7. The Zionist movement has given many Jews a new attitude toward the national resurrection of Israel. The nationalists expect the Jewish nation to awaken from a sleep of eighteen hundred years to new greatness in its ancient home, not as a religious, but as a political body, and in renouncing all allegiance to the priestly mission of Israel and its ancestral faith they are as remote from genuine Orthodoxy as from Reform Judaism. They assert that the soul of the [pg 396] Jewish people requires a national body rooted in its ancient soil in order that it may fulfill its appointed task among the nations; they even go so far as to declare all the achievements brought about by the assimilation of the culture of the surrounding nations to be a deterioration of the genuine character of the Jewish nation. The fact is that, as in nature there is nowhere a resurrection of the dead but an ever renewed regeneration of life, so is the history of the Jew and of Judaism a continuous process of regeneration manifested at every great turning-point of history, when the ideas and cultural elements of a new civilization exert their powerful influence on life and thought. There never was, nor will be an exclusively Jewish culture. It is the wondrous power of assimilation of the Jew which ever created and fashioned his culture anew. That which constitutes the peculiarity of the Jew and his life force is his religion fostered through the ages, preserved amidst the most antagonistic influences and hostile environments, and ever rejuvenated by its unique universalistic spirit when revived by contact with kindred movements. To maintain and propagate this, his religion in all lands and amidst all civilizations, is the task assigned to him by Providence, until God's Kingdom has been established all over the globe.
Chapter LV. Israel and the Heathen Nations
1. As there is but one Creator and Ruler of the universe, so there is before Him but one humanity. All the nations are under His guidance, while Israel, His chosen people, points to the kingdom of God which is to embrace them all. Israel was called the “first-born son” of God[1247] at the very moment of his election, implying that all the sons of men are His children. All of them are links in the divine plan of salvation. In the same sense God spoke through Isaiah: “Blessed be Egypt, My people, and Assyria the work of My hands, and Israel Mine inheritance.”[1248] As the first page of Scripture assigns a common origin to them all in the first man, so, the prophets tell us, at the end of time they shall all be filled with longing for the one God and form with Israel one community on earth, a great brotherhood of man serving the common Father above.[1249] Still, the actual world began, not with the unity, but with the wide diversity and dispersion of mankind. The idea of the unity of man came as a corollary to the kindred conception of the unity of God, after a long historical process.
Just as the creation of the world opens with the separation of light from darkness, so the process of the spiritual and moral development of mankind begins, according to the divine plan of salvation, with the separation of Israel from the heathen nations.[1250] The sharper the contrast became [pg 398] between the spiritual God of Israel and the crude sensual gods of heathendom, the wider grew the chasm between Judaism and heathenism, between Israel and the nations. As light is opposed to darkness, so Israel's truth stood opposed to the idolatry of the nations, until Christianity and Islam, its daughter-religions, arose between the two extremes. Henceforth Israel waits with still more confidence for the age whose dawning will bring the full knowledge of God to all mankind, leading the world from the night of error and discord to the noon-day brightness of truth and unity, when a universal monotheism will make all humanity one.
2. Nothing was more remote from ancient Israel than the hatred of the stranger or hostility to other nations, so often attributed to it.[1251] In the time of the patriarchs and under the monarchy, the Hebrews fostered a spirit of friendly intercourse with their neighbors, which was often confirmed by peaceful alliances.[1252] Of course, during war time the spirit of hostility had full sway, particularly as ancient warfare imposed a relentless ban upon both booty and human life among the vanquished. But even then the kings of Israel were called compassionate also toward their enemies when compared with other rulers.[1253] Indeed, the code of Israel is distinguished from all other codes of antiquity by mildness and tender compassion. On the other hand, the God of justice, revealed through Amos, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Habakkuk, punishes Israel and the nations impartially on account of their moral transgressions.[1254] He avenges acts of treachery, even when committed against pagan tyrants. “Shall not the Judge of all the earth do justly?”[1255] Such is the recurrent thought that governs Israel, demanding the same standard of judgment for Israelite and stranger.
3. The simple sense of justice inherent in the Jewish people admits so little difference between our own God-consciousness and that of others, that Scripture represents the Philistine King Abimelech as receiving a warning from Abraham's God JHVH.[1256] As the Bible holds up Job, the Bedouin Sheik, as the pattern of a blameless servant of God and true lover of mankind,[1257] so the Talmud cites the Philistine Dama ben Nethina as an example of filial piety.[1258] Altogether, the merits of the heathen receive their full measure of appreciation throughout Jewish literature,[1259] even though a narrow dissenting view occurs now and then.[1260]
4. Still from the very beginning a tendency to relentless harshness existed in one direction, when the pure worship of Israel's one and only God was endangered. The early Book of the Covenant forbade every alliance with idolatrous nations,[1261] and the Deuteronomic Code made this more stringent by prohibiting intermarriage and even the toleration of idolaters in the land, lest they seduce the people of God to turn away from Him.[1262] The Pharisean leaders, the founders of Rabbinism, went still further by placing an interdict upon eating with the heathen or using food and wine prepared by them, thus aiming at a complete separation from the non-Jewish world.[1263]
The contrast between Judaism and heathenism was further heightened by the view of the prophets and psalmists, showing that the great nations were the very embodiment of idolatrous iniquity, murderous violence and sexual impurity, a world of arrogance and pride, defying God and doomed to perdition, because they opposed the kingdom of God proclaimed by Israel.[1264] Henceforth the term “the nations” [pg 400] (goyim) was taken by the religious as meaning the wicked ones, who would not be able to stand the divine judgment in the future life, but would go down to Sheol, or Gehenna, to fall a prey to everlasting corruption, to the fire that is never quenched.[1265]