True, we are no longer in the 
 majority, as we were when our College was founded. 
 All the more necessary that we stand firmly together. 
 Reform has been, and still is, Judaism's saving power. 
 "Not by might nor by numerical strength, but by 
 My spirit, saith the Lord of Hosts," has ever been 
 Israel's watchword. 
 
 We need but a center and focus of light, a power- 
 house of the spirit to give us men of faith, of prin- 
 ciple and of firm conviction, a school-house whose 
 windows are open to the light of truth, of knowledge 
 and of research that streams in from all sides to 
 make each discovery a stepping-stone toward the 
 great future, promise and pledge of the day when 
 all over the earth Israel's God will be One and His 
 name be One. 
 
 Here in closest proximity to the University of 
 Cincinnati our College shall, with God's help, work 
 hand in hand with the city's institutions of learning 
 to become an enlightening force for all, a high tower 
 of learning to herald forth the harmony of reason and 
 faith, a bulwark of Progressive Judaism and an 
 arsenal of the knowledge and fear of God for all men. 
 
 So may here rise the fortress of our faith with the 
 banner of Reform Judaism unfurled. So may, with 
 the erecting of this monument to Israel's everlasting 
 truth, a great revival be wrought in our camp, a
 
 38 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 consolidation of all progressive forces of American 
 Judaism, a renewed sense of our great responsibility 
 and duty as God's elect. And particularly let us, 
 fellow-teachers and students, at this solemn moment, 
 with consecrated hearts, lay the foundation of our 
 sacred heritage, the principles of our faith deep down 
 in our innermost being, that we ourselves may be- 
 come disciples of the Lord, teachers and guides of 
 the people, builders of humanity's temple filled 
 with the spirit of God and the valor of true man- 
 hood as Jews and as Americans. And may the grace 
 of the Lord be on our work, and the work of our hands 
 establish Thou it, O God, and speed it with Thy 
 blessing. Amen!
 
 THE PURPOSE AND MISSION OF THE 
 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE.* 
 
 ONE of the striking episodes of the history of 
 early Israel brings before us Balaam, the heathen 
 seer, as he goes forth to hurl his fiercest curses upon 
 the young nation that had just emerged from bondage 
 to freedom; yet no sooner does he from the lofty 
 hilltop, where he had taken his stand, behold Israel's 
 tribes encamped alongside of each other, held to- 
 gether by an unseen force, than there came upon 
 him the spirit of God, and he burst out into a song 
 of praise echoing through the coming centuries: 
 "How beautiful are thy tents, O Jacob! thy 
 tabernacles, O Israel!" And here our sages remark: 
 Before his mental vision loomed up the school houses 
 and synagogs with which Judaism's genius makes 
 its world-conquering march through the lands and 
 the ages. Of this wondrous story I am reminded at 
 this glorious sight of the assembled representatives 
 of progressive American Israel from all parts of the 
 land, of the various cities, who have come in imposing 
 numbers to participate in the dedication of this 
 gorgeous new home of the Torah, and thus to mani- 
 fest their interest and their pride in the sacred work 
 
 *Address delivered at the dedication of the new Hebrew Union 
 College Building, January, 1913.
 
 40 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 of promulgating and perpetuating Israel's eternal 
 truths, to which these magnificent structures, the 
 school house and the library are being consecrated 
 to-day in due solemnity. You, the friends and bene- 
 factors of the college, have given us new inspiration, 
 a new impetus and incentive in our efforts on behalf 
 of the Jewish faith and Jewish learning, by giving 
 us these spacious halls, brimful of light and salubrious 
 air, on these elevated grounds, where the view ex- 
 tends far over hill and valley, over field and forest, 
 to enlarge the mental horizon. And in congratu- 
 lating you upon the proud monument you have 
 erected here, an ornament to the city and a credit 
 to American Israel, I offer our thanks to you in 
 the familiar Hebrew words: 
 
 "May your powers to do good ever increase!" 
 I am especially gratified to have my honored 
 friend, the illustrious president of the Jewish The- 
 ological Seminary of New York, Dr. Schechter, 
 with us to participate in our dedication ceremony 
 and thus give evidence of the spirit of amity and 
 fellowship that should ever exist among scholars 
 who are to follow the maxim: Out of all dissent in 
 views, mutual appreciation and friendship must 
 emanate in the end, if truth be the common aim and 
 object. And may I not repeat here what I said when 
 participating in the dedication of the New York 
 Seminary: There is room and necessity for both 
 schools, the Conservative and the Progressive, for, 
 as it was said of the Schools of Hillel and Shammai: 
 "The words of the living God are in both." We may
 
 MISSION OF THE HEBREW UNION COLLEGE 41 
 
 advance along different lines and under different 
 standards, yet in front of Mount Sinai, in the great 
 principles of Judaism, all Israel is one. 
 
 Glorious and admirable as are the achievements 
 of American Israel everywhere when the rearing of 
 majestic houses of worship is asked for, or the large 
 institutions of philanthropy demand great sacrifices, 
 yet the planning and planting of a Rabbinical School 
 started by the master genius of Dr. Wise forty years 
 ago, met but slowly and scantily with the encourage- 
 ment and warm support and appreciation to which 
 it was entitled. At last I see the hope and anticipa- 
 tion I voiced in my inaugural address as Dr. Wise's 
 successor realized: "From the valley below to the 
 sunlit heights, side by side with the great educational 
 institutions of the city." This was the burden of 
 my message nine and a half years ago. In giving 
 our college its fitting site on these lofty and beautiful 
 grounds you have not merely put a precious finishing 
 crown upon the monumental work of its sainted 
 founder. You have raised the very vocation of the 
 rabbi arid the position of the Rabbinical School in 
 the estimate of the people, who are more or less 
 inclined to regard the same as a mere professional 
 pursuit of the rabbinical career in which the com- 
 munity is little concerned. You have indeed proven 
 yourselves to be worthy heirs of "the men of the 
 great Assembly," who earned the title of greatness 
 because, we are told, they restored the Torah to its 
 pristine glory. Well, then, the marvelous history of 
 the Hebrew Union College has been unrolled to us
 
 42 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 with stirring eloquence by the worthy and genial 
 son of the great founder, Rabbi Jonah Wise. I hear 
 the message for the new era that has opened for the 
 college in its splendid new home, in the words of 
 Deutero-Isaiah "Behold, the former things have 
 come to pass and new things do I announce. Sing 
 unto the Lord a new song." Three leading thoughts 
 are suggested to me by these monumental structures: 
 The loftiness of Judaism's truth, the broadness of 
 Judaism's scope and the largeness of Judaism's 
 view and outlook. 
 
 Whenever I ascend these hills and stairs leading 
 up to this sanctuary of the Torah, I seem to hear the 
 call that came to the prophet: "Go forth and stand 
 on the hilltop in the presence of God," and the voice 
 resounds in my ear : "On the mountain heights God is 
 seen." There is a decided tendency in our enlightened 
 age to lay all the stress on doing works of love and 
 philanthropy in slums and settlements and underrate 
 that for which our faith and Torah ever stood, creating 
 heroes and martyrs such as no other religion or race 
 could ever glory in, the power and sublime grandeur of 
 truth. A little over three years ago, Dr. Eliot, the ex- 
 President of Harvard University, created a stir 
 throughout the English-speaking world by an address 
 in which he declared Christianity, with its dogmas, to 
 be antiquated, accentuating instead the need of a new 
 religion in which the deity stands for compassion 
 and helpful love, whereas the age demands as a new 
 virtue the passion for truth. Evidently the great leader 
 of thought in America failed to take due notice of
 
 MISSION OF THE HEBREW UNION COLLEGE 43 
 
 the views and teachings of Judaism, whose history 
 is nothing but a continuous and unique display of 
 its passion for truth. From patriarch to prophet, 
 from seer and singer to sage, from saintly master to 
 martyr and mystic, throughout all the centuries of 
 Jewish history there goes an ever unstilled longing 
 and searching, suffering and sighing for truth as 
 the Seal of God. By the thousands the Jewish 
 people gave their souls, and by tens of thousands the 
 sweat of their brow, for the truth of their only One 
 God. And in this zealous and keen pursuit of truth 
 the Jewish teachers and scholars in Alexandria, 
 Palestine and Babylonia, in Arabia and Spain ever 
 strove to liberate the mind from the shackles of the 
 letter and thus deepen, sublimate and spiritualize 
 the faith so as to reconcile religion and reason, the 
 stern law of Moses and the lucid philosophy of 
 Aristotle and Plato, and render them one light of 
 divine truth. Not a new religion, but a constant re- 
 newal and rejuvenation of religion is the demand of 
 ever progressive, ever expansive Judaism. To truth, 
 then, the lofty aim and ideal to which the human mind 
 ever aspires, to which religion, philosophy and science 
 will ever beckon and lead, to God, the Fountain- 
 head of all truth, whose majesty ever walked with 
 Israel to dwell in His school houses and synagogs, 
 we dedicate this institution of learning, this new home 
 of the Torah. For, to us the Torah is not the im- 
 movable, immutable Law as typified by the stony 
 figure of Moses in Sargent's fresco on the walls of 
 the Boston Library. To us the Torah is the Jewish
 
 44 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 lore in its continuous process of growth and evolu- 
 tion, expounded, interpreted and revealed ever anew 
 to become a vital force, a living truth, a living faith 
 and hope for the age, as the Midrash says: "Like a 
 degree of the King fresh from his hand and mouth." 
 And because it is the handwriting of God in many 
 languages, our studies are not confined to the Hebrew 
 and its kindred Aramaic tongue. As the Ten Words 
 of Sinai flashed forth, according to our rabbis, in 
 seventy tongues of fire to reach the seventy nations 
 on earth, so do we want Judaism to be studied in 
 all its phases and epochs, in all national and religious 
 spheres that have caught echoes from Sinai's thunders 
 and flashes from Sinai's lightnings. In fact, we must 
 so reconstruct the past and translate it into terms 
 of modern historical, philosophical and psychological 
 research as to see in Sinai the ladder leading up to 
 heaven, or, to use a striking expression of Geiger, 
 "to see God rising from the dark earth to the serene 
 heavenly realm of the spirit." We must, like Balaam, 
 look down from the lofty hilltop, the pinnacle of 
 historic research, to follow the groping and climbing 
 of men and ages in order "to see the truth sprout 
 forth from the earth," and then behold God on high, 
 in His sublime majesty, with the eyes of faith, with 
 the positive conviction of a sincere believer face 
 to face. We must have a positive theological system, 
 such as Dr. Wise and Dr. Einhorn, among the Re- 
 formers, and Dr. Schechter among the Conserva- 
 tives, have ever insisted upon: to offer leader and 
 people, scholar and student, what the polar star is
 
 MISSION OF THE HEBREW UNION COLLEGE 45 
 
 to the mariner, the guiding principle, the source of 
 inspiration and aspiration, of solace and strength 
 in life's struggles and strivings. 
 
 But all theory is worthless without impelling to 
 practice. Israel's God is a God of life, and the Torah 
 is nothing if not the law of life, not for the Jew only, 
 but for man, a life of justice and righteousness for 
 men of all classes and circles and in all spheres of 
 activity. This is what Judaism on the heights of 
 prophetic teaching ever pointed to, a religion that 
 touches life at every point, broad as the earth and 
 large as the human horizon. From Sinai's Law to 
 the seer of Zion, through Bible and Talmud, through 
 all system of ethics and sayings of wisdom of the 
 Jew, there runs like a mighty torrent the cry for 
 justice. 
 
 The first and the last thing the Jew ever had, and 
 still has to battle for as the soldier of God and the 
 champion of man, is righteousness. For 2,000 years 
 the world has been misled by the New Testament 
 accentuation of love at the expense of justice, and 
 thus the very foundation of society and individual 
 manhood, the basis of all moral and social welfare 
 has been perverted, if not subverted, so that now the 
 great cry shakes the earth from center to circum- 
 ference: Give us justice! Establish righteousness in 
 the relation of man to man which love, with its 
 partiality and insincerity, will never readjust. It is 
 this principle of justice that we, as exponents of 
 Judaism, must inculcate with ever increasing force. 
 We need no Christian sociologist or moralist to teach
 
 46 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 us wherein true ethics consists, or what a life of social 
 service means. The message of social justice, voiced 
 by our great prophets with a vehemence of storm 
 and strokes of hammer that shatter the rock, is 
 echoed through our Haggadah and Halakah, and rever- 
 berates even in a Karl Marx and Ferdinand Lasalle 
 of our days. It is Judaism's teaching for high and 
 low, for rich and poor, for Jew and Gentile. And to 
 this God of Justice and Righteousness we dedicate 
 this house of the Torah, so that freedom and light 
 should come upon it from all sides, and life and 
 liberty, justice and peace radiate from it to enrich, 
 to bless and to sanctify the life of Israel and humanity. 
 And finally, the third idea I take from the struc- 
 tures reared here to offer us such a grand, wide out- 
 look is largeness of view and brightness of prospects 
 for the future. It was not a mere phrase to rouse 
 the sneer of antagonists, it was a great fundamental 
 principle accentuated by Dr. Wise, when he made 
 American Judaism his watchword and battlecry. 
 He only emphasized what all the Reform leaders 
 had in mind, that the Jew participating in our Occi- 
 dental civilization as loyal and patriotic citizen has 
 not, nor should he have, the feeling of being in dis- 
 persion, in Galuth. God's majesty does not forever 
 dwell in the holy land, nor in the temple of Moriah 
 solely. Wherever Israel went, God went with him, 
 and while our face is ever turned in reverential awe 
 toward the rising sun, whence we started on our world 
 mission, we have learned from history that West- 
 ward wends the course of civilization's empire.
 
 MISSION OF THE HEBREW UNION COLLEGE 47 
 
 And America is the land destined to unite by its 
 mighty grasp of friendship and peace the races, the 
 creeds, yea, the nations of the world. America, with 
 her largeness of territory and of life's resources and 
 views, has broadened, and is ever broadening, the 
 views of mankind. Her spirit of democracy has made 
 the Jew not merely more liberal-hearted and liberal- 
 minded than the average European Jew is; she has 
 enhanced his love and zeal for a common-sense re- 
 ligion, for greater independence and a more outspoken 
 individuality of man and for a higher idealism in 
 woman. Thus American Judaism has become a 
 liberalizing force in our entire social and national 
 life, and its influence is making itself felt more and 
 more, even in England and Germany to-day. 
 
 And, casting our glance over the entire modern 
 civilization with its trend of thought, what is all 
 scientific and philosophical research, what the world- 
 revolutionizing discoveries and inventions, the divings 
 and delvings into the beliefs and writings of a hoary 
 past, the peering and prying into the mysteries of 
 the soul and the realms of the unseen, but the prayer- 
 ful cry like unto that of Moses: "O Lord, let me see 
 Thy glory!"? And do not the concentrated efforts of 
 nations and empires toward the betterment of 
 life's conditions, the enlarged sympathies and the 
 elevated standards of humanity, in spite of all bru- 
 tality and carnage, in spite of all class and race 
 hatred, persecution and prejudice, point to the reali- 
 zation of the great vision of our prophets of the time 
 when the great Jewish principle of the unity of God
 
 48 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 and the unity of mankind will be established in all 
 minds and hearts? 
 
 We see the day dawning when our age of restless 
 searching and seeking will learn to bow in awe before 
 Israel's Only One; when out of the great melting pot 
 of religions and races the Jew will come forth as the 
 banner-bearer of a faith which, as it has shaped the 
 world's actions and hopes to a large extent in the 
 past, shall become the corner-stone of civilization 
 in the future, rendering its truth and justice the 
 salvation of the nations and the bulwark of humanity. 
 
 In the symbolic language of the rabbis, the reali- 
 zation of the great dream of the prophets of the end 
 of history means that the Divine Hand that shapes 
 the destiny of the nations will pile hilltop .upon 
 hilltop, and mountain peak upon mountain peak, to 
 form the groundwork for Zion in order to have the 
 mountain of the Lord established on the top of all 
 the mountains. That is to say, the lofty ideals ol 
 all lands and civilizations must be combined into 
 one great consummation of all human endeavors 
 to form the basis for Israel's ideal of truth, justice, 
 holiness and peace, the ideal of all ideals. 
 
 In view of this sublime mission, Judaism needs 
 pulpits and propagandists of large vision and mighty 
 intellectual and spiritual power, and, above all, a 
 power-house of the spirit, a light-house of knowledge 
 that reaches far out into the life work of the nations, 
 an academy of learning which turns out men of wis- 
 dom and knowledge, men of principle and presever- 
 ance, of fortitude and firmness, men buoyed up by
 
 MISSION OF THE HEBREW UNION COLLEGE 49 
 
 the lofty ideals of the sage and seer of yore, by the 
 heroism of a strong conviction and by profound love 
 and zeal for God, for Israel and for humanity. 
 
 Great things, then, have you done here a real 
 work of Kiddush ha Shem, of glorification of God's 
 name. Yet these very grounds here speak louder 
 than words can of what is yet to be done for the 
 maintenance, the expansion and further develop- 
 ment of this institution. You must hold up our 
 hands. You must continue to bestow your great 
 generosity upon our college and manifest your in- 
 terest in its steady growth in numerical and spiritual 
 power and influence. You must complete the chain 
 of our buildings here by adding to the two proud 
 buildings the dormitory so urgently needed for the 
 physical and moral welfare of our students. You 
 must aid us in enlarging the scope of our work by 
 endowing chairs for the various branches of Jewish 
 learning, for Hellenistic and New Testament Research, 
 for Sociology and Philanthropy, and increasing the 
 number of scholarships for the encouragement of 
 our promising young men. Thus we may look for- 
 ward with confidence and bright hope into the future 
 and anticipate the triumph of our great cause. 
 
 To Judaism, then, to Progressive American Ju- 
 daism with ite lofty ideals, we dedicate this college 
 building, to the promulgation and perpetuation of 
 Israel's truths, to the elevation of human nature, to 
 the promotion of justice and righteousness on earth, 
 to the vindication of the name and faith of the Jew, 
 to the glorification of the eternal God, the Father of
 
 50 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 mankind, we dedicate this house as a temple of 
 divine knowledge and wisdom, and this chapel as 
 its Holy of Holies. May the Shekinah ever rest 
 here to fill the soul of each student and teacher with 
 the fire of holy enthusiasm for truth and justice, and 
 with the spirit of reverence and awe for whatever 
 is holy and good. Let light stream forth from the 
 treasure-house of Israel's literature to illumine the 
 eyes and ennoble the souls of all who enter. May we 
 all be consecrated anew to the service of God and 
 man as priests of the Most High! Amen.
 
 5. 
 
 ISAAC M. WISE, OR THE HEROIC QUALITIES 
 OF THE GOD-CHOSEN LEADER.* 
 
 THE great men of history, the heroes of mankind, 
 says Carlyle, show us in what they were or did 
 the possibilities and potentialities of our own nature. 
 In order to worthily commemorate the life of a great 
 master, it behooves us, therefore, to single out those 
 qualities in him which strike a responsive chord in 
 our souls to make us aspire to the same high ideal 
 and shape our lives after the pattern presented by 
 them. In this spirit can the Founder's Day be best 
 celebrated at the Hebrew Union College, the most 
 enduring monument of the achievements of Isaac 
 M. Wise, a source of light and of blessing for all gener- 
 ations to come. Which are then, I ask, the eminent 
 qualities of the illustrious founder of this blessed 
 institution of learning that made him among the 
 great leaders of his generation the chosen instrument 
 of Providence to organize and unify the progressive 
 forces of American Israel, and gave him his place in 
 history as the master-builder of Progressive American 
 Judaism? I find the answer in the 89th Psalm, 
 verse 20: "Thou spakest in vision to Thy holy one 
 and saidst, I have laid My help upon the mighty 
 one; I have exalted one chosen from among the 
 
 ^Founder's Day Address, 1912.
 
 52 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 people." Here you find the heroic qualities of the 
 God-chosen leader defined. In a glorious all-ab- 
 sorbing vision, in luminous thought that lights up 
 all the future for him there appears his life's task to 
 the providentially chosen one to take hold of him and 
 endow him with ever-increasing strength and courage, 
 with indomitable energy and perseverance until 
 all obstacles and difficulties are swept aside, and he 
 stands forth as heroic victor with the seal of God's 
 approval upon his illustrious career, and the people's 
 acclamation as the elect one. In other words, those 
 called upon to greatly and signally advance humanity 
 must have the vision and foresight of the prophet 
 and the power and courage of the hero. 
 
 The Midrash illustrates our text by referring first 
 of all to Moses and pointing out the significant 
 psychic process that made him "the father of the 
 prophets." This is described in the words at the 
 beginning of Wayikra: "The call came, sending 
 forth its thrilling appeal to the elders and sages, 
 yet only Moses heard out of the deafening noises 
 the voice of the Most High calling him to perform 
 his great task. And behold, he proved to be the 
 mighty one, able to sustain the power to which others 
 succumbed, and brave the opposition of a whole 
 people, to break their idol and shatter the tablets 
 of the Law on seeing them dance before the Golden 
 Calf at the foot of Mount Sinai. His was the strength 
 of will and perseverance to accomplish that wherein 
 the whole people failed, the erection of the Sanctuary 
 in the desert, and in his self-effacement he made the 
 Torah his own, and God's glory to be reflected in his.
 
 ISAAC M. WISE 53 
 
 But this, continues the Midrash, was the type of all 
 the God-inspired seers and leaders concerning all 
 of whom the Psalmist says: "Bless ye the Lord, 
 His messengers, the mighty ones in power who ful- 
 filled His word, hearing His bidding." Indeed, like 
 unto Moses, were all the prophets men of wondrous 
 power and fearless courage, men before whom people 
 and potentates stood in awe, because the words they 
 spoke fell like thunder to shake the earth and like 
 lightning to burn into the innermost conscience, 
 like fire to consume the evil-doers and like a hammer 
 to shatter hearts hard as flint. With their irresis- 
 tible zeal and world-defying courage these heroic 
 battlers for truth and righteousness, for purity and 
 holiness, routed the forces of heathendom to 
 rear the world upon new foundations of morality. 
 Yet what was the secret of their unparallelled power? 
 They were neither mystics, saints living in the 
 clouds like the Hindoo Brahmins, nor proud sages, 
 intellectual aristocrats standing aloof from the masses 
 like the Greek philosophers, but God's messengers 
 whose only strength and wisdom, wealth and dignity 
 consisted in striving, struggling and suffering for 
 the truth beheld by them on the mount of vision and 
 thus serving and fighting for the God that called 
 them. But, says our Midrash further on: "Not 
 Moses and the prophets of old merely, but all Israel 
 were chosen to be His messengers mighty in power 
 to fulfill His bidding and propagate Sinai's truths." 
 Yes, the Jew is the God-chosen prophet among the 
 nations of history, and his life throughout the cen- 
 turies a continued heroic battle for the pure mono-
 
 54 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 theistic truth, for righteousness on earth, for the 
 purity of home and life's ideal of holiness. What is 
 all "the sweetness and light that came from the 
 Greeks" compared with the spiritual forces that came 
 from the religion of Israel? What is the one Socrates 
 with his martyr's death compared with the hundreds 
 of thousands of Jewish martyrs who mounted the 
 funereal pyre and offered their neck to the execu- 
 tioner's sword with the cry: "Shema Yisrael" on 
 their lips; or with the myriads of Jewish sages who 
 soared up to the highest realms of truth while ever 
 holding fast to the sacred heritage of the past, ever 
 bent upon enriching the minds of the millions of 
 their brethren by every new acquisition of knowledge. 
 Indeed, the Jew 1 was the world's great hero, the 
 unconquered conqueror of the nations, as long as 
 religion endowed him with the power and courage 
 to defy a world hostile to God and truth, as long as 
 his conviction, his zeal and love for God was "as 
 strong as death" and "all the waters could not ex- 
 tinguish his love and loyalty." But the time came 
 when the prophetic truth lost for him its bright 
 lustre in the narrow Ghetto enclosure and the hero 
 of old was shorn of his strength by the thousand 
 and one paragraphs of the Shulhan Aruk, so that 
 he scarcely knew how to appreciate any longer his 
 world-conquering truth for which he had undergone 
 a thousandfold martyrdom. The Nazarite of old fell 
 a prey to the Philistine. Modern culture sapped 
 the strength of the faith that had withstood the 
 onslaught of centuries. 
 
 Again God called the men of vision, the men of 
 the spirit, the modern prophets, the Reform pioneers,
 
 ISAAC M. WISE 55 
 
 men without fear who, like Moses of yore, dared break 
 the people's idols, the idolatry of blind letter and 
 authority-worship in order that the spirit might 
 again become manifest in Israel, men who like Elijah 
 brought the fire down from heaven to make the 
 people cry for the living God, men who breathed 
 new life into the dry bones of Judaism to awaken a 
 new faith and new self-consciounsess in the heart of 
 the modern Jew. Let the Orthodox or the Nation- 
 alists in our midst deride as much as they please the 
 Reform pioneers; they were giants in their genera- 
 tions. Theirs was the clear vision of the prophet 
 and the resolution of the hero; they were with every 
 inch men and with every fiber of their soul Jews, 
 and they became, amidst the deluge of materialism 
 and skepticism that threatened to carry off the bul- 
 warks of the faith, the real saviors of Judaism. 
 So in Germany, and so in America. And while those 
 Reform pioneers that came from Germany and 
 especially David Einhorn, with his prophetic 
 genius, revitalized and regenerated the Synagogal 
 life, filling the hearts and homes with new faith and 
 hope and new self-respect as Jews, it was left to 
 Isaac M. Wise to achieve the glorious work which was 
 to safe-guard Israel's priceless heritage of the Torah 
 for future generations. It was the great task of 
 Americanizing Jew and Judaism that appeared to 
 him as a vision on the very threshold of his career 
 in the new land, and while concentrating his mar- 
 velous physical and mental powers upon this mighty 
 endeavor, he became the great man of action, the 
 heroic battler for the Jew's rights, for Judaism's
 
 56 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 truth and for God's treasure in Israel's keeping, the 
 Torah and for a sanctuary of learning. And behold 
 his triumphant success! The very men who had 
 fought and wrestled with him for years in loyalty 
 to their own principles extended their hand of fellow- 
 ship to him in the end to co-operate with him in the 
 realization of his plan of rearing an institution of 
 Jewish learning for American Israel in which they had 
 failed. By his unique powers of pen and tongue, 
 by incessant preaching and writing, by traveling 
 throughout the length and breath of the land, by 
 indefatigable and painstaking efforts to bring home 
 to the people near and far the ideas and ideals of 
 Judaism as humanity's everlasting truth and world- 
 redeeming law of righteousness, he ploughed the soil 
 and sowed the seeds finally to reap the golden har- 
 vest. Thus he succeeded in building up the Union 
 of American Hebrew Congregations and crowning 
 it with the founding of the College over which it 
 was his good fortune to preside for a quarter of 
 century until he reached by reason of his rare vigor 
 the four-score of years. And as it is said of Moses, 
 his eyes did not grow dim nor did his strength 
 abate until God called him away from his work to 
 the Yeshiba shel Maalah. 
 
 And now again I ask whence came to the prophets 
 of old and to these modern champions of light and of 
 progress the power to fulfill the arduous task they 
 were called upon to accomplish? There can be but 
 one answer: The divine idea that took possession of 
 their soul, the conviction, the principle upon which 
 they staked their life made them irresistible and
 
 ISAAC M. WISE 57 
 
 fearless. And whence did they derive their strength 
 of conviction, their clear vision and firm principle? 
 Their knowledge was deep as is the gold imbedded 
 in the bowels of the earth and the precious pearl 
 hidden in the depth of the sea, and so was their faith 
 firm as a rock, unshaken by current views of fashion. 
 There was no break in their system of thought, no 
 discord in their philosophy of life, their Weltan- 
 schaung. Like the golden candlestick in the Taber- 
 nacle, they were of one piece; their knowledge and 
 faith one. 
 
 More than ever before we need men of power and 
 of the spirit in the pulpit to-day, men that lead and 
 are not led by public opinion or by the desire for 
 popularity; men of firm religious principles and not 
 seekers after sensational novelties; in one word, 
 God-fearing and not man-serving preachers. 
 
 So let the spirit of God and zeal for Israel's faith 
 permeate your whole life while you are preparing 
 yourselves for the sacred task of the rabbi which is 
 to bring God and godliness home to each truth-seeking 
 soul, and allow not the profane fire of a Zionism 
 without God, the dazzling lights, the will o' wisps of 
 popular fads and fancies lure you away from our 
 spiritual heritage. 
 
 A king, says the Midrash, had a wise and loving 
 servant who built a palatial residence for him, 
 taking the finest marble blocks for it and having the 
 royal name engraved on each with beautiful coloring, 
 and when the king entered the gorgeous palace, he 
 wondered and said: "How can I dwell here, while 
 my servant who honored me here so grandly remains
 
 58 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 outside? Let him come and abide with me as friend." 
 So did God with Moses. He had worked with mind 
 and heart, with every step and thought of his life 
 for the glory of God, and so God called him "the 
 faithful friend of His house." So did indeed all the 
 great toilers for God and truth become sharers in 
 His Kingdom. And among these Isaac M. Wise 
 stands forth as a master-builder of this sanctuary 
 of the Torah. So may every nook and corner of these 
 halls of learning echo forth the cry to learners and 
 teachers, to student and rabbi: "Be strong and of 
 true courage, for thou art to lead the world out of 
 the darkness of doubt and denial to the light of faith 
 and of truth, and out of servitude to that freedom 
 which is vouched to him who is a true servant of 
 God." Amen.
 
 6. 
 
 MOSES MIELZINER, OR UNCONSCIOUS 
 GREATNESS.* 
 
 IT IS one of the precious characteristics of Judaism 
 that not even its greatest of men could assume the 
 attributes of Deity. We have no man-God nor 
 God-man. The line of demarcation between God 
 and man dares not be encroached upon by any per- 
 son, however holy. Even a Moses is presented to 
 us as a fallible and frail mortal with all the limita- 
 tions and shortcomings of earth-born men. Only 
 one feature of his life seemingly forms an exception 
 to this rule. In the chapter (Exodus XXXIV) 
 just read, we are told that, when coming down from 
 the top of Mount Sinai where he had been in com- 
 munion with God for forty days, and forty nights, 
 the skin of his face shone with such effulgence that 
 the people were unable to look at him, and he had to 
 cover his face with a veil. Let me say here in paren- 
 thesis that the well-known figure of Moses chiselled 
 by Michael Angelo which has a horn-like protuber- 
 ance emanating from his head is based upon the 
 Vulgate translation of the Hebrew Karan which 
 signifies a horn-like radiation fades cornuta. The 
 real meaning of the passage is that Moses' face 
 
 *Address at the Memorial Service held in honor of Moses 
 Mielziner in 1904.
 
 60 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 exhaled a sun-like radiance, the halo ascribed to 
 celestial beings. We would say, there was a wondrous 
 aureole around the brow of Moses manifesting the 
 divine glory of the Shekinah reflected upon his 
 countenance. 
 
 This superhuman feature, however, is at once 
 turned into a trait of simple human greatness when 
 we are further told: "And Moses knew not that the 
 skin of his face shone that is, he was not aware of 
 this resplendent mark of the divine dignity which he 
 bore on his countenance. He had no knowledge that 
 God had put the stamp of superiority in this lustre 
 of heavenly beings upon his brow. Only when he 
 noticed that the people were struck with awe, as 
 he stepped among them, and turned their eyes away, 
 he modestly hid his face before them. What an ex- 
 quisite picture of true, unconscious greatness! Let 
 me take it as a fitting subject for contemplation, as 
 we are eager to pay our tribute of loving regard and 
 honor to the memory of Moses Mielziner, for many 
 years the co-worker and afterwards for a couple of 
 years, the successor of Dr. Wise at the Hebrew Union 
 College, whose first anniversary of death we cele- 
 brate to-day. 
 
 Our rabbis, who always knew how to penetrate 
 into the kernel of the Biblical truth, offer two differ- 
 ent reasons for that luminous mark of divine glory 
 upon the face of Moses. "Whence came this radiance 
 to Moses?" they ask, and one answer points to that 
 sublime moment in Moses' life when he stood in the 
 cleft of the rock, while God's majesty passed by him,
 
 MOSES MIELZINER 61 
 
 and there fell a spark of the divine light upon him to 
 illumine his face for all time. Another answer points 
 to the moment when he, a mere mortal, took the 
 tablets of the Law from the hands of the Most High 
 to impart the everlasting words of truth and right- 
 eousness of heaven to the people on earth, and there 
 the effulgent light flashed forth from his face ever to 
 encircle it as a diadem of glory. There are two ways 
 open for man to attain the highest realms of divine 
 life and achieve the greatest triumphs. The one is 
 to pursue truth as the loftiest ideal by having all 
 faculties and energies of mind and soul bent upon 
 learning and the acquisition of wisdom until heaven 
 and earth, the world within and without, the past 
 and the future, yield their secrets to him as sage or 
 seer, and life in its totality becomes illumined with 
 thought and purpose so as to reveal God's innermost 
 nature to the soaring intellect. Of him the Scrip- 
 ture says: "Man's wisdom lighteth up his counte- 
 nance." A man thus filled with wisdom cannot fail 
 to impress us with his true greatness by the brightness 
 which eradiates from his countenance. Look for 
 instance at the picture of Moses Mendelssohn and 
 observe how this rather unseemly face with its 
 irregular features is lit up by the divine fire of genius 
 and fascinates you by that serenity and calmness 
 which betray both greatness of soul and sweetness 
 of heart. Or go through the gallery of great thinkers 
 and look at the statues of Socrates and Plato or at 
 the portraits of such lofty minds as have in their 
 solitude been in communion with God on high, and
 
 62 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 you cannot fail to discern the halo of glory, the 
 divine seal of magnificence upon their brow. 
 
 But alongside of these who shine in solitary 
 glory like Moses in the cleft of the rock, there are 
 the men of life-long labor in the service of man- 
 kind, the men that wrest the light of truth, the fire 
 of righteousness and holiness from heaven and 
 diffuse it among men on earth, the great teachers 
 and benefactors of men, "the bestowers of wisdom 
 that shine like the splendor of the firmament and 
 those that lead many to righteousness like the stars 
 forever and aye." They are less concerned with the 
 accumulation of the highest wisdom and knowledge 
 to satisfy the craving of their own soul than with the 
 enriching of other minds and supplying the needs 
 of their fellow-man. The divine goodness with which 
 their hearts abound is mirrored upon their brow, 
 and the grace of heaven rests upon their benign face 
 to tell that they are the beloved of God as well as 
 the lovers of men. 
 
 Now it seems to me that the beautiful features 
 delineated in our text were, indeed, found in our 
 never-to-be-forgotten Moses Mielziner who as col- 
 league or teacher, and always as friend endeared 
 himself to us and all who came into contact with 
 him. Even before he came to America he showed, 
 whether as teacher and rabbi in Copenhagen and 
 New York, or as writer, all the virtues of a pains- 
 taking searcher after truth, the accuracy and thor- 
 oughness of an eminent Rabbinical scholar. And 
 just because his New York friends, among whom I
 
 MOSES MIELZINER 63 
 
 will mention Einhorn, Adler and Huebsch, appre- 
 ciated and admired the erudition and acumen of 
 the fine Talmudic scholar who was so familiar with 
 the whole household of Jewish lore as to be more 
 worthy than any one else in America to be entrusted 
 with the task of training young men for the Rab- 
 binical career alongside of Dr. Wise at the Hebrew 
 Union College, they induced him to accept the call 
 to the Talmudic chair, and he proved, indeed, a 
 mighty power of support and a pillar of strength to 
 the College and its immortal founder. 
 
 But Moses Mielziner was more than a mere 
 scholar. His was the soul of a lover of God and man. 
 He was by nature not a fighter, neither for startling 
 new truth to displace long cherished old, though 
 antiquated, views, nor for radical Reform principles 
 to demolish the traditional system based upon Tal- 
 mudical law. Instead he loved to dive into the sea 
 of the Talmud to bring to the light of day precious 
 pearls of wisdom and hand them to his pupils for 
 guidance and monition. Neither was he eager to 
 put the literature and learning of the past into a new 
 mould foreign to their main purpose, as some radical 
 Reformers did. As the rabbis say of Moses that 
 "he seized part of the tables and God held part of 
 them, while there was space left between," so did 
 Moses Mielziner ever exert a certain self-restraint, 
 not taking too much into his grasp but rather to leave 
 room for the old and the new to blend. Thus he 
 became a skilful master of the Halakah to make it 
 voice the living truth as required by the time. But
 
 64 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 above all he was, like Moses of old, the meekest of 
 men, and by his exceeding modesty and self-denial 
 he won the warm affection and profound regard of 
 pupils and fellow-workers as few did. And now behold 
 his portrait as painted by his own son, Leo Mielziner! 
 Does his serene and placid face not bear the stamp 
 of inner greatness, of divine grace and glory? His 
 was that greatness which, like that of Moses, comes 
 from true humility. Even the greatness of the father 
 of the prophets did not consist in his mighty intel- 
 lectual grasp which comprised, as the rabbis tell us, 
 forty-nine out of the fifty degrees of the divine wis- 
 dom. Neither the spirit which soared up to the ethereal 
 realms of sublimest truth nor the matchless service 
 he did to his people accorded to Moses the highest 
 place in history. It was his personality which, while 
 striving so high and working so intensely for the wel- 
 fare of the people, sunk his own self altogether in the 
 work he did and the cause he served. Truth was too 
 lofty and the people's cause too dear and holy to 
 him to consider his own self and his own merit in 
 the work he achieved. Because Moses hid his face 
 in humility when he first beheld God's majesty in 
 the flaming bush the rabbis say furthermore he 
 was crowned by God with that diadem of glory that 
 the people stood in awe before him, seeing that 
 radiance of divinity that marked his face. True 
 greatness ever manifests itself in simplicity, in 
 reverence before God and in humility before men. 
 It was this Moses-like humility and meekness which 
 made a Hillel and a Moses Mendelssohn influential
 
 MOSES MIELZINER 65 
 
 leaders and moulders of men. It is the secret of 
 Abraham Lincoln's ever growing popularity among 
 the American people. Meekness and modesty were 
 also the pre-eminent traits of Moses Mielziner. He 
 did not know himself what charm there was about 
 what he spoke and what he taught, because of his 
 unselfish devotion to his task as learner and as teacher. 
 
 Truly he should ever be held up by us as a pattern 
 and model to be followed and emulated. Especially 
 ought the students and graduates of the Hebrew 
 Union College take the life and personality of Moses 
 Mielziner home to themselves as a lesson for their 
 career. 
 
 There is no denying the fact that humility, self- 
 forgetting modesty is becoming one" of the lost arts 
 among the rabbis no less than among other men in 
 their private or public life. Too often, popularity 
 is sought by self-parading, while self-effacement in 
 the great cause is seldom shown by our public men. 
 Yet the people need most of all examples of meekness 
 and humility in an age which, puffed up by reason, has 
 unlearned how to bend the knee before God. It is 
 a fatal error to ascribe greatness to mere intellectual- 
 ity, especially so in the domain of religion whose deep 
 emotional forces must make man aspire to God and 
 to the highest ideals of life. Nor is true greatness 
 won by good work alone, if the soul is not thrilled 
 by the fervor of a disinterested service of God and 
 man. Judaism wants all the avenues of knowledge 
 opened for man to beckon him on to the highest 
 realm of thought, and all the roads of human benef-
 
 66 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 icence laid out to improve and elevate the condi- 
 tions of men; but teacher and worker, seeker for truth 
 and for human welfare must, like Moses, at the very 
 top of his successful endeavors bend his face in 
 reverential humility before the Most High in order 
 that at life's completion the divine seal of approval 
 upon his brow may test to this excellence of the work 
 achieved. So may the memory of Moses Mielziner 
 be to us a help and an inspiration, and a blessing 
 forever. Amen.
 
 7. 
 DAVID EIXHORN AND SAMUEL ADLER.* 
 
 IT IS a delicate task that has devolved upon me 
 as President of the Hebrew Union College and 
 successor to its immortal founder, Isaac M. Wise, 
 to speak on behalf of the College authorities and 
 Cincinnati Jewry in honor of the memory of the 
 Reform pioneers whose hundreth anniversary of 
 birth the Union of American Hebrew Congregations 
 has decided to celebrate this week. David Einhorn 
 and Samuel Adler, the illustrious New York rabbis, 
 two knights of the Jewish legion of immortals who 
 often parried swords with the sainted Cincinnati 
 leader. But I derive courage in doing so from the 
 Rabbinical saying: "Where disciples of the wise 
 enter into a combat on behalf of Israel's sacred 
 heritage, they will ultimately arrive at a state of 
 mutual appreciation and amity." These great war- 
 riors in the cause of God and truth have all entered 
 into heaven's realm of peace, and the homage we pay 
 to the one or the other is a tribute of gratitude and 
 admiration to all the heroes whose life is an inspira- 
 tion and a pattern to us, their heirs and disciples. 
 In commenting upon the words in our Weekly 
 Portion spoken by Abraham: "The God of heaven 
 
 'Address at their Centenary Celebration, delivered at Temple 
 Bene Israel, on Sabbath Parashath Toledoth, 1909, Cin- 
 cinnati.
 
 68 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 and the God of the earth," the rabbis say "Abraham's 
 life task was to bring the Godhead believed to be 
 enthroned only in the heaven above, down to the 
 hearts of men on earth." This is, indeed, the whole 
 idea underlying the Reform movement. It is the 
 God within, the God of humanity that we want to 
 bring home to our generation. Commonplace truth 
 as this seems to be, we scarcely realize what price 
 our heroic leaders had to pay for it, what trials and 
 sufferings they had to undergo to win their generation 
 for the real understanding of the spirit of our faith. 
 Cynics may tell the people that the mere desire 
 for the things forbidden by the Mosaic law created 
 the Reform movement in America. How little do 
 they appreciate the inner struggles and heart-burnings 
 each step from the Ghetto darkness to the light of 
 the new day cost those lofty-minded pathfinders of 
 Reform, and what bitter anguish and martyrdom 
 they underwent for their conviction. Our sages of 
 old fully appreciated the trials of a religious hero 
 when they represented Abraham as having had to 
 go through the fiery furnace of the tyrant Nimrod 
 in order to have his faith tested, before he could go 
 out preaching the Only One God, to a listening world. 
 He had to be a brave, fearless idol-breaker challenging 
 the wrathful ruler, before he could go forth in pursuit 
 of his ideal and be an altar-builder to God on high. 
 He had to encounter all the curses of a fanatic mul- 
 titude, ere he could start out on his mission to be 
 a blessing to all mankind. H*e had first to present 
 his credentials as a man of firm principles and of 
 high character before he could be revered by those
 
 EINHORN AND ADLER 69 
 
 around him as a prophet and a "prince of God." 
 Abraham was the prototype of the Jew. 
 
 What lent the Jew the wondrous power of en- 
 durance and resistance with which he braved fire 
 and sword and a thousandfold death for the sake of 
 his faith, but that glorious example offered him by 
 the patriarch, of a passionate love for truth and of 
 a steadfast belief in the God of heaven who shall one 
 day be the God worshipped from one end of the earth 
 to the other? 
 
 Still, these simple and sublime truths were lost 
 sight of under the crushing weight of meaningless 
 and soulless practices tenaciously adhered to by blind 
 orthodoxy. In order, then, to emancipate the modern 
 Jew from the thraldom of letter and authority wor- 
 ship and liberate the imprisoned kernel from the 
 shell of dry legalism, the Reformer had to step forth 
 boldly as an idol-breaker and incur the hatred, the 
 curse and persecution of the fanatic. In order to 
 restore the faith in God and in man in all its prophetic 
 grandeur, he had to display the fearlessness, the for- 
 titude and heroism of the martyr often only to be 
 overcome, like Abraham, by a feeling of loneliness 
 and forsakenness and find comfort and strength 
 only in God who would appear to him in the night 
 of perplexity and peril, saying: "Fear not! I am 
 thy shield, and thy reward will be very great." 
 
 This is the story of all great Reform pioneers, as 
 it was that of the prophets of old, all of whom felt 
 that there was a fire burning within which they could 
 not quench, a message God had planted into their 
 heart which they could not withhold. But there are
 
 70 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 few life-stories so full of pathos, of such tremendous 
 and almost tragic earnestness as is that of David 
 Einhorn. His life was a continuous martyrdom from 
 the day when he who had been crowned with the 
 Rabbinical diadem of the Torah in his seventeenth 
 year, came back from the university, imbued with 
 modern ideas, to be proscribed and persecuted by his 
 own teachers at the Yeshibah of Fuerth as a heretic 
 and infidel, to that terrible night of mob rule in 
 Baltimore when he had to flee for his life, because 
 he was singled out for assault as one of the most 
 pronounced and intrepid Anti-Slavery men of the 
 pulpit and the press. Like Abraham, he had to wander 
 from land to land and from city to city, hunted by 
 fanatics and despots because of his independence 
 of mind and his courage of conviction. The friend 
 of Abraham Geiger, the peer and successor of Samuel 
 Holdheim, one of the most scholarly expounders of 
 the Reform principles at the Rabbinical Conferences 
 of Frankfort-on-Main and Breslau, he had hardly 
 found a field of activity worthy of his brilliant 
 capacities as chief rabbi of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, 
 when Jewish and Lutheran orthodoxy conspired 
 against him to undermine his position, because he 
 had quite correctly declared that not the Abraham- 
 itic rite but Jewish birth renders the Jew a 
 Jew. And no sooner did he begin to preach the 
 truth of Judaism to the radicals of the Reform Con- 
 gregation at Budapest than the Government shut 
 to him the gates of his temple at the instigation of 
 the conservatives who denounced him as a revolu- 
 tionary. And when at last he reached the goal
 
 EINHORN AND ADLER 71 
 
 of his destination in our land of liberty, his ordeals 
 were not yet at an end. He was branded by ortho- 
 dox and reform rabbis alike as an enemy of Jew and 
 Judaism and antagonized as an iconoclast. 
 
 They failed to understand him whom they so 
 bitterly assailed. He was, indeed, an idol-breaker. 
 He strove to end all hypocrisy in the pulpit and in 
 the rabbis' private life. He wanted truth and not 
 the semblance of truth. His was that fiery soul 
 that could not brook compromise. Like Elijah on 
 Mount Carmel he cried forth: "Choose between 
 God and Baal, between Orthodoxy and Reform, 
 but halt not between two opinions!" While the 
 great master-builder of American Judaism, Isaac 
 M. Wise, followed the maxim of the German state- 
 builder: "First Unity and then Liberty," Einhorn 
 stood unyieldingly by the principle: "First Truth 
 and then Peace," and thus became the master-mind 
 of Reform theology. Isaac M. Wise was the altar- 
 builder of American Jewry throughout the west, 
 the south and the north; David Einhorn the altar- 
 builder of Reform Judaism, the principles of which 
 found expression at the Philadelphia Conference and 
 were afterwards embodied in the Union Prayer Book 
 which is bone of his bone and spirit of his spirit. 
 Einhorn invested the pulpit with new dignity and 
 made it echo forth that American patriotism which 
 stands for the highest ideals of humanity. 
 
 His limitation was that he remained German in 
 speech and mode of thought. He stood on top hold- 
 ing aloft the staff of Reform, and the masses under- 
 stood him not. Few know that on coming to New
 
 72 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 York he also contemplated establishing a Hebrew 
 College, and when afterwards he with several others 
 in common with his friend Samuel Adler, secured 
 funds for this purpose, it was not realized, and he 
 withdrew. Providence chose Isaac M. Wise to be 
 the builder of the Rabbinical school for progressive 
 American Jewry. He had the full command of the 
 people, and in accepting the Chairmanship of the 
 Committee on the Course of Studies for the Hebrew 
 Union College, Einhorn showed his perfect willing- 
 ness to aid him in the great cause. Einhorn's last 
 words from the pulpit at the time of his retirement 
 was a blessing for the Union of American Hebrew 
 Congregations. "I am a Hebrew" was the text of 
 his farewell sermon in which he summed up his 
 eventful life, and all his colleagues throughout the 
 land, west and east, Orthodox and Reformer, 
 united in honoring him as a true "prince of God." 
 
 But how about Einhorn's friend and co-worker, 
 Samuel Adler? The rabbis note that Scripture speaks 
 of Moses and Aaron, at times mentioning Moses 
 after Aaro'n and at other times before him, and they 
 say: "This shows that before God they rank alike. 
 Alongside of the man with that vehement passion 
 for truth and justice, the unflinching insistence on 
 right and the unrelenting castigation of wrongdoing, 
 such as Moses was, the milder disposition of an 
 Aaron with his calmer and more cautious mind is 
 needed to encourage and aid the former when his 
 spirit droops, and to win the people for his message. 
 Einhorn and Adler, like Wise and Lilienthal, belonged 
 together as the Aaron and Moses of American Re-
 
 EINHORN AND ADLER 73 
 
 form. Samuel Adler, the scholar and conservative 
 Reformer at the Conference of Brunswick and Frank- 
 fort-on-the-Main became the co-worker and ally of 
 Einhorn as soon as he came to this country. Knowing 
 and admiring the companion of his youth as the 
 lofty-spirited champion, the knight without fear and 
 without blemish whose sword was so sharp, yet so 
 bright and clean from rust, he seconded him in every 
 movement and promoted his endeavors exactly as 
 did Dr. Lilienthal those of Dr. Wise. He published 
 little, but what he wrote or spoke bore the stamp 
 of profound thought, and his library which his 
 children donated to the Hebrew Union College 
 testifies to the wide range of his scholarly studies. 
 Einhorn and Adler, entwined in their life, shall not 
 be separated in the esteem of posterity in their death. 
 They will live in American Jewry as long as Jewish 
 fidelity, Jewish thinking and feeling will live and 
 inspire us with love for, and loyalty to, our Jewish 
 patrimony, a blessing and a benediction forever. 
 Amen.
 
 8. 
 SAMUEL HIRSCH.* 
 
 "The wise shall shine like the brightness of the firma- 
 ment and those that lead many to righteousness like 
 the stars forever and aye." Daniel XII 3. 
 
 WHAT the azure blue is which fills the universe, 
 linking star to star in the vast infinitude of 
 space, modern science has as yet failed to discover. 
 We only know that it is akin to the luminous orbs 
 and impregnated with star-life. The stars them- 
 selves have yielded their secret to us. We know that 
 they differ from our sun and its planetary system 
 only in degree, not in kind; in quantity, not in quality 
 of their life and life elements. But while yonder are 
 so near and indispensable to us as to furnish us with 
 the very essence of our life, others are so remote 
 as to serve only the mariner and the astronomer as 
 marks and guides in their calculations; and others 
 again are at such a distance that they seem almost 
 to merge in the ethereal element surrounding them. 
 Such are the great men on the firmament of human 
 history. Some move at such remote distances that 
 the rays of light which emanated from them have 
 penetrated our entire spirituality, while they them- 
 selves are scarcely distinguishable in their peculiar 
 
 *Memorial Address delivered at Temple Sinai, Chicago, May, 
 1889.
 
 76 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 relation to us. Others shine like polar stars, like 
 mighty finger-posts of Divine guidance, mapping 
 out the road and the destination for us. But then 
 there are those who shine like the sun and the moon 
 on our path, forming sum and substance, permeating 
 bone and marrow of our existence, the fashioners 
 and leaders of our age. 
 
 Thus while speaking of our Reform pioneers, 
 we gratefully acknowledge Samuel Hirsch to have 
 been one of these luminous orbs, part of the solar 
 constellation that brightened up our mental horizon 
 and imbued us with new intellectual and spiritual 
 life-force. He stands forth in unique splendor as 
 one who dared, when still very young, to write a 
 philosophy of Judaism after the prevailing system of 
 Hegel, transforming the Mosaic and Talmudic tales 
 and ordinances into allegories and symbols, and to 
 present Israel s faith to the world as " the religion 
 of humanity." 
 
 In order to form a just estimate of such Reform- 
 Pioneers as were Geiger, Holdheim, Einhorn, Hirsch 
 and others in Germany, we must guard against 
 conferring upon them the claim of infallibility which 
 they themselves have wrested for us from the author- 
 ities of old. We would sin against the very spirit 
 of progress which made them leaders and prophets 
 of their age, should we attempt to canonize their 
 every word. We would, furthermore, do them in- 
 justice, were we to weigh all their utterances and 
 opinions in the scale of modern research and by the 
 standard of recent investigations. Truth grows, 
 and many a thing which seemed true fifty years ago,
 
 SAMUEL HIRSCH 77 
 
 is no longer considered so to-day. Heaven and earth 
 have been revolutionized since. Creation and Revela- 
 tion have assumed altogether new aspects in the 
 perspective of this Darwinian age of ours. Both 
 religion and ethics present different and far more 
 difficult problems than they did two generations ago. 
 The catechisms of Einhorn and Holdheim, of Hirsch, 
 Formstecher and Herxheimer, have served their 
 day. Whether they dogmatize after Maimonidean 
 fashion, or allegorize after the example of Philo, 
 they start from premises which we no longer recognize 
 as ours. Their rationalism and Geiger's criticism 
 appear in some respects alike antiquated from our 
 advanced point of view. In fact, our progress was 
 rather one-sided. In order to make our religion the 
 rallying power of many, and not of the few, we must 
 lay more stress on the emotional and the practical 
 side than on the mere intellectual and theoretical 
 one, as has thus far been done. Like the boat on the 
 water, so also has the vessel which carries man, two 
 rudders to steer it forward; and like the bird, so does 
 the soul-life require two wings to soar aloft, and these 
 are mind and heart, well balanced and harmonized. 
 The work of reform, then, is far from being completed. 
 Judaism has to undergo many changes yet. But all 
 the greater is our indebtedness to those men who 
 have risen to the demands of their age, turning 
 Judaism from stability and stagnation to progress 
 and enlightenment, and elevating it from Oriental- 
 ism and Ritualism to the ideal of a broad ethical and 
 prophetical religion of humanity. Their providential 
 task consisted in their having shown the world that
 
 78 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 Israel is not a mere relic of the past, a curse-laden 
 wanderer with the mark of sin on his care-furrowed 
 brow; but, like Abraham, still a seed of great promise; 
 that Judaism is not the desolate and forsaken daugh- 
 ter of Zion, but like Sarah still the princess among 
 the religions of the world. Not a race-religion, the 
 heirloom of a single Oriental tribe, but a light and a 
 bond interlinking all the nations and sects; that its 
 staff of life is not withered, but was only waiting for 
 the spring-tide of modern civilization to burst forth 
 into new buds and blossoms, and ripen new fruit to 
 feed humanity thereon. 
 
