The Maccabaean

TO what do you ascribe your recent awakening to Jewish interests?"

"To all sorts of things—growth, study, and, largely, the infection of the current Jewish revival."

"Do you infer a revival from your individual awakening?"

"I hope not. I try to avoid the not uncommon error of making one's own experience the barometer of the world's affairs. On the other hand, I mustn't fail to correlate my personal experience with the larger movements within the Jewish community. Indeed, I would rather be found exaggerating than underestimating the social significance of my awakening, because in the one case I should merely make myself ridiculous by crying 'Fire' over a spluttering match, while in the other case I might miss the moment for bringing the old gold and silver of my life to the furnishing of the tabernacle of resurrected Jewish nationality."

This is not a report of an actual conversation. It is a boiling down of a hundred fragments of question and answer, challenge and retort, in which I have borne a part on a hundred occasions, as the more or less willing subject of impromptu inquisitions. I can stand moral vivisection as well as anyone. What I can’t stand is having the most important part of my testimony thrown away as irrelevant.

In a popular movement, every adherent may be either a straw showing which way the wind blows, or the breath of the wind that blows. I know all sorts of people who have been affected by the Jewish revival and have responded as straws, chiefly because they are not aware of the nature of the transforming influence. I have talked with men and women in different parts of the United States who are somewhat strenuously making over their lives along Jewish lines, who showed little curiosity and less understanding of the source of their Jewish stimulation. Some of these people, heads of families who had earlier banished from their homes everything Jewish, on the hasty assumption that the repudiation of Judaism was a necessary first step toward citizenship in a modern state, had come around, latterly, to sending their children to Hebrew school, and superimposing on their dejudaized lives of odds and ends of ancestral form and custom, raked out almost at random from the dead ashes of extinguished Jewish loyalties. To the children these arbitrarily imposed Jewish fragments appeared as inconsequential tyrannies of the parental mind, without justification in the logic of the only world they had been taught to know. Naturally the children rebelled, and the parents, as often as not, gave in; and yet the impulse to resume their place in the Jewish world, properly interpreted as a personal reaction to a living social movement involving millions of Jews the world over, would have set these people on a firm bottom of reasoned conviction, and endowed them in the eyes of their children with the authority of modern prophets.

In the home of a prominent Jew in a Kansas town where I was entertained, the assembled mishpoche, and as many invited friends as could crowd around the dining table, cross-questioned me one evening as to the most reliable means of "bringing back the children." With the unreserve that is practised only among Jews, everybody present commented on my own history, the gist of which appeared to be that I had myself "come back." Wouldn't I tell them how the trick worked? Quite ac-

customed to being consulted as a repentant sinner, I was ready with my formula of salvation.

"You can bring back the children as soon as you know clearly what you want to bring them back to," I told them; and to effect this orientation of their vague impulses toward Judaism I recommended getting acquainted with current Jewish affairs. I made the most of this opportunity, and of others like it, to point out the fact that I am no unique specimen of the prodigial daughter in the house of American Israel; that the great centers of Jewish life and thought had been for decades past generating currents of Jewish sentiment, which accounted for the forked lightnings of individual conversions. The simultaneous revival of Jewish enthusiasms in so many far corners could not be ascribed entirely to coincidence. There were universal influences at work, and my Kansas friends and I and many more had fallen under their spell. If our individual fortunes, our several contacts with the world at large, had provided some of us with the wick and the oil, it still needed a coal from the glowing furnace of contemporary Jewish thought to kindle the lamp of our reborn faith. I insisted on this point, because I am sure we must all carry our little lamps the higher for recognizing the impersonal origin of their flames.

My Kansas friends have their intellectual doubles in every Jewish settlement, and their numbers constitute a vast potentiality at the present critical juncture in Jewish life. Some of these people are leaders in their communities. They ought to be the breath of the wind; they are only straws. They are not acquainted with the facts of recent progress in Jewish affairs. They have not reflected on the immense national vitality indicated, in this country, by the materialization of the Jewish Congress out of so much froth and spume of debate, and by the remarkable steadiness of the Zionist movement where under the shock of war. They do not know that the wind that is stirring the weeds in the neglected alleys of their Jewish souls is the breath of the reviving Jewish nation. Unseeing spectators of the most stupendous drama of all Jewish history, they do not understand that the curtain is about to go down on the era of passive endurance, to rise again, if Israel so wills, on an era of national self-direction and international influence. They do not realize that they are cast for a part in the drama, that the effect will be blurred by just so much if they fail to respond to their cue.

Their cue, my cue, has just been spoken. Those who have ears to hear heard it through the crash of the walls of the huge prison of the Pale, at the birth of Russian freedom. The greatest reservoir of Jewish faith and tradition is suddenly undammed. The deep waters thereof will presently spread to the wide boundaries of the Russian empire, and beyond, to the rim of the habitable world. They will water many gardens of human activity and reclaim waste places in the world’s economy. In wider circles than ever before, the Jewish spirit will delve and build and invent and refine, and bring forth its familiar prodigies of aspiration and enterprise. The nations of. the earth, fainting after prodigious battle, will drink from the cup of Jewish faith in the midst of cataclysm, Jewish courage in the face of ruin—they will drink and throw away the cup. Then will the Jewish flavor be forgotten, as the flavor of the manna that nourished the

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