"A People Without A Home"
NOT only have the Jews been looked upon by others as a people without a home; subconsciously they have always regarded themselves as such. To-day a gigantic fund is proposed for the relief of the Jews affected by the present war, by the very ones who have argued most persistently for adaptation and assimilation. Yet this is a relief fund not for Belgian Jews, nor French Jews, nor German Jews, but for all Jews irrespective of the side on which they fight. The Jews are not thinking of themselves in terms of citizens or subjects of this or that country, but only as members of the Jewish race, who have no unity save as members of that race. It is the surest indication that beneath all self-delusion the Jews have subconsciously realized themselves as a homeless people, men without a country. Is it strange that the rest of the world should regard the Jew as alien when he cannot but hold himself as such?
It would seem that this argument leads along a straight path towards Zionism as its conclusion. But practical Zionism, like all other programs of reconstruction, must await a time which will admit of reconstruction, and that is not the present. It may be that when this war is concluded, world conditions will have so completely changed that Zionism and its geographic program will no longer be the answer to the problem of Jewry. All that is certain of it now is its uncertainty. But the spirit of which Zionism is the expression, and which has made of it more than a mere experiment in colonization, still remains, emphasized by the self-realization to which the Jews have been brought in the present conflict.
The Persistence of the Jewish Faith
IN every crisis, even in those which have swept whole nations from existence, the Jew has always found himself with one inalienable possession—his faith. There is something mystifying about the persistence through so many vicissitudes of a religion which commands respect from neighbors who see in it a powerful inspiration, while the Jew himself, especially the Jew more fortunately placed in the general community, endeavors so often to cast it off as outworn and impracticable. It is the Jew himself who has misled the rest of the world into a delusion. He has seemed to consider himself, and the faith with which he is bound up, inferior. In his endeavor to take on the color of his environment, he has sought to lay aside all that was old, and of this the religion of his fathers was a part. But a faith as strong and as far-reaching as Judaism cannot be dropped out of the life into which it has been ingrained, and hence the Jew has been hard put to cover it up, to hide it, or to attempt its modification to fit the fashion in religions. The inevitable reaction on the non-Jewish part of the community has been a feeling of mystification, and, following on that, suspicion and distrust.
It is this which has undermined confidence in the Jews as a people—their negation of that which is their valuable heritage. For Judaism is not merely tradition, a thing to be reverenced as a relic; it is a thing to be put to everyday use. This practical and vitalized Judaism is the real salvation for which the Jews have been groping, all the while under the delusion that it was anywhere but near at hand. Such a rejuvenated faith would mean an end of that homelessness which is accountable for much of the Jew's displacement in the world's life. And though the remedy has been intimate to him these many years he has failed to make positive use of it. It is true that the Zionists have been striving for a geographical base for Judaism. But a geographical base is never more than an outward expression of a people's unity; it is an excellent starting point, but as an end in itself it is nothing. The Jews had a geographical base for their start; thereby they were enabled to build up a unified result, the Jewish spirit. It is this which, if recognized as a positive fact, will take from the Jew his feeling of homelessness, and from his neighbor the notion that the Jew is a member of a tribe forever unestablished and purposeless. It is around a spiritual core that the Jews as a people must build, around that central force which has thus far held them intact.
The Spiritual Service of the Jew
AND never has there been a time, it would seem, when not only the Jews themselves but the world at large were so ready for this reconstruction. If in the very near future, as seems probable, the Jews are again to play a prominent rôle in history, it will be more largely through the pressure exerted by the world outside than through their own initiative. Men are coming more and more to need what the Jewish people, under certain conditions, are peculiarly qualified to bestow. The period of materialism now undoubtedly coming to a close has brought with it a heavy burden of discontent, and there has been a turning from tangible comforts, a reaching out for spiritual consolation. Under the rule of enlightenment religion has gone away, and the world begins to feel its lack. One may not prophesy that religion is soon to return, but the suggestion of its coming is in the air. What the Jew will then be able to furnish may now be an open question, but the great fact of his religion is undeniable. It should be remembered that only in things spiritual has the Jew been able to render world service; in material progress he has been able to do little more than march with the rank and file. Should the Jew again lead in the world, it must be in a time when the things of the spirit are paramount in men's desires. With the hope that such a time is near at hand, the Jew should retrim his lamp, in the faith that it may help to illuminate much that had fallen into darkness.