 And, behold! Do these leaders of Reform not 
 still shine aloft in solitary glory, pointing the way? 
 Do they not still, like Moses with Aaron and Hur 
 on his side, stand high upon the mountain-top hold- 
 ing up the banner of victory to cheer and to inspire 
 us in the struggle for a religion purified, spiritualized 
 and world-embracing; whereas the bulk, the great 
 majority of Jews, still grope in the darkness of fear 
 and superstition, of letter-worship and authority- 
 belief, while others wallow in the mire of materialism 
 and sensualism, forgetful of their obligations to the 
 past and to the glorious future of mankind? 
 
 Yet, while each of these great pioneers of Reform 
 shines with a peculiar light of his own, each having 
 advanced some new idea which formed a foundation 
 stone in the structure of modern Judaism, Samuel 
 Hirsch deserves special credit for a virtue so rare 
 among the pulpit-men of all denominations, and which 
 made him, like Einhorn, the target of fanatical ortho- 
 doxy and the threat and terror of the time-serving
 
 SAMUEL HIRSCH 79 
 
 hypocrite, for his intellectual honesty and inde- 
 pendence. Both Einhorn and Hirsch emancipated 
 American Judaism from the thraldom of ritualistic 
 hypocrisy and deceit, thereby raising it in the respect 
 of the world as well as in self-esteem. But while 
 Einhorn spent his main force in this glorious battle 
 until it resulted in a complete victory, and he died 
 with a prayer for the success of the Sunday service 
 upon his lips, Samuel Hirsch actually introduced the 
 Sunday service in his Congregation in Philadelphia, 
 and he remained aggressive and grew in boldness 
 and outspoken radicalism as he advanced in years, 
 so that it seemed as if the prophetic mantle of Samuel 
 Holdheim of Germany had fallen upon him in Amer- 
 ica. Having been of that unbending cast of mind, 
 of that rigid, unyielding intellectualism which would 
 not shrink from turning the whole Mosaic law, with 
 its legendary poetry and its priestly ritualism into 
 one great symbolic lesson of labor, one system of 
 instruction to work and to improve matter and mind 
 on earth, he made the Sabbath the corner-stone of 
 that religion of toiling humanity, insisting all the 
 more upon the observance of the Sunday as the 
 common day of rest for all. He thus became on this 
 free virgin soil of America the most uncompromising 
 advocate of this most radical of all reform measures 
 the transfer of the historical Sabbath to Sunday. 
 
 Both nature and history advance slowly and surely, 
 not by leaps and destructive storms. I trust, I am 
 personally too long and too intimately connected 
 with the Sunday movement in this, my still beloved 
 former congregation and in the country at large, to
 
 80 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 be misunderstood if I venture to say that the prophet- 
 ical hope for the time when all flesh will bow before 
 God on one and the same Sabbath will and must 
 necessarily ripen but slowly and gradually. But this 
 I will say: When Progressive Judaism in America 
 will once have united upon declaring before the world : 
 "Better the public Sabbath day kept in earnest 
 than to have a sham Sabbath clung to in name, 
 but violated in fact!" then the name of Samuel 
 Hirsch will stand out in bold relief in the future 
 history of Judaism, as he ventured to stand out in 
 every Conference and Synod in which he took part 
 for the last fifty years. 
 
 It almost seems fore-ordained that the mortal 
 frame, as well as the immortal fame of Samuel 
 Hirsch, should remain in the safe keeping of the 
 Chicago Sinai Congregation and its distinguished 
 leader, his own son. 
 
 So let us honor the conscientious and profound 
 scholar, the zealous defender of the cause of Judaism 
 and humanity, the noble-hearted and untiring worker 
 in the field of education and religion, of charity and 
 philanthropy, the honest and stalwart soldier in 
 the army of progress and of enlightenment by not 
 simply placing him on mere partisan lines. Samuel 
 Hirsch's loyalty and devotion to our priceless ances- 
 tral heirloom ; his labors on behalf of religious instruc- 
 tion and of true beneficence, will secure him a high 
 rank in the history of modern Israel and will forever 
 redound to the glory of American Judaism and the 
 Jewish pulpit. His hands were held up to bless, 
 his heart remained faithful to the cause of God and
 
 SAMUEL HIRSCH 81 
 
 of Israel, and his head clear and bright in eagerness 
 to disclose the grandeur of Judaism, until his life's 
 sun set, henceforth to shed its bright radiance from 
 a serener realm of blessedness. 
 
 And we can in no better, nor more befitting man- 
 ner honor his memory than by working in the same 
 spirit and with the same loyalty to our conviction, 
 following the dictates of our own conscience and 
 obeying the demands of our age and surrounding 
 conditions in unbroken continuity with our great 
 past and in consonance with the claims and prospects 
 of our glorious future. 
 
 Of the ancient prophet Samuel we read that his 
 spirit was called up from the dead only to cast an 
 all the more glaring light of contrast upon a degener- 
 ate age. We desire to have the spirit of Samuel 
 Hirsch to work with us as a living force serving us 
 as landmark and finger-post in the progress of Ju- 
 daism, in the advance of humanity, in the unfolding of 
 all that is divine in man and humanity. Russian folk- 
 lore tells of heroes who could not die before having 
 imbued their successors with their last breath in 
 order to equip them with the strength enabling them 
 to emulate their prowess and fill the world with their 
 fame. Thus let us imbibe the last breath of our great 
 leaders and prophetic heroes to feel the glow of their 
 enthusiasm and love for all that is holy to mankind 
 and precious in the eyes of God, that they may shine 
 for us and for coming generations "like the brightness 
 of the firmament and like the stars forever and aye." 
 Amen.
 
 9. 
 
 ABRAHAM GEIGER.* 
 THE MASTER BUILDER OF MODERN JUDAISM. 
 
 SURELY the Lord God will do nothing unless 
 He revealeth His secret to His servants, the 
 prophets." Often the question is asked whether the 
 age creates the man who imprints his name and char- 
 acter upon an epoch, or the man the age that stands 
 for certain ideas and ideals. The fact is, that Provi- 
 dence so welds the collective and the individual 
 forces together as to make them work out its own plans 
 and purposes, and so does the genius reveal the 
 secrets of God. In Abraham Geiger, Judaism reached 
 a new stage of its existence. He broke the spell of 
 centuries and spoke the liberating word which im- 
 bued it with new life and vigor, with new self-con- 
 sciousness and self-confidence. He was the prophet 
 to whom God revealed the secret of the age for 
 modern Israel. He was its genius of rejuvenation 
 and became the spiritual regenerator of Judaism 
 and the Jew. He gave the reform movement its 
 scientific basis, its historical foundation, and thus 
 became the master-builder of modern Judaism. Be- 
 fore the torch-light of his keen research and the 
 brightness of his vision, the dark recesses of Jewish 
 
 "Centenary Address, May 28th, 1910.
 
 84 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 history were lit up, and order and harmony entered 
 the chaos of Jewish thought. For him Judaism spelt 
 progress and development, and therein he found the 
 key to unlock the mysteries of the past, and at the 
 same time the magic power wherewith to revitalize 
 the Law, and the faith of Israel that seemed to be 
 on the decline. Not only, then, as the first and fore- 
 most champion of Reform pioneers does Abraham 
 Geiger claim our homage on this Sabbath, on the 
 Sabbath following the hundredth anniversary of 
 his birth, but as the great creative genius, as the 
 historical refashioner and rebuilder of Judaism, 
 and it behooves particularly the Hebrew Union 
 College, upon whose banner American Reform 
 Judaism is inscribed, to solemnly celebrate his cen- 
 tenary. 
 
 There are many in these days who say: Religion 
 should come as a heavenly message of peace, fostering 
 love and good-will among men, and not as a theology 
 which engenders strife and division, especially at 
 a time when the Jew must show a united front 
 against his aggressors. They who speak thus from 
 pulpit and platform, through the press and from 
 among the people, fail to realize that Israel's God is 
 a God of truth, who can not be bribed by gifts or 
 works of philanthropy; that Israel's creed Shema 
 Yisrael! is the battle-cry of heroes who fought, 
 bled and died for the truth as it lived in their inner- 
 most conviction, and that the same fire which burned 
 in an Elijah, an Amos and an Isaiah created both 
 the martyrs and the sages of the middle age who 
 also gave their life and all for their faith, and the
 
 ABRAHAM GEIGER 85 
 
 Reformers of our own day, whose life was one of 
 continuous trial and peril and martyrdom, like that 
 of the prophets of old. 
 
 Of all those brave battlers for spiritual freedom 
 and intellectual honesty Geiger, was the first to en- 
 counter the hatred, the anathema and the persecu- 
 tion of orthodoxy. But what made him great was not 
 so much the war-cry he raised against hypocrisy 
 and hollow formalism, nor the battle array he formed 
 in marshaling all the forces of Reform, nor even the 
 reforms he introduced and proposed, which, after 
 all, remained but half-measures compared with what 
 his fellow-champions and particularly the American 
 Reform pioneers did. Geiger's real and lasting 
 greatness consisted in that, while he laid bare the sore 
 wounds which showed Judaism to be in a perilous 
 state, he as a true diagnostician pointed out both 
 the cause of the disease and the method of its cure. 
 He felt the pulse-beat, heard the heart-throbs be- 
 neath all the formations and transformations and 
 even the deformations, and, like Elijah, declared 
 to the despairing mother: Behold, thy child liveth! 
 
 He was not, as Prof. Adler said the other day, 
 a mere critic who stopped at the negation of the old. 
 He was most positive in his assertion that Judaism, 
 when purified of its dross and cleared of its debris, was 
 sure to win the world for its truth, as humanity's 
 faith. His was a constructive mind, and as a historian 
 of great divinatory power, he knew how to pene- 
 trate into the deeper forces of religious and social 
 life and trace their origin and growth. He voiced the 
 threefold message of the age for the Jew: Evolution, 
 Regeneration and Historic Continuity.
 
 86 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 This was far more than the emancipation wrought 
 by Moses Mendelssohn and the renaissance effected 
 by Leopold Zunz. 
 
 Mendelssohn led modern Israel out of the house 
 of Egyptian bondage, but his land of promise offered 
 no spiritual freedom. Belonging to the school of 
 cosmopolitan deists, he lacked the historical sense, 
 the insight into the laws of human progress, and 
 hence, like Maimonides, he believed in the im- 
 mutability of the whole Mosaic system of laws and 
 ceremonies. Yet when his shallow rationalism was 
 swept away by the "Critik der reinen Vernunft" of 
 Immanuel Kant, the Robespierre of the Mental 
 Revolution, as he was called, and the inrushing tide 
 of the new culture carried the Ghetto Jew, bewildered 
 and dazed, out into the maelstrom of a humanity 
 that knew of no bounds nor barriers, all hope of 
 Judaism seemed gone; and apostasy and assimilation 
 became the watchword of the enlightened. 
 
 The American painter, Sargent, in his famous, 
 though unhistorical, fresco of Moses and the Proph- 
 ets in the Boston Library, portrays the Hebrew law- 
 giver as a grand, imposing figure, yet immovable 
 as a rock. Such was indeed the traditional concept 
 of the Mosaic Law. It was believed to have come 
 forth out of the mouth of God on Mount Sinai all 
 finished in its dual character, written and oral, fixed 
 and unchangeable for all time. Altered conditions 
 could at best suspend, but never abolish or alter 
 one iota. Was it possible, then, that this four thous- 
 and years' structure should fall before the furious 
 storm that ushered in the new era, without burying 
 all the faithful beneath its ruins?
 
 ABRAHAM GEIGER 87 
 
 It was a well-meant and laudable endeavor on 
 the part of the early reformers, such as Israel Jacob- 
 son, Solomon and Kley, to check the growing tide 
 by removing the repulsive features of the old synagog 
 and putting the venerable matron in a more attrac- 
 tive attire borrowed from the church, by introducing 
 innovations such as confirmation, the organ and 
 choir, and the sermon in the vernacular. But such 
 aesthetic reforms could not conceal from the thinking 
 Jew the inner discord. The pillars of the faith were 
 tottering and tumbling; the whole Law, Mosaic or 
 Rabbinical, the Sabbath, the Dietary and Purity laws 
 were broken and set aside. Could moralizing ser- 
 mons after Protestant fashion without a spark of 
 Jewish sentiment and thought, of which also Zunz 
 published a volume of little depth, heal the breach 
 between life and the Law, between theory and prac- 
 tice? 
 
 In this deluge of destruction Zunz stepped to 
 the fore, another Noah with his ark. "Let us build 
 up," he cried, "die Wissenschaft, the scientific lore 
 of Judaism, and we shall not perish in the flood." 
 His crew, the members of the Juedische Kulturverein 
 he had formed, were overtaken by the flood, but he, 
 the boatman, remained true to his "grossmuethige 
 Grille," as Heine says, and he became the regenerator 
 of Jewish literature, he in common with his three 
 compeers, Krochmal, Rappaport and Luzzatto. With 
 his stupendous learning and wondrous mastership 
 he cut a path through the impenetrable forest of a 
 three thousand years' literature, and revealed to the 
 astonished world order, system and growth, where 
 all seemed but confusion and stagnation. Especially
 
 88 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 did his master-work, "Die Gottesdienstliche Vor- 
 traege, of 1832, impress the learned youth, as Geiger 
 writes, "like a mighty fructifying torrent falling 
 upon a parched soil to stimulate everywhere new 
 thought and new effort." Still, the great pathfinder 
 fell short of the expectations he had aroused. He 
 failed to touch the deeper forces and light up the 
 inner process of Judaism. As the majestic river 
 Rhine is lost in the sand of the Dutch lowlands, so 
 were Zunz's gigantic efforts lost in a dry-as-dust 
 erudition which registered names and dates, and was, 
 as Geiger writes, concerned more with dead formulas 
 and tombstone inscriptions than with the living faith 
 of living Israel. Buried among dust-covered folios, 
 he lost hold of life, and life of him. He became 
 embittered, a hater of the Reform he had espoused, 
 and a vilifier of Reformers, an advocate of obso- 
 lete rites and practices he himself had discarded, 
 despite the fact that he assigned to the books of 
 Moses a post-exilic origin far beyond that of the 
 most radical critics. He became a Baal Teshubah, a 
 retrogressionist, and, as Geiger's scathing review 
 of his later work, "Zur Geschichte und Literatur," 
 points out, a Nationalist. 
 
 For the great work of Israel's religious emancipa- 
 tion from the thraldom of blind letter and authority- 
 worship and the rebuilding of Judaism upon the solid 
 ground work of modern thought and modern research, 
 Providence had singled out a man of a different cast 
 of mind, a man fully abreast of the achievements and 
 aims, the ideas and ideals of the age, and filled with 
 an unquenchable thirst for truth and for righteous-
 
 ABRAHAM GEIGER 89 
 
 ness. This man was Abraham Geiger. The community 
 of Frankfort, his native town, was, as in fact it still 
 is, rent asunder by two factions, the men of the 
 Philanthropine and the men of the Klause, radicals 
 who sneered and scoffed, and fanatics and blind 
 followers who bewailed and deplored the new state 
 of things. Young Geiger stood and moved between 
 these two extremes. His father and first teacher 
 was an old-fashioned orthodox rabbi who died after 
 he had reached his 14th year. But Providence would 
 have him come under the influence of Wolf Heiden- 
 heim, the fine grammarian and text-critic, for his 
 Bible studies, and of his own older brother, Solomon 
 Geiger for the study of the Mishnah, which he 
 learned to read independently of the Gemarah. Thus 
 he at once acquired a historical and critical method. 
 At the same time access to the secular, the historical 
 and classical literature awakened in the precocious 
 youth doubt, which is the beginning of independent 
 thought. The universities of Heidelberg and Bonn, 
 whither his liberal friends urged him to go in prepar- 
 ation for his rabbinical career, failed to offer him 
 what he was greatly in search of, a clear system of 
 thought, or Weltanschaung, in harmony with his 
 aspirations as Jewish theologian. With all the greater 
 delight he devoted his energies to the study of the 
 Semitic languages, the Arabic and the Syriac, by 
 the mastery of which he was enabled to unlock the 
 hidden treasures of Jewish, Mohammedan and early 
 Church lore, and to achieve undreamt-of triumphs 
 in the field of religion and philosophy, as well as 
 philology. The prize he won as a student of 22 years
 
 90 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 by his essay on "What Has Mohammed Drawn 
 from Judaism?" at once manifested the wide grasp 
 of his intellect, while at the same time it directed 
 his efforts toward a broad historical survey of what 
 Judaism accomplished as mother of the two world- 
 religions and of many systems of philosophy, old 
 and new. With his mental horizon thus enlarged, 
 the former Bible and Talmud student beheld the 
 teachings of the synagog. the church and the mosque, 
 the Scriptures and their interpretations, in the light 
 of historical research as a continuous process of growth 
 and development. He had thus become a true son of 
 the nineteenth century which endowed man with a new 
 sense, the sense of historical analysis and historical 
 perception. Just as before the scrutinizing gaze of the 
 geologist, Mother Earth had to lay bare her layers of 
 rock to give account of the various geological periods 
 she had to go through during the millions of years of 
 her existence, so were the laws, the languages and the 
 literatures of the nations, old or young, examined 
 one after the other as to their kinship, growth and 
 origin, to offer a deeper insight into the work-shop 
 of the human mind and elucidate the laws governing 
 all social, intellectual and spiritual life. Could 
 Judaism have been exempt from the law of evolu- 
 tion and growth? 
 
 To this painstaking research of a lifetime Geiger 
 consecrated his ingenious powers as historian and 
 theologian. With fine critical acumen he learned 
 to distinguish in the Mosaic Law and Biblical legend, 
 in the Exilic and Post-exilic literature, in the Mish- 
 naic, the Midrashic and Targumic and parallel
 
 ABRAHAM GEICER 91 
 
 groups of Halakic and Haggadic interpretations of 
 Scripture different currents and forces, different 
 powers and potencies of religious life struggling for 
 the dominion, each source representing another 
 stratum in the composition and formation of the 
 whole: the nomadic and the agricultural, the 
 Israelitic and the Judaic period, prophet and priest, 
 exilic and post-exilic life, each having left its imprint 
 upon the Mosaic code, because beneath the dead 
 letter there had been surging and struggling life. 
 Particularly was Talmudic Judaism, thus long de- 
 nounced and condemned alike by the world, the 
 enlightened modern Jew and the Christian theo- 
 logian, brought out by him in an altogether new 
 light. He rolled off the shame, the curse and the doom 
 placed by the New Testament upon the Pharisee, 
 showing him to have been animated by the principle 
 of religious democracy, which was to revitalize the 
 Law and invest Jewish life with new sanctity. In 
 opposition to the presumptuous claim of the Saddu- 
 cean priesthood, Pharisaism insisted upon the priestly 
 holiness of all Israel and upon its possessorship and 
 guardianship of the Law, and, in order to justify 
 this title, it created the various rites and ceremonies 
 intended to sanctify the daily life of the Jew at 
 every step. Not hypocrisy, but the hallowing of life 
 was the object of rabbinism in its creative state, this 
 was the revolutionizing viewpoint of Geiger. His mas- 
 ter-work, "Die Urschrift und ihre Uebersetzungen," 
 in the year 1&57, came like a new revelation. It 
 presented the proof that the Torah, the written and 
 the oral Law, far from having remained intact and
 
 92 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 unaltered throughout the centuries, had undergone 
 change and transformation, both as to the letter and 
 the interpretation of the same. Because the Bible, 
 the Book of the Law, was to be the Law of Life, 
 the educator and fashioner of the people, it had 
 to be refashioned and remodeled ever anew in 
 conformity with the prevailing and ever-advancing 
 views concerning God and man. 
 
 It can not be my purpose here to explain in detail 
 Geiger's views of the Sadducees and Pharisees and 
 of their relations to the Samaritans and Karaites, 
 or of the Mishnaic and Pre-Mishnaic systems of 
 the Halakah, by which he revolutionized the entire 
 history of Judaism. Let me only state that, while 
 they were rejected and ridiculed by his opponents, 
 chiefly of the Breslau school, Schechter's Genizah 
 find of Ben Sira confirmed Geiger's theory regarding 
 the rule of the Sons of Zaddok during the Second 
 Temple; Harkavy's find of Anan's Sefer Ha Mizwoth 
 confirmed Geiger's statement of the relationship 
 between the Sadducees and the Karaites, and Halevy's 
 find of a work by the Falashas on the Sabbath con- 
 firmed Geiger's explanation of Shebuth as a rigid 
 Sabbath prohibition of the old Halakah, with the 
 penalty of death upon its transgression. 
 
 So were all the Jewish rites, festivals and insti- 
 tutions shown by Geiger's critical and historical 
 investigations to have undergone a continuous 
 alteration and transformation. They had to be 
 changed, because life changed. Neither could the 
 views and doctrines concerning God and man, 
 Israel and humanity remain the same, because the 
 world-view never remained the same.
 
 ABRA HA M GEIGER 93 
 
 Here, then, was given for all time the basis 
 for reform, for a reform from within, not from 
 without, and that is Regeneration and Rejuvenation. 
 As the earth becomes young at each turn of the year 
 when the genial sun of spring beckons the hidden 
 seeds of the soil to burst forth into beautiful verdure 
 and luxuriant growth, where winter's frost had caused 
 isolation and barrenness before; as the tree covers 
 itself anew with green foliage and produces sweet 
 fruitage, after the storm and the tempest have cast 
 off the dried leaves and the withered branches; so 
 Judaism. It is a living tree, a vital truth, and when 
 the storm of destruction carries off the lifeless forms, 
 all the dead wood that hinders its fresh growth, 
 it means new life and greater expansion. Then it 
 behooves the true guardian to separate the precious 
 from the worthless, the essential from the transient, 
 the kernel from the shell, the gold from the dross, 
 in order to bring out to greater efficiency and potency 
 the eternal truth, the vitalizing forces of Judaism. 
 For this very crisis of the time is to cause Judaism 
 to enter upon a new stage greater than the stage of 
 either Rabbinism or that of Sadducean Mosaism 
 was, a stage on which with its lofty world-conquering 
 truths it is destined to wield still greater power and 
 influence on a larger humanity bent, with all its 
 intellectual and social powers, to free itself from the 
 trammels of church dogma and the burden of a soul- 
 less ceremonialism. Away, then with the excrescences 
 and deformities of Ghetto life! Away with all the 
 laws and the practices that disgrace Judaism, dis- 
 figure the Jew and degrade the Jewess! Away with
 
 94 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 Oriental barbarism, with the hollowness of formalism, 
 with hypocrisy of official rabbidom! Thus sounded 
 the war-tocsin, the battle-cry of the 25-year-old 
 rabbi of Wiesbaden, as he rallied the foremost 
 scholars and liberal rabbis around him in his "Wis- 
 senschaftliche Zeitschrift fur Juedische Theologie," 
 and his call to Breslau two years afterward, with the 
 Tiktin controversy that ensued, made him the central 
 figure of the whole Reform movement in Germany. 
 But while waging war for continuous progress 
 and absolutely free research, he accentuated on every 
 occasion the principle of historical continuity. He be- 
 lieved in evolution, not in revolution; he wanted a 
 wholesome growth, of the whole, not a breaking 
 away to injure the development, not a secession 
 and isolation. He insisted on his title as rabbi 
 instead of Reform preacher; he would not be leader 
 of a pronounced Reform temple, nor of a Sunday- 
 Sabbath congregation. He loved Holdheim for his 
 outspokenness and sincerity, and preached the 
 funeral sermon over him, but neither endorsed his 
 radical views, nor accepted the position vacated by 
 his death. Instead of being a Christianizer, as the 
 Reformers are called by the retrogressionists, Geiger 
 was the most persistent, the most outspoken and the 
 most dreaded antagonist of official Christianity. He 
 opposed the Sunday-Sabbath as a concession to the 
 Church. No one contested the right of the Church 
 to claim for herself the title and privilege of the new 
 and higher truth as forcefully as he did. No one 
 challenged the authorities of Christendom to verify 
 its presumptuous assertions concerning the inferior-
 
 ABRA HA M GEICER 95 
 
 ity of Judaism in bolder language than he. To him 
 Judaism was not a truth, but the truth, not a system 
 of dead beliefs and practices, but spiritual life, 
 ever unfolding and expanding, ever progressing and 
 advancing, until its essence has permeated humanity 
 in realization of the Messianic ideal, a process of 
 development ever moved on by the spirit of history, 
 the divine spirit ruling man in the various ages. 
 Denouncing the narrow spirit of theological semina- 
 ries, which set dams and bars to free inquiry, and 
 especially the intellectual dishonesty and the indul- 
 gence in casuistry such as prevailed in the Breslau 
 school, he gave utterance to the following striking 
 remark: "A religion of the minority which must 
 rely solely on its own strength to be of power and 
 influence, can maintain itself only when keeping 
 itself on the very heights of mental and spiritual 
 life, forming the vanguard in the battle of the intel- 
 lect, and strong enough by its intrinsic solidity, its 
 true inwardness and perfect freedom of thought to 
 wrest recognition from the world around." "Only 
 an institution of Jewish learning that remains in 
 touch with the university spirit of free research, 
 can truly promote and embody Jewish thought." 
 
 Judaism, he says, on another occasion, is not a 
 tragedy, a thing to weep over. Even the tragic 
 middle ages enclosed a great idea modern time has 
 to unfold. The great drama of history is not closed. 
 Only the last act can tell, and we live and hope and 
 wait. The joy of optimism must be echoed forth 
 in the synagog and the home of the Jew. 
 
 Such were the views of Geiger, who lives in all 
 that modern Judaism, Reform or Conservative, has
 
 96 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 accomplished ever since. Without Geiger neither 
 Frankel nor Graetz could have done what they did. 
 Nor did Geiger overlook the needs of a revival of 
 domestic devotion in the Jewish home; a revival, not 
 a resurrection of the dead, he wanted. Time forbids 
 me to dwell on what he did as preacher and a power- 
 ful preacher he was or as practical reformer, as his- 
 torian and critic, or as translator of the medieval 
 poets and a fine classical style he had as writer 
 whether in Hebrew or in German or finally as 
 theologian at the Berlin Hochschule. In fertility 
 and richness of mind, in scientific depth and accuracy, 
 in range of knowledge and mental grasp, as well as 
 indefatigable industry, he had no equal, unless you 
 go back to Maimonides as his peer. There was no 
 field of Jewish literature and thought which he 
 did not enrich, enlarge and deepen. His works are 
 an inexhaustible mine of knowledge and of sug- 
 gestiveness to the student. As it is said of Moses, 
 his eyes became not dim, and his freshness of mind 
 did not abate. His enthusiasm and zeal for Judaism's 
 truth kept him young, until death lulled the great 
 worker to sleep in his 64th year. And greater than 
 the scholar, the writer and preacher was the man, 
 the kindliest, the most lovable and most genial 
 personality; his mind bright as steel, his heart of the 
 purest gold. 
 
 When the Pharaonic edict had gone out con- 
 demning the Hebrew youth to die in the water, the 
 precious life of the infant Moses was saved by Pha- 
 raoh's own daughter, who took him out of the ark 
 of bulrushes floating on the water and placed him
 
 ABRAHAM GEIGER 97 
 
 under her fostering care; but there stood the sister 
 of Moses ready to call Jochebed in order to nurture 
 the future law-giver of Israel with the milk of the 
 Jewish mother. So did Abraham Geiger call the 
 spirit of Jewish history to impart the nutritious 
 essence of Jewish life and Jewish thought and Jewish 
 consciousness to Reform, in order to render it a true 
 saving power for modern Judaism. 
 
 "Let them who antagonize me curse; Thou, O 
 God, wilt bless," Geiger said, and he became a bles- 
 sing, a source of light and of inspiration to many. 
 May his spirit, his example and his life-work ever 
 inspire us in our work for the cause of God, of Israel 
 and humanity! Amen.
 
 10. 
 THE PEACE MISSION OF JUDAISM.* 
 
 peace have they that love Thy law, O 
 God, and there is no stumbling unto them." 
 These words of the Psalmist I offer as a greeting at 
 the formal opening of the Hebrew Union College. 
 There is a remarkable passage found in the Midrash 
 Tanhuma with reference to this verse. "God's cove- 
 nant with heaven and earth rests upon the preserva- 
 tion of the Torah in Israel. And so twelve years 
 previous to the destruction of the Holy City by 
 Nebuchadnezzar, God sent heroic men of the law in the 
 company of King Jekoniah to Babylonia as pioneers, 
 that they might there lay the foundations of the two 
 great Academies, which were to remain intact for 
 all the centuries amidst all the hostilities of war, of 
 persecution and captivity, so as to be the central 
 seats of the Torah, abodes of the Shekinah until the 
 very beginning of the Messianic time. Yea, even the 
 last great war that precedes the advent of the Messiah 
 should not hurt nor affect them. No stumbling will 
 come to their peaceful occupation." This providen- 
 tial task, this glorious privilege claimed here for the 
 Babylonian academies we proudly claim for our 
 American institutions of learning. 
 
 *Address delivered at the re-opening of the College, September, 
 1914.
 
 100 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 Throughout Europe and Asia there rages since 
 months a world-war of unprecedented fury and 
 savagery. The seminaries of Berlin, Breslau, Vienna 
 and Budapest and the Yeshiboth of Russia and 
 Galicia, I understand, are closed, because teachers 
 and students are for the most part engaged in the 
 cruel fight of the nations and races against each other. 
 Our blessed land of freedom has, thanks to the Most 
 High, been spared, and our schools and colleges 
 continue undisturbed their educational pursuits. 
 So do we, under the divine guidance, open our dear 
 institution under the most favorable auspices for 
 the sacred work of the year. O, what a great incentive 
 for us! What a great responsibility to see to it that 
 as is said in the passage quoted with regard to 
 the Babylonian academies "the study of the Tor ah 
 may not be neglected in our land." 
 
 But, dear Colleagues and Students, there is a 
 deeper truth conveyed to us by the Psalm verse 
 selected. Behold, all the classes and circles of 
 society, the industrial and commercial and social 
 and political world is everywhere disturbed and 
 shaken up to the core by this terrible war, whereas 
 a benign Providence has assigned to us a vocation 
 of peace. "The disciples of the Torah," our sages 
 say, "are entrusted with the task of strengthening 
 the forces of peace in the world. For we read: 'All 
 thy children shall be taught of the Lord, and then 
 great shall be the peace of thy children' " of those 
 who are to build up the world's welfare by their 
 idealism, their spiritual endeavors. 
 
 You hear and read so much in these days of the 
 Peace Mission of Judaism, and, indeed, I could,
 
 JUDAISM'S PEACE MISSION 101 
 
 and so could you, quote many Scriptural or Talmudic 
 passages to verify this claim. But have you really 
 considered what this peace mission means and implies? 
 Can it mean that we as Jews should simply point 
 to the familiar Messianic prophecy of Isaiah an- 
 nouncing in inimitable classic sentences the time of 
 universal peace when "the nations will learn war no 
 more" and "wolf and lamb will dwell together in 
 concord," and for the rest shrink, or encourage our 
 brethren to shrink, from participating as patriots 
 in the battles fought by the nations in whose lands 
 they live, for the honor and greatness of their country 
 in the light in which they see it? Why, look at 
 Abraham our ancestor! He fought nobly for his coun- 
 try when it was assailed by the northern foe, dis- 
 playing valor and generosity in carrying away booty 
 and giving it back to the king of Sodom. And 
 this example of patriotic heroism was followed by 
 the Jew everywhere, not merely in Palestine, the 
 land he owned, but no less so in Babylonia, where 
 at the time of Rab and Samuel, Jew stood against 
 Jew siding with one dynasty or the other; and their 
 loyalty to either was recognized by those very mas- 
 ters of Jewish lore. And so throughout history in 
 every land in which he lived, the Jew won laurels 
 for bravery as soldier and patriot. Whether in the 
 old hemisphere or in the new, whether under a liberal 
 or a despotic government, he stood in the front 
 rank of those who battled heroically for the country 
 to which he owed allegiance. And to-day even the 
 Zionist, I am told, feels the throbbing of the heart 
 for the land of his birth and culture, and proudly 
 offers his service to fight or to die for its flag, be it
 
 102 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 that of Germany and Austria or that of Russia, 
 France and England. Yet who dares withhold the 
 tribute of admiration from the Jew for such display 
 of loyalty in these trying days, or lessen the patriotic 
 ardor in the one or the other fellow-Jew? 
 
 Not in the political field or direction lies the 
 peace-mission of the Jew. What then is the peace- 
 mission of Judaism? When the Lord appeared to 
 Israel on Sinai amidst thunder and lightning and 
 earthquake, the Midrash tells, the nations were in 
 fear, lest another deluge of water or fire was to come 
 and sink the earth back into chaos; but when they 
 heard the words of the Decalogue ring forth in 
 seventy languages, they exclaimed: "The Lord is 
 endowing His people with power; He blesses them 
 with the instrument of peace." The Torah is the 
 world's instrument of peace. Let us see how! "God 
 maketh peace in His heavenly heights" This is 
 explained by the rabbis as follows: There are the 
 angelic powers, the elements of fire and water, the 
 forces of light and darkness, of growth and decay, 
 of life and death in perpetual conflict with one an- 
 other, but God establishes peace among them by 
 bringing them into harmonious relations to each 
 other. Man, too, composed as he is of heavenly and 
 earthly elements, of upward and downward striving 
 forces, must know how to establish harmony and 
 peace among them. When man was to emanate 
 from the hands of the great Creator, we are told, 
 there was dissension in the angelic council. Love 
 and Kindness favored the plan, saying: "Create 
 him, O Master of the World, for he is kind and 
 merciful." But the spirit of Truth said: "No, he is
 
 JUDAISM'S PEACE. MISSION 103 
 
 full of lying and falsehood." Likewise the spirit of 
 Peace said: "No, create him not, he is full of quarrel- 
 ing and strife." Then God seized Truth and cast 
 it down to the earth, exclaiming: "Let Truth grow 
 forth from the earth ascending ever higher and 
 higher, while Righteousness looketh down from heaven. 
 So will Kindness and Truth meet, Righteousness and 
 Peace blend in man." Here you have the function 
 of peace assigned to the law. The beast in man 
 must be subordinated to the divine. The lower 
 passions must be put under t"he control of the higher 
 aspirations of the soul. Truth, Justice and Peace 
 belong inseparably together. Without truth and 
 justice there can be no real peace. 
 
 When, 1900 years ago, Christianity entered the 
 world with the proclamation of peace and good-will 
 to men on earth through the advent of its "Prince of 
 Peace," it was bound to fail, because it did not provide 
 for truth and justice as the firm foundations of peace. 
 The truth of monotheism had at the very beginning, 
 as the most recent researches show, to enter a com- 
 promise with polytheism. Justice was frustrated 
 by such doctrines as "Resist not evil!" and "If one 
 smite thee on the right cheek, offer him also. the 
 other!" Peace was made with heaven by the sur- 
 render of the earth to the worldly powers, and thus 
 Christianity became a religion of other-worldliness. 
 Instead of uniting mankind, it divided it into hostile 
 sects, into such as would be saved and such as are 
 forever doomed. Hence love was turned into hatred, 
 and, instead of peace, strife, warfare and persecution 
 became the ruling passion of the centuries. Now, when 
 at last the medieval spirit was exhausted and the
 
 104 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 modern era brought about a reaction and new condi- 
 tions of life, the pendulum swung from one extreme 
 to the other. Other-worldliness made room for mere 
 worldliness, illusive idealism for gross materialism, 
 religious fanaticism for one-sided intellectualism, and 
 Church discipline for unbridled individualism. And 
 here you have the very root of all the evils from which 
 our so-called enlightened age labors, and which have 
 found their terrible culmination in this world-con- 
 flagration, the breakdown of our much boasted civil- 
 ization. For it is the passion for wealth, for industrial 
 and commercial aggrandizement that has engendered 
 and fanned all the jealousy, hatred and strife existing 
 between the classes and masses, between the nations 
 and races. And on the other hand, it is the false 
 culture-ideal, the overweening pride of intellectual- 
 ism which has created new codes of ethics for the 
 superman, new rules of conduct for the would-be 
 superior races, and has sown the seeds of discord and 
 prejudice everywhere among men, so as to make them 
 cast the fear of God and the love for fellowman to 
 the winds. Notwithstanding all the wondrous 
 achievements of science and industry working for 
 the .ever closer union and brotherhood of man, we 
 see to-day but the fiercest passions and furies of the 
 beast rage, and despite all theoretical or practical 
 altruism, man is further away than ever from his 
 brother-man. Whence, then, shall come the real, 
 the lasting peace to grieving humanity? This is the 
 great concern of us all. 
 
 Now, it is not mere phraseology nor mere self- 
 delusion, if I say that this great crisis in the history 
 of mankind is the great opportunity for Judaism, if
 
 JUDAISM'S PEACE MISSION 105 
 
 we would but realize it and courageously step forth 
 to point out to an anxious world the path of peace. 
 The world is in need of new valuations, new standards, 
 new ideals of life; and none can offer them with greater 
 power and authority than he who can draw from the 
 rich storehouse of Jewish lore and wisdom. Ever 
 since we have ceased to be a political nation, if not 
 long before, Judaism lost its annals of war, pointing 
 to the schoolhouse as the true armory for its battles 
 and for its ammunition. The hand that is stained 
 with blood, David was told, can not build the temple 
 of God, whose name is Peace. Iron, the weapon of 
 destruction, must not rear an altar to the God of 
 life and happiness, the law declares. 
 
 The sword was given to Esau to live by; Israel's 
 watchword is: "Not by numerical strength and 
 physical might, but by My spirit, saith the Lord of 
 Hosts." Our warfare is that of the spirit, and our 
 sword, the God of truth. Religion for the Jew is 
 not an insurance policy for the world to come, but the 
 hallowing of this world, of the whole of life here. 
 Nor is it a contempt for, or mistrust of, reason and 
 free research, but a harmonious blending of mind and 
 heart-culture, peace between faith and free-thought. 
 Again, its practical aim is not condescending charity, 
 love at the expense of justice, nor generous altruism, 
 which implies nobility on the one side and humiliation 
 on the other, but mutualistic righteousness, the 
 interdependence of rich and poor, of high and low 
 upon the basis of true fellowship, of universal justice. 
 Neither does Judaism set up creed or color or race 
 as barrier between man and man; but, beginning 
 with the first man and pointing to the united family
 
 106 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 of man as the end, it wants to have all men, nations, 
 classes and creeds united in the one covenant of peace, 
 of which the rainbow in the clouds after the flood is 
 the symbol, betokening a new heaven and a new 
 earth for humanity. Each day, therefore, the Jew 
 prays for the speedy establishment of the Kingdom 
 of God, not in heaven, but on earth, and at the 
 beginning of each year his prayers go forth to the 
 throne of the heavenly Father, not for the Jew alone 
 but for the bond of the brotherhood of man. This 
 is the peace doctrine, this is the peace mission of the 
 Jew. 
 
 Yet, in order to be able to fulfill this mission of 
 peace, in order successfully to offer the world the 
 new valuations, the new standards, the new ideals 
 of life demanded these days, the Jew must undergo 
 a great transformation himself. In this age of 
 rationalism he must again become a pattern of 
 reverential piety and render holiness his ideal of 
 life. Amidst the pursuits of wealth, amidst the 
 materialistic tendencies of the time he must again 
 become the banner-bearer of idealism, and verify 
 by this life the claim that the spirit of prophet and 
 sage and martyr still lives in him; that he embodies, 
 indeed, the kingdom of priests and the holy nation 
 for which he was chosen by Providence. Then only 
 can he influence the world, if, while living in and for 
 the world, God, whose herald he claims to be, again 
 becomes the hallowing force of his life. 
 
 Whence shall this new spirit come to the Jew, 
 whence the belief in his great world-mission, whence 
 the love and zeal for this mighty religious task with 
 which Israel has been entrusted for all the ages, if
 
 JUDAISM'S PEACE MISSION 107 
 
 not from the pulpit, if not from the rabbi, the Jewish 
 preacher? The Jewish teacher and leader must be 
 aglow with faith in the God he preaches, in the mission 
 he proclaims. He must burn with enthusiasm and 
 love, with zeal and devotion for the sublime, yet simple 
 truth he is to utter, or else he can not inspire others 
 with faith and true idealism. Unless his own life is 
 adorned with the beauty of holiness, how should 
 he be able to beautify and hallow the life of others? 
 The man in the pulpit must be a man of power of 
 mind and heart, of firmness in faith. 
 
 And here comes the important lesson, the power- 
 ful monition to you, dear students who prepare for 
 the Jewish ministry. We are all in our theological 
 studies to-day under the influence of historical and 
 critical research, which appeals exclusively to reason 
 and offers so little for the nurture of the soul, the 
 emotional and spiritual side. Just in the very years 
 when the young mind, in its struggle for independence, 
 is open to skepticism, teachings and books are 
 brought to the knowledge of the student that tend 
 to unsettle his inherited faith and to bring to him 
 disillusion, disappointment and doubt; and there 
 is comparatively little presented in his studies that 
 deepens the sentiment, the reverential spirit of de- 
 votion and faith. Against all these perils and trials, 
 these pitfalls and stumbling blocks that come in 
 the way of the very best of students, my text offers 
 the remedy: "Great peace have they that love 
 Thy law, O God, and there is no stumbling to them." 
 Love for the ancestral faith, loyalty to the God of the 
 fathers, culture of the heart, of the spring of emo- 
 tions, is necessary as a counterbalance to all the
 
 108 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 intellectual efforts your studies require of you, in 
 order to help you to find and establish the true 
 peace within. At no stage of your progress allow the 
 old God of Israel, the daily prayer, the holy reverence 
 for the divine books and traditions, to lose their 
 hold upon you. Let no day pass without communion 
 with God in devotion and prayer, without a new 
 consecration of life to your sacred task, without 
 strengthening of the powers that make for faith, 
 for reverence, for virtue and godliness. Whatever 
 doubts or scruples you may have, bring them before 
 us your teachers and friends so that we may help 
 you; and, like Abraham, Moses or Job, wrestle 
 with God until you, too, have established peace 
 within and without. 
 
 Let me close with another beautiful Midrashic 
 comment on the verse quoted: "All thy children 
 shall be disciples of the Lord, and great shall be the 
 peace of thy children." What does this mean? 
 As long as people derive their truth from mere flesh 
 and blood, there may be misunderstanding and 
 difference of opinion that lead to dissension and 
 bitter strife. But when once men will learn the 
 truth from God himself, because He dwells in their 
 heart and mind as the source of truth, there will be 
 but peace and harmony among them all, because 
 there is but One Truth, One Justice and One Love." 
 
 So may the peace of God dwell in your hearts and 
 minds. May the peace of God come to us all, to all 
 men and nations through Israel and its institutions 
 of learning, through our American land. The Lord 
 give strength unto His people, and may He bless 
 all His children with peace. Amen.
 
 11. 
 
 PRIEST, PROPHET AND PREACHER.* 
 
 RELIGION stands in seeming contrast to the 
 tendencies of our age. The former is pre- 
 eminently the feeling of dependence upon a higher 
 Power and submission to a higher Will, whereas the 
 latter strives for independence, both material and 
 intellectual, and tends to individualism, the asser- 
 tion of our own will and power. Still, such is due to 
 this being a time of transition. In a home where 
 parental authority is chiefly manifested by the swing- 
 ing of the rod, by frowning, scolding and punishing, 
 the child sighs for the day when he will be his own 
 master. Thus, having for centuries felt only the 
 leading-strings, the shackles and yoke of bondage 
 with which religion hampered body and soul, people 
 naturally crave for the time when they can tear off 
 the ropes and rid themselves of the burden. But this 
 cannot remain thus forever. Sooner or later they 
 will recognize the fact that the old ties cannot be 
 severed altogether. We do not make, we are born 
 into those relations which fashion life for us. We 
 cannot undo our own past. We are in a far greater 
 measure the children of yesterday than we are the 
 fathers of to-morrow. Our socialistic schemers, who 
 
 *Sunday Discourse, Temple Beth El, New York, February 19, 
 1888.
 
 110 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 are eager to find the Archimedean point wherefrom 
 to unhinge the world, learn soon enough that, unless 
 they fight within the line, they can never obtain a 
 foothold. No Robinson Crusoe can rear a society 
 of his own, unless he brings the inheritance of cen- 
 turies in his arm and in his brain along to his island. 
 The household gods of Troy had to help Aeneas in 
 laying the foundation of the Roman City. You 
 may refuse revering the sanctities and symbols of 
 religion, but you can as little escape her influence 
 as you can that of home and country. She received 
 you at the cradle, and will hold watch over your 
 grave. She is not a mere theory, but a life, the 
 concentrated force of ages. Advance in culture may 
 modify, alter and improve our relation to the great 
 order of things comprised by religion, but cannot 
 uproot it. Education and erudition may place 
 Ernest Renan, David Friedrich Strauss, and Heinrich 
 Heine, side by side and outside of the pale of religion, 
 still the divergency between the Catholic, the Protes- 
 tant and the Jew goes down to the root of their being. 
 Apple, pear, and cherry tree do not differ only in 
 fruit, blossom and leaf, but in every particle of their 
 substance, in the seed and the cell. Religion is an 
 organic growth. You and I cannot make nor unmake 
 it. It is a historical power which shapes and sways 
 us unconsciously as sentiment and emotion, and 
 consciously as conviction and clearly formulated 
 opinion. 
 
 Viewed in this light, I see religion going through 
 three stages of growth, best represented by Priest, 
 Prophet, and Preacher as its exponents.
 
 PRIEST, PROPHET AND PREACHER 111 
 
 Last century rationalism discredited the priest, 
 denouncing him as an impostor. The reason was 
 that religion was misunderstood. Creeds and rituals 
 were held to be inventions of shrewd and selfish 
 hierarchical despots who, speculating on the frailties 
 of superstitious multitudes, imposed on them certain 
 modes of belief and worship to keep them in utter 
 subjection and ignorance, while they reserved all 
 power and knowledge for themselves. This view is 
 no longer tenable in the face of modern research. 
 Far down in the lower strata of human society we see 
 primitive man, without the priest as guide, in constant 
 dread of hostile powers around, above, and beneath, 
 against which he must be on his guard. In order 
 to feel safe, he must be armed with club and stone 
 in his war against fellow-man and beast, and no less 
 so with amulet and fetich against ghosts and goblins 
 that hover above or below. Into this absolute anarchy, 
 into this chaotic state of darkness, the priest enters as 
 friend and benefactor, establishing order, peace, 
 and law. With the pure flame he ignites on the altar, 
 with the bright light he kindles, with hand and head 
 lifted upwards to the sky where friendly powers 
 shine, he lends expression to the deeper aspiration 
 of man. He adores the good and kind deities above, 
 consigning evil and darkness to the unfriendly powers 
 beneath. To win the favor of the benign gods and 
 ward off the malign influence of the wicked spirits 
 below, is the main object of the established rites of 
 sacrifice and purification. Unlike the magician or 
 sorcerer who rules by fear while conjuring the 
 demon, the priest inspires people with trust in the god
 
 112 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 he adores, while keeping aloof from all that appears 
 unclean and belongs to, or suggests, powers of evil. 
 Thus he holds watch over the rights of all and the 
 safety of the tribe, to become the defender of justice 
 and executor of the law. The very stability of the 
 rites secures the welfare of society; for neglect of 
 worship would mean relapse into disorder. 
 
 From our advanced standpoint we hardly realize 
 the benefits the priest conferred upon groping and 
 struggling humanity. We can only, while glancing 
 over vast epochs, behold wide gulfs between the 
 savage piling crude stones upon his dead, lest they 
 may rise again and molest him, and the priestly 
 architect rearing huge pyramids and gorgeous temples 
 in honor of kings and gods; or between the beating 
 of drums for the sake of dispelling the ghosts, and the 
 melodious strains of music and song accompanying 
 the sacrifice in Egypt, Chaldea, and Palestine. What 
 a mighty progress from the carving of signs and pic- 
 tures on rocks and woods, to the art of writing dis- 
 covered by the priest on the Nile, and again from the 
 star-gazing of the dweller in the wilderness fore- 
 casting his destiny, to the marvellous astronomical 
 science arrived at by the priest on the Euphrates! 
 All the beginnings of knowledge and art we owe to 
 the priest, who brought order and system into the 
 crude beliefs of primitive man. But the blessing 
 of one age frequently becomes the curse of the next. 
 The principle of stability grew into an impediment 
 of all progress. Religion became the domain of a 
 privileged class which claimed all godliness, holiness, 
 and wisdom as inalienable rights. A new order of
 
 PRIEST, PROPHET AND PREACHER 113 
 
 things was needed which would no longer bar the 
 people out of communion with a world of goodness 
 and bliss, but render religion a blessing, not a prison, 
 for man. This became the prophet's task. 
 
 The prophet started as the priest's assistant, as 
 his seer and singer; poetry and prophecy having 
 the element of inspiration in common. When in 
 great emergencies out of the usual routine the priest 
 could not cope with the perplexing difficulties, 
 he called upon the seer by means of magic to divine 
 the future. And this manifestation of soul-power 
 offered the seer opportunities of outdoing the priest. 
 For might he not, in a state of ecstasy, of enthu- 
 siastic vision, be carried aloft by some new truth far 
 above the priest's ken? Might he not herald forth 
 an idea grander than all the petrified wisdom of 
 priestcraft? Some such efforts we meet with even 
 in heathen life. As contemporary of Moses we 
 hear Balaam mentioned both as sorcerer and prophet 
 coming from Northern Mesopotamia, where the god 
 of prophecy, Nebo (from the same root as Nabi), 
 takes his rank among the heavenly rulers. In Hellas 
 and Rome, prophecy led over to classical poetry and 
 philosophy. But nowhere throughout heathendom 
 for the monk Buddha points back to ascetic systems 
 anterior to priestcraft did any of the prophets dare 
 to reform religion itself by breaking through the 
 system, fixed as it was forever by the priestly 
 caste. This was Judaism's grand mission. The 
 Jewish prophet wrested religion from the hands of 
 the priesthood to transfer it to the people. He brought 
 God down from the inaccessible heights of heaven to
 
 114 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 rear His throne in the heart of man. Penetrating 
 into the very nature of the Most High, he unveiled 
 the deep mysteries of life. He rendered religion a 
 revelation of God by showing Him to be mirrored 
 in the spirit of man. 
 
