form, but of essence. The tendency of the one is to subordination and
oppression; of the other, to individual freedom. Strangest of recorded
birth! From the strongest and most splendid despotism of antiquity
comes the freest republic. From between the paws of the rock-hewn
Sphinx rises the genius of human liberty, and the trumpets of the
Exodus throb with the defiant proclamation of the rights of man.
The Hebrew commonwealth was based upon the individual――a commonwealth
whose ideal it was that every man should sit under his own vine and
fig-tree, with none to vex him or make him afraid; a commonwealth in
which none should be condemned to ceaseless toil; in which, for even
the bond slave there should be hope; in which, for even the beast of
burden there should be rest. It is not the protection of property,
but the protection of humanity, that is the aim of the Mosaic code.
Its Sabbath day and Sabbath year secure, even to the lowliest, rest
and leisure. With the blast of the jubilee trumpets the slave goes
free, and a re-division of the land secures again to the poorest his
fair share in the bounty of the common Creator. The reaper must leave
something for the gleaner; even the ox cannot be muzzled as he treadeth
out the corn. Everywhere, in everything, the dominant idea is that of
our homely phrase――‘Live and let live.’
That there is one day in the week that the working man may call his
own, one day in the week on which the hammer is silent and the loom
stands idle, is due, through Christianity, to Judaism――to the code
promulgated in the Sinaitic wilderness. And who that considers the
waste of productive forces can doubt that modern society would be not
merely happier, but richer, had we received as well as the Sabbath
day the grand idea of the Sabbath year, or, adapting its spirit to our
changed conditions, secured in another way an equivalent reduction of
working hours.
It is in these characteristics of the Mosaic institutions that, as
in the fragments of a Colossus, we may read the greatness of the mind
whose impress they bear――of a mind in advance of its surroundings, in
advance of its age; of one of those star souls that dwindle not with
distance, but, glowing with the radiance of essential truth, hold their
light while institutions and languages and creeds change and pass.
Leader and servant of men! Law-giver and benefactor! Toiler towards
the Promised Land seen only by the eye of faith! Type of the high
souls who in every age have given to earth its heroes and its martyrs,
whose deeds are the precious possession of the race, whose memories are
its sacred heritage! With whom among the founders of Empire shall we
compare him?
To dispute about the inspiration of such a man were to dispute about
words. From the depths of the Unseen such characters must draw their
strength; from fountains that flow only from the pure in heart must
come their wisdom. Of something more real than matter; of something
higher than the stars; of a light that will endure when suns are dead
and dark; of a purpose of which the physical universe is but a passing
phrase, such lives tell.
HENRY GEORGE, 1884.
THE BURIAL OF MOSES
BY Nebo’s lonely mountain,
On this side Jordan’s wave,
In a vale in the land of Moab,
There lies a lonely grave.
But no man built that sepulchre,
And no man saw it e’er;
For the angels of God upturned the sod
And laid the dead man there.
That was the grandest funeral
That ever passed on earth;
Yet no man heard the trampling,
Or saw the train go forth:
Noiselessly as the daylight
Comes when the night is done,
And the crimson streak on ocean’s cheek
Grows into the great sun.
Perchance the bald old eagle
On grey Beth-peor’s height
Out of his rocky eyrie
Looked on the wondrous sight;
Perchance the lion stalking
Still shuns that hallowed spot;
For beast and bird have seen and heard
That which man knoweth not.
This was the bravest warrior
That ever buckled sword;
This the most gifted poet
That ever breathed a word;
And never earth’s philosopher
Traced with his golden pen
On the deathless page truths half so sage
As he wrote down for men.
C. F. ALEXANDER.
ISRAEL’S PSALTER
AT no period throughout the whole range of Jewish history has the
poetic voice been mute. Every great fact throughout its entire course,
right down to modern times, has left its impress on the Synagogue
liturgy. Jewish poetry is the mirror of Jewish national life, and
poetic utterance a divine instinct of the Jewish mind. For to the
Hebrew, poetry was both prayer and praise, and alike in mercy and
affliction the poet’s words became for the Hebrew the medium of direct
communion with the Divine. Adoration can rise no higher than we find it
in the Psalter.
JOHN E. DOW, 1890.
