Religious growth may also be compared to the growth of a tree. To expect that development shall continue along the Hebrew or Christian lines is like expecting that a tree will continue to develop along one of its branches. There is a limit beyond which the extension of a branch cannot go. Then growth must show itself in the putting forth of a new branch.
But let me now state with somewhat greater particularity the reasons that compelled me to depart from the faith of Israel, and to leave my early religious home, cherishing pious memories of it, but nevertheless firmly set in my course towards new horizons.[8]
1. The difficulty created by the claim that Israel is an elect people, that it stands in a peculiar relation to the Deity. This claim, at the time when it was put forth, was neither arrogant nor unfounded. It was not arrogant because the mission was understood to be a heavy burden not a privilege: or if a privilege at all, then the tragic privilege of martyrdom, a martyrdom continued through generations. And the claim was not unfounded or preposterous at the time when it was put forth because the Hebrews were in reality the only people who conceived of morality in terms of holiness. It was not absurd for them to assert their mission to be the teachers of mankind in respect to the spiritual interpretation of morality, since there was something, and that something infinitely important, which they actually had to teach. Moral thinking and moral practices of course had existed from immemorial times everywhere, but the conception of morality as divine in its source, as spiritual in its inmost essence,—this immense idea was the offspring of the Hebrew mind. On the other hand, I asked myself, has not the task of Israel in this respect been accomplished? Have not its Scriptures become the common property of the civilized nations? And does not that teacher mistake his office who attempts to maintain his magisterial authority after his pupils have come to man’s estate, and are capable of original contributions? The “nations” are not to be looked upon in the light of mere pupils. The ethical message of Israel so far as it is sane is universalistic. It is founded on the conviction that there is a moral nature in every human being, and that the moral nature is a spiritual nature. And if this be so, then the utterances, the insights, the new visions with which the spiritual nature is pregnant, cannot be supposed to be restricted to members of the Jewish people. If the teaching function is to be maintained it must be exercised by all who have the gift. If there is to be an elect body (a dangerous conception, the meaning of which is to be carefully defined), it must consist of gentiles and Jews, of men of every race and condition in whom the spiritual nature is more awakened than in others, peculiarly vivid, pressing towards utterance.
2. Aside from the spiritual interpretation of morality, the mission of the Jewish people has been said to consist in holding aloft the standard of pure monotheism as against trinitarianism. But pure monotheism is a philosophy rather than a religion. Taken by itself it is too pure, too empty of content to serve the purposes of a living faith. The attributes of omniscience, omnipotence, etc., ascribed to Deity are highly abstract, too abstruse to be even thinkable, save indirectly, and they certainly fail to touch the heart. As a matter of fact it was the image of the Father projected upon the background of these abstractions, that made the object of Jewish piety. Jahweh is the heavenly spouse; Israel is to be his faithful earthly spouse. The Children of Israel are pre-eminently his children. Other nations likewise are his children,—some children of wrath to be cast out and destroyed like the rebellious son in Deuteronomy, others to be eventually gathered into the patriarchal household. But this view comes back to the same general conception of the relations of Israel to other nations which has just been discussed. Moreover, the Father image, as representing the divine life in the world, even when extended so as to include all mankind on equal terms, is open to a serious objection.[9]
3. If, nevertheless, the Jews have a mission, is it perhaps this: to rehabilitate the prophetic ideal of social justice? Is it not social justice that the world is crying for today? Were not the prophets of Israel the great preachers of righteousness in the sense of social justice? Did they not affirm that religion consists in justice and in its concomitant mercifulness, but above all in justice? Did not Isaiah say: “When ye come to tread my courts, who has demanded this of you? Go wash you, make you clean. Put away the evil that is in your hands. Cease to do evil; learn to do good.” And later on, “That ye let the oppressed go free, and that ye break every yoke.” These are solemn, marvelous words assuredly! They have been ringing down through the ages, and still find their echo in our hearts. And yet the justice idea of the prophets is inadequate to serve the purpose of social reconstruction today. To go back to it would mean repristination, not renovation. It is sound as far as it goes, but it does not go far enough. It is negative, rather than positive; it is based on the idea of non-violation. What we require today is a positive conception, and this implies a positive definition of that holy thing in man that is to be treated as inviolable. To the mind of the prophets justice meant chiefly resistance to oppression, since oppression is the most palpable exemplification of the forbidden violation. The prophets in their outlook on the external relations of their people stood for the weak, the oppressed, against the strong, the oppressor. They stood for their own weak little nation, the Belgium of those days, against the two over-mighty empires, Egypt and Assyria, that bordered it on either side. In the internal affairs of Israel they espoused the cause of the weak against the rich and strong: “Woe unto them that add house to house and field to field, that grind the faces of the poor.” Ever and ever again the same note resounds, the same intense, passionately indignant feeling against violation in the form of oppression. But this aspect of justice, as I have said, is the negative aspect,—inestimably important, but insufficient. Where oppression does not occur, have the claims of justice ceased? Is there not something even greater than mere non-infringement, greater than mercifulness or kindness, which in justice we owe to the personality of our fellows, namely, to aid in the development of their personality? Righteousness, yes, by all means,—but does the righteousness of the prophets of Israel exhaust or begin to exhaust the content of that vast idea?