 It matters not whether, in accordance with Bib- 
 lical tradition, we see the beginning of prophecy 
 with Moses, the chief among the prophets, who, 
 however, still holds the magician's staff in his hand 
 when contending with Pharaoh's sorcerers; or whether, 
 with the old school of critics, we behold the first 
 actual prophet in Samuel, who also was a wise 
 soothsayer and with wonder-doing Elijah; or, 
 with the new school, in plain, rustic Amos. Certain 
 it is that only in bold opposition, in fierce antag- 
 onism- to the priesthood, does the prophet enter 
 upon his great life-task. For he stands for pro- 
 gress, whereas the priest insists on fossilized 
 ritualism. He pleads for humanity, while the priest 
 only defends class interests and authorities of the 
 past. It required no little courage of a man from 
 among the people, with no authority, no pedigree, no 
 tradition nor law to support him, to brave the preju- 
 diced crowds and challenge a mighty priesthood in 
 voicing the unheard-of claims of man in the name of 
 the Eternal God. Renan is right in calling the proph- 
 ets of Judea revolutionists. They actually aimed at, 
 and finally succeeded in, upsetting the entire founda- 
 tion of ancient society. It was not so much the ques- 
 tion between One God and many gods as whether the 
 world's government should forever remain in charge 
 of the priest, who bribed heaven by sacrifice to appease
 
 PRIEST, PROPHET AND PREACHER 115 
 
 its wrath; or whether the world's throne should for- 
 ever be safely established upon the pillars of justice 
 and mercy. It was once for all time to be decided 
 whether God on high was forever to be flattered and 
 bribed by mighty oppressors, or whether He pre- 
 ferred to dwell among the lowly and contrite of heart; 
 whether religion meant a system of bribe and threat, 
 or a rule of righteousness and love. It was not a 
 theological, but a social, a national issue between 
 prophet and priest. It was nothing less than strik- 
 ing at the very root of State power when Amos, 
 Hosea and Micah, Isaiah and Jeremiah hurled forth 
 their thunderbolts against all ceremonialism, con- 
 demning it as idolatry, denying to shrines and altars, 
 fasts and feasts the title of holiness, and declaring 
 an humble heart to be the true temple of God, and 
 works of justice and benevolence the only sweet 
 incense God takes delight in. To us to-day these 
 truths seem to appeal to the conscience of the people. 
 But we forget that that conscience was as yet fast 
 asleep, and could only by terrific shocks, by fearful 
 catastrophes, by successive defeats and destructions 
 of states and temples be roused from its stupor. Only 
 by announcing the approaching doom, and by hold- 
 ing out over the impending ruin the promise of 
 future resurrection of the people, could Israel be 
 rendered the teacher of a new principle of life, the 
 establisher of a new order of things. Not Chris- 
 tianity, but Judaism centred upon its matchless 
 prophets, revolutionized the ancient world, and con- 
 quered the new. Since then the world's history turns 
 on the contest between these two principles or powers:
 
 116 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 priestly conservatism and prophetical progress of 
 humanity. For all the systems of worship and be- 
 lief established ever since, Mosaic and Rabbinical 
 Judaism, Christianity and Islamism, are but forms 
 of compromise effected for the time. No sooner had 
 the prophet's great charge been fulfilled and his 
 message been committed to writing, than over the 
 Book of Revelation, the law and the tradition, the 
 battle was waged anew between the priest of the 
 second temple, the Sadducee, and the defender of 
 the people's rights, the Pharisee, represented by such 
 men as Hillel and Jesus of Nazareth. Liberalism 
 and conservatism, reform and orthodoxy in synagog 
 or church are but heirs and successors to either 
 prophet or priest, the one placing conscience, recti- 
 tude, and purity of hand and heart above the form, 
 the other insisting on the inherited practice and creed 
 as the mainstay of religion; the one regarding the 
 observance of this or that ceremony of no greater 
 importance than whether the national flag should 
 have red or blue as its color, the other constantly 
 dreading heaven's anger in this or in the next world, 
 if any of these rites be discontinued which derive 
 sanctity from their old age, as, in fact, they had their 
 origin in the most primitive state of mankind. 
 
 Of course, as each army requires a flag to rally 
 its soldiers for battle, each religion must have certain 
 signs and symbols with which to unite its adherents 
 for the defense of its truths. But if these have lost 
 all their significance and no longer express or suggest 
 any living truth, the demand for better and more 
 adequate forms must be voiced and complied with. 
 This is, and will ever be. the battle-cry of reform.
 
 PRIEST, PROPHET AND PREACHER 117 
 
 Now, our age having well-nigh reached the ethical 
 standpoint of the prophet, the task of the modern 
 Preacher appears to be very easy. He has no priest- 
 craft to contend with, no authority to challenge, 
 no prejudice to face, no superstition to cope with. 
 His path seems perfectly smooth. He needs merely 
 give utterance to those sentiments which permeate 
 the people; and can he not, with some oratorical 
 power and rhetorical skill, sway his audience in 
 whatever direction he desires? In former times, 
 he had at least to wrestle with harsh, unyielding 
 Bible texts from which certain dogmatic or practical 
 truths had to be elicited, which required some mental 
 gymnastics to perform the feat creditably. To-day 
 the Bible, weighed down under the encumbrances of 
 ritualism and dogmatism, has lost its former hold 
 on the heart as to form the absolutely fixed and neces- 
 sary starting-point. He is at liberty to choose any 
 subject or text he pleases. Ethics forming the marrow 
 and tissue of life, he is never at a loss to find an in- 
 teresting topic. And the less worship is alluded to, 
 the more it is appreciated by both liberals and con- 
 servatives. If he only succeeds by brilliancy of wit, 
 by versatility of mind and originality of style in 
 holding his hearers spell-bound whilst speaking, his 
 popularity is established. What more is desired? 
 
 Still I claim the modern preacher's task is one of 
 the greatest, holiest, and most trying ones. His 
 office is a trust, not from the people to whom, but 
 from God for whom he speaks, and unless his power 
 and authority are felt and recognized as coming, 
 not from man, but from God on high, unless he voices
 
 118 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 that which is holiest, dearest, and truest to all, he 
 is no lawful heir to priest and prophet. For into his 
 hands is committed the future of humanity. His 
 hands are to mould the destinies of homes and com- 
 munities. He is the appointed guardian of souls. 
 Greater demands and claims are made on him than 
 at any other previous time. Greater trials and 
 temptations beset his heart and mind than ever 
 known in former days. Doubts and struggles from 
 within, social pressure from without render his path 
 difficult and thorny. Two worlds are arrayed for 
 battle against each other, and unless he knows how 
 to offer reassuring words of victory, comfort, and peace 
 amidst the fierce contest, he is not the trusty champion 
 needed in the cause of God and humanity. 
 
 The issue to-day is no longer between Reform and 
 Orthodoxy, but between a world with God and a 
 world without God. Behold the old foundation of 
 morality shaken, time-honored faith sapped, the age 
 moving, shifting, and changing in feverish inquietude, 
 and life levelled down by pursuits and aims which 
 rouse passion and selfishness to their utmost fury. 
 The seeds of discontent are cast among the masses 
 to threaten society with nihilism and anarchy, and 
 in the general race for happiness only dissonances are 
 heard amidst the colliding interests of classes and 
 vocations on the mart of business, in the court of 
 justice and the council of the nations. The light 
 of culture which streams in through every window 
 of the soul, through press and from platform, school 
 and library, on the high and by-ways of life, to feed 
 the intellect and expand it to its highest capacity,
 
 PRIEST, PROPHET AND PREACHER 119 
 
 makes the blood course to the brain, leaving the 
 heart empty and cold. The sombre hue of pessimism 
 and despair darkens the bright prospects of a glorious 
 age, so rich in resources, and so proud of its un- 
 dreamt-of conquests in every field of labor. The old 
 order of things which comforted the less fortunate 
 with the promise of great treasures of bliss in the 
 next world, no longer satisfies the people. A new 
 earth and a new heaven are being ushered in, a 
 human life which is to carry heaven within its own 
 bosom and to reveal God in its own life. And who 
 should stand as sponsor, as mediator between a world 
 dying and a world nascent and promising, but the 
 modern preacher? Amidst the surging flood of new 
 ideas, amidst the restless progress of humanity, he 
 must point to the immovable Rock of Ages beneath 
 whom all ages are to take shelter against any storm 
 that rages. When all appears unstable and unsafe, 
 both his words and actions must tell that heaven 
 means principle. When in our mercenary age things 
 and persons are measured by outward success, he 
 must, like the monument erected in honor of George 
 Washington, tower up, "as the straight line of truth," 
 as the pillar of rectitude, unyielding, unbending, 
 holding forth the all-surpassing lesson of integrity 
 of character. When all are out in search of truth, 
 never satisfied, never at rest, he must point inward to 
 the core of things, to truthfulness, and upwards to 
 the heart of hearts, the Fountain-head of all truth. 
 Like the prophet of old, it is the preacher's glorious 
 task to plead the cause of the feeble and the lowly, and 
 side with the humble and needy. Yes, his place is in
 
 120 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 the break between the militant classes, between the 
 warring views and interests, to help in building up a 
 new system of life, in the establishing of a new order 
 of justice, love and peace. 
 
 Yet how can he do so, without the fiery eloquence 
 of a holy conviction, without the live-coal of heavenly 
 inspiration upon his tongue? How can he expect, 
 like the prophet of yore, to rouse a storm within 
 his hearers' consciences to humble the pride of the 
 haughty, to curb passion and make cruelty in high 
 or low places tremble and sink into dust, without the 
 sweeping force of irresistible earnestness? How can 
 he hope to kindle in the bosom of his audience a fire 
 which burns up every idol of popular favor and con- 
 sumes vice and selfishness to make all hunger and 
 thirst for righteousness and love, if truth has not 
 set every fibre of his being ablaze? Pyrotechnics 
 are of no avail. At the end people will learn to 
 discriminate between chaff and wheat. In spite 
 of his heavy tongue, Moses became the greatest of 
 prophets. The pulpit must stand for consistency. 
 It must not be degraded into a platform, swayed by 
 every change of public opinion to render the speaker 
 a weather-cock indicating the fluctuations of the 
 atmosphere, or a reed which bends to every wind. 
 It ought not be transformed into a stage where the 
 truth is not preached, but acted with the comedian's 
 skill, now to make the people laugh, and then with 
 simulated tragic to move them into tears. What our 
 time is most in need of is faith in God and in humanity, 
 a faith which still moves mountains and performs 
 wonders of resurrection. Religion must be hope
 
 PRIEST, PROPHET AND PREACHER 121 
 
 and cheering comfort and encouraging trust in life's 
 great Ordainer. And the preacher can neither afford 
 to ignore the past, nor be blind to the great issues of 
 the present time; but as the flame on the altar of the 
 second temple was ignited by the spark hidden in 
 the ashes of the first, so must reverential piety for 
 the past kindle the hope for a brighter future. Neither 
 learning nor art, but wealth of sentiment and firm- 
 ness of principle make the leader. Russian folk-lore 
 tells of heroes who, after having achieved life-long 
 wonders of prowess, could not die before imbuing 
 their successors with their last breath to equip them 
 with strength to emulate their greatness and fill the 
 land with fame. In order to build up humanity in 
 all its grandeur and divine glory, we must, both preach- 
 er and hearer, imbibe the very breath of all the 
 prophets and great geniuses of all ages and lands, 
 to feel their glow of enthusiasm and love for all that 
 is and ever will be dear and holy to mankind. May 
 God aid us in this endeavor! Amen.
 
 12. 
 
 THE NEW TEMPLE A TESTIMONY TO OUR 
 FAITH IN ISRAEL'S GOD, IN 
 HUMANITY'S FUTURE.* 
 
 WITH fervent thanksgiving to the Most High, 
 we have entered this house filled with glory, 
 thrilled with emotions which no words can express, 
 and like Jacob of old at Beth El, we see a ladder 
 reaching up to heaven with angels ascending and 
 descending, and the words are echoed in our ear: 
 "How awe-inspiring is this place! Truly this is a 
 house of God; and this is a gate of heaven." 
 
 Still what is all architectual beauty and grandeur, 
 all harmony of design and color, all magnificence of 
 form, unless it embodies a living truth; unless it 
 enshrines an idea more enduring than the granite 
 rock out of which a structure is hewn? 
 
 "Not unto us, O Lord, not unto us, unto Thy 
 name belongeth the glory!" The fire from heaven 
 must descend and fill this house with the divine 
 glory. Such is the purpose, such is the meaning, of 
 this dedication. 
 
 I take my text from Haggai, the prophet (ii.7-9) : 
 "I will fill this house with glory, saith the Lord 
 of Hosts, and greater will be the latter glory of the 
 
 *Dedication of the new Temple Beth El, New York, Sept. 
 18, 1891.
 
 124 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 house than the former, and I will give peace in this 
 place." 
 
 The erection of a new shrine for our ancient 
 faith in the heart of our great American metropolis, 
 is in itself an occasion of joy and satisfaction to a 
 far larger circle than that circumscribed by Beth-El's 
 congregation. I claim that every new temple reared 
 to the glorification of God is an advancement of the 
 cause of humanity. Every dome gives the soul an 
 upward bent; every sacred spire stands for higher 
 aspirations. We know, all who read the Sacred Book 
 know, that God, who is all spirit, whose glory tran- 
 scends the heavens, and around whose throne suns and 
 stars swing through aeons in majestic pageant, re- 
 quires no house built by human hands; that He 
 cares not for the glitter of gold, for decorated walls, 
 but for hearts humble and upright. But man needs 
 consecrated spots that fill him with wonder, with 
 admiration and awe. 
 
 Man wants the impress of beauty in order to soar 
 up to the sublimity of the divine. Glance over man- 
 kind's path through the ages, and you will find the 
 progress of civilization marked by the ruins of 
 temples, which in their very decay bespeak a glory 
 which never fades. The frames and forms of worship 
 perish; worship itself, the soul of religion, never! 
 Each flaming altar, each lighted lamp, each lofty 
 dome symbolizes man's longing for the harmonies of 
 a higher world. From the sanctuaries of God, man 
 ever derived his greatness and beauty, his valor and 
 his virtue. Excelsior! is the cry of heaven-aspiring 
 faith. Were it true that our enlightened age needed
 
 THE TEMPLE, TESTIMONY TO ISRAEL'S FAITH 125 
 
 temples no longer, then we had better give up the 
 hope of advancing any further. For science, with 
 its complicated problems, lands man in a sea of de- 
 spair, and ethics divested of God, duty void of the 
 Great Commander fails to shield against the dagger 
 of the suicide. How can a man stand on a ladder 
 and yet hold it in the air? We need a stronger arm 
 than ours to sustain us, to shelter us from life's 
 tempests and storms. We need the uplifting power 
 of religion to-day more than ever before. Each new 
 temple symbolizes this perpetual need, the perpetuity 
 of the ideal world. 
 
 How cheap is the wisdom of those who say: 
 "Temples of charity we want," not of religion; 
 homes for the helpless, not for the Great Helper 
 above! The very men who at great sacrifice reared 
 the magnificent shrines of God are the ones who built 
 and who maintain our glorious institutions of philan- 
 thropy. It is the joy of sacrifice that enriches the 
 heart and turns each temple into a channel of blessed- 
 ness. 
 
 But a far mightier lesson must this beauteous 
 house preach, a far more wondrous truth must this 
 mighty organ peal forth. It is to the glorification 
 of Israel's Only One, to the perpetuation and propa- 
 gation of Judaism, that this Temple was built. If 
 every house of God is a tower of strength to feeble 
 mortals, the Jewish Synagog stands forth as an ensign 
 of the nations, as a banner of victory, an arch of 
 triumph, proclaiming the irresistible power of truth 
 over error, of justice over wrongdoing, of liberty over 
 oppression, of light over darkness. Four thousand
 
 126 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 years the light of Abrahamitic faith has shone as a 
 perpetual lamp to illumine man's path, and no storm 
 was fierce enough to quench it, no sun of human 
 culture bright enough to eclipse it. And however 
 dreary our journey, however thorny our path, how- 
 ever furious the lashes we have received at the hands 
 of our persecutors, our feet have not grown weary, 
 our eyes have not become dim, our strength has not 
 abated. Here we stand, the living witnesses of the 
 remotest past, the sons of the Chaldean shepherds, 
 on this virgin soil of America, under the genial sun 
 of liberty to unfurl the flag unstained by any dis- 
 loyalty, and to proclaim a truth that challenges all 
 creeds in loftiness of thought, in purity of senti- 
 ment, in broadness of mind and in comprehensive- 
 ness. Wipe out every miracle from the pages of his- 
 tory, sacred or profane; efface every trace of divine 
 interference by Darwinian methods, the Jew is still 
 a miracle, every synagog a finger-post of Divine 
 Providence. Though despised by the builders, the 
 Jew has become the corner-stone of civilization, the 
 main pillar in the temple of humanity. Sneer not 
 at his bent-down stature, mock not at his sharply- 
 cut features; he has carried your load of shame, ye 
 nations! He has been singled out to battle for the 
 truth you crave after, to champion the right and the 
 justice upon which your well being is founded. He 
 has been, and, alas still is, the Man of Sorrow whom 
 you crucified, who bled and suffered for you. Yet enter 
 his gates of worship, listen to his teaching and pray- 
 ers. The God he adores is the Father of all, whose 
 true son is man, endowed with His light of reason,
 
 THE TEMPLE, TESTIMONY TO ISRAEL'S FAITH 127 
 
 drawing life from His empyrean of love. No par- 
 tiality of creed, no monopoly of heaven, no hell for 
 heretics, no damnation for sinners! All life but one 
 revelation of God all humanity but one Kingdom 
 of Righteousness, and whoseoever is clean of hands 
 and pure of heart is on the road to the sun-lit hill 
 of blessedness, forever! 
 
 Ought we not be thankful to the benign Ruler 
 of history that, under the blessed sway of the free 
 institutions of our country, we are permitted to stand 
 here on this beautiful spot, amidst surroundings which 
 suggest broadness and freshness, vigor and verdure, 
 and herald forth these doctrines, which cannot but 
 enlist the attention and command the recognition 
 of the wide world? Too long have we been forced to 
 live in obscurity and hide our light before men. 
 Thank heaven, the American Jew is not shut up in 
 narrow streets, nor impeded in his industrial progress, 
 nor hampered in his social success. All the more 
 must he hail the opportunity of casting off the re- 
 proach of materialism and infidelism, and offering 
 up the testimony before the wide world that, as little 
 as his God, the Rock of Ages, has changed, so little 
 has he swerved in his loyalty to the cause of truth, 
 in his allegiance to God and to humanity! Our 
 Temple is the seal of our faith in the perpetuity of 
 Judaism. 
 
 But greater still is thy task, Temple Beth-El, 
 brighter thy future as pioneer of progress, as banner- 
 bearer of Reform! On Moriah's hill the seer once stood, 
 pointing to the house on the top of the mountain 
 over whose gates the words are inscribed in letters
 
 128 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 of fire: "Mine house shall be a house of prayer for 
 all nations." To scale these heights and swing wide 
 open the doors of humanity's temple is modern Israel's 
 mission. People marvel at the Jew, because he 
 numbers so many centuries; the greater marvel is 
 that his religion never grows old, but forms a well of 
 perennial life, a fount of youth for heart and spirit. 
 It ever advanced with the age; it was rejuvenated 
 by the morning dew of each new era of liberty. 
 Germany cradled the new Moses that broke the 
 shackles of mediaeval Egypt from off the neck of the 
 Jew. Then Reform, the twin sister of Light, came and 
 pruned and trimmed the ancient tree to make it 
 bloom again, as the spring arrived, and hold forth its 
 shade to cover the nations. And behold, the venerable 
 mother that, centuries ago, gave birth to the world's 
 great religions, took off the veil of widowhood, and 
 felt imbued with new strength and hope, to vie 
 with her proud daughter, looking for the time when 
 her old covenant will rebuild the house spacious 
 enough to embrace all the children of God religion 
 humanized and humanity religionized. This became 
 the aim of modern Judaism. And nowhere so as on 
 our free American soil. "Lay aside the wanderer's 
 staff. Fling away the Oriental garb! Render the 
 New World thy Jerusalem! Here is the Holy Land, 
 where God works justice and salvation!" This was 
 the battle-cry of Beth-El's founder, the illustrious 
 Reform champion, Dr. Einhorn. This prophetic 
 summons his pulpit and his Sabbath school re- 
 echoed. To these views and principles Beth-El's 
 new house is dedicated. Yet not to lead a mere
 
 THE TEMPLE, TESTIMONY TO ISRAEL'S FAITH 129 
 
 wing of Israel's army, and separate from our breth- 
 ren at large, but, with united forces, to ascend the 
 hill of Zion and give light to the nations, is our aim 
 and purpose. Piety coupled with progress, loyalty 
 to the past entwined with liberal-mindedness, is 
 our watchword. 
 
 Nor shall it be the mere preaching, but the prac- 
 tice of the great principle of broad-minded humanity 
 that this Temple will stand for. Not merely prayer 
 and praise, but promotion of peace and establish- 
 ment of justice; not creed, but deed, is Judaism's 
 object. Not merely pulpit, but pew; not words, but 
 actions, not the beliefs, but the lives of the members, 
 manifest the Temple's sanctity and glory. May 
 Beth El's new mount tower high in righteousness! 
 May its three pillars, Enlightenment, Faith and 
 Practical Love, grow in firmness, in solidity and in 
 far-reaching power. When, in ancient times, a new 
 house was erected, a live coal from off the old hearth- 
 stone was taken, to ignite therewith the fire upon the 
 new. So was the sacred flame of the second Temple 
 kindled with the sparks, kept deep down in the earth, 
 from the first. We, too, bring along all the sweet 
 and sacred memories of our old temple, all the dear 
 reminiscences of the past and our departed ones, 
 to work as an inspiration and an incentive to greater 
 efforts in the new, in order that greater shall be the 
 latter glory of the house than the former, and that 
 our benign God render this house a promoter of 
 peace, a link of friendship among the various syn- 
 agogs and congregations, a source of blessing to all 
 classes, creeds and races, that there may be written
 
 130 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 upon our Temple: "Holy to God on high! Blessing 
 and Peace to all families of men on earth!" 
 
 And so I consecrate thee, O beauteous place, 
 unto the worship of the Eternal, the living God of 
 Israel, the Holy One whom all men shall yet own 
 and adore as Father and King! Be thou a home of 
 light and truth, a treasure-house of comfort and 
 inspiration to every Israelite, even to the stranger 
 that visits thy gates! May the cheerless be here 
 gladdened, the despondent endowed with new cour- 
 age and hope, and the bereft ones feel that they have 
 still a Father and a Friend on high! May the prosper- 
 ous learn here the lesson of gratitude, the proud 
 become meek, and the erring find the road to truth 
 and happiness. 
 
 I consecrate thee, holy ark with the scrolls of the 
 Law, Israel's banner. Be thou a blessed stream of 
 holiness! May God's holy spirit dwell within thee, 
 and when those gates are lifted, may we hear the voice 
 of the Lord: "Not by power, nor by might, but by 
 My spirit!" 
 
 I consecrate thee, perpetual lamp, emblem of 
 life eternal, symbol of Israel's never fading truth! and 
 thee, the Reader's Desk, table of God. Be a fount 
 of living water for thirsty souls! Awaken thou the 
 noblest emotions, the sweetest sentiments in all! 
 Thou majestic organ, peal forth the glory of the Most 
 High! Sway the hearts for good, soothe all sufferings, 
 kindle with thy swelling anthems the enthusiasm of 
 the people for all that is holy! 
 
 I consecrate thee, pulpit, holy altar of God, to 
 the cause of truth and righteousness. May heaven's
 
 THE TEMPLE, TESTIMONY TO ISRAEL'S FAITH 131 
 
 fire ever come down to endow the speaker's tongue 
 with courage, with the sincerity of conviction, with 
 the earnestness of a man of God! May all idolatry 
 and falsehood be banished, the right defended, 
 loyalty and patriotism, purity and integrity be taught, 
 every soul be uplifted, every heart quickened and 
 refreshed, everything good promoted! 
 
 I consecrate thee, Sabbath School, to the glorifi- 
 cation of God, to the promotion of Judaism, to the 
 dissemination of truth and of love, to the education 
 and elevation of character, to the development of 
 noble manhood and womanhood! 
 
 I consecrate the whole house, the entire congre- 
 gation to the service of God, to the highest welfare 
 of humanity. May it be a center and focus of light, 
 of righteousness and love! Amen.
 
 13. 
 
 THE THREEFOLD PURPOSE OF THE 
 SYNAGOG.* 
 
 THIS is a great day of rejoicing for Sinai Congre- 
 gation and for the entire community of Chicago, 
 and we all from near and far rejoice with you and con- 
 gratulate you, Rabbi and members of Sinai Temple, 
 upon your glorious achievement. The majestic 
 monument the like of which in beauty and awe- 
 inspiring grandeur is scarcely to be found throughout 
 the land, and which you have reared here for the glory 
 of Israel's God and for the service of humanity, 
 is a joy to the beholder, an ornament or pride to the 
 city and a testimony to the large-heartedness of the 
 Congregation, and to the power and efficacy of Sinai's 
 rabbi. Indeed, the tongue falters, were I to express 
 the feelings that move and thrill me at this moment. 
 All I can say is that it is with unspeakable joy that 
 I participate in these festivities, and I deeply appre- 
 ciate the honor of being called upon to voice the 
 gladsome thanksgivings of this large assembly to 
 the Most High, who has permitted us to see this day 
 of great doings and still greater expectations for the 
 future, and to consecrate this majestic edifice to its 
 high and holy purposes. 
 
 * Address delivered at the Dedication of the new Sinai Temple, 
 Chicago, March 1, 1912.
 
 134 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 Thirty-six years ago it was my privilege to 
 dedicate the former temple, which during the early 
 years of my ministry with you had risen in magnifi- 
 cence out of the ruins of the great fire. Oh what a 
 noble record of heroic struggles and signal triumphs, 
 of courageous efforts and brilliant successes does 
 that temple as well as its predecessors now recall! 
 Only a few of the noble toilers, the high-minded 
 pioneers who stood sponsors at Sinai's cradle let 
 me but mention the venerable father and uncle of 
 your honored President, God bless them! have 
 under God's special favor been spared to embody 
 these sweet memories for us, and to witness the 
 realization of Sinai's boldest dream, that of having 
 the religious, the educational and social work centered 
 and focused in one gigantic structure. Indeed, 
 progress is inscribed on Sinai's banner. The seer's 
 inspiring words: "Enlarge the place of thy tent, 
 stretch forth the curtains of thy habitation without 
 sparing; spread to the right and to the left that thy 
 seed shall possess the nations!" were with thrilling 
 eloquence echoed forth from your pulpit, and noble 
 was the response that has come from the pew. Here, 
 then, is the text for my dedicatory address: "Greater 
 shall be the glory of the new house than that of the 
 former, and in this place will I give peace, says the 
 Lord of Hosts." (Haggai II., 9.) 
 
 Your Temple about to be consecrated to Israel's 
 imperishable truths and to mankind's highest 
 ideals of righteousness and love stands on historic 
 Jewish ground in a deeper sense that many realize. 
 In three-fold glory, with a three-fold object in view,
 
 THREEFOLD PURPOSE OF THE SYNAGOG 135 
 
 the Synagog has ever since its foundation stood forth 
 as mother of Church and Mosque, as a "House of 
 Worship" Beth Tejillah a "House of Religious 
 Instruction and Education" Beth Ha Midrash 
 and a "House of Communal Gathering for Social 
 Service" Beth ha Kheseth following the maxim 
 of the Men of the Great Assembly: "On the Torah, 
 on Worship and on Beneficence Rests the Moral 
 Welfare of the World.' The first, we are told, is 
 typified by Abraham's Mount of Vision; the second 
 by Isaac's field; the third by Jacob's house. For all 
 these your Temple offers a large scope, an ever 
 widening sphere of activity. 
 
 As a hill of God this sanctuary of worship towers 
 above all your homes, inviting all to ascend to the 
 serene realm of the ideal. Sinai zeh sullam, "Sinai 
 spells scaling the heavenly heights of truth and 
 righteousness," say the rabbis. True, each shrine 
 or altar, church steeple or dome is symbol or token 
 of man's upward striving and yearning. But, as 
 Israel's God was never enshrined within the walls 
 of its temple, nor encompassed by the heavens and 
 heaven of heavens, so he who enters this house of 
 God finds Him only in the craving for truth and jus- 
 tice, in the yearning for purity and goodness that 
 wells up in the heart within and mirrors the Infinite 
 and Holy One above. Herein lies the secret of Israel's 
 faith. It is unending aspiration and elevation of 
 soul and mind, constant progress with the advancing 
 ages of history. We have no Old Testament. The 
 fount of Divine Revelation never slackened for the 
 genius of the Jew. Judaism's well-spring of truth
 
 136 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 never ran dry. From Abraham, who rose to Moriah's 
 height to behold the Only One God as the Father of 
 man, to the seers and sages of our time who read the 
 ancient Scriptures in the light of our own knowledge, 
 there is but one continuous stream of light, one 
 dynamic process of intellectual and spiritual growth 
 and development to render Judaism a living, ever- 
 progressive, ever-expanding truth, an ever-rejuvenat- 
 ing, liberalizing and humanizing force. 
 
 This great fact of history was obscured and lost 
 sight of in the Ghetto Synagog with its petrified 
 Oriental forms, its mechanical system of worship and 
 its obsolete ceremonialism and antiquated litanies. 
 Thanks, everlasting thanks to our heroic regenerators 
 of Judaism, the prophets of our own time, our Reform 
 Temple opened the avenues of the soul anew to the 
 life-quickening and world-conquering verities of 
 Israelite's heritage, and with its powerful appeal 
 to mind and heart and its inspiring and uplifting 
 forms, invested worship with new life and meaning, 
 filling the courts of God again with the beauty of 
 holiness. 
 
 And among all the Reform temples in the land, 
 Sinai's Temple at the very outset took its stand in 
 the foremost ranks, espousing, without hesitancy and 
 without compromise, the principle of Liberalism, of 
 Modernism and broad Humanitarianism while loyal 
 to Judaism's historic task. "For My house shall be 
 a house of prayer for all the nations" was written 
 over its gates. And with the courage of consistency 
 you established divine service on the day of common 
 rest in order to have your house of worship filled
 
 THREEFOLD PURPOSE OF THE SYNAGOG 137 
 
 from week to week with devout men and women, 
 young and old, from each household, eager to enroll 
 in the army of battlers for Israel's law of truth 
 and righteousness, and be lifted up by the peerless 
 powers of your leader to the lofty realms of the ideal. 
 Who dares question your Judaism, or blame you for 
 thus satisfying a religious need not otherwise pro- 
 vided for? Least of all, I, who did not merely in- 
 troduce the Sunday service alongside of the tradi- 
 tional Sabbath service, but who, in the years of plas- 
 tic, formative youth that I spent with you, imbibed 
 here the enthusiasm and zeal that spurred me on to 
 soar to the heights of keener vision and to strive 
 with my humble powers to become an interpreter 
 of our great past in the spirit of our age of evolution, 
 endeavoring to harmonize modern thought with the 
 ancient faith. 
 
 All the more would I on this grand occasion urge 
 you not to stand aloof, but to work hand in hand 
 with all the progressive forces, all the liberal elements 
 of Judaism the world over. More than ever are we 
 to-day in need of concerted action in view of the re- 
 actionary tide that has set in. We must present a 
 united front against the un-American and non- 
 religious Kehillah movement, which threatens to 
 erect new Ghetto walls in this free country and to 
 deflect the Jew from his historic world-task and 
 world- wide truth. 
 
 Do you glory in your radicalism? Be it so. The 
 most radical Jew, if he is but a Jew by conviction and 
 faith, is a thousand times more of a Jew than the 
 nationalist who belittles the faith our fathers suffered
 
 138 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 and died for, and who regards the Hebrew language 
 as of greater importance than the Ten Words of Sinai 
 which blazed forth in seventy tongues of fire, to il- 
 lumine all the nations of the world. 
 
 What the Jew needs most of all amidst this stren- 
 uous intellectual and industrial life, is a God under 
 whose everlasting arms he may seek shelter from 
 storm and stress, a house of prayer to find the God 
 within. Amidst the three R's that dominate life and 
 learning to-day, we need as the fourth and most es- 
 sential R, Reverence "the holy awe" which, as 
 Goethe says, "is the best in man." We need reli- 
 gion, as the heavenly source of Righteousness, the 
 tribunal of Responsibility. So may the glory of your 
 Temple be manifested in greater power of spirituality, 
 so that new faith and courage, new strength and hope, 
 new comfort and light come to each and all who 
 enter here, member or stranger, and God give peace 
 to every striving and struggling soul. 
 
 And then there is the Beth ha Midrash, "the Sanc- 
 tuary of Religious Instruction and Education," 
 that opens its portals here to larger assemblies of 
 men and women aspiring to truth than heretofore. 
 The Synagog was for the Jew at all times "the 
 Shul," the house of learning, the school that endowed 
 his mind with knowledge, that trained him for life's 
 highest duties and equipped him with soldier-like 
 courage for the defense of the right and the true, 
 with priestly sanctity consecrating him to his mis- 
 sion. It taught him the grand lessons of the father- 
 hood of God and the brotherhood of man to which 
 he adhered despite an unbrotherly world about him,
 
 THREEFOLD PURPOSE OF THE SYN AGOG 139 
 
 It inculcated in him the principle of justice, however 
 unjustly the life without dealt with him. It echoed 
 forth the words of love and peace amid environments 
 of hatred and bloodshed. Yes, it was a field in which 
 the seeds of truth were sown in the hearts of young 
 and old to fill all minds with light and enrich all hearts 
 with the treasures of the spirit. The golden candle- 
 stick, the Menorah, is Judaism's emblem, and its 
 ultimate aim and hope is the time when "the whole 
 earth shall be filled with the knowledge of God as 
 the waters covers the sea." 
 
 And in obedience to this call the Reform pulpit 
 strove to render the Torah anew the educator of the 
 people and the Synagog a schoolhouse of humanity. 
 It endeavored again to democratize Israel's religion 
 and to bring Judaism's treasures home to all, to 
 woman as well as to man, to child as well as to adult, 
 to non-Jew as well as to Jew. And whoever has come 
 within reach of Sinai's Temple felt that higher de- 
 mands were made upon Sinai's pulpit to make it a 
 far-reaching power for religious enlightenment and 
 liberalism, an educating influence for a clearer com- 
 prehension of the problems and the great issues of 
 life; they beheld here the light of the new day, and 
 not a few that were lost in the labyrinth of doubt, 
 under the guidance of your great preacher, again 
 found the road to the city of God. Sinai's much- 
 assailed liberalism made the congregation not merely 
 liberal-minded, but still more liberal-hearted, since 
 its pulpit taught not alone truth for the thinker, 
 but still more forcibly the all-captivating, prophetic 
 lesson of social justice and righteousness.
 
 140 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 And yet, friends, we would all deceive ourselves, 
 did we shut our eyes to the fact that our liberalism 
 has failed to kindle the lamps of learning in our 
 modern homes and social circles. We can no longer 
 boast, as did the former generation, that Judaism 
 knows of no distinction between laymen and clergy, 
 because familiarity with the Torah was the rule and 
 ignorance the exception. The hunger after the word 
 of God, the thirst after the deeper fountains of 
 Jewish knowledge is sadly on the decrease amongst 
 "the people of the Book." It is true, and I am proud 
 to state it here, that Sinai's Rabbi and Sinai Congre- 
 gation have at all times manifested their ardent 
 devotion and active zeal for the propagation and 
 promotion of Jewish learning, the one as an inspir- 
 ing influence and teacher of many of our students 
 and the other as the generous-hearted supporter of 
 the Hebrew Union College. But we need more of 
 the light and more of the oil for the Menorah, more 
 lamps and more lights for the whole household of 
 American Israel. May the new field opened here 
 bring to you and all of us a greater harvest. May the 
 light that emanates here from pulpit and Sabbath 
 School shine forth with ever greater effulgence that 
 "all thy sons and daughters be disciples of the Lord, 
 and great be the peace of thy children." 
 
 But the crowning glory of this new Temple lies 
 in its being a house for the gathering of far larger 
 numbers than Congregation and worshipping as- 
 semblies, a Beth ha Kneseth, a house for communal 
 life and social service in its best and most compre- 
 hensive meaning. Yet, far from being an innovation,
 
 THREEFOLD PURPOSE OF THE SYNAGOG 141 
 
 a departure, this is but a restoration of the house of 
 God to its pristine glory. The very Kiddush that 
 used to be recited in the Synagog on Sabbath eve 
 and morn was originally intended for the poor and 
 homeless that were housed and fed in the adjoining 
 rooms devoted to benevolence and redeeming love. 
 Your work here, then, is but an extension of the 
 ancient practice. And to this is added a feature of 
 great significance. For, whereas our mode of worship 
 and our religious views, so different from the tra- 
 ditional ones, necessarily create divisions in our camp 
 between Orthodoxy and Reform, here the Scriptural 
 word holds true: "The work of righteousness estab- 
 lishes peace." Here all differences are forgotten. 
 Here Jew meets Jew. Here man helps and uplifts 
 man. Here rich and poor, strong and feeble, high 
 and low come together as children of the One God 
 and Father. Here the commonest needs and require- 
 ments of man will be hallowed by the principle of 
 mutual helpfulness and love. And well might the 
 Scriptural verse: "In that day there shall be upon 
 the bells and the pots, 'Holy to the Lord,' " be in- 
 scribed on your door, or else the classical motto: 
 Introite et hie dii sunt: "Enter, for here, too, the 
 Deity dwells!" 
 
 Of one of the noblest martyrs of the Hadrianic 
 persecution, R. Hananya ben Teradion, the touching 
 story is told that, when on the road to his glorious 
 death he met his companion and fellow-martyr, 
 Eleazar ben Parta, who was both a master of the 
 law and a philanthropic worker, to whom he said: 
 "Happy thou -who didst not merely study the law
 
 142 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 of truth, but also practiced the law of tighteousness 
 and benevolence throughout life, while I, alas, 
 have only been a teacher of the Torah, but have 
 failed to translate the law into life and practical 
 love." Only when he was reminded of the fact that 
 he, too, had done deeds of kindness and helpfulness 
 when the occasion offered, did he feel comforted; for, 
 "Only the practice of righteousness and goodness 
 brings God as a living God of truth home to our 
 fellow-men." What a beautiful lustre does this 
 Talmudic passage cast on Judaism's teaching of 
 old, and on this most modern house of God! Sinai 
 Temple was always among the very foremost in works 
 of philanthropy and education, of mutual help- 
 fulness and social service, thus translating Sinai's 
 teaching into practical life and rendering religion 
 a living power to win all hearts for the God of Israel, 
 and its blessings will grow with the enlarged oppor- 
 tunities. 
 
 So may your Temple with its three-fold splendor, 
 your Congregation and Rabbi with the three-fold 
 crown of glory earn three-fold, nay thousand-fold 
 blessing from Jew and Gentile near and far, and peace 
 and joy unending come to you from God, whose 
 Shekinah may ever rest upon his place! Amen.
 
 14. 
 THE ETHICAL BASIS OF JUDAISM.* 
 
 AT THE beginning of this century, Schleiermacher, 
 the great Christian theologian, brought about 
 a great religious revival throughout enlightened 
 Germany, by delivering a course of lectures on re- 
 ligion before unbelievers for the purpose of convincing 
 them that religion is the cry and need of all ages. 
 
 Such a course of lectures has been proposed by 
 the Young Men's Hebrew Association of this 
 city for the purpose of reviving Jewish sentiment and 
 the Jewish faith in our midst. And speaking under 
 its auspices to-night, I propose to show that the basis 
 of Judaism is Jewish Ethics and that, as it has 
 substantially carried the world for the last two 
 thousand years, so it will hold and support and car- 
 ry humanity for many thousand years to come, 
 until, indeed, its highest hopes and ideals will have 
 been realized. 
 
 Ethics is the dame of fashion, much courted now, 
 the pet-child of the age. Religion poor thing! is 
 declared to be very old. Her bright days are said to 
 be over. She is expected soon to take the veil and 
 go to a nunnery. For who would marry her, God 
 himself being on trial? "There is nothing new under 
 
 *Address delivered before the Young Men's Hebrew Associa- 
 tion, at Temple Beth El, New York, December 20, 1886.
 
 144 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 the sun." In the classic land of Greece, ethics was first 
 offered as a substitute for religion at a time when the 
 very foundations of society were sapped, and the 
 old home-spun virtue and piety of those pagans scoffed 
 and sneered at. The old Olympian gods with their 
 frivolous passion and lewdness had become a laughing- 
 stock, when quaint and whimsical Socrates beleaguered 
 the streets of Athens to offer virtue as the most de- 
 sirable good to every passer-by. "If the world's 
 rulers do not prefer the just to the unjust, it is better 
 to die than to live," said the lofty-spirited heathen 
 who put the seal of martyrdom upon his protest 
 against pagan folly. His strange life and his tragic 
 death gave rise to the grand ethical system of Plato, 
 with Divine Goodness as its central idea; then came 
 Aristotle and the Epicureans and the Stoics, forming 
 different schools and systems of ethics. Still, how- 
 ever grand and admirable as monuments of the Gre- 
 cian genius, they could not save the ancient world 
 from shipwreck. Philosophy can never replace reli- 
 gion. When once the heart-strings binding man to 
 a heavenly Commander of life are broken asunder, 
 the earth quakes and humanity quivers and shivers 
 with pain and agony, until the God is found who would 
 hold and redeem the world anew. The name of the 
 great I Am, the Lord of Hosts, had to be spelled out 
 to summon man to duty anew. 
 
 I need not point to old China where the sage 
 Confucius, nor to India where the princely hermit 
 Gautama Buddha attempted to replace the old 
 religions by new ethical doctrines and with similar 
 results. Suffice it to say that the present tide runs
 
 ETHICAL BASIS OF JUDAISM 145 
 
 in parallel lines. The flood-gates of the heart have 
 been dried up by rationalism. Skepticism has 
 shaken the strongholds of religion. Critical and 
 historical research has undermined the dogmas of 
 the Church, the creeds. Revelation and retribution 
 are arraigned by doubt, ridiculed by blasphemers. 
 Therefore the cry goes forth for humanitarian 
 ethics. 
 
 At the dawn of the new era Baruch Spinoza, the 
 Jew, dissatisfied with Church and Synagog, reared 
 his marvelous edifice of ethics on the foundation of 
 pure, cold reason, and in his train followed the English 
 moralists. At the close of the last century Immanuel 
 Kant, the Robespierre in the realm of thought, after 
 having demolished the old form of reasoning, offered 
 his stern philosophy of duty built on "the categorical 
 imperative" of "thou oughtst;" and soon after him 
 August Comte in France started social ethics. Since 
 then one ethical system after the other has sprung up 
 to embarrass the learned no less than the multitude. 
 In the former century it took a man of the size of 
 Moses Mendelssohn, Lessing's Nathan the Wise, 
 to solve the dilemma of choosing between the three 
 great religions, in pointing to the old Jewish tale of 
 the three rings, which had the prize accorded to the 
 one which would charm most by fostering heart- 
 winning virtue and love. 
 
 Nowadays it is rather difficult for any one to 
 decide between the innumerable ethical theories 
 presented, egotistic or altruistic, utilitarian or intui- 
 tional, and tell which is the best. And yet you hear 
 constantly the demand made for a pure and simple
 
 146 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 morality divested of religion, the kernel without the 
 shell, as they say. Says a recent writer in the Popular 
 Science Monthly: "God cannot make morality. He 
 has to be moral himself before he can sanction it, 
 and if we know God as moral, we know morality apart 
 from the idea of God. The problem of the day, 
 therefore, is the formulation and enforcement of a 
 natural morality, a morality resulting from the nature 
 of man and the conditions of his existence." Aside 
 now from the question, whether there exists such a 
 thing as natural morality, whether this is not a 
 contradiction in itself I simply ask: Can you 
 enforce morality? How? By the club of the police- 
 man? By the authority of the State? Or by society 
 at large? This is no morality. A morality enforced 
 from without is no longer morality. All your systems 
 cannot create a conscience, cannot put that sentinel 
 before the gates of the heart and make him ring the 
 bell of alarm whenever the foe comes near. Cut loose 
 from religion, ethics is but a broken cistern that 
 holds no water. However delicious the fruit, you 
 cannot make it grow without stem and blade. Call 
 your conscience a magnetic needle in the direction 
 of the right and the good, but forget not that without 
 some great magnetic power around and above, no 
 needle will work. Herbert Spencer, the idol of almost 
 every American college graduate, has quite recently 
 been mercilessly cast down from his pedestal by 
 Sidgwick, who sums up his survey of the methods of 
 ethics by saying: "Without religious sanction or a 
 similar assumption, the ethical Cosmos falls back 
 into chaos, and ethical science cannot be constructed."
 
 His opinion is endorsed by no less a philosopher than 
 Wilhelm Wundt, one of the master-minds of philo- 
 sophical Germany to-day, in his recent great work on 
 "Ethics," in which he emphasizes "the need of reli- 
 gion, not merely as the means of elevating man to 
 the highest morality, but as holding up before the 
 human race a common purpose and scope, the 
 greatest of all moral truths, which alone makes life 
 worth living for, that man with his finite ends is 
 linked to the Infinite Unity with its infinite ends, 
 that are past finding out." 
 
 The fact is, the whole ethical movement of the 
 present day is the symptom of a disease rather than 
 a cure. Because the heart of the social machinery, 
 emptied of its life-blood, does not work well, the vital 
 fluid is expected to run from brain downwards instead 
 of taking its regular course from heart to brain. 
 The feverish spasms of the age are due to general 
 debility, in consequence of the low temperature of 
 religion. To use a homely illustration, there is a 
 woman watching days and nights without ceasing 
 at a mother's or husband's sick bed, not even allow- 
 ing her delicate frame the necessary rest, amidst 
 the all-absorbing care and anxiety for her beloved 
 one. Offer to take her place, to give her respite if 
 but for a few hours, and she would refuse, saying: 
 "No; never will I leave this place until I see my dear 
 one better." But how great is your astonishment, 
 when, after a few weeks, as you see her again attend 
 the sick, the pathetic words fall from her lips in 
 plaintive strains: "Oh, duty! stern duty! for thy 
 sake I hold out here, sacrificing my life, though the
 
 148 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 task is hard!" Is that the same true, plain, affection- 
 ate, devoted woman you saw the other day? The 
 same staunch-hearted, good soul that never pon- 
 dered, never reasoned, never thought of herself? 
 You cannot help searching for the strange cause that 
 cast a shadow upon her innermost being, a spell of 
 doubt, a poison-drop of bitterness into her heart to 
 chill her affection, that she now is in need of a stimu- 
 lant, a tonic. What she to-day calls duty is to serve 
 as substitute for the natural bent of her soul, for the 
 unaffected goodness and piety that are fast giving 
 out. There is a break in the harmony of her life. 
 Such a break we observe to-day. The tide of ethical 
 culture indicates a transition, a change in the world's 
 religion. People are tired of walking in the narrow 
 grooves of dogma and ritual. They sigh for a religion 
 which is broad as the whole man, as wide as the globe, 
 as high as the heavens, and deep enough to embrace 
 all life, all thought and sentiment and make it sweet 
 and cheerful and holy. And the question with which 
 we are deeply concerned to-night is, whether we are 
 safe, whether tide and wind are favorable to our 
 ship, whether Judaism is drifting in a direction to 
 meet these demands. 
 
 I say, it is. For Judaism is the only religion which 
 made humanity, the moral up-building and perfection 
 of man, the ethical structure of society, its starting 
 point and its end. Judaism alone has the salvation 
 and happiness of all men and nations here on earth 
 as its goal. Judaism alone among all religions has 
 the welfare of society at large and not merely the 
 individual salvation in view. Jewish ethics is human-
 
 ETHICAL BASIS OF JUDAISM 149 
 
 itarian, is cosmopolitan and philanthropic. Owing 
 to long oppression and seclusion, the Jew had well- 
 nigh unlearned the fact that before speaking to 
 Abraham, God spoke to man; that before Israel was 
 made the covenant-people, God made a covenant 
 with the whole race of man; that, in fact, Judaism is 
 based on a Revelation of God to all men; that the 
 Bible opens with the first records of man, pointing 
 to the great brotherhood of man as the final goal of 
 history; that our sacred Prophets first voiced the 
 eternal rights, the solemn demands, the grand hopes 
 and ideals of man; that our Psalmists rung forth 
 in matchless strains, in undying melodies as from the 
 world's harp the deep longings, the awful pangs 
 and the glorious thanksgivings of the heart of man; 
 that throughout our entire literature and history 
 runs like a golden thread the idea that all the doings 
 of the nations are but the preparation, the fitting-up 
 of the earth for the time when humanity is but 
 one, one kingdom of divine righteousness and love. 
 Yet, this was the spell by which the Roman empire 
 was captured for Israel's God. You are all, no doubt, 
 familiar with the answer Hillel, half a century before 
 the Christian era, gave to the Roman who mockingly 
 wanted to hear the Jewish Law expounded while he 
 stood before him on one foot: "Do not do unto 
 others what you do not want others to do unto you! 
 This is the law; the rest is merely the commentary." 
 Recent research, however, has placed it beyond doubt 
 that these and similar lessons of simple and pure 
 humanitarian ethics have gone forth in Greek garb 
 from Jewish writers in the shape of sermons, of
 
 150 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 Jewish mission tracts, of poems under the guise of 
 ancient seers and singers of heathendom, to captivate 
 the Greek and Roman world centuries before Chris- 
 tianity appeared on the stage. In the garb of the 
 Greek philosopher and poet and also of a simple 
 pedler, the versatile cosmopolitan Jew of Alexandria 
 carried his Jewish lessons of Ethics into the heart of 
 paganism, to make imperial Rome through her very 
 poet laureate, Virgil, sigh for the millenium of peace 
 and righteousness. Indeed, Judaism ploughed the 
 field and cast the seeds hundreds of years before the 
 Church came to reap the golden harvest and take all 
 the credit to herself. Christianity misspelled the 
 name. It was not a Jew, but the Jew who built and 
 cemented a tottering and shaken world anew. 
 
 Jewish ethics gave life a higher meaning and 
 purpose, made it earnest, made it real. It is an old 
 truism: As man is, so is his God. What was life 
 to the Greek but a race for pleasure and sport, a 
 play-ground? Their men and their gods were, as 
 Heinrich Heine said, "but jesters compared with the 
 serious Hebrew." Still, Judaism kept alike remote 
 from the gloomy, despondent view of the Hindoo 
 hermit, alike distant from asceticism and frivolous 
 gaiety. It beholds in the whole of life, with its dark 
 and bright sides, the working of a good and holy God 
 everywhere, thus rendering it ever hopeful and cheer- 
 ful. And this optimistic, yet sober view of life, this 
 vigorous idealism made the prophet, moulded the 
 Jew, created the Bible, the Old Testament and the 
 New, and determined the course of human history. 
 Matthew Arnold says: "Light and Sweetness,"
 
 ETHICAL BASIS OF JUDAISM 151 
 
 that is beauty and clearness, art, science and 
 philosophy "came from the Greeks", "salvation" 
 that is the inner beauty and harmony of life, law, 
 righteousness and holiness "from the Jews." It was 
 not so much the idea of the unity as the faith in 
 a moral government of the world or, to use Matthew 
 Arnold's words, "The power that maketh for right- 
 eousness," which made humanity kneel before the 
 Jewish God. The abstract notion of a Divine Unity 
 has been arrived at also elsewhere by philosophical 
 speculation. But none beheld God face to face, see- 
 ing His glory mirrored in justice, kindness and good- 
 ness, as did Moses. Just as the magnet attracts the 
 iron by virtue of its chemical affinities, so did the Jew 
 through his ethical qualities touch upon the moral 
 essence of God, thus striking the very key-note of relig- 
 ion and humanity. "Before revealing the Law of 
 Israel," says the Midrash, "the Lord offered it to the 
 heathen nations, but they refused it, being neither 
 chaste, nor kind, neither fond of justice nor of rever- 
 ential piety." This means to convey the great psy- 
 chological truth that, through his finer humanity, his 
 Abraham nature, the Jew found the true God for 
 mankind, and this ethical monotheism could not 
 help again refining and hallowing life and sentiment. 
 From the Jewish conception of a just and holy God 
 emanated the sacredness of life, of home, of honor, 
 of property and labor, the power of justice and love, 
 while through these very virtues God's nature was 
 discerned. In the prophet's mind the human and the 
 divine melted and became one. 
 
 Compare the ethical standard of Greece and Rome 
 with the Jewish. What was the scale man was
 
 152 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 measured by in Greece? Only as a member of the 
 State, only as far as he was of use to the nation, he 
 was valued. A foreigner had no rights, no claim upon 
 the law. A barbarian, says the great Aristotle, was 
 less than a horse. Still worse off was the slave. He 
 was not treated any better than any other piece of 
 property. And can there be a home where woman is 
 but a tool in the service of race preservation, a 
 chattel excluded from decent society of men, yea, 
 even from the table of her husband, unless when she 
 has to wait on him, yet never his equal; where pure, 
 chaste love is rarely found, and the marriage vow of 
 little account? What name is dearer than that of 
 mother and child? Yet its spell cannot have been 
 felt where the father could at pleasure disown his 
 tender infant, and with immunity expose it to cruel 
 death. Alas for the invalid and the cripple! Who 
 cared for them, they being of little benefit to the 
 community? Murder seemed to be the best expedient 
 for these unfortunate ones. Nor did the law make 
 any provision for the needy, the orphans and widows. 
 They had to thank their good fortune if, on some un- 
 usual occasion, one of the wealthy citizens would 
 give special proof of his free, noble birth (this is the 
 original meaning of generosity or liberality), by 
 distributing bread or money in large quantities in 
 order to court public favor. For the rest they had 
 to live on beggary. Such was life in classic antiquity. 
 Life-long toil, oppression and woe on one side; 
 sensual pleasure and unbridled passion on the other. 
 What a contrast to Judea! There you find man's 
 dignity as God's child recognized in the stranger, the
 
 153 
 
 laborer, the slave, even in the foe and the criminal; 
 woman esteemed as man's helpmate, as the builder 
 of the home; purity and chastity made the founda- 
 tion of domestic happiness; maternal feelings taken 
 regard of, even in the dumb animal; life treasured 
 as a sacred trust, whether in the old or the ailing; 
 all possible respect shown to the workingman; 
 laws given to provide for the sustenance of the 
 poor, and charitable societies established in every 
 town to take care of the helpless, the sick and the 
 shelterless; the orphans well housed by private 
 generosity; finally, the Sabbath day hailed every- 
 where as the hallowed harbinger of rest, comfort, 
 elevation and instruction by all, high and low, 
 servant and master. 
 
