Elijah Benamozegh

“ Jewish ethics is justice and charity united, each tempering the other and both working in unison for the government of the grand family, mankind; the one, having as its special organ, the written law; the other represented rather by the oral law; the one having to deal with society whose interests it governs, the other having its seat rather in the conscience of the individual. Thus Judaism includes the whole man, body and spirit, life actual and life to come; the first coming from the Mosaic code, the second from tradition, which is the code of conscience. ”

“ The consecration of labor would be as strange for Christianity as would be its absence in Judaism; which, far from teaching the incarnation of the Word in an individual, sees its embodiment in doctrine; which, far from making our salvation depend upon the imputation to us of the merits of another, makes each one his own true redeemer; and which, instead of limiting redemption to a point of history, to the hours of Jesus' crucifixion, realizes and develops it always and everywhere through a succession of ages. ”

“ Labor, arts, wealth, the goods of life, are so valued there, to the exclusion of all else that Biblical Judaism has been charged with pure materialism by those who mistook the Pentateuch for the religions instead of the civil code of the Jews. The past, the present, the future of Judaism, all its history, its fears and hopes, breathe of labor, abundance, and the good things of life. ”

“ Now, has Christianity any object to give us with which Pharisaism was not previously acquainted? Paul has given us the watch-word of which the Church has often made bad use, namely, the glory of God. With him all acts, however poor and mean, should have regard to the greater glory of God. "Whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, let it be to the glory of God." We think we hear the Pharisees teaching the disciples: "In what little sentence of the Bible is the whole body of the Law enclosed?" ”

“ In vain did the world rage against the old weak Israel; Israel, that in its infancy struggled with the angel, found always new force to oppose to the world. In vain did this world display before it all that was horrible and revolting—destitution, torture, slavery—nothing could shake its faith in the world, never by it made the synonym of evil and sin. The more Judaic life was compressed, the more vigorously it rebounded from its falls, reacting with new energy against the causes that should seemingly have exasperated it against the world. ”

“ One need not be as well versed as he in Hebrew knowledge to know that the Pharisees, so far from taking cognizance only of external actions, penetrated, on the contrary, into the most private recesses of the human heart, disclosing its weaknesses, its caprices, its most subtle artifices, and demanding purity of thought and sentiment, the curbing of our passions, just as well as obedience to the practical laws, civil or religious. ”

“ But what finishes the picture, is the very example of the Pharisees, who humbled themselves to the lowest trades, and who thought neither their virtue nor holiness injured by making stockings for Roman courtezans who, debased though they were, but touched perhaps by that Jewish magic proscribed by the Senate, knew no oath more solemn than, I swear by the life of the holy doctors of Israel's country. [15] The fact as to industry needs no long citations; if the history of the Pharisees prove anything, it is that trade or manual labor always accompanied their study of the Law. ”

“ These sources, especially the Bible, are much more accessible to all than are the almost unknown writings of the Rabbis. The ethics of the former Christianity will much more readily accept, as long as the Pharisees are regarded as the corrupters of Israel's ethics, and Jesus is believed to be its glorious restorer. In short, if the deplorable prejudices that have at all times hindered the due appreciation of Biblical ethics, are yielding daily to the advance of light and truth, they hold, alas! yet their old tyrannical sway over men as to the Pharisees. ”

“ Consider the birds of the air, they neither sow, nor reap, nor store away, and yet your Heavenly Father feeds them; are you not much more worth than they? And who among you, by taking thought, can add to his stature one cubit? ”

“ But who does not see the difference, also; the man of little faith, according to Judaism, is he who, having bread in his basket, yet doubts as to his subsistence for the morrow; the Christian example is simply he who foresees, or the true sage. [6] Above all, beside the extravagant trust in God pushed to improvidence, beside the instance given us of the beasts in the fields, not a word in the Gospels to temper declarations so absolute, to encourage us to labor or to condemn idleness. ”

“ Does not the teaching of his children some art or trade constitute, with circumcision and the study of the Law, one of a father's first duties towards them? Is it not, according to the Pharisees, to make one's child a robber, not to teach him a trade? [11] Is not labor a species of culture far preferable to indolent meditation? ”

“ Nor shall we say that a natural ethics would possess essentially those very characteristics that Mr. Salvador says the Jewish ethics lacks, namely, passion, sentiment, and expansion. We shall only say that Jewish ethics indeed resembles man, but man in his double nature; that is, the primitive man of Moses, the androgyne of Plato, the bisexual man, or rather, man and woman reunited by marriage; in a word, the family home. Yes, Christian ethics resembles woman, but woman isolated from man, without the counterpoise of his judgment, firmness, and experience ”

“ But this doctrine, so exaggerated by Jesus, has a date anterior to that of the contest between the Rabbis. It may be found in those fine counsels given by R. Meir, remarkably qualified though, by a recommendation to an occupation: "Let a man always teach his son an honorable and easy trade; above all, pray to Him to whom all wealth belongs; for in every trade are found, now poverty, now abundance; neither depends on industry itself, but on a man's deserts." And here the parable used by Jesus appears without danger, tempered as it is by the preceding advice. ”

“ Salvador has characterized the two ethical codes by a similitude that is not lacking in originality or truth. He says that the legislative and natural ethics of Moses is man in the full strength and expansion of his faculties; that the ethics of Jesus is woman—woman with her sensibility, grace, and tender yearnings. ”

“ As long as it was contented with the maxim: "Enough for each day is the evil thereof," it but echoed the teachings of the old Ben Sirach: "Be not troubled about the ills of tomorrow, for thou knowest not what may happen to-day;" ”

“ Here, as elsewhere, has Christianity taken the most ascetic doctrines of the Jews, those which governed a special sect, a society of meditatists, to make them general rules for human life; here, as elsewhere, has Christianity transferred the doctrines and ethics of the Essenes to the midst of society, of its concerns and needs ”

“ While the former, attached to the general spirit of Judaism, would associate the toil of the Law and of contemplation with that of civilization and art, the latter—taking as its chief R. Simeon, the prince of ascetics, the avowed author of that Cabala which has given Christianity everything—spoke a very different language. It said, after its master: If man tills the ground, harvests, and occupies himself with all material works as they present themselves in their seasons, how shall he find time to study the Law? ”