The Maccabaean

There is a custom among Mohammedans which demands that every believer shall pay a visit to holy Mecca at least once during his lifetime and when that pilgrimage is accomplished, he prefixes to his name the proud title of Hajji. Some Jewish Hajjis from Palestine are your guests this evening to the end that they tell you some of the things they have seen and have heard there. Whatever their individual impressions may have been, I am sure that they will join in the chant of the Psalmist, "I am glad when they said unto me: Let us go to the House of the Lord."

I could wish that this custom were general among us Jews also; that we should feel, everyone of us, that we owe allegiance and service to the ancient home, and that in such allegiance and service all Jews can share whatever be their view of the past or the hope for the future. We ought to be able to say with a Jewish Hajji of the Middle Ages: "My heart is in the East, even though my body be in the furthermost West."

Many and varied are the impressions carried away by visitors to Palestine; many and varied the estimates of its worth as physical home and as a spiritual center. But here, as is so often the case, the judgment of a traveller depends to a large extent as much upon that which he brings with him as upon that which he takes away. He who goes to the East must keep in mind that he is going from an advanced civilization to one that is more primitive; from the complex and intricate life of the West, to the com-

Address delivered at Cooper Union, Monday evening, November 14.

parative simplicity and uniformity of the East. Nay more; he must accustom himself to see things with the eye of faith and to look beyond that which is directly evident and back of that which first greets his eyesight.

For when one comes to Palestine, the first vision is not always reassuring. In our Western countries we have a way of hiding that which is disagreeable. Our slums are in back streets; misery and want slink into alleyways, we cover up the tattered garments of poverty with a robe that is fair to look upon; and the casual visitor to our lands need not, unless he wants, see the seamy side of our civilization. In the East, all this is different. There are no back streets or alleyways; or, perhaps, nothing but them. Whatever of misery and want and suffering there may be, is open to the view, and the better things, those which in the end really determine existence, are buried out of sight. Some of these better things the traveller is apt to forget but one thing must impress itself upon him, however prosaic and matter-of-fact he may be. It is no useless vaunt to sing the praises of nature in Palestine. We city-bred folk approach nature as a youthful lover does the maiden of his choice. We have to organize nature-study parties and under the guidance of experienced teachers be taught her beauty and her service. To the man in the East, nature is a companion from his youth upward; he lives in constant communion with it; he is intimate with its delights; he is, in one word, so much more a part of nature than we are. "Nature is forgetful and her wants are few," are the words of an English poet; and he who lives with nature must