Some Aspect of Present-Day Judaism
Y now, it has been thoroughly borne in upon the American Jewish mind that movements aiming at the improvement of any class or condition of humanity, must fail in their primal intention, if they lack the elements of religious purpose and religious fervor that give force, form and color to all effort. Our experience of overmuch materialism, has impressed upon us the futility and emptiness of all worldly striving, of all earthly excellence, when unaccompanied by that higher seeking after God, which invokes His aid and His blessing upon our works. So that we are in a measure sharing, though for different reasons, in the religious revival movement of our century and it is through this revival of the religious spirit that those of us making toward a goal of usefulness can hope to achieve anything noble and purposeful for our age. It is with bodies as with individuals. The life of each is practically worthless and without meaning, unless inspired by a desire that is not of the earth, not material and of the flesh, but of that subtler element that reaches into the higher and more ethereal realms of thought and purpose. It is in this highest striving after the ideal that we unconsciously come nigh unto the Throne of Him who rules, and who implants in the hearts of His human children, what is known to men as Religion.
Many among us there are who, in the flush and health of their prime, maintain that they do not need religion; who allow themselves to be led away by thought and speculative reasoning, into the well-trodden fields where Matter and Evolution hobnob with theories of First Cause and all the kindred scientific formulæ of the great metaphysicians. These pride themselves upon their ability to probe the mysteries of life, of death, of free will, of conscience; to prick the bubble of religion, to show it up in all its vainglo- riousness and shirking of the Ego. They are the emancipated ones of earth, who accuse those who believe in something beyond themselves, of deadening thought. Whether they are right or wrong, we cannot know, and all the intellectual reasoning in the world can never decide. What we do know is, that life teaches us by ways that are past finding out that there is a power in the universe that rules us in the end for good. A
power that places limit even upon thought; that impels such men as Humboldt, Darwin and Pasteur to bow their lofty intellects before that which is and must ever remain the Unknown and the Unknowable. Once this knowledge is ours, the various schools of philosophy are left far behind. Faith is a concomitant and a result of Life. Whether it come to us as a heritage or as the triumphant outcome of a long spiritual struggle against the powers that make for our undoing, does not matter. They who have it are happy; they who have it not, lack something in their lives of priceless value. And Faith is the heritage of the Jew. To the Jew was first accorded a sense, and knowledge of a Supreme Being, all powerful, just and merciful. So to the Jew, throughout the ages, has been bequeathed the mission of spreading this knowledge to the Nations of Earth till all shall be as one family, one human brotherhood, one vast world-federation. This aspect of Faith — in the God-elected—has come down in the history of the race to the present day. It has been the source of inspiration for sermons, treatises and volumes without number. The Jew, what part in the great world federation he is to play; his Past, his Future; whether he is to undergo assimilation into the national life of the other races, or whether he is to be allowed to work out alone and unaided his strange destiny. Is he to be the bit of leaven that is to temper the whole mass, or is he to be true to his mission? Has he any special mission? All these are questions that have exercised the intellect of laymen and scholars, of religious enthusiasts, statesmen and philosophers. Interesting as is the problem to the outside world, it holds a still greater fascination and interest for the thoughtful Jew; an interest that transcends all others and in many cases becomes the absorbing passion of a lifetime. To the Jew, the why and the wherefore of his formation into a separate chosen people must recur with renewed questioning insistence. The evolution of his race from a tribal community, with only the merest beginnings of recognition of a God beyond the powers of Nature, this tribe to be gradually moulded and chiselled into a nation of clean-cut purposeful legislation, bearing a distinct mission to humanity; the knowledge moreover, that notwithstanding