But at the same time they had no objection to changes in traditional practice. The abbreviated prayerbook of the Jewish Welfare Board was much appreciated, even though one or two of the boys would state proudly that they had also a special festival prayerbook. The short service was practical and the boys therefore preferred it to the longer one of the synagogue. They understood that, with the large number of non-Jews at our services and the usual majority of Jews who could not read Hebrew, it was necessary to read part of the prayers in English. They liked an English sermon, too, although the chaplain skilled in army methods always gave a very informal talk, far from the formal sermon of the synagogue. And when interested they asked questions, often interrupting the even flow of the sermon but assisting the rabbi and congregation to an understanding of the problem at issue.
One of the chief characteristics of an army congregation was its constant desire to participate in the service. The soldiers liked responsive readings; they preferred sermons with the open forum method; they were ready to volunteer to usher, to announce the service throughout the unit, or for any job from moving chairs to chanting the service. At the Passover services at Le Mans, we had all the volunteers necessary among the crowd for everything from "K. P." (kitchen police) to assist in preparing the dinner to an excellent reader for the prophetic portion. The services meant more to the soldiers as they became their own.
Another characteristic of services in the army was the large number of non-Jews attending them. I have come to a Y. M. C. A. on a Sunday morning directly after the Protestant chaplain, when most of his congregation joined me, and my group in consequence was nine-tenths non-Jewish. At first this factor was a source of embarrassment to many of the Jewish men. They came to me beforehand to whisper that a few non-Jews were present, but I took it as a matter of course, having learned my lesson with my first service in France. Later even the most self-conscious of Jews accepted the presence of non-Jews at a Jewish service just as Christians expect those of other denominations than their own. When Jewish services often have from ten to eighty per cent. of non-Jews in attendance, the Jewish soldiers are doubly glad to have a partially English service and a sermon. They want the Christians to respect their religion as they do their own, an end usually very easy of attainment. And while a few Jews would have preferred to drop the special Jewish characteristics of our service, I have never heard a critical word from a Christian about our wearing our hats, our Hebrew prayers, and the rest. Often, in fact, I have had to answer respectful questions, giving the sort of information which broadens both sides and makes for general tolerance.
At the front, even the most thoughtless desired some sort of a personal religion. In the midst of the constant danger to life and limb, seeing their comrades about them dead and wounded, with life reduced to the minimum of necessities and the few elemental problems, men were forced to think of the realities of life and death. With these eternal questions forced upon them, the great majority must always turn to religion. The men prayed at the front. They wanted safety and they felt the need of God. After a battle they were eager to offer thanks for their own safety and to say the memorial prayers for their friends who had just laid down their lives. Perhaps the most religious congregation I have ever had was the little group of men who gathered together under the trees after the great battle at the Hindenburg Lane. The impressions of the conflict had not yet worn off. The men were, in a way, uplifted by their terrific experiences. And the words they spoke there of their fallen comrades were infinitely touching. The appeal of a memorial prayer was so profound in the army that many of the Protestant chaplains followed the Episcopal and Catholic custom and prayed for the dead although their own churches do not generally follow the custom.
But with all this deep yearning for personal religion, the men adopted fatalism as their prevalent philosophy. For one thing, it seemed to answer the immediate facts the best. When five men are together in a shell hole and a bursting shell kills three of them and leaves the two unharmed, all our theories seem worthless. When one man, volunteering for a dangerous duty, comes back only slightly gassed, while another left at headquarters is killed at his dinner by long distance fire, men wonder. And when they must face conditions like this day after day, never knowing their own fate from minute to minute, only sure that they are certain to be killed if they stay at the front long enough, they become fatalists sooner or later. As the soldiers used to say, "If my number isn't on that shell, it won't get me." I argued against fatalism many times with the soldiers, but I found when it came my own turn to live under fire day after day that a fatalistic attitude was the most convenient for doing one's duty under the constantly roaring menace, and I fear that—with proper philosophic qualifications—for the time being, I was as much of a fatalist as the rest.
At the rear the personal need for religion was less in evidence. The men who had gone through the fire were not untouched by the flame, and gave some evidence of it from time to time. The men who had not been at the front, who comprised the majority in back areas, had no touch of that feeling. They all shared in the yearning for home and the things of home and for Judaism as the religion of home, for the traditional service of the festivals, for the friendship, ministrations and assistance of the chaplain. Judaism meant more to them in a strange land, amid an alien people, living the hard and unlovely life of the common soldier, than it ever did at home when the schul was just around the corner and the careless youth had seldom entered it. The lonely soldier longed for Judaism as the religion of home just as under fire he longed for comfort from the living God. And the military approval of all religions on the same plane, the recognition by the non-Jewish authorities of his festivals and his services, gave Judaism a standing in his eyes which it had lacked when only the older people of his own family ever paid much attention to religion. Thus Judaism as an institution, as the religion of home, had a great place in the heart of the soldier in France.
Some of the men, especially at the first, felt that they were being neglected by the Jews of America, that our effort was not commensurate with that which the Christian denominations were making to care for the soldiers of their faiths. We must admit sadly that they had some justification for such a view. Our representatives arrived in France late though not at all too late for splendid results. American Jewry was almost criminally slow in caring for our hundred thousand boys in service abroad. A few of the soldiers carried this complaint even to the point of bitterness and estrangement from Judaism. Here and there I met an enlisted man who challenged Jewry as negligent. Usually these were not our most loyal or interested Jews, but they were Jews and should not have been neglected. The men who entertained real loyalty to their faith were usually active already in some minor way and ready to coöperate with the Jewish Welfare Board when it was in a position to back them up. Most of the men, however, were eager to forgive as in a family quarrel as soon as our welfare workers arrived in France and showed immediate accomplishment.
Our Jewish boys came back from overseas with certain new knowledge of life and new valuation of their religion. Beginning merely as average young men in their twenties, they acquired the need and appreciation of their ancestral faith, though not in a conventional sense. They are not to-day reform Jews in the sense of adherents of a reform theology; neither are they orthodox in the sense of complete and consistent observance. They have felt the reality of certain truths in Judaism, the comfort it brings to the dying and the mourner, the touch of home when one celebrates the festivals in a foreign land, the real value of Jewish friends, a Jewish minister, a Jewish club to take the place of the home they missed over there. That is, Judaism means more to them both as a longing and an institution.
But not all the things which we customarily associate with Judaism have this appeal to them. Some seem to them matters of complete indifference, and the usual emphasis on the wrong thing makes them feel that the synagogue at home is out of sympathy with their new-found yearning. If we give them what we consider good for them, they will take nothing. If we give them what they want—the religion of God, of home, of service—and with all three terms defined as they have seen and felt them, then they will prove the great constructive force in the synagogue of to-morrow. The Jewish soldier had religion; if he was at the front, he has had the personal desire for God; in any case he has felt the longing for the religion of home. He was often proud of his fellow Jews, sometimes of his Judaism. He did heroic acts gladly, feeling the added impetus to do them because he must not disgrace the name of Jew. Kiddush ha Shem, sanctification of the name of God, was the impelling motive of many a wearer of the D. S. C., though he may never have heard the term. The recognition by church and synagogue of the world-shaking events of the war must be accompanied by an equal recognition of the influence of war on the minds and hearts of the men who engaged in it, and for whom those world-shaking events have become a part of their very being.