* * * * *
THE ancient psalm still keeps its music, and this is but the outer
sign of its spiritual power, which remains as near and intimate to our
needs, human and divine, as in David’s day. So, indeed, it seems to
have remained through all the centuries――the one body of poetry which
has gone on, apart from the change of races and languages, speaking
with a voice of power to the hearts of men.
ERNEST RHYS, 1895.
* * * * *
THE Psalms resound, and will continue to resound, as long as there
shall be men created in the image of God, in whose hearts the sacred
fire of religion shines and glows; for they are religion itself put
into speech.
C. H. CORNILL, 1897.
THE PSALMS IN HUMAN LIFE
ABOVE the couch of David, according to Rabbinical tradition, there hung
a harp. The midnight breeze, as it rippled over the strings, made such
music that the poet king was constrained to rise from his bed, and till
the dawn flushed the eastern skies he wedded words to the strains. The
poetry of that tradition is condensed in the saying that the Book of
Psalms contains the whole music of the heart of man, swept by the hand
of his Maker. In it are gathered the lyrical burst of his tenderness,
the moan of his penitence, the pathos of his sorrow, the triumph of his
victory, the despair of his defeat, the firmness of his confidence, the
rapture of his assured hope.
The Psalms express in exquisite words the kinship which every
thoughtful human heart craves to find with a supreme, unchanging,
loving God, who will be to him a protector, guardian, and friend. They
translate into speech the spiritual passion of the loftiest genius;
they also utter, with the beauty born of truth and simplicity, the
inarticulate and humble longings of the unlettered peasant. They alone
have known no limitations to a particular age, country, or form of
faith. In the Psalms the vast hosts of suffering humanity have found
the deepest expression of their hopes and fears.
R. E. PROTHERO, 1903.
THE SPACIOUS FIRMAMENT ON HIGH
(PSALM 19)
The spacious firmament on high,
With all the blue ethereal sky,
And spangled heavens, a shining frame,
Their great Original proclaim.
Th’ unwearied sun from day to day
Does his Creator’s power display,
And publishes to every land
The work of an Almighty hand.
Soon as the evening shades prevail,
The moon takes up the wondrous tale;
And nightly to the list’ning earth,
Repeats the story of her birth:
Whilst all the stars that round her burn,
And all the planets in their turn,
Confirm the tidings as they roll,
And spread the truth from pole to pole.
What though in solemn silence all
Move round the dark terrestrial ball?
What though nor real voice nor sound
Amid their radiant orbs be found?
In reason’s ear they all rejoice,
And utter forth a glorious voice;
For ever singing as they shine,
‘The hand that made us is divine.’
JOSEPH ADDISON, 1719.
‘O GOD, OUR HELP IN AGES PAST’
(PSALM 90)
O GOD, our help in ages past,
Our hope for years to come,
Our shelter from the stormy blast,
And our eternal home;
Beneath the shadow of Thy Throne
Thy saints have dwelt secure;
Sufficient is Thine arm alone,
And our defence is sure.
Before the hills in order stood,
Or earth received her frame,
From everlasting Thou art God,
To endless years the same.
A thousand ages in Thy sight
Are like an evening gone;
Short as the watch that ends the night
Before the rising sun.
Time, like an ever-rolling stream,
Bears all its sons away;
They fly, forgotten, as a dream
Dies at the opening day.
O God, our help in ages past,
Our hope for years to come,
Be Thou our guard while troubles last,
And our eternal home.
ISAAC WATTS, 1719.
THE LIVING POWER OF THE JEWISH PROPHETS[44]
THE moral feelings of men have been deepened and strengthened, and also
softened, and almost created, by the Jewish prophets. In modern times
we hardly like to acknowledge the full force of their words, lest they
should prove subversive to society. And so we explain them away or
spiritualize them, and convert what is figurative into what is literal,
and what is literal into what is figurative. And still, after all our
interpretation or misinterpretation, whether due to a false theology or
an imperfect knowledge of the original language, the force of the words
remains, and a light of heavenly truth and love streams from them even
now more than 2,500 years after they were first uttered.
BENJAMIN JOWETT.
* * * * *
ONE lesson, and only one, history may be said to repeat with
distinctness, that the world is built somehow on moral foundations;
that in the long run it is well with the good; in the long run it is
ill with the wicked. But this is no science; it is no more than the old
doctrine taught long ago by the Hebrew prophets.
J. A. FROUDE, 1889.
THE BOOK OF JONAH.
