The Maccabaean

SUCH is the fascination of Jerusalem that the visitor is apt either to write a book about the city, or to write long descriptions of the things that he is discovering anew, after thousands of pilgrims and tourists have discovered them and recorded their discoveries. At least since the time of the Psalmist, visitors to Jerusalem have considered it their duty to "walk about Zion, and go around about her, and count the towers thereof, mark well her ramparts and traverse her palaces, to tell it to the generation following," and since the time of the writer of the Itinerarium a Burdigala Hierusalem usque some sixteen hundred years ago, this injunction of the Psalmist has been most conscientiously obeyed.

I have no discoveries to proclaim except one, rather astonishing to me, that Palestine and Jerusalem are realities. They are more than a name and a legend, a literature and a tradition. The Jordan is not a Biblical name; it is a real river, for I have seen it from afar, glistening some sixteen miles away four thousand feet below me. Jerusalem is not an historical memory or a religious dream; it is a real city of human beings, houses and municipal problems. Palestine is not some remote, storied place or a paragraph in a geography book. It is a land of stones and earth and trees and mountains, a land neglected, it is true, and sadly devastated, but a land which is again becoming "a good land, a land of brooks of water, of fountains and depths, springing forth in valleys and hills, a land of wheat and barley, and vines and fig trees and pomegranates, a land of olive trees and honey." Zionism is here not a subject for debate, nor a theory of Jewish life; it is the condition of existence of the Palestinian Jew.

This reality of the physical Zion, and of Zionism incarnate and "interrate," is the most striking impression received by a Zionist of my training. One who has been a Zionist for years in the atmosphere of universities and lecture platforms, who has thought and talked and written his way through to a convinced Zionism as the inevitable religio-historical fulfillment of all the years of Jewish history, is not altogether prepared to see Zionism as history that is being lived. One who has seen in Zionism a religious, cultural, national and political movement, receives a shock of surprise when on the soil of the Land of Israel it is daily and hourly borne in upon him that Zionism is neither an academic subject of discussion nor a "movement," but that it is a practical problem in a land of matter.

What Jerusalem needs now is not preachments and policies, but food, sanitation and hard physical work. As in the days of David, the approach to the conquest of the city is by way of the water conduits. Until the water that the

British have brought into the city can be used by an enlightened city government for the cleansing of streets and passages, shops and cellars, court yards and homes, the city cannot become "the city of the Great King"; it will remain the city in which Beelzebub and his children, Malaria and Blindness, will rule. You cannot expect spiritual vision from eyes that are inflamed or darkened. One should not look for healthy religious normality from the hungry or destitute. Religious ecstasy or prophetic fervor are not to be found in their purity in the one whose body is racked with fever. Unless physical Zionism precedes spiritual Zionism, there may be developed in Jerusalem a Zionism built up either of an immature materialized social justice, or of the hectic dreams and morbid visions of the blinded, the fevered and the famished. I have met a prophet in Jerusalem but he is a Jew married with a Christian wife. I have met the Messiah in Jerusalem, but he, poor fellow, is compassionately cared for behind the walls of our "Home for the Diseased in Spirit," while he nurses his visions of the potentates of the earth who visited him in his squalid dwelling.

D. R. POOL, who is well known to the readers of The Maccabaean, is now in Palestine with the Zionist Commission. This article is more than a mere record of impressions. It is imbued with the spirit that will make the Jewish Commonwealth, the spirit of inspired toil, grappling with the sordid things of the present but never unmindful of the exalted aim.

who is well known as of The Macca- Palestine with the ion. This article mere record of imbued with the make the Jewish the spirit of ining with the sordid resent but never the exalted aim. When there are thousands of orphans to be cared for, when the sanitary conditions within the walls of the Holy City call out for radical improvement, when war- wrecked houses have to be rebuilt and the war-scattered rehabilitated, shops reopened, industries revived and food has to be given to the aged, the widow, the ailing, and the destitute —to talk then of spiritual Zionism, or of any other "ism" within Zionism, is the trick of the missionary who will feed you and care for all your wants if first you will swallow the testament and the creed which he offers you. There is no room in Jerusalem for the shibboleth of the partisan or the iterations of the closed mind. Cultural Zionist, political Zionist, Poalei Zionist, Mizrachi Zionist, spiritual Zionist —for none of these has the Jerusalem of today a welcome. But for the Zionist who comes to do the work that lies at hand, forgetful or independent of party or creed, Jerusalem hungers. It does not wish to be further riven by party, faction and doctrinaire. The over-intellectualized and over-individualized Jew of Jerusalem has often been so preoccupied in creating a home for his own particular spirit and his own particular party (of which sometimes he seems to be the only member), that he has had little time or inclination to make a home for his body and to make room for his fellow Jews. The result is a life of strong color and inbred intensity. Jerusalem, a microcosmos of Jewry, contains all the planks needed for a national Jewish platform, but each one is carefully guarded under the cloak of its devotee. If a sense of greater largeness and greater freedom from individual interests were developed, these planks could be brought