cial support; the empty pews save in those high holidays when Israel for some reason best known to itself would sem to be whipped into line, like so many recalcitrant, shirking soldiers—this is the Israel that confronts us to-day. An Israel enriched by God given plenty, not a thankful Israel remindful of the grace and goodness of God, not a wise or regardful Israel hastening with its sheaves to lay them on the altar of its God, not an Israel restful after the fray and bent on a life spent in God's service, but an Israel intent on imitating all the vices and follies, all the foibles and vanities of the peoples by which it is surrounded. This is the sin of the Jew against which he has been warned of old, the sin of following after false gods. A peculiar people in the might and brain of its life conceptions, in the great wisdom of the laws laid down for its conduct at all times and in all the ways and walks of life—this is the sin of the Jew, that where he should lead he follows; that where he should impress with his own stamp of an older and wiser culture, he imitates the unstable, the vari-colored, ephemeral cults of the day. Note among us the numbers of Cremationists, Ethical Culturists, Christian Scientists, Mental Physicists, faddists of all sorts and conditions, in all grades of Jewry, in all states of Judaism. From the woman who elects to celebrate the Kippur by a day in the country with her progeny, reading Tennyson, down to the woman who thinks she can best serve her race and people by marriage with a proselytizing and missionizing Christian, it is all of a piece of folly gone to seed, unhealthful, pernicious. How they flock to the least of the age's minor prophets! Such crowds, such concourses as assembled in our temples last winter to listen to the latest prophet on the "Simple
Life." Men and women whose forefathers of a generation or two ago could have given cards and spades, so to speak, to Charles Wagner and won hands down on the simple life! Men and women who to-day are like sheep astray wandering hither and thither reaching out helpless hands for the least clue that will take them out of their labyrinth of futile un-Jewish lives. Apropos of Mr. Wagner's visit to America, and to show how well he understood the fine restraint of the Jewish sages whose disciple he most truly is, it was the scribe of the "Simple Life" himself who, at a banquet tendered him by a body of well-known Jews, suggested the blessing over the bread, himself breaking the bread and reciting the "motza" in Hebrew, with but one single voice to accompany and respond with a whole-souled Jewish "Amen!" and that the voice of Israel's best-known philanthropist.
An Israel without blessings, or grace before or after meals, an Israel without Sabbaths, an incessantly toiling Israel without spiritual breathing spaces—what other fate if America is to be the rally-ground of the Judaism of the future, what other fate can befall them more woeful, more calamitous? With Judaism in our lives, the merest husk of the mighty and all-suffering faith of our fathers—what can be the result of our present inefficiency, our present colorlessness. For, be it remembered, in the Americanization of the foreign Jew and his offspring the same disintegrating influences are at work. The same straining and striving is theirs, the same faculty for imitation, alas! is theirs also. The uptown or West Side Jew, as the case may be in the various cities of the union, supposedly more cultured than his downtown or East Side brethren, form-