_"Every man who has seen the world knows that nothing
is so useless as a general maxim."_
_Macaulay, in Essay on "Machiavelli."_
[Illustration: _MORDECAI M. KAPLAN (born in Russia in 1881, came to
America in 1889), studied at College of the City of New York (A. B.
1900), Columbia (M. A. 1902) and Jewish Theological Seminary (Rabbi,
1902); held Rabbinical position in New York, 1903-1909; Principal
since 1909 of the Teachers' Institute, and Professor of Homiletics
since 1910 in the Jewish Theological Seminary. Fearless and original
in thought, and exceptionally stimulating as a Menorah lecturer,
Professor Kaplan has won the deep respect and friendship of Menorah
students at the various universities where he has lectured on Jewish
Religion and Education._]
MOST of the pain, which according to Koheleth comes with the increase
of knowledge, is in the unlearning of the old rather than in the
learning of the new. Once an idea has become imbedded in the mind, it
cannot be removed without causing a mental upheaval. Blessed are the
young to whom unlearning is easy, or who have not much to unlearn.
Whether our Jewish young men know much or little about Judaism, they
are certain, as a rule, to have formed notions about it of which they
must be disabused, if Judaism is to constitute an important factor in
their lives. Strange to say, they have obtained these notions not from
sources hostile to Judaism, but on the contrary from sources
distinctly intended to inculcate both a love and an understanding of
the Jewish religion,--such as catechisms and text-books used in our
religious schools, and articles in encyclopedias meant for the
enlightenment of the general public. The view of Judaism that one gets
in this manner is not only a distorted one, but it has the effect of
bringing all further reflection to a standstill. It lands one in a
blind alley. The conclusion which a person generally arrives at when
he consults these sources for information about the Jewish religion is
that, whatever else Judaism might be, it certainly offers no field for
the exercise of deep insight or broad vision. This largely accounts
for the manifest sterility and uncreativeness of present-day Judaism.
To give new impetus to fruitful and creative thinking in Jewish life,
it is necessary, in the first place, to counteract the paralyzing
spell of these routine and conventional interpretations of Judaism.
To be concrete, let us take a typical instance of the kind of
instruction that has been in vogue for more than a century. Here are a
few sentences from the article on Judaism in Hastings' _Encyclopedia
of Religion and Ethics_: "Judaism may be defined as the strictest form
of monotheistic belief; but it is something more than a bare mental
belief. It is the effect which such a belief, with all its logical
consequences, exerts on life, that is to say, on thought and
conduct. . . . A formal and precise definition of Judaism is a matter of
some difficulty, because it raises the question, What is the absolute
and irreducible minimum of conformity? . . . Judaism denounces idolatry
and polytheism. It believes in a universal God, but it is not
exclusive. It believes that this world is good, and that man is
capable of perfection. He possesses free will, and is responsible for
his actions. Judaism rejects any mediator and any cosmic force for
evil. Man is free. He is not subject to Satan; nor are his material
gifts of life inherently bad. Wealth might be a blessing as well as a
curse," etc., etc.
In an encyclopedia we do not expect to find original or striking
views. It is not the particular article from which this excerpt is
taken that fault is found with. That article is selected simply as
representative of the kind of information that is expected to help one
grasp the meaning of Judaism. It is typical of the baffling glibness
with which Jewish teachers and preachers usually talk about the Jewish
religion. One who reads or listens to such statements finds that
somehow or other little has been added to his stock of knowledge about
Judaism. He experiences how irritating words can be when they either
hide thought or betray its absence.
