Various

“ THE United States of America are at peace with all the world. Our government is not taking sides in the great war; officially we are the friends of all the embattled powers. And yet—we have but to take up any newspaper, anywhere in America, to find violent praise of one side, violent blame of the other. The sentiment of our country is divided. On all sides, our diverse populations are emphasizing afresh their European origins and background. The German in German-American, the Slav in Slavic-American, the Briton in British-American, have awakened, have become demonstrative and emphatic. ”

“ The inevitable reaction on the non-Jewish part of the community has been a feeling of mystification, and, following on that, suspicion and distrust.
It is this which has undermined confidence in the Jews as a people—their negation of that which is their valuable heritage. For Judaism is not merely tradition, a thing to be reverenced as a relic; it is a thing to be put to everyday use. This practical and vitalized Judaism is the real salvation for which the Jews have been groping, all the while under the delusion that it was anywhere but near at hand. ”

“ You ought to be foremost among those who labor for equality and freedom. We have a right to count upon you in the fight against all prejudices—prejudices of race and color, of class and country, of caste and religion. The emancipated Jew must be an emancipator.
I welcome the Menorah Society because, though devoted primarily to the tradition of your people, it does not look exclusively towards the past. Be rightly proud of the most unique and entrancing tradition in the history of the world. ”

“ We all feel that the present is a moment when the very foundations of our ethical life—both as individuals and as groups—have received a rude shock. At such a time—more than ever—we need to understand and to bear in mind the great teachings which Jewish sages have given to the world, as their and our contribution to the moral foundations of society. Such teachings were, in most cases, not decked out in the tawdry trappings of a recondite and far-fetched philosophy, nor garnished with the decorations of superlogical terminology, nor even put forth with lusty rhetoric. ”

“ If we were to wipe out all the records of the past, what a series of inexplicable riddles would our own history present, and if we were to blot out entirely every reference to ancient writers, or were to blow away all the perfume that has been shaken down from the vestments of those writers, how blurred and how scentless would the fairest and most fragrant pages of our own great poets and historians appear! ”

“ Deeply rooted to the soil of Jewish reality, he is like the best of the academic youth of other nations responsive to the needs of his own people. If in spots he is still groping in the dark, he is no longer a lone, stray wanderer, but is seeking his way out to light in the company of kindred souls. A comprehensive and exhaustive study of native Jewish student bodies in countries like England, Germany, Austria, France and Italy, as well as of the Russian Jewish student colonies strewn all over Western Europe, would bring out, in the most striking manner, contrasting tendencies in modern Jewry. ”

“ Are we after all and regardless of our beliefs and special obligations, a peculiar people, perhaps even a separate nation? The answer to this question lies, I think, in the study of our history. For centuries past the Jew has been persecuted, driven from one country to another, despoiled, massacred, and at best despised and forced to live in the Ghetto clothed in the badges of disdain. All of this the Jew has suffered and yet survived and kept his religion intact; willing at all times to remain a man apart because he knew that in the past the Jews had been a nation founded on a spiritual ideal ”

“ The Jews were the first people to uphold the sacred character of patriotism, the patriotism of principle, not of mere power, the patriotism that teaches that it is not might that makes right, but right which makes might. How sadly the European powers need to learn this lesson today! Only "righteousness exalteth the nation" and gives it the power and the right to lead in the world. If nations would seek righteousness as a means of winning leadership, they would never need to go to war, and the exercise of might would never be necessary. ”

“ PRIDE in ancestry is not pride of race, but pride in the spirit of the race, and pride of ancestry is not pride merely of background, but pride in the obligations that ancestry sets. All aristocrats have one motto—it is noblesse oblige. This must be the motto of the Jew. We must hence carry our obligation in the spirit of the prophets, which is not primarily a theological spirit, but a purely humane spirit, for which the necessity of man determines the invocation of God; in which the ideal of a free and happy humanity, in a just and democratic society, is the dominating ideal ”

“ The Rapprochement of Jew and Gentile in America
I WONDER if the time is not near at hand when your people will reconstruct your conceptions so much as to recognize Jesus as a typical, golden, Jewish youth, worthy of being an ideal for young men. We certainly do have in his life as now interpreted exactly what youth needs above all things,—ambition, enthusiasm, idealism, all of them absorbing, all of them diverting physical and sensuous energy into the very highest culture sphere, sublimating desire, and making us understand that youth is not complete without a great effort at achievement. ”

“ Most of us could not renounce Judaism because deep down in our consciousness, aside from reason or logic, we know we are not as other men; we know we are Jews. We hear the cry of the suffering in Belgium and we answer to that cry because we are men and nothing human is alien to us,—but when we hear the cry of the suffering Jew in Poland and Palestine, then the true Jew answers that cry as the cry not only of a fellow human being, but as the cry of a brother. ”

“ Dark though these present days are, yet humanity must progress into the light of a permanent peace, and though the Jews are doing their full share of the fighting in this war brought on by their rulers, we must do more than our share in bringing to its fruition the ancient prophecy: "For the law shall go forth from Zion and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. And He shall judge many people and rebuke strong nations, and they shall beat their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning-hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more." ”