AN involuntary smile passes over one’s features at the mention of the
name of Jonah. For the popular conception sees nothing in this book but
a silly tale exciting us to derision. I have read the Book of Jonah at
least a hundred times, and I will publicly avow that I cannot even now
take up this marvellous book, nay, nor even speak of it, without the
tears rising to my eyes and my heart beating higher. This apparently
trivial book is one of the deepest and grandest that was ever written,
and I should like to say to every one who approaches it, ‘Take off thy
shoes, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground’.
Jonah receives from God the command to go to Nineveh to proclaim the
judgement, but he rose to flee from the presence of the Lord by ship
unto Tarshish in the far west. From the very beginning of the narrative,
the genuine and loyal devotion of the heathen seamen is placed in
intentional and exceedingly powerful contrast to the behaviour of the
prophet――they are the sincere believers: he is the only heathen on
board. After Jonah has been saved from storm and sea by the fish, he
again receives the command to go to Nineveh. He obeys; and, wonderful
to relate, scarcely has the strange preacher traversed the third part
of the city crying out his warning, than the whole of Nineveh proclaim
a fast and put on sackcloth. The people of Nineveh believed the words
of the preacher and humiliated themselves before God; therefore, the
ground and motive of the Divine judgement ceased to exist: ‘God
repented of the evil that He thought to do them, and He did it not’.
Now comes the fourth chapter, on account of which the whole book was
written, and which cannot be replaced by paraphrase.
‘But it’ [i.e. God’s determining not to destroy Nineveh because of its
sincere repentance] ‘displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was angry.
And he prayed unto the Lord, and said, I pray thee, O Lord, was not
this my saying, when I was yet in my country? Therefore I hasted to
flee unto Tarshish: for I knew that Thou art a gracious God, and full
of compassion, slow to anger, and plenteous in mercy, and repentest
Thee of the evil. Therefore now, O Lord, take, I beseech Thee, my life
from me; for it is better for me to die than to live. And the Lord said,
Doest thou well to be angry? Then Jonah went out of the city, and sat
on the east side of the city, and there made him a booth, and sat under
it in the shadow, till he might see what would become of the city. And
the Lord God prepared a gourd and made it to come up over Jonah, that
it might be a shadow over his head, to deliver him from his evil case.
So Jonah was exceedingly glad because of the gourd. But God prepared
a worm when the morning rose the next day, and it smote the gourd that
it withered. And it came to pass, when the sun arose, that God prepared
a sultry east wind; and the sun beat upon the head of Jonah, that he
fainted, and requested for himself that he might die, and said, It is
better for me to die than to live. And God said to Jonah, Doest thou
well to be angry for the gourd? And he said, I do well to be angry even
unto death. And the Lord said, Thou hast had pity on the gourd, for the
which thou hast not laboured, neither madest it grow; which came up in
a night and perished in a night; and should not I have pity on Nineveh,
that great city; wherein are more than sixscore thousand persons that
cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand; and also
much cattle’?
With this question the book closes. More simply, as something quite
self-evident, and therefore more sublimely and touchingly, the truth
was never spoken in the Hebrew Scriptures that God, as Creator of the
whole earth, must also be the God and Father of the entire world, in
whose loving, kind, and fatherly heart all men are equal, before whom
there is no difference of nation and creed, but only men, whom He has
created in His own image.[45]
C. H. CORNILL, 1894.
I AM convinced that the Bible becomes ever more beautiful the more it
is understood.
J. W. GOETHE.
JOB
I CALL the Book of Job one of the grandest things ever written with
pen ... a noble book, all men’s book! There is nothing, I think, in the
Bible or out of it, of equal literary merit.
T. CARLYLE.
* * * * *
THIS extraordinary book――a book of which it is to say little to call
it unequalled of its kind, and which will one day, perhaps, when it is
allowed to stand on its own merits, be seen towering up alone, far away
above all the poetry of the world.
J. A. FROUDE, 1885.
ECCLESIASTES
THE old cycles are for ever renewed, and it is no paradox that he who
would advance can never cling too close to the past. _The thing that
has been is the thing that will be again_; if we realize that, we may
avoid many of the disillusions, miseries, insanities that for ever
accompany the throes of new birth. Set your shoulder joyously to the
world’s wheel; you may spare yourself some unhappiness if, beforehand,
you slip the Book of Ecclesiastes beneath your arm.