_Mistaking the Shadow for the Thing Itself_
IN the instance quoted, it is both amusing and painful to follow the
author's vacillating description of Judaism. At first Judaism is a
form of belief. Then it becomes the effect of that belief upon thought
and conduct. From that it evolves into some irreducible minimum of
conformity, if we can only get hold of it. This being difficult, it
gets to be a series of colorless platitudes. Such a definition calls
up the image of a streamlet, now leaping over rocks and boulders, now
meandering upon level ground, and finally losing itself in the
marshes. The fitfulness and inconsistency of the formulation, the
picking up of the different threads of thought without following out
any one of them to its conclusion, are characteristic of this type of
definitions. They are as devoid of vitality as a long drawn-out yawn,
and their want of logic is exasperating. The merest tyro can see that
one can profess the principles they embody without being a Jew. There
are many sects that would heartily subscribe to all of them.
Universalists, Deists, Theists, Unitarians, and even Ethical
Culturists hold these doctrines. As matters stand at present, these
sects engage more actively in spreading them than we do.
What is fundamentally wrong with the above definition and with the
entire class of formulations of which it is an instance? The tendency
to mistake the shadow of a thing for the thing itself. The main cause
for misapprehending the true character of Judaism is the proneness to
regard it merely as a form of truth, or, at best, as the effect of a
truth upon thought and conduct, and to overlook entirely the fact that
it is a living reality, a very strand of the primal moving forces of
the world. "Judaism is the truest form of truth," says one writer.
"Judaism gives, to truth the most truthful shape," says another. Now
and then they speak of it as a "form" of life, but it turns out to be
only a lip service, or a homiletical phrase. They fail to follow up
the clue which is more than once suggested to them by the difficulty
of expounding Judaism as a form of truth. That being a Jew has always
involved conforming to certain principles and modes of life is a
truism. But these principles or observances by themselves constitute
only the outward expression of Judaism. The mathematical formula which
states the law of gravitation is not the same as the force of
gravitation itself. It is conceivable that further experimentation
might make it necessary to qualify the mathematical formula. But the
force of gravitation will ever be the same as it has been. The change
from looking upon Judaism as a form of truth to that of regarding it
as of the very substance of reality calls for a complete
transformation in our mode of thinking, or what has been termed "a
psychological change of front." We must break completely with the
habit of identifying the whole of the Jewish religion with merely
certain beliefs and duties, while ignoring completely the living
energy which has operated to produce them. They are only the static
residue of something that is essentially dynamic.
_The Jewish Aversion to Creeds and Formulas_
THE change in attitude which is here advocated is not a departure from
all that has gone before in Jewish life. If it were that, Judaism
could not possibly survive under it. The fact is that we are only
bringing to the fore and translating into modern phraseology an
attitude that in one form or another has always asserted itself in
Judaism. Simultaneously with the tendency to compress Judaism within
certain formulas, there has always shown itself a strong aversion to
gathering Judaism within creeds and minima of conformity. To-day that
aversion, which has hitherto remained a matter of feeling and
intuition, can make itself articulate by availing itself of the
results of recent research in the fields of religion. It need no
longer entertain the fear of being charged with spiritual anarchy.
Discountenancing dogmas in Judaism is not synonymous with intellectual
libertinism. It is rather a protest against shallowness and
superficiality, much like the chagrin of the artist at having his
knowledge of drawing praised and the soul of the picture missed.
We can give in this connection a few cursory examples of the
anti-summarizing tendency. The Torah itself, in one instance, seems to
set out with a view of reducing Judaism to a minimum, but scarcely
finds itself able to do so. "And now, Israel, what doth the Lord thy
God require of thee, but to fear the Lord thy God, and to walk in all
His ways, and to love Him, and to serve the Lord thy God with all thy
heart and with all thy soul, to keep the commandments of thy Lord and
the statutes, which I command thee this day, for thine own good?" "Is
this a small matter?" asks the Talmud, in evident surprise at the
hugeness of the program. When the would-be proselyte came to Shammai
and requested him to sum up the entire Torah in one principle, he
received no better treatment than he deserved, when he was made to
take to his heels. That Hillel did not rebuff him and gave him the
principle, "What is hateful to thee do not do unto thy neighbor,"
proves that Hillel knew how to be patient and tactful, but not that
the Talmud looks upon that summary, or any other, as expressive of the
essence of Judaism. The same applies to religious practices,
concerning which the Mishnah announces the maxim that it is not for us
to estimate which are more important than others. We are told that the
custom obtained at one time of having the Ten Commandments read as
part of the daily service; but that as soon as it gave rise to the
impression that the Ten Commandments were more essential than the rest
of the Torah, it was discontinued. It is true that Philo reduces the
teachings of Judaism to five essential doctrines, but that was because
Judaism to Philo was Platonism divinely revealed.
