to Jewry? Yet again, there is any number of Jewish individuals, among whom I must count myself, who find it impossible to adjust their consciences with any official type of theological doctrine, who are interested in discovering the truth, and are compelled to acknowledge that no truth has been discovered finally, once and for all; there are hundreds and thousands such. What is to be their relation to their people if Jews are to be considered members merely of Judaistic sects? Yet Jews they are, and if they do not contribute directly to Judaism, they do contribute to Hebraism.
Hebraism stands not for that particular expression of the Jewish mind, religion, but for all that has appeared in Jewish history, both religious and secular. The term Judaism stands for that partial expression of the Jewish genius which is religious.
It has been said that the genius of the Jew is entirely religious. I do not think that that is historically a demonstrable proposition. For the dominant motive even in Judaism is not a religious motive. It is an ethical motive. Judaism does not conceive its God as requiring man to be damned for his glory. It conceives its God as an instrument by the worship of whom “thy days may be lengthened in the land.” Righteousness and not salvation is the aim even of the Jewish religion. Hebraism is the name for this living spirit which demands righteousness, expressed in all the different interests in which Jews, as Jews, have a share—in art, science, philosophy and social organization, and in religion. Hebraism, hence, is a wider term than religion and its continuity embraces, but is not embraced by, the community of religion.
Now the Harvard Menorah Society, taking this fact into consideration, made use, because of the tradition of English usage, of the term "Hebraic." It recognized that since Hebraism is more comprehensive than Judaism, many people might be Hebraists who are not and need not be Judaists. It refused to exclude them from a share in Jewish life and an opportunity for Jewish service. The organization goes on the principle that nothing Jewish is alien to it. For this reason the Menorah takes no sides; for this reason it is Hebraic and not Judaistic. For this reason it welcomes everything Jewish without exception—theological and secular, Russian, German, French, English. It requires only that a thing shall be Jewish, that it shall be a pos-
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sible part of the organic total we call Hebraism.
Hebraism is the flower and fruit of the whole of Jewish life. Its root is the ethnic nationality of the Jewish people, and with this also the secularizing reformers agree when they prohibit and discourage the marriage of Jew with Gentile.
Many of us, however, are not content with merely the status quo. Throughout the nineteenth century it has thrown us into a series of dishonorable compromises. We want a condition in which the genius of the Jew. the Hebraic spirit, may express itself without any need of compromise. The orthodox Jew, at least, retains his integrity with his darkness. But we are in danger of losing our integrity. We concede to our environment point after point. But we are not liberated in spirit by these concessions ; we are merely turned into amateur Gentiles. The orthodox sectary makes no concession to environment, and tends to petrify and die. The reformed sectary makes too many, and tends to dissolve and die. This is the penalty for the status quo.
Life, to be sure, consists of compromise and concession. But for integral living we must make them as masters, not serfs. There must be one place where the ancestral spirit of the Jew will not need to adapt itself to the world, but will, like the English or French spirit, adapt the world to itself. That place is determined nationally, just as the places of all European culture are determined nationally and racially.
Pride in ancestry is not pride of race, but pride in the spirit of the race, and pride of ancestry is not pride merely of background, but pride in the obligations that ancestry sets. All aristocrats have one motto—it is noblesse oblige. This must be the motto of the Jew. We must hence carry our obligation in the spirit of the prophets, which is not primarily a theological spirit, but a purely humane spirit, for which the necessity of man determines the invocation of God; in which the ideal of a free and happy humanity, in a just and democratic society, is the dominating ideal; in which a righteous Jewish state is a persistent aspiration.
This Hebraism, academically realized through study, must be realized in the lives of individuals through work, and in the life of the great Jewish mass in a free Jewish state. Every ideal we acquire from the past must be turned into a fact of the present. Noblesse oblige!
Through centuries of darkness the diamond sleeps in its cold-black prison.
Purely encrusted in its scaly casket, the breath tarnished pearl slumbers in mud and ooze.
Buried in the bowels of earth, rugged and obscure, lies the ingot of gold.
Long hast thou been buried, O Israel, in the bowels of earth; long hast thou slumbered beneath the overwhelming waves; long hast thou slept in the rayless house of darkness.
Rejoice and sing; for only thus couldst thou rightly guard the golden knowledge, Truth, the delicate pearl and adamantine jewel of the Law.—SELECTED.