ECCLESIASTES
THE old cycles are for ever renewed, and it is no paradox that he who would advance can never cling too close to the past. The thing that has been is the thing that will be again; if we realize that, we may avoid many of the disillusions, miseries, insanities that for ever accompany the throes of new birth. Set your shoulder joyously to the world’s wheel; you may spare yourself some unhappiness if, beforehand, you slip the Book of Ecclesiastes beneath your arm.
HAVELOCK ELLIS.
THE BOOK OF ESTHER[46]
WITHIN it burn a lofty independence and a genuine patriotism.
The story of Esther, glorified by the genius of Handel and sanctified by the piety of Racine, not only affords material for the noblest and gentlest of meditations, but is a token that in the daily events—the unforeseen chances—of life, in little unremembered acts, God is surely present.
When Esther nerved herself to enter, at the risk of her life, the presence of Ahasuerus—‘I will go in unto the king, and if I perish I perish’—when her patriotic feeling vented itself in that noble cry, ‘How can I endure to see the evil that shall come unto my people? or how can I endure to see the destruction of my kindred’?—she expressed, although she never named the name of God, a religious devotion as acceptable to Him as that of Moses and David.
A. P. STANLEY, 1876.
WE search the world for truth; we cull
The good, the pure, the beautiful
From graven stone and written scroll,
From all old flower-fields of the soul;
And, weary seekers of the best,
We come back laden from our quest,
To find that all the sages said
Is in the Book our mothers read.
J. G. WHITTIER.
THE TALMUD[47]
THE Talmud, which was as a second life to the men of the Ghetto, was not only a book of philosophy or devotion, it was a reservoir of national life; it was the faithful mirror of the civilization of Babylon and Judea, and, at the same time, a magical phantasmagoria of all the wild dreams, the fables, the legends, the scraps of science more or less exact, the reveries, the audacious theories discovered by the Wandering Jew in his endless travels. Every generation of Judaism had accumulated its facts and fancies there. Even the Bible itself did not come so close to the daily life of the Ghetto as the Talmud and the Mishna. The Bible was a thing eternal, apart, unchanging. The Talmud was a daily companion, living, breathing, contemporary, with a hundred remedies for a hundred needs. A nation persecuted, lives through its time of stress rather by its commentaries than by its Scriptures. In the Ghetto the Talmud was a door into the ideal always open. When the Christians burned the Jews they did no enduring harm to Judaism, for martyrdom purifies and strengthens every cause. But when they sequestrated every copy of the Talmud that fraud or force could discover, and burned the spiritual bread of a devoted people upon the public square, they committed an irreparable injury; for, by withdrawing its ideal, they debased the population of the Ghetto.
A. MARY F. ROBINSON, 1892.