The Maccabaean

SPRING is in the air. I am wakened every morning by timid chirpings of little birds, growing bolder every day. Life is astir: soon, the assurance of life’s beauty and life’s power will sing out of every frail throat in the bushes, will gleam forth from every early flower, and will lie like a benediction over all the landscape. One must feel this: feel life as living, not merely existing; feel it as the stuff from which the deathless aspirations of the world are made; feel it as the unconquerable breath of mortality surging towards shoreless eternity.

BinnEEE = I > En nt Something has touched the man whom I imprison. Something has called to the Hermit within my heart. Something has broken down the bars, and the limits of this intensely concentrated Self have become lost in the glad resurgency of Life round about. I walked forth the other day with heaving breast and quickened pulse, and I found myself floating off into vast limitless spaces. I became as part of the landscape of river and trees and the low-ridged mountains. Do you ever feel that way?: Unless you do, unless you sense the oneness of your being with the far-circling life of the All, unless you realize with a poignancy that is almost physical the invisible tides of your soul flowing to and fro between the horizon and yourself, you do not know what life is. The sharply individualized Ego, whose outlines are hard and unpliant, narrows down the meaning of existence to one bare bit of animated matter separate from the rest of this living universe; in this egoistic separation lies the danger to all art and all religion. But the moment these outlines yield to a keen consciousness of Unity, and the Ego knows itself to be part of an immensity too stupendous for words, not separate nor yet lost, merged but not submerged,— that moment man touches the height of the heroic. That moment is brimful with the pressure of Life’s age-long adventure. That moment holds God. ... .

It is dificult to set these things down in cold type. It is almost impossible to tell of such a moment of reality, intense like a ihrob and as brief. All I know is that I was filled with a vibrant sense of living, some sharp thrill of superb aliveness that communicated itself to me from the tremulous spring atmosphere, and which I in turn conveyed to the soft breezes that caressed my face. It was a sense of something a little lower than Beatitude but vastly higher than Happiness—it was Felicity. Beatitude is for the quiet folk who sleep beneath the sod; Happiness is for the slothful folk who lie supinely above the pulsing heart of the earth; but Felicity is for those who feel the living pulse of the world in their own bosom; to whom Life is an adventure shared alike by God and the Soul: who can make their reckoning without Happiness and whom no fate can turn from the hope of the Beatitude that waits Beyond.

Felicity, pulse of the world and overflowing life of the skies! Felicity, haunting beauty of the far hills and dewy freshness of the dawn! Felicity, glad thrill of being that runs down in gleaming ripples with the rushing river and sings out of frail bird throats! Felicity, exquisite vitality and red wine of the blood: you it was who called to the Hermit and touched: him with magic wand into Freedom

and Enlargement! I have seen your face as the beautiful face of my God, I have heard your voice as the voice of angels, and I have answered you as one answers the tender summons of Mother. . . .

Under your spell the Hermit sang out triumphantly: I am!

And God, too, proclaimed from the ramparts of heaven: I am that I am!

And, as all things chimed back the joyous cry of Life, Death became the ugly lie of crumbling tombstones and tottering theologies. Only Life is true: Life and the Eternal Desire that tints ihe petals with the waking blush of the Sleeping Beautv whom men name Sprine. .. .

II.

The Hermit is a Jew. He is a Zionist. He is a Jew with an excess-Judaism beating in him. I talk about him because I know him better than anyone else. We are all made of layers, and I am no different. But when I remove the stratifications of my being and penetrate to the last layer of personality, I find there, under the sheerest, filmiest covering of my Selfhood, the ancient Jew. He is myself yet not myself; he is of today yet he is of yesterday—of that bygone day whose sun shone in Moses' eye when he led forth his people eastward to the Land of the Promise. As I enclose the Hermit, so does the Hermit enclose him, and his is the wisdom of the ages. All that my people has felt of joy and sorrow, of passion and of longing, lives there in calm brooding fashion, to wake up mightily with every stir of my more personal life.

Is then the individual a lie? Is he a delusion? Maya? Only when he is separate. When the life of the universe, the life of God, wakes within him, he is more keenly alive, more gloriously existent, than when he insists on Self alone. He becomes free. So also with respect to the peculiar type of human individual who is known as Jew. His slavery, his unreality, consists in separation from the larger life of his people. The individual Jew is a lie when he is more an individual ihan a Jew. But when the life of Israel, when the Ancient-Jew, wakes in him, he himself comes more gloriously and more abundantly to life for this self-identification with the life of his people. He becomes free by being bound. All freedom consists of some glorified bondage, as the worst bondage lies in some debased freedom The personal life of the Jew is of a freer and more generous kind, through a liberal admixture of his mean clay with the hallowed dust of his ancestors, through a voluntary blending of his spirit with the Soul on whose wings Abraham and Moses and Isaiah sought to share the Freedom of God’s life. But God Himself is bound, voluntarily bound, to His resisting world of men and matters.

I am, then, I, only because I am not I. My life must needs overstep its limits in order to be alive. When I steep myself into the life of the world, when at Springtime wondrous intimations of indestructible being thrill along the central nerve of my life, I am more really alive than when I am shut in my private hermitage. But as a Jew, I am still.