As Joseph Jacobs reminded us in his "Biblical Archæology" and as Sir
James Frazer is just illustrating afresh, the whole of Hebrew ritual
is permeated by savage survivals, a fact recognized by Maimonides
himself when he declared that Moses adapted idolatrous practices to a
purer worship. Israel was environed by barbarous practices and
gradually rose beyond them. And it was the same with concepts as with
practices. Judaism, which added to the Bible the fruits of centuries
of spiritual evolution in the shape of the Talmud, has passed utterly
beyond the more primitive stages of the Old Testament, even as it has
replaced polygamy by monogamy. That Song of Hate at the Red Sea was
wiped out, for example, by the oft-quoted Midrash in which God rebukes
the angels who wished to join in the song. "How can ye sing when My
creatures are perishing?" The very miracles of the Old Testament were
side-tracked by the Rabbinic exposition that they were merely special
creations antecedent to that unchangeable system of nature which went
its course, however fools suffered. Our daily bread, said the sages,
is as miraculous as the division of the Red Sea. And the dry retort of
the soberest of Pharisaic Rabbis, when a voice from heaven interfered
with the voting on a legal point, _en mashgîchin be-bathkol_--"We
cannot have regard to the Bath Kol, the Torah is for earth, not
heaven"--was a sign that, for one school of thought at least, reason
and the democratic principle were not to be browbeaten, and that the
era of miracles in Judaism was over. The very incoherence of the
Talmud, its confusion of voices, is an index of free thinking.
Post-biblical Israel has had a veritable galaxy of thinkers and
saints, from Maimonides its Aquinas to Crescas its Duns Scotus, from
Mendelssohn its Erasmus to the Baal-Shem its St. Francis. But it has
been at once the weakness and the strength of orthodox Judaism never
to have made a breach with its past; possibly out of too great a
reverence for history, possibly out of over-consideration for the
masses, whose mentality would in any case have transformed the new
back again to the old. Thus it has carried its whole lumber piously
forward, even as the human body is, according to evolutionists, "a
veritable museum of relics," or as whales have vestiges of hind legs
with now immovable, muscles. Already in the Persian period Judaism had
begun to evolve "the service of the Synagogue," but it did not shed
the animal sacrifices, and even when these were abruptly ended by the
destruction of the Temple, and Jochanan ben Zaccai must needs
substitute prayer and charity, Judaism still preserved through the
ages the nominal hope of their restoration. So that even were the
Jehovah of the Old Testament the fee-fi-fo-fum ogre of popular
imagination, that tyrant of the heavens whose unfairness in choosing
Israel was only equalled by its bad taste, it would not follow that
Judaism had not silently replaced him by a nobler Deity centuries ago.
The truth is, however, that it is precisely in the Old Testament that
is reached the highest ethical note ever yet sounded, not only by
Judaism but by man, and that this mass of literature is so saturated
with the conception of a people chosen not for its own but for
universal salvation, that the more material prophecies--evoked
moreover in the bitterness of exile, as Belgian poets are now moved to
foretell restoration and glory--are practically swamped. At the worst,
we may say there are two conflicting currents of thought, as there are
in the bosom of every nation, one primarily self-regarding, and the
other setting towards the larger life of humanity. It may help us to
understand the paradox of the junction of Israel's glory with God's,
if we remember that the most inspired of mortals, those whose life is
consecrated to an art, a social reform, a political redemption, are
rarely able to separate the success of their mission from their own
individual success or at least individual importance. Even Jesus
looked forward to his twelve legions of angels and his seat at the
right hand of Power. But in no other nation known to history has the
balance of motives been cast so overwhelmingly on the side of
idealism. An episode related by Josephus touching Pontius Pilate
serves to illuminate the more famous episode in which he figures. When
he brought the Roman ensigns with Cæsar's effigies to Jerusalem, the
Jews so wearied him with their petitions to remove this defiling
deification that at last he surrounded the petitioners with soldiers
and menaced them with immediate death unless they ceased to pester and
went home. "But they threw themselves upon the ground and laid their
necks bare and said they would take their deaths very willingly rather
than the wisdom of their laws should be transgressed." And Pilate,
touched, removed the effigies. Such a story explains at once how the
Jews could produce Jesus and why they could not worship him.
