Zionism as the Leaven
Dr. Heller has been a frequent contributor to THE MACCABAEAN. He is president of the Central Conference of the American Rabbis, and strange to say, he is one Zionist who is beloved by the "American Israelite," to which he is an editorial contributor. Dr. Heller is a graduate of the Hebrew Union College, is a recognized leader among reformative rabbis, and, above all, is a well-informed and devoted Zionist. He is a rabbi in New Orleans.
FOR one reason or another Zionism has lately again drawn the fire of certain Reform rabbis whose bete noire it has always been. In some ways it is natural that Zionism should be the unpardonable crime in circles where the wearisome asseveration of Americanism constitutes a species of mania, where the word Oriental is synonymous with everything that is shunned, where “progressiveness” is the slogan of piety and the word “modern” the acme of everything perfect. “Progressive American Israel”, the men who delight in that mouth-filling phrase can see no harm in repeating the Protestant theologian'’s slander about the “yoke of legalism,” in seconding Prof. Felix AGler’s indictment of Judaism as a system that preaches the subordination of woman, in denouncing the Shulchan Aruch as a “prison-house.”
The logic of such a position is rigidly consistent, once you begin to erect shrines before the golden calf of Americanism and to proclaim: "These are thy gods, O Israel." Said the protagonist of this school of philosophy of history, in placing his interpretation of the Jewish past before the Council of the Congregational Union: "Judaism at all times received its peculiar traits, views and forms from its environment," a very pretty statement which, presumably, would be highly satisfactory to a man like Prof. Frederick Delitzsch who could hardly have improved upon it in its absoluteness as an indictment of utter unoriginality. No wonder, with such perfect plasticity as this, that "in the dreary Russian or Medieval ghetto," Judaism should have become "degraded into a system of hair-splitting casuistry and superstition." Poor, pitiable fanatics that suffered and died for such
a system, who are suffering and dying for it today! The system, of course, is an "armor of protection around Judaism to keep it intact," but what can be the good of keeping anything "intact" that is a mere compound of casuistry and superstition?
Just here appears the necessity, in Reform Judaism, of the Zionist, as a leaven to ferment such mixtures. The Zionist cannot cringe in the dust before any idols of nationalism, even while denouncing the nationalist in his own midst. His Jewish heart, his feeling for his glorious past, which cannot be obscured by any pedantic, absurd thearies about @ chameleon Judaism, they will not allow him to seek any such devious paths. The Zionist cannot find pleasure in any Judaism that deifies its temporary home, ascribing to it the credit for every forward step of emancipation and enlightenment. {Of course, the purblind misreader of our history whose attention is glued only to the changing surfaces of Jewish faith and practice, who cannot discern the quiet, unchanging depths of the soul life beneath, he can understand history only in geographical terms. Judaism, to him, is a matter of location and environment; just as Babylonian Judaism is, to him, al? Babylon and nothing else, so he has an American Judaism wherein Americanism is the Alpha and the Omega.
To such a Judaism, of course, Orientalism spells high treason; to name it, is to call it anathema. A Judaism of that sort is American in the worst sense, m the sense of that irreverent shallowness, so characteristic of much that calls + American, of the blind worship of “up-to-dateness’ as the highest of all the virtues.
The Zionist is the man who has learned