It is gratifying to me to attend this meeting of the Menorah, because,
as the Chairman has said, I heard the flapping of the wings of the
stork at its birth. I recall very well the preliminary meetings that
we had when the organization of the Menorah Society at Cambridge was
first spoken of. At that time I was one of the doubters; I held back.
There were in Cambridge a number of societies, social primarily, that
did not desire members of our faith among their number. I felt that a
movement which was composed entirely of Jewish men would be mistaken
for an effort at a Jewish fraternity that was to take the place of the
fraternities in which we were not welcome. The other men, however,
felt that we could have a society the purposes of which had nothing to
do with social matters, and that we could bring out all that was good
in Jewish matters of culture and develop a society to promote those
interests. So at first somewhat reluctantly, I joined in with the
movement, and the result has justified their farsightedness, and I am
sorry now that I was only a "trailer" in the beginning.
The position of the Menorah movement and what it stands for calls to
mind a story that was told in Montreal a couple of years ago by Lord
Haldane, who came to America to attend a meeting of the American Bar
Association. A part of the story was recited in verse (which I do not
recall exactly) and had to do with an Englishman who was taken
prisoner in one of the countries of the Far East, and was offered his
choice between conversion to the religion of his captors or death. He
was a man who had no particular religious feelings; he was not
religious when at home. However, he felt that first and foremost he
was an Englishman and that if he were to do anything base it would
reflect upon all those ideals which were so dear to him, and therefore
he cast in his lot and chose against the change of religion. So, too,
with some of us who perhaps are not religious in a formal way; the
realization of the great things that have been accomplished in the
past by Jews, the Jewish historical background, is in itself a shield
to us, and the realization of what Judaism is and stands for must act
to prevent us from doing something that would be unworthy of
ourselves and of the religion of which we are a part.