"God's witnesses," "a light of the nations," "a suffering servant," "a
kingdom of priests"--the old Testament metaphors for Israel's mission
are as numerous as they are noble. And the lyrics in which they occur
are unparalleled in literature for their fusion of ethical passion
with poetical beauty. Take, for example, the forty-second chapter of
Isaiah. (I quote as in gratitude bound the accurate Jewish version of
the Bible we owe to America.)
Behold My servant whom I uphold;
Mine elect in whom My soul delighteth;
I have put My spirit upon him,
He shall make the right to go forth to the nations:
He shall not fail or be crushed
Till he have set the right on the earth,
And the isles shall wait for his teaching.
Thus saith God the LORD,
He that created the heavens, and stretched them forth,
He that spread forth the earth and that which cometh out of it,
He that giveth bread unto the people upon it,
And spirit to them that walk therein:
I the LORD have called thee in righteousness,
And have taken hold of thy hand,
And kept thee, and set thee for a covenant of the people,
For a light of the nations;
To open the blind eyes,
To bring out the prisoners from the dungeon,
And them that sit in darkness out of the prison-house.
Never was ideal less tribal: it is still the dynamic impulse of all
civilization. "Let justice well up as waters and righteousness as a
mighty stream." "Nation shall not lift sword against nation, neither
shall there be war any more."
Nor does this mission march always with the pageantry of external
triumph. "Despised and forsaken of men," Isaiah paints Israel. "Yet he
bore the sin of many. And made intercession for the transgressors ...
with his stripes we were healed."
Happily all that is best in Christendom recognizes, with Kuenen or
Matthew Arnold, the grandeur of the Old Testament ideal. But that
this ideal penetrated equally to our everyday liturgy is less
understood of the world. "Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, who hast
chosen Israel from all peoples and given him the Law." Here is no
choice of a favourite but of a servant, and when it is added that
"from Zion shall the Law go forth" it is obvious what that servant's
task is to be. "What everlasting love hast Thou loved the house of
Israel," says the Evening Prayer. But in what does this love consist?
Is it that we have been pampered, cosseted? The contrary. "A Law, and
commandments, statutes and judgments hast Thou taught us." Before
these were thundered from Sinai, the historian of the Exodus records,
Israel was explicitly informed that only by obedience to them could
he enjoy peculiar favour. "Now therefore, if ye will hearken unto My
voice indeed, and keep My covenant, then ye shall be Mine own treasure
from among all peoples; for all the earth is Mine; and ye shall be
unto Me a kingdom of priests, and a holy nation." A chosen people is
really a choosing people. Not idly does Talmudical legend assert that
the Law was offered first to all other nations and only Israel
accepted the yoke.
How far the discipline of the Law actually produced the Chosen People
postulated in its conferment is a subtle question for pragmatists. Mr.
Lucien Wolf once urged that "the yoke of the Torah" had fashioned a
racial aristocracy possessing marked biological advantages over
average humanity, as well as sociological superiorities of temperance
and family life. And indeed the statistics of Jewish vitality and
brain-power, and even of artistic faculty, are amazing enough to
invite investigation from all eugenists, biologists, and statesmen.
But whether this general superiority--a superiority not inconsistent
with grave failings and drawbacks--is due to the rigorous selection of
a tragic history, or whether it is, as Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu
maintains, the heritage of a civilization older by thousands of years
than that of Europe; whether the Torah made the greatness of the
people, or the people--precisely because of its greatness--made the
Torah; whether we have a case of natural election or artificial
election to study, it is not in any self-sufficient superiority or
aim thereat that the essence of Judaism lies, but in an apostolic
altruism. The old Hebrew writers indeed--when one considers the
impress the Bible was destined to make on the faith, art, and
imagination of the world--might well be credited with the intuition of
genius in attributing to their people a quality of election. And the
Jews of to-day in attributing to themselves that quality would have
the ground not only of intuition but of history. Nevertheless that
election is, even by Jewish orthodoxy, conceived as designed solely
for world-service, for that spiritual mission for which Israel when
fashioned was exiled and scattered like wind-borne seeds, and of the
consummation of which his ultimate repatriation and glory will be but
the symbol. It is with _Alenu_ that every service ends--the prayer
for the coming of the Kingdom of God, "when Thou wilt remove the
abominations from the earth, and the idols will be utterly cut off,
when the world will be perfected under the Kingdom of the Almighty and
all the children of flesh will call upon Thy name, when Thou wilt turn
unto Thyself all the wicked of the earth.... In that day the Lord
shall be One and His name One." Israel disappears altogether in this
diurnal aspiration.