The Maccabaean

cepted as authoritative because it was the word of God, and therefore “true and righteous altogether.” Accordingly, all Jewish life became organized about its principles and precepts. All of the nation’s activities came under the jealous scrutiny of the national conscience, which we find reflected in its religious literature. This conscience was so clear-sighted and objective that it readily conceived the possibility of the nation as a whole sinning and requiring to be punished. This is the message of all the prophets from Moses to Malachi. The very belief in the choice of Israel which might easily minister to national self-complacency was construed by the religious leaders of Israel to involve not special privileges and prerogatives, but deeper responsibility and stricter accountability, as the prophet Amos expresses it, “You only have I known of all the families of the earth; therefore I will visit upon you all your iniquities.” Nothing can be more eloquent of how deeply this conviction took root in the Jewish people than the way in which our present dispersion is regarded by the great masses of our people, not in the light of a divine martyrdom, but as Punishment for the nation’s sins.

How superior is this traditional Jewish nationalism which conceives of the purpose of the nation’s existence as the consecration of all its forces to the service of a universal God and of His law when compared with the self-contained and self-limited ideal of a nation that bows down to its own image as reflected in its culture and recognizes no higher law than that which its own nature imposes on itself.

And yet there are Zionists who urge that at this late date in Jewish history we abandon this ideal, which has

guided us heretofore, and adopt in its place the program of cultural Zionism: which esteems as of equal value every product of the Jewish genius—one is almost inclined to say every by-product of Jewish life—merely because it is Jewish. The religion of the Jew it considers as only one element of the Jewish kultur possessing value not so much because of its inherent truth and moral elevation as because the Jewish people happens to have been its author. But to put all elements of a nation’s culture on the same plane is like putting all elements of a man’s character on the same plane, his carnal appetites side by side with his religious aspirations, and substituting the romantic ideal of self-expression for the moral ideal of self-control. The religion of the Jew has been that element of his culture in which his moral conscience that relates him to the world about him and gives purpose and meaning to his national life finds expression, and it therefore can bear no comparison with the merely secular elements of his culture that express, as it were, only chance desires and incidental interests in life.

If the success of Zionism must mean the substitution’ of kultur for religion, of Jewishness for Judaism, then it were indeed better that modern Zionism should not succeed and our people remain longer in exile. But it will not mean that, and no Zionist need be afraid of the ultimate goal to which the movement leads. For the kultur cult is already discredited by the free nations of the world, and the return of the Jewish people to Judæa will necessarily bring with it a return to the Jewish nationalism that was born in Judæa and a repudiation of the Jewish nationalism that bears the label “Made in Germany.”

Her heart is like the Vale of Sharon,And her thoughts within it are lilies and anemones:She is soft as buds in the month of AdarAnd fragrant as the blossoms of the myrtle.

Her hair is dark as night with the lustre of stars upon it,And her face beneath is dawn.

Her head is as the Lebanon,She is uplifted as the peaks of Hermon,Dropping dew upon my soulAnd sweet refreshment on my spirit.