Shaivism

“ Already there are abundant signs that long scattered and long neglected Israel is hastening back to his land to pass through ere long that fiery ordeal and furnace awaiting him in Zion. Perhaps the most significant fact in this connection, is the formation of the Jewish, almost universal, "Chovevi Zion Association," which seems destined, after centuries of dispersion, to bind all the scattered fragments of the people into one national force, with the ostensible aim of regaining possession of the land of their fathers. ”

“ And so political Zionism cannot satisfy those Jews who care for Judaism: its growth seems to them to be fraught with danger to the object of their own aspiration.
The secret of our people's persistence is -- as I have tried to show elsewhere [3] --that at a very early period the Prophets taught it to respect only spiritual power, and not to worship material power. For this reason the clash with enemies stronger than itself never brought the Jewish nation, as it did the other nations of antiquity, to the point of self-effacement. ”

“ Zionism does not worship “tribalism.” Far from it. Jewish religious doctrines are of value to the whole world, and their ethics undoubtedly tend to unite humanity. This is a truth so evident as to need no confirmation. But Jews are not ghosts; they are human beings, and they have to look upon Judaism in a human sense. And the human sense is that Jews, notwithstanding the spiritual character of their teachings, are, like any other ethnic group, a species of the genus homo, a distinct people united by their origin and by their common history. ”

“ Shylock's plea for the Jew has been quoted with much force by women and on behalf of women: "Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? ”

“ To talk Hebrew—therein lay Israel's real salvation. Let little children once again lisp in the language of Isaiah and Hosea—that was true Zionism.
'Then don't you want the Holy Land?' asked the astonished David.
'Merely as a centre of Cultur. Merely as a University where Herbert Spencer may be studied in the tongue of the Psalmist. All the rest is bourgeois Zionism. Political Zionism? Economic Zionism? Pah! Mere tawdry imitations of heathen politics!'
'Then you agree with the Chovevi Zionists!'
'Not at all. Zion is less a place than a state of mind. We want Culture—not Agriculture ”

“ But Zionism is essentially an active Jewish programme. Zionism is real Jewish self-help. Zionism tends to make the Jews creators, not creatures of conditions and situations.
Zionists, like all Jews, are fundamentally optimists; but theirs is no mere “wait and see” optimism. Confidence in the Future has been the curse of the Jew. Confidence in “Progress” as an idol has been blindness. Away with idols! Jews have to take their cause into their own hands, for God helps those who help themselves. ”

“ The Promised Land, Jewish national distinctiveness, the future of the Jewish people—these ideas exist in Judaism and in Christianity. They go back to the remotest past; they take, during many generations, a thousand forms—sentimental, practical, sublime, even mystical. In Modern Zionism we find them all. On the other hand, while the elements of the older Zionism seem familiar, the total effect of Modern Zionism is that of something new and strange. ”

“ Hence the Chovevé Zion chose the line of self-interest, not because they preferred it, but because no other was open. “The Jewish masses do not properly understand the language of the national sentiment. Our endeavour must be to make actions speak to them in a language which they do understand—the language of self-interest. Then calculation will succeed where sentiment cannot.” ”

“ Revenge is not a characteristic of the Jew. He is subject to sudden fits of passion, but that intellect which always stands sentinel over the Hebrew soon subdues the gust. However strong in Shylock's time might have been the hatred of the Jew towards the Christian, the lust of lucre was more strong, and Shakespeare might have ransacked every Ghetto in Christendom without finding a Jew, or a Christian either, who would have preferred a pound of flesh to a pound sterling; and Jews also shrink from physical contests. Their disposition is to triumph by intellect rather than violence. ”

“ It is the keynote of all Hebrew poetry, old and new, from the holy Psalms to the inspired poems of Jehudah Ha’levi, and from Jehudah Ha’levi to the living Hebrew poets of our own day. This everlasting, all-absorbing and unconquerable idea of a national future is absolutely Jewish. It has accompanied the Jews from the cradle to the grave. It is the secret of their long existence, which has no parallel in history. It has nothing to do with nationalistic tendencies and currents among the Gentiles in modern times. It existed as well in times of distress and misfortune as in times of prosperity. ”

“ And if it was not merely euphemism when the Jews were accorded the same right to exist, when the name or the nation in whose country they became settled was conferred upon them, wherefore an independent organization? Now, the course of evolution of the Jews up to the present, especially its last phase, has revealed that not only the masses of Judaism which are not yet on a high plane of cultural development feel nationally. It is just in the Zionism of the educated Jews that the full justification of the national movement shows itself. ”

“ So he devotes himself to the ideal with all the ardour of which he is capable; he gives rein to his fancy, and lets it soar as ft will, up above reality and the limitations of human power. For it is not the attainment of the ideal that he needs: its pursuit alone is sufficient to cure him of his moral sickness, which is the consciousness of inferiority; and the higher and more distant the ideal, the greater its power of exaltation.
This is the basis of Western Zionism and the secret of its attraction. But Eastern Chibbath Zion has a different origin and development. ”

“ There is no reason for humanity to deny this natural right to the oldest nation of the world, and no justification for the Jews themselves to commit a sort of national hari-kari because of the spirituality of Judaism.
2. The Zionist conception of a living nationality, with all universal qualities, yet living and distinctive, holds good also for the idea of the Mission of Judaism. Frankly, Zionists do not like this idea as a justification of the Jew’s “right to exist.” But what exactly is the meaning of a mission of a people? ”