The universalistic ethical idea in the Hebrew religion is bound up with and bound down by racial restrictions. The issue between monotheism and trinitarianism is no longer a vital issue of our day. The Father image as the symbol of Deity raises expectations which experience does not confirm. The ideal of social justice as conceived by the prophets of Israel is a valid but incomplete expression of what is implied in social justice. These are weighty considerations that make it difficult to retain the belief in the elect character attributed to the people of Israel. There is one other, of very deep-reaching importance, that must be noticed. An elect people is supposed to be an exemplary people, one that sets a moral example which other nations are expected to copy. But it has become more and more clear to me that the value of example in the moral life has been overestimated and misunderstood. No individual, for instance, can really serve as an example to others so as to be copied by them. The circumstances are always somewhat different, the natures are different, and the obligations, finely examined, are never quite the same. In fact, the best that anyone can do for another by his example is to stimulate him to express with consummate fidelity his different nature in his own different way. I do not of course deny that there are certain uniformities, chiefly negative, in moral conduct, but I have come to think that the ethical quality of moral acts consists in the points in which they differ rather than in those in which they agree. The ideally ethical act, to my mind, is the most completely individualized act.
And what is true of individuals is no less true of peoples. No people can really be exemplary for other peoples, and in this sense elect. Every people possesses a character of its own to which it is to give expression in ways which I shall indicate in the last part of this work. But the way rightly adopted by one nation cannot be a law or a model for its sister nations. If the ideal of the modern Zionists were realized, if the Jews were to return to Palestine, to speak once more the language of the Bible, to cultivate their distinctive gifts, they would not therefore produce a pattern which could be copied in Japan, or among the 400 millions of China, or in the United States, or among the Slavic or Latin peoples.
In concluding these reflections, I may not conceal from myself or from others that the objection to the function of exemplariness, if sustained, affects at the root both the theology and the ethics of the past. If no individual can be in the strict sense an example to others, neither can an individual Deity be an example to be copied by men, neither can Christ be the perfect exemplar to be imitated. There can be no single perfect exemplar. Virtues that bear the same name are not therefore the same virtues. Often it is only the name that is the same, not the substance; and where they are in a broad way the same, yet there remains a difference of accent. The natures of men are unlike. Their moral destiny is to work out the unlikeness of each in harmony with that of the others. The moral equivalence of men, rather than their moral equality, is for me the expression of the fundamental moral relation.[10]
At the early stage of my career to which I am still adverting it was urgently put to me that with all the changes that had taken place in my inner life, I need not separate myself from the religion of the Fathers, nay, that I might remain a servant and teacher of religion within the Jewish fold, gradually weaning away from the beliefs which they held those whom I might contrive to influence, and drawing them up—such was the phrase used—to my own “higher level.” But this advice was repelled by every inmost fibre of my being, and could not but be utterly rejected. I was to publicly represent a certain belief with the purpose of undermining it. I was to trade upon the simplicity of my hearers in order to rob them of what they, crudely and mistakenly perhaps, considered their most sacred truth, by feigning provisionally, until I could alter their views, to be in agreement with them. Would this be fair to them or to myself? Was I to act a lie in order to teach the truth? There was especially one passage in the Sabbath service which brought me to the point of resolution: I mean the words spoken by the officiating minister as he holds up the Pentateuch scroll, “And this is the Law which Moses set before the people of Israel.” I had lately returned from abroad where I had had a fairly thorough course in Biblical exegesis, and had become convinced that the Mosaic religion is so to speak a religious mosaic, and that there is hardly a single stone in it which can with certainty be traced to the authorship of Moses. Was I to repeat these words? It was impossible. I was certain that they would stick in my throat. On these grounds the separation was decided on by me, and became irremediable.