 Well could Philo at Alexandria and Josephus 
 in Judea challenge the heathen to tell whether their 
 mode of living matched the Jewish one. Indeed, 
 those people know but little of real Judaism who 
 find Jewish ethics circumscribed by the letter of the 
 law which, by way of compromise, allowed and 
 sanctioned for those barbarous times, polygamy, 
 slavery, retaliation and cruel warfare. In order to 
 know Jewish ethics, you must search after the spirit 
 which dictated the law, which created the Bible, the 
 Sabbath and Judaism in its entirety, aiming, indeed, 
 at the realization of the lofty prophetical ideas which, 
 in broadness, width and depth, eclipse every other 
 ethical system. And this spirit penetrated Roman 
 society as a leavening force, or, as Mommsen puts 
 it, as "a power of decomposition," changing it from 
 bottom to top. It was not the triune God of the late
 
 154 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 church dogma, but the Jewish God; not the New 
 Testament canonized no earlier than the third cen- 
 tury, but the Jewish Holy Writ, the Old Testament, 
 that wrought the change. Our civilization is Chris- 
 tian only in so far as the Church took the Decalogue, 
 the Sabbath, the poor laws, the marriage laws, the 
 whole work out of the hands of the Jews to put a 
 narrower construction upon it, turning the great 
 Messianic hope, the goal of humanity, into a 
 dogma for an intolerant and exclusive sect. 
 
 Berthold Auerbach once said: "I am a Jew, 
 in so far as I protest against Christianity." He 
 would have done better, had he emphasized the 
 positive side. Leaving dogma out of view, I may 
 briefly state the difference between Jewish and 
 Christian ethics to be this: The prophet says (Micah 
 vi. 8), "Thou hast been told, Oh man, what is good, 
 and what the Lord thy God requires of thee: the 
 practice of righteousness, the love of kindness, and 
 an humble walking with thy God." To put it into 
 plain words: Be just, be kind, be humble by meas- 
 uring yourself by what God, the highest ideal of 
 perfection, demands. First comes justice. First 
 do what is right. Offend none, encroach upon the 
 rights of no one. Recognize and establish the rights 
 of all fellow-beings. But this alone will not do. 
 There is want; there is need of assistance, of sympa- 
 thy. You must come to the rescue of the suffering 
 and the helpless. You must help all. You must do 
 more than you are bound to do by right. You must 
 be kind. You must show brotherly love, compassion 
 and piety to all. You must live for others, after
 
 ETHICAL BASIS OF JUDAISM 155 
 
 having provided for your own well-being. Finally, be 
 humble. Be modest. However great and good you 
 are, you fall short of what you might and ought to 
 be. With all you are, do, or know, you are but little 
 compared with the great Ruler of Life. 
 
 Now, the order of these three fundamental prin- 
 ciples of Jewish ethics was simply inverted by Chris- 
 tianity. It said: First be humble, so humble as to 
 no longer believe in your own reason, in your own 
 strength to do good and to be good, unless you rely 
 on the priest and the mediating savior. Then be 
 kind; so kind as to offer him your right cheek who 
 smites you on the left; so kind as to take all you have 
 and give it to the poor; so kind as to love him who 
 hurts you, even your enemy, who refuses to accept 
 you as friend, however much you try to do him good. 
 And for the rest, be just. 
 
 To be sure, on this principle no State can be built, 
 no society established, no order and no law main- 
 tained. Consequently, the world, the life that now 
 is, had to be handed over to the Power of Evil, to 
 the enemy of God. A double code of morality sprang 
 up: one for religion and another for life; one for the 
 priests and monks and the Church, and another for 
 the laity and the State; one concerning believers 
 and another one concerning unbelievers. Love with- 
 out religion finally led the Church to burn the bodies 
 of heretics in order to save their souls; or to allow 
 people to steal leather from the rich in order to give 
 shoes to the poor. Morals and religion ran in opposite 
 ways; and the more the unknown hereafter, the 
 salvation in the next world was dwelt upon and
 
 156 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 rendered the only object of human life, the more 
 was the very soul and essence of morality perverted. 
 For morality is nothing if not pure unselfishness, 
 while religion often seemed to foster only refined, 
 heart-hardened selfishness. Even the works of 
 charity and love received the flavor of offensive 
 narrowness and obtrusive fanaticism. Surely enough, 
 man rose in opposition to such morality as soon as 
 he began again to make use of his reason. He cried 
 out for a power that would render him happy and 
 cheerful rather than wretched and miserable. And 
 this power appeared in the shape of worldliness, in 
 the shape of comfort and pleasure, of commerce and 
 industry, of art and science, chiefly, if not altogether, 
 ushered into life by the Moor and the Jew. 
 
 With the Reformation the work of purification 
 began, and morality was placed on a higher level. 
 The Old Testament, thus long neglected, was unclasp- 
 ed and read anew. Step by step Christianity retreated 
 from its old position and came nearer to the Jewish 
 view of morality. The world's demands, the State, 
 the people, the school and common life were recog- 
 nized by religion, while the State, on the other hand, 
 took charge of religious institutions like the Sabbath 
 and others. God and Caesar no longer appeared as 
 antagonistic, at least in free Protestant countries. 
 Still, the right peace and harmony between religion 
 and morals has not been established as yet. Chris- 
 tianity still overrules humanity. Christian love and 
 charity are still far from being cosmopolitan and 
 free from sectarian bias. In fact, the great philan- 
 thropists are found to stand outside of the Church.
 
 ETHICAL BASIS OF JUDAISM 157 
 
 The dominant sect has nowhere outgrown sectarian- 
 ism in a manner to recognize the right of conscience, 
 the claims of other opinions but those of the ruling 
 sects and races. Religion and science have hardly 
 begun to clasp hands. Church morals and Sunday 
 morals still differ from common and everyday morals. 
 
 And again, humanitarian ethics takes little regard 
 of religion, of the inner working of the soul. It meas- 
 ures the deed, but fails to weigh the motive, to 
 judge and touch the inner springs of action. Yet 
 can morality be complete and perfect without purity 
 of heart and nobility of sentiment? Are the foun- 
 dations of society sound and safe so long as the 
 commands: "Thou shalt not steal!" "Thou shalt 
 not commit adultery!" are not followed and sup- 
 ported by the command: "Thou shalt not covet?" 
 What are justice and love without a holy and stern 
 Judge and Lawgiver on high, watching the scales 
 and shielding the pillars of life and holding all classes 
 and sects and nations and individuals together by 
 invisible and inseparable links? How can the equilib- 
 rium of humanity be maintained without humble- 
 ness before God, by which alone war and strife, 
 wrong-doing and passion can be checked and kept 
 at bay? 
 
 Here is the place for Judaism to step in and help 
 human society in joining morality and religion anew. 
 I hold that the Jew, with his broad philanthropy, his 
 keen sense of justice, his sound, practical view of 
 life, is destined to humanize religion and to religionize 
 humanity. If to-day the vital element of Judaism 
 seems to have all gone into the extremities, if the
 
 158 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 hand and the brain do all the work of religion and 
 the heart, the seat of devotion and reverential piety, 
 remains cold and barren, it is probably for the reason 
 that the Jew is called upon to interlink the different 
 parts of humanity by his broadness and liberality 
 of mind and heart. He is to reclaim humanity for 
 his God, the only One. He is to point anew to the 
 Decalogue, to the golden rule: Love God and love 
 thy fellow-man; to the Jewish principles of ethics 
 as the only stable and immutable groundwork of 
 social happiness. He is to teach the world anew that 
 religion does not mean to people the heaven with 
 souls, but to render the earth the dwelling-place of 
 the divine glory. He is to show that reason and 
 knowledge, science and art, industry and commerce, 
 all the various pursuits of man are but rounds in the 
 ladder of perfection, leading up to God as the highest 
 ideal and the only source of truth, justice, love and 
 holiness; that all human types of perfection are but 
 parts and signs of God's greatness, but no perfect 
 and absolute ideals, or else they turn into idols which 
 deprive man of his heaven-born nobility. He is to 
 reassert and proclaim anew that religion, whose 
 ethics takes full cognizance of all the demands of life, 
 includes everything and excludes nothing that is 
 noble and good and true in man, and is, therefore, 
 the broadest and purest and safest of all moral 
 systems. 
 
 Look into the cause of all the troubles, strifes, 
 wars and crises which agitate human society at pres- 
 ent, and you can trace it to some conflict between 
 justice and love, between selfish claims and self-
 
 ETHICAL BASIS OF JUDAISM 159 
 
 surrender to law and duty; and only a religion which 
 floods the entire sphere of life from center to cir- 
 cumference with the glow of morality, only the fear 
 and love of a holy and good God can truly and 
 finally solve them. Yet such a religion, such a God 
 Judaism offers. 
 
 It is high time, indeed, for the Jew to open his 
 eyes and see what a treasure Divine Providence has 
 placed in his trust. It is high time for him to learn 
 how to appreciate it, and to make the world appre- 
 ciate it. Nor will the mere doctrine, the theory do. 
 It must be carried abroad. It must become a life- 
 power. It must be practiced. Of Abraham, our 
 ancestor, we are told that, whensoever he tendered the 
 hospitalities of his house to the needy and the strangers 
 that passed by his tent, he would receive no thanks, 
 but pointed to God on High who, after endowing 
 him with His blessing, made him the steward of 
 charity. And thus he won the heart of man for the 
 religious truths he proclaimed. The modern Jew 
 deserves all credit for his philanthropy and charity 
 and cosmopolitan liberality. But he fails to point 
 heavenward and acknowledge God as his Lord and 
 Master. The Jewish home, Jewish virtue, piety and 
 purity of life are no longer what they were in times 
 of seclusion. How dare we hope to be teachers and 
 models of ethics, so long as our aims are so low and 
 our thoughts only bent on sensual pleasure and 
 material gain; so long as we do not rise above the 
 sphere of selfishness and spread the wings of our 
 souls to soar up to the realm of the ideal and come 
 within the magnetic reach of eternal truths? In 
 other words, without religion?
 
 160 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 But if certain signs deceive not, a reaction has 
 set in, an earnest desire is felt of doing better. Well, 
 may we not derive some encouragement from the 
 Maccabean festival that is before our doors, which 
 reminds us that one single Jew held forth the igniting 
 spark to set the whole people ablaze with love and 
 devotion for God, for the true and the good, so that 
 one of the most glorious victories human history 
 records has been won under the flag upon which, 
 in letters of fire, the words were inscribed: Mi 
 Kamocha Ba Elim Adonay "Who among the mighty 
 ones is like Thee, oh Lord!" So let us hope and trust 
 that the Maccabean spirit is still alive in our midst, 
 still kindling the lights and the fires of pure religion 
 in the minds and hearts of the Jews to make the 
 cause of truth, the Jewish faith, the Jewish God, 
 Jewish ethics, win the victory over the world.
 
 15. 
 ISRAEL'S MISSION IN THE WORLD.* 
 
 THE subject on which I propose to speak to you 
 has become the Shibboleth of the parties in 
 Jewry to-day. Strange to say, men who have never 
 before been identified with the Synagog are acclaimed 
 as mouth-pieces of Judaism while denying that the 
 Jew has a religious mission. Under the caption of 
 Nationalism, that ominous word which has plunged 
 the whole civilized world into the most horrible 
 of all wars in history, they want to turn us, who 
 are happy and proud of our American citizenship, into 
 a political nation and thus make us aliens in the land 
 that has given us liberty and equal opportunity with 
 all our fellow-citizens. Not satisfied with the coloni- 
 zation of a million or more of Jews in the Holy Land, 
 which would be feasible and acceptable to all and 
 sympathetic also to non-Jewish men of power and 
 influence, these Zionists would deprive the Jew of 
 his glorious diadem of priesthood and cast aside his 
 crown of the Torah, which has ever been more 
 precious to him than life itself, only to have him made 
 the sole owner of a little territory and the builder of 
 a little State such as is Serbia or Greece. As if this 
 were the end and goal of Israel's unique history, and 
 as if thereby the great Jewish Question, whether 
 
 *Address delivered at Temple Israel, Boston, Nov. 7, 1915.
 
 162 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 from an economic or a historical point of view, could 
 be solved! It seems to me that there can be no 
 more timely nor more important subject for the rabbi 
 to discuss, not in any polemical spirit but in a calm 
 and reasonable manner, than Israel's mission in the 
 world. In doing so, I take the word of the great seer 
 of the Exile, the so-called second Isaiah, for my 
 text: "The people that I have created for Me, shall 
 relate My praise among the nations." 
 
 Believing with me, as I trust you all do, in the 
 God of history, in an all-ruling Providence direct- 
 ing the destinies of nations, whom, by the way, the 
 Zionist leader Nordau flatly denied in a book which 
 appeared several years ago we cannot but assume 
 that the Jew has a divine mission, a world-task and 
 a world-duty to fulfill in the world, or else he would 
 have vanished from history long ago. As a matter 
 of fact, as we behold design and purpose in creation, 
 we must recognize in human history the working 
 out of a higher plan in which each nation takes its 
 part. Who can fail to see that Greece with her art 
 and philosophy and Rome with her jurisprudence 
 and statesmanship, or Egypt with her architecture 
 and her hieroglyphic writings and Babylon with 
 her astronomy and hoary wisdom, and so the various 
 nations of the old, medieval and modern world, have 
 each with their peculiar powers contributed their 
 share to the ever-advancing civilization of the race 
 in accordance with the plan comprising the whole 
 history of mankind. There is however, a marked 
 difference between all these and the chosen people 
 of Israel. For in vain do we look for a vision or an
 
 ISRAEL'S MISSION IN THE WORLD 163 
 
 intuition on the part of any of these that they have 
 actually received such a life-task or mission from on 
 high. They all performed their work instinctively, 
 unconsciously as does the bee in gathering its honey, 
 or the silk-worm in spinning its delicate web for us. 
 Only the Jewish people set out with a special call 
 from heaven to go forth as a priest-people and as 
 God's holy nation to win the world about for its 
 truth; and the revelation they received on Sinai 
 became a charge, a truth entrusted to their care for 
 all generations to come. Thus is the story of Abraham 
 their ancestor so written as to render him, as he wan- 
 ders from land to land building altars to the God of 
 heaven and earth and proclaiming His name among 
 men, the prototype and pattern of a missionary, of 
 a preacher and teacher of the monotheistic truth 
 among the Gentiles. But especially when the sons 
 of Judah had been carried away as captives from 
 their own land to be dispersed all over the globe, 
 there came to the seer of the Exile the wondrous 
 message of God: "It is not enough for Me to restore 
 the tribes of Jacob and reunite Israel. I shall make 
 thee a light for the nations and a covenant inter- 
 linking the peoples. . . Ye are My witnesses, 
 saith the Lord." Here was announced for all time 
 the unique destiny of the Jew. 
 
 Our mission is by no means to send forth men to 
 convert the non-Jewish world into Jews. For us 
 salvation is not conditioned on the acceptance of a 
 creed. Judaism declares through its sages of the 
 Talmud that the gates of eternal bliss are swung 
 wide open to admit the righteous of all creeds or
 
 164 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 races. "To do justly, to love mercy and to walk 
 humbly before God" is all that is required of man, 
 says the prophet. The task which the God of history 
 has assigned to us is to unfold and spread the light of 
 the monotheistic truth in its undimmed splendor, 
 ever to be living witnesses, and also to die, if needs be, 
 as martyrs for the Only One and holy God, to strive 
 and battle and also, if needs be, to suffer for the cause 
 of truth, justice and righteousness, and thus to win 
 the nations, the races and creeds, all classes of men by 
 teaching and example, by a life of mental and moral 
 endeavor as well as of incessant self-sacrifice and ser- 
 vice for Israel's religious and ethical ideals. 
 
 Have you done so, or are you doing so?, asks the 
 scoffer and detractor within and outside our camp. 
 Well, we proudly point to our history which was 
 throughout our whole past a continuous glorification 
 and sanctification of God. We point to our matchless 
 literature, the soul and essence of which is religious 
 truth, without any peer and parallel in any other 
 literature. We point above all to the Book of Books, 
 which has become the household book of humanity 
 and which is, even in its non-Jewish garb, flesh of 
 our flesh and spirit of our spirit. The product of the 
 Jewish genius, it has given the world its religion and 
 its ethics and, as Matthew Arnold puts it, has created 
 four-fifths of our whole culture! Yet Israel's monothe- 
 istic truth did not come full-panoplied from the brain 
 of a Moses or from the heights of Sinai. It took cen- 
 turies upon centuries to develop it, to elucidate and 
 to spiritualize it. Only because the Jew came in 
 touch with the civilizations of antiquity and the
 
 ISRAEL'S MISSION IN THE WORLD 165 
 
 various streams of thought and currents of ideas 
 throughout the ages, his religion went through that 
 process of growth which rendered it the ripest fruit 
 of the human mind and the finest outcome of the 
 human soul. Nor does the Bible or any other book 
 of Jewry offer the truth in finite or absolute form. 
 The whole literature of the Jew simply mirrors the 
 effort of the Jewish mind and soul to attain an ever 
 higher and loftier conception of God and man. Only 
 a people that lives forever, passing from one stage 
 of culture to the other, as did and does thejew, can 
 claim to be the God-chosen prophet and expounder 
 of the world's highest truth. God and the Jew are 
 inseparable. Here lies the peculiar historical mission 
 of the Jew. All the great nations that accomplished 
 some great thing in history by their civilization, 
 their philosophical or scientific systems of thought, 
 rose like the orb of day until they reached the zenith 
 of their power, and then they went down to dis- 
 appear forever from the stage of life. Their fruit 
 having been harvested in the storehouse of literature 
 or art, there was no longer any cause for their ex- 
 istence. Not so Judaism. Its life was ever renewed 
 and rejuvenated, like the ever waxing and waning 
 moon, with which it is likened by the rabbis, 
 because its spirit is perennial. The Jewish people 
 is immortal, because it is ever linked with the God of 
 life. The culture of the ages ever deepened and 
 elevated its religious and ethical ideas and ideals. 
 Surely the Greek, too, fondly loved the truth as a 
 precious boon. But did he produce men filled with 
 such a passionate love of truth that they would rather
 
 166 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 die by the thousands and tens of thousands than 
 surrender one iota of it, as did the Jewish people 
 throughout the generations to this very day? Science 
 certainly has its martyrs, too. But can they compare 
 with the heroic martyrdom of the millions of Jews 
 who mounted the funereal pile and bent their neck 
 under the executioner's sword with the song of 
 rejoicing on their lips at such sanctification of the 
 name of their God? And should this mission of the 
 Jew for his only One God die out at the very time when 
 the world needs him most, nay, when the world is 
 actually waiting for him to cleanse the truth of Sinai 
 from the alloy, the falsehood with which it has been 
 mixed by the ruling Church? 
 
 It was precisely the missionary spirit, the conviction 
 of Israel's world-enlightening and world-conquering 
 power which gave rise to the large propaganda work 
 of the Jew at the time of the Hellenic culture, to which 
 alone the Church and the Mosque owe their origin. 
 And as late as the third century we hear one of the 
 Talmudic sages utter the remarkable sentence: 
 "Israel would not have been sent into the diaspora 
 but for the purpose of making ever more proselytes 
 among the heathen world." Of course, the medieval 
 Ghetto life offered little chance to the Jew to make 
 his sublime truth felt among the surrounding world, 
 except by the unparalleled suffering and sacrifice 
 he underwent on its behalf, and by the magnificent 
 books his numerous sages sent forth to illumine the 
 minds also of a few monks and prelates of an otherwise 
 benighted Christendom. Only under the benign 
 sceptre of Moorish and Spanish rulers Jews became
 
 ISRAEL'S MISSION IN THE WORLD 167 
 
 the torchbearers of science and philosophy, rousing 
 Christian Europe from her medieval slumber, and 
 preparing the world for the era of the Reformation. 
 Small as their number was, they fulfilled in part 
 the Jews' mission of truth. 
 
 To-day a new opportunity, and therewith a new 
 task has come to the Jew. Behold, the thinking 
 multitude is turning away more and more from the 
 mythology of the Christian Trinity belief and from 
 all the dogmas that militate against reason and 
 common sense, craving for a faith which is in accord 
 with reason and scientific research. Is this not the 
 time for the Jew to exclaim with the seer of yore: 
 "Arise, O light, and shine, and let the glory of God 
 illumine anew the nations?" There is a saying of 
 the rabbis that the very storm which cast down the 
 idols of Nebuchadnezzar, the Babylonian king, 
 raised the dead of Israel's exile from the grave to 
 new life. So did the very decline of Ghetto Judaism 
 lift the spirit of our great Reform pioneers to a higher 
 grasp of Israel's world-mission, and they beheld in 
 the breaking down of the old religious life of the 
 Jew the day-break of a new spiritual scope, the dawn 
 of a new era of universalism for Jew and Judaism. 
 Not a Jewish nationality re-established in Palestine, 
 nor a revival of the Hebraic literature such as the 
 Zionists plan, can purge the philosophy and theology 
 of the Christian world of its errors and render the 
 monotheistic faith of Israel the cementing link of 
 mankind. Only in living and working in and with 
 the world for his only One God and His truth, true 
 and loyal to his sacred heritage, can the Jew achieve 
 his mission of truth.
 
 168 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 And there is another mission of light the Jew has 
 to work for, and that is the mission for justice and 
 righteousness. Look about you and listen to the 
 teaching of the very best and noblest of men and 
 women, or read the choicest of works to find out 
 what is the soul and essence of their ethics. They 
 will with one voice tell you, it is love. This is the New 
 Testament view which emanated from a class of 
 men that lived outside of the world, away from all 
 political, industrial and social interests of life. It 
 is still preached as the very substance of morality 
 by men like Leo Tolstoi and others. As a matter 
 of fact, these very teachings, far from having built 
 society on firm and safe foundations, have sown 
 hatred instead of love among men, because they 
 ignored the true principle of all social and individual 
 ethics upon which alone character as well as society 
 rests, and that is justice. 
 
 Read the Torah and the Talmud, follow the battle 
 the prophets waged against the haughty and tyran- 
 nical rich in defence of the poor and oppressed, what 
 is it but the stern insistence upon the claim of right 
 against might? "Justice is the cause of God, "says the 
 lawgiver, and behold his maxim, as the rabbis ex- 
 press it: "Let the mountain be pierced and shaken, 
 if but the right prevail." And this is the soul of the 
 Jew. He hungers and yearns for justice. From 
 Abraham to the author of Job, from Amos and Isaiah 
 to Ferdinand Lassalle and Karl Marx there goes through 
 the Jewish people the incessant cry for righteousness 
 and justice in private and in public life. The whole 
 religion of the Jew is beautifully summed up by
 
 ISRAEL'S MISSION IN THE WORLD 169 
 
 Matthew Arnold in the words: "The power, not 
 ourselves that maketh for righteousness." What is 
 to-day called and ever more emphatically insisted 
 on, social justice and helpful scientific beneficence, 
 is but part of the old Jewish Zedakah. If the poor, 
 the laboring class, all those crushed and ground by 
 the manipulations of the greedy men of wealth say 
 to-day: "We do not want your charity; give us what 
 is due to us! We no longer want the crumbs that 
 fall from the table of the rich; we claim our share 
 in the bounties God has given to all His children" 
 they simply voice the teachings of Judaism which 
 claims for the feeble the help of the strong. You 
 hear nowadays so much of altruism that is, care 
 for others, in opposition to egoism which is care for 
 one's self. Noble as the virtue is, it is implied in the 
 Golden Rule of the Mosaic Law pointed out as life's 
 leading principle by Hilleland the Nazarene teacher. 
 But it does by no means cover the whole of ethics. 
 For after all, you dare not neglect yourself either. 
 In order to be of service to others, you must endeavor 
 to develop all the powers and faculties you possess 
 to become a useful member of society. You must 
 through struggle and trial acquire strength of 
 character, self-reliance and independence in order 
 to be able to help others. The morality of the 
 Sermon on the Mount fails to build up human society 
 such as it is constituted. You must with all your 
 power resist evil and assert your own right as well 
 as that of others, because justice is the foundation 
 of God's throne, and without it the whole social 
 structure totters and falls. Here, then, is the scope
 
 170 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 and mission of the Jew. Not in an especial State 
 of his own, but in the very midst of the nations among 
 which he lives, must he, as he did under far less pro- 
 pitious conditions in former ages, battle for justice 
 and righteousness as the true basis of social and 
 private ethics, as the foundation of the world. 
 
 And finally there is the third mission for the Jew 
 to accomplish, while living and working as fellow- 
 citizen of the members of the various States and 
 nations of the world, and this is to be the great 
 factor of peace which is the crowning cupola of all 
 human civilization. Did you ever ponder over the 
 strange and puzzling fact that the lofty teachings 
 of him whose birth was, according to the Gospels, 
 hailed by the angels of God as the harbinger of 
 "Glory to God on high, and Peace and Good will 
 among men on earth," that the high ideals of the 
 New Testament, so full of sympathy with suffering 
 mankind, should have brought about discord and 
 strife, hatred, bloodshed and war rather than harmony 
 and peace among men and nations? The answer is: 
 The words ascribed to the Nazarene preacher: 
 "My kingdom is not of this world" lent the Christian 
 religion that character of other-worldliness which 
 gave the whole life of man a false meaning and 
 direction. They made the millions of adherents of 
 the Church look with contempt upon the life of State 
 and society, upon industry, culture and science, and 
 hunger only after heavenly salvation and bliss. They 
 handed the things of this world over to Satan, and 
 gave the whole earthly existence of man an entirely 
 wrong aspect. They created a two-fold system of
 
 ISRAEL'S MISSION IN THE WORLD 171 
 
 ethics, one for the Church and one for the world, 
 one for Sunday and another for working days, one 
 for sacred and one for secular things. And it is against 
 this view of religion and ethics that Judaism must 
 ever protest anew, and insist on the holiness of the 
 whole life, the holiness of duty everywhere on earth. 
 Here is the Kingdom of God to be built up by man, 
 not in a life beyond. And it cannot be denied that 
 much of the decline of sound morality, much of the 
 depravity, the corruption, the crime and vice that 
 prevail in high and low places to-day, that the very 
 cruelty and brutality that has brought mankind 
 from civilization to a state of barbarism and savagery, 
 is due to the religious crisis through which we are 
 passing. The former generations were more or less 
 held in restraint and kept on the path of virtue and 
 piety by fear of hell and hope for heaven's bliss. All 
 these threats and bribes are no longer of any avail, 
 because the belief in a world of punishment and 
 reward beyond the grave has been shaken. Man 
 needs a higher and deeper ethical motive, and only 
 a religion which makes holiness the aim of the soul, 
 instead of salvation, can lift humanity to higher planes. 
 Only a system of faith which teaches man to do the 
 good, because it is good and godly, and shun evil, 
 because it is evil and ungodly, only a disinterested 
 service of God and man, emanating from the principle 
 of life's holiness, will lead men back to virtue, to 
 righteousness and goodness, to serene peace within 
 and without. Yet such is the religion and ethics of 
 Judaism. And where is the place for the Jew to teach 
 and proclaim it as the true basis of man's brother-
 
 172 
 
 hood? Surely not in the confines of .the little terri- 
 tory of Palestine. Wherever the Jew lives, he must 
 do his share to turn the earth into a mountain of 
 God, the seat of righteousness and disinterested 
 love. And at no time did he have such opportunity 
 to again mount the watch-tower of prophecy and 
 teach, by precept and practice, the ancient truth in 
 the language of modern thought as to-day and in this 
 glorious land of liberty, if he himself would but rise 
 to the great emergency, and from a selfish materialist 
 become again the idealist among the creeds and 
 classes of men. 
 
 Surely the very catastrophe of our days points 
 for him who can see beyond the surface of things, 
 to a great transformation and regeneration of man, 
 to the need of higher ideals. And who can tell what 
 great things God has planned for the future! Surely 
 out of this terrible deluge of blood and woe a new 
 earth and a new heaven will rise. We sow in tears 
 and shall reap in joy. Selfish materialism and narrow 
 nationalism have plunged the world into this calam- 
 itous war. We need a mighty spiritual force to lift 
 us to true idealism. Will the Jew in this free and God- 
 blessed soil not awaken to the realization of his 
 glorious mission? 
 
 To America the Jews all over the world look for 
 help and for inspiration. America's Jews shall shape 
 the destiny of the Jew the world over. So let us 
 take a broad outlook upon life as American Jews 
 and American patriots, and work for a humanity 
 re-established and reunited upon the divine principles 
 of truth, justice and peace. Amen.
 
 16. 
 
 THE BIBLE IN THE LIGHT OF 
 MODERN RESEARCH.* 
 
 RELIGION is not the same as theology. Religion 
 is a godly life; theology is a great battle-arena 
 with an armory full of weapons, rude and polished, 
 of all the ages. When seeing two persons engaged in 
 a fierce strife, people go out of the way. So they do 
 in regard to theological questions. They prefer 
 neutral grounds. Still, it will not do to remain un- 
 concerned and indifferent when the object of the 
 strife is of vital importance. Every person that 
 lays claim to education, still more the Jew, of what- 
 ever view and shade of opinion he be, ought to have 
 a clear conception of: What the Bible is, or should 
 be in the light of modern research. 
 
 Of all the nations that held dominion over the 
 earth, of all the conquerors that ruled the destinies 
 of man, none exerted such extensive power and en- 
 during influence on all ages as did the Jewish people 
 through the Bible. Before its irresistible sway 
 Bel and Osiris, the gods of Olympus and of Asaheim, 
 disappeared to let Jahveh, Israel's Only One, 
 reign, "from the rising of the sun unto its setting." 
 The memories of Hercules and Siegfried faded before 
 the lustre of Abraham and David. And what do 
 
 *Sunday Lecture, delivered at Temple Beth-El, New York, 
 November 15, 1887.
 
 174 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 the literatures, the arts, and sciences of the various 
 nations weigh in the scale against the Hebrew Book? 
 Forcing its way into every household, hut or palace, 
 it became the companion of the forsaken, the com- 
 forter of the distressed, the staff of the feeble, the 
 inspiration of the great, and the illumination of the 
 wise. It has formed our morals, built our States, 
 framed our social life, and shaped our thoughts. 
 It remoulded humanity amidst the downbreak of 
 ancient civilization, and cradled and nursed all the 
 modern nations of Europe. The Bible, wrested from 
 the Church, gave Germany its intellectual, England 
 its political spirit of independence. It created our 
 American Republic. In token of loyalty to our com- 
 monwealth, do our Presidents press their lips upon 
 this Book when assuming their high office. Nor did 
 the great leaders of modern thought, Lessing and 
 Goethe, Carlyle and Huxley, even the sceptic Heine, 
 hesitate, in various strains of eulogy, to call it the 
 great and unique Book, the educator of humanity. 
 You may as well attempt to drive the sun out of 
 our planet as divest our entire culture of the in- 
 fluences of this book from Judea. 
 
 And need I dwell particularly on what the Bible 
 is to the Jews? It was our ark of the covenant that 
 led us through wide deserts and over roaring seas. 
 It was our banner of victory that decided our battles 
 with the world, our fountain of living waters in the 
 dry lands, our safeguard and elixir of life that rescued 
 us from a thousandfold death, the source of truth 
 from which all the intellects of the ages drew inspira- 
 tion and light.
 
 THE BIBLE AND MODERN RESEARCH 175 
 
 Yet, notwithstanding all this, we see this Sacred 
 Book, the friend, the guide, the comforter of mankind 
 for the last two thousand years, sneered at by our so- 
 called enlightened ones to-day. How can we account 
 for this strange phenomenon? 
 
 My friends, the explanation seems easy to find. 
 Love often turns into hatred when strained beyond 
 measure. Both love and hatred are blind, the one 
 to the faults, the other to the virtues of their object. 
 Therefore disappointment leads from one extreme 
 to the other. This is exactly what happened with the 
 Bible. From gratitude for what it offered, people 
 made of it an idol, a fetich. While regarding it as 
 the Book of God, they not only derived from it their 
 geology and astronomy and history, for many cen- 
 turies to impede the progress of science, but they read 
 into it all their follies and falsehoods, so that there 
 was hardly a crime or a cruelty which was not sanc- 
 tioned with its divine authority. The burning of 
 heretics and witches and all the deviltry perpetrated 
 by the Church, looked to the Hebrew Code for 
 justification; just as did slavery and polygamy in our 
 day. Child-like fables portraying the paradisiacal 
 home of the first man, and Oriental figures of speech 
 picturing the coming kingdom of peace were twisted 
 into ropes, forged into shackles, to enslave man and 
 enchain his reason and common-sense. And though 
 the Jew was spared the iron strait-jacket of dogmatic 
 belief, though his reason remained unfettered, in 
 spite of the weird superstitions which from all lands 
 and ages had crept into his mind, the law which he 
 was bound to obey became a heavy and oppressive
 
 176 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 yoke, nevertheless. True, it shielded and guarded 
 him against the vices and passions swaying the world 
 around him, but it also barred him out of any friendly 
 intercourse with humanity at large. It kept him in 
 slavish subjection and in unwholesome seclusion. 
 
 At last, fretting and chafing under the despotic 
 dominion of this Book, man with the torch of inquiry 
 in hand, began to expose its errors, its contradic- 
 tions, its often false notions and assumptions about 
 God and nature. Like the slave rejoicing at the 
 breaking of his chains, he gloried in finding the 
 hitherto infallible Bible faulty; and casting it down 
 from its presumptuous high seat, he contrasted it 
 with the true Book of Divine Revelation, with God's 
 handwriting in the stars and the rocks, upon the 
 hearts and conscience of man. Thus the spell was 
 broken, and the Book lay in fragments before him, 
 like the two tablets of the law at the feet of Moses. 
 Condemn not iconoclasts like Diderot, Voltaire, 
 and Thomas Paine. Though they abused the Bible, 
 they meant well with man and his divine freedom. 
 Their ridicule emancipated the race from the thral- 
 dom of the book. Still, neither abuse by the one 
 nor misuse by the other, led to a true appreciation, 
 or correct view of the Bible. A new era of research 
 dawned, the century of Darwin. People commenced 
 to re-read the world's history. The Napoleonic 
 expedition to Egypt at once opened the horizon 
 of man. Just as the little planet earth was swung 
 off the world's center by the discovery of Copernicus, 
 so were the Biblical records about the remote past 
 eclipsed by the far older and more glorious civilization
 
 THE BIBLE AND MODERN RESEARCH 177 
 
 on the Nile and the Euphrates, now restored to light. 
 Homer was shown to be the work, not of one man, 
 but of ages. The older history of Rome and Greece 
 proved to be a series of legends. Gradually India, 
 Persia, and China yielded up their long-hidden 
 treasures of literature, art, and religion, and then 
 the Bible appeared in an altogether new light. The 
 same legends about creation, paradise, and the flood 
 here as there; the same rites and practices here 
 as there; the same holy books existing here as there, 
 and the same modes of treating and using them also. 
 And, once examined like any other human writing, 
 under the microscope of critical analysis, the Bible 
 turned out to be not a book dictated by God to 
 Moses and David and Solomon and the few known 
 prophets, but the slow and steady growth of a nation's 
 intellectual life-work, the outcome of toiling centuries 
 groping after light and truth, justice and comfort 
 and peace. Instead of seeing in the Pentateuch 
 the legacy of the one great law-giver Moses, we learn 
 from the many contradictory views and discrepan- 
 cies found in the records and the statutes, that many 
 historians and priestly legislators must have been at 
 work, augmenting and improving the written, or 
 unwritten, laws bearing the name of Moses, before 
 Ezra, the priestly scribe, could present it to the new 
 colony of Judea as the foundation-stone of the 
 Jewish commonwealth. Instead of taking the 
 Psalms to be the composition of the great warrior- 
 king David, their intrinsic character proved that the 
 sacred music of that undying hymn-book of the na- 
 tions could not have struck the chord of the Jewish
 
 178 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 heart, ere the weepings of the exiled had elicited 
 from David's harp the elevating strains of comfort. 
 Likewise was the name of King Solomon, renowned 
 for wisdom, used only to reflect credit on the literary 
 productions of the Jewish schools of the wise. As 
 chief representatives, however, of the Jewish genius, 
 as the true heralds and founders of the Jewish religion 
 loomed up, not Abraham and Moses, around whose 
 brows latter ages wove the aureola of glory reflected 
 from the full mid-day sun that had risen on Zion, 
 but the lofty seers of Judea who, standing forth like 
 high mountain peaks which herald the light, were the 
 first, with tongues of fire striking the ages, to pro- 
 claim religion to be good conduct, righteousness, 
 and mercy. 
 
 Of course, this view, which makes of the Bible a 
 successive composition and compilation by schools 
 rather than one single or several inspired books, 
 contradicts all theories of the past. It is denounced 
 by the orthodox of both Church and Synagogue 
 as an awful heresy. For it presents the truth as 
 growing and rising from earth-born man rather than 
 as handed down, complete and perfect, from heaven. 
 It seems to do away with Revelation and put Evolu- 
 tion in its stead. 
 
 Of course, the question presses for an answer: 
 Can Judaism be reconciled with this view? May 
 any one holding such views and I would in all likeli- 
 hood not breathe the free air of America to-day , had 
 I not many years ago been one of the first to pub- 
 licly voice them still speak in the name and with 
 the authority of Judaism?
 
 THE BIBLE AND MODERN RESEARCH 179 
 
 I shall not refer here to the great master-minds 
 and highest authorities of Judaism, such as Mai- 
 monides, Ibn Ezra, and Gersonides, who did not 
 believe in supernatural revelation either; who dis- 
 carded the miracle stories in the Bible, being, in 
 fact, the first critics and rationalists. I maintain 
 that only this liberal view of the Bible offers the 
 broad and solid foundation to that religion of human- 
 ity, of which Reform Judaism is the exponent. 
 
 Standing among the great Alpine mountains, 
 you can hardly recognize the difference between 
 mighty giant-mountains, like Mont Blanc and the 
 Jungfrau, and the others. They all appear alike, 
 when near to you. But glance at them from the dis- 
 tance, and you will soon find the one over-towering 
 all the rest. Placed among the various Holy Books, 
 the Bible appears to resemble now one and then 
 another. But look at it through the vista of the ages, 
 and you will see how they are all dwarfed by its 
 colossal grandeur. The Bible is holy, not because 
 it is inspired, but because, and in so far as it does 
 still, inspire. It is not true, because God has spoken 
 the word, but because in the truth, the comfort, the 
 hope, the final victory of justice which it holds out, 
 you hear God speak to you in soul stirring strains. 
 "Whatever finds me," says Coleridge, "bears witness 
 of itself that it has proceeded from the Holy Spirit." 
 No book in the world enraptures the heart, respond- 
 ing to the innermost needs of the soul so much as 
 does of course, only in certain parts this vener- 
 able Bible. Compare it with other writings and see 
 whether it did not give virtue a finer mould, morality
 
 180 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 a deeper ring and resonance. In commanding "Be 
 holy as your God is holy," it placed a ladder of per- 
 fection before man, bidding him rise from one round 
 to another and higher one, until the uppermost top 
 will be reached, on which the highest ideal of all 
 that is good and true is seen. What matters it if 
 all the symbolic rites, appearing no longer as avail- 
 able helps and lifts, are cast aside? We need no crutch- 
 es as soon as we are able to walk upright and straight 
 in the presence of the Eternal. What of it, if all the 
 Biblical life-pictures have ceased to be perfect 
 models? Standing on their shoulders, we must needs 
 strive for higher ideals. And if all the Biblical tales 
 about reward and punishment, all the threats and 
 bribes, have lost their hold upon us, the consciousness 
 of the Divine within us ought all the more bring us 
 within the magnetic sweep of divine principles, of 
 eternal truths. Not as a leaden weight to keep us 
 down, but as a wing with which to soar up, not as 
 a bar to shut man out of heaven, but as a gate to 
 open heaven's freedom and bliss for him, do we want 
 to use the Bible. It must be read in the light of its 
 own history. Its characters, its laws, its legends, 
 its poetry and history must be judged by the standard 
 of their age, not by ours, which, owing to the Bible's 
 influence, is a far higher one. The Bible is not a 
 book understood by the average reader without the 
 help of students or commentaries. It must be used 
 with wise discretion. 
 
 It is no work written or dictated by God. Were 
 it such a one, we could not accept it as holy with its 
 often crude notions and harsh sentiments of hatred,
 
 THE BIBLE AND MODERN RESEARCH 181 
 
 revenge, and passion, which are anything but divine. 
 Quite different it is, if, taking the spirit instead of 
 the letter, we see through its medium the heroes of 
 yore, an Abraham, a Moses, and an Isaiah, wrestling 
 like Jacob with God all through the night, until a 
 new day dawns upon their minds ; if we behold those 
 seers of old climbing up the mount of vision, until 
 they have reached the sun-lit summit of a lofty 
 religious perception. Just as before the growing 
 intellect of the child, sun, sky, and ocean expand, so 
 we find the idea of God growing and expanding, until 
 His glory surpasses the heavens. 
 
 Yes, God did descend to the hill-top of Sinai 
 wrapped in smoke and fire, yea, betraying human 
 passion and frailty, but only to lift man up to ever 
 higher regions of thought, His all-consuming fire, 
 brightening into a sun of righteousness, before which 
 wickedness vanishes like mist, and His wrathful 
 frown changing into the serene smile of paternal 
 love and compassion. The very greatness of the Bible 
 consists in that it does not offer a mere philosophical 
 God, but a God living within man and ever rising 
 before him. Its gold is not coined into creeds, but 
 is still, with all the dross and the quartz, imbedded 
 in the mine; its water of life not presented in pitchers 
 and cups, but pouring forth from the perennial 
 fountains of the heart. The forms of worship pre- 
 scribed, the laws given there, are not the same 
 throughout the Book; they are changing, shifting, 
 and constantly improving, thus showing that all 
 rites and ceremonies must change; that just as nature 
 renews its garb from year to year, so must religion,
 
 182 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 in order to remain vigorous and full of vitality, be 
 in a constant state of progress and evolution. 
 
 And finally, while all other books and literatures 
 represent but parts and fragments of man's history, the 
 Bible opens before us the great panorama of universal 
 history. Watching the waves and tides of the sea, 
 we are apt to behold in them a mere play of chance, 
 until we learn the law which bids the moon sway the 
 tidal march of the rolling ocean with its constant 
 ebb and flow. The existence of this law in history 
 which makes the tidal waves of God's justice and love 
 sweep over individuals and nations in never-faltering 
 might, was first proclaimed by the Hebrew seers. 
 They first pointed to those slowly but steadily work- 
 ing mills of God, which separate the chaff from the 
 wheat. They disclosed the magnificent chariot of 
 God securing victory to all that is good and true, 
 and crushing under its wheels all that is hollow and 
 worthless. Thus history became the great refiner 
 and educator of the race, culminating in the lofty 
 Messianic goal, in the great consummation of hu- 
 manity, when all lands and streams of culture will 
 offer their gift upon the altar of the Most High, 
 whose truth and love are mirrored everywhere, as the 
 sun is in the ocean and the dew-drop. 
 
 What the Darwins of Chaldea four thousand 
 years ago discovered while gazing upon nature's 
 work, says Renan, the Jewish sages have embodied 
 in the first chapters of the Bible. And will not the 
 disclosures of those geniuses who, after another four 
 thousand years, may illumine mankind, still harmonize 
 with the bright hopes and great truths offered by the
 
 THE BIBLE AND MODERN RESEARCH 183 
 
 Bible? Two great nations have reared the pillars of 
 civilization : the Greeks with their Midas-hand turned 
 the bequest of Chaldea and Phenicia into the gold 
 of art and science; the Jews, with the flame of their 
 divine inspiration, moulded the past into an ideal 
 of holiness and perfection. Ought we not, as the 
 guardians of the Book, preserve and cultivate the 
 spirit which has kept and enlivened the Bible, the 
 spirit of freedom, of progress, and of enlightenment? 
 And if the Bible of Humanity in the future will be 
 large enough to have room for all that is inspiring 
 and ennobling, cheering and elevating in all the 
 literatures and arts of the nations, men will yet with 
 our Whittier sing: 
 
 We search the world for truth; we cull 
 The good, the pure, the beautiful 
 From graven stone, and written scroll, 
 From the old flower-field of the soul; 
 And weary seekers of the best, 
 We come back laden to our quest, 
 To find that all the sages said 
 Is in the Book our mothers read.
 
 17 
 THE WANDERING JEW.* 
 
 IF WE believe the old medieval legend, the Wander- 
 ing Jew is a luckless fugitive, with a haggard, 
 weather-beaten face, a tall, emaciated figure, and 
 dishevelled hair, clothed in rags, bare-footed, having 
 nothing but his knotty staff to lean on, the very 
 image of misery and despondency. He has long 
 ceased smiling. He can only sigh. He has a strange 
 story to tell of human folly and cruelty; for he has 
 traversed the wide globe, seen every land and chron- 
 icled the events of each age. He witnessed the down- 
 fall of Jerusalem, the ruin of the Roman empire. 
 He beheld the Church in her rise and her decline; 
 Islamism in its zenith and its defeat. He saw genera- 
 tions as they came and went, civilizations as they 
 sprang up and vanished, kingdoms and empires as 
 they appeared and disappeared. He stood at the 
 cradle of so many nations only to shed a tear over 
 their graves. He saw all enter life and die; do their 
 work and then go to their rest. He alone is not per- 
 mitted to find a respite. To wander from place to 
 place, and from one country to another, without rest 
 for his weary foot, is his doom. And why? Poor 
 man! He does not seem to remember that event 
 quite distinctly. When seen by an Armenian bishop 
 
 *Sunday Discourse, delivered at Temple Beth El, New York, 
 April 1, 1888.
 
 186 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 in the East in the beginning of the XIII. century, 
 he said that his name was Cartaphilus ("the much- 
 beloved"), and having been doorkeeper of Pontius 
 Pilate, he struck Jesus on the neck as he passed on 
 to the cross, telling him to go quicker, whereupon 
 Jesus cursed him, saying: "I shall go, but thou shalt 
 remain waiting till I come back." But, three hundred 
 years later, when first sighted in European countries, 
 in Hamburg, London, and elsewhere, he gave his name 
 as Ahasuerus, and his story ran differently. A shoe- 
 maker by profession, he stood at the doorway when 
 Jesus, with the heavy cross on his shoulder, wanted 
 to rest in front of his house, and he pushed him for- 
 ward, ordering him to hasten on; whereupon Jesus 
 looked sternly at him, saying: "I shall stand here 
 and rest, but thou shalt move on forever until dooms- 
 day." At another time he appeared under still 
 another name. But there is no need of dwelling longer 
 on the mere frame of the legend. Suffice it to say that 
 the Wandering Jew became one of the most popular 
 figures of European folk-lore. Inquiries tell us that 
 the old Teutonic god of storm and wind, surviving 
 under the name of the Wild Huntsman, has been 
 frequently identified with our hero. Strange indeed, 
 that in hunting the Jew, the German hunted his old 
 god, who had to die in order to lend new force to 
 the never-dying Jew. But the source of the legend 
 can be traced still farther east. The Arabian Jews 
 in Mohammed's time spoke of a cursed Samaritan 
 who was doomed to roam about like a beast of the 
 forest, without rest, because he formed the golden 
 calf for Aaron. Many such Cain-like fugitives
 
 THE WANDERING JEW 187 
 
 exist in Eastern folk-lore. Yet, perhaps, the original 
 type of the Wandering Jew was not an accursed man, 
 but the great world-traverser Elijah, the prophet 
 who was spared death in order to be the forerunner 
 of the expected Messiah. He, according to Jewish 
 belief, still appears from time to time on earth in 
 the shape of an old man deeply interested in the 
 progress of humanity. He lives under the name of 
 the deathless Chidr among the Moslems, and as 
 St. John "the Beloved One" among Christians in 
 the East. 
 
 But in the Christian mind the restless wanderer 
 became the personification of the Jewish race. The 
 strange fate of that wondrous people, who, defying 
 fire and sword, and braving all the storms and 
 furies of the people's passion, driven from land to 
 land, weighed down by the curse of the nations, still 
 continued to march on with unabated vigor, an 
 object of pity, yet unyielding, uncompromising, 
 unconquerable in its determination to kneel before 
 no savior but its Only One God, could not but puzzle 
 and perplex Christianity. For what will become of 
 the promised second coming of its Messiah, as long 
 as the Jews refuse to recognize him as king? This 
 fact alone explains why so cruel an injustice, as to 
 have him inflict so terrible a curse upon a man for 
 so slight an offense, was ascribed to the otherwise 
 tender-hearted teacher of Nazareth. Christ and the 
 Wandering Jew, however, stand here as the repre- 
 sentatives of the two creeds in their implacable hos- 
 tility. But, thank God, what was intended to be a 
 caricature of the Jew, is to-day his glorification. I
 
 188 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 trust, Christianity itself is to-day ashamed of the 
 awful curse flung at the martyr-race, and no longer 
 extols its crucified God by crucifying the Jews. 
 Likewise is the grotesque figure of the Wandering 
 Jew, through the magic spell of the modern genius 
 of poetry, through Goethe and Shelley, transformed 
 into a grand Prometheus-like type of wandering and 
 struggling humanity. All the more should we feel 
 induced to read the history of the past in the light 
 of the day, not as Longfellow, when speaking of 
 the Jews, says: 
 
 "Spelling it backward like a Hebrew book, 
 Till life became a Legend of the Dead," 
 
 but rather in a sense which imbues the Legend of the 
 Dead with the spirit of life. 
 
 Yes, the Jew has all along been an unsteady wan- 
 derer on earth, but not like Cain with the mark of 
 bloody guilt on his forehead, but like Abraham, his 
 ancestor, commissioned by God to bestow blessing, 
 both materially and spiritually, upon all families 
 of man. True enough, there is something about the 
 history of the Jewish people which seems to place 
 them outside of the law governing the life of others. 
 Their endurance and elasticity, their powers of 
 resistance and tenacity appear to be without parallel. 
 .Greek mythology speaks of a hero for whom his 
 mother obtained the boon of immortal life, but, 
 having forgotten to pray also for his immortal yputh, 
 she saw him shrivel and dwindle into a size ',vhich 
 made his sight more repulsive than death. For 
 without continual regeneration, everlasting life be- 
 comes a burden and a curse. This is not the case
 
 THE WANDERING JEW 189 
 
 with the Jew. He was privileged to drink ever anew 
 from the fountain of youth. His history is a per- 
 petual rejuvenation, an oft-repeated, phoenix-like 
 resurrection from the grave. This is due to his two- 
 fold nature. Like man among the animated beings, 
 he among the nations leads a double life, animal and 
 divine, combining two forces, a material and a 
 spiritual, a national and a cosmopolitan idea of man. 
 Israel has often been likened to the stars, also wander- 
 ers along the expanse of heaven. Some of them lead, 
 so to say, a vagabond life, and by their eccentric ways 
 appear like disturbers of the order of the solar system. 
 Such are the comets dreaded by the people and hardly 
 reckoned among the stars. Yet they, too, wheel 
 around the same luminous center in their solitary 
 track along the sky. Thus does "the star of Jacob," 
 "in its solitude not counted among the nations," 
 swing around the bright orb of humanity while pur- 
 suing a different course from the others. The Jew's 
 history is the world's history in miniature. All 
 streams of culture meet on his path. His treasury 
 of knowledge is full of the best wisdom of all the 
 nations. Like the bee, he alone has been busy in 
 gathering honey from every flower in the garden 
 of culture. 
 
 Watch his childhood. See how he listened to the 
 rather dull fables of old Chaldea, soon to coin them 
 into grand moral truths about the world's beginnings. 
 He did not care to have Egypt's hieroglyphics read 
 and her sphinxes' riddles solved, but, pervaded by 
 sound reason and common sense, he made his God on 
 Sinai hurl forth His most terrific thunders against
 
 190 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 her caste despotism, and flash forth His lightnings 
 against her worship of brutes and her oppression 
 of man. He craved for liberty as man's highest 
 boon. He went forth to see humanity free and simple. 
 He spent his youth in Palestine. There he became 
 an apprentice to Phoenician art and culture. But 
 he was not granted a long career as a peaceful farmer. 
 His land was too near the great theater of war be- 
 tween the world's mighty empires; he was dragged 
 into the bloody strife, his land was seized as spoil. 
 Afl the louder he raised his voice against injustice 
 and tyranny. PointlJ^to a higher rule of righteous- 
 ness, he ascended the world's pulpit to preach the 
 judgment day of the Lord of Hosts, in whose hands 
 Assyria, Babylon, and Egypt are but rods of chas- 
 tisement, and threshing-flails to separate the chaff 
 from the wheat. What mattered it to him if the 
 coming storm, destined to smite all the nations of 
 antiquity, should also strike his tree, if but the root 
 and a single branch remain to witness that God 
 ruleth? 
 