“ Granting, if only for argument’s sake, that Zionism will on them confer a benefit, will it not inflict an injury upon others who, though Jews by descent, and often by religion, desire wholly to identify themselves with the life of the country wherein they have made their home. Among these are to be found some of the most gifted members of a gifted race. Their ranks contain (at least, so I think) more than their proportionate share of the world’s supply of men distinguished in science and philosophy, literature and art, medicine, politics and law. ”

“ From the Most Sublime Horizon there hath shone forth that which leaveth no room unto any one for vacillation, repudiation or denial. The wayward, however, have failed to profit therefrom; nay, it shall only increase their loss.
O Shaykh! It is incumbent upon the divines to unite with His Majesty, the Sháh—may God assist him—and to cleave day and night unto that which will exalt the station of both the government and the nation. This people are assiduously occupied in enlightening the souls of men and in rehabilitating their condition. ”

“ The humanist ideal, which stood sponsor at its rebirth, bore within itself a germ of dissolution. For national and religious aims it desired to substitute the idea of liberty and equality. Sooner or later it would have had to end in assimilation. During the course of a whole century, from the appearance of the first issue of Ha-Meassef, in 1784-5, until the cessation of Ha-Shahar, in 1885, Hebrew literature offers the spectacle of a constant conflict between the humanist ideals and Judaism. ”

“ But the achievement of a political success with this or that Power must never be mistaken for the real aim of Zionism. Its real aim is the regeneration—physical, economic, moral—of the Jewish people. That is a constructive task of the highest value from the point of view of humanity, and those who set their hands to such a task need many high qualities—patience and tenacity of purpose, experience and foresight. Above all, they need the gifts of imagination and optimism, without which no great object has ever been achieved. ”

“ There this feeling would become what it is among all other sound, healthy and civilized peoples: the joyful consciousness of belonging to a nation that in life, customs and language bears the impress of an ancient and yet new culture. It is in this and not in the superficialities of a state that the centre of gravity of Zionist efforts consists. What Zionists want is to find in the historical fatherland the conditions requisite for the untrammelled development of a Jewish nation. Zionism is in its deepest sense a product of Jewish national consciousness. ”

“ They have justly regarded such things as savoring rather of Judaism: for the Jews are more solicitous about outward solemnities than the obedience of the heart; and therefore are they under the curse, because they do not discern the spiritual bearing of the Mosaic law, but rest in its types and shadows. Those who favor the Jews admit the allegorical meaning of these things; and yet they wage a deadly warfare against the observance of days and months, without applying to them a similar sense: thus do they necessarily involve themselves in a common condemnation with the Jews. ”

“ Therefore if we wish to prevent this evil and to obviate such convulsions in the future, we must establish for the remnant of this people a firm foundation and a safe shelter in the land of their fathers. Thus once again the flame of war and the terrible sufferings of our brethren have revealed the truth of the Zionist idea in all its strength and clarity as being the only true solution of the Jewish problem, that problem whose consequences are written in the blood of myriads of our brethren. ”

“ In teaching that all men are brethren it lays the foundation of the equality of men and races, and excludes in principle every impulse of race egotism as immoral. In Judaism is therefore contained from the beginning the suppression of national limitation and animosity. And what is founded upon Judaism must necessarily prevail in Zionism, which represents the quintessence of Judaism, with all the power of logic and tradition. But it is just upon this point that those Jews who combat Zionism make a surprising mistake. ”

“ Only an imaginative nervousness suggests that the realization of territorial Zionism, in some form, would cause Christendom to round on the Jews and say, ‘Now you have a land of your own, go to it!’ The Jews who feel themselves to be British, French, or American would, doubtless, tend to identify themselves more than ever with the lands of their political allegiance and to become more and more a solely religious community. The rapid changes of nationality that have been so noticeable among Jews in the past would become increasingly discredited. ”

“ Speaking at a Zionist meeting in 1914, in Cincinnati, the late Professor Solomon Schechter said: “Zionism is now a living fact. We must have Zionism, if we want Judaism, orthodox or reform, to continue to exist. Judaism is at the present time in a very weak condition, not only in America, but also in Europe. The Jew cannot live in his own atmosphere, he is compelled to breathe the spirit of other religions.... The question then arises: What is it that can preserve the Jewish people? ♦How can Judaism be saved from complete annihilation? ”

“ We must be Zionists in colonization, in the spirit, and in religion. In what each says, there is some truth. The error lies only in the fact that in each of these assertions, a partial truth claims to represent the whole truth. Zionism is not a part; it is the totality, the sum, the synthesis of these efforts. ”

“ The world’s general Press, in all languages, devoted to Zionism an amount of space second only to the events of the war. The mere fact that at a time such as the present, when the world is in the throes of a universal struggle, and every nation is concerned for its own safety, and even existence, so much interest was directed to our movement throws a dazzling light upon the naïve absurdity of the anti-Zionist assertion, that the whole movement is nothing more than an Utopia. ”

“ And how cometh he not to show that the Gentile which doeth aright is not inferior to the Jew which doeth aright, but that the Gentile which doeth aright is better than the Jew which breaketh the Law? It was that he might make the victory an undoubted one. For when this is agreed upon, of necessity the circumcision of the flesh is set aside, and the need of a good life is everywhere demonstrated. For when the Greek is saved without these, but the Jew with these is yet punished, Judaism stands by doing nothing. ”