But meantime we are waiting, and the soul "waiteth for the Lord more
than watchmen look for the morning, yea, more than watchmen for the
morning." Again, as in earlier periods of history, the world lies in
darkness, listening to the silence of God--a silence that can be felt.
"Watchmen, what of the night?" Such a blackness fell upon the ancient
Jews when Hadrian passed the plough over Mount Zion. But, turning from
empty apocalyptic visions, they drew in on themselves and created an
inner Jerusalem, which has solaced and safeguarded them ever since.
Such a blackness fell on the ancient Christians when the Huns invaded
Rome, and the young Christian world, robbed of its millennial hopes,
began to wonder if perchance this was not the vengeance of the
discarded gods. But drawing in on themselves, they learned from St.
Augustine to create an inner "City of God." How shall humanity meet
this blackest crisis of all? What new "City of God" can it build on
the tragic wreckage of a thousand years of civilization? Has Israel no
contribution to offer here but the old quarrel with Christianity? But
that quarrel shrinks into comparative concord beside the common peril
from the resurrected gods of paganism, from Thor and Odin and Priapus.
And it was always an exaggerated quarrel--half misunderstanding, like
most quarrels. Neither St. Augustine nor St. Anselm believed God was
other than One. Jesus but applied to himself distributively--as
logicians say--those conceptions of divine sonship and suffering
service which were already assets of Judaism, and but for the theology
of atonement woven by Paul under Greek influences, either of them
might have carried Judaism forward on that path of universalism which
its essential genius demands, and which even without them it only just
missed. Is it not humiliating that Islam, whose Koran expressly
recalls its obligation to our prophets, should have beaten them in the
work of universalization? Maimonides acknowledged the good work done
by Jesus and Mohammed in propagating the Bible. But if the
universalism they achieved held faulty elements, is that any reason
why the purer truth should shrink from universalization? Has Judaism
less future than Buddhism--that religion of negation and
monkery--whose sacred classics enjoin the Bhiksu to camp in and
contemplate a cemetery? Has it less inspiration and optimism than that
apocalyptic vision of the ultimate victory of Good which consoles the
disciples of Zoroaster? If there is anything now discredited in its
ancient Scriptures, the Synagogue can, as of yore, relegate it to the
Apocrypha, even as it can enrich the canon with later expressions of
the Hebrew genius. Its one possible rival, Islam, is, as Kuenen
maintains, as sterile for the future as Buddhism, too irretrievably
narrowed to the Arab mentality. But why, despite his magnificent
tribute to Judaism, does this unfettered thinker imagine that the last
word is with Christianity? Eucken, too, would call the future
Christian, though he rejects the Incarnation and regards the Atonement
as injurious to religion, and the doctrine of the Trinity as a
stumbling-block rather than a help. Abraham Lincoln being only a plain
man, was not able to juggle with himself like a German theologian, and
with the simplicity of greatness he confessed: "I have never united
myself to any Church, because I have found difficulty in giving my
assent, without mental reservation, to the long, complicated
statements of the Christian doctrine which characterize their Articles
of Belief and Confessions of Faith." "When any church," he added,
"will inscribe over its altar, as its sole qualification for
membership, ... 'Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart,
and with all thy soul, and with all thy might, and thy neighbour as
thyself,' that church will I join with all my heart and with all my
soul."
Can one read this and not wonder what Judaism has been about that
Lincoln did not even know there _was_ such a church? But call the
coming religious reconstruction what you will, what do names matter
when all humanity is crucified, what does anything matter but to save
it from meaningless frictions and massacres? "Would that My people
forgot Me and kept My commandments," says the Jerusalem Talmud. Too
long has Israel been silent. "Who is blind," says the prophet, "but
My servant, or deaf as My messenger?" He is not deaf to-day, he is
only dumb. But the voice of Jerusalem must be heard again when the new
world-order is shaping. The Chosen People must choose. To be or not to
be. "The religion of the Jews is indeed a light," said Coleridge in
his "Table Talk," "but it is as the light of the glow-worm which gives
no heat and illumines nothing but itself." Why let a sun sink into a
glow-worm? And even a glow-worm should turn. It does not even
pay--that prudent maxim of the Babylonian Talmud, _Dina dimalchutha
dina_ ("In Rome do as the Romans"). Despite every effort of Jews as
individual citizens the world still tends to see them as Crabbe saw
them a century ago in his "Borough":--
Nor war nor wisdom yields our Jews delight,
They will not study and they dare not fight.
It is because they fight under no banner of their own. But the time
has come when they must fight as Jews--fight that "mental fight" from
which that greater English poet, Blake, declared he would not cease
till he had "built Jerusalem in England's green and pleasant land." To
build Jerusalem in every land--even in Palestine--that is the Jewish
mission. As Nina Salaman sings--and I am glad to end with the words of
a daughter of the lofty-souled scholar in whose honour this lecture is
given--
Wherefore else our age-long life, our wandering landless,
Every land our home for ill or good?
Ours it was long since to join the hands of nations
Through the link of our own brotherhood.