‘IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE TIMES’
WAS Judaism ever ‘in accordance with the times’? Did Judaism ever correspond with the views of dominant contemporaries? Was it ever convenient to be a Jew or a Jewess?
Was the Judaism of our ancestors in accordance with the times, when compelled by the Egyptians to bend their necks during centuries under the yoke of slavery and to suffer their babes to be buried in the waves of the Nile? Was the Judaism of the Maccabees in accordance with their times, when they resisted to the utmost the introduction of Grecian manners prevailing in their days?When the Temple at Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans and the sons of Judah were slaughtered, sold in slave markets, cast before wild beasts or scattered through every country then known;when Worldly Wisdom would have taught, ‘Now it is certainly impossible for us to remain Jews’—did not the Hillels[67] and the son of Zakkai[68] teach yet more earnestly the holiness of our laws and our customs, and so order and regulate things that not a fibre might be lost from the ancestral sanctuary? Was that Judaism in accordance withthe times, for which, during the centuries following the Dispersion, our fathers suffered in all lands, through all the various periods, the most degrading oppression, the most biting contempt, and a thousand-fold death and persecution?
And yet we would make it the aim and scope of Judaism to be always ‘in accordance with the times’!
SAMSON RAPHAEL HIRSCH, 1854.
(Trans. Isaac Leeser.)