The Maccabaean

PATRIOTISM is as old as man. No people has been insignificant to have felt it, nor has any land been too mean to have inspired it. Patriotism is common to every race, yet history has produced but one nation in whom the passion has survived a twenty-century exile.

To the Jew Palestine was not alone the land of his birth and the home of his ancestors, but the hallowed spot where God had communed with man, where the prophets in words of thunder fearlessly made manifest the commands of the Divine One. Palestine to the Jew was not only the land that had produced him, but the territory whereon the Am Segullah (the chosen people) was to live its priestly life, a perpetual light and example unto the Gentile. And Israel believed in its mission.

With the fall of pagan nations their gods were dethroned; not so, however, with Israel. When, therefore, the year seventy came with its overpowering calamity, the Jew, firm in the belief that his God could not lie, that his prophets were not false, that his holy mission was not a myth, survived the shock of expatriation buoyed up by the splendid hope that the exile was but temporary—perhaps the penalty for sin and neglected responsibility—and that “repentance, prayer and righteous deeds” would help to shorten its duration and hasten the day of redemption.

History has its romances; and if the devotion of a single lover to his beloved could inspire the genius of artist and poet, what of the sublime fidelity of a nation throughout twenty centuries of unparalleled vicissitudes to the land from which it had been cruelly torn?

For Jerusalem meant more to the Jewthan Athens to the Greek or Alexandria tothe Egyptian. It was the place where theShekinah dwelt; and the national cataclysm

only served to burn the name Jerusalem indelibly in letters of fire on the living, throbbing, heart of Israel, where, as the centuries passed, it became scarred instead of eradicated.

Not for a moment was the hope of her rebuilding abandoned. But the hands were Esau’s and only the voice was Jacob’s, the might and power and tools of war belong to Edom, to Israel only suffering, endurance and prayer. Deep from the anguished soul of an anguished people then was wrung the cry for redemption. It became the motive thought of the Jewish liturgy and breathes forth from every page of the prayer-book. “From Thy place shine forth, O King, and rule over us,” we say in the Sabbath Kedusha, “for we wait for Thee, for the time when Thou wouldst vouchsafe speedily and in our days to dwell there forever and ever. Mayest Thou be exalted and sanctified in all generations and all eternity. O let our eyes behold Thy kingdom, according to the words that were spoken in the songs of Thy might by David Thy righteous anointed. The Lord shall reign forever, even Thy God, O Zion, throughout all generations, hallelujah!”

How often do we find the repetition that our own eyes may behold the restoration, that it may speedily come to pass in our days? The modern man may scoff at the credulity with which numerous self-declared deliverers, pseudo-Messiahs, were at various times received; but to Israel the belief in a national rehabilitation was synonymous with the belief in eternal justice, and both were essential doctrines of Judaism.

In the memory of the Jew Jerusalem became enshrined as a sorrowing mother whose banished children were languishing for her tender embrace. The day that marks the anniversary of her fall was in-