I WILL continue to hold my banner aloft. I find myself born—ay, born—into a people and a religion. The preservation of my people must be for a purpose, for God does nothing without a purpose. His reasons are unfathomable to me, but on my own reason I place little dependence; test it where I will it fails me. The simple, the ultimate in every direction is sealed to me. It is as difficult to understand matter as mind. The courses of the planets are no harder to explain than the growth of a blade of grass. Therefore am I willing to remain a link in the great chain. What has been preserved for four thousand years was not saved that I should overthrow it. My people have survived the prehistoric paganism, the Babylonian polytheism, the aesthetic Hellenism, the sagacious Romanism, at once the blandishments and persecutions of the Church; and it will survive the modern dilettantism and the current materialism, holding aloft the traditional Jewish ideals inflexibly until the world shall become capable of recognizing their worth.
CYRUS ADLER, 1894.
THE GOOD FIGHT
IF thou hadst lived in the dread days of martyrdom, and the peoples had fallen on thee to force thee to apostatize from thy faith, thou wouldst surely, as did so many, have given thy life in its defence. Well then, fight now the fight laid on thee in the better days, the fight with evil desire; fight and conquer, and seek for allies in this warfare of your soul, seek them in the fear of God and the study of the Law. Forget not that God recompenses according to the measure wherewith ye withstand the evil in your heart. Be a man in thy youth; but if thou wert then defeated in the struggle, return, return at last to God, however old thou mayest be.
ELEAZAR (ROKËACH) OF WORMS, c. 1200.
(Trans. M. Joseph.)
EVERY ISRAELITE HOLDS THE HONOUR OF HIS ENTIRE PEOPLE IN HIS HANDS
I
‘ALL Israelites are mutually accountable for each other.’ In a boat at sea one of the men began to bore a hole in the bottom of the boat. On being remonstrated with, he answered: ‘I am only boring under my own seat’. ‘Yes’, said his comrades, ‘but when the sea rushes in we shall all be drowned with you.’ So it is with Israel. Its weal or its woe is in the hands of every individual Israelite.
TALMUD.