ECCLESIASTICUS 24. 28, 29.
ISRAEL THE PEOPLE OF REVELATION
HAD there been no Israelites there would be no Torah. Israel’s pre-eminence is not derived from Moses, it is Moses whose pre-eminence is due to Israel. The Divine love went out towards the multitude of the children of the Patriarchs, the Congregation of Jacob. Moses was merely the divinely chosen instrument through whom God’s Blessing was to be assured unto them. We are called not the people of Moses, but the people of God.
YEHUDAH HALEVI, 1141.
THE Greeks were not all artists, but the Greek nation was alone capable of producing a Phidias or a Praxiteles. The same was the case with Judaism. It is certain that not all Jews were prophets; the exclamation, ‘Would that all the people of the Lord were prophets!’ was a pious wish. Nevertheless, Israel is the people of Revelation. It must have had a native endowment that could produce, that could rear, such men. Nor does Judaism claim to be the work of single individuals; it does not speak of the God of Moses, nor of the God of the Prophets, but of the God of Israel. The fact that the greatest prophet left his work unfinished contains a profound truth. No man knoweth of his sepulchre unto this day. Thereon our ancient teachers remark: ‘His grave should not serve as a place of pilgrimage whither men go to do honour to one man, and thus raise him above the level of man’.
A. GEIGER, 1865.