 The Babylonian exile became his high-school 
 of trials. There he prepared himself for his grand, 
 historical task. If he lost his land, he learned to 
 render the wide world his home. His Hebrew nation- 
 ality found an early grave, but the cosmopolitan 
 Jew was cradled and nursed. Kaulbach, in his famous 
 painting "The Destruction of Jerusalem," represents 
 the "Wandering Jew" as starting forth from the ruins 
 a shattered man overwhelmed with anguish, deprived 
 of hope, with a lacerated heart, down-cast with a 
 sorrow for which there is no relief, while in the back-
 
 THE WANDERING JEW 191 
 
 ground of that picture of woe and desolation Chris- 
 tianity enters in the white garb of innocence with 
 its flag unfurled, shouting victory and triumph. 
 This is the Christian construction of history, but 
 the facts contradict it. Six centuries before the fall 
 of the second temple, the Jew had started upon his 
 journey throughout the lands. He had served in the 
 highest positions at Babylonian, Persian, and Egyp- 
 tian courts, like Joseph of yore. He had won laurels 
 in the battle-fields, while fighting under Alexander 
 the Great and under the Ptolemies; he had tilted 
 their soil and extended their ^(Jhmerce and industry. 
 The whole African and Asiatic coast of the Medi- 
 terranean sea was dotted with Jewish settlements, 
 from all of which the sublime truths of a common 
 father and a common brotherhood of man were issued 
 forth, long before Christianity had appeared on the 
 stage. Kingdoms in the far East and in the distant 
 South had been converted to Judaism, scattering 
 the seeds which afterwards yielded such unexpected 
 harvests to both the Church and the Mosque. The 
 Wandering Jew had followed in the wake of King 
 Cyrus of Persia, and of Alexander the Macedonian 
 conqueror, to blend Occidental and Oriental ideas 
 and habits of life. Jewish intellects built the bridge 
 between Hellenic wisdom and Oriental thought 
 through which the entire medieval world had to pass. 
 And after the Roman soldier had thrown the fire- 
 brand into the Jewish temple, could not the Wandering 
 Jew point to his house of learning and with the 
 Greek sage say : "I carry all my possessions with me?" 
 He possessed mankind's holiest treasure, the Book
 
 192 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 of Books, translated into every tongue, and brightened 
 up by the gems of the best philosophies of the nations. 
 Look to Persia, Arabia, and Asia Minor. Have those 
 princes and knights, those grandees and courtiers, 
 those astronomers and physicians, those lofty poets 
 and wealthy rulers of the money-mart the look of 
 despair and cowardice about them? And then 
 follow the march of civilization westward under the 
 sway of Islamism, and see who is in the van. Who 
 does, like Joseph did in Egypt, store up, in the times 
 of plenty, the treasures of philosophy, science, and 
 popular wisdom to distribute them to the Christian 
 nations in the days of spiritual famine? Whose 
 counsel saves the European world from lapsing into 
 utter barbarism? In the entire commercial, literary 
 and political intercourse of nations, the Wandering 
 Jew was the mediator, the pioneer of civilization. 
 When Columbus or Vasco da Gama went forth in 
 search of new lands and continents, or when Kepler 
 looked out for new worlds on the firmament, they 
 were assisted by the Wandering Jew. And again 
 when Italy gave rise to the Renaissance, and 
 Germany to the Reformation, he stood there with the 
 torch of enlightenment to kindle research and nurture 
 the spirit of awakening humanity. 
 
 Only when for most of the modern nations the 
 dark night of mediaevalism seemed to be well-nigh 
 past and a new day was first heralded in Italy and 
 then in Holland, only for the last three or four 
 hundred years, the Wandering Jew fell asleep, being 
 fatigued and exhausted from his long, thorny path. 
 Into his gloomy Ghetto the new day was slow to
 
 THE WANDERING JEW 193 
 
 enter. But he did not sleep long. As soon as the new 
 morn was announced by Mendelssohn and Lessing, 
 at the trumpet blasts of liberty proclaimed in France 
 and America, he rose with delight to drink in the light 
 of freedom and hail the blessings of progress. See 
 him now standing in the front ranks among the 
 champions of liberty against oppression, of justice 
 against intolerance, of cosmopolitan love and charity 
 against narrow seclusiveness. In every land and 
 zone you find him to-day holding the highest posts 
 of honor in law and politics, reflecting glory upon his 
 country and profession in every field of honorable 
 labor. He challenges his fellow-citizens by his social 
 virtues no less than by his enterprise and success. 
 Thank God, he is no longer hunted, no longer thecurse- 
 laden fugitive. He is recognized as a man and as a 
 citizen. He has found rest, a sweet home of liberty, 
 and nowhere so as in our blessed land. Well, then, 
 has he reached his goal? Why does he not then cast 
 off the Jewish cloak, his storm-beaten mantle, and 
 amalgamate with the nations around him? Why 
 not drop his peculiarities, the name of Jew, and 
 become citizen of the wide world? 
 
 My friends! If the Wandering Jew has come to 
 stay, humanity has not. Mankind is wandering and 
 moving onward and forward from station to station, 
 and the Jew, the suffering Messiah of former ages, 
 must still lead to see his humanity's cause triumph. 
 For the humanity we look for is not a mere visionary 
 cosmopolitism, a religion without God, a morality 
 without religion, but the great harvest of human 
 history, the consummate growth of all the divine
 
 194 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 seeds of the good, the true and the beautiful, the 
 kingdom of God on earth realized. History will 
 yet have many ascents and descents of man, many 
 empires and systems of religion and philosophy 
 rising and setting like the sun, while Judaism will 
 wax and wane with ever renewed vigor like the moon. 
 No. The Wandering Jew dares not drop his priestly 
 robe nor sell his birth-right for a pottage of lentils. 
 His master is not the spirit of the age, but the ever- 
 lasting Spirit of all the Ages. His fount of youth is 
 mankind's fountain of life. The true leader must be 
 the first in storming the heights, but the last in 
 leaving the battle-field. The world's battles for the 
 right and the true have not been fought and decided 
 as yet. Mankind still needs our service; God still 
 counts upon Abraham's seed. Yes, Elijah is the 
 prototype of the Wandering Jew, that is, as herald 
 of the great Messianic time. For our Messiah has 
 not come, but is carried along in the arms of centuries 
 by all the advancing arts, sciences and ideals of man. 
 Genius of mankind is his name. Peace is his scepter, 
 righteousness his shield, truth his chariot and his 
 golden diadem, reflecting the majesty of God on high, 
 is love. Yet, as long as God is not enthroned as 
 Father of Righteousness and Love in the hearts of 
 all nations and sects, so long thy task, O Wandering 
 Jew, is not fulfilled. Falter not. With the ark of 
 covenant upon thy shoulders, thou art to lead man- 
 kind to Zion's heights, and, like the priests on Jor- 
 dan's shore, thou must wait till the last of thy brethren 
 has entered the land of promise, of a humanity 
 united by thy God of truth, of justice and of peace. 
 Amen.
 
 18. 
 
 AMERICAN JUDAISM.* 
 
 AS REPRESENTED BY THE UNION OF AMERICAN 
 
 HEBREW CONGREGATIONS AND THE HEBREW 
 
 UNION COLLEGE. 
 
 " Nedibe Am Neesafu Am Elohe Abraham The princes of 
 the people are gathered together, the representatives of the 
 people of the God of Abraham." 
 
 IT IS a great privilege to address this distinguished 
 assembly, representing the great body of pro- 
 gressive American Israel throughout the length and 
 breadth of this glorious land, in this metropolis 
 which holds in its midst a larger Jewish population 
 than was held in the holy city of Jerusalem or in 
 Alexandria in their most prosperous days, and speak 
 on what must be of the highest and deepest concern 
 to all of us, on American Judaism as it is represented 
 by the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, 
 and as>ft is expounded and held up as a banner of 
 light and victory by the Hebrew Union College. Oh, 
 when I think of what Judaism meant to our fathers 
 when, within the gloomy Ghetto walls, amidst 
 unparalleled woe and in the face of crudest perse- 
 cution by fanatics and death-dealing mobs, they went 
 
 'Address before the Council of the Union of American Hebrew 
 Congregations, Jan. 18, 1911.
 
 196 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 each morning to the synagogue to proudly proclaim 
 the unity of God in the Sh'ma Yisrael, and declare 
 their readiness to offer their life and all they had for 
 the glorification of the Most High, while reciting 
 the benediction, "Blessed be the Lord, whose name 
 is to be sanctified before the great world;" and when 
 I compare therewith what Judaism means to us, who 
 live in amity and concord with all our fellow-citizens 
 round about, enjoying the same rights and privileges, 
 and finding all avenues and opportunities to success 
 and station, to power, honor and influence open to 
 each as the peer and equal of all, and yet stand up 
 with heart and soul, with might and main, with burn- 
 ing zeal and glowing enthusiasm for the ancient 
 faith, to the potency and vitality of which our 
 magnificent temples and our glorious institutions of 
 philanthropy and education all over the country 
 give loud and unequivocal testimony; and when I 
 further consider what is being done by American 
 Israel for the suffering and struggling, the storm- 
 tossed and fury-lashed Jew of other lands and climes, 
 then American Judaism, the soul and spiritual 
 essence of American Jewry, appears to me to be a 
 theme so grand and rich, so bright in outlook, and so 
 suggestive of hope and unlimited potentialities, that 
 the pen quivers and the tongue falters in the endeavor 
 to do it justice. 
 
 Ever since I was privileged to imbibe the invigor- 
 ating air of this God-blessed land of liberty, Amer- 
 ican Israel appeared to me as a new type of Joseph, 
 "the prince among his brethren," whom Divine 
 Providence entrusted with the mission of not merely
 
 AMERICAN JUDAISM 197 
 
 preserving the lives of the tens of thousands who 
 come to seek bread and shelter under the starry 
 banner, but of reviving the spirit of God's chosen 
 people, and of endowing them with new hope and 
 a wider outlook, with a deeper comprehension of 
 their prophetic vision and their world-duty. I do 
 not wonder at the story that the simple sons of Jacob, 
 the shepherd sheikh of Canaan, were so awe-struck 
 at the sight of the gigantic palaces and the colossal 
 temples and obelisks in the strange wonderland of 
 Egypt that they failed to recognize their brother 
 Joseph in his royal garb and glory who had become 
 a thorough Egyptian in speech and manner, and 
 that they would not trust him, even after he had as- 
 sured them of his love and loyalty as brother and 
 kinsman. Neither do I wonder if our Russian or 
 Roumanian brethren, brought up under the humil- 
 iating conditions and widely different religious views 
 and influences of their benighted country, harbor a 
 certain mistrust of us, when they see our majestic 
 houses of worship and our educational and philan- 
 thropic structures reared after, and maintained by 
 altogether different methods. In their bewilderment 
 they fail to recognize that in blending Americanism 
 with Judaism we have, like Joseph of yore, stored 
 up the treasures of life for their children as well as 
 for ours; that in changing or modifying the form, we 
 have been preserving and guarding the faith far better 
 than did our brethren in Europe, who are being 
 confronted with the peril of spiritual starvation, 
 and whose children sell their Jewish birthright by 
 the thousands for a mess of pottage, for political or
 
 198 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 social recognition and promotion. No, we who rally 
 under the banner of progressive American Judaism are 
 not behind our conservative brethren in loyalty to, 
 and in love for, our sacred heritage. In fact, love 
 for the truth, for which our fathers died, bade our 
 Reform pioneers liberate it from the prison- 
 house of Shulhan Aruk legalism, in order to render 
 it a source of life again for us and those who come 
 after us. Loyalty to our wondrous past prompted 
 our heroic leaders in this free land to so regenerate 
 Judaism as to make it a beacon light for the living 
 and a fountain of hope for all the future. 
 
 For what is American Judaism, and for what does 
 it stand? The very name has been challenged by 
 those who assert that there is, and there should be, 
 but one Judaism, Catholic Judaism, as they choose 
 to call it, pointing to the traditional law, the Halakah, 
 as the impregnable fortress and foundation of united 
 Israel. As if this very law, with its diverse codes, 
 as if this very Judaism of the centuries, was not the 
 product of various lands and civilizations. Whether 
 Palestinian or Babylonian, Alexandrian or Persian, 
 Polish or Portuguese, medieval or modern, Judaism 
 at all times received its peculiar traits, views and 
 forms from its environments, which either broadened 
 it or rendered it narrow and clannish. In the bright 
 sunshine of Persian, Hellenic and Arabic culture it 
 expanded in scope and vision to become a cosmo- 
 politan power, giving rise to new systems of thought 
 and higher conceptions and ideals of life. In the 
 dreary Russian or medieval Ghetto its growth be- 
 came stunted, and it deteriorated into a system of hair-
 
 AMERICAN JUDAISM 199 
 
 splitting casuistry and superstition. True, there 
 was wondrous sweetness and brightness behind those 
 Ghetto walls. As the tossing billows of the ocean, 
 built out of the very slime, cast forth by the oyster 
 the thick shell that protects its tiny life, so did the 
 floods of persecution and oppression render Talmudic 
 legalism an armor of protection around Judaism to 
 keep it intact. But how about the life when the shell 
 opens? The wall had to give way before the trumpet 
 blast of liberty, in order that Judaism might again 
 thrive and rise to its full stature. 
 
 There is no room for Ghetto Judaism in America. 
 Look at any of the creeds and churches in our free 
 land! They are all more tolerant, more liberal, more 
 humane and sympathetic in their mutual relations 
 than those in Europe. Our free institutions, our 
 common school education, our enlightening press 
 and pulpit, with their appeal to common sense, en- 
 large the mental and social horizon and render prog- 
 ress the guiding maxim. Least of all could Judaism 
 retain its medieval garb, its alien form, its seclusive- 
 ness, in a country that rolled off the shame and the 
 taunt of the centuries from the shoulders of the 
 wandering Jew, to place him, the former Pariah 
 of the nations, alongside of the highest and the best, 
 according to his worth and merit as man, and among 
 a people that adopted the very principles of justice and 
 human dignity proclaimed by Israel's lawgivers and 
 prophets, and made them the foundation stones of 
 their commonwealth. No, American Judaism must 
 step forth, the equal of any church in broadness of 
 view and largeness of scope, as a living truth, as an
 
 200 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 inspiring message to the new humanity that is now 
 in the making, not as a mere memory of the past and 
 a piece of Orientalism in the midst of vigorous, 
 forward-pressing Occidental civilization. 
 
 American Judaism! What a power of inspira- 
 tion lies in these two words! They spell the triumph 
 of the world's two greatest principles and ideals, 
 the consummation of mankind's choicest possessions, 
 the one offered by the oldest, the other by the young- 
 est of the great nations of history, the highest moral 
 and spiritual and the highest political and social 
 aim of humanity; the God of righteousness and holi- 
 ness to unite and uplift all men and nations, and the 
 Magna Charta of liberty and human equality to 
 endow each individual with God-like sovereignty. 
 Behold America, the land of the future! When the 
 sun sets on the western horizon of Europe, its effulgent 
 rays gild the hills that herald the dawn to the new 
 world. The land of promise for all the persecuted! 
 God hid it, as it were, in His treasure-house to reserve 
 it for the most glorious chapter of human history, 
 when out of the mingling of races and sects, nay, out 
 of the boldest, the most courageous and most inde- 
 pendent elements of society, a new, a stronger, health- 
 ier and happier type of men and women should 
 emerge, able to cope successfully with the hardships 
 and problems of life, and bring the world nearer to 
 the realization of its highest and holiest dreams and 
 ideals, social, political and religious. And behold 
 Judaism leaving the ark, because the flood of un- 
 righteousness, of cruelty and inhumanity has ceased, 
 and looking out upon a new earth and a new heaven,
 
 A MERICA N JUDA ISM 201 
 
 wherein justice, liberty and peace reign in fulfillment 
 of its seer's visions. Was not the cry "Land! Land!" 
 that resounded on Columbus' ship, the opening up 
 of a new future for the martyr-race at the very time, 
 when its woe and misery had reached their culmina^ 
 tion in the land it had enriched by its own toil? 
 Then the voice of God was heard speaking to the 
 fugitive Spanish Jew, as He afterward spoke to the 
 German, the Galician and the Russian Jew: "Go 
 forth and be a blessing to the multitudes of people, 
 and a light to the many nations and classes that 
 settle in the new hemisphere." Yet the call was 
 only gradually heard. The God of the fathers was 
 not forgotten, but life's pressing demands made ever 
 new inroads upon religion. The continued disregard 
 of the ceremonial, the dietary and the Sabbath laws 
 amid the strife and struggle for bare existence weak- 
 ened the faith and blighted the self-respect of many, 
 to fill their souls with despondency or religious 
 apathy. Of what avail was the praying and yearning 
 for the glory of a world that has gone? As the 
 winter's snow before the approaching sun of spring, 
 so seemed the ancient creed to melt away under the 
 genial rays of the new world's freedom. Then Re- 
 form, a child of German philosophy, unfurled its 
 banner to revive the faith, reclaim the lost and fill 
 the houses of worship with the inspiring strains of 
 new devotion. Reform, whatever our reactionaries 
 may say to the contrary, became the savior of Ju- 
 daism in America. It opened the eyes of the blind 
 to see Judaism's great opportunity and realize the 
 mighty obligation thrust upon the American Jew
 
 202 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 by the privileges he enjoys. In laying stress on the 
 essentials and pushing the smaller things into the 
 background, it kindled new love and zeal for the 
 sacred heritage in the hearts of all, and roused the self- 
 consciousness, the self-esteem of the Jew. It rendered 
 him both more liberal-minded and more liberal- 
 hearted. 
 
 At first Reform appealed to his esthetic taste. 
 It beautified and dignified the service, and modern- 
 ized the synagog to reflect new luster on the ancient 
 faith. And here the American spirit of independence 
 manifested itself at once. Even the conservatives 
 dared not, as they do in Europe, denounce as un- 
 Jewish the organ and the Confirmation, nor insist 
 on the partition wall which all these centuries past 
 Orientalism had reared in the synagog to keep the 
 woman, the wife and daughter, out of the main body 
 of worshippers. Yes, a mere glance at our temples 
 shows the working of the American spirit, which, 
 in doing away with Orientalism and rendering woman 
 the equal of man in all spheres of religion, has given 
 a new powerful impetus to all Jewish endeavors. 
 
 Then came consistent, systematic theological 
 Reform, and took hold of the free American pulpit 
 to preach in clarion notes those principles of historical 
 progress which, in lighting up the traditions of the 
 past, took the yoke of legalism, the burden of con- 
 tinuous self-reproach, from the conscience of the 
 modern Jew, to lift him to the heights of vision of 
 a world-uniting prophetic religion. And here Amer- 
 ican Judaism soon scored another victory in rejec ing 
 the hypocritical maxim of European Jewry, which
 
 AMERICAN JUDAISM 203 
 
 made the rabbi the scapegoat of the congregation 
 by insisting that the dietary and the minute Sabbath 
 laws must be observed by proxy. Henceforth, 
 manliness, sincerity and the courage of conviction 
 became virtues prized in the American rabbi, and 
 the pulpit grew to be a liberalizing influence, creating 
 a generation of enlightened, yet truly loyal Jews and 
 Jewesses. These were the men and women that 
 formed the strength and vigor of our congregations 
 and Jewish fraternities, that started and achieved 
 the great work required at the time in the cause of 
 religious education and philanthropy. In humble 
 gratitude to God for the success and opulence that 
 fell to their lot, they reared the temples and glorious 
 institutions that have become the object of admira- 
 tion and pride in the eyes of the non- Jewish world, 
 and told our brethren in Europe that the ancient 
 God of Israel still lives in the heart of the trans- 
 Atlantic Jew. 
 
 And, as in building up our American institutions 
 and in fighting for American liberty and American 
 greatness, the Jew took a prominent part, as citizen 
 and as soldier, so did American Judaism, as em- 
 bodied in its men of progress and its leaders of Re- 
 form, uphold the cause of American freedom and 
 human equality 
 
 Still, as most of these pioneers spoke in the tongue 
 of their fatherland, and the progressive congregations 
 themselves were recruited from the German element, 
 Reform itself seemed to many but an exotic growth, 
 an imported plant which failed to strike deep roots 
 in the American soil.
 
 204 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 Then came, the man of profound practical insight 
 and of undaunted energy and perseverance, Isaac 
 M. Wise, the master-builder of American Judaism, 
 and ploughed the soil and cast the seed, tentatively 
 at first and amidst perplexing circumstances, often 
 opposed because his plan, which ripened but slowly, 
 was not understood. But his indomitable will and 
 his unique power as leader of men carried him on to 
 triumph and lasting success. Americanization of 
 the Jew was his watchword and guiding motive from 
 the very day he set foot on this free soil, and American 
 Judaism will forever be bound up with the Union 
 of American Hebrew Congregations, of which he 
 was the founder, and with the Hebrew Union College, 
 by which he became to America what Johanan ben 
 Zakkai, what Abba Areka became, at great turning- 
 points of Jewish history, the master, the teacher of 
 teachers, the harbinger of a new era of centralized 
 intellectual and religious progress for coming genera- 
 tions. At first the Union aimed at bringing all but 
 the ultra-orthodox congregations together for the 
 purpose of creating a center of Jewish learning for 
 the training of rabbis and the preservation of the 
 ancestral faith in the new country. In this spirit 
 of a common obligation and a common solidarity 
 of interest, the Union was founded in 1873 and the 
 College opened in 1875, and when on April 12, 1881, 
 the present edifice was dedicated by Dr. Wise, the 
 immortal founder and lifelong president of the 
 College, and by the venerable president of the Board, 
 Mr. Bernhard Bettmann, whom a benign Provi- 
 dence has spared to us to witness the further progress
 
 A MERICA N JUDA ISM 205 
 
 of the institution, there was but one progressive 
 American Israel and one Judaism, constituting, as 
 Dr. Wise .said, "neither a race nor a nation, but a 
 religious denomination," all realizing the need of 
 American-bred rabbis, because the generation born 
 on this soil is intensely American, the need of en- 
 lightened rabbis, for this is a liberal age and an en- 
 lightened country." "All lines of demarcation were 
 abandoned in the Union; all distinctions between 
 Orthodox and Reform were regarded as obsolete, in 
 view of the broad, liberal, humane and impartial 
 spirit which governed the institution." Still, the 
 conflicting views were but hushed, not harmonized, 
 and the friction both in theory and practice was sure 
 to come. The first graduates of the College, thor- 
 oughly imbued with the American spirit of inde- 
 pendence, men of eloquence and of bold initiative, 
 called to the pulpits of Einhorn, Hirsch and others, 
 became outspoken champions of liberalism, and en- 
 thusiastically espoused the principles voiced at the 
 Philadelphia and later at the Pittsburg conference. 
 So clouds gathered over the College, and when finally 
 the Pittsburgh platform of radical Reform, hailed 
 by Dr. Wise, who presided, as a "Jewish-American 
 declaration of independence," was adopted, there arose 
 a storm which, notwithstanding the resolutions of 
 perfect neutrality passed by the Union, divided 
 American Israel anew into two camps and created 
 the imperative demand for two Rabbinical schools, 
 one for the conservative congregations of the East, 
 the other for the progressive congregations, -then 
 still forming the great majority in the land. Yet far
 
 206 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 from doing harm, the storm cleared the atmosphere 
 and strengthened the cause of progress. It brought 
 about a fuller consolidation of the forces. 
 
 There is room, nay, a necessity for both schools, 
 and as it was said of the schools of Hillel and of 
 Shammai, we may say: "The words of the living 
 God are in both." Nor is there anything in the way 
 of their working together for the common good in 
 matters concerning the welfare and the needs of 
 American Israel, as is done at present in regard to 
 the English Bible translation. 
 
 In our camp the way was paved for the introduc- 
 tion of the Union Prayer Book, which, based on Ein- 
 horn's inimitable German work of genius, kindled 
 a new religious fervor in young and old, and became 
 a source of comfort, of elevation and inspiration to 
 tens of thousands to whom the old ritual remained 
 and will ever remain a sealed book. By adopting 
 the same, the well-nigh two hundred congregations 
 of the Union placed themselves on the side of Reform, 
 endorsing the fundamental principle that not in a 
 restoration of the Palestinian State and temple, but in 
 building up of a universal kingdom of righteousness 
 and peace, to which all lands and ages, all the great 
 ones on earth, contribute their share, will Israel's 
 mission be fulfilled. 
 
 For the Union the opportunity came somewhat 
 later to place itself on record as advocating the Re- 
 form principle, when, in 1898, in view of the Zion- 
 istic movement, it declared itself to be unalterably 
 opposed to political Zionism, and America to be the 
 home and the Zion of hope of the American Jew, 
 Judaism's mission being spiritual, not political.
 
 AMERICAN JUDAISM 207 
 
 Small and humble in its beginnings, the Union 
 has grown into a mighty instrument in promoting 
 and spreading the teachings of progressive Judaism 
 throughout the length and breadth of the land. 
 By so doing and encouraging systematic work in 
 behalf of religious education, by its synagog and school 
 extension work, and the generous support of other 
 educational efforts besides the College, it has strength- 
 ened the feeble, rallied the scattered, and created 
 centers of religious life in remote parts of the land. 
 It has become an efficient force in defending the cause 
 of the Jew and his civic rights the world over, to make 
 the name of the American Jew and of American 
 Judaism respected and honored near and far. 
 
 But the strength and soul of the Union, its life- 
 center, is the Hebrew Union College, the institution 
 of learning which since 1883 has sent forth 130 rabbis 
 to occupy most of the prominent pulpits in the land, 
 and to wield a powerful influence in the cause of the 
 religious education and social elevation of the Jew. 
 The Hebrew Union College has created a new type 
 of rabbi, a new standard for the Jewish ministry, 
 one more congenial to the American soil and more 
 responsive to the demands of a free, vigorous and 
 enlightened people. The vocation of the American 
 rabbi is to promote the personal, moral and spiritual 
 welfare of old and young, of the members of his flock 
 and the stranger at the gate, and manifest a deep 
 concern in all communal interests, in all the great 
 issues and problems of the times, instead of being 
 closeted up in his study. Judaism must be to him a 
 living truth, the hallowing of life, a battle for truth
 
 208 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 and social justice, and not mere archaeology and 
 ritualism, not dry learning and dead formalism. 
 
 While, therefore, we eagerly and reverently study 
 the past, deriving strength and light from the rich 
 storehouses of Jewish literature and history, inspira- 
 tion and fervor, truth and righteousness from Bible, 
 Talmud and Rabbinical writings, we do not foster 
 and cultivate that cold and colorless "Wissenschaft 
 des Judenihums" (science of Judaism), which fails 
 to thrill the heart and kindle the soul with the spark 
 from the live coal from God's empyrean, and is ob- 
 viously compatible also with skepticism, atheism 
 and hypocrisy. Like Heaven's manna, which was 
 meat for the old and pabulum for the young, ours must 
 be truth for head and heart, for sage and simple, for 
 Jew and Non-Jew, positive as well as progressive. We 
 want, above all, men of power and enthusiasm, 
 men of faith and of principle, men of the spirit, 
 fearless champions of righteousness, inspiring and 
 inspired leaders and workers. We want sincerity, 
 and therefore we draw no boundary lines for scien- 
 tific, critical and historical research, either in the 
 Biblical or the philosophical and Hellenistic realm, 
 to warn off the student, saying, "Touch me not!" 
 thereby to awaken doubt and dissent in the truth- 
 seeking youth. We apply rather the historical meth- 
 od, which shows the past in all its stages and phases 
 to be a continuous process of evolution and involution, 
 so as to enable us not only to understand and appre- 
 ciate the entire religious life of the various ages, 
 but also to arrive at a deeper comprehension of the 
 needs of our own time, and find the true justification
 
 AMERICAN JUDAISM 209 
 
 for, as well as the logical necessity of, altering our 
 forms of religion in view of life's altered conditions. 
 Nay, more. The very principle of development and 
 continual progress casts its searchlight on the remotest 
 past and the most distant future, to show the provi- 
 dential working of the Jewish genius as the creator 
 and promoter of the highest religious truth for man- 
 kind, and thus explain the world-mission of the Jew 
 and his relation to the two great world-religions, 
 which are flesh of his flesh and spirit of his spirit. 
 Particularly does a deeper insight into Prophetism 
 and Mosaism, such as we endeavor to obtain in our 
 studies, bring out in clear, ringing notes the message 
 of Judaism to our age, the message of social justice, 
 by which all the great vexatious problems of our in- 
 dustrial and social life are to find their ultimate 
 and peaceful solution. 
 
 Surely to minds thus trained, to hearts thus pre- 
 pared, the Jewish ministry must be more than a mere 
 profession, and Judaism more than a mere congrega- 
 tional and communal, scholastic or national concern. 
 It can be nothing less than a world-task, a power 
 working for righteousness, individual and social, 
 and for truth universal, to influence, to uplift and to 
 spiritualize all of life and the whole of humanity. 
 These are the views and traditions of the Hebrew 
 Union College, with its faculty representing eminent 
 Jewish scholarship, devoted to the cause of learning, 
 and its administration representing sound, practical 
 wisdom and whole-hearted loyalty to our time-hon- 
 ored faith. 
 
 American Judaism, as represented by the Union 
 and the Hebrew Union College, stands for loyalty
 
 210 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 as well as for liberalism, for faithfulness as well as 
 for freedom of thought, for positiveness as well as 
 for progressiveness in religion, for a profound Jewish 
 consciousness and Jewish spirituality as well as for 
 a genuine and strong American spirit and sentiment. 
 For ours is a religious and ethical truth that appeals 
 to all hearts, and is bound to win a world eager to 
 listen and learn. Ours is a religion of righteousness 
 that will have its share in the moulding of the life 
 and character of all men and classes in a land in which 
 the Jew's voice is heard as arbiter of peace, as states- 
 man and as educator and benefactor of men. To us, 
 therefore, liberal Judaism in Germany to-day looks 
 for inspiration and re-invigoration ; to us liberal 
 Judaism in England looks for leadership and leaders. 
 Will this Judaism of ours assume a different aspect 
 amidst the constant influx of new elements of Jewry 
 bringing along different views and traditions, which 
 tends to lead backward instead of forward, which, 
 instead of Americanizing the Jew, threatens to 
 Orientalize him? I, for one, have too much confidence 
 in our blessed land and its institutions to fear for the 
 future. The foundations of liberty and human 
 equality laid by the Puritan, the Quaker and the 
 Cavalier, by the framers of the American Constitu- 
 tion, will not be overthrown nor radically changed 
 by the millions that are yet to enter the land. Neither 
 will the American Jew and American Judaism be 
 Russianized, Hebraized or Orientalized by visionary 
 idealists. The process of fermentation, of assimila- 
 tion, will require years and decades, but as to the 
 outcome we need not fear. You may as well believe
 
 AMERICAN JUDAISM 211 
 
 that the Hudson will some day turn its waters back- 
 ward to the source as that American Judaism will 
 retrograde and despise a civilization that gave 
 humanity its individual and social liberty and equality 
 under the very influence of the Decalogue of Sinai. 
 
 All the greater is the task and the responsibility 
 of the Union and the Hebrew Union College as guar- 
 dian and banner-bearer of progressive American 
 Judaism, and you, the delegates of the Congregations, 
 must uphold and strengthen our arm. You have 
 reared the institution of Jewish learning in the 
 American spirit upon democratic principles, to render 
 it a light-house for the people and a power-house 
 of the spirit for congregations and leaders, and you 
 dare not rest until it stand forth a monument of 
 spiritual grandeur to reflect credit upon the entire 
 body of American Jews and rank in efficiency and 
 comprehensive learning alongside of any similar 
 American institution. 
 
 A few princely donations by men whose names 
 have become a household word in American Israel 
 encouraged us to begin erecting an edifice, such as 
 has been planned, more adequate to the needs and 
 demands of a large theological school than the one 
 we have had until now, but more is needed for its 
 completion and more for its maintenance. More 
 contributions are necessary to complete the I. M. 
 Wise fund, and many more scholarships than we 
 have for the encouragement of our students. Nor 
 can we ever expect to build up a true academic school 
 of Jewish learning in the modern sense of the word 
 without having chairs endowed for the Oriental
 
 212 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 languages and for Hellenistic literature, neither will 
 we be able fully to equip the modern rabbi with the 
 knowledge required for communal work without a 
 chair for Applied Sociology and Scientific Jewish 
 Philanthropy. 
 
 I am well aware of the fact that the gigantic 
 efforts made towards ameliorating the social condi- 
 tion of the thousands and tens of thousands of our 
 unfortunate brethren flocking to our shores from the 
 benighted East, push all other demands into the 
 background, and the stupendous work done by our 
 charitable and educational institutions in the various 
 cities of the land practically monopolizes the interest 
 and energy of our warm-hearted well-to-do Jews and 
 Jewesses. Still it is the soul and not the body, it 
 is Judaism and not the Jew that claims the first 
 consideration of the Union. Look at the motto 
 of the Union. Its seal bears as inscription the words 
 found on the first pages of the ancient Hebrew Prayer 
 Book: Talmud Torah Keneged Kullam. "None 
 of the great works of charity and benevolence done 
 for the benefit of suffering and struggling humanity 
 equals in value that which is done for the promotion 
 of the Torah, for the planting of the Jewish faith 
 and Jewish truth in the minds and hearts of the people," 
 It is the religious heritage of the Jew that trained 
 his soul to become leader in philanthropy and the 
 champion of righteousness. 
 
 The Torah is the tree of life, the fruitage of which 
 are the virtues of the Jew. 
 
 Look then, ye delegates and members of the 
 Union, as faithful guardians to the growing influence
 
 AMERICAN JUDAISM 213 
 
 and power of our temple of learning with the ark of 
 the Law in its Holy of Holies, the Hebrew Union 
 College, "the stronghold of free scientific research 
 and of religious progress." Make it a monument of 
 Jewish loyalty to the ancient faith, worthy of our 
 glorious country and of free American Israel. Let 
 Jewish scholarship in America, permeated by the 
 spirit of healthy progress and illumined by the light 
 of modern research, be one that enlists the attention 
 of the world. Let our educational institutions for 
 rabbis and for teachers challenge their kindred in 
 spiritual and intellectual power and efficiency, and 
 the cause of progressive American Judaism will be 
 assured and its future bright and great. 
 
 "When all thy children are taught of the Lord, 
 great will be the peace of thy children," the builders 
 of the temple of humanity's God. Amen.
 
 19. 
 
 MOSES AND JESUS.* 
 
 AT7HEN Moses prayed to God to show him His 
 * * ways, the Lord said: "I will make My glory 
 pass, and thou shalt behold Me, after I have passed 
 by thee, but My face shall not be seen." All begin- 
 nings of things are hidden from mortal eyes. No 
 eye ever saw the grass grow. Nor did any one ever 
 observe the awakening of self-consciousness in a 
 child. The origin of physical and mental life is 
 veiled. God says: Let there be light! and behold, 
 there is light. However much light modern investi- 
 gation has thrown upon the process of evolution of 
 matter and mind, creation and revelation remain 
 mysteries. As it was two thousand years ago, so 
 science is still puzzled by v the question: What came 
 first? The egg or the hen? The acorn or the oak? 
 The grain of sand or the hi^? Science, in order to 
 operate, must separate cause and effect, while actually 
 they form one organic whole. In history, too, the 
 problem vexes us: Are the great men, the master- 
 minds of the centuries, the products or the builders 
 of the ages? Is the genius the child or the father of 
 the idea or the movement it represents? Is music 
 the creation or the creator of Bach and Beethoven? 
 Did ' poetry produce Shakespeare, or Shakespeare 
 
 K 
 
 *Lecture delivered before the Beth El Congregation, Albany 
 in 1892.
 
 216 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 his poetry? Did art make a Phidias, a Michael 
 Angelo and a Raphael, or the men these arts? 
 
 There was a time when religion was looked upon 
 as the invention of priestcraft, and the great religious 
 leaders and law-givers as mere impostors. We 
 know better now. We have learned to recognize 
 religion as the strongest and deepest of all human 
 forces, as the one that cradled laws, arts and sciences, 
 as the guardian of morality and the chief factor of 
 civilization. But the prevailing tendency to skep- 
 ticism and criticism has, on the other hand, led us 
 to attribute everything to the successive work of 
 ages, and to underrate individual power. We are 
 inclined to reduce the lives of Moses and Jesus, not 
 to speak of the founders of other religious sytems, 
 to mere myths and fables, because they are wrapt in 
 legend. Yet is the great drama in which a powerful 
 nation here, and a world-conquering sect there, are 
 ushered into existence, really cleared and brightened 
 up by the mere striking off of such names as Moses 
 and Jesus from the pages of history? Is the great 
 historical fact of the appearance of a power like 
 Judaism and like Christianity better accounted for 
 by unknown impersonal factors than by known per- 
 sonal forces? The more I ponder on the history of 
 Moses and Jesus in connection with the two great 
 religions of which each forms the central figure, the 
 more does the conviction take hold of me that the 
 life and teaching of each not only reflected, but 
 actually determined and embodied the character, 
 the aims and ideals of their followers to an eminent 
 degree. Their own principles became characteristic
 
 MOSES AND JESUS 217 
 
 types of the religions they represent, and because 
 these principles run in convergent lines, they could 
 not avoid colliding with one another, while, in fact, 
 they must merge into one another and complete 
 each other, as they have grown from one and the same 
 root. And only in the same measure as a mutual 
 understanding is reached between them, are mutual 
 recognition and respect and a final reconciliation 
 between Jew and Christian made possible. 
 
 I. 
 
 Who is Moses, around whose banner we, the 
 progressive sons of the nineteenth century, are stil 
 to rally, and whose law we must, under a thousand- 
 fold martyrdom, if it needs be, in the midst of a hostile 
 world, forever uphold? Egypt's unlocked hierogly- 
 phical treasures furnish no glimpse of him and his 
 doings. The monuments of King Rameses II. and 
 Menephtha, his contemporaries, show no trace of 
 the Hebrew exodus with its miraculous events. The 
 annalists are perfectly silent concerning Jahveh and 
 his servants. Exactly as the law of gravitation by 
 which Earth and Neptune are bound to the solar 
 orb, and this again to a larger system of stars, 
 flashed upon the mind of Isaac Newton to enlighten 
 for him the universe, so did the law of Sinai, by 
 which nations are freed from thraldom and the 
 eternal right of man is established, beam upon the 
 mind of the Hebrew shepherd. Explain it as you 
 may, a spark of the divine fire of righteousness fell 
 upon the soul of Moses to dispel for him the world's
 
 218 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 darkness. The Decalogue may be the successive 
 work of generations; Moses was -th,e. first to give 
 voice to the call: "I am the Lord who leadeth out of 
 the house of bondage." 
 
 Did he then, steal the name Jahveh out of the 
 mysteries of the Egyptian priesthood, as has been 
 claimed? Or was it transferred from some obscure 
 corner of Arabia by some unknown seer to Israel's 
 sanctuaries, as recent critics maintain? The idea is 
 so preposterous, that one wonders how wise men 
 could seriously express it. On the contrary, if any- 
 thing, Jahveh, the God of Abraham, of Moses and 
 of Elijah, strikes us as being rather too realistic, too 
 natural a power. Dwelling on the heights of Sinai, 
 enwrapt in pillars of fire and smoke, sending forth 
 hail and stormwind to shake the earth, the air and 
 the water with the powers of His awful majesty, 
 He still had in those days all the qualities of a Be- 
 douin Deity ruling the vast desert. However, the 
 spiritual insight of Moses lifted Sinai to sublimer 
 heights. His religious genius invested the thunder, 
 the lightning and whirlwind of Jahveh with the sacred 
 purpose of purging the world of its wrong in order to 
 establish righteousness. Earth assumed a new aspect, 
 when the frown or smile of heaven betokened the 
 wrath or the pleasure of a God of Justice. The 
 wisdom and skill of the priests on the Nile were set 
 to naught by the plain shepherd of Midian who, 
 without title and mandate from their schools, brought 
 a new message from the great Ruler of heaven. How 
 did all the gods of proud Egypt crouch and tremble 
 before the great God of Israel whose shield was
 
 MOSES AND JESUS 219 
 
 righteousness, whose seal truth, whose essence the 
 all-devouring fire of holiness! All their gigantic 
 temples, obelisks and pyramids, all the colossal 
 structures of art and science dotting Egypt from 
 sea to cataract, totter and tumble as His hand touches, 
 as His eye scans them, since they are built on injustice, 
 on oppression. 
 
 Yes, there is a deep inward relationship, i a great 
 moral affinity between God and His prophet, There 
 is a fire in Moses' bosom, mighty and deep as in a 
 glowing yet slumbering volcano, the top of which is 
 all serene and bright with smiling landscapes, while 
 suddenly it pours forth its devouring streams of lava, 
 to spread terror round about. Moses' soul is set 
 ablaze with the holy wrath of justice at the sight of 
 violence and innocent suffering to avenge the wrong 
 on the evil-doer, while his heart reaches forth in tender 
 compassionate love to vindicate the right of the 
 oppressed. Thus is Jahveh a jealous God, who toler- 
 ates no wrong. His fire consumes injustice and 
 falsehood, while righteousness is at the core. There 
 is something hard as a rock and unyielding like 
 granite in the character of Moses, yet only he who 
 says: "Let the heavens fall, but justice prevail!" is 
 the man to unhinge a world of cruel wickedness and 
 folly, and rebuild it on the adamantine foundations 
 of the right and the good. 
 
 There is a sternness and rigidity in the Hebrew 
 Scriptures that often startles and scares the soft- 
 hearted, yet this was the forge in which the Jewish 
 character was to be formed, and the laws made, that 
 were to outlast the ages. This was the quarry out
 
 220 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 of which "pyramids of men" were built; this the chisel 
 with which men were carved, endowed with a heroism 
 that defies death. 
 
 In the plain of Babylonia palaces have been 
 unearthed, each brick of which has the name of King 
 Nebuchadnezzar, its builder, engraved on it. So does 
 every single law in the Mosaic books, no matter 
 when they were written, bear the stamp of that 
 mind which liberated the Hebrew slaves by the prin- 
 ciple of justice, saying: "Yield not! Swerve not! 
 Right must triumph over every wrong!" Hearken 
 to the awe-inspiring threats of the Pentateuch! 
 Read the fulminant and fury-lashed appeals of the 
 prophets! Or peruse the minute statutes of Talmud- 
 ical casuistry. They are all born of the same spirit 
 of unbending righteousness, of unflinching truth. 
 The sum and substance of Judaism is: As God's eyes 
 cannot behold evil, so banish all injustice from His 
 sight. Stand up in defence of the right, be it that of 
 the high or the low-born, of the rich or the poor, the 
 free or the slave, the native or the stranger! Yield 
 not, for justice is God's. Brook no sin. Bad means 
 can never be justified by good ends. There is for- 
 giveness and repentance for sinners, but not until 
 the wrong has been undone; for the fruit of sin is 
 death, and Jahveh is the God of life. 
 
 And behold the people moulded by the grea 
 law-giver! What are the classic people of Hellas 
 with their master-works of art and science, the 
 Roman with his law, the Chaldean with his astronomy, 
 and all the great nations of history with their glorious 
 achievements compared with the insignificant, the
 
 MOSES AND JESUS 221 
 
 despised and persecuted yet unyielding Jew? In- 
 destructible like Sinai, he seems to be hewn out of 
 the rock. While the rest furnished the framework, 
 the modes of culture, the followers of Moses offered 
 the basis,- the essence, the law of conduct. Men 
 can live without letters, without art and science, 
 without comfort and beauty, but not as men without 
 justice and goodness. And what is the secret of this 
 wonderful endurance of the Jew, his marvelous power 
 of resistance? The souls of all coming generations 
 partook in the oath of the covenant of Sinai, say the 
 rabbis. Indeed, there is a spark of that fire of Moses 
 in every Jew, to make him defy the persecutor and 
 brave the enticer. The baptismal fount only worked, 
 according to Leroy Beaulieu, by the law of natural 
 selection to make the rest of the Jews the firmer 
 and more steadfast. Sneer as much as you may at 
 those sharply cut features of the Hebrew, they 
 betoken resistance to the last. Light-hearted au- 
 diences may applaud Portia and vilify Shylock. 
 If, however, heroic wrestling with injustice deserves 
 the prize, Shylock must receive our homage. The 
 laws of Venice are wrong, and the Jew is right. Nor 
 is the Jew satisfied with a bill drawn on the world 
 beyond the grave. This life of man here on earth 
 must turn out right. Justice must hold sway first, 
 then love and peace can rei^i not before. From 
 Isaiah to Cremieux and Lasker, the Jews have been 
 God's champions of Justice and Truth. 
 
 And glance over the march of centuries. Watch 
 the path of history. The trumpet blasts of Sinai, 
 announcing Jahveh's Day of Judgment, sounded
 
 222 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 the dirge over antiquity's fall and rung in the era of 
 Christianity. Only by an appeal from the New 
 Testament to the Old, from Jesus to Moses, did 
 Luther, Calvin and Cromwell succeed in combating 
 and defeating Papal tyranny. The tempests and 
 thunders of Mount Horeb ushered in the Reformation, 
 the Revolution, the American Declaration of Inde- 
 pendence, the modern era of liberty. 
 
 There is a majestic grandeur in the statue of 
 Moses created by the chisel of Michael Angelo. His 
 every muscle and nerve from head to foot betray a 
 resolute firmness of will and clearness of purpose, 
 which seem to inspire us with confidence, telling us 
 to safely commit the destinies of mankind to these 
 arms that carry the tablets of the law, to those 
 shoulders that bear that lofty head protuberant with 
 light. And yet Moses died with the land of promise 
 unreached before him. He claimed no perfection, 
 no infallibility, no absolute goodness or holiness. 
 He was but the servant of the Most High, and died, 
 leaving his work to be continued and finished by all 
 the coming generations. 
 
 II. 
 
 Who, on the other hand, is Jesus, the central figure 
 of the New Testament, the divine ideal of the Chris- 
 tian? We shall leave aside the story of the cruci- 
 fixion, the tragic end of Jesus, with which Christianity 
 began its course. Never would the name of Jesus 
 have been uttered by the Jews with any but reveren- 
 tial admiration, had the guilt and the curse of his
 
 MOSES AND JESUS 223 
 
 murder not been rlung upon them, his own kinsmen, 
 at a time when it was deemed wise policy to exonerate 
 the Roman prefect and his soldiers from the crime. 
 We shudder at the thought of the millions that fell 
 as victims to this slanderous charge; but we do not 
 blame Jesus for the cruelties perpetrated in his name. 
 Neither shall we consider Jesus as a performer of 
 miracles, in which quality alone, to judge from 
 Rabbinical tradition, he left a lasting impression 
 on the generality of Jews. These wondrous cures 
 formed the specialty of the entire class of Essenes, 
 a sect of saintly hermits practising baptism and 
 invocations of the Holy Ghost, from whom the car- 
 penter's son of Nazareth emanated. 
 
 We are exclusively concerned here with the great 
 popular teacher of Galilee, the preacher of the 
 Sermon on the Mount, the promulgator of a new 
 covenant, of a new law of love, as is the Christian 
 claim. And there behold the sweet silver-tongued 
 prophet of the people, as he walks among the un- 
 taught and forsaken, attracting the crowds by his 
 exquisite parables and bringing them the cheering 
 message of the All-loving Father in heaven. He moves 
 among sinners saying, "I am the good shepherd who 
 leaves the ninety-nine sheep in the fold, to seek the 
 one that has gone astray in order to lead it back." 
 He takes his seat among the forlorn and outcasts 
 saying, "Not the healthy need the physician, but the 
 sick." Listen to him as he teaches, "Be not angry 
 with thy brother! Resist not evil! Hate not! Love 
 your enemies; bless them that curse you, and do good 
 to them that hate you." Or watch him, as he takes
 
 224 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 a little child and, putting it in the midst of the 
 crowd, says, "Be like little children, and you are not 
 far from the kingdom of heaven." Seeing a woman 
 dragged along to meet her punishment on the charge 
 of adultery, he cries out, "Let him that is without 
 guilt cast the first stone!" and then tells the fallen 
 one, "Go thou, and sin no more!" There is a wonderful 
 music in that voice, an undefinable grace about the 
 serene face. There is a fascinating charm about every 
 word that drops from those benign lips. 
 
 And again how bold and crushing does his lan- 
 guage become when, turning to the haughty aristo- 
 cracy, he exclaims, "It' is easier for a camel to go 
 through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to 
 enter the kingdom of heaven," or when speaking of 
 unlawful desires of the flesh, he says, "If thy eye 
 offend thee, pluck it out! If thy hand offend thee, 
 cut it off. It is better for thee that one part of thy 
 body should perish than that thy whole body should 
 be cast into hell." 
 
 There is a ring of true greatness in all these words. 
 We need not wonder, if the multitude followed with 
 ardor and admiration the young master who spoke 
 thus differently from all the rest, eager to offer him 
 the highest crown within the gift of the Jew, the 
 diadem of Messiahship which he bought at the 
 price of his life. 
 
 Yet does this holy man with all his heart-winning 
 persuasiveness and touching humanity really surpass 
 the imposing nature of Moses? Does the prophet 
 of the New Testament eclipse the creative genius 
 of the Old? It is like comparing a sweet flower to
 
 MOSES AND JESUS 225 
 
 a mighty oak, the slender steeple to the massive 
 structure upon which it is reared. 
 
 Naturally enough did the twelve centuries which 
 elapsed after Moses elevate the moral status of the 
 people, ennoble their ethical and spiritualize their 
 religious views. Most of the teachings ascribed to 
 Jesus by the New Testament writers were current 
 among the Essenes and in the Pharisean schools. 
 The Golden Rule, the so-called Lord's Prayer, the 
 greater part of the Sermon on the Mount are derived 
 from other sources. In fact, half of what is attributed 
 to Jesus contradicts the other half of what he is re- 
 ported to have said. For if he really placed himself 
 on the shoulders of Moses, saying, "I have not come 
 to change one iota of the law; I am not come to 
 destroy, but to fulfill," he could not well have dreamt 
 of antagonizing either the Sabbath or the temple. 
 And if he dared refuse to cure a heathen woman, 
 saying, "It is not meet to cast the bread to the dogs," 
 his was not even the broad-heartedness of a Hillel 
 and Philo whose religion of love knew no confines 
 of race or sect. 
 
 The greatness of Jesus lay in that he lent new 
 grandeur to humility, in that he broke down the 
 barriers of the school and brought the wisdom of 
 life from the learned home to the lowliest, thus 
 striking the keynote of humanity. He actually 
 became the redeemer of the poor, the friend of the 
 cheerless, the comforter of the woe-stricken. He 
 lent, both through his life and through his death as 
 the Man of Sorrow, a deeper meaning, a more solemn 
 pathos to suffering, sickness and sin. Life received
 
 226 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 from him a new holiness, a greater inspiration. And 
 as he went forth to seek and provide for the lost 
 sheep in Israel, so did the Church founded on his 
 name go forth to redeem the poverty stricken, the 
 ignorant and the neglected, all the lower classes of 
 society. Christianity was the gospel for the poor 
 and the despised. Hence all the works of love, 
 charity and philanthropy, fostered among the Jews, 
 found under the cross a new powerful impetus, a 
 larger, world-wide scope. 
 
 But the very virtue of the teaching, of the char- 
 acter and life of Jesus was also his weakness. He 
 was of that type of idealists that appeal to the 
 sentiments, but overlook the demands of real life. 
 Considering the terrible catastrophe that soon 
 afterwards befell Judea and was already fast approach- 
 ing, we are amazed at the almost idyllic life the 
 Nazarene saint passes in the midst of his followers 
 on the beautiful lake of Gennesareth, perfectly listless 
 and unconcerned, while a world around him sinks 
 into ruin. The sentiments expressed by him remind 
 us of a recluse waiting and praying for the millenium 
 of peace, while the shocks and earthquakes of war 
 resound in the distance. It is the political apathy of 
 the Essene, which, in the face of the boiling wrath 
 of the patriots, prompts the cool advice: "Render 
 unto Caesar what is Caesar's, and unto God what is 
 God's. 'Resist not- the Evil One\' for the Kingdom of 
 God is at hand!" This is the substance of the entire 
 New Testament. "Yield, rather than assert your 
 right! Swear not! Struggle not! Abandon all 
 worldly care and ambition. Renounce all possession
 
 MOSES AND JESUS 227 
 
 and domestic bliss! The God who clothes the lilies 
 in the field will also provide for you!" This was the 
 road straightway to the cloister and the nunnery, 
 to world-contempt, to misanthropy and asceticism, 
 to a double code of ethics, one for the layman and 
 another for the monk. 
 
 This principle of non-resistance influenced and 
 determined the entire course of Christianity. While 
 Jesus the Christ was, after the visions of his resur- 
 rection, expected to come down from the clouds with 
 his angelic host, to redeem his saints, the new sect 
 surrendered the world to the Evil One. "Resist 
 not!" being the maxim, passion, vice and ignorance 
 speedily took hold of the Church, and the sword 
 in the hands of the former persecuted made them 
 persecutors. Resist not! was the principle, and 
 consequently justice had to yield to violence, and 
 truth to pagan falsehood and folly. Error and wicked- 
 ness forced their way into the council and up to the 
 throne, and the mild figure of Jesus was transferred 
 to ideal heights beyond the reach of worldly pursuit. 
 He assumed now the face of a Syrian, then of a 
 Greek, and later on that of a barbarian god, and his 
 name shielded all possible wrong. 
 
 Justice and truth are the foundations of God's 
 throne: Christ's the Christian God's is love, but 
 rather lacking in justice and truth. Jesus' strong side 
 was the heart, the sentiment. And so did Christianity 
 deepen the pathos, enrich the emotional side of life. 
 By her care for the sick and the suffering, by her 
 cultivation of art, of music, of painting, the entire 
 soul-life of man was unfolded and refined by the
 
 228 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 Church as by no, other sect. Yet when after the 
 centuries of medieval barbarism and despotism, 
 freedom of thought and action was to be regained 
 for Europe, when the State, when science and in- 
 dustrial independence had to be built up, Sinai 
 with its Decalogue offered a safer basis than did 
 Calvary with its beatitudes. The idealism of Jesus 
 was, like any other Utopian system, like communism 
 and mysticism, the vision of a time when the wolf 
 and the lamb would pasture together in peace, not 
 the programme of a life of struggle and strife, full 
 of contrasts such as ours is. 
 