“ The establishment of the legally secured Jewish home is no longer a dream. For more than a generation brave pioneers have been building the foundations of our new old home. It remains for us to build the superstructure. The Ghetto walls are now falling, Jewish life cannot be preserved and developed, assimilation cannot be averted, unless there be reëstablished in the fatherland a center from which the Jewish spirit may radiate and give to the Jews scattered throughout the world that inspiration which springs from the memories of a great past and the hope of a great future. ”

“ For it is from his own people that he must draw his vision and spiritual sustenance if he is to live a life of self-mastery rather than the life of a contemptible parasite rooted nowhere and chameleonizing everywhere. Time was when their fellow-Jews half excused the college men, who drifted away from the life of Israel, as if the burden of the Jewish bond were too much for the untried and unrobust shoulders of our Jewish college men, as if their intellectual and moral squeamishness led to inevitable revolt against association with their much-despised and wholly misunderstood Jewish fellows. ”

“ It is therefore a highly laudable endeavor undertaken by the Intercollegiate Menorah Association to arouse the dormant spirit of self-respect in the academic Jewish youth, to stir in him the ambition to study and know this matchless history and literature, and to kindle in his soul anew that idealism which made the Jew throughout all the ages endure and brave the onslaughts of the empires and churches and the persecuting mobs, so that even to-day he is as young and as vigorous as any of the youngest races and nations in the world. ”

“ The spectacle of thousands going out by trainload to settle differences through slaughter has been a terrible shock. Individuals, having progressed beyond that stage, had assumed that collectively, too, men must share the same aversion to so illogical a method as murder for the solution of differences. This assumption has had root in a justifiable belief in the world's attainment to a higher plane of civilization. The quality of to-day's culture may not be so fine as that of Judæa, of Greece, or Rome, or of the Renaissance, but surely in no period of history has its extent been so great. ”

“ When one thinks of the carnival of murder to which the idolatry of territorial, political patriotism has led, one cannot but wonder whether the Jewish people throughout the world might not afford an example for all to follow. In Judaism we have tradition, culture and race dissociated from any special habitat or from any political form; and this nation without a land, this nation without a king, is developing, prospering, unconquerable. ”

“ If we really want religion, if we want to stir again the Jew's traditional passion for religion, if we want to inspire once more the Jew's genius for religion, let us try to understand all aspects and all manifestations of it, let us bend our efforts to a renaissance of religious influence. The future of the Jew in this country will not be determined by the theories or the practices of any one group or sect of Jews. The result will be a composite result, to which the reform Jew and the Zionist, the orthodox Jew and the anti-Zionist, will alike contribute. ”

“ Scholarly when scholarship will be in order, but always endeavoring to be timely, vivacious, readable; keen in the pursuit of truth wherever its source and whatever the consequences; a Jewish forum open to all sides; devoted first and last to bringing out the values of Jewish culture and ideals, of Hebraism and of Judaism, and striving for their advancement—the Menorah Journal hopes not merely to entertain, but to enlighten, in a time when knowledge, thought, and vision are more than ever imperative in Jewish life. ”

“ We have been looking backward at the literary accomplishment of three Jewish men of genius. It is, I believe, a fault of modern Judaism to look backward instead of forward, as if the glory of Israel had indeed departed, and as if nothing were left but to look back with pride and regret upon what has passed like a dream away. But I believe Jews may look forward now with confident hope toward the years that are to be. That Israel has completely played its role—that it has finished its service to the world—cannot for a moment entertain. ”

“ Now, what I am attempting to do for French, the Menorah plans to do for the traditions, the problems, the aspirations of the Jewish race. And although I believe that the people which gave to the world Saint Louis, Joan of Arc, Calvin, Descartes, Pascal, Rousseau, Pasteur, Victor Hugo has left its imperial imprint upon the whole of modern civilization, yet I cannot but be conscious of the prior and higher claims of that strange family of whose blood Moses, Jesus and Spinoza were born. Judaism and Hellenism, said Renan, are the twin miracles of human history. ”

“ Each of them has a cause to die for. Most of us, by reason of our Jewish descent, find life, particularly in the higher sense of the word, to be a keener struggle for existence than our neighbors do. Yet it would not be half so wearing if our difficulties were consecrated by an inspiring cause or by a thrilling loyalty. Why need we be poverty-stricken in spirit, bereft of everything that makes struggle sweet and suffering endurable? We must put the very question, What is Judaism? ”

“ Is it not meet that we, who still retain the plasticity of youth, make advances? Without surrendering an iota of our own individuality we might cultivate that sympathetic insight that would reveal the inestimable worth of our spiritual heritage. Not merely reverence for the past, but a regard for our own future prompts us to achieve a proper understanding of Judaism.
It is well to realize at the outset that the problem of religion is not confined to the Jews alone. Every great world-faith experiences nowadays the throes of transformation and readjustment. ”