_As Shown by Judah Ha-Levi_
THE movement to formulate the fundamental teachings of Judaism first
gained headway at the beginning of the eleventh century with the
Karaites, whose entire conception of Judaism was such as to render
their sect hopelessly stagnant and doomed to dwindle. Still, even they
would never have thought of emphasizing certain dogmas as
indispensable, had they not discerned in the teachings of
Mohammedanism a dangerous challenge to Judaism. Thus the dogma-making
tendency in Judaism arose during the Middle Ages not as an indigenous
product but as a retort to the dominant religions of the time. What
might be called the application of the synoptic method to the Jewish
religion remained confined mostly to the part of Jewry which came,
directly or indirectly, under the influence of Aristotelian
intellectualism.
To this trend Judah Ha-Levi (1085-1140) stands out as a notable
exception. In him the disapproval of having Judaism subsumed under
formulas of a philosophic stamp comes again to the surface. His being
a poet even more than a philosopher enabled him to get a better
insight into the inwardness of Judaism than that obtained by the
intellectualists with their analytic scalpels. This is apparent in his
well-known "Al-Khazari." The story goes that the Khazar king, after
consulting a philosopher, a Mohammedan, and a Christian as to what he
should believe and do, finally turned to a Jewish rabbi. When the king
asked him about the Jewish religion, the rabbi replied, "I believe in
the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, who led the Children of Israel
out of Egypt, who fed them in the desert, and gave them the land. . . .
Our belief is comprised in the Torah, a very large domain." Upon
hearing this, the king grew indignant, and said to the rabbi,
"Shouldst thou, O Jew, not have said that thou believest in the
Creator of the world, its Governor and Guide, and in Him who created
and keeps thee, and such attributes which serve as evidence for every
believer?" But the rabbi persists in his mode of stating Judaism. He
parries successfully the king's efforts to draw out of him some
definition of Judaism in terms of speculative theology. The king in
time becomes a convert to Judaism, and it is only then, according to
Judah Ha-Levi, that he succeeds in getting the rabbi to teach him
concerning the attributes of God, as if to imply that one has first to
be a Jew before indulging in any abstract or philosophic study of
Judaism. The keynote of Ha-Levi's thought is that the essence of
Judaism is not merely to give assent to any general belief, but to
belong to Israel and share in its experiences.
_By Maimonides and by Abravanel_
EVEN Maimonides (1135-1204), who is usually represented as the chief
sponsor of the systematizing and speculative tendency in Judaism, is
far from having attached as much significance to the Creed he
formulated as the fact of its presence in the prayer book might
indicate. He himself strongly deprecates attaching more importance to
one part of the Torah than to another. "The Ten Commandments and the
Shema in the Torah," he says in the very same chapter of his
commentary on the Mishnah which contains the Creed, "are no holier
than any of the genealogies that are found in it." Albo (1380-1444)
reduces the essence of Judaism to three, yet inconsistently declares
that he who denies other articles of faith which are of minor
importance is no less a heretic than he who denies any of the
essential ones. In fact, he admits that there are as many articles of
faith as commandments in the Torah.
Abravanel (1437-1508), though an admirer of scholasticism, and
practically the last of the line of Jewish Aristotelians, considers
the thirteen Articles of Maimonides' Creed gratuitous, and as not
representative of the maturer views of Maimonides. His opinion is that
they properly belonged to the commentary on the Mishnah, which was the
work of his youth; and that as he ripened intellectually, he changed
his mind about their value. We miss them in the Code and in the
"Guide to the Perplexed," where we should most of all have expected to
find them. In the same connection, Abravanel adds that the fashion of
laying down creeds as fundamental in Judaism owes its origin to the
method employed in the secular studies which always started with
certain indisputable axioms.
