On the eve of the next approaching birthday of Israel, many of the faithful gathered around the gay family table, will stand up, holding the tray loaded with Matzoth and bitter herbs, by the corners of its enveloping table cloth, and will understandingly or without comprehension join in singing the well-conned Aramic text, in which whoever is ahungered is invited to come and eat, whoever is in need, to come and make his Passover:
"This year here, next year in the land of Israel. This year as bondsmen, next year as freemen."
Two Hebrew words are imbedded in this Aramaic setting, and they are sung out twice: 'Ishanah habbaah, which are rendered "next year;" but literally they are only the coming year, a future year; not necessarily the very next. Let us show some endurance! As that prince of wise saws and modern instances, Sancho Panza, says in his childlike way: Paciencia y barajar, patience and shuffling the cards; or as a stanza in a Polish patriotic song, praising constancy the mark of the right-minded, puts it:
Bo co sic raz nic powiodlo, Pewno teraz sic powiedzic. "For what has not yet come to pass, Surely once will come to pass."
Or if we wish to express ourselves only in English proverbs: "The mills of the God grind slowly, but they grind exceeding fine;" or in one which is distinctively American: "Nothing is settled, until it is settled right." Certainly the question of the Holy Land is not settled, till the land itself is settled by hardworking, self-respecting Jews.
How will this ever come to pass? How will Israel regain a foothold in the land of
its fathers? Not through a series of accidents; not through the doings of a kind Providence, by instruments other than ourselves. Those hard-hearted and hard-headed Romans, the very nation who overturned Jerusalem and drove our ancestors into exile, have a saying, easily remembered by its assonance: Fortem fortuna juvat— may be rendered, “God helps those who help themselves.” The Haggadah gives us a good hint: “In every generation a man should look upon himself as if he had himself gone forth from Egypt:” that is, every Jew should, at least on the recurrence of the Passover, feel that solidarity of the race which glowed in the hearts of our forefathers, the followers of Moses and Aaron, when leaving the land of Goshen, they boldly marched forward, across the reedy sea, and across the howling wilderness, to take possession of the land promised to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob. If the Jews of our time, or even if one half of them, were aglow with such a feeling, the shares of the Jewish Colonial Trust would by this time have been sold and paid for not once, but ten times over; and we could, pointing to a teeming treasury behind us, do business with Sultan Abdul-Hamid much more quickly than Zerubbabel, a poor man, though of royal descent, did with those Persian Kings, Cyrus and Darius; for over twenty-five years elapsed between the decree for the return of the Jews to their land issued by the former, which rested unnoticed in the archives of Ecbatana, and its enforcement by the latter.
And there is another lesson which we can learn from our little Haggadah. Whenever the rubric comes in about filling the wine cup, the Hebrew words are: Mozegin et ha-Kos—‘they mix the cup,” i. e., they pour in half wine, half water. For, when