 Moses, too, spent forty days on the heights of 
 Sinai immersed in contemplation, but he stepped 
 down with his law to elevate and educate his people 
 for their high mission of righteousness and truth. 
 For religion is not a dreamland, a mere realm of 
 vision, a hope for a world to come. It is the up- 
 building of divine life in all its realities here on 
 earth. It is the indwelling of God in man. Jesus 
 represents the highest ideal of the Christian; Moses 
 points to a higher type of manhood. Neither Sjnai 
 nor Golgotha, but Zion, as the goal of all the nations 
 in history, is the focus and goal of united humanity 
 Did Christianity indeed enshrine and embody love, 
 the feminine element of the world? Judaism first 
 insists on, and battles for, righteousness and truth. 
 Duty, the sterner part of life, is also the stronger and 
 more indispensable one. Still we believe that, as has 
 recently been so well said, the two together yield 
 the perfect ideal; their unity will make humanity 
 whole and free. Amen.
 
 20. 
 
 THE HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT OF 
 JEWISH CHARITY.* 
 
 /CHARITY from the Latin Caritas is display of 
 ^^ love and sympathy by man towards man. 
 It is accordingly to be viewed as a trait of humanity, 
 as the Greek word philanthropy also suggests. This 
 is exactly true to a certain extent. The history of 
 man is essentially the history of benevolence. While 
 the brute does not extend its compassion beyond 
 the maternal care for its young, and the sight of 
 suffering and sickness excites disgust and antipathy 
 in the animal's breast rather than pity and helpful 
 love, man by ties of compassionate tenderness and 
 sympathy feels drawn towards the ailing and grief- 
 stricken. The appeal of the helpless and forsaken 
 for protection finds a resonance in the breast of the 
 fiercest savage to make him cast aside his javelin 
 and boomerang to receive the suppliant stranger 
 as brother. Read the inscriptions on Egyptian tombs 
 of 5,000 years ago, and you find extolled in glowing 
 praise the virtue of kindness to the homeless and 
 fatherless. So did the people of Athens hold in high 
 esteem that liberal-hearted citizen of theirs who in 
 time of want lavishly showered his bounties upon 
 the people, saying: "I would rather be poor than 
 
 *Paper read before the Jewish Chautauqua Assembly, July 26, 
 1903.
 
 230 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 spend all my possessions upon myself." Also Rome 
 with her insatiable oppressions and wars of con- 
 quests, presents as redeeming features those immense 
 distributions of gold and corn for the relief of the 
 pressing need of the populace that made it the willing 
 slave of the wealthy, not to speak of the large bequests 
 made by the emperors for the sheltering of waifs 
 and invalid soldiers. Nor can an impartial seeker 
 after truth afford to ignore the sweet and tender 
 lessons of sympathy and beneficence uttered by 
 the Hindoo prince Gautama Buddha, whose hundreds 
 of millions of adherents have for the last twenty-five 
 hundred years spent their best efforts upon alleviating 
 the pain and suffering of their fellow-creatures, and 
 who certainly were the first in erecting hospitals for 
 the sick. You see, I am far from claiming charity 
 to be an exclusively Jewish virtue. Nor do I go to 
 Lecky's History of European Morals for the support of 
 my view that charity is simply a human characteristic. 
 I read it in my Bible, where not only the most ex- 
 quisite sentiments regarding compassionate love for 
 human kinship, whether slave or stranger, are put 
 into the mouth of the Arabian shepherd-prince Job 
 (in Ch. xxxiv), but where a heathen woman, who 
 follows the maternal impulse of her womanly soul, 
 the Egyptian princess, is introduced as the guardian- 
 angel of Israel's greatest man, of Moses the law- 
 giver. And yet I speak, without bias, of charity as 
 a specific Jewish imperative. It was the Jewish law 
 that made charity a human obligation. It was the 
 genius of the Jewish people that invested benevolence 
 with the sense of duty to render it a divine command.
 
 DEVELOPMENT OF JEWISH CHARITY 231 
 
 All the large-hearted munificence bestowed upon the 
 masses by Greek or Roman men of wealth was at 
 best a spontaneous act of magnanimity which 
 benefited the giver rather than the receiver; it 
 elevated the high born who gave, and impoverished 
 or degraded the low-born who took. Nor did the 
 benevolence taught by Buddha help and uplift the 
 down-trodden and unfortunate. In his opinion 
 life itself is a misfortune. In the common misery 
 of existence there was neither joy nor blessing in the 
 bestowal of charity, and the ailing brute evoked tears 
 of sympathy, or claimed a place in the hospital as 
 much as helpless man. It was the Jewish law-giver, 
 bard and prophet that disclosed the divine nature 
 of charity, giving it a scope commensurate with the 
 progress of man; and it is the purpose of this paper 
 to outline its history throughout the ages in life and 
 literature, in laws and institutions. 
 
 In doing this I shall not follow the traditional 
 view which regards as prime source and factor of 
 Jewish charity the Mosaic law enjoining the people 
 to leave the forgotten sheaves and the corners of the 
 field to the poor widow and fatherless. Such customs 
 rest upon unwritten laws, before they are embodied 
 in the code of law. Laws and customs originate not 
 in the head of priest, prophet and sage, but among an 
 approving multitude whose consensus sanctions them 
 and gives them the divine stamp of a higher origin. 
 
 Thus the Bible gives us, so to say, a photographic 
 picture of the way the law of charity was first spelled 
 forth. The owners of fields, of vineyards and olive 
 trees are seen holding their harvests and carrying
 
 232 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 home wagons full of sheaves of wheat, of grapes and 
 olives, while the poor, the widows and fatherless 
 look on with hungry eyes and starving souls. But 
 there are a number of sheaves that have been dropped 
 on the way, or single grapes and olives still hanging 
 on the stalks or trees that have been overlooked, 
 and the poor creatures wait with eagerness for the 
 moment when they may seize them and eat them, or 
 carry them home to their dear ones. As they attempt 
 to do so, behold, there the heavy hands of the har- 
 vesters fall upon them and drive them off with furious 
 lashes. Instantly one of tenderer soul steps forth 
 and stays his fellow-harvesters saying: It is not 
 proper to deny one of these pitiable people the 
 little privilege they claim in taking these stray sheaves 
 and single grapes and olives. And henceforth it 
 became customary among the Hebrews to leave the 
 stray sheaves and grapes to the needy. But we are 
 in the position of tracing the custom of leaving the 
 corners of the fields to the poor still further. Among 
 the old Teutons the last crops of the harvest were 
 altogether sacred to the god of fertility, and they 
 left them untouched and burned them as a sacrifice 
 under many strange pagan rites. Similar customs 
 have recently been found also among Semitic tribes. 
 The fact is that individual ownership was in primi- 
 tive times regarded as an attempt to rob the gods of 
 their property for which some atoning sacrifice seemed 
 necessary. How much sweeter and saner, then, was 
 the Hebrew view which consecrated the corners of 
 the field to the poor, as the people to be befriended 
 in the name of God, the Giver of all good!
 
 DEVELOPMENT OF JEWISH CHARITY 233 
 
 Nor was this the only way the Hebrew farmers 
 learned to befriend the poor and forsaken. It being 
 the most natural thing in the world to have the 
 poor as bystanders when the rich held their harvest 
 festivals amidst great rejoicing. Hebrew custom made 
 it a law to invite the homeless and fatherless to par- 
 ticipate in these feasts and gladden their hearts also. 
 And as during the former shepherd life, both the first- 
 lings and the tenth of the yearly produce of the flocks 
 and the herds were considered as holy to the God 
 who opens the womb, so was the tenth of the produce 
 of the fields also sacred to God, not only to be eaten 
 at the sanctuary, but to be shared with by, or handed 
 over altogether every second or third year, either to 
 the poor Levite or to the stranger, the widow and 
 fatherless. Nor was this all. As the number seven 
 was a holy number among all Semite tribes by which 
 covenant oaths were taken, so was the seventh 
 day, the seventh month, the seventh year and 
 the Jubilee year, that is the half year following 
 the seven times seventh year, made a season of re- 
 adjustment of all inadequacies of social life, when 
 master and servant, rich and poor, should be made 
 to feel that all have an equal claim upon life's gifts. 
 And so were these years devoted to the supply of 
 the wants of the poor by the release of all claims 
 of the rich upon landed property or slaves. The 
 underlying thought of all these practices was dictated 
 by that spirit of charity so peculiar to the tender- 
 hearted shepherd race, the type of which was Rebecca 
 with her compassionate love for the fatigued fellow- 
 creatures, man or brute, and which resented as
 
 234 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 inhuman the unkindness of a people who, like Edom 
 and Moab, would refuse passing caravans bread and 
 water out of their store of plenty. 
 
 It is this inborn pastoral kindness that gave rise 
 to all these customs, before they were embodied in 
 any code of law, and it is just because the Abraham 
 spirit of human tenderness and compassion permeated 
 the prophets, to whom the shepherd ideal of kindness 
 and simplicity remained dear and sacred, that they 
 became the God-chosen champions of a justice which 
 laid all the stress on the rights and the claims of the 
 poor and the feeble, as against their wealthy and 
 powerful oppressors. It was the unwritten law 
 of morality and custom, the ancient and deep- 
 rooted practice of the shepherd race, ever anxious 
 to take care of the suffering and famishing creature, 
 to which these matchless defenders of the down- 
 trodden appealed, when they insisted that to serve 
 God is to aid His pensioners, the needy and forsaken, 
 and that the sight of distress should be the divine 
 summons to come to the rescue. Thus utterance was 
 given to the ethical view that the naked found on the 
 street has a claim upon our garment, until he is 
 clothed; the hungry upon our bread, until his hunger 
 is stilled; the one exposed to storm and cold without 
 shelter upon our own protecting roof, until he is 
 brought into safety. In other words, that feeling of 
 sympathy with those in want which moves more 
 or less every human heart, prompting it to helpfulness, 
 has been developed by the genius of the Jew, owing 
 to his patriarchial traditions, into a deep and firm 
 sense of duty, into a law of social righteousness, so
 
 DEVELOPMENT OF JEWISH CHARITY 235 
 
 that every one who has, should be impressed with 
 the feeling of responsibility for the weal and woe of 
 him who has not. 
 
 And here lies the essential difference between the 
 Mosaic and every other code of law. Take that now 
 so famous code of Hamurabi, so interesting and so 
 instructive as being the oldest known in history. It is 
 the embodiment of the principle that might consti- 
 stutes right. It has no room for helping love. Prop- 
 erty is valued, not personality. Man is held in 
 bondage for every piece of property not returned. 
 Exactly the same view is taken of debt in ancient 
 Roman law. Shylock's pound of flesh is taken from 
 the Twelve Tablets of Rome. It is the Jewish 
 law that recognizes the principle of mercy as an 
 element of justice. It is in the name of the Lord who 
 is gracious, that the raiment given as a pledge is to 
 be returned to the owner when needed for his personal 
 comfort. "Return the pledge when the sun goes 
 down that he (the poor who owns it) may sleep in 
 his raiment and bless thee, and it shall be righteous- 
 ness unto thee before the Lord thy God." The whole 
 relation of man to man is to be established on mutual 
 sympathy and forbearance. Hence ordinances occur 
 such as these: "If thy brother be waxen poor and 
 fallen in decay with thee, then thou shalt relieve 
 him, whether he be a stranger or a sojourner, that he 
 may live with thee." During the Biblical time 
 they had no organized system of relief, and so 
 people in dire want sold themselves of their own 
 accord as slaves; but then the Mosaic law urged 
 kind treatment of the victim of such conditions, and
 
 236 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 did everything to prevent such servitude as contra- 
 dictory of the principles of equality of men before 
 God. It laid down two fundamental principles of 
 charity. First, every possession involves an obliga- 
 tion. God, as the Giver of all blessings, as the actual 
 Owner of the land, claims certain portions of His 
 gifts, part of the annual produce, for those in need. 
 "For the poor shall never cease out of the land, there- 
 fore, I command thee, saying: Thou shalt open 
 thine hand wide unto thy brother, thy poor and thy 
 needy, in thy land." In insisting, therefore, that 
 on every occasion of joy and thanksgiving for the 
 bounties of heaven, the poor should be remembered, 
 the law views charity as a legal assessment of the 
 rich, and not merely as a spontaneous act of generosity 
 left to individuals who may, and may not, discharge 
 their duty towards their fellow beings. Of course, 
 it still remains a free-will offering. R. Akiba, when 
 asked by a Roman general: "Why does your God 
 who loves the needy not provide for their support 
 himself," answered, "God, the Father of both rich 
 and poor, wants the one to help the other, so as to 
 make the world a household of love." And there is 
 a second fundamental principle of charity expressed 
 in the law, and this is that of personal responsibility. 
 The cry of the distressed is an appeal which must 
 find a response in the heart of the fortunate, or else 
 He who executes the judgment of the fatherless and 
 the widow, will hear it and punish those that remain 
 deaf to the call of duty. The poor are My people, 
 says God; they stand under God's special protection. 
 "He that hath pity unto the poor lendeth unto the
 
 DEVELOPMENT OF JEWISH CHARITY 237 
 
 Lord." It is especially this view of life which makes 
 the strong bear with the weak, and the prosperous 
 provide for the unfortunate a view entirely foreign 
 to pagan thought which changed the moral aspect 
 of the world. It did not merely, as is stated by Chris- 
 tian writers, render the Mosaic poor laws fundamental 
 parts of the Christian State and of Christian civiliza- 
 tion, but it created that system of organized charity, 
 those institutions of benevolence to which the Chris- 
 tian Church owes her wondrous triumphs throughout 
 the centuries, and which existed in Jewry long before 
 the rise of Christianity, though not as fully developed 
 and as richly endowed as they were, when Roman 
 opulence and power furnished the Church with the 
 means to achieve her grand and far-reaching works 
 of redeeming love. 
 
 It is this chapter of Jewish history about which 
 the greatest errors prevail, owing to the fact that 
 Christian writers on the subject either had no access 
 to Jewish sources, even if they were free from preju- 
 dice, or they took no notice of the Rabbinical writ- 
 ings, taking it for granted that it was Christianity 
 which, according to their preconceived notion, re- 
 vealed to the world, the principle of love, while Juda- 
 ism is and ever was under the bondage of the law, 
 from which the New Testament Christ alone liber- 
 ated the world. 
 
 The rabbis have two words for charity. The one 
 is "Zedakah," the practice of righteousness which 
 consists in the giving of money to provide for the 
 immediate needs of the poor; the other is Gemilut 
 Hasadim, the bestowal of kindness which includes the
 
 238 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 elements of personal helpfulness. This again the old 
 Hasidim, the pious ones whose chief occupation was the 
 practice of charity, divided into seven or ten branches: 
 the feeding of the hungry and giving the thirsty 
 to drink; the clothing of the naked; the visiting of 
 the sick; the burying of the dead; the ransoming of 
 the captives; the educating of the fatherless, and 
 providing poor maidens with dowries, so as to enable 
 them to marry. All those who know something of 
 old Jewish life are acquainted with the fact that 
 every large Jewish community had various associa- 
 tions, fraternities and sisterhoods hebrot who de- 
 voted their time to these works of benevolence, 
 such as made a specialty of one of these. Now the 
 general belief is that these associations or hebrot 
 whose historic records reach back only a few hun- 
 dred years, were called into existence only during the 
 middle ages, and often the assertion has been made 
 also by Jewish scholars that hospitals and asylums 
 are institutions which the Jews copied from their 
 Christian surroundings. This is not so. As early 
 as the third century B. C. E., Simon the Just, one of 
 the last of the Men of the Great Synagogue, declared 
 that the moral welfare of the world rests upon three 
 things; upon an organized system of instruction 
 in the Law, upon organized worship and upon an 
 organized system of charity and benevolence. Wher- 
 ever Jews settled in sufficiently large numbers and 
 that was wherever commerce offered them oppor- 
 tunities, along the whole Mediterranean Sea, ever 
 since the time of Alexander the Great there sprang 
 up synagogues as centers of worship, of religious
 
 DEVELOPMENT OF JEWISH CHARITY 239 
 
 instruction and of practical charity. They were prob- 
 ably built by those devotees of piety and love, known 
 as Essenes, who traveled far and wide as disciples of 
 Moses and followers of the example of Abraham and 
 other reputed saints of a remote antiquity in doing 
 the work of love mercy to win their fellow-creat- 
 ures for God, the universal Father whose ways 
 are mercy and kindness. I cannot go into detail, 
 but there are ample proofs given in Talmud and 
 Midrash, showing how these Essene brother- 
 hoods, from whose ranks Jesus and his early fol- 
 lowers emerged, pursued and developed the whole 
 plan of systematic relief, which the Church after- 
 wards adopted. In fact, it may be stated without 
 fear of challenge that whatever was taught and 
 practised in the New Testament circles by Jesus and 
 his disciples in regard to charity, has been taken over 
 from Judaism. Let me illustrate by two instances: 
 In Matthew xxv, 31-46, the following words are 
 put into the mouth of Jesus: "When the Son of 
 Man that is the Messiah shall come in his glory 
 and all the holy angels with him, and he shall sit 
 upon the throne to judge the people and separate 
 the lambs that is the righteous from the goats, 
 placing the lambs to his right, and the goats that 
 is the unrighteous to the left, thus shall the Messiah 
 say unto them on his right hand: 'Come ye blessed 
 of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you 
 from the foundation of the world. For I was hungered, 
 and ye gave me meat; I was thirsty, and ye gave me 
 drink. I was a stranger, and ye took me in; naked, 
 and ye clothed me; I was sick, and ye visited me;
 
 240 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 I was in prison, and ye came to release me.' Then 
 shall the righteous answer him, saying: 'Lord, when 
 saw we thee hungered, and fed thee, or thirsty, and 
 gave thee drink? When saw we thee a stranger, and 
 took thee in? Or naked, and clothed thee, or when saw 
 we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee?' And 
 the Messiah shall answer and say unto them: 'I 
 say unto you; inasmuch as ye have done it unto one 
 of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it 
 unto .me. And so, vice versa, to the unrighteous 
 who refused to do these acts of kindness he will 
 say; 'Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least 
 of these, ye did it not to me.' ' Now these words 
 plainly refer to the various branches of charity prac- 
 tised by the Hasidim, called the white lambs in the 
 Book of Enoch, in contradistinction to the goats that 
 are rejected on the great Judgment Day by the Mes- 
 siah or Son of Man. And the whole passage corre- 
 sponds with a Midrashic interpretation of the Psalm 
 verse; "Open unto me the gates of righteousness that 
 I may enter," according to which he who feeds the 
 hungry, gives drink to the thirsty, takes in the strang- 
 er, clothes the naked and ransoms the captives will see 
 the gates of bliss open to him, because what he does 
 to the poor he does to God's proteges, and it is as if 
 he gave it to God himself. You see how much more 
 intelligible and clear this New Testament passage 
 becomes when viewed in the light of Jewish life and 
 thought. Let me refer you to another characteristic 
 saying attributed to Jesus. "Lay not up for yourselves 
 treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth cro- 
 rupt, and where thieves break through and steal.
 
 DEVELOPMENT OF JEWISH CHARITY 241 
 
 But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where 
 neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where 
 thieves do not break through, nor steal." The original 
 of this rather obscure saying has been preserved for 
 us in the following highly interesting story of the 
 Talmud: The son of Queen Helen of Adiabene 
 became like his more famous mother a warm adherent 
 of Judaism, and when famine had broken out in Judea, 
 both the queen and her son sent victuals and money 
 in great plenty to Jerusalem for distribution among 
 the poor. For this the king was severely reproached 
 by the other princes of the royal house, who said: 
 "Thy royal fathers gathered riches, and thou didst 
 spend them instead." Whereupon the noble king aptly 
 replied, with reference to Biblical verses: "My fathers 
 have gathered treasures on earth; I in heaven. My 
 fathers have gathered treasures where thieves can 
 lay hands upon them and take them; I, where no 
 man can lay hands upon them; my fathers have 
 gathered treasures that perish; I for a world that 
 does not perish." How much more striking and 
 beautiful is this Rabbinic passage! 
 
 But the story about the great munificence of the 
 Queen and King of Abiabene during the Palestine 
 famine furnishes us with very valuable information 
 concerning one point which greatly interests us here. 
 Josephus relates that the king sent great sums of 
 money to the foremost men of Jerusalem for distri- 
 bution among the people. These foremost men were 
 none other than the Gabbae Zedakah, the charity 
 administrators who, standing at the head of the 
 community, had the relief work in charge, for which
 
 242 
 
 office only the best men and descendants of the 
 foremost families were elected according to an ancient 
 Mishnah. We have here then the historical evidence 
 that organized charity is older than Christianity. 
 
 But we have most accurate information about 
 the Jewish system of relief as far back as Hillel's 
 time; the principal rule was that no lover of God 
 should live in a community that has no charity 
 organization. The word used for organized charity 
 is "Kuppah" charity box; this contained the 
 funds for the support of the indigent townsmen, who 
 every Friday received money for the meals for the 
 whole week, besides clothing, and also of the trans- 
 ient poor who received as much as was needed for 
 the day and on Sabbath for three meals. 
 
 Besides the treasury, they had what we would call 
 a soup kitchen tamhoi a charity bowl for the keep- 
 ing of victuals needed for immediate relief. The 
 charity treasury was in charge of three trustees who 
 decided on the worthiness of each case; for profes- 
 sional beggars received, at best, clothing, but rarely, 
 if ever, money, while honorable persons and of good 
 family in reduced circumstances were supported in 
 accordance with their former station. For the 
 collection of the money two men of the very highest 
 standing were sent out, endowed with full power to 
 tax the people and to seize their property, until the 
 sum required was given. In order to avoid suspicion, 
 these collectors were not allowed to separate while 
 collecting or holding the money. These collections 
 were made weekly. The victuals for the tamhoi 
 were collected and distributed for immediate use
 
 DEVELOPMENT OF JEWISH CHARITY 243 
 
 by three charity administrators. While regarded as 
 the greatest honor, it was also a most delicate task 
 to be administrator of charity, because the leading 
 maxim was never to put the receiver to shame. 
 Besides, he had to consider the meritoriousness of 
 each claimant, and at the same time use caution 
 against impostors. It is quite characteristic of the 
 Jewish sentiment that a woman's claim was considered 
 before that of a man, and that of the student of the 
 law before that of an ignorant man, though he be of 
 high rank. Non-Jewish poor of the city were also 
 supported from the charity fund, while ill-reputed 
 Jews w r ere not treated as brothers. Also the duty 
 of visiting the sick and burying the dead was extended 
 to non-Jews who had none to take care of them. 
 And here we come back to the first and fundamental 
 Jewish principle of charity. It is human in character. 
 Just as Abraham and Job, the shepherd sheiks, 
 had the doors of their tents opened on all sides to 
 receive men of all nationality under their hospitable 
 roof according to tradition, so should charity be 
 broad, a promoter of peace among men. 
 
 And here a word or two must be said regarding 
 another institution of charity. All along it has been 
 stated with apparent plausibility that, just as the 
 name hospital is Roman, so did also this and similar 
 institutions for the reception of the stranger and the 
 sick originate in Rome and among the adherents of 
 the Church. Thus says Lecky in his History of Euro- 
 pean Morals, following older writers. The fact is 
 that St. Jerome, who was instrumental in the found- 
 ing of the first sick house in Rome and of the first
 
 244 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 inn for poor strangers in Ostia through the agency of 
 Fabiola, a wealthy Roman convert to Christianity, 
 expressly writes that he is happy to see "a branch 
 of Abraham's terebinth transplanted from the East." 
 That is to say, he acknowledges that he is not the 
 originator, but a mere follower, and in referring to 
 Abraham who, according to Rabbinical tradition, 
 built under the oak at Hebron and the terebinth 
 of Beersheba, an inn for strangers Pandocheion 
 he implicitly gives credit to the Jews for having been 
 the first hospital builders. This hospice or Stranger's 
 Inn was open alike for the homeless and the sick who 
 needed a shelter. And what was the name given by 
 the Jews to the sickhouse and old people's home? 
 All those here of the older generation know it, while 
 the real importance of the name has not been recog- 
 nized by the Jewish scholars. Hekdesh is the term; 
 that is a house consecrated to the use of the poor 
 a term used by the old Essenes when they took 
 their property and gave it to the poor, as was done 
 afterwards by the early Christians. So the Jew, and 
 not the Church, was the first to institutionalize 
 charity. The Essene was the first who so practiced 
 love that in his enthusiastic altruism he disregarded 
 self, and gave all he had away. 
 
 And this lofty spirit of the Essenes was imbibed 
 by the early Christians, whose ardor and self-denial 
 converted the large pagan world to their faith. Yes, 
 just as Abraham is pictured in the Midrash as having 
 won the idolaters that passed his tent for the God he 
 worshiped, by the charity he bestowed on them in his 
 tent, so did the great Christian brotherhoods and sis-
 
 DEVELOPMENT OF JEWISH CHARITY 245 
 
 terhoods win the heathen of the Roman empire for 
 their gospel of love and hope by doing admirable and 
 unique service to suffering humanity. And no sooner 
 did the wealth and influence of noble-hearted Roman 
 matrons and patricians flow into the channels of the 
 rising Church, than those grand institutions of bene- 
 volence sprang up which redound to the lasting glory 
 of Christendom. No impartial reader can peruse that 
 chapter of Church history which narrates the heroic 
 zeal with which, all through the middle ages, the great 
 fraternities and the sisters of mercy endeavored to 
 alleviate the ills and sufferings of humanity, without 
 paying homage to those lofty angelic souls. 
 
 But while giving the church fullest praise for this 
 meritorious work of unparalleled beneficence and for 
 the new impetus and inspiration she gave to the 
 world, we cannot exonerate her from the charge of 
 narrow-minded exclusiveness and want of discretion 
 and of practical common sense. A spirit of monkish 
 world-contempt pervaded all her institutions, and 
 made the object of charity not so much the relief 
 of the sufferer, as the release of the giver's soul from 
 the fires of hell. Lavishly given and thoughtlessly 
 squandered away, it did not enrich, but pauperized 
 humanity. Begging came to be considered a holier 
 occupation than labor and industry. Did not the 
 founder of Christianity encourage this medieval 
 view by the well known saying: "Behold the birds 
 of heaven, they sow not, neither do they reap, and 
 your heavenly Father feedeth them. Consider the 
 lilies of the field. They toil not, neither do they 
 spin, yet Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed
 
 246 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 like these. So be not anxious concerning your eating 
 and drinking and clothing?" 
 
 Against such unhealthy views of life cherished by 
 the Essenes as well as Christians, the rabbis wisely 
 remonstrated, and as early as the second century they 
 decreed that no one should give away to the poor 
 more than the fifth part of all he had, and thus deprive 
 himself of the means of self-support and self-respect. 
 Nay more, they cautioned against fostering beggary 
 and idleness, and recommended the advancing of 
 money to honorable pursuers of a trade. "Better 
 he who lends money than he who gives," they say, 
 "because this encourages labor and dignifies man." 
 In summing up the maxims of the Talmud, Mai- 
 monides counts eight different degrees of giving 
 charity: The least is he who gives without good will; 
 better is he who gives with good will, though not in 
 accordance with his means. Better again is he who 
 gives adequately, but not without being asked; 
 higher ranks he who gives without being asked; high- 
 er again he who gives without knowing the recipient; 
 higher still he who gives in secret, not letting the 
 receivers know who their benefactor is; much higher 
 yet he who gives, not knowing who is the recipient, 
 nor letting the recipient know who is the giver. 
 The highest of all is he who helps the poor along 
 the road of self-help by advancing him money or 
 procuring for him a lucrative occupation. 
 
 It was this sensible, practical, helpful charity 
 that was chiefly practised by the Jew, although his 
 heart was too sympathetic and tender to let the 
 poor suppliant pass his door unaided. The history
 
 DEVELOPMENT OF JEWISH CHARITY 247 
 
 of Jewish charity in the middle ages has not been 
 written as yet, and will be difficult to write, since 
 most of its pages, written with tears, have been torn 
 out by the storms of persecution that swept over the 
 head of the Wandering Jew. But what is left in 
 scarcely known casual, casuistic and ethical writings 
 shows it to have been continuous and constant, 
 watchful, tender, yet wise care for the needy by the 
 wealthier class. Often it was the history of one promi- 
 nent successful man of enterprise and public spirit 
 who founded the eleemosynary institutions of the 
 city, and at the same time led the whole community 
 from a state of poverty and dependence by ways 
 of wise economy to self-help. A lover of God and 
 man and high in favor with the rulers of State or 
 country, he, the so-called Shtadlan, as a rule, promoted 
 at the same time the cause of charity and of educa- 
 tion, and the various Hekdeshim hospitals, asy- 
 lums, or poorhouses occasionally perpetuate his 
 name. In most cases, charity was the combined and 
 systematized effort of the well-to-do and pious men 
 of the community who, forming the various brother- 
 hoods, made all, even the poorest, contribute their 
 mite to the work of relief and the maintenance of the 
 benevolent institutions. Throughout the medieval 
 times, the Maaser, the tenth of the annual income, 
 was the tax imposed upon all, and willingly paid by 
 every law-abiding Jew. Yet however great the merit 
 of alms-giving appeared in theory and tradition, 
 one leading maxim preponderated in practice, the 
 honor and self-respect as well as the respectability 
 of the poorer classes were at all events to be main-
 
 248 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 tained, and on every Sabbath Eve the indigent families 
 were remembered by the rich, besides receiving their 
 weekly support in money or victuals from the charity 
 treasury. As far as we can trace the history of Jewish 
 congregations, we find charitable societies organized 
 for the support and the clothing of the poor, for the 
 education of their children and especially for the 
 nursing and training of the fatherless, for visiting 
 the sick and for aiding the sick and the lying-in- 
 women among the poor, for dowries for poor maidens, 
 for sheltering the aged and homeless, for ransom- 
 ing prisoners and for burying the dead, especially 
 giving free burial to the poor. To become foster- 
 parents to the orphans was at all times considered 
 the highest act of charity, and therefore the founding 
 of orphan asylums was not as frequent among the 
 Jews as the founding of poor and sick houses. While 
 institutionalized charity is Jewish in origin, personal 
 service, personal care for, and personal interest in 
 the poor, ever remained the Leitmotif of Jewish 
 charity, which was always a beautiful combination 
 of tender compassion and wise provision and help- 
 fulness. 
 
 Modern times created new conditions and new 
 needs. First of all the Reformation, leaning towards 
 the far sounder and healthier Old Testament prin- 
 ciples of morals, gradually led to a better compre- 
 hension of the scope and object of charity. Then 
 came the age of reason with its insistence upon the 
 claims of man and its opposition to the exclusive 
 narrowness of sectarianism, and made philanthropy, 
 in its broadest sense, the aim and standard of charity.
 
 DEVELOPMENT OF JEWISH CHARITY 249 
 
 Under, the influence of this ruling idea of the last 
 century, all benevolent and educational institutions 
 were reorganized and remodeled, and new means and 
 methods of physical, moral and intellectual elevation 
 and emancipation of the poor and forsaken were 
 created. No one caught this spirit of broad philan- 
 thropy more eagerly than the Jew, and he was quick 
 in lending to all his eleemosynary institutions this 
 character of broad humanity, ingrained in his soul 
 from the time of Abraham. 
 
 At the beginning of the last century the tendency 
 was to specialize the various works and measures of 
 charity and, under the supervision and auspices of the 
 Jewish congregation or community, to start special 
 societies for each. Homes for the Aged and Infirm 
 and for convalescents, asylums for the deaf and 
 dumb as well as for the orphans, homes for destitute, 
 neglected and delinquent children, soup kitchens and 
 similar organizations sprang up in Germany, England, 
 France, and elsewhere, under various managements. 
 To-day the cry is for centralization of all communal 
 charities, nay, for the centralization of all relief work 
 in State and country, in order to prevent fraud, mis- 
 chief and pauperization. But in the same measure as 
 philanthropy and scientific methods came into play, 
 the religious character of the work seemed to be 
 infringed upon, and its connection with congrega- 
 tional life was loosened, if not altogether severed. 
 Let me not forget to mention in this connection our 
 congregational sisterhoods, which form a connecting 
 link between the united relief work of the community 
 and the congregation, while at the same time giving
 
 250 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 the work the ardor and enthusiasm of religion, the 
 service of self-sacrificing love and the element of 
 personal friendship and sympathy for the needy. 
 But the age of reason and cosmopolitan humani- 
 tarianism has given way to an age of social unrest 
 and industrial strife, and the congested cities present 
 a continual warfare between the masses and the 
 classes, between labor and capital, between employer 
 and employees. "We want no charity; we want the 
 means of getting a decent livelihood," is the cry of 
 the many poverty-stricken to the few privileged 
 ones, in whose hands the wealth of the nation is 
 accumulating with ever increasing power and peril. 
 Charity to-day is confronted with problems which 
 become ever graver, as the life of society becomes 
 ever more complex. The old methods of giving, 
 especially those indulged in by the Church which 
 offers bread in the one hand and the gospel in the 
 other, have been discarded and condemned as lower- 
 ing the dignity of both man and religion. All indi- 
 vidual and sporadic relief has been found harmful, 
 and the cry is not merely for a systematic, but above 
 all for a scientific mode of charity, for a beneficence 
 which helps rather than gives, which uplifts instead 
 of humiliating, which awakens self-esteem and 
 develops a spirit of manhood in the beneficiary. 
 It is on this principle that not only relief work, but 
 also our hospitals and homes for the aged, and our 
 orphan asylums and kindred institutions are being 
 rebuilt and reshaped. Charity is becoming more and 
 more an integral part of sociology; it is a study of 
 the relation of man to man. Nay, more, it has
 
 DEVELOPMENT OF JEWISH CHARITY 251 
 
 ceased to be a mere outpouring of altruistic senti- 
 ment; it tends more and more towards a recognition 
 of mutual interest and mutual responsibility. All 
 these problems of the age, all these wants and woes 
 of the suffering and struggling masses "die Massen- 
 Noth, das Massen-Elend," are aggravated in the 
 case of the Jew. Persecution and wholesale immi- 
 gration multiply the difficulty and increase the danger 
 of congested city life a thousand fold, and the great 
 question is, what about our Jewish charity? What 
 about our much-vaunted Jewish sympathy and the 
 Jewish heart, when we stand face to face with thou- 
 sands and tens of thousands of hapless beings who 
 appeal to us as brothers and fellow-creatures for 
 relief from crying want. Does scientific charity, 
 does sociology offer the all-sufficient remedy, the 
 solution of the problem? 
 
 It seems to me that my historical review of Jewish 
 charity is incomplete and of no intrinsic value whatso- 
 ever, if it does not suggest an answer to this most 
 vexatious question of to-day. Yet I think it does. 
 The Jewish principle of charity is in fullest harmony 
 with what is called the science of charity. It is so- 
 ciological. It voices the law of justice. It demands 
 in the name of God, the Ordainer of life, a full share 
 of the possessions of the fortunate for those defeated 
 in the race. It declares the ownership of great wealth 
 to be a misappropriation of God's gifts before the 
 tribunal of highest justice, unless it is regarded as a 
 stewardship for the purpose of alleviating in adequate 
 mea&ire the wants of the masses. But science is a 
 cold, calculating array of ciphers and dates. It lacks 
 the warmth of the heart, the power of the emotion,
 
 252 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 the joy of self-sacrifice which the word charity im- 
 plies. Jewish charity is that deep sense of mutual 
 responsibility which weaves its golden threads of 
 love and sympathy around individuals and com- 
 munities, rendering the weal of the one and the woe 
 of the other the warp and the woof in the loom of the 
 social fabric, whose foundation stones, taken from 
 God's throne, are justice and righteousness. Yes, 
 the Jewish question to-day is a social question; it 
 is the question of justice in human society, and this 
 question will not be solved by running away, as the 
 agnostic here and the Zionist there does. It will 
 be solved only, if the Jew rises to the great emergency 
 of the hour and becomes a high priest of justice, a 
 perfect type and model of righteousness; if he realizes 
 that the very name Jew Jehudah involves respon- 
 sibility for all those beneath him in the social scale, 
 first of his own kind, and then of all mankind. Yes, 
 the Jew has ever been, and more than ever before 
 he must be the exponent and practiser of a philan- 
 thropy rooted in justice, and the present crisis is to 
 stimulate the Jew to greater energy and greater 
 efforts toward charity and social justice. Of Abraham 
 the Rabbinical legend tells that he wore a jewel on his 
 breast, by the lustre of which he cured the sick and 
 relieved the ailing, and ere he died, he hung it upon 
 the sky, saying: "Let henceforth each who suffers 
 look up to the orb of light, whence this jewel received 
 its splendor, and be cured." That jewel, methinks, 
 was cosmopolitan philanthropy, charity in the garb 
 of righteousness. May it in undimmed splendor 
 ever shine on the Jewish breast, and cheer suffering 
 and struggling humanity!
 
 21. 
 THE MIRACLES OF THE BIBLE.* 
 
 MIRACLE is the dearest child of faith. "Das 
 Wunder ist des Glauben's liebstes Kind" is 
 a saying of Goethe's. Miracles, or extraordinary 
 acts which excel the skill and comprehension of man, 
 are everywhere offered as proofs of divine omnipotence 
 in support of faith, yet as soon as you accept them as 
 proofs, you cannot help feeling that you have staked 
 the best and the holiest part of faith on mere chance. 
 Your faith has not gained in the least by its mere 
 acceptance. Suppose the Egyptian sorcerers had 
 outstripped Moses in the art of performing wonders, 
 would the truth have been on the side of Egypt rather 
 than of Israel? Each religion claims the same mir- 
 aculous power for its own prophets or saints. What 
 is the difference between the water of Lourdes, by 
 which the Catholic religion in France wins converts 
 to-day, and the healing powers of the Jordan's 
 water, by which Elijah converted the Syrian general 
 Naaman ? 
 
 If miracles are to testify to the fact that Moses 
 or Elijah were men of God, then Jesus, Mohammed 
 and Buddha have equal claims to offer. As Moses 
 Mendelssohn wrote to Lavater who had challenged 
 him to either disprove Bonnet's evidences of Chris- 
 
 *Lecture delivered before the Temple Emanu-El-Bible Class, New 
 York, 1892.
 
 254 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 tianity or become a Christian: "Miracles cannot 
 prove the truth of a religion, because every religion 
 has such to present, and the Mosaic law expressly 
 warns against being misled by miracles performed 
 by false prophets." The Jewish religion does not 
 rest on belief in miracles. It rests on the intrinsic 
 truth of its laws. "If a prophet doth wonders while 
 saying: 'Worship another god!' hearken not unto 
 him, for thy God is testing thy belief in Him," says 
 the Law. 
 
 Consequently miracles play a subordinate role 
 in Judaism. The rabbis saw the danger of placing 
 trust in miracles, especially since Christianity was so 
 prolific in these stories, and they deprecated them, 
 laying all the greater stress on the cosmic unity and 
 order established by the Creator from the very begin- 
 ning. 
 
 And here is another point which must be empha- 
 sized. Every miracle is an interference with the laws 
 of the universe, a stoppage of the entire system of 
 creation. For a man to restore a dead person to 
 life, or to make iron swim on the water's surface, 
 or to fly from earth to heaven, is tantamount to 
 allowing, in favor of a single person, the suspension 
 of the entire machinery by which suns and stars, 
 the organic and inorganic lives of aeons are kept 
 rolling throughout the infinitude of space and time. 
 And what purpose would such a temporary cessation 
 of the entire empire of law in the universe serve? 
 Can it prove the omnipotence of God? An all- 
 knowing and almighty Creator must provide for 
 every emergency, for every part of the infinite world
 
 THE MIRACLES OF THE BIBLE 255 
 
 at the very beginning of things. He cannot allow 
 breaks and interventions to lay bare the insufficiency 
 of His work. The order of the Eternal must neces- 
 sarily suffice for all eternity, or else we cannot have 
 perfect trust in Him. Instead of confirming and 
 strengthening our faith in God, miracles weaken it, 
 because they allow chance and caprice to take the 
 place of immutable law and order. In order to avoid 
 this difficulty, our ancient rabbis in the Mishnah 
 and Midrash declared that, at the very creation of 
 the world, God provided for these miraculous altera- 
 tions of nature by preparing the conditions for such 
 contingencies. Under usual circumstances no animal 
 could open its mouth to speak, but the ass of Balaam 
 was a special work of the Almighty Creator, and so 
 was the mouth of the earth that swallowed Korah 
 in the wilderness, or the rock that yielded water to 
 Israel in the desert, and so forth. 
 
 You see here how the ancient sages of Israel, 
 far from insisting on a blind belief in miracles, en- 
 deavored to harmonize the Biblical stories with the 
 postulates of reason, with an enlightened faith in an 
 all-wise and all-ruling Providence. And when the 
 great Jewish sages of the middle ages had come into 
 contact with Arabian philosophy and science, basing 
 the very belief in God's unity upon the immutable 
 cosmic order and law, miracle became a problem 
 rather than a proof, a difficulty more than a demon- 
 stration of faith. Nature as a marvelous unit, and 
 history as a succession of mighty acts of Divine 
 Providence these are the miracles which manifest 
 everywhere the omnipresence and omnipotence of
 
 256 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 God. Revelation itself is a miracle, the greatest in 
 life. The miracle stories we need lay no stress on. 
 This is their mode of reasoning. Spinoza, in denying 
 the very possibility of miracles, only went a step or 
 two beyond what Maimonides and others had said. 
 Our attitude as Jews to the miracles of the Bible 
 is, therefore, an altogether different one from that of 
 the Christian believer. Take away the miracle of 
 resurrection, of incarnation and transfiguration, 
 reduce Christ to human size and his doings to human 
 proportions, and Christianity becomes identical 
 with the faith of the Jewish prophets and sages, a 
 section of Judaism. Take away all the miracles told 
 of Moses or Elijah, of Joshua and Daniel, and nothing 
 essential of the Jewish truth is infringed upon. We 
 are, consequently, at liberty to treat miracles, like 
 any other form of belief, from a general human point 
 of view. We are not bound to believe that the serpent 
 in Paradise spoke, or that the diversity of human 
 speech originated in the confusion of men's language 
 at the Tower of Babel. We know that the Bible 
 contains legends which present truth in the form of 
 fiction. We do not for a moment accept the story 
 as a fact that the Dead Sea owes its origin to the 
 wrath of divine justice which visited the people of 
 Sodom and Gomorrha with an earthquake; or that 
 the wife of Lot turned into a pillar of salt, because 
 she stopped in her flight to look back. On the 
 contrary, the pillar of salt, still seen in one corner of 
 the lake, because it is forming ever anew, gave rise 
 to a popular tale concerning Lot's wife, and the awful 
 sight of a dreary and desolate land covered with salt
 
 THE MIRACLES OF THE BIBLE 257 
 
 and brimstone suggested the story of wicked in- 
 habitants who had provoked the anger of God. 
 Where science asks for natural causes, the narrator 
 of the Bible looks for ethical motives. In like manner 
 the Bible stories invest every occurrence in nature 
 or in history with a religious significance. 
 
 We strike here upon the very nature of miracles. 
 They turn every fact in the life of the man or the nation 
 they dwell on into a lesson, a symbol of some religious 
 truth. Miracles do not create, but illustrate, faith. 
 They are the efflorescence, not the root, the beauti- 
 ful blossom, not the nourishing sap, of belief. Every 
 bright day begins with the charm of a beautiful 
 sunrise. So does poetry in every nation precede the 
 real facts of history and philosophy. Miracles are 
 the poetry of religion, the garb in which the religious 
 truth is presented to, or received by, the childhood 
 of humanity. 
 
 The child likes to indulge in dreams, in fanciful 
 stories, in fairy tales. Its imagination, defying the 
 limits of real life, delights in soaring in the boundless 
 realm of the ideal. It sees the world not as it is, 
 but as it should be, or might be. And behold, life 
 appears impregnated with moral purposes, and in the 
 great contest the good always triumphs, and the 
 evil is crushed; for God does what He pleases. His 
 resources to help the just and to punish the evil- 
 doer are unlimited. In this stage of human concep- 
 tion miracles rise and spread. They are neither 
 invented nor distorted facts, but popular traditions 
 which reflect more or less dimly some historical 
 reminiscence, but always viewed in the light of an
 
 258 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 inner religious experience. You must be in sympathy 
 with the faith that created the miracle, in order to 
 appreciate its truth. Unless you can enjoy the beauty 
 of the rainbow, you fail to see in it more than a re- 
 flection of the sun. .Only a poetic age could behold 
 in it the ark of heaven suspended as a sign of peace 
 after the storm and uproar of nature. 
 
 This sense for the beautiful the rationalist lacks 
 who reduces the Biblical miracle to a natural occur- 
 rence, holdingfor instance, that Israel's passage through 
 the Red Sea followed by destruction of Pharaoh's 
 hosts was due to a temporary ebb and flood which 
 Moses had taken into account, but not Pharaoh ; 
 or that the downfall of Jericho's walls was caused 
 by some stratagem of Joshua effecting their under- 
 mining. In a similar manner some would explain 
 the grand act of Divine Revelation on Mount Sinai 
 by referring to the deep and multifarious resonance 
 heard there at times, owing to falling sand, and the 
 mighty echo of Moses thus produced, they would 
 say, could really be ascribed to God on high. All these 
 rationalistic explanations, which deprive Biblical 
 history of its poetic charm, are not only extremely 
 silly in themselves, but they represent the great 
 prophets of Israel as jugglers and impostors, and God 
 himself as aiding or instructing in the art of trickery 
 and deceit. In order to save the literal truth, they 
 kill the very spirit of faith. 
 
 Let me, before proceeding to offer a better explana- 
 tion, ask you: Why do miracles still gain currency 
 in certain districts in Southern France and Italy 
 and not among cultured people? Simply because
 
 THE MIRACLES OF THE BIBLE 259 
 
 there they are expected and regarded as possible, 
 whereas people, trained to behold in nature an un- 
 broken reign of law, look only for natural explana- 
 tions of whatever occurs. We know what life and 
 death, health and disease are, and we understood 
 the law long before Harvey discovered the circula- 
 tion of the blood, and before the microscope dis- 
 closed to us microbic germs of disease. Consequently 
 we do not expect to be cured of leprosy or of blind- 
 ness by some supernatural influence. But people 
 who ascribe illness to evil spirits taking possession 
 of man find no difficulty in using charms and magic 
 formulas to drive off the malign influences. Here you 
 have the key to all the New Testament miracles. 
 Resurrection of the dead is for reasoning people 
 to-day scarcely thinkable. We see the body lapse 
 into dissolution, the moment the clockwork of life 
 stops. But I remember as a child to have freely 
 cherished the belief that during sleep at night the 
 soul goes up to heaven to return in the morning. 
 Then it was quite natural for me to expect that, when 
 my body goes to its eternal sleep, the soul will wait 
 in heaven for the summons of God to enter the body 
 imbedded in the soil. 
 
 For us who know how by the unfailing law of 
 gravitation sun, earth, moon and stars rotate around 
 each other along the heavens, it is simply impossible 
 to imagine that at Joshua's bidding the sun should 
 have stood still in his course one day. Shall I tell 
 you what the rising and the setting of the sun was to 
 the ancient mind? A picture found on one of the 
 temple gates of Nineveh shows heavenly spirits
 
 260 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 pulling a mighty rope by which the gates of the 
 eastern horizon are opened, and the brilliant orb 
 of day is let in in the morning and let out in the even- 
 ing. How easy then for Joshua by his divine power 
 for once to stop the heavenly spirits in their work of 
 pulling the ropes of the sun, or of driving this golden 
 chariot along the sky! 
 
 We to-day see in rain and storm, hail or snow, 
 lightning or earthquake the unceasing work of one 
 will and mind governing the universe. For us a break 
 means return to chaos. But for those who believed 
 that there were, as Job has it, "storehouses of rain and 
 dew, of snow and hail in heaven waiting for God to 
 unlock them and send them down ever anew, either 
 for the weal or for the woe of the land," every shower 
 of rain and every draught was a special act or inter- 
 ference of God. Hence it was perfectly in His power 
 to alter the course of things in favor of one land and 
 against the interest of another. 
 
 But on entering into the psychology of the Bib- 
 lical miracles, we must analyze also their forms and 
 contents and find their historical and local connec- 
 tions. Without a study of the land and the beliefs 
 of Egypt and of the Sinai peninsula and their history, 
 we are at a loss to explain the wonders of the Exo- 
 dus and of Israel's sojourn in the wilderness. 
 
 Most people forget that the Bible is not a cate- 
 chism with fixed definitions of God and soul. It is 
 a nation's history and poetry. It shows religion in 
 the state of evolution. The truth is seen there growing 
 and maturing, but not finished and perfect. Of course, 
 when we speak of Divine Revelation, we cannot help
 
 THE MIRACLES OF THE BIBLE 261 
 
 thinking of the spirit of man communing with the 
 Spirit of the universe by means of profound medita- 
 tion, or by some other flight of the soul aspiring to the 
 highest and loftiest. The fire in which God appears 
 to Moses in the bush, or the thunder and lightning 
 in which God reveals Himself to the people of Israel 
 on Mount Sinai simply puzzle and perplex us. How 
 can we harmonize the spirituality or omnipresence 
 of God with His coming down to some earthly lo- 
 cality? But the matter becomes still more puzzling 
 when we read how, before announcing the ten plagues 
 to Pharaoh, God gives Moses instruction in the art 
 of turning a staff into a serpent and water into blood, 
 and similar magic. Nor is the story of -the ten plagues 
 and particularly the last one, the death of the first- 
 born, with the anterior command to Israel to borrow 
 gold and silver vessels from the Egyptians before 
 their departure, in accord with our conception of 
 God. A philosophical debate between Moses and the 
 wise men of Egypt would have appeared to us as a 
 far more appropriate introduction to the new religious 
 truth disclosed on Sinai. Instead of this, the Bible 
 unrolls before us a mighty warfare between the gods 
 of Egypt and the lofty God of Sinai. It is a strange 
 contest between a simple deity of a shepherd tribe and 
 the numerous gods that created the highest civilization 
 then reached by man. It has been said by Jewish 
 writers of old and repeated in the New Testament that 
 Moses was learned in all the wisdom of Egypt. The 
 Scriptures tell nothing of the kind. On the contrary, 
 Moses' faith conquered the world by its very simplicity 
 while Egypt's religion, like all polytheism, defeated 
 the truth by its complicated multiplicity.
 
 262 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 Now what is a simple faith? Not a god so remote 
 from human life that only philosophers can think 
 him out, but a God who is near to every one, and who 
 helps whenever He is called upon. This is exactly 
 the meaning of Jahveh: Ehyeh asher Ehyeh. Such 
 a god cannot be invented. He must have been 
 known as the God of the fathers. He must have 
 been worshiped for generations right there, where He 
 first appeared to Moses. Indeed, Mount Sinai was 
 the hill of God, a place of pilgrimage, long before 
 Moses' time perhaps a thousand years. 
 
 Heavenward we gaze when we long for the Infinite. 
 How natural, then, for the shepherd to find his God 
 dwelling on lofty heights, unseen, yet giving signs 
 of His presence in fire and whirlwind! How much 
 grander is the Lord of the heavenly hosts and of the 
 vast desert than all the gods enshrined in the Egyp- 
 tian temples! The ten plagues are climatic phenomena 
 of Egypt put into dramatic form. They all come from 
 the surrounding desert: the hot wind that blinds the 
 eyes, the insects and impurities that fill the air with 
 germs of disease and pestilence, the earth that red- 
 dens the waters of the Nile. How powerless are the 
 gods and the men of Egypt against the Ruler of the 
 free and vast desert! 
 
 We know from the Egyptian monuments that the 
 Hebrews who resided in Goshen, the border-land of 
 the wilderness, worshiped the god of life, using as his 
 image a bald-headed serpent, attended by two 
 priestesses. We understand thus why Moses started 
 on his great mission with the sign of the serpent. 
 Not the serpent with his two priestesses, who could
 
 THE MIRACLES OF THE BIBLE 263 
 
 not give you back your freedom, I proclaim to you 
 as God. No, says he, the God of Sinai, He shall re- 
 deem you, and Him shall you worship with the very 
 silver and gold vessels borrowed from your masters. 
 He, the Ruler of the heavens, will smite the gods of 
 Egypt and set you free. He will avenge on Pharaoh 
 the death of Israel's children, His first-born, by killing 
 the first-born of Egypt. Nay, more. Exactly as 
 Jahveh in ancient poetry appears in fire-clouds 
 when combating with Rahab, the power of darkness, 
 or the great serpent of night, so does He pursue the 
 mighty host of Pharaoh or Egypt, the great serpent, 
 until they sink into the deep. To His ransomed 
 ones, the people of Israel, however, He appears on 
 Sinai in the garb of His glory, to reveal to them His 
 law and consecrate them to be His priests forever. 
 
