tains within itself the greatest progressive idea of the century. Our opponents now have abandoned the frightening words, and are now employing the sympathy-winning words. From all sides they cry to us now, "Peace and Harmony," that is to say, that in the life of the Jewish people, peace and harmony reigns, but we Zionists come to destroy them both.
How foolish and petty it is to attempt to frighten us by such means! Either the new prophets of peace and harmony are very naive and do not understand the meaning of the words they use, or they consider us naive.
There is peace in sleep, and harmony in the cemetery. There is the peace of laziness, of not concerning one's self with the process of life; there is the harmony of doing nothing, of delivering one's self into the hands of fate, and waiting, "for that which is to come, will come." It is the fatalism that has killed many people and destroyed many lands.
Zionism, however, came as a protest against irresponsible sleepiness of Jewish leaders, and in that respect, it has revolutionized the Jewish mind. It has not
been frightened at the thought of revolution. Zionist came to awaken, to stir to activity, and to prevent our life from being influenced by external forces.
We, too, are for peace and harmony. We understand by these two words things entirely different. We see peace as a harmony of the creative power of a people. To preach the philosophy of "sit and do nothing," to cry that because of peace we must remain passive and undertake nothing; that because of harmony everything should continue as it has been dragging along until now, is the philosophy of "Good Night," the philosophy of the grave digger.
And, strange, people with ideas of the past, sleepy thoughts and with obsolete philosophy, cannot contain themselves. They cannot quiet themselves. They come with demands and protests in the name of their peace and their harmony, and insist that an entire people should remain quiet and passive, not argue and not protest. The Greek sophists might envy such emulators of their way of thinking.
Zionism and Religion
N Reform circles, not only by rabbis, but also among interested laymen, much capital is made of whatever unreligious elements are tolerated, even prominently in Zionism. How can a rabbi, especially a Reform rabbi, feel at home in a movement in which even the leaders are often men who have been estranged from the synagogue for decades, men who have intermarried, other men who openly profess themselves adherents of no existing system of faith, still other men who scoff at the “mission of Judaism,” others to whom Judaism has no particular value, even those who champion nihilistic and anarchistic theories and those whose literary work must be classed with the decadant schools? What sense of fellowship can a Reform rabbi harbor for such types of fellow-Jews? How can he ever feel at home among them? How can he, consistently with his convictions, even consent to work with them?
Whether it is to my credit or to my shame, I must confess that I have never seriously asked myself any such questions. To begin with, the whole absurdity of such quasi-religious scruples is laid open, once I formulate the question thus: How can a rabbi feel a sense of fellowship with a fellow Jew, be the latter whoever he may? There are rabbis, of course, whose ingrained and congenial snobbishness forbids any all-embracing sense of fellowship; this kind of moral cripple is produced in all spheres by the occupational diseases incidental to the life-vocation of the elbower and climber. But the Jewish rabbi—for the distinction has a meaning—needs no explanation of the fact that somewhere in his heart there is a well-spring of sympathy. an irrepressible instinct of fellow-feeling, with everything that is—whether nobly or ignobly— Jewish. I may be repelled by Jewish vulearity; but my repulsion is tempered bv the con-
sciousness that this vulgarity was largely brought about by the injustice of abnormal conditions of living. I may be appalled, even stung into bitter resentment, by the disgraces of Jewish vice and Jewish crime; and yet I am prepared to find in the criminal, in the dangerous enemy of our peace and our good name, some tragically perverted human material, wherein the most promising of gifts may have been turned into social poison by the revolting alchemy of social injustice. If, in penitentiary and insane asylum; if, in restricted district and pickpocket alley I can still trace Jewish physiognomy and Jewish type, no matter how extreme the disfiguration. it is because there is historic and psychological truth in the old rabbinie principle: even though he has sinned, he remains an Israelite. The spiritual discipline of centuries may be covered completely out of sight by some unfortunate environment which has all but overcome hereditary instincts; somewhere beneath the deceptive surface the Jewish heart is still stirring, the appeal to the fellow-Jew is still there, if one is sincerely and patiently on the lookout for it.
These are, of course, extreme, and, I fear, offensive illustrations, merely intended to accord to a principle its utmost scope. But why shall a man cease to be a Jew to me, simply because his education, his associations, the salient influences of his formative years, his reading and his intercourse have somehow estranged him from the faith of his forefathers? Wherefore must I resent the inescapable fact of a man's being the child of his period? Some forty years or so ago, a bold and noble spirit like Felix Adler, finding no room in Reform Judaism for his complexion of liberalism, built up a semi-religious organization outside its pale; some decades later an independent of similar calibre, Stephen S. Wise, secured not