It is therefore a highly laudable endeavor undertaken by the Intercollegiate Menorah Association to arouse the dormant spirit of self-respect in the academic Jewish youth, to stir in him the ambition to study and know this matchless history and literature, and to kindle in his soul anew that idealism which made the Jew throughout all the ages endure and brave the onslaughts of the empires and churches and the persecuting mobs, so that even to-day he is as young and as vigorous as any of the youngest races and nations in the world.
The Importance of Israel's Religion
THIS past, I say, cannot but appeal to every high-minded American, whether Christian or Jew, and your study of it will certainly meet with our warmest support and encouragement. Only, in my opinion, one thing you need, young as your association is, young in years and young in experience, and that is, a full comprehension and keen realization of the subject you have in view and a wise and right direction towards it. No one doubts or questions the sincerity of your motives or the praiseworthiness of your aims and purposes when you place on your program the study of Jewish history, culture and problems, and the advancement of Jewish ideals, but you omit that which is most essential, which is the all-encompassing force and factor of Jewish life, the real, peculiar and genuine product of the Jewish genius—religion. We have got a religion which, as has been put by Matthew Arnold, has fashioned four-fifths of the world's civilization. In omitting the idea, as expressed by Matthew Arnold, of the power that maketh for righteousness, in declaring your movement as being altogether non-religious, you run the risk of making of your endeavor an inevitable and certain failure.[G] Let me quote to you from an address delivered recently before a Jewish society in London on "Israel and Medicine" by Professor Osler, sentences that are remarkable and worth repeating. He says:
"In estimating the position of Israel in the human values, one must remember that the quest for righteousness is Oriental, the quest for knowledge, Occidental. With the great prophets of the East—Moses, Isaiah, Mahomet [he might have included Jesus of Nazareth], the word was 'Thus saith the Lord.' With the seers of the West, from Aristotle to Darwin, it was 'What says nature?' Modern civilization is the outcome of the two great movements of the mind of man, who is to-day ruled in heart and head by Israel and by Greece. From the one he has learned responsibility to a Supreme Being and love for his neighbor, in which are embraced the law and the prophets. From the other he has gathered the promise of Eden, to have dominion over the earth in which he lives."
Now let me add to this that whatever the Jew claims or possesses of culture he has borrowed from the nations and civilizations around him, whether it be architecture, the art or the mode of writing, philosophy and science, the modes of social and industrial life, all of which he has taken and assimilated into his own life.
Not so with his religious truth. This is all his own, his peculiar and genuine contribution to humanity. Thereby he has given human life its eternal value, its purpose, its goal and hope for all time.
Now it seems to me that you may as well expect of the blind to depict for you his impressions of the prismatic glories of the rainbow, or of the deaf to orate on the beauties of a Beethoven symphony, as to expect of one who lacks the sense of religion, the spirit of faith, to expound, or even to understand, the ideals of the Jew, whose history throughout the past was but one continuous glorification of the only one God, by the master works of its hundreds and thousands of men of learning and the unparalleled martyrdom of the whole people, and whose future is humanity made one by the belief in the only one God and Father. Therefore, let me give you, delegates and members of the Intercollegiate Menorah Association, the advice to continue as you started, as an academic, cosmopolitan association, yet at the same time let it be linked to the synagogue of each city as the center of the faith. Let your watch-word be true to the symbol of קומי אורי "arise and shine," and give light to all the nations. Let your inspiration and your power of enlightening the world ever come fresh from the sanctuary of faith, as of yore, and you will not only be all the more honored for this loyalty to the spirit of the past and the spirit of the American people which is religious, but the sweetest delight that comes from the classic world of beauty will reflect only the brighter light of the holiness, the beauty of holiness, that comes from Israel's one God.
Prof. I. Leo Sharfman
WE want all that is worthy in the Jewish past to be made a potent force in the American life of the present. You men and women who are students at our universities cannot perform your full duty to your universities unless you add to the richness of the university life, to the variety of its content, to its genuineness and versatility. And in the larger American community we Jews cannot perform our full duty unless we place at the disposal of our country the best fruits of the Jewish spirit. Our Menorah allegiance, then, rests on the foundation of Americanism. And insofar as, through the Menorah movement, we are succeeding in uniting by a common bond men and women who have been brought up under a great variety of circumstances and conditions, we are increasing the democratic spirit of our universities and of the larger life beyond the academic gates. Within the universities, too, the broadening effect of the Menorah idea is not limited to the student body. I can bear witness from personal experience that the university authorities, both faculty members and administrative officers, are not merely tolerating, or even mildly accepting, the work of our Menorah Societies in their midst, but are themselves being led to a better understanding of the place which the Jewish problem occupies in the larger problem of their universities and of the American community for whose service they are training the youth of the land.
Menorah and Religion