A Book of Jewish Thoughts. Various
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as in no other Empire in the world, there breathes a passionate love of freedom, a burning hatred of tyrant wrong.
HERMANN ADLER, at the unveiling of the Memorial to the Jewish soldiers who fell in the South African War, 1905.
TO ENGLAND
LINES OF A RUSSIAN JEW
IN childhood I learned to love thee,
Thy name was a legend to me;
I dreamt of a distant great island,
Where men may be strong, yet be free.
And I, who the clatter of fetters
Have heard in my childhood and youth,
Do bless thee for giving me refuge,
And faith in the triumph of truth.
Thou art not my stepmother, England,
My sister of mercy thou art;
For thee in the hour of thy trial
A brotherly love fills my heart.
P. M. RASKIN, 1914.
JUDAISM AND THE JEW IN AMERICA
I
LIKE the river that takes its rise in the distant hills, gradually courses its way through the country, passing alike through sublime landscape and hideous morass, offering its banks for the foundation of great cities, its waters enriched and modified by the tributaries that gradually flow towards it, until it at last loses itself in the ocean: so Judaism, taking its rise among the mountains of Sinai, slowly and steadily has advanced; passing alternately through a golden age of toleration and an iron age of persecution, giving its moral code for the foundation of many a government; modified by the customs and modes of life of each nation through which it has passed, chastened and enriched by centuries of experience—shall I say, as I said with the river, that it, too, at last loses itself in the great sea of humanity? No! rather like the Gulf Stream, which, passing through the vast Atlantic Ocean, part of it, and yet distinct from it, never losing its individuality, but always detected by its deeper colour and warmer temperature, until it eventually modifies the severe climate of a distant country: so Judaism, passing through all the nations of the old world, part of them, and yet distinct from them, ever recognized by its depth and intensity, has at last reached this new world without having lost its individuality. And here it is still able, by the loftiness of its ethical truth and by the purity of its principles, to give intellectual and moral stamina to a never-ending future humanity.
M. H. HARRIS, 1887.
II
WE, more than any other nation on the globe, recall the happy day when the light of promise first dawned in a modern Canaan, overflowing with the milk and honey of humane kindness, in a land symbolized by the torch of the goddess of liberty, whose soft, mild, yet penetrating rays are reflected o’er all the scattered sons of much-tried Israel, whom she so benignantly beckons to these shores.
ALEXANDER KOHUT, on the 400th Anniversary of the Discovery of America, 1892.
THE DELUGE OF FIRE
(1914–1918)
MANKIND craves the conviction that the agony and tears and suffering of these hundreds of millions of belligerents, constituting the vast majority of the human race, are not in vain; that somehow good will come of all this infinite woe.
In old Jewish books there is a wondrous legend of a second Deluge, a Deluge of Fire, that would sweep over the earth. In anticipation of it, the children of men were bidden to write the story of man on tables of clay, as such tables would not only escape destruction, but would become the more enduring. We to-day are the eyewitnesses of such a fire-deluge dreamt of by the ancients. Let us not, however, fear that civilization and religion will perish from the earth. Quite other will be its far-reaching results for mankind. Right and humanity will emerge stronger than ever from this world-conflagration. Before this war we saw that the laws of God and man were written as it were on mere tables of clay, breakable and effaceable at will. This very world-conflagration, however, will yet render the Law of Nations indestructible and for ever unassailable by insolence or power. The behests of humanity, which so far have been but pious wishes, will be converted into regulative principles in international dealings.
J. H. HERTZ, to a congregation of Jewish soldiers at the Front, France, 1915.
THE HEALING OF THE NATIONS
THE sun and the moon are become black,
And the stars withdraw their shining …
And the heavens and the earth shall shake;
But the Lord will be a refuge unto His people.
JOEL 4. 15, 16.
AND the loftiness of man shall be bowed down,
And the haughtiness of men shall be brought low;
And the Lord alone shall be exalted in that day.
And the idols shall utterly pass away.
ISAIAH 2. 17, 18.
AND, behold, the Lord passed by, and a great and strong wind rent the mountains, and broke in pieces the rocks before the Lord; but the Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake; but the Lord was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire; but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire a still small voice.
1 KINGS 19. 11, 12.
HEAL us, O Lord, and we shall be healed; save us, and we shall be saved; for Thou art our praise. Vouchsafe a perfect healing unto all our wounds; for Thou, almighty King, art a faithful and merciful Physician.
DAILY PRAYER BOOK.
THE MESSIANIC HOPE
WHEN the harp of Judah sounded, thrilled with the touch of inspiration Divine, among the echoes it waked in the human heart were those sweet sounds whose witcheries transport the soul into the realms of happiness. That melody has been our source of courage, our solace and our strength, and in all our wanderings we have sung it. It is the music of the Messianic age, the triumph-hymn to be one day thundered by all humanity, the real psalm of life as mankind shall sing it when Israel’s world-task of teaching it shall have been accomplished. Its harmony is the harmony of the families of the earth, at last at peace, at last united in brotherhood, at last happy in their return to the One Great Father.
H. PEREIRA MENDES, 1887.
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