ing for it, and those who are found in the ranks of the Zionists, the modern Maccabaeans, are willing to sacrifice the possession of comfort, of peace, of all the ease of whatever temporary home, they may find, for the upbuilding, the rebuilding, of their own home, the hope of their ancestors, holy to them not because it is richer, better, but because it is their own.
But that, it seems, was when you were a boy.
Life forces other interpretations of Chanuka upon you. Jewish life is not in reality so natural, nor so dignified, nor a source of pride. You see the Jewish nation dismembered, scattered, and the majority of our people the victims of persecution, or swept by every wave of life into the adoption of alien ways of living, and but a small handful fighting in the spirit of the Maccabaeans for all those things that are of value to us. Only when a shriek ıs heard, pressed from the lips of some tortured Jews, are you aware of the fact that the dismembered parts of the Jewish people remember the physical pains of their race. And what grotesque antics are performed by some of the dismembered parts in their moments of indifference to Jewish suffering! What unnatural explanations are offered for the continued existence of the Jewish people, and with what eagerness are ways and means sought, for a gradual submergence of the Jew. It is said, with feeble delight, that the French Jews are more French than the Frenchmen, the German Jews more German than the Germans, the American Jews more American than the Americans, and even in Russia, there are Jews more Russian than the Tartars. Our religion responds to every wave .of alien thought, but gives little heed to Jewish needs ; Jewish demands. We are always justifying our life, which gives us little time to live. We are always seeking other ideals, conforming to new cultures, until we present the spectacle of a people clad in the crazy-quilt of all national colors but our own.
Gone, it seems, is the dream of our youth, and with it the glory of the ancient world.
But our celebration of Chanuka, our Zionist celebration, is a protest and a jubilant song. We who are Zionists offer you once more
the youthful dream, the hope and the ardor which should go with every ideal of life. We do not take you through the dry paths of metaphysics to explain Jewish life, nor do we appeal to a denuded religion to inspire you with the same freshness of interest, which you must have when you were young. We claim Judas Maccabaeus as our own, not because he found a cruse of oil sufficient to illuminate the Temple for a week, but because he was the warrior Jew, who fought the battles of his people until death cut him down in the midst of his labors. We offer you the rational explanation of Jewish life, and the natural, wholesome solution of its problems. We speak of life for the Jewish people on its own soil. Our program speaks of upbuilding, not of cutting away. We do not seek to decorate dead things, but to blow the sparks of life until they flare up into an ardent flame. We speak of Palestine, the land of the Jewish people, not as the source of archzological treasures, but as the spring of life, the fountain from which Jews shall imbibe wholesome, manly life, in harmonv with the spirıt of the Maccabaeans.
The Jewish law, the ineradicable basıs of the Jewish religion, was given to a nation. That law grew out of the life of a people living on its own soil. Every particle of Jewish religious thought received its coloring from the life and history of a nation. You cannot take the religion and repudiate the nation. Judaism was the product of the soil, its prophets were messengers to a nation, its literature was the literature of a nation. When the Fathers saw the nation in distress, they took with them in exile that national literature, for they knew that it contained the essence of Jewish life, and that as long as the Jews remembered it and studied it, and let it color their life, they would never forget their nation while in exile, the flame of the national spirit would never be extinguished. They preserved Judaism for the sake of the nation. That was what made the Jewish people so intolerant of mutilations of that law or literature, for it was the visible embodiment of the spirit of their nation. The hope of redemption made sufferance in exile if not manly at least rational. Without that hope of redemption, that love of Zion, what would there have been