WE, more than any other nation on the globe, recall the happy day when the light of promise first dawned in a modern Canaan, overflowing with the milk and honey of humane kindness, in a land symbolized by the torch of the goddess of liberty, whose soft, mild, yet penetrating rays are reflected o’er all the scattered sons of much-tried Israel, whom she so benignantly beckons to these shores.
ALEXANDER KOHUT, on the 400th Anniversary of the Discovery of America, 1892.
THE DELUGE OF FIRE
(1914–1918)
MANKIND craves the conviction that the agony and tears and suffering of these hundreds of millions of belligerents, constituting the vast majority of the human race, are not in vain; that somehow good will come of all this infinite woe.
In old Jewish books there is a wondrous legend of a second Deluge, a Deluge of Fire, that would sweep over the earth. In anticipation of it, the children of men were bidden to write the story of man on tables of clay, as such tables would not only escape destruction, but would become the more enduring. We to-day are the eyewitnesses of such a fire-deluge dreamt of by the ancients. Let us not, however, fear that civilization and religion will perish from the earth. Quite other will be its far-reaching results for mankind. Right and humanity will emerge stronger than ever from this world-conflagration. Before this war we saw that the laws of God and man were written as it were on mere tables of clay, breakable and effaceable at will. This very world-conflagration, however, will yet render the Law of Nations indestructible and for ever unassailable by insolence or power. The behests of humanity, which so far have been but pious wishes, will be converted into regulative principles in international dealings.
J. H. HERTZ, to a congregation of Jewish soldiers at the Front, France, 1915.
THE HEALING OF THE NATIONS
THE sun and the moon are become black,