 On the Sinai peninsula there falls every year in 
 spring the Manna sap in white globules upon the 
 ground, and the Bedouins call this sweet juice 
 Mann Essamma gift of heaven. Some call it 
 "angel's bread." Who else but the Ruler of the 
 desert, the great Jahveh, could have offered this as 
 food to His people? Annually at the very same time 
 large flights of quails are seen coming to nestle there, 
 and they say that the sun-god awakens from his slum- 
 ber at their arrival. This, too, then, and the water 
 that flows out of the dry rock, are gifts of Jahveh, 
 the God of Sinai. 
 
 Likewise is the whole story of the conquest by 
 Joshua and the wondrous battle fought by Elijah 
 nothing but the poetic conception of the warfare of 
 Sinai's God who has storm, fire and whirlwind at
 
 264 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 His command, against the giants and the gods of 
 Canaan. "Jahveh is the great God who gives rain 
 and withholds it at his pleasure, not Baal!" This is 
 the grand truth expressed in the miraculous contest 
 carried on by Elijah on Mount Carmel against Jeze- 
 bel's prophets of Baal. The God of Sinai is a de- 
 vouring fire to annihilate all injustice and wrong, and 
 a pillar of light to lead the righteous to the land of 
 promise. Even on the last day of judgment God will 
 judge the world by fire of righteousness and purify 
 man like silver and gold in the furnace, before the 
 universal reign of peace will unite all His children. 
 Think of Elijah's last moments on earth! He was 
 seen by his pupil Elisha riding upon a chariot of 
 fire drawn by fiery horses to heaven. Was this not 
 originally the fiery cherub on which Israel's God 
 Jahveh rode along the sky? But the idea of God had 
 become too sublime to allow such mythical forms to 
 be attached any longer to Him. The chariot therefore, 
 fell to the lot of the prophet. But it still symbolized 
 that wrath of God against an idolatrous nation of which 
 the whole life of Elijah was an embodiment. The God 
 of Isaiah dwelt no longer on Sinai. His residence is 
 the heaven above, and even there He is no longer seen, 
 not even by the angelic beings that surround him. 
 Henceforth the world of miracles ceases. All the more 
 is the past invested with the miraculous. The be- 
 ginnings of history, the very origin of the nation, 
 become a succession of wonders. Did God then re- 
 cede from the lives of men? Was the wondrous 
 working arm of God no longer with the Jew? The 
 priestly Sadducees, the worldly Jews, said : No. The
 
 THE MIRACLES OF -THE BIBLE .-,. \ 265 
 
 pious ones in their tribulations and trials protested,, 
 and so the miraculous story of Daniel came forth as a 
 testimony that the God of Israel was still near and 
 ready to save in a miraculous way from the fire of 
 the persecutor and from the claws of lions. >- lrL ^ } 
 
 Taken altogether, the Biblical miracles offer 
 sublime truths in child-like form. They illustrate 
 in symbolical language the ideas of Divine Justice 
 and of benign Providence. As long as the human 
 heart remains young and eager to listen to eternal 
 truths in parable, the Bible with its miracle tales will 
 remain mankind's indestructible picture-book. It 
 is not a text-book of history, nor of philosophy. It 
 is all poetry, which is often the sublimest truth, 
 as every ideal world is loftier than the real. For, 
 after all, is the heart not a more potent factor of 
 humanity than the intellect? Is not emotion a strong- 
 er power than cold reflection? Behind all reason, all 
 knowledge and skill, lies the power of faith which 
 moves mountains, which performs wonders. Faith 
 in God and the divine forces within us achieves the 
 best things and the greatest in life. There is a saving 
 power in faith at which all miracles hint. Faith 
 makes prophets, heroes, artists, explorers and dis- 
 coverers. One with God, we are all-powerful ; without 
 God, we are pigmies. Greater than the miracle of 
 the Red Sea is the wonder of Divine Providence 
 seen in our every day life, say the rabbis. Our age 
 of enterprising self-reliance and of iron machinery 
 repudiates miracles, and justly so. All the more we 
 must needs learn how to behold in the entire life of 
 the universe a complex of wonders, one great miracle
 
 266 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 of divine forethought before which we should stand 
 in holy awe, realizing the sway of a divine power 
 by which man imbues life with holy purposes and 
 lofty ideals, the rule of a God whose truth triumphs 
 in the end. Amen.
 
 22. 
 THE NEW BIBLE TRANSLATION.* 
 
 THIS is, indeed, a memorable event in the history 
 of American Judaism which we are celebrating. 
 We greatly appreciate the honor you, our honored 
 hosts and friends, bestow upon us to-night, in view 
 of the work we have done. But it is only with your 
 generous aid that we shall succeed in rendering the 
 Bible, whose translation we have finished, a welcome 
 boon and a valued household treasure in every Jewish 
 home in America. 
 
 All the great Bible translations made throughout 
 the lands and the ages marked a new epoch in the 
 history of the Jew, or the world at large, whether 
 we think of Mendelssohn's work, so instrumental in 
 breaking down the Ghetto walls for the modern Jew, 
 or the Greek translation in Alexandria, which in- 
 augurated a new era for Jew and Gentile by the blend- 
 ing of the beauty of Hellenic culture with the lofty 
 spirit of the Hebrew's faith, or whether we have in 
 mind Luther's Bible and the King James' Version 
 which worked as liberators of the mind of Germany 
 here, of England there. In the seventy languages 
 of the seventy nations of the globe should the words 
 of God be written, in order that all may learn the 
 
 *Spoken at the dinner given in New York in honor of the Editor- 
 ial Board of the new Bible Translation, February 10, 1914.
 
 268 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 truth of God's Fatherhood and man's brotherhood, 
 say our rabbis. The Book of Books should be in 
 the hands of all, monitor and comforter of high and 
 low, the educator of mankind, the unifier of men, 
 the greatest democratizing power of humanity. 
 
 In this spirit have we been wofking together to 
 bring the Bible within easy reach of the highest 
 and lowliest, man, Woman and child, hoping and 
 trusting that, like the great Christian Bible Societies, 
 we, too, would succeed in getting millions at our dis- 
 posal for the sacred cause. 
 
 Now at first blush, I was rather embarrassed and 
 puzzled when seeing the subject assigned to me; 
 "The Bible for the Student." Why, it is a Bible for 
 the People that we wanted to create. We live in an 
 age when the scholar in his study or the scientist 
 in his laboratory is expected to place his best faculties 
 and energies at the service of common humanity. 
 How much more so the student of the Bible, which 
 is the holiest concern of all! 
 
 On closer reflection, however, I came to the con- 
 clusion that I should speak on my subject by way of 
 contrast. 
 
 You all probably know that for the student the 
 Scriptural words have different meanings according 
 to the standpoint of each. The medieval rabbis 
 speak of four different methods of interpretation 
 to bring out either the simple or the symbolic, the 
 homiletic (that is Halakic or Haggadic) or mystic 
 sense. The older sages speak of 49 different methods. 
 Yes, just as the diamond reflects its brilliancy in 
 dozens of facets flashing forth light in many direc-
 
 269 
 
 tions, so has the Torah 49 faces of the truth to offer 
 to the student. Yet beneath all these the simple 
 meaning must ever remain as the basic one appealing 
 to all. 
 
 Thus the theological students of the various 
 schools differ as to concept or interpretation of 
 Scripture; in regard to the plain text we all, conserva- 
 tive or liberal, agree. As students we had our heated 
 controversies, our sore defeats and proud victories 
 each ; as workers at a Bible for the people we were ready 
 for a compromise and become all of one accord. 
 
 Another important consideration for the student 
 is the Hebrew text itself, concerning which ancient 
 tradition records many variations. And these have 
 been greatly increased in number and in significance, 
 since we have learned to compare the ancient ver- 
 sions with our Masoretic text, not to speak of the 
 independent text criticism of modern days. Many a 
 student, even among the conservatives, keeps in his 
 closet a Bible edition interleaved, noting his emenda- 
 tions of the text, which are greatly at variance with 
 those of his fellow-workers. Now over against these 
 varieties of the Bible text or its translations, which 
 disfigure the sacred Scripture by lacunae, asterisks 
 or interrogation points, and occasionally by the 
 transposition of entire verses and chapters, however 
 legitimate in themselves, or sanctioned by ancient 
 practice, the Bible for the People must leave the Masor- 
 etic text intact, in order to manifest profound regard 
 for the venerable authority of the Book of Books, 
 of which we cannot afford to offer 57 varieties. This 
 was one of the principles which guided us in our 
 translation.
 
 270 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 Again, it is a well-known fact that each student 
 has a certain predilection in regard to the words 
 he uses or the explanation of Scriptural terms. 
 When, accordingly, following the plan pursued by the 
 former Board of Bible Editors, consisting of the late 
 Dr. Jastrow, Dr. De Sola Mendes and myself, the 
 various books of the Bible were assigned to different 
 translators, there was evidently too much individual- 
 ism shown in the rendering of each book, at the ex- 
 pense of the uniformity and harmony of the whole. 
 It was, therefore, a wise step taken by our Board of 
 Editors in following as closely as possible the standard 
 of the Authorized Version, thereby to preserve the 
 classical English diction with all the vigor and 
 rhythmic beauty which only the inspiration of genius 
 could produce, and at the same time to safeguard the 
 uniformity of the translation. As students we might 
 have displayed in many instances greater originality; 
 as workers at a Bible for the People, we gladly yielded 
 in favor of a translation which created the God- 
 fearing, liberty-loving race of men that made England 
 and North America what they are. In one respect 
 however, we approach our work as students equipped 
 with the ammunition of modern research. Just as 
 the Revised Version, the work of modern English 
 and American scholars, represents, aside from a few 
 Christological features that have still been left here 
 and there, the advanced scientific character of modern 
 Biblical exegesis, so does our translation, the result 
 of independent studies with especial consultation 
 also of Jewish tradition and Jewish authorities, offer 
 to the Jewish world the Scriptures in modern English
 
 THE NEW BIBLE TRANSLATION 271 
 
 upon a thorough scientific basis, free from any sec- 
 tarianism or any Jewish bias. It is a Jewish Bible 
 only in so far as it takes cognizance of the Synagogue 
 usage regarding the order of books and the divisions 
 of the Pentateuchal Sabbath portions and their 
 Hebrew nomenclatures. Aside from this, it presents 
 itself as the translation of the Scripture pure and sim- 
 ple, and we confidently expect that non- Jewish 
 scholars will use it with profit in future revisions of 
 their own versions, since as Jewish students we fre- 
 quently succeeded in penetrating deeper into the 
 spirit of the Hebrew original than did translators 
 less conversant with the Hebrew diction. 
 
 Thus our work is truly a peace-offering to both 
 the Jewish and the non-Jewish world. Being the result 
 of harmonious co-operation between the represen- 
 tatives of the two wings of American Judaism, the 
 Conservative and the Reform wing, it will, we hope 
 and trust, form a bond of union between all the 
 branches and divisions of American Israel, to bring 
 about a greater consolidation of its spiritual interests, 
 and at the same time serve as a link to entwine us 
 also with our God-seeking non-Jewish brethren 
 throughout the English-speaking world. Yes, as 
 Jewish students we are mindful of the word of our 
 sages: "The disciples of the wise will increase the 
 world's peace, for it is said, All thy children will be 
 taught of God, and great shall then be the peace 
 of thy children, the up-builders of the divine king- 
 dom of truth."
 
 23. 
 WOMAN'S INFLUENCE ON JUDAISM.* 
 
 WOMAN'S social position has often been called 
 the barometer of civilization. Her state of 
 subjection or of freedom indicates the degree of cul- 
 ture which a people or an age has attained. But there 
 are two different aspects of the question. Liberty 
 of the individual is one; the purity and welfare of 
 the home is another. Occidental life lays more 
 stress on the former, Oriental life on the latter. No 
 doubt, the ancient civilization of the world produced 
 a higher standard of beauty, but did morality hold 
 pace with its progress? One of the saddest impres- 
 sions made by Greek history is that the advance of its 
 culture marked the decline of virtue. The beautiful 
 types of women of the Homeric age, such as An- 
 dromache and Penelope, are looked for in vain among 
 the enlightened people of Athens. Still greater was 
 the fall of woman in Rome. Beginning with the 
 lofty spirit of a Cornelia, she sinks to the level of a 
 Messalina. 
 
 The Jew offered the world a new and higher stand- 
 ard of morality the principle of holiness. Just as 
 light is born out of darkness, so was the conception 
 of a God of holiness, who abhors everything impure, 
 born out of the contest against the abominable 
 
 *Address delivered before the Cincinnati Section of the Council 
 of Jewish Women, in 1906.
 
 274 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 Semitic idol-worship. The pure monotheistic faith 
 of the Jew is the efflorescence and fruitage of his 
 pure moral sentiment and his domestic virtue. The 
 shocking immoralities perpetrated at the shrine of 
 the gods and goddesses of Canaan and Chaldea in- 
 duced him to barricade his house against the vices 
 prevailing round about him. The exclusivism of the 
 law had the preservation of the patriarchal virtue 
 of chastity for its object. Whenever the purity 
 of home life is threatened in Biblical times, there is 
 a cry of alarm sounded throughout the camp of 
 Israel that rallies each and all in defence of its honor. 
 But while it is universally recognized that the 
 Jewish woman created a model home life, the general 
 impression is that her influence on Judaism at large 
 amounted to very little; that only in single instances 
 was her power felt, but for the rest she was, like any 
 other Oriental woman, pushed into the background 
 and forced to inactivity. It is my endeavor, there- 
 fore, to show that in many respects woman lent 
 Judaism the character it has, and that her influence, 
 deep and silent like the warmth of the sun, has ever 
 been in the ascendant. 
 
 Beginning with Biblical times, we find the 
 Hebrew woman at once occupy a far more dignified 
 position than does the women of other nations. True, 
 the story of Eden holds Eve responsible for the fate, 
 or fall, of man a Chaldean legend which has its 
 counterpart in the Greek tale of fair Pandora, whose 
 curiosity causes all the ills of life to come forth out 
 of the fatal chest, to the chagrin of man, and leave 
 only hope as last solace; also in the Zoroastrian story
 
 WOMAN'S INFLUENCE ON JUDAISM 275 
 
 which makes woman the very ally of the Evil One. 
 Still, the Bible does not accentuate her guilt so much as 
 her frailty. On the other hand, the story of her 
 formation out of Adam's rib is but a poetical pre- 
 sentation of her equality and partnership with man. 
 In point of fact, compared with the women in India, 
 Persia, and Greece who were never allowed to par- 
 take of the social life the men enjoyed, nor even of 
 their meals, the Hebrew woman possesses an en- 
 viable degree of power and freedom. She moves 
 about with perfect ease and participates in the social 
 or public life. Especially noteworthy is the fact, 
 rarely met with among other tribes, that she is be- 
 loved and respected for her personal qualities. 
 The Biblical stories dwell with special emphasis 
 upon the beauty and wisdom in which the women of 
 the patriarchal or monarchical age excel. While 
 the preservation of kin, the obtaining of worthy 
 heirs, is the chief consideration in the choice of a 
 wife, woman is loved for her own sake, and we hear 
 it testified by Jacob and Elkanah that this love is 
 more to them than the possession of children. And 
 this sentiment of pure love finds its expression every- 
 where in the prophetic writings as well as in Hebrew 
 poetry, and even in the law. What greater mark of 
 respect can be shown to the wife than is offered in 
 the law which ordains that the man who has be- 
 trothed a wife, but not yet wedded her, should be 
 exempt from going to war? Much has been written 
 regarding polygamy in the Bible. The fact is that it 
 is condemned on the first page as being in conflict 
 with the design of the Creator, who made woman to
 
 276 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 be a helpmate and consort to man. But the legislator 
 who deals with real facts, not with mere ideals, clearly 
 points to the possible evil results arising from such a 
 state, when speaking of a case where the one wife 
 is loved and the other disliked, and in the ensuing 
 discord the law must, by all means, protect the 
 rights of the disliked one. In fact, every deviation 
 from the divinely-ordained monogamous marriage 
 in the Bible records is either accompanied by some 
 plea or excuse, as in the story of Abraham and Jacob, 
 or followed by some penalty in the shape of discord 
 and strife. 
 
 Is there anything in the world's literature as 
 touching as the love the prophet Hosea harbors in 
 his breast for his wife, even after she has proven 
 faithless to him? That love revealed to his troubled 
 mind the profundity of God's all-forgiving love 
 and mercy for His people with all their failings. 
 Even the stern law dealing with divorce does not 
 for a moment assume that a man would send off his 
 wife, unless she had by her conduct given him suffi- 
 cient reason to justify the separation. In reading 
 the Bible we must not overlook the fact that the 
 laws and customs of a nation cannot be changed with 
 one stroke. Throughout antiquity woman was 
 claimed by man as his property. When given in 
 marriage by father or kinsman, she only changed 
 masters; a will of her own she had not. But 
 while the law remained the same, the spirit of the 
 people, of prophet and law-giver, tended toward 
 elevating her to a higher position and recognizing 
 her personality, her individual claims. Rebecca was
 
 WOMAN'S INFLUENCE ON JUDAISM 
 
 asked whether she would go with Eliezer to be Isaac's 
 wife. Likewise, while the Mosaic law of adultery 
 applies only to the woman that is faithless to her 
 husband, and not to the husband who is faithless to 
 his wife, we find the prophet Malachi rebuke with 
 unsparing bitterness the husband who deals treacher- 
 ously with his wife, and takes a stranger in her 
 place. 
 
 A careful study of the laws prohibiting kin-mar- 
 riages, such as were allowed and fostered among other 
 nations, also discloses the underlying motive of 
 freeing woman from the bondage of the clan, and 
 rendering marriage an institution based on the full 
 recognition of woman as the free, congenial life- 
 partner of man. 
 
 In one respect, however, the influence of the He- 
 brew woman has been exaggerated. Miriam, De- 
 borah, Hulda and the wise woman of Tokoa have 
 been pointed out as typical representatives of the 
 woman in Israel. The fact is that everywhere in 
 primitive times woman played a prominent part as 
 diviner and seer. Her receptive and intuitive 
 nature, her emotional powers, bring her into closer 
 contact with the mysterious side of life, and render 
 her the medium or exponent of those occult forces 
 of the spirit that manifest themselves in all ages 
 and phases of humanity under some form of re- 
 ligious belief. Hagar and the wife of Manoah, as 
 well as Magdalene in the New Testament, have 
 visions of angels, while the men see nothing of the 
 kind. The same psychic force that produces for- 
 tune-tellers and witches gives on a higher stage the
 
 278 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 impulse to prophecy. So there is nothing specifically 
 Hebrew in woman appearing as prophetess. But 
 there is another side to this religious proclivity of 
 the Hebrew woman, which has not received the at- 
 tention it deserves. Notice the household gods, the 
 Teraphim, which Rachael steals from her father, or 
 which Michal, the daughter of King Saul, keeps in her 
 house as David's wife. See with what readiness the 
 mother of Micah hands forth her silver for the making 
 of an idol, and the women of Israel at the foot of 
 Mount Sinai give up their jewels for the making of 
 the Golden Calf. Listen attentively to the speeches 
 of Amos and Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel addressed 
 to the daughters of Israel, and to what law-giver and 
 historian say regarding the heathenish practices to 
 which the people adhered to the very last, in defiance 
 of all prophetic monition and menace of divine 
 anger. The heathenish, the idolatrous woman was 
 Israel's stumbling-block all through the pre-exilic 
 ages. Hebraism thus I call the history of Israel 
 previous to the exile in spite of the great prophets 
 that appeared illumining the wide world with the 
 truth flashed forth by their visions, was a failure, 
 because the Hebrew woman was not trained for her 
 task of guarding Israel's treasure. Miriam, the 
 sister of Moses, voiced the true sentiment when she, 
 in common with her brother Aaron, rebuked Moses 
 for having taken an Ethiopian wife, and, when called 
 to account for such lack of respect, said: "Hath 
 the Lord spoken only through Moses and not also 
 through us?" This sentiment became the regenerat- 
 ing force when Ezra and Nehemiah resorted to the
 
 WOMAN'S INFLUENCE ON JUDAISM 279 
 
 rather cruel measure of expelling the heathen wives 
 from the new Judean colony. It was an unheard-of 
 proceeding, militating against the practice of the 
 preceding centuries. But it was an amputation 
 necessary to save the main body of the Jews. It 
 is true that, by crushing all heathen alliances and 
 forcing all such priests and people as married heathen 
 women out of the Jewish camp, Ezra and Nehemiah 
 created a narrower faith than the one the prophets 
 had preached and the law-giver had contemplated. 
 Still they rendered Judaism the greatest possible 
 service by giving it Jewish wives and Jewish mothers 
 to build up Jewish homes. "The hallowing of the 
 home," says Israel Abrahams in his "Jewish Life in 
 the Middle Ages" was one of the earliest factors in 
 the development of Judaism after the Babylonian 
 Exile, and monogamy grew up then as a flower on 
 the family hearth. Monogamy was the result, not 
 the cause, of the idealized conception of the family 
 relations." Indeed, Judaism begins a new, a higher 
 and holier life the moment the Jewess, consecrated 
 anew to her task as priestess of the fireside, enters 
 the home to become its sole ruler. What is it 
 that made Judaism so different from any other 
 religion? Nay, what distinguishes Judaism, since 
 the Babylonian Exile, so essentially from Mosaism, 
 or the Law laid down in the written books of Moses? 
 What gave the Sabbath and festivals, the home 
 life, the table, the entire private and social life of the 
 Jew their peculiar character? It seems to me that these 
 points have never been carefully considered in con- 
 nection with my theme: Woman. If we had nothing
 
 280 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 else but that song of the Virtuous Woman at the 
 close of the Book of Proverbs, the like of which the 
 literature of no other nation possesses, that alone 
 would be sufficient testimony to the spirit of domestic 
 affection the Jewess engendered. So does the very fact 
 that the name by which the wife was called by the 
 Jews in Talmudical time debetha, "the Mistress of 
 Home" show that in the position accorded to her 
 she had no rival. But I claim more for the Jewish 
 woman of those days. I maintain that she was the 
 main factor and regenerator of the religious life of 
 the Jew. The rabbis say that the piety of the Jewish 
 woman worked as the redeeming power when the 
 Hebrews were in Egyptian bondage. The Mid- 
 rashic saying reflects the inner life of the Jew during 
 the critical times of Syrian and Roman oppression 
 and vice. Read the books of the Maccabees or the 
 book of Judith, and you find that there were many 
 mothers who, like Hannah with her seven sons, would 
 die rather than break the covenant of the fathers. 
 The Jewish women were the first to undergo mar- 
 tyrdom in the cause of their religion during perse- 
 cution. So we read of many Jewish women in later 
 times distinguished by great piety. One of them, 
 the wife of Abba Hilkia, the grandson of Onias the 
 Saint, so excelled her husband in fear of God and love 
 of man that, when they both prayed for rain during 
 the time of a great drought, her prayer was, according 
 to the story, heard first. Beruria, the wife of Rabbi 
 Meir, who lived three generations later, would not 
 allow her husband to curse the vile crowd, since 
 "God hated the sins of man, but not the sinners."
 
 WOMAN'S INFLUENCE ON JUDAISM 281 
 
 Ostensibly the example of domestic piety and virtue 
 displayed by the Jewish women impressed their 
 heathen neighbors, and won them in large numbers 
 for the Jewish faith. Thus we learn from Josephus 
 that almost all the women of the Syrian city of 
 Damascus were attached to the Jewish religion. 
 It is remarkable that, before Christianity entered 
 the world as a proselytizing power, heathen women 
 of the highest rank, such as Queen Helen of Adiabene 
 and Nero's wife Poppea, and many others whose 
 names are preserved in Talmudic literature and on 
 Roman catacombs, espoused the Jewish faith either 
 as perfect converts, or as semi-proselytes. What 
 then made Judaism so attractive to woman especially? 
 My answer is: The Jewish home with its bright joy, 
 its Sabbath light, its festive family gathering, and 
 its high standard of purity, and last but not least, 
 the dignity it accorded to woman. Of these Sabbath 
 lights and festal meals, Roman poets like Persius and 
 philosophers like Seneca speak in mocking terms, 
 but when reading their satire, we cannot help feeling 
 that, as Josephus actually observes, these things must 
 have made a deep impression upon the heathen 
 world. And now, who kindled the Sabbath lamp 
 and trimmed the festal table, or invested the home 
 with an air of purity and sanctity that put all the 
 shrines of heathendom into the shade? Of course, 
 the Jewish woman. But who empowered her to do 
 so? 
 
 Follow me into an obscure part of Jewish his- 
 tory, the moulding of Judaism after the exile by the 
 three factions: The Sadducees, the Essenes and the
 
 282 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 Pharisees. The Sadducees, the priestly sons of 
 Zaddok and his followers, forming the aristocracy of 
 blood, bound to observe the written Law of Moses 
 before their lapse into Epicurean vice, had the 
 maintenance of the temple and priesthood as their 
 only object in view. Why should they accord to 
 woman privileges she had not enjoyed before? Why 
 should they impart to private households a sanctity 
 which thus far only the house of God claimed? They 
 surely did not introduce the kindling of the Sabbath 
 lights. On the contrary. We know of the Samaritans 
 and Karaites, who as a rule followed in the footsteps 
 of the Sadducees, that they considered it a violation 
 of the Sabbath to have a light burn on the Sabbath 
 Eve. Nothing that renders the Sabbath a day of 
 cheer for man and wife and fosters the spirit of domes- 
 ticity, did they consider as permissible. This was 
 according to many indications also the view of the 
 Sadducees. Especially were the Levitical laws of 
 purity rigid and inexorable regarding woman's ap- 
 proach to the temple precincts and her participation 
 in the sacred meals. Poor woman! Martyr of her 
 maternal vocation, she was, after she had given birth 
 to a child, barred out of the sanctuary for weeks; 
 and then she had to offer sacrifices not of thanks- 
 giving, but of purification. In this direction, then, 
 the spiritual elevation of woman did not lie. 
 
 Still less regard did the Hasidim or the older 
 school of the Pharisees, represented afterwards by 
 the saintly Essenes, pay to woman. Banded to- 
 gether as brotherhoods for common meals and com- 
 mon devotion, with the view of attaining the same
 
 WOMAN'S INFLUENCE ON JUDAISM 283 
 
 holiness and purity as the priests, they invested the 
 Sabbath with new sanctity, but were still more 
 rigorous than the rest in their intercourse with 
 woman, lest her very touch, or breath, might defile 
 them and unfit them to hold communion with the 
 holy spirit. While some went in their asceticism 
 so far as to shun the married state altogether, when 
 advanced in years, the Hasidean code of ethics, 
 aiming at the highest ideal of purity, was to judge 
 from the few rules and historical facts preserved to 
 us so austere as to make the domestic life of woman 
 almost unbearable. At any rate, woman and home 
 did not profit by the influence of Essenism. 
 
 The scribes, then, who enjoined upon every 
 Jewish household the duty of having the light kindled 
 on Sabbath Eve and the Sabbath rendered a day of 
 domestic joy, belonged to those Pharisean schools 
 who felt and recognized the elevating, cheering and 
 sanctifying influence of woman and the home. And 
 we are in the position to fix the time when that in- 
 fluence became a power to modify the law and 
 render the dignity of woman and the comfort of home, 
 the ruling principle of Rabbinical practice. Simeon 
 ben Shatah, the brother of Queen Salome Alexandra, 
 the first of the Pharisean leaders who obtained a 
 decisive victory for his party in the Sanhedrin, was 
 the one who introduced legislative measures to secure 
 to the wife her right of dowry, and by the form of a 
 written contract the Kethuba in which the hus- 
 band pledged himself to support and honor his 
 wife, also to protect her against any whim and 
 abuse. Henceforth we see the Jewish woman, more
 
 284 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 and more, break the fetters of social bondage and the 
 bars of religious seclusion, and make her power felt 
 as a religious force, and as a source of practical 
 wisdom. Gradually the old ban of Orientalism, 
 which treated her like a chattel to be bought and 
 sold, to be given away and taken in marriage by 
 man without her own will and consent, is removed. 
 Henceforth "she can no longer be married without 
 her consent" according to the Rabbinical law, and 
 under circumstances she may demand a divorce 
 from her husband. Moreover, she should not be 
 married without love, or without assurance being 
 given that she be loved and worthy of her husband's 
 esteem. "He who weds a wife without having seen 
 her before, or marries one unbecoming his station, 
 commits a five-fold sin," says the great master 
 Akiba. 
 
 But it was owing far more to her own spon- 
 taneity and her self-emancipation than to concessions 
 made by the doctors of the law, that she obtained her 
 full recognition. The law still puts her on a par with 
 the slave and the immature youth, considers her 
 testimony before the court invalid, and excludes her 
 from membership in the Congregation and from all 
 the privileges of religious communion. She does not 
 even count at the grace after meal, w^here three 
 persons unite for solemn thanksgiving. Here the 
 ancient view of priest and presbyter still prevail. 
 Nay, more. Jose ben Johanan, in the Early Sayings 
 of the Fathers, teaches: "Do not talk much with 
 woman." How strict this Essene rule was, may be 
 incidentally learned from the story of the Samaritan
 
 WOMAN'S INFLUENCE ON JUDAISM 285 
 
 woman, according to which the people were surprised 
 to see Jesus talking with a woman. Notice with what 
 disregard of her higher qualities of mind and soul 
 Philo and Josephus still speak of woman. The men 
 are to "thank God that He did not make them a 
 woman," as the ancient ritual has it in a formula 
 prescribed by R. Meir, and apparently already fa- 
 miliar to St. Paul following the example of Plato 
 and other Greek sages, if not the more ancient 
 Persian sages who likewise thanked God every day 
 "that He did not make them a Barbarian, a slave 
 and a woman." Indeed, the law exempts woman, 
 in view of her physical disabilities, from observing 
 those commandments that are given for stated times; 
 and the orthodox Jew who still recites that benedic- 
 tion refers to this fact in justification of the same. 
 But see with what zeal, nevertheless, woman espoused 
 her faith and endeavored, of her own accord, to per- 
 form any religious duty she could. She traveled, 
 during the time of the Temple, for miles to offer 
 her prayers on the holy spot, and all through the 
 Talmudic and the medieval ages she was eager to 
 study the Law and acquire proficiency therein, so 
 as to be able to teach and to enter into learned dis- 
 putes with the rabbis, or with heathen and Christian 
 sages. How powerfully must she have impressed 
 the rabbis of old, when, in commenting upon the 
 scriptural verse: God "built the rib of Adam into 
 woman" they say: "God endowed her with deeper 
 wisdom and intuition", and that He created Eve as 
 the highest type of beauty and plaited her hair, 
 adorning her like a bride to render her attractive
 
 286 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 to Adam. Indeed, those stern rabbis felt, and often 
 made it a principle of law, notwithstanding all 
 Levitical or Sabbatical statutes to the contrary, 
 that woman should be a source of joy in the house, 
 and no matter how plain the home, she should 
 spread an air of contentment and happiness about 
 her. "The daughters of Israel are all beautiful, 
 unless poverty disfigures them," says R. Jishmael, 
 Akiba's companion. Israel Zangwill's Ghetto women 
 do not represent the true type of Jewesses. 
 
 Christian writers often tell us that Christianity 
 emancipated woman. This claim is false. What are 
 the Marthas and Magdalenes of the New Testament, 
 compared with Beruria, the clever and pious wife 
 of Rabbi Meir, or with Rachel, the wife of R. Akiba 
 whose romantic love for her father's shepherd casts 
 a glow of human pathos around the life of Judaism's 
 great hero and martyr? The Church produced fine 
 types of Sisters of Mercy, but what has Christian 
 literature to compare with the ideal picture of a 
 wife presented by the rabbis in Sarah? "Three signs 
 of God's favor" the Midrash tells us "were mani- 
 fested in the house of Abraham, as long as Sarah was 
 alive: The first one was that, as over the taber- 
 nacle in the wilderness, so hovered over the tent of 
 Sarah a pillar of cloud radiating with the majesty 
 of God to make happiness and contentment reign 
 therein. Secondly, God's blessing rested in a signal 
 manner upon the bread she baked, so that, the more 
 they handed of it to the poor and homeless who en- 
 tered the hospitable house open on all sides to wel- 
 come them, the more there was to satisfy all. And
 
 THE CEREMONIES IN JUDAISM 287 
 
 thirdly, the lamp which illumined her tent, burned 
 in undiminished lustre from Sabbath Eve to Sabbath 
 Eve, as if some angelic hand had trimmed and filled 
 it with sacred oil, to spread light and cheer through- 
 out the household and hallow it. And when Sarah 
 died, these tokens of God's grace ceased; but no 
 sooner did Rebecca enter the house as Isaac's be- 
 trothed, than the home was again crowned with its 
 pristine glory." Now whatever imagination may 
 have done for this beautiful picture of the true wife, 
 actual experience must have prompted it. The 
 Jewess of the Talmudical age must have proved a 
 model wife as guardian of home, as prompter of 
 religious sentiment par excellence, and as the minister 
 of charity in the best sense of the word. Indeed, 
 in all three qualities did the Jewish woman at all 
 times excel, and well could a rabbi of the third 
 century, R. Eleazar ben Pedath, say: "He who is 
 without a wife is without joy, without happiness, 
 without blessing, without peace." Surely it was out 
 of his own experience that Akiba spoke when saying: 
 "Rich is he who has a wife beautiful in her actions." 
 The Talmud is replete with instances of great men 
 of learning who received their inspiration for their 
 devotion to the Law from their self-sacrificing wives. 
 Well could, therefore, the Midrash portray to us the 
 Hebrew wives in Egypt as steeling the men with faith 
 and hope, when their spirits drooped under the Phar- 
 aonic oppression. How significant it is to learn that, 
 when God told Moses to speak to the children of 
 Israel, preparing them for their great mission as a 
 kingdom of priests and a holy nation, he was first
 
 288 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 to address the women as the true representatives of 
 "the house of Israel," in order to win them for their 
 sacred task as wives and mothers. 
 
 But not only religious zeal, domestic affection 
 and tender humanity do we find displayed by the 
 Jewess of the Talmudical time. That broadness of 
 mind and love of culture in which the woman of to- 
 day excels, was also fostered by her. The women 
 of the house of Hillel, the daughter of R. Abbahu and 
 others were conversant in Greek, and thus enabled 
 to hold discussions with pagan and Christian philoso- 
 phers. What obstacles they had to overcome when 
 coming across a rabbi of the old school, may be learned 
 from one striking instance. Ima Shalom, the sister 
 of Rabban Gamaliel, possessed culture and wit in a 
 high degree. Once hearing a scoffer say to her 
 father: "Your God is a thief, he stole a rib from 
 Adam while he was asleep," she exclaimed: "Send 
 for a sheriff!" "What has happened? asked the 
 scoffer. "Thieves," she continued, "have broken 
 into my house, and stolen a silver pitcher, and put a 
 golden one in its place." "And these you call thieves?" 
 "Yet," she answered, "dost thou call God a thief, 
 who stole a rib from Adam and placed fair Eve in 
 its stead!" Now, this high-minded woman was mar- 
 ried to Eliezer ben Hyrcanus, a fanatical adherent 
 of the Shammaite principle of austerity in the Law. 
 In vain she endeavored to infuse liberal ideas into 
 him; he remained harsh and treated her with little 
 regard. He applied the law in all its rigor, and 
 did not care for the spirit of love and home comfort. 
 He was in principle an Essene, an ascetic, and it is
 
 WOMAN'S INFLUENCE ON JUDAISM 289 
 
 he who made two statements often quoted as if 
 expressive of Talmudical narrowness. The one is: 
 "Woman's wisdom only turns on the spinning 
 wheel." The other, "To let a daughter study the 
 Law is to let her spend her time on folly." 
 
 How strange, then, to find our Eliezer, and like- 
 wise the old Shammaite school, condemn divorce, 
 unless the wife has given cause by immoral conduct. 
 "The altar of God sheds tears over the dismissal of 
 the wife of one's youth," Eliezer says with reference to 
 Malachi's words: "The Lord hates divorce"; whereas 
 R. Akiba, in common with the whole school of Hillel 
 would allow divorce to take place in every case of 
 estrangement of sentiment and discord. We are 
 in this respect far more inclined to indorse as the 
 higher ethical view the maxim expressed in the 
 New Testament, "What God has joined together, 
 man shall not put asunder." We must, however, 
 bear in mind that, if Judaism has followed the leading 
 of Akiba and the Hillelite school, this is not because 
 it entertains a lower opinion of woman than does 
 the Essene school and the Church which emanated 
 from the same, but because it insists that marriage 
 and home life should be built on the deepest and 
 truest sentiments of love, on lasting relations of 
 mutual devotion and esteem. Of course, we may 
 differ in regard to this, and claim indissoluble sacred- 
 ness for the marriage tie. In that respect the progress 
 of Jewish legislation shows a decided tendency to 
 restrict the husband's power of divorcing his wife. 
 Especially when the Jews came under the influence 
 of Occidental not Christian so much as German
 
 290 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 civilization was woman's claim as man's equal 
 recognized by the Rabbinical authorities. But al- 
 ready the ancient rabbis felt that love may overcome 
 the harsh letter of the law. You are probably familiar 
 with the story of the couple who, after having lived 
 together for years and finding their marriage not 
 blessed with children, were ready in compliance with 
 the law to be divorced. Having agreed that, before 
 parting, the wife should take the choicest treasure 
 of the house with her, she waited until her husband 
 had fallen asleep, and then she carried him into her 
 father's house, where they were re-united. Whereupon 
 Simeon ben Johai, the saint, invoked God's blessing 
 upon them, and they became happy parents. You 
 can observe how far "Reb Shemuel" in the "Children 
 of the Ghetto" is from the true spirit of the Law. 
 
 Nothing, in fact, characterizes Judaism better 
 than the law which insists that its highest repre- 
 sentative before God, the high-priest, must have a 
 wife, or else he cannot fill his sacred office on the 
 great Day of Atonement. Only he whose heart is 
 permeated by the sentiment of love for wife and 
 home was expected, according to the Talmud, to 
 offer up the prayers of the Community to the uni- 
 versal Father in heaven, and be heard. The Christian 
 Church takes marriage to be only a concession to 
 the flesh, and therefore insists that her highest 
 dignitary, the pope, should, like its founder or central 
 figure, be unfamiliar with those deepest of all human 
 feelings, the relations that bind man to his home, 
 and have no wife. The Jewish religion centers in 
 the home whose priestess, whether as wife and
 
 WOMAN'S INFLUENCE ON JUDAISM 291 
 
 mother or as educator and fashioner of the soul, is 
 woman. 
 
 Need I dwell at length on what the Jewess was 
 during the dark middle ages, when minstrels sang of 
 love, but sinned against the home; and when priests 
 and monks gloried in their abstinence vow and revelled 
 in illicit passion; when barbarity and ignorance pre- 
 vailed all over Christendom? While the husband 
 and son had to wage the hard battle of existence 
 far away from home throughout all the days of the 
 week, facing the sneers of the mob, the Jewish wife 
 kept the lamp of faith, the flame of religious educa- 
 tion, the Sabbath light of domestic joy and purity, 
 bright upon the altar of heart and home. The Jewish 
 house-father knew why, on coming home on the Sab- 
 bath Eve, he recited the Song of the Virtuous Woman, 
 ever anew. The preservation of Jewish life and 
 sentiment was all the work of the Jewish woman. 
 Nahida Remy, in her book on the Jewish Woman, 
 names only a few of the great representatives of her 
 sex who typified love of learning and zeal for the Law 
 during the centuries of persecution. The fact is that 
 everywhere the women exhorted their husbands to 
 persevere in their loyalty to the ancestral faith ; they 
 were always the first to undergo martyrdom for 
 the glorification of God's name and inspire the rest 
 by their example. They attended to the affairs of 
 both the household and the business in order to enable 
 their husbands to spend their lives in the sacred work 
 of studying the Law, and as a rule they did works 
 of charity in a far more kindly and gentle manner 
 than the men.
 
 292 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 We hardly realize what a fund of poetry, of 
 wisdom and wit she contributed to medieval Judaism ; 
 how she lent the Sabbath and the festival seasons, 
 the whole life of the Jew, its charms and its rhythm ; 
 and how her artistic talent provided also for the 
 elevation and beautification of the divine service. 
 
 But we also see the Jewess everywhere keeping 
 abreast of the time; she shows greater familiarity 
 than the men with the language, the literature, the 
 fables, the folklore and the wise sayings of the 
 surrounding world. She read not only devotional 
 books, but also ethical works and legends written in 
 the vernacular and introduced the elements of poetry 
 and wit into the monotonous and dreary home life. 
 No wonder, if occasionally warm friendship sprang 
 up between Jewesses and Christian women of high 
 rank in Spain and Italy, and it is not surprising to 
 read that fear was entertained by the priests, lest 
 these Christian women might be won over to Judaism 
 by such friendly intercourse. 
 
 How singular, indeed, that, while a large number 
 of prominent Jews turned renegades and traitors to 
 their religion, there are, during the Middle Ages 
 but rare instances found, of cultured Jewesses who 
 yielded to powerful influences and broke away from 
 the faith of their fathers. As Professor Lazarus 
 says, "The Jewess was the guardian-angel of the 
 Jewish race the main preserver of Judaism." 
 
 It is only since the beginning of the new era that 
 a change has come over the Jewish woman. The 
 greater refinement and culture of Christian society 
 round about her, and the lack of true sentiment and
 
 WOMAN'S INFLUENCE ON JUDAISM 293 
 
 soul-life in the mere formal observance of the an- 
 cient rites, seem to have caused a break in her re- 
 ligious consciousness, in her soul's unity with God. 
 Under the leadership of the Mendelssohnian circles, 
 where enlightenment meant apostacy, the modern 
 Jewess became the pioneer of the social and intel- 
 lectual emancipation of woman, and she has every- 
 where since then earned laurels in the field of litera- 
 ture, art, education and philanthropy. As the stand- 
 ard bearer of religion only has she been slow to 
 come forward. At the ark of faith she has not yet 
 taken the place assigned to her as a Deborah, Han- 
 nah or Hulda. 
 
 Of course, we glory in the four women our century 
 produced, each of whom shed bright lustre upon 
 her age and sex. Grace Aguilar, the gifted author 
 who kindled love for the Jewish faith in thousands 
 of young Israelites; and Emma Lazarus, the poetess, 
 who so proudly unfurled the banner of the Jew in 
 battle against the anti-Semite; Judith Montefiore, 
 the soul and inspiration of her illustrious husband, 
 the Jewish philanthropist, Sir Moses Montefiore; 
 and not the least of these is Clara de Hirsch, the 
 queen of all philanthropists, whose name will be 
 mentioned with blessings innumerable by many 
 generations to come. But I do not want to speak 
 of individuals. What is Judaism to the Jewess in 
 general to-day, I ask? The Jewess who has left 
 the views and the customs of the Ghetto behind her 
 and breathes the fresh, invigorating air of modern 
 culture and refinement, of broad humanity with 
 all its aims and ideals.
 
 294 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 When the Reform movement, child of the period 
 of German enlightenment, was started in the second 
 half of the last century, the sympathy and support of 
 the Jewess were enlisted and her religious emancipa- 
 tion proclaimed with the implicit hope and confidence 
 that she would inaugurate a new era in Judaism, that 
 she would kindle the smouldering fires of religion 
 anew in the heart and the home. All innovations in 
 Synagog and school were made with the view of 
 securing perfect equality between woman and man 
 before God, and the emotional powers rather than the 
 intellectual were evoked to win men and women 
 alike by the spirit, rather than by insistence on the 
 letter of the law. And behold, woman has responded 
 to the call; she has helped in filling our pews and 
 lending greater solemnity and dignity to our service, 
 and new enthusiasm and love to our work of educa- 
 tion. Conservative and liberal both build their hope 
 on woman to-day. 
 
 Dare we give expression to disappointment, be- 
 cause the fruitage is slow to ripen, the anticipated 
 change has not come about? 
 
 The Council of Jewish Women, offspring of the 
 World's Parliament of Women, with its two fields 
 of labor, study of the Bible and its philanthropic 
 circle, has also awakened new expectations in many 
 of us, and given rise to new visions and new energies 
 in the cause of Judaism. But as yet the great revival 
 of the Synagog, so eagerly looked for, has not 
 come, nor has the religious ardor anywhere percep- 
 tibly increased. Laudable efforts in starting Mission 
 schools in the poorer districts have been made; 
 individuals have been reclaimed to the Jewish fold
 
 WOMAN'S INFLUENCE ON JUDAISM 295 
 
 by the movement; still, the masses have not been 
 touched, the Jewish soul in its depth has not been 
 stirred. Not a single seer has come forth with a 
 prophetic call; not a single singer has voiced the 
 message of the hour. And yet we are in great need 
 of poetry and song. We crave for the word of in- 
 spiration from among the people, since the pulpit 
 has lost so much of its power, and the rabbi, in this 
 critical age, is well-nigh bereft of his authority. 
 
 The great mistake which we have been making 
 all along is that in the attempt at reforming the 
 Synagog, we overlooked the greater need of a re- 
 consecrated home life. Israel's first sanctuary was 
 not the tabernacle, but the house. The fire on the 
 altar of home must be rekindled; the Sabbath lamp 
 must be relit; the music of prayer and praise to God 
 must be heard again in our domestic circle. The 
 study of the Biblical and Jewish literature and the 
 science of philanthropy are noble objects and do 
 much good in their way, but they are the concern 
 only of the few. We require more concentrated ef- 
 forts on behalf of religious education and elevation. 
 We need the hearty co-operation of the pew and the 
 pulpit, the full harmonious blending of heart and 
 head, of congregation and of woman's wise leadership 
 and council. Woman's persuasive power says the 
 Midrash drove man out of Paradise; woman's 
 light and leading must bring him back. 
 
 At no previous time were the privileges and 
 opportunities, and therewith also the duties and 
 responsibilities of woman as great as they are to-day. 
 It is in woman's power to rescue our social life from 
 the mire of sensuality, which threatens to engulf it.
 
 296 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 and lift it to higher aims and standards, so as to 
 make the Jewish star of household virtue shine again 
 in its pristine splendor. Let every mother, every 
 daughter of Israel again make Judaism the glory and 
 central object of her life, and find her pride in the 
 glorification of the Jewish faith, in the stainless 
 purity and rectitude of every member of her house, 
 in the love and zeal for Jewish living and thinking 
 fostered therein. Then we will hear less of the Jewish 
 Question, less of prejudice and persecution, less of the 
 world's hatred and of life's woe; because each one will 
 then possess a treasure worth living, worth dying and 
 worth suffering for. Idealism is what made the Jewess 
 the preserver of her race. Idealism is what we so 
 sorely need to-day. 
 
 Life's stern battle for independence and power 
 strains all the nerves of man, absorbing his interest 
 and energy to render him a selfish utilitarian, a mater- 
 ialist in this materialistic age. Woman, with a soul 
 truer to nature and more responsive to the tender 
 appeals of religious duty, to the softer chords of 
 piety, is called upon to hold aloft the banner of 
 idealism, and to kindle the lamp of fidelity and 
 faith in the home. May we not confidently look for 
 the time when the Jewess of to-day, when the self- 
 respecting and loyal American Jewess with her greater 
 gifts of intellect and her higher culture of heart, will 
 make a determined effort to turn her home life, her 
 social life, the life of all entrusted to her care, God- 
 ward instead of worldward, and help in the great 
 work of regeneration of Israel, to bring piety and 
 peace back to our homes, the lost Paradise back to 
 man? May God speed the day! Amen.
 
 24. 
 
 THE ORIGIN AND FUNCTION OF CERE- 
 MONIES IN JUDAISM.* 
 
 THE significance of ceremony in the religious 
 life of the Jew forms one of the main points 
 at issue between Orthodoxy and Reform. To Rab- 
 binical Judaism the Sinaitic Law, written or oral, is 
 immutable, each of the 613 commandments being 
 regarded as fundamental, and the distinction made 
 between moral laws, dictated by reason, and ritual 
 laws, which rather baffle reason and common sense, 
 did not imply that the former are of greater im- 
 portance. While dividing the Mosaic laws into uni- 
 versally human or social and specifically Jewish or 
 religious precepts, Maimonides expressly assigns to 
 the latter a higher rank, in view of their ulterior 
 spiritual aims and purposes. Moses Mendelssohn 
 was, therefore, in perfect accord with tradition 
 when, rationalist as he was, he declared the ceremonial 
 laws to be the essential portion of the Mosaic legisla- 
 tion, whereas the ethical laws of the Pentateuch, 
 being dictates of reason and common-sense, are the 
 universal property of mankind. "Instead of imposed 
 dogmatic beliefs which shackle the human intellect, 
 those ceremonies should form a species of picture- 
 
 *Paper read before the Central Rabbinical Conference, in 1907, 
 and adapted for the general reader by the omission of archeo- 
 logical and bibliographical detail.
 
 298 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 language to awaken and foster certain thoughts in 
 the minds of all, and appeal to the heart of each 
 so as to render them guardians of pure theism." This 
 view, presented by Mendelssohn in his Jerusalem, 
 prevailed, and all stress was laid upon the cere- 
 monial law as being peculiarly Jewish and bound 
 up with the memories and hopes of the Jewish 
 people. It is, however, a great inconsistency on the 
 one hand to denounce submission to an imposed 
 creed in the name of liberty of conscience, and 
 on the other hand to demand blind submission to 
 imposed forms of practice which no longer have any 
 meaning for us. It is perfectly logical for him who 
 believes in a supernatural revelation to maintain 
 that, no matter whether they appeal to our under- 
 standing or not, the ritual laws demand obedience 
 as "the decrees of the great Ruler of Life concerning 
 which scrutiny is not permissible." On the part of 
 those, however, who deny the authenticity of the 
 Pentateuch, blind adherence to usages that have no 
 justification in themselves is slavish practice without 
 conviction, unworthy of thinking men. Reform, 
 then, hinges on the question whether Judaism is a 
 system of ceremonial observance as binding upon the 
 Jew as is the system of dogmatic belief upon the 
 Christian, or whether Judaism is a system of religious 
 and ethical truths, the ceremonies being only the 
 means to higher ends, not ends in themselves. But 
 in how far these are to be regarded as essentially 
 Jewish and therefore to be unalterably maintained, 
 and in how far they present only adaptations from 
 older non-Jewish life and, accordingly, permit of
 
 THE CEREMONIES IN JUDAISM 299 
 
 modifications, alterations and radical changes, is a 
 question concerning which opinions still widely differ. 
 In order to reach positive conclusions, a historic 
 review of the ceremonies in their various stages of 
 growth is required, and the principles underlying 
 their development in the different phases of religious 
 life must be investigated and established. 
 
 When speaking of ceremony, we must dismiss 
 the notion we moderns have that it is a mere con- 
 ventional form without intrinsic value and meaning. 
 To go back to the Latin, caerimonia signifies reverence 
 and awe, like the word religio with which it is fre- 
 quently coupled, while the plural caerimoniae denotes 
 religious rites. For the pagan mind in general 
 the ceremonies constitute religion, which is viewed 
 simply as a mode of worship void of ethical purposes. 
 In the course of time, however, the original object 
 of these ceremonies is forgotten, and they become 
 empty forms, until upon a higher stage they are in- 
 vested with new meaning and made to convey higher 
 thoughts. There is, consequently, a singular affinity 
 noticeable between the ceremonies of various people 
 and classes, since as a rule, they have a common 
 origin in primitive life. Ceremonies are never the 
 creations of individuals; they grow and change like 
 languages. They are, as Edward B. Tylor calls 
 them, "the gesture-language of theology." The 
 people that crave for rain, for instance, would in 
 solemn manner pour out water before the heavenly 
 power to suggest what it should do for them, and 
 henceforth water libation becomes part of the sacri- 
 ficial ritual elsewhere. Each ceremony may thus
 
 300 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 be traced to its origin in primitive time. When the 
 Occidental lifts his hat before a superior to-day, he 
 is unaware of the far older form of showing submissive 
 self-surrender by stripping oneself of all armaments 
 and equipments, which, of course, included the head- 
 gear. This corresponds with the Oriental custom of 
 taking off the shoes. On the other hand, it is regarded 
 as disrespectful in the East to receive, or be seen by 
 strangers, bareheaded, and it stands to reason that 
 it is considered by Orientals still more derogatory to 
 the honor of God to stand bareheaded before Him 
 in prayer or in sight of the sanctuary. You observe, 
 at once the pivotal question at issue: Are we as 
 Jews in Occidental life to be Orientals in the house 
 of God, or are we Occidentals in every respect? 
 
