The Maccabaean

stone. What are they doing here, my father and mother?

They have come to see that we are quite safe, to make sure that nothing has happened to us—God forbid. Heaven knows what might have happened . . . a bridge . . . a river . . .

Queer folk, my father and mother.

"And where are the greens?"

"What greens?"

"The greens for Shabuot you went to gather?"

The two of us, Bessie and I, look at each other. I read her eyes and I understand her looks. And she seems to speak to me in the words of the Song of Songs:

"Oh, that thou wert unto me as a brother. Why wert thou not a brother unto me?"

"Well, well, I suppose our greens for Shabuot will come in their own good time," says my father, and smiles above the silver threads of his beard that gleam in the golden sunlight. "Thank Heaven nothing has happened to the children."

"Thank Heaven!" repeats my mother, and with her shawl wipes her red, perspiring face.

And both of them look at us and their faces begin to beam. . . .

Queer folk, my father and mother.

Letter from a Zionist with the English Army in Palestine

WE have been wandering in the wilderness of Sinai for more than a year, making our way step by step towards Palestine. How many of the children of Israel there are with me in the desert I do not know. We do not march according to our tribes, and there is no tabernacle round which we can gather. But every now and then I run across a fellow-Jew, and when I do I always find his heart thrilling like my own with the idea that we are on the march to the land of our fathers, and that we are proceeding, if not by the road, at least in the way that the children of Israel went out of Egypt 3,000 years ago to become a nation.

It is a strange coincidence that the military authorities should have ordered a census of all Jews serving in the area, in the second year after they were come out of the land of Egypt, even as Moses numbered his congregation by their armies in the second year (Numbers i, 1-3). We may be but a small band scattered about the line between the Suez Canal to El-Arish. But we regard ourselves, and can be regarded, as the representatives of hundreds of thousands whose hearts are with us and whose eyes are turned daily in the direction we move, with longing for the country which we are about to enter. It is, too, a coincidence that just over forty years have passed since the desire to make Palestine again a Jewish land, rendered fertile by Jewish hands, took outward expression in the establishment of the "Hope of Israel," the Mikveh Israel colony, near Jaffa. During those forty years the generation which was fearful to assert Jewish individuality and to move towards the Land of Promise, has died out. Today Jewry, all the world over, is united in the resolve to move forward, and we stand at the portal of the Land no longer checked by the craven fear of being great.

There are some who say that the army service destroys religious belief; yet it is among soldiers that simple faith lives on in all its freshness. It is not an accident that the idea of the Jewish restoration to Palestine has appealed particularly to soldiers; men like Colonel Goldsmid among English Jews, General Warren and Colonel Conder among non-Jews. Men who have to face death at any moment have a strange consciousness of the Divine Will working in human things.

I had a vivid illustration of that simple soldier's faith a few days ago when I was travelling on the railway which now links Egypt to Syria, and which I have seen laid mile by mile over the sands of Sinai. A New Zealand Colonel with bronzed face and eager eyes was talking with me of the issues of the war. "Of course the people of Israel," he said, "will go back to Palestine. We are laying the way for them. It is all foretold by Isaiah. Do not you remember the words: 'In that day shall there be a highway out of Egypt to Syria [the text says "Assyria," but he allowed himself a believer's license], and the Syrian shall come into Egypt and the Egyptian to Syria, and the Egyptian shall serve with the Syrian.' In that day shall Israel be the third with Egypt and with Syria, even a blessing in the midst of the land." The highway is almost complete; we on our side have built it from Kantara to El-Arish and the Turk on his has carried it from Beersheba to Damascus and thence to the Euphrates. Political wisdom, like military engineering, is moving the way of prophecy and sees a security for peace in the planting of a Jewish population between Egypt and Mesopotamia.

As I look from my tent at El-Arish, I can see on the East the blue hills of Judea stretching away to the horizon, and on the West the blue waters of the Mediterra- near breaking along the coast as far as eye can reach. And I foresee the day when the space between them will be covered with Jewish villages and fertile fields stretching away up the Wadi-el-Arish, the river of Egypt, which was the boundary of the land promised to the patriarchs. From the mountains of Lebanon to the river of Egypt— that precious strip of country between the desert and the sea—it is there we have to make again one of the good countries of the earth, one of the hearths of civilization. The guidance of Providence is manifest; for 2,000 years there has been no such opportunity for the Jewish people to recover its heritage. Can we fail to respond to that guidance? Here, as I feel the breath of Syria, failure seems impossible. The children of Israel cry back in my ears from the four corners of the earth. “We will do, and we will hearken.”—From the Jewish Chron- acle.