HAVELOCK ELLIS.
THE BOOK OF ESTHER[46]
WITHIN it burn a lofty independence and a genuine patriotism.
The story of Esther, glorified by the genius of Handel and sanctified
by the piety of Racine, not only affords material for the noblest and
gentlest of meditations, but is a token that in the daily events――the
unforeseen chances――of life, in little unremembered acts, God is surely
present.
When Esther nerved herself to enter, at the risk of her life, the
presence of Ahasuerus――‘I will go in unto the king, and if I perish
I perish’――when her patriotic feeling vented itself in that noble cry,
‘How can I endure to see the evil that shall come unto my people? or
how can I endure to see the destruction of my kindred’?――she expressed,
although she never named the name of God, a religious devotion as
acceptable to Him as that of Moses and David.
A. P. STANLEY, 1876.
* * * * *
WE search the world for truth; we cull
The good, the pure, the beautiful
From graven stone and written scroll,
From all old flower-fields of the soul;
And, weary seekers of the best,
We come back laden from our quest,
To find that all the sages said
Is in the Book our mothers read.
J. G. WHITTIER.
THE TALMUD[47]
THE Talmud, which was as a second life to the men of the Ghetto,
was not only a book of philosophy or devotion, it was a reservoir
of national life; it was the faithful mirror of the civilization of
Babylon and Judea, and, at the same time, a magical phantasmagoria of
all the wild dreams, the fables, the legends, the scraps of science
more or less exact, the reveries, the audacious theories discovered by
the Wandering Jew in his endless travels. Every generation of Judaism
had accumulated its facts and fancies there. Even the Bible itself did
not come so close to the daily life of the Ghetto as the Talmud and the
Mishna. The Bible was a thing eternal, apart, unchanging. The Talmud
was a daily companion, living, breathing, contemporary, with a hundred
remedies for a hundred needs. A nation persecuted, lives through its
time of stress rather by its commentaries than by its Scriptures.
In the Ghetto the Talmud was a door into the ideal always open. When
the Christians burned the Jews they did no enduring harm to Judaism,
for martyrdom purifies and strengthens every cause. But when they
sequestrated every copy of the Talmud that fraud or force could
discover, and burned the spiritual bread of a devoted people upon
the public square, they committed an irreparable injury; for, by
withdrawing its ideal, they debased the population of the Ghetto.
A. MARY F. ROBINSON, 1892.
THE HUMANITY OF JEWISH WISDOM
IN my early youth I read――I have forgotten where――the words of the
ancient Jewish sage――Hillel, if I remember rightly: ‘If thou art not
for thyself, who will be for thee? But if thou art for thyself alone,
wherefore art thou’?[48]
The inner meaning of these words impressed me with its profound wisdom,
and I interpreted them for myself in this manner: I must actively take
care of myself, that my life should be better, and I must not impose
the care of myself on other people’s shoulders; but if I am going to
take care of myself alone, of nothing but my own personal life, it will
be useless, ugly, meaningless. This thought ate its way deep into my
soul, and I say now with conviction: Hillel’s wisdom served as a strong
staff on my road, which was neither even nor easy.
I believe that Jewish wisdom is more all-human and universal than
any other; and this not only because of its immemorial age, not
only because it is the firstborn, but also because of the powerful
humaneness that saturates it, because of its high estimate of man.
MAXIM GORKY, 1916.
THE PHARISEES[49]
OF all the strange ironies of history, perhaps the strangest is that
‘Pharisee’ is current as a term of reproach among the theological
descendants of that sect of Nazarenes who, without the martyr spirit
of those primitive Puritans, would never have come into existence.
T. H. HUXLEY.
* * * * *
THE Pharisees built up religious individualism and a purely spiritual
worship; they deepened the belief in a future life; they championed
the cause of the laity against an exclusive priesthood; they made the
Scriptures the possession of the people, and in the weekly assemblages
of the Synagogue they preached to them the truths and hopes of religion
out of the Sacred Books.... The Pharisees consistently strove to bring
life more and more under the dominion of religious observance. By
carefully formed habits, by the ceremonial of religious observances,
religious ideas and sanctions could be impressed upon the people’s mind
and heart. But the outward was subordinated to the inward.
CANON G. H. BOX, 1911.