 The Mosaic ceremonial system, impressive as it 
 is with the authority of divine legislation and with the 
 grandeur of a great world-wide historic power, speaks 
 to us, nevertheless, in a religious language not our 
 own. We have to retranslate it into our own mode 
 of thinking and feeling. It is based upon sacrifice, 
 against which our religious consciousness revolts. 
 It rests upon notions of priestly holiness and purity 
 which we reject. It confines the worship of the Most 
 High to the priesthood and the sanctuary, and fails 
 to bring God nigh to the people, and home to each 
 heaven-aspiring soul. Mosaism, with its temple 
 cult, is to us and this is the essential difference 
 between Reform and Orthodox Judaism only the 
 preparatory stage to Rabbinism with its Synagogal 
 life, and to Modern Judaism with its many-centered 
 religious life. Those who call us Karaites or Mosaites
 
 301 
 
 know neither what Karaism was, nor what Reform 
 Judaism stands for. We believe in the ever-working 
 laws of historic evolution, and see in assimilation a 
 force ever at work in Judaism's progress. The entire 
 sacrificial cult of the Pentateuch is the result of a 
 powerful assimilation. Careful scientific investiga- 
 tions comparing the Babylonian, the Phenician 
 and the old Arabic sacrificial system, including even 
 the terminology, with that of the Mosaic Code, have 
 established the fact beyond a cavil of doubt that the 
 divine lawgiver, or lawgivers, simply adopted the 
 rules and customs of priestly practice prevalent for 
 ages, while at the same time eliminating such ele- 
 ments as were connected with idolatry, witchcraft 
 and the abominable orgies of the Astarte and Baal 
 cult, and changing form and character here and there 
 to give the whole service a higher and more spiritual 
 meaning and purpose. The fundamental principle 
 that all the sacrificial and priestly practices should, 
 by various degrees of purity and sanctity, lead up to 
 and culminate in the divine ideal of Holiness, in a 
 Holy God whose sacredness is to eradiate from the 
 sanctuary and impart itself to the people over the 
 land, at once lent the system a peculiar and lofty 
 character; but the system itself as a religious machin- 
 ery was borrowed from its environments. The central 
 idea which pervades the entire sacrificial service is 
 the same that underlies the Semitic, if not primitive 
 religion in general, and that is, that only blood as 
 the vital power of man and beast unites and reunites 
 men and God. Only blood possesses the power of 
 atonement. Only blood seals a covenant and recon-
 
 302 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 ciles an angry deity. Only the signs of blood protect 
 the houses, the men and the flocks against malign 
 spirits. Read the personal observations made in 
 Bible lands by Prof. Curtiss in his "Primitive Semitic 
 Religion" and by Clay Trumbull as recorded in his 
 "Blood Covenant" and "The Threshold Covenant," 
 and you have the key to many religious ceremonies 
 of ancient Israel. New light is there thrown upon the 
 twelfth and thirteenth chapters of Exodus, which 
 treat of the Passover lamb whose blood is sprinkled 
 upon the doorsill and doorposts, and of the sacrifice 
 of the firstborn of the flock and the herd, together with 
 the signs upon the arm and the forehead. We learn 
 of the shepherds of Arabia and Palestine offering each 
 spring at the increase of their flocks and herds some 
 of the firstborn as a sacrifice called Fedu the same as 
 Pidion, "Redemption," into the blood of which they 
 dip the hand to put the sign of "a hand" or of the 
 letter Tau, which had originally the form of a cross, 
 upon the doorsill and upon the forehead of men, and 
 sprinkle some upon the flock and the herd to avert 
 ill-luck, or to insure the divine blessing. So is every 
 new household, opened by a moving tribe, or by a 
 newly married couple, consecrated by sacrificial 
 blood warding off evil spirits that may beleaguer it. 
 Likewise is the life of a child in cases of sickness 
 or distress, dedicated to the local saint, bought off 
 by the sacrifice of a lamb or goat, and in case of 
 poverty also by a rooster or hen. We thus find 
 the closest similarity between the practices mentioned 
 in the Bible and those still in use in the Bible lands. 
 Also in regard to the festivities of the ingathering and
 
 THE CEREMONIES IN JUDAISM 303 
 
 the firstlings of the yearly produce. As Maimonides, 
 in the third book of his Moreh, has suggested with 
 fine divinatory powers, it was the method of a wise 
 pedagogy which either made use of pagan rites to 
 train the people of Israel for higher religious views 
 and habits, or so transformed the ancient practices 
 as to guard the people against lapsing into heathen 
 vice and cruelty. 
 
 We must bear in mind that antiquity knew of no 
 other form of worship than sacrifice. However 
 bitterly the great prophets in Israel condemned the 
 heathen mode of bribing deity by the blood and the 
 oil poured upon the altar, while Israel's God demanded 
 righteous conduct, they could not abrogate the sacri- 
 ficial cult. Nor did they intend doing so. They did 
 not accord to prayer and song a higher place in the 
 service. Even the great seer of the Exile, when giving 
 utterance to the glorious vision of the time when the 
 house of God would become a house of prayer for 
 all the nations, still beholds the pillars of smoke 
 rising from an altar decked with holocausts and 
 other blood offerings. And so does "the incense of 
 sacrifice offered to God from the rising of the sun 
 until its setting" betoken to the last of the Prophets 
 the universality of religion. Only the Hasidean 
 Psalms XI and L echo forth the clear note of dissent, 
 ushering in a new era of religious life during the 
 Exile, as we shall see. In the Mosaic system the 
 priestly ritual, dominant in all sanctuaries, is the 
 only legitimate one. Prayer and confession of sin 
 are admitted as occasional outpourings of the indi- 
 vidual, yet only at the outer parts of the sanctuary.
 
 304 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 Even the inspiring song and music of Levitical 
 choirs find no place, or mention, alongside of the 
 primitive horn (Shofar) and trumpet. 
 
 In all likelihood this simplicity is intentional. 
 It was to form a striking contrast to the seductive 
 orgies of the Canaanite. This would also account 
 for the strange lack of ceremonial prescribed for the 
 different holy days. Only the old shepherd festival 
 of spring, Pesah, transformed into a memorial feast 
 of the Exodus, has a more elaborate ritual. The three 
 agricultural festivals still appear in a rather shadowy 
 form, except in so far as the number of sacrifices is 
 concerned. There are several indications in Scriptural 
 passages that the Sukkoth festivities of the water 
 libation held in the second temple originated in 
 ancient times; but the priestly legislation had no in- 
 terest in a public ceremonial outside of the sanctuary. 
 
 In the Atonement Day ceremonial we have a 
 peculiar combination of a primitive Semitic and a 
 purely monotheistic rite of expiation. The scape- 
 goat sent out to Azazel, the goat-like demon of the 
 wilderness, belongs to the same category as the bird 
 sent out to carry the disease of the leper into the 
 wilderness, and has many analogies in ancient Semitic 
 usages. This archaic rite meant for the inhabitants 
 of Jerusalem originally the removal of physical evil 
 for the new solar year. The priesthood, on the other 
 hand, expatiated on the rites of expiation for the 
 sanctuary, the effects of which only indirectly affected 
 the people for whom the day was made a fast day. 
 The whole ritual has an exclusively hierarchical 
 character, which was changed only at the hands of
 
 THE CEREMONIES IN JUDAISM 305 
 
 the Pharisees in their combat with Sadduceeism. 
 These only gave it the character of a grand symbolic 
 act of purification and divine atonement. 
 
 The only day which stands out as a genuine Jewish 
 institution without parallel in paganism is the 
 Sabbath. It is emphatically declared to be the sign 
 of the covenant between God and Israel. Unlike 
 the Babylonian Sabbath, which figures as a day of 
 austerity and gloom for the royal representative of the 
 nation, the Mosaic Sabbath is a day of rest and 
 recreation for the whole nation, including the slave, 
 the stranger and the beast. It is a testimonial to 
 God as the Creator of the Universe as well as the 
 Liberator of man. Still, a ceremonial of a positive 
 kind is prescribed only for the priest who, besides 
 the additional sacrifice, places the new shew-bread 
 upon the golden table each Sabbath day, while taking 
 home the old. 
 
 As the great Memorial day of the deliverance 
 from Egypt, the Passover feast also occupies a central 
 position in the Mosaic number of holy days. Many 
 ceremonies cluster around it to become reminders 
 of important religious and ethical laws, the unleavened 
 bread of primitive time having been rendered sym- 
 bolic of the hastened exodus of Israel from the land 
 of bondage. 
 
 There remain for discussion, then, those cere- 
 monies particularly enjoined as signs for the body. 
 The most important of these is the sign of the Abra- 
 hamitic covenant. Here, too, the pedagogical tend- 
 ency of the Mosaic law becomes evident, as soon as 
 we compare the rite prescribed in Genesis with the
 
 306 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 one in use among all the other tribes in Arabia, 
 Africa and Australia, and find traces of the older 
 primitive form also in ancient Biblical time. It is 
 the consecration of manhood at the approach of 
 puberty and before marriage that is intended by the 
 practice in primitive life, and the painful ordeal 
 becomes a test for the youth, as in similar savage 
 custom's. Obviously, in assigning the tenderest age 
 of infancy as the time for the performance of the 
 rite, when the pain, or consciousness of pain, is 
 minimized, whereas Ishmael, the father of the 
 Beduin tribe, is circumcised at thirteen years of 
 age, the act is elevated to the dignity of a solemn 
 initiation of the child into the Abrahamitic household. 
 There is no doubt, however, that the idea of the Blood- 
 Covenant prevailed also in relation to this rite, as 
 may be learned from its relation to the Passover 
 feast. And this leads us to the "sign" on the hand 
 and between the eyes mentioned in this connection 
 in Exodus xiii, 9 and 16. Rabbinical tradition refers 
 this to the Phylacteries introduced in post-Biblical 
 time. But Samaritan practice to this very day helps 
 to elucidate the passage. The blood of the Passover- 
 lamb slaughtered on Mount Gerizim is being put on 
 the arm and the forehead of the children. Out of 
 such custom, which has talismanic character, the 
 Tefillin or Phylacteries developed, just as the Mezuz- 
 zah grew out of the other talismanic practice of be- 
 daubing the doors with blood in the shape of a hand 
 and the like. The Deuteronomic law-giver suggests 
 by way of symbolism "the binding of the words of 
 the Law on arm and forehead and the inscription of
 
 THE CEREMONIES IN JUDAISM 307 
 
 the same on the doorposts," a practice met with among 
 Moslems to-day and among Christians of old; and 
 this became a fixed ceremonial law, although the talis- 
 manic character of both the Tefillin and Mezuzzah 
 is occasionally alluded to in the Targum and the 
 Talmud. The Zizith, too, which in Deuteronomy 
 is merely enjoined as a lesson of public decorum, are 
 prescribed in the Holiness Code as a ceremonial 
 practice of a religious nature, though the talismanic 
 character of the purple blue thread upon the fringes 
 is generally assumed by modern commentators and 
 seemingly confirmed by Talmudic utterances. 
 
 A real consecration of the entire people of Israel 
 as God's holy priest-nation is expressed in the dietary 
 laws, the priestly origin and character of which cannot 
 be doubted by the student of comparative religion. 
 Whether R. Smith's theory of the totemitic signifi- 
 cance of the unclean, or tabooed, animals, be ac- 
 cepted or not, the fact that the laws of the Hindoos, 
 of the Persians, the Babylonians and the Egyptians 
 forbade the same classes of animals to the priesthood, 
 and that the Mosaic Code itself takes it for granted 
 that the distinction between the clean and the un- 
 clean animals dates back to the oldest, the Noahidic 
 times, proves that the underlying principle is not a 
 social or hygienic, but a specifically religious one. 
 It is the great legislative attempt to carry into prac- 
 tical effect the prophetical idea expressed at the 
 Sinai tic Revelation: "Ye shall be unto Me a king- 
 dom of priests and a holy nation." It was, however, 
 on a higher stage, in a more congenial religious atmos- 
 phere, that this great plan could be brought nearer
 
 308 
 
 to its realization, and this was the period of Hasidean 
 or Pharisaic and Rabbinical Judaism. 
 
 The difference in the religious life between pre- 
 Exilic and post-Exilic Israel is so marked and so 
 amazingly great, that the rabbis could account for 
 it only by the legend that the founders of the Syna- 
 gogue, "the Men of the great Asembly," had seized 
 the Yezer ha Ra by magic and exterminated him from 
 the earth, so as to put an end to the idolatrous propen- 
 sities of the people. The fact is that with the rise of 
 Persia a new spirit entered the world and brought 
 about a great change, especially among the Jewish 
 exiles. The higher conception of Deity which lent 
 to life in general a moral purpose, though based on 
 dualism, demanded of the Parsee a purer form of 
 worship. The rising and setting sun, the waning and 
 waxing moon, the various phenomena of nature 
 presenting the combat of light with darkness, and 
 of life with death, were greeted with invocations and 
 prayers rather than with bloody sacrifice. The 
 sensual worship of the lascivious Babylonian deities 
 made way for an adoration of the god of light. Again 
 it is the principle of assimilation which is at work in 
 the shaping of the Jewish religion. Alongside of the 
 temple with its sacrificial cult attended to by the Sad- 
 ducean hierarchy, the Synagog arises as a new center 
 of religious life created by "the humble" or "pious 
 ones," the saints of the people, impregnated with 
 the prophetic truths and echoing forth their lofty 
 aspirations in the psalms, and then in a liturgy 
 shaped after Parsee models. An intense religious 
 enthusiasm which finds its resonance in the people's
 
 THE CEREMONIES IN JUDAISM 309 
 
 heart, is awakened by these Hasidim of the type of 
 Daniel, and expresses itself in ceremonies of a far 
 higher order than is the priestly ritual. The origin 
 of the recital of the Shema, with the preceding bene- 
 diction praising the Creator for the light of day and 
 Israel's Only One for the light of the Torah, has been 
 traced to Parsee influence. It was not imitation, but 
 assimilation that prompted all the great improve- 
 ments upon the old priestly cult. Yes, the founders of 
 the Synagog were reformers in adopting the Parsee 
 ceremony of greeting the orb of light at its rise every 
 morning and every evening at its setting; but whereas 
 the worshippers of Ormuzd with their magic formula 
 hailed the sun as deity, the Hasidim invoked God 
 as the Creator of Light and Darkness, expressly 
 accentuating the monotheistic doctrine in contradic- 
 tion to the dualism of Persia. In connection with this, 
 a recognition of God's sovereignty, was the ceremony 
 of putting on the Tefillin and of wrapping the head 
 into theZizith (or Tallith} made a regular part of the 
 morning prayer, for which also the Parsee custom 
 offers an analogy. In fact, most of the ceremonies 
 and benedictions are adaptations from Parseeism. 
 
 The leading idea of the epoch ushered in by the 
 Persian dominion was the assertion of the right of the 
 individual in the religious life of the nation. And of 
 this the Synagog became the powerful exponent, 
 revolutionizing religion by instituting, in place of the 
 sacrificial priestly pomp, a simple service fervent 
 with true devotion and rich in instruction, to appeal 
 to all hearts. God stepped, as it were, out of the dark- 
 ness of the Holy of Holies, to which only the elect of
 
 310 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 the priesthood had access once a year, into the full 
 daylight of reason and knowledge, to become in reality 
 the God and Father of all. The Torah in the hand 
 of the scribe, the teacher and preacher, was to become 
 the property of all ; and around the ark containing it 
 and the desk from which it was read and expounded 
 to the congregation, sprang up ceremonies full of 
 meaning and impressiveness. The Torah lent to the 
 Sabbath and holy days a significance they could not 
 have had in ancient Israel; it gave to each season 
 of the circling years a new charm and rhythm. 
 Out of the heart of the religious community blos- 
 somed forth the ideas which transformed the three 
 agricultural feasts and the feast of the temple expia- 
 tion on the tenth of Tishri with its herald, the day 
 of the Shofar blowing, into the great awakeners of 
 religious thought and sentiment, and around each 
 there began to cluster specific ceremonies of soul- 
 stirring beauty and grandeur. 
 
 But here, too, we must not lose sight of the 
 historic law of evolution. It is always the few elect 
 who usher in new ideas. The Pharisean brother- 
 hoods, in reclaiming for their assemblies the sanctity 
 of the priesthood guaranteed to Israel at Sinai, gave 
 a new solemnity to their Sabbath and holy day 
 meals by the Kiddush and Habdalah ceremony, 
 made the Passover night resonant with the joyous 
 strains of the Haggadah, transformed the farmer's 
 feast of the firstlings into a memorial day of Sinai, 
 and created the great autumnal season of religious 
 revival for the Jew. The daily meals were also 
 lifted out of the commonplace and invested with
 
 THE CEREMONIES IN JUDAISM 311 
 
 priestly holiness by these brotherhoods. Seated 
 around a common table, they began and finished 
 with benedictions and other ceremonies, in imita- 
 tion of temple practice and that of other religious 
 fraternities. In like manner, social events, such 
 as weddings and funerals, or the initiation of 
 youths into the study and practice of the Torah, 
 the Bar Mizwah celebration, were made specific 
 religious solemnities. Gradually a new factor of 
 religious life enters and opens a new sphere for 
 ceremonial observance. Woman as builder and guar- 
 dian of the home is more and more recognized, and 
 the rigor of the Mosaic purity laws, as well as the 
 austerity of the Hasidean saint, gives way to the 
 dictates of common sense. Henceforth the Jewish 
 home is emblazoned and enriched with new cere- 
 monies which accord to woman a prominent place 
 in religious life. The kindling of the Sabbath lamp 
 and the baking of the Sabbath bread, and the like, 
 invest domestic life with new means of sanctification. 
 In the same measure as the Jew withdraws from the 
 political arena to form an exclusively religious com- 
 munity in the midst of the nations, his life from the 
 cradle to the grave becomes a round of ceremonial 
 observances distinguishing it from his surroundings. 
 Yet as the real purpose and origin of all these rites 
 and ceremonies were forgotten, the impression obtains 
 that separation, distinction of the Jew from the non- 
 Jew, was the sole object, and non-Jewish habits, even 
 of the most innocent kind, are condemned as included 
 in the Mosaic prohibition of Hukkat ha Goy, which 
 refers only to the lewd practices of the idolatrous 
 nations.
 
 312 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 But such is the power of assimilation working 
 unconsciously in Judaism, that almost every age and 
 country added customs and ceremonies of pagan 
 origin and superstitious character. Such a one is 
 the rite of Kapparoth, the waiving and slaughtering 
 of a cock, respectively hen, for males and females, 
 on the eve of Yom Kippur, a sort of vicarious sacri- 
 fice met with also among Mohammedans, and like- 
 wise the ransoming of the dangerously sick, "Pidyon 
 ha Nefesh". 
 
 The rites connected with marriage, birth and death 
 present a strange combination of ancient Oriental 
 and Occidental practices. The wine and the benedic- 
 tions at the wedding date from the time when the 
 sacrificial meal cemented the matrimonial covenant, 
 whereas the ring as a symbol is a medieval innova- 
 tion. Few people are aware that the bridal veil, 
 which lent the name to the Roman nuptials, is but a 
 survival of the cutting-off of the bride's hair, a prac- 
 tice still adhered to in Russia among Jews and 
 Gentiles. So has the Rabbinical prohibition to have 
 weddings take place in holy seasons its parallel in 
 Roman custom, while the forbidding of weddings 
 during the Omer days corresponds to the Roman and 
 English avoidance of May weddings. 
 
 The solemnizing of the Berith Milah is neither 
 Biblical nor Talmudical, but was apparently adopted 
 from the Mohammedans. Especially interesting is 
 the adoption of the feast of Naming the Child 
 from the Germans under the heathen name of 
 Holle Kreisch for the daughter, since Oriental tradi- 
 tion had made no provision for this family event.
 
 THE CEREMONIES IN JUDAISM 313 
 
 Especially large is the number of practices 
 adopted by the Jew from his surroundings in the 
 event of death. Superstition, deisidaemonia "fear 
 of the demons" as the Greeks call it is the child 
 of fear. Most funeral rites were originally means of 
 pacifying the dead who claimed their part from the 
 living. Out of the sacrifices to the dead, transformed 
 later into sacrifices for the dead, developed all the 
 rites and prayers that at a more advanced stage 
 became sources of comfort for the living. The ancient 
 fear died away, and piety stepped into its place to 
 preserve the old customs in a new garb and in a new 
 spirit. There is nothing that so appeals to the Jew 
 with his innate love for the fathers who sleep in the 
 dust, as does the Kaddish and the Yahrzeit. Yet 
 both have their origin in fear, fear of the purgatory 
 and fear lest the unlucky day again bring death. 
 They have obtained a prominent place in Jewish 
 life, though their origin and character are un-Jewish. 
 
 In thus reviewing the entire system of Jewish 
 observances we find them to be indispensable 
 forms of expressing the religious feelings prompted 
 by the various events of life. As we advance in 
 culture, enlightenment and refinement, these various 
 ceremonies may appear to us as empty shells, void of 
 meaning, but we must never forget that nothing 
 grows on the tree or in the soil without the shielding 
 leaf and husk. Abstract truth and ethical practice 
 fail to satisfy the religious craving of man. He needs 
 ceremonies that impress him with the nearness and 
 the holiness of the divine. And while the Mosaic 
 Code placed the sanctuary and the priesthood into
 
 314 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 the foreground, often ignoring the life of the people, 
 we see Pharisaic and Rabbinic Judaism creating new 
 ceremonies or transforming the old, so as to impress 
 the Jew on all occasions with his priestly sanctity. 
 He rejoices in the multitude of observances which 
 surround his life like so many guardian-angels. 
 Unlike his Christian neighbor, who from fear of the 
 Satanic powers of evil surrenders to blind dogma, 
 he sees his path of life lined with ceremonies which 
 secure to him the divine favor. 
 
 The question for us to-day, however, is : Can these 
 ceremonies of traditional Judaism still occupy the 
 same place in our life? True, they have accom- 
 plished much for the Jew of the past in offering a 
 wondrous discipline, which drilled him to do soldier's 
 duty in defending the ancestral inheritance and in 
 shunning no sacrifice to uphold it against a world 
 of bitterest enmity and intolerance. Still, they 
 have long ceased to impress us with the idea of 
 priestly holiness and have become "the work of men 
 inculcated by rote." Rabbinical ceremonialism has 
 become as unbearable to us as the sacrificial sacer- 
 dotalism was to the prophets of old. The dietary 
 and purity laws, whether Mosaic or Rabbinical, are 
 dead for most of us, and no power in the world can 
 resuscitate them. And this is the case with many 
 other ceremonial institutions deemed fundamental 
 by the law-observing Orthodox. We cannot shut 
 our eyes to the fact that, as our entire Weltanschauung 
 changes, so must our religious views necessarily 
 change. In order to have a positive religious value 
 and significance, ceremonies must either directly
 
 THE CEREMONIES IN JUDAISM 315 
 
 or symbolically express thoughts and feelings that 
 appeal to us, while elevating, hallowing and enriching 
 our lives. Romanticism, which only loves ancient 
 practices because they are picturesque representa- 
 tions of a dead past, is not religion, which must above 
 all be the voice of a living truth, of a living God. 
 
 As for modern Judaism the fact must be ack- 
 nowledged that the same laws that have been at work 
 both in the Mosaic and in the Rabbinic periods of 
 Judaism are still at work in the modern epoch; 
 only with the essential difference that in the former 
 stages the work was done by unconscious forces of 
 the Jewish genius, for which the religious terminology 
 is revelation and inspiration, God working through 
 His chosen organs and authorities, whereas in our 
 age of reason the religious progress is achieved by us 
 in response to the dictates of our own religious con- 
 sciousness. The recognition of the fact that both 
 Mosaism and Pharisaism have been borrowing and 
 adopting forms of religious practice from their sur- 
 roundings in the shaping and reshaping of the re- 
 ligious life of the Jewish people, entitles us to pursue 
 the same method of the remodeling of the present 
 Judaism in order to revitalize and quicken its forces. 
 Of course, innovations and reforms at first militate 
 against the justly venerated authority of the past, 
 and it requires a successive period of tacit assent to 
 legitimize them and render them integral parts of 
 the whole system of religion. 
 
 Now there can be no question as to the need of 
 ceremonial practices in our age. Doctrine alone, 
 however lofty, does not stir the soul and bring it
 
 316 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 in touch with the great Fountainhead of Holiness 
 and Love. Religious practices do. They awaken and 
 deepen, as Lazarus says in his "Jewish Ethics," 
 the sense of duty in us. They develop our spiritual 
 faculties, because they appeal to our emotional 
 nature. They impress us with the holiness of life 
 much more than abstract truth can. They bring all 
 the lessons of religion home to us in striking, per- 
 suasive form. The skeptic who remains cold when 
 he hears arguments, however convincing, is moved 
 to tears when some ceremonial act brings back to 
 him long-forgotten memories, roused by associations 
 of thought and sentiment connected therewith. 
 No religion can be without such memorial "signs", 
 least of all Judaism with its wondrous history of 
 achievement and of endurance. Ceremonies are 
 the educators and monitors of the people; they speak 
 to old and young, to sage and simple-minded alike 
 the language of faith, of hope and of loyalty. 
 
 The question is, however, in how far do our in- 
 herited religious practices fulfill this aim and object? 
 There is no dispute among the most radical that the 
 Sabbath and festival days are still most potent 
 ceremonial institutions, performing the function of 
 educators for the Jewish community, the home and 
 the individual. They revive the dormant soul of 
 the Jew ever anew, giving rhythm, pathos and charm 
 to the life of each and all. But, then, are the cere- 
 monies connected with each, real signs and testi- 
 monies symbolic of the truths they are to convey? 
 Do they speak an intelligible language to the young 
 for whom they are, according to Scripture, chiefly
 
 THE CEREMONIES IN JUDAISM 317 
 
 intended? Here is the place where Reform has to 
 step in and render the old ceremonial attractive, 
 suggestive and impressive for the new generation. 
 We all realize to-day that the ceremonies for the 
 home have not received sufficient attention. The 
 importance of hallowing and enriching the Jewish 
 home life has not been fully appreciated. Dr. Berko- 
 witz has made a good beginning with his Sabbath 
 Eve Kiddush. Thus should the beautiful parental 
 blessing at each family reunion on Sabbath and holy 
 day eve again be introduced, to render the whole 
 more impressive. It must be placed to the credit of 
 the Reformers that the ceremony of the kindling of 
 the Hanukkah lights has been revived in homes, where 
 the Christmas tree threatened to captivate the 
 young hearts and lessen their pride in their ancestral 
 faith. Yet much more ought to be done by us to 
 awaken the sentiment of loyalty and love in the 
 young, by the introduction of new appropriate forms 
 where the old ones have lost their impressiveness. 
 
 At present we need means of strengthening the 
 self-respect of the Jew, of arousing his Jewish con- 
 sciousness. Especial emphasis must therefore be 
 laid upon the ties that bind him to his past, which 
 alone will fill his soul with pride in his great heritage. 
 In religion especially, where reverence plays so 
 prominent a role, the ancient institutions must be 
 treated with regard and awe, and as long as any 
 religious observance proves helpful, it should be 
 retained. We can herein learn from nature, never to 
 cast off the old before the new is strong enough 
 to weather the storms. If the wholesome effect
 
 318 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 made by ceremonies upon the parents is observed 
 by the child, they will not fail to work by the mystery 
 of sympathy upon the latter in the plastic time of 
 youth. Upon the much neglected home of the Jew, 
 then, the ceremonial system should be centered. 
 Religion should stand as sponsor at the naming of 
 the child, and should solemnize each important 
 event in the life of the household, thus rendering 
 the home a true sanctuary, and father and mother 
 its priest and priestess, as of yore. Even the recital 
 of the Shema each morning and evening might be 
 transformed into a solemn domestic service, to leave 
 its ennobling and hallowing impression upon each 
 member of the household. 
 
 We must bear in mind that we are in a great 
 transition period. The yoke-bearing age is behind 
 us. Formerly the ceremonies were to be observed 
 as divine commands; for us to-day they must have an 
 intrinsic value in order to be of binding force. Re- 
 ligion must first of all voice the innermost craving of 
 the human soul as a child of God. Ceremonies 
 which assign to woman an inferior rank according 
 to Oriental notions, are out of place with us. Reform 
 Judaism recognizes woman as man's equal and sees 
 in her deeper emotional nature, which is more re- 
 sponsive to the promptings of the spirit, the real 
 inspiring influence for religious life in the household. 
 Accordingly, all the ceremonies in the domestic life 
 to-day should be Occidental rather than Oriental 
 in form and character. 
 
 The calling up of the thirteen year old lad, the 
 Bar Mitzwah, to read from the Torah, is a mere sur-
 
 THE CEREMONIES IN JUDAISM 319 
 
 vival of the calling up of all the members of the 
 congregation to the Torah reading. The original 
 significance, which was to indicate thereby the 
 admission of the lad into the membership of the 
 congregation, has been forgotten, and consequently 
 the usage to-day is meaningless. The moment the 
 Oriental notion of the superiority of man over woman 
 in religious life was abandoned, a form of consecration 
 for the young of both sexes was instituted in its 
 place, and the beautiful rite of confirmation was 
 adopted. As a befitting conclusion of many years 
 of religious instruction it exerts a potent influence 
 upon the young Jews and Jewesses, while it has lent 
 new attractiveness to the Shabuoth festival, which 
 otherwise lacked a specific or characteristic ceremony 
 in traditional Judaism. 
 
 Greater stress than in former days is laid to-day 
 upon the recital of the Kaddish and similar trib- 
 utes of affectionate regard for the dead. True, such 
 emotional piety can never replace true, religious 
 sentiment. Nevertheless there is a brighter side to 
 it, of which account must be taken. The crude 
 belief in resurrection of the dead, which has been the 
 source of fear and superstitious practices, has made 
 way for the belief in the immortality of the soul. 
 And this has lent new solemnity to that part of the 
 service called Commemoration of the Dead a liturgy 
 which, while emphasizing in classic form the inherited 
 trait of Jewish reverence and piety, has invested the 
 Yom Kippur with new lustre for the Jew of to-day. 
 
 But above all, the Jewish religion must be pre- 
 sented as a factor of life in humanity's work, in order
 
 320 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 to win all hearts to-day. It must accentuate the 
 universal, the human and the practical side of life. 
 It must train man for the service of mankind. Are 
 our ceremonials vocal of this prophetic truth? It is 
 by no means sufficient to have symbols bringing home 
 to us the glorious memories of the past. We must 
 have such as hold before us the great hopes, promises 
 and ideals of the future, together with practical les- 
 sons for the present. The feast of redemption must 
 tell us of the redemption of an oppressed world and 
 of the great universal plan of liberty, allotting its 
 burdens and its tasks to each and all. So must the 
 Maccabean feast of lights proclaim the ultimate 
 triumph of truth and justice over falsehood, intoler- 
 ance and wrongdoing everywhere. So will each fes- 
 tival, the Day of the Giving of the Law with its 
 lesson concerning Ruth and the Proselyte, and Suk- 
 koth with its peace offerings for the seventy nations 
 of the world, lead us out of the narrowness of the 
 national self to the broad outlook of cosmopolitan 
 humanity with its practical aims. And as the great 
 New Year's and Atonement Days preached since 
 wellnigh two-thousand years the religion of man- 
 hood and of broad humanity, may they not become 
 also powerful instrumentalities of uniting and recon- 
 ciling all classes and races of men by practical modes 
 of readjusting the inadequacies of social life sug- 
 gested by symbols taken from the Yom Kippur 
 Haphthara, and by the Jubilee idea connected with 
 the Yom Kippur? 
 
 It has been said that in emphasizing our mission 
 to preach pure ethical monotheism, we are fast losing
 
 THE CEREMONIES IN JUDAISM 321 
 
 our Jewishness, which is maintained only through 
 separatistic Jewish observances of the Oriental 
 type. It seems to me that they labor under a great 
 misapprehension who earnestly believe that the 
 Occidental Jew in general will ever fashion his social 
 life differently from that of the people amongst whom 
 he lives. And if he were to do so, he would merely 
 lessen the great opportunities offered him by this age 
 of ours of rendering his religion "a light to the nations" 
 and "a blessing to all families on earth." To us Judaism 
 is an ever-progressive religion, and in a congenial 
 atmosphere of freedom and moral greatness, it is 
 bound to expand, and its symbolic rites will be 
 commensurate in suggestiveness and intrinsic value. 
 No fear, then, that the Jew may lose his identity 
 when he aspires to the highest aims of life, buoyed 
 up with the consciousness of his mission for the 
 world. In order to impress the Jew with the great- 
 ness of his task and his responsibility as mankind's 
 priest, we should have certain ceremonies. It is for 
 this that new symbolic forms may have to be created 
 expressive of the Jew's world-duty as God's chosen 
 one, since the mere prohibition of intermarriage or 
 the Abraharaitic sign of the covenant is not suffi- 
 ciently indicative of Israel's priest-dignity. 
 
 I am neither a prophet nor the son of a prophet, 
 but I see the day dawning when the larger view and 
 the larger life of the new age of which the Jew par- 
 takes in so eminent a degree, will suggest religious 
 practices and symbolic observances offering prac- 
 tical lessons of universal love, peace and righteousness 
 to the Jew as humanity's teacher and pattern.
 
 322 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 Where pessimists see nothing but decline and decay, 
 I see a gradual transformation, leading to a rejuvena- 
 tion of Judaism and a broadening out of its scope 
 and its sphere of influence. 
 
 Ceremonies are the poetry of religion ; they invest 
 life with the beauty of holiness. The need of such 
 has been felt by Judaism all the more, because images 
 and signs representing the Deity have at all times 
 been scrupulously shunned. Imperceptibly, however, 
 old ceremonies are transformed and finally replaced 
 by new ones, while some have become distinctive 
 features, which must be upheld, to keep it from dis- 
 integration. As Morris Joseph in his "Judaism as 
 Life and Creed" correctly says: "That a law or an 
 observance tends to keep up Jewish separateness 
 is by itself no valid argument for its retention. To 
 justify its continued existence it must show that it 
 still serves a moral and religious purpose, that its 
 spiritual vitality is unexhausted. Mere separateness 
 is not an ideal to be cherished. Rightly conceived, it 
 is but a means to an end, and that end is the effective- 
 ness of the Jew as a religious instrument. If it fail 
 to secure that end, it is an unmixed evil." "Break 
 the barrel but let not one drop of the precious wine 
 flow out!" This is the way the rabbis characterize 
 a seemingly impossible task. Such is the problem 
 Reform has to solve. Under the influence of time the 
 old forms crumble and fall. We must see to it that 
 the fragrance, the spirit of the old, be not lost, as 
 we pass on to the new.
 
 25. 
 SOLOMON SCHECHTER.* 
 
 WHEN one of the world's great sages dies, all 
 mourn the loss of one near and dear to them, 
 says the Talmud. Solomon Schechter's death is an 
 irreparable loss, not merely to our sister-institution, 
 the Jewish Theological Seminary of New York, 
 whose illustrious head and powerful reorganizer he 
 was, but to the entire American Jewry and the whole 
 learned world as well. And it is especially befitting 
 that we, the Board of Governors, the Faculty and the 
 Student body of the Hebrew Union College, should 
 give public testimony to the high esteem in which the 
 departed master was held by us, in a special Memorial 
 Service given in his honor, all the more so, as the 
 impression which his genial personality and the 
 beautiful words of wisdom he spoke on the occasion 
 of the dedication of this, our new College Building, 
 made upon us, is still treasured in our hearts as a 
 precious memento. When Jacob the patriarch was 
 being gathered to his fathers, the Midrash tells us, 
 all the royalties of Egypt deposited their crowns 
 upon his bier, and, seeing these tokens of honor be- 
 stowed upon so simple a man, the Canaanites cried 
 forth: "This is indeed a great mourning unto 
 
 Memorial address delivered at the Chapel of the Hebrew Union 
 College on December 18, 1915.
 
 324 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 Egypt," and they, too, laid down their crowns to 
 honor the patriarch. So on two continents do Jewish 
 and Christian scholars alike testify by their grief 
 that a great man and a prince of learning has gone 
 from our midst. 
 
 However, the object of a Memorial Address is 
 not to voice grief at the loss sustained, but to give 
 expression to the truth that "the righteous are by 
 their very death ushered into a life of greater in- 
 fluence and power;" nay more, that death lifts 
 them to a loftier plane where their noble figure appears 
 illumined by the virtues they displayed, to make them 
 a greater object of love, while their foibles and short- 
 comings pale before the good they have accom- 
 plished. And yet our portraiture must above all be 
 true and not have a false coloring. Judaism tolerates 
 no apotheosis. Our greatest and holiest of men, even 
 a Moses, are depicted with all their human frailty, 
 so that by their humanity they may become patterns 
 by which to mould our lives, a monition and inspira- 
 tion to guide and influence us in our endeavors and 
 aims. 
 
 In this light I propose to present to you the career 
 and life-work of Solomon Schechter as scholar and 
 sage, as writer and discoverer of great literary treas- 
 ures, as theologian and conservative leader of thought, 
 as a personality of rare gifts and charms, and at the 
 same time point out to you in what direction he should 
 be of lasting influence also for us of the Reform wing 
 who differ from him in doctrine and practice. 
 
 To Rabbi Jose ben Chalafta a Roman matron 
 well versed in Scripture came with the question:
 
 SOLOMON SCHECHTER 325 
 
 "What strange praise are you bestowing on your God 
 in saying: 'He giveth wisdom to the wise' (Dan. II, 
 21). That He maketh the unwise wise would have 
 been a much better declaration of His power." 
 Whereupon R. Jose answered: "Would you hand 
 one of your costly and delicate ornaments to any 
 ordinary person you meet, and not rather lend it only 
 to one who knows how to handle it well? It takes 
 the wise man to make good use of wisdom and 
 learning." Wisdom says: "I love those who love me" 
 and initiates only the few favored ones into her 
 secrets. Only genius possesses the master-key to 
 knowledge, penetrating into the core of things. 
 Yet like the wild stream that rushes down from the 
 high hills and has to cut its path through the rocks, 
 gathering strength for its wide march to the distant 
 sea from the very obstacles it has to overcome, so 
 does genius derive strength from privation and want 
 by its very limitation and concentration. 
 
 Like almost all the scholars coming from the East, 
 young Schechter lacked the opportunities of a liberal, 
 that is, classic and scientific, education, but he was 
 compensated by the power of genius, which by 
 intuition unlocked for him the innermost depth of 
 Jewish lore which his keen intellect mastered so 
 quickly. 
 
 Schechter's cradle stood in that portion of Rou- 
 mania which was the hot-bed of Chasidism. He 
 himself told me: "The blood of generations of Chasi- 
 dim runs through my veins." And this accounts 
 for his predilection for mysticism, his fondness for 
 "the saints of Safed" and their miraculous deeds.
 
 326 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 "The Chasidim" was the subject of a paper with 
 which he first stepped before an English-speaking 
 audience. He understood the psychology of the 
 mystics, which remained a book with seven seals for 
 such historians as Graetz and Geiger and their 
 followers. In fact, he inherited from the Chasidim 
 the love and zeal for all that makes for saintliness 
 and holiness, which forms such a prominent point 
 of view in his Rabbinic theology. The ethical works 
 of the medieval mystics were, like the Talmud and 
 Midrash, his daily companions, and he loved to 
 exhibit to the visitor his rare collection of the Techin- 
 not and Bakashot books of private devotion and 
 meditation, Hebrew and Judeo-German. So he 
 brought home to us the lives of Nahmanides and Baal 
 Shem Tob in attractive garb, and he found delight 
 in Thomas a Kempis' "Imitatio Dei," in Pascal and 
 Amiel's letters as well as in Chayim Vital and Ye- 
 huda ha Chasid. Hence also his insistence on greater 
 enthusiasm for Israel's heritage and a better culti- 
 vation of the emotional side of religion. Above all 
 is his constant accentuation of the spirituality of 
 Judaism, its Law and its ceremonies the heritage 
 of his Chasidean ancestry and environment, forming 
 a striking contrast to the rationalism of the Western 
 Jew since the days of Mendelssohn. 
 
 On the other hand, his Talmudic studies, in which 
 he excelled at an early age, developed to a high degree 
 his mental capacities, and so there arose in him a 
 certain duality of view and purpose. The reasoning 
 power, sharpened by the study of the Halakah, he 
 says, led many of the Eastern Synagogue either to
 
 SOLOMON SCHECHTER 327 
 
 the beginnings of the "Juedische Wissenschaft," for 
 which the Gaon of Wilna stands as a prototype, or to 
 heresy and doubt such as may be traced in Krochmal. 
 It became most typical in Solomon Maimon. Now 
 I have it from his own lips : After he left the narrow 
 surroundings of home and entered the wide world 
 with its dazzling new views of life, he passed through 
 a crisis in which none but Meyer Friedman of the 
 Vienna Beth ha Midrash, his teacher and friend 
 to whom he set such a noble monument in his "Semin- 
 ary Addresses," became his safe guide, "or else"- 
 these were his very words: "I might have taken 
 the same stand in Judaism that you Reformers 
 maintain." Meyer Friedman, one of the finest 
 students of the Midrashic literature while Isaac 
 Hirsch Weiss, his other teacher, was more of a 
 Talmudist implanted into Schechter's soul that 
 profound love and at the same time that broad 
 historical and critical view of Rabbinic literature 
 that determined and fashioned his whole life-work, 
 which confined itself to the products of Rabbinism. 
 He made him a conscientious student of the Mid- 
 rashic texts by comparison with older editions and 
 rare manuscripts, and thus he became the searcher 
 for rare literary treasures, and finally the editor of 
 valuable works with rich instructive notes such as 
 the Aboth di R. Nathan, the Midrash Ha-Gadol 
 and others which won for him a world-wide fame. 
 
 To the Berlin University and Hochschule he came 
 as a mature Rabbinic scholar who would not take 
 on a new view of the past or present, and with 
 probably the same aversion to Bible criticism as
 
 328 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 a fellow student of mine exhibited under my eyes 
 when he at every critical remark made by the pro- 
 fessor accompanied his notes with the words: Chas 
 Weshalom "God beware." Neither did Steinthal's 
 mythology nor any other German method of investi- 
 gation attract him. Geiger was dead, and his historical 
 view of Judaism was, indeed, too radical for him to 
 find a responsive chord in his heart, but Steinschnei- 
 der's vast biographical material and Israel Lewy's 
 strange combination of a radical Talmud critic and 
 a saint in the observance of the Rabbinic Code 
 fascinated him. 
 
 It was Claude Montefiore who, while studying 
 under Frankl and Steinthal, discovered in Schechter 
 the rough diamond that would require but slight 
 polishing in order to shine forth in brilliant radiance 
 out of dozens of sparkling facets. He brought him 
 to England, introduced him to the literary world of 
 Cambridge and London, made him write one valuable 
 essay after another for the "Jewish Quarterly Re- 
 view" edited by him and Israel Abrahams, and aided 
 him materially in the edition of Aboth di R. Nathan 
 in attractive classical form. 
 
 England was thus the making of Schechter, 
 and he, in turn, roused the young English Jewry 
 from slumber, creating, with the help of a circle of 
 young men that rallied around him, a Jewish renais- 
 sance in a land in which wealth and social prestige 
 together with a proud and all-powerful hierarchical 
 orthodoxy had kept the lamps of Jewish learning 
 dim and untrimmed. Soon the learned English 
 world realized that a man of power equipped with all
 
 SOLOMON SCHECHTER 329 
 
 the ammunition for the battle of the Lord had come 
 into their midst. Endowed with a phenomenal 
 memory and a still more marked capacity for fine, 
 vigorous and lucid diction, acquired by a marvelous 
 absorption of English literature, whether classic, 
 scientific or novelistic, and a large reserve fund 
 of pithy sayings and clever stories culled from 
 everywhere, he soon impressed old and young, 
 Christian and Jew, by the rare gifts of his intellect 
 and the lightning flashes of his ever-ready wit. 
 Elected as Reader in Rabbinics at Cambridge, he 
 captivated his hearers or readers by his novel methods 
 of presentation of Jewish history and literature, and 
 by the search-light he cast upon the three thousand 
 years' work of the schools and the Synagog in 
 interpreting the Scripture, the influence of which he 
 also traced in New Testament teachings, It is, he 
 declared, not the letter in its primary meaning, but 
 the spirit which gave it a secondary meaning, and this 
 was ever changing and shifting in accordance with 
 the views and needs of time and environment and 
 through assimilation of originally foreign elements. 
 You see here that in principle Schechter in England 
 was a progressive. Only his palliative was what he 
 called Traditional Judaism which holds fast to the 
 ancient practice, rejecting innovations not approved 
 of by "Catholic Israel." He thus claimed to repre- 
 sent after English fashion the broader Jewish High 
 Church, while the narrow Orthodoxy around him 
 he characterized as Low Church. 
 
 His influence was in the ascendant when he was 
 induced to go to Italy and' examine the valuable
 
 330 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 Rabbinic manuscripts in the various libraries there, 
 and he returned with results which enriched the store 
 of knowledge in the field of Haggadic lore. But 
 the zenith of his fame was reached when, in connec- 
 tion with his Ben Sira studies and after his discovery 
 of a leaf of the Hebrew Ben Sira manuscript handed 
 him by Cambridge lady-travelers who had brought 
 it with them from Egypt, he was sent to Cairo to in- 
 vestigate the contents of the Genizah. He came back 
 not merely with the larger part of the original Ben 
 Sira, the publications of which stirred and astonished 
 the entire learned world, but also with tens of thou- 
 sands of scraps and scrolls of parchment and paper 
 constituting an inexhaustible mine of literary treas- 
 ures, Hebrew, Arabic and Aramaic, the contents 
 of which were and are destined to add entirely new 
 chapters to our history of Jew and Judaism, and to 
 open new roads to scientific investigations for genera- 
 tions of scholars. The whole period of the Geonim 
 is now being re-written in consequence of these new 
 finds, and our view of the Sadducean, the Samaritan 
 and the Karaite sects as well as of the Falashas 
 will have to undergo a transformation, in view of 
 Schechter's publication of the document he found, 
 emanating from a hitherto altogether unknown 
 sect in Damascus which called itself Zadokites, and 
 which has become a puzzle and an unsolved problem 
 for the student. 
 
 But the twenty years of activity in England 
 where, in fact, all the works published by him after- 
 wards were substantially written were but the pre- 
 paration for his great,' and alas, only too brief life-
 
 SOLOMON SCHECHTER 331 
 
 work as head of the New York Seminary since 1902. 
 Two years before he received this call, I was privileged 
 to spend a glorious day with him at Cambridge, 
 and we both found that, notwithstanding all our 
 difference of opinion, we had so much in common, 
 and that we felt especially deeply concerned in the 
 imperative need of a positive Jewish theology for 
 our time, the importance of which is so lamentably 
 underrated by the average Jewish scholar. We 
 realized alike the demand for a constructive system 
 of Jewish thought, which should be at the same time 
 an impregnable fortress of defense against the Church 
 dogma and the Christian interpretation of Scripture 
 on the one hand, and against the ravages of a destruc- 
 tive Bible Criticism and a rampant skepticism and 
 unbelief on the other. 
 
 He then looked eagerly forward to the larger 
 field soon to be opened for him on American soil, 
 longing, as he said he did, for "a Jewish atmosphere" 
 which he missed at Cambridge, and I, on my part, 
 indulged in the dream of working side by side with 
 him in New York like Hillel and Shammai with the 
 maxim: "Both views echo the voice of the living 
 God." Providence ordained it otherwise. Our 
 spheres of activity led us far asunder. During the 
 first year of his stay in New York our relations were 
 of the friendliest nature, nay, I may say, intimate, 
 sweetened by an almost daily intercourse and ex- 
 change of views on scientific and religious questions. 
 Later on, our mutual friendship and esteem was never 
 diminished nor interfered with by occasional public 
 controversies carried on for the sake of the cause
 
 332 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 we both held dear and sacred and prompted only by 
 love of God and truth. 
 
 Naturally, the new environment as well as the 
 new responsibilities as head of the conservative 
 school led him with his ardor and passionate soul to 
 advocate what he termed "Reasonable Orthodoxy," 
 and he would occasionally become a bitter assailant 
 of Reform in which he beheld "Christianizing" 
 tendencies, and which, owing to the shallowness, 
 the cant, and ignorance displayed in many a liberal 
 pulpit, seemed to him, like Hellenistic Judaism of yore, 
 to be in danger of drifting away altogether from the 
 moorings of the Synagog. All the more he insisted 
 on the preservation of the old landmarks, the old 
 liturgy and ceremonies in Synagog and home. 
 As to your "Prophetic Judaism," he said wittily: 
 "One cannot live on oxygen only." And as to those 
 who want to reduce Judaism to a system of social 
 justice and social service, he sarcastically points to 
 the ancient law concerning the practice of benevolence 
 and its effect on Jewish life, saying: "All these works 
 were done during the centuries before the ugly word 
 Altruism was invented." Thus he endeavored at 
 least to achieve what the rabbis ascribe to the Men 
 of the Great Synagogue: "They received the attri- 
 bute of greatness, because they restored the law to 
 its pristine glory." 
 
 Solomon Schechter, with the staff of eminent schol- 
 ars at his side, raised the New York Seminary to a 
 high standard of efficiency and learning, and thereby 
 strengthened greatly the cause of Orthodoxy. In 
 fact, he made enlightened Conservatism more power-
 
 SOLOMON SCHECHTER 333 
 
 ful, more popular in the East, nay, fashionable. 
 But he achieved the far greater task of awakening 
 a new zeal and love for Jewish learning and a new 
 interest in Jewish literature in all circles. He brought 
 about a revival of Jewish learning in this country. 
 He loved with his whole heart the land of Abraham 
 Lincoln, whom he admired and whose life he fondly 
 studied. He filled us all, consciously or unconsciously, 
 with deeper respect and reverence for all the great 
 men and the grand doings of the past. But the chief 
 lesson he preached, not only to his disciples at the 
 Seminary but to all of us, teachers and learners, is 
 the lesson so much needed, of greater spirituality. 
 When studying Bible or Talmud, the literature or 
 the history of the Jew, teachers and disciples dwell 
 too much on the surface of things, on the words and 
 sentences, the outward facts and forms, instead of 
 penetrating to the core and kernel, to the soul of 
 prophet and psalmist, of sage and saint. Get at 
 the soul of men and things, the soul of the Jew and 
 Judaism, the religious substance, the flood-gate of 
 holiness, and you will feel the quickening power of 
 the Torah, the burning flame of Sinai's fire, and you 
 will not go to Golgotha for the understanding of our 
 past and of our duty to the world. Be not followers 
 of the Church, which has her best from us, but leaders; 
 not imitators, but masters of the Law. This is the 
 wholesome monition of Schechter's theology which 
 should be again heeded by us, as it was actually 
 heeded and felt by our great Reform pioneers. Like 
 yon father in the fable who before dying said to his 
 sons: "There are hidden treasures in the acres I
 
 334 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 left to you, dig for them," and when they digged 
 and digged, the promised treasures could not be 
 found, but when the harvest time came, behold, 
 they reaped ten-fold of what they had gathered in 
 former years, and thus the father's words were veri- 
 fied so does Solomon Schechter say to all who study 
 the Law, the history and literature of Israel: "Dig, 
 dig deeper and ever deeper into the soil of the Torah, 
 and you will reap ever richer fruitage, untold blessings 
 of the spirit." 
 
 And after all, we of the Reform wing need more of 
 the spirit, more of the soul of Judaism, which is its 
 religious truth, just because we look more to the 
 essentials and less to the forms, because our field 
 of study should comprise the whole process of evolu- 
 tion of the Jewish truth from its very beginning, and 
 extend to the very end of human history as the scope 
 of our Messianic mission. To us the Torah begins 
 with man as the son of God, and ends with the whole 
 family of men, to be made one by God's law of jus- 
 tice and truth. Our Zion is not a nationalistic con- 
 cern, but the symbol of a world-union established 
 upon a universal allegiance to the Only One and Holy 
 God of Israel. And let me say in this connection that 
 Schechter's Zionism aimed at nothing but the full 
 unfolding of the religious soul of Jew and Judaism, 
 whereas a Zionism without religion and without God, 
 the so-called Nationalism, is most vehemently de- 
 nounced by him as un-Jewish. 
 
 So let us thank God to-day for having given us in 
 Solomon Schechter a banner-bearer of light, a man 
 of the spirit, an interpreter of Israel's soul, a zealous
 
 SOLOMON SCHECHTER 335 
 
 champion of the Torah, even though he represented, 
 as he said to us nearly three years ago from this pul- 
 pit, "His Majesty's Opposition." Judaism always had, 
 and in fact will always need, its two opposing forces, 
 Conservative and Progressive, just as the stars in 
 heaven are carried along by a centripetal and centrif- 
 ugal power to keep them on the right track; just as 
 the bird while soaring along the sky needs its two wings 
 to fly steadily onward. Each wing must work as the 
 right balancing force to the other. Thus there will 
 be mutual recognition and helpfulness. This spirit 
 was especially manifested by Schechter in his later 
 years. 
 
 Thus we, the representatives of the two wings of 
 American Judaism, have worked together in mutual 
 esteem and fellowship at the translation of the Bible, 
 which was completed but a few weeks ago, and we 
 looked forward to the taking up of the more arduous 
 task of editing and translating the master works of 
 the Jewish Classics under the chairmanship of 
 Solomon Schechter, who was actually the sponsor 
 of the great undertaking, while the generosity of 
 Jacob H. Schiff furnished the capital for the same. 
 God in His inscrutable wisdom has summoned the 
 revered master to the Academy on high, and we, his 
 co-workers, shall sadly miss the unique personality, 
 the venerable man with the leonine head, who was 
 so human with his healthy laughter, his sledge- 
 hammer wit and his humorous stories, and again 
 with his fierce outbursts of temper and his terrible 
 scolding and condemning, and yet so true and loyal 
 and full only of zeal for God and His Law. He is now
 
 336 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE ADDRESSES 
 
 with his completed life-work before the eternal Master 
 to receive his reward, and to radiate light and bles- 
 sing unending from above among men on earth. 
 So let us bless God and the memory of His servant, 
 saying with the Psalmist: "Bless ye all His angels 
 mighty in strength, His servants fulfilling His will." 
 Amen.
 
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