The Maccabaean

Individuality is founded in feeling; and the recesses of feeling, the darker, blinder strata of character, are the only places in the world in which we catch real fact in the making.—WM. JAMES. (Varieties of Religious Experience, Conclusions.)

THERE are those to whom Zionism has always been in harmony with their religious traditions, who, therefore, required no argument to convince them of its truth. There are others who have been converted to Zionism by a process of logic or by an illuminating experience; and among these, it is not seldom found that Jewish nationalism has been their means of access to an understanding of Jewish law and to love for its observance. It does not so often happen that this order is reversed, and that Jews who have not had any Jewish instruction, who have indeed been wholly under the influence of assimilation, have become spiritually restless, and in looking for that which would satisfy their quest have ultimately discovered the answer in the Jewish religion—then to find instantaneously that Zionism was a part of their belief! The stages by which they reached their conclusions were at first long and slow, accelerating only at the very end; slow at first because those who have been brought up under rationalistic influences and have been accustomed always to test values as they would test arguments, require a long re-education before they can catch a glimmer of another sort of test, the test by spiritual experience. I should like to show how this re-education was effected in the case that, naturally, I know best.

The story is in the main a record of friendship, for in this particular case, greater insight into truth came as the result of the teachings, conscious or unconscious, of friendly messengers.

* * * * *

In the summer of 1896, my mother and I were making a tour of Switzerland, and on stopping over in Zurich one night, en route to places higher up, we came upon an announcement in a local paper that made us change our plans. We found that we had come to Zurich at a time appointed for a conference of ethical societies. Early the next morning we set forth in search of the Polytechnicum, where some of the meetings were to be held; and discovered it on a lovely hillside of Zurich, green and cool and sweet with fragrant trees and Alpine air—the stillness broken on that morning by the far-off piping of a pensive boy playing a clear melody of youth. Perhaps that is why, though the season was late summer, in memory it always became spring. At one of the meetings of this conference in Zurich, a stir was caused by the introduction of a young speaker who had just been released from imprisonment for lèse majesté. This was Friedrich Wilhelm Foerster, the oldest son of the German leader, Prof. Wilhelm Foerster, head of the Royal Astronomical Observatory in Berlin. Professor Foerster, as presiding officer, introduced the

* One essay of this series appeared in the Hadassah Number of THE MACCABAEAN, 1917.

†This same Geheimrat Foerster in 1914 was one of the signers of the protest against the action of those other German Intellectuals who, shortly after the outbreak of the World War, dispossessed themselves of the honorary degrees they had received from English Universities.

newcomer to the audience, stating that his son was on the point of deciding to abandon his previous purpose of following a scientific career, in order to devote himself wholly to the service of the Ethical Societies. The effect produced by the address of young Dr. Foerster was such that to ourselves we called him fortunate, as one knowing the alternatives before him, and ready to make his choice,—as one knowing his proper use, no longer a scrap of steel awaiting the magnet that would pick him up and turn him to account. Possibly the occasion impressed itself upon our minds because of its memorable sequels in later years.

Not long after the conference in Zurich, the younger Foerster received an appointment as International Secretary of the Ethical Societies. A few years later he came to America to study the American Ethical Movement at close range; and at that time was a guest in our home for several weeks. Never was there a more delightful, a more stimulating friend. It is true, a sort of tragic earnestness enveloped him, but his head was in the sun. He loved to sing, told stories well, relished nonsense, and originated fun. Though his intellect made austere demands of him in all that pertained to reason or to study, yet, unlike the ‘newly intellectuals’ one meets so often in America, he measured all men by qualities of heart and soul. And so it was too that he measured the Society for Ethical Culture. Up to that time, the ethical Welt-Anschau- ung had seemed to many to be the highest reach of man’s vision, its philosophy had seemed final. But Dr. Foerster, himself prominent in the Ethical Movement, regarded the society critically in relation to other movements. He compared and contrasted. Every now and then he would drop a new idea into my mind, which, even when it did not germinate, none the less enriched the ground for later plantings. I remember a few of these seeds. Some of the leaders of the Society wished to introduce formal observances and symbols into the Sunday morning service, which consisted only of a lecture preceded and followed by a little music. A few members had tried to establish a quasi-religious custom in their homes, of having their children recite set verses before and after meals. We thought Dr. Foerster would be pleased with these innovations; to our surprise he was not. “You cannot create new religious forms by a mere act of will; they are an age-long development; they are an expression of intense and sustained emotion; they must respond to deep needs of masses of men.” “The Society for Ethical Culture should keep to its own domain, and should not step into the domain of the Church.” This is the deposit his ideas left in my memory, although they were not understood at the time.

It was less difficult to grasp his tenets in regard to the moral instruction of children. Here indeed he made me perceive possibilities I had not been cognizant of before. He was not satisfied with telling his pupils beautiful stories, or with analyzing the wisdom or folly of this or that kind of behavior. When stories were introduced into the lesson they came as a final concrete presentation of truths the child had already observed functioning in the life familiar to him. Thus to some extent, the same order of development was