* * * * *
PHARISAISM in history has had a hard fate. For there has seldom been
for Christians the opportunity to know what Pharisaism really meant,
and perhaps still more seldom the desire to use that opportunity.
Is then the Christian religion so weak that it must be advocated by
blackening the character of its oldest rival?
R. TRAVERS HERFORD, 1912.
THE JEWISH PRAYER BOOK
WHEN we come to view the half-dozen or so great Liturgies of the world
purely as religious documents, and to weigh their value as devotional
classics, the incomparable superiority of the Jewish convincingly
appears. The Jewish Liturgy occupies its pages with the One Eternal
Lord; holds ever true, confident, and direct speech with Him; exhausts
the resources of language in songs of praise, in utterances of loving
gratitude, in rejoicing at His nearness, in natural outpourings of
grief for sin; never so much as a dream of intercessors or of hidings
from His blessed punishments; and, withal, such a sweet sense of the
divine accessibility every moment to each sinful, suffering child of
earth. Where shall one find a hymn of universal faith like the Adon
Olam, of mystical beauty like the Hymn of Glory[50]; or services so
solemn, touching, and tender as those appointed for Yom Kippur? Compare
the misery, gloom, and introspection surrounding other requiem and
funeral services, with the chastened, dignified sobriety of the Hebrew
prayer for the dying,[51] and the healthy, cheerful manliness of the
Mourner’s Kaddish.
Again, there is most refreshing silence in regard to life-conditions
after death. Neither is there any spiteful condemnation of the
followers of other faiths; the Jew is singularly free from narrow
intolerance.
Certainly the Jew has cause to thank God, and the fathers before him,
for the noblest Liturgy the annals of faith can show.
G. E. BIDDLE, 1907.
IN A SYNAGOGUE[52]
DERONDA gave himself up to that strongest effect of chanted liturgies
which is independent of detailed verbal meaning. The most powerful
movement of feeling with a liturgy is the prayer which seeks for
nothing special, but is a yearning to escape from the limitations
of our own weakness and an invocation of all Good to enter and abide
with us; or else a self-oblivious lifting up of gladness, a ‘Gloria in
excelsis’ that such Good exists; both the yearning and the exultation
gathering their utmost force from the sense of communion in a form
which has expressed them both for long generations of struggling
fellow-men. The Hebrew liturgy, like others, has its transitions of
litany, lyric proclamation, dry statement, and blessing; but this
evening all were one for Deronda; the chant of the Chazan’s or Reader’s
grand wide-ranging voice with its passage from monotony to sudden
cries, the outburst of sweet boys’ voices from the little choir, the
devotional swaying of men’s bodies backwards and forwards, the very
commonness of the building and shabbiness of the scene where a national
faith, which had penetrated the thinking of half the world, had moulded
the splendid forms of that world’s religion, was finding a remote,
obscure echo――all were blent for him as one expression of a binding
history, tragic and yet glorious.
GEORGE ELIOT, 1876.
THE TORCH OF JEWISH LEARNING[53]
LEARNING was for two thousand years the sole claim to distinction
recognized by Israel. ‘The scholar’, says the Talmud, ‘takes precedence
over the king.’ Israel remained faithful to this precept throughout
all her humiliations. Whenever, in Christian or Moslem lands, a hostile
hand closed her schools, the rabbis crossed the seas to reopen their
academies in a distant country. Like the legendary Wandering Jew,
the flickering torch of Jewish scholarship thus passed from East to
West, from North to South, changing every two or three hundred years
from one country to another. Whenever a royal edict commanded them to
leave, within three months, the country in which their fathers had been
buried and their sons had been born, the treasure which the Jews were
most anxious to carry away with them was their books. Among all the
_autos-da-fé_ which the daughter of Zion has had to witness, none has
cost her such bitter tears as those flames which, during the Middle
Ages, greedily consumed the scrolls of the Talmud.
A. LEROY BEAULIEU, 1893.
DURING THE CRUSADES[54]
IN the little town Tiberias, on the shore of the Lake of Gennesaret,
sat the old Jew Eleazar, with his family, prepared to celebrate the
Passover. It was the fourteenth day of the month Nisan of the year 1089.
After the head of the family had washed his hands, he blessed the gifts
of God, drank some wine, took some of the bitter herbs, and ate and
gave to the others. After that, the second cup of wine was served, and
the youngest son of the house asked, according to the sacred custom,
‘What is the meaning of this feast?’