The same resistance to the effort to extract Judaism from a few source
principles is encountered in Jewish mysticism. Whatever we may think
of the particular form which mysticism took on in the Jewish religion,
we cannot but regard it as the outbreak of a longing that forms a part
of all vital religion. We have good reason, therefore, to treat with
respect its opinion of the intellectualizing process of Jewish
philosophy. Although it was also addicted to speculative categories
and developed a theosophy instead of a theology, it approached Judaism
from an entirely different angle. Being impressionistic in its trend,
it was bound to look elsewhere than to abstract concepts for the core
of Judaism. To put Judaism into the form of a creed appeared to the
mystics like combining pure gold with a baser metal, in order to mint
it for circulation.
_And More Recently by Mendelssohn_
IN modern times the anti-dogmatizing tendency found a vigorous
exponent in Mendelssohn. Yet, somehow or other, he has been singled
out for attack, as though he had advocated a dry formalism, unredeemed
by any inner principle or inspiration. He is charged with having been
under the influence of the shallow deism of the English philosophers.
The truth is that Mendelssohn only repeats in his way what Judah
Ha-Levi had taught before him. He distinctly emphasizes the belief in
the existence of God, in providence and in retribution as the sine qua
non of Judaism, but he is clear-minded enough to realize that they
constitute what he calls "the universal religion of mankind," and not
Judaism.
Mendelssohn did not succeed in developing a constructive view of
Judaism, whereby it might be enabled to withstand the shock of
modernism; nevertheless, he does not deserve the treatment accorded
him because of his alleged attitude towards creeds. His position as to
the relation of creeds to Judaism is the only tenable one. He
maintains that creeds can only be of two kinds; either they oppose
reason, and should therefore find no place in Judaism, or are so
self-evident that they are not confined to Judaism. This does not mean
that to be a Jew one can believe whatever he likes, or not believe at
all. It does not mean that Judaism only demands outward conformity.
Mendelssohn was aware that certain "Hobot ha-Lebabot," Duties of the
Heart, are indispensable to Judaism. But he refused to make of Judaism
a mutilated philosophy.
_Judaism Needs Working Principles--Not Abstract Dogmas_
NO sphere of life can be maintained intelligently without some basic
principles, particularly so exalted a sphere as religion. Who counts
upon any art attaining a high degree of development by mere rule of
thumb? Is anything so characteristic of modern life as emphasis upon
the mutual interrelation of theory and practice? All our strivings to
rehabilitate Judaism are bound to prove futile unless they are made to
center about some definite conception of its aims and methods. We need
principles, yea dogmas, in Judaism as we need working hypotheses in
any great undertaking. But dogmas, in the sense of abstract
principles, regarded as immutable, are both superfluous and dangerous.
If such dogmas are nothing more than the common denominator of all
that has been identified with Judaism in the course of its history,
they are sure to be banal and colorless. If they are to be fixed and
unalterable, they are bound in time to clash with reason and
experience, and to sap the religion of its vitality. Judaism needs
principles that can help it to withstand danger, that can give it a
lease upon life. This is the criterion to be applied to any articulate
conception of Judaism. Can the principles which the text-books on
Judaism declare to be fundamental render this service? The reply is an
unequivocal No. Hence they are worse than useless.
But we cannot afford to stop at this point. Knowing what Judaism is
not, is only half-knowledge, and therefore quite dangerous. We must
apply ourselves anew to the task of pondering over the problem of
Judaism. We may indulge to our heart's content in lauding the past
when one could be a Jew without troubling his head about the question,
"What is Judaism?" We may sigh in regret for those days when a Jew
upon being asked about his religion was able to reply, "I have no
religion; I am a Jew." The danger of the entire economy of the Jewish
soul going to pieces is too imminent to permit us to lull ourselves
into that blissful unconsciousness, the praises of which Carlyle sang
quite consciously. We are treading the narrow ledge of a precipice.
