The Maccabaean

RELATIONS, naturally, are fluid and indeterminate in any young movement; development cannot hopefully start from rigid and definitely fixed parts. And Zionism, as a political movement, is young and immature, no matter how old the roots and how age-seasoned the instincts from which it draws its strength.

It is not easy, therefore, whether for rabbi or layman, to apprehend calmly and impartially, in what relation Zionism, by the nature of its aims and efforts, must stand to Judaism.

That Judaism needs Zionism, no Jew will deny who has any understanding of our inner life in the past or of our political environment and religious outlook in the present. If Zionism was, to the Jew of the Dark Ages, his invisible elixir of life, the guiding-star of his matchless constancy, the most fragrant spice of his Sabbaths and festivals, the logical goal of his wanderings, we have come to a time when, politically, what with boycotts and pogroms at home and anti-immigration laws abroad, the hope of the new national home seems the one ray of light that stands between our Eastern brothers and utter despair; while, religiously, even the Anti-Zionist, seeing the steady decline of Jewishness, among orthodox as well as reformers, comes to pin his faith in the “spiritual reservoir” of a reborn Zion.

But how far does Zionism need Judaism? The question gives rise to many answers, reaching from extremes on the right to extremes on the left. The Anti-Zionist, in his groping for charges to hurl at the new Zion, pretends to apprehend the realization of both extremes, now the one, now the other, as whim or humor may direct his wild imaginings. At one time he warns us that we shall fall victims to the bigotry and fanaticism of the darkest and most intolerant orthodoxy in a Church-State which will establish the Shulchan Aruch as the law of the land, a law of the Medes and Persians, “a statute that shall not pass.” At another time his Zionistic nightmare assumes the opposite shape: of a seething laboratory of social experiment, of a Bolshevist paradise of free love and no religion in which the pious are to be scandalized by the most frenzied antics of nihilism and decadence enacted on the holy soil. If you accept the enraged anti-Zionist as your illumined prophet you have your choice: between medisval Ghetto thrice re-enforced and between blasphemous nihilism of the most vitriolic variety, between pitch-black or flame-red; there can be no middle ground.

It is safe to say that neither extreme, intolerant fanaticism nor religious nihilism, is likely to commend itself to the solid sense of a mentally balanced and sanely practical people. Our history of many centuries refuses to sanction the espousal of either extreme.

And it is here that we find our path pointed out for us with ample clearness. The policy of our religious leaders through the centuries of the past has, except for rare aberrations, been guilty neither of the sins of intolerance, nor of the vagaries of license. Judaism has been a free faith, holding its people, not through any coercions of regimented organization, nor through any threats of after-death punishment, but through bonds of loyalty and truth; authority hardly ever degenerated into tyranny, nor did freedom

lapse into lawlessness. In a continuous development, only restricted and made unnatural by the abnormal environment of virtual outlawny, Judaism retained its moral and religious balance, its power to hold united, and to preserve in spiritual health, a scattered people through the long period of its exile.

I cannot, therefore, take any alarm, as, e.g., our unforgettable teacher, Prof. Schechter did, from the appearance of the decadent note in modern Hebrew literature, any more than I share the apprehension, whether fancied or real, of others that Jerusalem will be tarnished by all the prurient accompaniments of modern civilization, such as musical comedy, sensuous dancing, jazz music and worse. A modern language, to cover the whole range of modern life, must lend itself to some unpalatable uses; a modern civilization, under auspices of freedom, must be allowed its occasional excesses, so far as legislation cannot be expected to suppress all the excrescences of a luxuriant development. We shall have to pay the price of freedom in allowing some scope, even to error and vice, inasmuch as utter suppression is bound to give rise to phenomena even more morbid.

It is because of my faith in the power of truth and temperance to assert themselves and to emerge victorious, that I cannot but believe in a measure of toleration for unavoidable error and temporary wrong. Especially, when there is so much of error and wrong which arises in noble characters as a protest against conditions of intolerable injustice. It is therefore that, as rabbi and as man, I delight in the intercourse with men and women, many of them unselfish and highminded to the last degree, who, in their hard battle for social ideals, have lost their religion and become strangers to their ancestral faith. Such people, in most cases, have lost mere formulas: the dogmas of the creed, the observances of the calendar. They still hold fast to much of the spirit of Judaism: to the charity of justice, to the brotherliness which does not "hide itself from its own flesh," to the exalted self-denial which places justice above self and constitutes the moral core of the prophetic spirit.

Nor would it be just to judge such personalities and their spiritual temperament without recalling and taking into careful account the altogether ephemeral character of such phenomena in our history. The Russian pogrom may give rise to the Jewish nihilist; the joy, the inspiration, the normal, law-abiding life of the Holy Land may be trusted to restore the lost balance. There is a wholesome, well-founded optimism, a profound knowledge of human nature, a certain degree of confidence in inherited Jewish instincts in the rabbinical maxim: מתוך שלא לשמה בא לשמה "having performed a religious duty, at first, from extraneous motives, one comes, in the end, to perform it in the proper spirit." Even should our atheists of the Russian Inferno remain lifelong strangers to their faith, even should they stubbornly refuse to yield their unfaith to the mellowing sunshine of a kindlier milieu, their wives will see to it that their children's hearts will be rerooted in the old beliefs and practices. It was not only our pious women of old Egypt that kept alive names and traditions, paving the