Men like Zollschan, Ruppin, and Theilhaber have pointed out the awful
chasm that threatens to engulf us. It requires not a little courage to
maintain our nerve and avoid being seized with the vertigo. But
courage alone is not enough. We must take into account the narrowness
of the path and tread over it warily.
_We Must Face the Real Problem of Judaism_
WE Jews must do some very hard thinking, of a kind, perhaps, that we
have not been called upon to do before. That task dare not be shirked.
We must not give in to that tendency which breaks out whenever we have
something very difficult to do, of turning to anything except that
which we know demands peremptory attention. A task that is thus
neglected revenges itself by haunting us and upsetting whatever we
undertake. Instead of giving to the problem of Judaism the careful
deliberation that it requires, we get busy with a thousand and one
things, whereby we hope to escape the need of concentrated attention.
We have become fussy and fidgety. We are divided into committees and
sub-committees. In place of clearness of thought we have a confusion
of tongues. Our case illustrates the truth which Pascal enunciated,
that most of the evils in the world can be traced to the inability of
a person to sit in his room and think.
Without deprecating any of the undertakings to bring order out of the
social chaos in Jewish life, we must place at the present time chief
emphasis upon the serious consideration of our inner problem, the
problem of the Jewish soul and of the Jewish spirit, the problem of
Judaism. We may well envy the thousands of soldiers on the
battlefields of Europe to whom it is a joy to meet death for the sake
of their respective flags. Each of them has a cause to die for. Most
of us, by reason of our Jewish descent, find life, particularly in the
higher sense of the word, to be a keener struggle for existence than
our neighbors do. Yet it would not be half so wearing if our
difficulties were consecrated by an inspiring cause or by a thrilling
loyalty. Why need we be poverty-stricken in spirit, bereft of
everything that makes struggle sweet and suffering endurable? We must
put the very question, What is Judaism? in a new way and in a
different spirit. We must have the definite purpose in mind, of so
understanding it as to know what to do next, and to strive for that
vigorously, so as not to drift like helpless flotsam and jetsam. We
need strong beliefs which, as Bagehot puts it, win strong men, and
then make them stronger.
_Judaism Must Speak to Us in the Language of Today_
IN the Talmud we find the principle enunciated that the Torah adopted
the style of language that men were wont to use. A condition
indispensable to a religion being an active force in human life is
that it speak to men in terms of their own experience. Judaism, to be
significant to modern man or woman, can no longer afford to speak in
the language of theology. Psychology and social science, history and
human experience, have revealed new worlds in the domain of the
spirit. The language of theology might have a certain quaintness and
charm to the ears of those to whom religion is a kind of dreamy
romanticism. But to those who want to find in Judaism a way of life
and a higher ambition, it must address itself in the language of
concrete and verifiable experience.
The ideas in which Judaism was wont to spell itself out in the past
are no longer at home in the Weltanschauung of the modern man. What
prevented the Reform movement from becoming a real reformation and a
vitalization of Judaism was that it sought to adjust Judaism to a
Weltanschauung which had already begun to grow obsolete. We have to
reckon with all that has been learned in the meantime concerning human
society and the place of religion in it. When one comes to a strange
land, and has with him only the coin of his native country, he must
calculate in terms of the currency of the land he is in, if he wants
to know whether or not he has enough to live on. Can we Jews afford to
live spiritually upon our heritage? That can only be answered if we
learn what that heritage is equivalent to in the current mental coin
of the modern man. If we do not wish to be cut off from the stream of
living thought, if we do not want to be spiritually starved, we Jews
must know not so much what Judaism meant twenty centuries ago, nor
even a century ago, but what it is to mean to us of today.
[Illustration: Signature: MMKaplan]
EDITORS' NOTE.--_In articles to follow, Professor
Kaplan will give his conception of "What Judaism Is."_